Welcome, my name is Dr. Warrick Bishop. I'm a cardiologist, an author and a keynote speaker. I'm CEO of the Healthy Heart Network. I'm all about trying to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible. Heart disease is huge in Australia. Every 20 minutes someone suffers a heart attack. Most of these could probably have been avoided if only we knew what to do. This podcast is all about helping you understand. blood pressure, weight, cholesterol for better health. If you enjoy this podcast, I would be honoured for a five-star review. You can share it with your family and friends. It may well save someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr. Warrick Bishop and welcome to my podcast and videocast station. Today, we're following up with part two with Alistair Horscroft. Al, who is CEO of the Mind Academy. and known colloquially as the street philosopher in part one. If you missed it, shame on you. But a quick update. We really talked about ours. past and growing up in the UK, had some interesting influences in those younger years. And he even had a fair bit of hard knocks experience, which set him up for his journey in helping people. And we wrapped up the last podcast talking about habits and the importance of identity, behavior, goal. And we also got some of Al's feelings about meditation which has a place not universally but appropriately placed for individuals and their objectives. For now I'm going to introduce Al and we're going to jump into habits again. Hi Al, thanks for joining me again. Thanks for having me again Warrick, I really appreciate it. You summed that up very beautifully by the way, my meditation because I try not to be too contentious with the meditation because I do see its place but I think it's overbaked. A really interesting space, and I think this is so important for us to dive into a bit more. We were talking about habits and how people need to change habits, and obviously that's relevant almost for everyone, but the reason I brought it to the table is because the individuals I see who, for whatever reason, need to alter eating behaviour, alter exercise behaviour, perhaps alter smoking behaviour, whatever it might be. We talked about that, and you were really... indicating that what we need to be thinking about more is that when we look to implement change, it's uncomfortable for the body. It really becomes a struggle that's internal that we can't put a finger on. And as we spoke in the last podcast, you really said we need to embrace that change, feel that agitation, irritation and frustration. And I'd love you to speak on from there if you wouldn't mind. yeah of course i think what may be useful for people to understand is if we because we need to separate two very important parts of two very important things that go on in the brain okay so in the general scientific model of the mind brain connection because we've got what we call the local model and the non-local model so the local model of the mind brain distinction because this will answer a lot of questions for people how to make changes and habitual changes is that basically the mind is an output of the brain so your mind is nothing more than the electrical frequencies that go around your brain and so really all that your mind is is the accumulation of experiences from birth all the way till now yes and then what your sensory apparatus has allowed you to basically bring in an experience and become aware of so And that is contained within your brain in electrical, you know, frequencies or areas of your brain that people refer to as the mind. But the big problem with that, Warrick, is that if you look at the population of the world, 97 percent, between 96 and 97 percent of the population of the world, whether they realize or not, believe in a kind of life after death in some way. Yeah. So they don't believe that they or their mind or their soul or their spirit, whatever you want to call it. ends with physical death so what we've got is the current psycho psychological model of the mind brain is only really appropriate to three percent of the world's population yeah because you get what i'm saying yeah and that's a big problem so that's something that needs to be kind of thought out more and i think that's a reason why a lot of you know psychology isn't working as well as it possibly could Because even though people might go there in a deterministic or associational manner to resolve a problem, like I said, psychology isn't really dealing with the deeper beliefs that may be, you know, propagating the actual problem or behavior or whatever it might be. Yeah, something as simple as we might learn in nutrition is it might be all well and good saying, well, you've got to eat in this way, but that might be at odds with their cultural tradition, for example. So we've got simple basic things or their spiritual tradition, but anyway. Why is this useful to know? It's useful to know because at the level of brain, we've got two things. We've got basically, when you look at the brain, really, it's an associational mechanism. That's what it is. It's an associational mechanism. At the level of mind, we have to bring in meaning. Yeah. So you could split the brain into kind of having two ways of processing at the same time. One is just basic association. which is really easy to resolve, to be honest. I'll give you a little exercise to show you how easy that is. And then you've got another one, which is this huge kind of elephant that you're trying to wrangle, which is meaning, yeah? And the meaning people associate to it. So let me give you an example. Let's say, for example, a client comes to see me to, let's say, for example, they've got a Coca-Cola addiction. Now, if I ask that client and I say, hey, um if you get a sense and just kind of get a sense of how you kind of represent coca-cola in your minds are if you were to just imagine it now yeah not everyone but the majority of people would see coca-cola and they would imagine the coca-cola is big bright colorful they'd probably have a feeling inside their body that moves them towards it they probably have some internal dialogue that says oh yeah yum yum can't wait to have that you know so you can clearly see that from a brain perspective they're making it very inviting aren't they you know if you've got what we call towards pleasure and away from pain, you can clearly, just from what I'm saying, realize that this person is clearly associating pleasure to this thing. Yeah, big, bright and colorful. Maybe they can imagine the sound of the and see the glistening, you know, droplets of cold water down it. And they've got this feeling inside that's moving towards feeling this taste in their mouth and this voice in their head that says, yum, yum, have to have it. Now, from a purely associational perspective, and truly this works so much more than most people realize, is if I get that same person to imagine that Coca-Cola in black and white, flat, still, maybe to the slightly off behind them, I get them to reverse the sensation, have a voice inside their head that like maybe from the other side of the head or get their voice to talk about in a boring way. Yeah. Oh, there's the Coca-Cola again with a sinking feeling and a black and white image of it. You can clearly see that I'm telling the brain it's not important. Does that make sense? I'm basically giving the brain a code. to represent Coca-Cola in a way that it goes, oh, yeah, that's either painful or neutral or not important to me. Presumably also, Al, not necessarily pleasurable and therefore not necessarily going to kick off a pleasure response. Perfect. Exactly right. Exactly. So, I mean, the listeners can just play that game. Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen. This is going to work for everybody because there's nuance to everything. We're just talking about generalizations. Yeah. But as a generalized concept. I'm sure most people could easily understand that if you visualize something big, bright and colorful, you've got a good, strong, positive feeling towards it, positive internal dialogue, you're going to tell your brain, yeah, great, let's go for it. If, however, you've got an image that's back on why, internal boring dialogue, thinking, feeling, you're telling the brain, as you said, no interest, no pleasure, don't bother going towards it. And now I've been helping people. I mean, I think I've worked with, I think, 10,000 private clients in the last, you know, 24 years. So when people say, well, that can't work, I go, well, You see 10,000 clients and then tell me, because I can assure you, it works far more than you could possibly imagine. Yeah. And this is why we have psychologists and psychiatrists and doctors and therapists come and take our course because they go, really? Does that really work? And then they realize that, yeah, it does. But here's the caveat. Does it work all the time? No. Why not? Because unfortunately, we just dealt with Coca-Cola at the level of association, your basic brain association of pain and pleasure. We didn't bring in meaning. Yeah. So let's bring in meaning. What does Coca-Cola mean to me? Well, it means maybe fond childhood memories. It means connection. It means time out. You know what I mean? It could have innumerable associations and make me feel cool, make me feel, you know, relaxed on a summer's day. Do you know what I mean? So it's got a whole gamma of meaning associations to it, independent of just the primary. cause-effect brain associations. You're following my train here, Warrick. I certainly do. And it may relate to moments in the childhood where a child felt loved at the time they were given a particular beverage and for that reason, or it was the treat they received for... being good, and that was a show of love. So it may even be as deep as acceptance and love and quite deep meanings, I guess. I don't want to overstep the mark, but as you're talking about it, that's what's coming to me, actually. Not that I drink Coca-Cola. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's perfect what you're saying. It's just you can replace Coca-Cola with anything. You can replace it with... smoking you can replace it with eating too much you can replace it with you know anything you know i mean and then the same uh premise is is is is presented so here's the thing that most therapists and uh are potentially neglecting is that for a successful habits change to occur We need to be aware of both sides of it, because if the therapist is all about meaning and they just talk about meaning all the time, that might not get the outcome because they're simply not just dealing with the basic brain associations. They might not have the toolkit for that. Yeah. Equally, if someone's just trained in basic brain associations, you know, like, say, for example, when it comes to phobias, flooding or, you know, what do they call it? depersonalization whatever it might be I can't remember what they call it um desensitization sorry desensitization yeah flooding then that's all well and good because that's brain associational but they're not taking care of the meaning part of it doesn't make sense they're just dealing with the level of brain so what I've seen unequivocally and I have many chats with people who come and train with us many chats with psychologists psychiatrists therapists coaches and they all they go yeah you're absolutely right and once again it goes back to what we said in In the first interview, people are forgetting about this incredible term called synthesis. We're living in a world where it's this against that. But true discussion or true evolution is we put the thesis, then we put the antithesis, and then we look at the merits of both, and then we combine them and create the synthesis. And so psychology is no longer a synthesis. Philosophy is no longer a synthesis. Spirituality is no longer a synthesis. Medicine is no longer a synthesis. They've all become these compartmentalized this versus that fields. Yeah. And that's not good enough. Human beings are a holistic creature and they need solutions that are a synthesis of the best of information, rather a compartmentalized ego driven, you know, one size fits all approach. So. I'm incredibly successful at helping people change most things. Like I was very successful. Why? Because I can look at the behavioural brain part and the meaning part and identify which avenue to pursue or both. So one of the things that I'm intrigued about is how complex is it or what's the art or skill in trying to identify meaning for an individual who has a... has an associative habit. The Coca-Cola is a reasonable example. How hard is it for you to expose or recognise those particular meanings? And then once you've identified those, does a simple conversation allow a recalibration and that awareness drive change? How does that work, Al? Well, again, I don't want to sound contentious because I really don't, because I know that there are plenty of people who are wonderful and amazing and well-intended, and I'm not saying I have the answer to everything. But I do have a lot of experience. And I don't think it's as complex as people make it out. Let's be honest about it. We gave you the example in the previous one about me resetting my nutritional qualification. And all I really had to do was, you know, read some PDFs and prove that I'd read them. Yeah, that's brilliant. Do a little bit of other stuff. If we take the average degree, you know, I did an honors degree in philosophy. And that was a four-year degree. If I'm honest with myself, I think it probably took me four months. You know what I mean? Really? You know, like, it didn't take me long. Let's take a psychology degree. with all the bells and whistles until they're a clinical psychologist? What, six, seven years? Okay, what do they do in that six, seven years? They read an awful lot of books that may be very interesting and give you a lot of theory. But how much practical tools do they really get? In my experience, not too many. And any psychologist who's honest will admit, believe me, not too many. They've got like six things that they're allowed to use. And that's basically it. And a lot of those are relatively dubious and scientific. Because when anyone ever says, when anyone in this day and age uses, evidence-based i just literally want to walk away from the table because most evidence-based data these days is correlation let alone causation you know i mean we know this this is happening in medicine we know and psychiatry and psychology so i'm like well you're evidence-based and i'm like yeah sure whatever so the the the thing that's going to strike and annoy a lot of people's egos is i've got to be honest it's not particularly complex i would say i could take the average person in about three weeks really give them an extraordinary ability to assist people in changing most things in their life however let's be honest about it there are everything in life is both an art and a science the art or the science rather is the process the mechanics the maths the biology the physiology this is all that and then the art is the person's ability to drive all of that yeah and so people have different you know capacities based on your um you know your your your your your disposition your innate talents and so on and so forth so one person might get that body of knowledge and be able to drive it immediately at the end of three weeks someone else might have to sit with it digest it work it out because it might be so different to their frame of reference but it might take them six months to get their head around it or a year to get their head around it um and we know this because we know that in any given field i mean you're a cardiologist i mean you train with plenty of people I'm sure there are plenty of people you train with who just immediately got it. And then other people who it took maybe years before they developed capability or what's your thoughts on that? Yeah. So look, I'll jump in because this, this is a topic that is incredibly important. I actually addressed it in my first book. If anyone's listening and read the book, you'll remember that I dedicate a whole chapter to evidence-based. And I'm a little bit like you, Al. I wouldn't say I become defensive when people talk about evidence-based, but I do become disappointed when evidence-based becomes the ruling dictum for management of patients over and above experience and the individual patient. And in the book I wrote, and I'll share this analogy with you because I think you'll love it. I tried to describe medical practitioners using evidence base as something a bit like an astronomer looking up into a universe that we do not understand. We can accept we do not understand the universe. And those stars are the fixed points of evidence, tiny, minuscule in the expanse of the entirety. So we've got these little points of knowledge base. Our role as an astronomer slash doctor is to, for the individual patient, recognize how we connect those stars for the individual sitting in front of us based on our experience looking at those stars for 10 or 20 years. And it isn't just evidence-based. It isn't just guessing. It does include. the patient. And I've got this beautiful cartoon of an astronomer just looking up at the sky. And when you think of it, the universe is beyond our comprehension as medicine is, as the brain is. And so these points of knowledge, how can they possibly define complete understanding? It's a joke. So I'm on your page. It's a beautiful analogy. It really is. I will, if that's okay by you, haven't trademarks it, I will definitely be using that one. But for a second, I thought you'd say you'd buy the book, but that's taking it a bit far. I'd love you to use that analogy because I think it works so well. And I haven't got an issue with evidence base. I think it's incredibly important. We do need to prove what's right and wrong, but we can never accept that it's the answer to everything because that individual person fits differently. in that stellar arrangement. You know, one person might be an Aries, one might be a Capricorn, depending on how we draw those lines together. And I think it's so important that we don't forget there is an art to medicine with that science. So, no, thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, no, not at all. I think you're absolutely right. Of course it's an important part. I'm not denying that at all. You know, there's some incredible research that goes on and incredible information. But like you said, you know, Evidence changes. Yeah. And it's only part of the picture and it represents a very select population. And so, you know, when Mrs. 93 years of age walks through the door with her gammy leg and her diabetes and a funny eye, no one's done a study on her. No one's done a study on 5,000 women like that patient or whatever it might be, because everyone's different. Everyone's an individual. But look, enough of enjoying these analogies. I'm going to pull you back to these habits. We've really started to recognise that the brain needs to deal with not only association but meaning. I think that's super important and I want people to try and get that. One of the other things I wanted to jump onto, and we've really only got a few minutes left, so if it's all right with you, I might invite you back on another occasion. Would that be? Of course, Warrick. It's lovely talking to you. I'm getting to seal all your metaphors and analogies. Yeah, well, people do say you can have too much of a good thing, but I want to make sure that we don't overcook it. What I might do is in the last couple of minutes, just wrap up habits. You know, a simple conversation. You talked about someone who may have a Coca-Cola addiction. What's the absolute executive summary conversation you'd have with this person? Dot points. What would you say to them, Alan? And how would you step them through that? You said about three weeks you could change people's behavior. Talk us through that in a very succinct way if you could. Well, I'm going to sound even more arrogant now, I'm afraid, Warren. In three weeks, I could teach the average person how to become very good at helping other people change their habits and behaviours. Personally, it would normally take me anywhere between half an hour to three hours to help someone change their habit or behaviour, OK? Again, that might seem ridiculous, but it's not. It's not when you just, like you said, when you see the constellations. Because, you know, I know we want to get into the specifics, and I promise I will sum it up. What you have in today's society is everyone is compartmentalizing and they are learning in a very specified way. In university, they funnel you into specifics all the time. All of the great minds throughout history have always studied more than one subject at any point in time. Why? So they can begin to see the universal patterns of life and how it all interconnects. This is very, very important. And that's what a classic old school education was all about. You'd learn geography. You'd learn, you know, a second language. You would learn your math, your physics, your biology. You would learn them all in the hope that you start seeing, as you said, all of the constellations and how they interact rather than just focusing in one particular area. So I think it's very important for people to understand that. Now, secondly, to answer your question, if someone came to see me with a habit, the honest truth is, and this is where it gets, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be evasive, but like you said, I really need to be aware of the person in front of me. their lifestyle, the language that they use, their associations, what's important, what's not important, you know, the boundaries around what they're willing to do, what they're not willing to do, you know, how, you know, we've got a saying, and the saying is this, if it's important enough to you, and you know how you can achieve almost anything. So if it's important enough to you, and you know how you can achieve almost anything. So what we have is a very basic equation. Priority plus knowledge equals success. So the first thing that I'm going to do is really talk to this client and I'm going to say, you prove to me that you want this. I'm not going to be the one who's going to try and convince you. You are going to convince me why this change is so important to you that you've come to see me. Because a lot of people think that when they come and see a doctor or a therapist or a coach or whatever, the burden of change is on the clinician or the coach or the therapist. No, no, no, it never is. The burden of responsibility is always primarily on you as the client, whether you like it or not, as the patient or the client. So when a client comes in to see me or even on the phone, I mean, I don't really see private clients too much anymore, but it went back in the day when I saw innumerable amounts, I would always go, prove to me that you want this change. How's it going to change your life? You prove to me how this is going to change your life. How's it going to change your relationship? How's it going to change your health? How's it going to change, you know, your relationship to yourself? You prove to me that it's important enough to you. Why? Because I've already said success is priority plus knowledge. So I'm always going to get the priority thing done first. And I'm going to make them prove to me that they want it enough. Something that a lot of therapists fail to do. A lot of therapists always try and be, to a certain degree, the enabler of change. Convince the person. I know therapists who are literally begging their client to change. I'm like, what? Well, that's a completely wrong way around power dynamic. The power dynamic is installing the power within your client. If you're trying to force your client to change, that's power over, even if you're doing it in the nicest way possible. The whole point is to ignite the spark in your client, for them to connect within themselves that, yeah, they damn well want this. Number one, once they've got that sorted, Then it's about just doing an assessment of how this person experiences the habitual problem. You know, is it associational? Is it meaning orientated? You know, how do they relate to it? And then it's a matter of really on a functional level, really clarifying that pain pleasure relationship to that thing and changing that pain pleasure dynamic. And then also making sure that whatever meaning they've associated to it is looked after. We call it in our version of psychology. We call it secondary gains. Yeah. So that to a certain degree becomes the meaning part of it. So if someone's having the Coca-Cola, for example, yeah, they might be, as we talked about having that Coca-Cola and the benefit of having that Coca-Cola is it makes them feel comfortable. Say for example, it gives them a sense of comfort. So that comfort would be the meaning associated to it. So I mean, if we try and take away that Coca-Cola without replacing it with something that makes them feel comfortable, they're going to reject that change. Yeah. So whatever new, solution we bring in has to include meeting their need for comfort otherwise they're going to have a vacuum which they're going to try and fill with some other you know erroneous um you know solution so i'm really looking at the functional problem and i'm looking at the meaning and most of the time the meaning is what's the secondary gain we say what's the intention that's driving their desire to do that problem behaviour. We'll wrap it up there. And I very much look forward to speaking with you in another episode and maybe just round that off because really that habit changes about priority and I completely get that. Then understanding whether that habit is really based in association or meaning for that individual, talking about how the brain, works in those two separate ways that you discussed, and then understanding that you can't take away a particular pleasure for someone without recognising that needs to be replaced. And I think this is a great point to end. I'm going to wrap up now. I hope that those listening have got as much out of this as I have. I think it's just great. Normally, Al, I would have stopped you about 15 minutes ago, but you've gone way over time. But it's good stuff. And I'm absolutely sure that people listening will have got some benefit and food for thought out of this. Before I wrap up, I am so grateful for everyone who has listened to this podcast. I'm dropping in and out of the top 100 medical podcasts in Australia. If you'd be kind enough to subscribe and leave a positive review, that would really help. And for now. If you've got any queries or questions, drop us a note. Until next time, I hope you live as well as possible for as long as possible. Take care and bye for now. Join the Healthy Heart Network and become part of our growing community. Do you want to know more about your heart health and know more about your risk of heart attack? For $5, get lifetime access valued at over $55. 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