Forging Resilience
Join us as we explore experiences and stories to help gain fresh insights into the art of resilience and the true meaning of success.
Whether you're seeking to overcome personal challenges, enhance your leadership skills, or simply navigate life's twists and turns, "Forging Resilience" offers a unique and inspiring perspective for you to apply in your own life.
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Forging Resilience
20 Professor Martin I. Jones: "If your sense of worth is based on always winning, it becomes a slippery slope".
Embark on a psychological expedition as we join forces with Professor Martin Jones, a distinguished sport and exercise psychologist, who walks us through the intricate dance of mental and physical performance.
From the rigor of athletic fields to the unpredictability of military operations, Martin offers a treasure trove of knowledge on sleep, fatigue, and resilience.
His insights illuminate the intricate ways in which our minds navigate high-pressure environments, shedding light on the importance of a well-nurtured psyche for athletes, soldiers, and anyone looking to optimize their performance under stress.
Martin helps us understand the delicate balance required to foster a nurturing environment that encourages effort and growth, steering clear of the pitfalls of treating children as mini-adults with expectations beyond their years. We explore the long-lasting impact of a mastery-oriented approach to sports, and the pivotal lessons it imparts on resilience and leadership that extend well beyond the playing field.
The episode is a masterclass in the psychology of performance, packed with strategies to calm the mind and foster restful slumber for those seeking to thrive amidst life's myriad challenges.
To see more of Martin's work, find the two links below:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-i-jones-94563455/
https://www.duratusuk.com/
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Welcome to Forge and Resilience. Exploring for a different perspective on strength and leadership, join me as we discuss experiences and stories with guests to help gain fresh insights around challenge, success and leadership. Martin, welcome to Forge and Resilience, mate.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:No worries, it's my pleasure. I've been looking forward to speaking to you for quite a while, not just for the logistical reasons that we've had to manage, also because to share some of your experience and expertise and the things that you do. I know it will be very valuable to myself and my listeners. So thanks for making time to be here today, mate.
Speaker 1:Yes my pleasure, professor Martin Jones, I mean. Lots of times I try and do an introduction. I don't always do it justice. So, for the sake of our listeners, give us a bit of your background and a small introduction that's relevant for us today, for people listening.
Speaker 2:Sure thing, I am a psychologist, so I'm a sport and exercise psychologist by background. So my journey started age 18, thinking I wanted to be a PE teacher, going off to university to study sports science, thinking that that was going to be the career for me. So went to university, was exposed to lots of different areas of sports science which really translates into what we now think of as human performance but very much focused on sport and started to change my direction slightly. So went away from PE and started thinking, well, there's other things I could be doing I'm interested in, looked at a little bit of strength and conditioning, looked at physiotherapy and ended up falling on this idea of sport psychology. Really came through some relationships with really good lecturers, some mentoring relationships with some great lecturers who inspired me as a 19, 20 year old, thinking this is fascinating. I just really got interested in the mind and how our thoughts and our emotions and our behaviours can influence our well-being, our performance, our development. So started moving down that path and got to the end of my degree and I was just eager to learn more. I wanted to learn more so I went off and did a master's degree at Loughborough, so I was originally in Leeds. I went down to Loughborough Same sort of thing just had some great mentors, some great lecturers who, again, just that fire kept burning. That led me into a PhD and then worked in higher education for a number of years.
Speaker 2:So moved across to Canada, worked at a university in Canada for a couple of years, came back to the UK, was a lecturer, senior lecturer, researcher, teacher all that kind of stuff within universities in Britain. So almost came back to effectively being a PE teacher, but just in a slightly different setting. I wasn't playing rugby, I was sat in a lecture hall teaching. So that took me. I was doing that for around about 15 years probably and loved it, loved teaching. Like I think I'm an educator at heart. That's what I enjoy doing. I like working with people and teaching people. So I was working with athletes at that point, done all my training so I could work as a practitioner psychologist, working with coaches, athletes, performance directors and parents.
Speaker 2:And then around about 2018-ish, a job advert came out that was a full-time research post within the Ministry of Defence. It's called the Defence Science Technology Laboratory, or DSTL. So I looked at that and I thought that looks cool. That looks interesting. I'd been exposed to the military a little bit. One of my former students was a Royal Marine who was involved in the coaching and mentoring team down at Limstone, so I was exposed to some of his work and just met other people throughout my time in Canada and back in the UK and I thought this is interesting.
Speaker 2:It's a different performance context. It's not. It's similar to sport but it's very different to sport. The predictability of sport is quite comfortable. The unpredictability of defence is a real challenge from a psychological perspective. So I was drawn to that, thinking this could be cool.
Speaker 2:So I started working there, ended up working as what was called the Principal Advisor for Human Performance for DSTL had a role in NATO as the UK lead to something called the Human Facts and Medicine Panel, and just doing lots of research around how to optimise military personnel every fighting arm of the UK military effectively Trying to understand the unique requirements of these different roles and what can we do, both physically but predominantly psychologically, as that's my background to try and help people. That again quite fortuitously led me to Oxford where I managed to do a master's degree in sleep medicine. So I've focused a lot on sleep and fatigue and mainly resilience and that sort of brings me up to where I am now. I've left that job. I've set up as an independent consultant and working with elite performers in sport, in business and in the military.
Speaker 1:Love it, mate. There's so many things to potentially go down the rabbit hole there, but one of my first things that jumped out in terms of your own curiosity and love for learning was that you trying to, was that spiked through, you trying to improve yourself and your sports, or was it an innate thing, just to understand and help others, or something different? It?
Speaker 2:started, as I think, as many people who work in elite sport I think, in support roles in elite sport. I was a decent athlete. I was never great. I was a good all-rounder. I played a lot of sports. Which sports did you play? I?
Speaker 1:played tennis.
Speaker 2:I played tennis it was my main sport, bit of rugby, bit of hockey. I tried everything pretty much at school, but tennis was probably the main sport and as a child that was. My aim was to set foot on set in the court and play at Wimbledon. That's what I wanted. So my initial interest in the psychology sport I think it allowed me to almost look inside myself. I was learning about these theories. I kind of looked in thinking I understand why I thought that way.
Speaker 2:And there was those outbursts I had as a kid when I was throwing racket. That kind of started to make sense now. So initially it was a self-awareness thing. At that point I knew I wasn't going to play at Wimbledon, but it was interesting for me to understand the psychology sport by using my own experiences. But then as I moved further through my career, I briefly pivoted away from performance sport and really looked more at developmental sport. So my PhD and my postdoctoral research were focused on youth sport. So I specialised in adolescence and what sport can do to help young people develop transferable skills.
Speaker 1:What drew you to that, then, rather than the maybe professional developmental side of?
Speaker 2:things. I can tell you the date and time when it happened. It was a very memorable experience. I was at Loughborough University. An eminent professor, a guy called Professor Dangleld, had come over from America. He was very successful, worked with a lot of Olympic teams, a lot of professional athletes, an eminent figure in the world of sport psychology. He came over to the UK and delivered a lecture. He delivered this lecture that was funded by the NFL. It was the National Football League, the American Football League, that funded him.
Speaker 2:He basically posed that question of if you've got let's just pick a number a thousand people who play youth sport, who play Pee Wee League football, as he called it, our grassroots under nines soccer, football in Europe or rugby, whatever. If that thousand, how many are going to go and play for man City? How many are going to go and play for Exeter Chiefs or the Philadelphia Eagles, whatever? Who gets a professional contract? We know that the numbers are pretty small. Out of a thousand who start as a 10-year-old? Maybe one, maybe none. Out of a thousand, it's really quite small. Who can make an actual career out of it? I'm not talking playing semi-pro, eighth division of the Football League. We're talking who makes a proper career out of this. It's really small.
Speaker 2:So he posed that question is that the only thing that these kids are going to get from sport Is a paycheck, the only outcome? And the obvious answer is well, of course it isn't. There's loads of things. I look back at my own life of playing team sports, of playing individual sports, and you can think well, my love for physical activity now. But why am I healthy, physically active now? Well, that's probably linked to the fact that I was physically active as an adolescent Teamwork skills, communication, determination, learning how to deal with failure, learning how to deal with difficult people, how to be competitive but don't hate people, so how to want to be an opponent but then be able to shake the hand at the end of it. All of these life skills effectively, what we call them, these transferable life skills. They are outcomes, they're really valuable outcomes. So listening to that lecture, there's a light bulb moment. I thought, yeah, he's right, there's so much more to it than just a professional career. And that sparked my interest in this idea of how do we facilitate life skill development.
Speaker 2:There's this saying in youth sport that sport builds character, or maybe sport reveals character. It's a positive experience, but we can look across professional sport in particular and the listeners now will be thinking of lots of different athletes and maybe you've had a bit of a checkered past. They've been a professional sport, they've maybe served time in prison, they've crashed their cars, they've wasted all their money. Clearly, playing sport isn't necessarily the only thing that we need to build character. We need to look at, well, what are the coaches doing? How are the parents supporting it? Where are the opportunities for skill development?
Speaker 2:Just playing football isn't the thing that builds character. It's playing football in a developmentally appropriate setting where you've got support and you've got resource and you've got peer support, coach support. You're learning opportunities. That's what helps build character. So my PhD was really focused on that question. What do we need to do as organisers, as adults, as coaches, as leaders, to shape a young person's sport and experience so that they can take those valuable life lessons away from sport into their relationships, into the boardroom, wherever they end up If?
Speaker 1:they're not playing sport anymore. Yeah, no, I love that, and especially as both my kids play sport. And, yeah, I can see that we've purposefully, rightly or wrongly tried to keep our son away from football from such a young age, just because the atmosphere I live in Barcelona. Everybody to a point I'm generalising here wants their son to be the next Messi. So I feel that there's quite a lot of pressure and the atmosphere isn't always conducive, I feel, for young kids, and I'm talking four, five, six, seven, and so we've waited before going into sport. So I can definitely see that and I guess I don't know you could tell me. But one of my things is a parent looking for my kids to be developed not just in technical skills on the pitch, but outside. Like you said, where in life where it really counts would be the ability to, like you touched on, manage emotions and the ability to, I guess, almost be authentic, I think, is the word that's coming to me at the moment. But what are some of your findings from your research?
Speaker 2:Right, it's interesting that parents are really important. So parents are a source of tangible support. You know they're going to drive the child around, they're going to buy the boots, they're going to buy the kit. They're a source of informational support. Sometimes they're going to give you tips and tricks here's how to hit a four and here's how you run past someone or cross a ball and they can give emotional support. And so they're critical Because children age, the peer group begins to take over a little bit, but parents are still very, really important throughout, and my research in Canada I was working in ice hockey.
Speaker 2:So Canadian ice hockey is, you know, people say it's like a religion, but I mean that doesn't do it justice. It's way more important than religion. It's so culturally salient. Everybody in Canada that I interacted with watches and played hockey as a kid and what I used to see was some parents being really quite aggressive. They're shouting at the referees. They're shouting at the coaches.
Speaker 2:You know there were stories of players and parents attacking referees, waiting in the parking lot and beating up their coach or the referee. And this is the Canadians. Imagine what it was like in America. Yeah, so this is the mild-mannered Canadians doing these things. We look at those behaviors and these people are not bad people. They're not like a lot of the things that parents do in support of their children. What I find is their heart is in the right place. They think they're doing the right thing. So sometimes what I see now I've got two young daughters and I take them to play tennis, they go swimming, they do different things, different sports, and sometimes I can go to the dog who you might hear barking in the room next door, Right hockey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well done. So I sometimes walk the dog and I might see the kids playing football and the parents are creating a miniature version of the professional game. They're professionalising youth sport. They're treating a child like they were treating an adult. So they're shouting at the kids, trying to give them advice which would be appropriate to a 25-year-old professional athlete. But these kids aren't 25. They're cognitively, emotionally different. They are not miniature adults. They're physically not the same.
Speaker 2:So we need to look at creating a developmentally appropriate system around children that recognises that they don't think like adults do. They don't think like 19-year-olds do. They're children. So we need to set the sport up that's aligned with their stage of development physically, cognitively, socially, emotionally. All those things and that was one of the main things that I came away is that people don't intentionally do the wrong thing. What they're doing, their behaviours and what they're saying is they are thinking that's going to support them, that's going to help them get better. But with a bit of extra knowledge around psychology, around child development, you start to recognise that you're actively thwarting their psychosocial development and their athletic development. So there's a big education piece with parents to try and get them to understand what are the right things a bit stronger. What are the task relevant or the more developmentally relevant things to say that will both support psychosocial development and athletic development.
Speaker 1:Could you give us an example, then, for my son, who's eight years old, playing basketball. What could something I say or not say do to help him in his journey?
Speaker 2:Simple, one Simple one. You're watching your son play basketball. He's at the free throw line, sinks a shot and you just shout awesome, that's great, fantastic, positive, it's sound, positive. But if you're looking to develop, you're saying awesome because you want them to repeat that behaviour, that you're trying to give positive reinforcement, what's awesome? You've just shouted that's great, that's awesome, what, specifically, is good?
Speaker 2:So do we praise the footwork? Do we say that's, you know your feet were in the best position Awesome. Do you praise the effort, the fact that it's awesome? Because I know you missed one last week and it's great to see you bounce back. And I'm praising you for the fact that you've been able to maintain your concentration, your effort, your determination. So what we can, just the shout of awesome is ambiguous to a child. So if we can help them and say what we think is good about it, and then we need to be really careful about what we're selecting, because what we can, when we give that sort of feedback to a child, we can be reinforcing certain beliefs.
Speaker 2:So does that child.
Speaker 2:If you're endorsing the fact that that was awesome because you've just handed it to your opponent, you've crushed your opponent, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:Or do you say it's awesome because of how much concentration it took to block out distractions and showing your child what you are valuing effort, determination, the things that they can control versus. Are you praising normative success? You're better than somebody else? They can't control that because at some point there's always going to be someone bigger, better, faster, stronger and at that point their sense of competence is a bit more fragile.
Speaker 2:So the words that we say, the things that we value, how we communicate that to the child, can be really, really important, especially as they get older and they go from being the best player in their team and then they move up to, say, like a county standard or a semi-pression standard, and now that they're maybe in the bottom half, the kids that don't have what we call a task orientation or a mastery orientation, where they focus on self-development, comparing themselves to where they were yesterday, or what we call these self-referenced concepts of competence versus other, or normative, like comparing yourself to somebody else. If you start getting beaten consistently and your sense of worth or sense of competence is based on whether you can beat other people, it's a slippery slope and ultimately you see a lot of those kids start dropping out of sport.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really, really interesting. There's a couple of things around that. This is the yeah, mental side of relief, because I do. I do remember reading the mindset book by Carol Caldwick.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Caldwick.
Speaker 1:And then I think he was really, really young. I was away overseas at the time and a light bulb went off here. It's the effort, not the outcome, and the way that I praise them. And yeah, and I think for me, my biggest takeaway is, as a young lad failing at sport, I might add, for a long, long time Well, failing, I'll come onto that in a sec, but it's like it doesn't define you. You're enough. You know, and that's been a massive insight that I've had through self-awareness is that I'm enough. It's not the thing that I do, it's who I am. And the interesting thing about that is, yeah, from the ages of like 10 to 16, both the primary school and secondary school I went to we used to get smashed week in, week out at football. I think the most we lost boy was 24-0. And the best we managed was probably a 3-1 loss. So, yeah, it was a very interesting experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, parents are so important in that. You talk about this growth mindset, or so? Carol Dweck is an educational psychologist I think she started. A lot of her work was around education.
Speaker 2:So this idea of like, if you think of intelligence, we can apply this growth set idea to something like intelligence. So do you believe that you have got what we call like an incremental belief system, which is equivalent to growth, that you can, if you put in the effort, you can increase your intelligence? Or do you believe you've got what's like an entity belief or a fixed mindset where you believe that you were born that way. Doesn't matter how hard you try, there's no point adding more, there's no point putting in effort.
Speaker 2:Now, the interesting thing with that growth and fixed mindset is the consequences of those beliefs. So if you believe that you have got a fixed athletic ability, if you believe that you cannot get any fitter, that this is your genetic predisposition and that's it, then it will be reflected in your behaviors. This is the thing with the growth mindset that I think is really important. The mindset there's, the beliefs and the attitudes around whether it is possible to get better are reflected in behavioral choices. What we then do based on that belief, if we don't think we can improve. If we've got a fixed mindset, it will be reflected in the types of things that we choose to do or don't do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's the beauty of it, isn't it? That beliefs are just thoughts that we hold to be true, and we might have been handed those down with a positive intention. However, if it's been reinforced by a certain behaviors or outcomes, as a young kid, like you say, it can be guess difficult to distinguish whether it's us or the outcome that's being rewarded, and you get a bit messy. Yeah, you mentioned something right at the beginning, and it's reflected in the name of this podcast in terms of resilience. But what does resilience mean to you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so resilience is again. It's an interesting topic. It's a word that's used a lot. So my research I started to, as I said, was interested in youth sport and then I moved into a slightly different area. So I was interested in the individual differences. We call this differential psychology. What makes you unique to me? How are we different from one another?
Speaker 2:And I was really interested specifically in this concept called mental toughness as an example of a factor, of a construct that we will differ on. There's going to be a spectrum in a population. Some people are going to be high, some people are going to be low and I was really interested in understanding the components of mental toughness. What is mental toughness? There's even a paper called what is this thing called mental toughness? It was written in 2002, I think it was. So I was interested in that idea and one of the critiques of the research at the time was a lot of the research around mental toughness isn't really explaining what it is Like. It's not really defining it. What it's actually doing is providing a list of things that people who are mentally tough could do.
Speaker 2:So it was almost behaviors linked to mental toughness, and one of them was pain. So the belief that people who are high in mental toughness can maintain technique in the presence of pain. They can maintain their focus when in discomfort. So I thought, well, that's easy to, I can hurt people. That's an easy thing to experimentally manipulate, and I used to do it with cold water. So I set up a sort of called a cold presser test where you submerge your hand up to the wrist in very cold, circulating water. So it's not, there's a slight current, so it's moving the water away from the hand. We're talking like one degree, zero degrees or so. We used to use salt so it didn't freeze. It's very, very, very cold. And you put your hand in that water and we try and you can.
Speaker 2:You can measure three different components of pain. We can measure our pain threshold. So when you put your hand in the water, what point and we do this in terms of time how long does it take you before you say that hurts, like at some point that sensation will go from uncomfortable to this hurts. That's your pain threshold. We can then look at pain intensity. So you're saying it hurts. How much does it hurt? Is it zero? Doesn't really hurt at all? 10, the worst pain imaginable. That's your pain intensity and then pain tolerance is defined as the maximum amount of pain that you're willing to accept. So we can again measure that in time. So once you've got your pain threshold, how much are you willing to endure that moment? So it's motivational. It's a motivational construct because you're asking someone why it's why you're doing that. So I was interested in understanding mental toughness and I'll come back to resilience. Just bear with me.
Speaker 1:I'm going around now. I love it.
Speaker 2:I basically found that it didn't predict. So mental toughness did not predict these pain variables. We did other experiments where we're holding a weight out in front of you like a static or isometric weight hold. Again, anyone who's done that will know your shoulders start to burn and hurt quite quickly. So is that related to mental toughness? The answer is no. We didn't find particularly strong correlations. There's other things happening essentially.
Speaker 2:So then I started working with a PhD student, a guy called Brad Cooper not the actor, a different Brad Cooper and he was doing some really interesting studies. He was an endurance athlete. He'd done the race across America marathons, he'd been to the Kona World Champion Ironman Like he'd put himself in that pain space through his athletic career and he was interested in his experience of racing the race across America coast to coast bike race and he'd looked at the physiology, the nutrition. His bike setup was perfect, everything was his aerodynamics, and yet he was experiencing these ups and downs throughout the race where sometimes he was just so focused on chasing down the team in front of him and it was. Everything was good, his thoughts were good, his emotions were good, he was ready to go and then at other points of the race. It was the exact opposite Lost motivation, he felt really quite down. He was really struggling and he saw this up and down of what he said was mental toughness. It wasn't something that he could call on all the time.
Speaker 2:So we started doing some experiments and we found that mental toughness isn't one thing, it changes. We call it a person, situation interaction, that your genes, your personality, your life experiences interact with the situation that you're in. So, for example, I might be sleep deprived, so I'm quite moody, so I'm not able to apply that mental toughness bank that I've got because of the situation. It might be that the situation is so much more important because now my family are involved. Now if my family are in danger, then I can apply extra resource Because if that situation is interacting with my resources and create a different outcome, so that's what we found. It changes, changed the situation. So then I come into resilience.
Speaker 2:So if you look at the resilience literature, people, some people say you're born with it. Now I remember talking to a relatively senior non-commissioned officer in an aspect of the UK military effectively said why are we bothering training this stuff? We don't train resilience, we select for it. They're either resilient or not, we don't need to train it. So there's this pervasive myth I think it's a myth that you're born resilient, so.
Speaker 2:But there is some literature that suggests it's a disposition, it's a personality factor, and I think, well, is it not the same as mental toughness? Does it not change? Does it not change based on different things? You know, and the talking of pain, like as an outcome I could get, I could find a woman on the street, do that pain test and she might have relatively low pain threshold, very short pain tolerance reports, very high pain intensity. So would suggest, you know, not particularly pain, pain tolerant. That same woman is in the hospital about to give birth and you rate them again. It's really high because the situation is completely different. Putting a hand in a cold water tank is meaningless, it's arbitrary. Why would you push through that, pushing through the pain, except in the pain? Because it means you're gonna have a healthy child and you don't, maybe don't want to take the drugs because you feel like there's a consequence to that. You know, people have different beliefs around these things, but the situation is fundamentally different, which means that the resource allocation and that person's situation, interaction, creates a different outcome. And I started to think well, that's the same for resilience. Surely it's more than just this born with. So we started to look at the.
Speaker 2:There's so much literature on resilience we can look at. I think of resilience as the trajectory of functioning following exposure to an adversity. So we can think of it. If you imagine a graph where we can look at, you know a straight line, everything's ticking along and adversity hits. And then what happens afterwards? Now we can plot that graph where the line hits the bottom and stays down. That's what we call succumbing. You've succumbed to that adversity, that stressor, that pressure, whatever you want to call it. Arguably, that's not resilience, right? That's something that you've not been able. The stressor has fundamentally ruined your performance, you're functioning, your wellbeing. So resilience is that trajectory. It's can you.
Speaker 2:Then you get a dip and then can you come back to baseline, or can you come back and increase so we get post adversarial growth that the result of a stressor can get you back. So I'm interested in what happens afterwards, like how do we allocate resources? What we've got could be our personality, the skills we've learned, our social support network. There's loads of different resources, but how do they come together to ensure that that dip doesn't dip really low. How do we flatten the curve? In the world of COVID we talk about flattening the curve. How do we stop that dip from dipping? And if we come in back to baseline, can we drag that backwards so we bounce back quicker? And if we get post adversarial growth, what do we need to do to get beyond baseline to an improvement? So that's what resilience is. For me, it's that trajectory of functioning. And then how do we help people when we think about what are the conditions, what are the skills that can enable people to maintain those adaptive trajectories and avoid those succumbing trajectories?
Speaker 2:One thing that I think resilience isn't is this idea that you can just put your head down and bash through walls, that it's just when we think of that adversity hits. We don't have any change in function. We just maintain our positive function all the way through. I think people like to think that is resilience, but I don't think it is, because then, basically, what that's telling me is that stressor that I'm calling a stressor, but for the individual it's not stressor, it's not created any change in their function, it's benign. We call it a benign. So, for example, me talking to you right now isn't creating a stress response I don't think, I don't mean.
Speaker 1:I don't have not taken my pulse rate, I'm just checking myself in the camera.
Speaker 2:I don't think so. So am I demonstrating that resilience trajectory at the moment? Probably not, because the fact that we're talking is comfortable and it's not creating a stress response. There's no dip in performance, there's no dip in functions, no dip in well-being, in productivity, so I don't need to rebound, I don't need to come back up to baseline because I'm already at baseline. So that's where I think there's some myth around resilience that it's just these people who just don't get affected by stress, that they just smash through everything and they just gris everything out, and I think that's not resilience.
Speaker 1:No, neither to me. And what was interesting about resilience for me is that I for so long was trying to project an image of who I was by what I did in terms of my military service Ironman, and I found that you're potentially, physically I could push myself into certain levels of discomfort, but when I peel back the layers of the onion, I recognize that emotionally I couldn't. So asking people to come onto my podcast at the beginning was a challenge because I feared the rejection. So it was recognizing that and stepping into it, doing it anyway. It's just a no. It's a no to me and, yeah, it's recovering. For me, this is what it means getting back up after a setback and learning to recognize what I can take away from it. Not necessarily to say it's positive, but it is what it is type of attitude, yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm like a former colleague of mine. Tom Curran works a lot in perfectionism, just written a book about perfectionism Really good book. If anyone wants to read that, shout out to Tom. What's the name of it? It's called the Perfection Trap. It's about perfectionism but it talks about failure, and I'm going to butcher the book because he does a better way of describing it.
Speaker 2:But it's part of the human condition we fail, we're fragile, and this belief or this desire to never fail holds us back. And actually people who are really perfectionistic often withhold effort because they're scared that they're going to fail and they don't want to put themselves out there. So it's related to resilience, I guess. But I think one of the things that again another myth around resilience that I've seen time and time again is the way to get people more resilient is just expose them to stress. Let's just get people exposed to adversity. If that was true, every homeless person on the streets of London or Barcelona, wherever you are there, would surely be the most resilient people on the planet, because they are exposed to adversity on a daily basis. They are living a hard, hard life and we know that they are not rebounding. But whatever stress has happened to these people. I mean, I'm making a broad, sweeping statement of people who are homeless. But you know, we know that some things probably happened in their life and it's led to this current situation where they're on the street, they're not rebounding, they're succumbing. So the exposure to adversity isn't the thing that's getting people more resilient.
Speaker 2:Now, we don't become, we don't increase our capacity for resilience by living a soft life, an easy life. We do need some exposure, but it's the afterwards, it's not the adversity. It's what we then do. How do we, as parents, as coaches, as leaders, hold somebody's hand? We call this scaffolding. We're providing a scaffolded experience. We're exposing people to difficulty that's too difficult for them to deal with on their own.
Speaker 2:But we are creating a scaffold, we're creating a boundary where we are supporting them to deal with the adversity. Then, over time, we can gradually take that scaffolding down so that they then can learn how to do it on their own. This is called the zone of proximal development. We put people in this zone of proximal development, where they are unable to deal with the adversity on their own, but with support of somebody else they can get through it. And then, over time, you just gradually step away, slowly, slowly, slowly, and then their zone of proximal development has now shifted because they've learned how to deal with adversity and then they've got another zone of proximal development, another area that they can develop into. So we can, as leaders, as coaches, as parents, as friends, as partners, we can provide that scaffolding and facilitate those adaptive trajectories to adversity, not just smashing people and then saying, well, bounce back, I'm just gonna hit you harder, bounce back, you've got it. People need to learn how to bounce back.
Speaker 1:So part of that as well, I guess, is understanding what they're making it mean, and just getting to bring that into the light of day, that the loss, the defeat, the rejection, Would that be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it can be. I think, from a sort of cognitive behavioral perspective, it's not the adversity itself that's causing the loss of function in performance, it's your beliefs about that loss. It's your beliefs about the consequences. So we can control those. So if we learn how to apply some of those skills where we can almost I talk about driving a wedge between stimulus and response where something's happened, we've then got a negative emotional response or a cognitive response. Can we drive a wedge between that and just use that space?
Speaker 2:Victor Frankel, a famous psychiatrist he wrote Man's Search for Meaning he talks about there's a space between stimulus and response where we can choose our reaction. So, from resilience, we may have experienced a loss and the consequence might be some self-defeating thoughts around. This means I'm a bad person. Let's drive a wedge between it and let's say, right, let's think about some of the alternatives. What are the other ways we can think about this? What are the other options, what are the choices that we have, so we don't have to go down that self-defeating path that lowers our self-worth and self-esteem. Can we come up with a different narrative around? Well, yes, I've lost, but I can look at it in a way as it's gonna help me. It's gonna. It's something that I might experience again. So having gone through it now means that the next time won't be as bad.
Speaker 2:And you know, this morning I'm downstairs with my two daughters, one's 10, one's six. The six-year-old is sat on the sofa making a racket. She's just like I can't even call it singing. She's just making an absolute racket. And my 10-year-old's getting more and more frustrated and she's shouting will you stop? Will you stop? So I just say to her like can't you think of this in a different way? You're gonna be frustrated by people, maybe today at school. So actually this is a good opportunity because you get to practice. You know it's with your sister. You're in your house. No one's gonna care what you look like or do you're in a safe space, if we wanna call it that. This is a good opportunity for you to practice your reaction to being annoyed. So this is a good thing. You don't have to be angry at Daisy. You should be thanking her that she's giving you an opportunity to practice these skills. No, she's still screaming and shouting because she's 10. But it's that kind of thing. We can choose how we respond and how we view these adversities.
Speaker 1:But it goes back to what we started this conversation with and why the developmental thing is so interesting, because I guess that's the most fertile time, that the kids' minds are open to these and exported, I guess, is an accelerator of certain situations, like you said, that they will go through those peaks and troughs of life. Or, in this case, sport, and with that scaffold, ie the parent and the message and the coach there to help them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sports, just loaded with these life experiences that we could talk for an hour Just thinking about it. But you lose, you get selected. You don't get selected. You're now on the bench when you thought you were going to play. There's disappointment there. You've not lost, you're just not playing and you want to.
Speaker 2:You have arguments, you get injured and you have to learn how to deal with that setback. There's dealing with elation, there's lots of excitement and there's lots of positive things that sometimes, if you get too caught up in them, they can end up leading you down a strange path. So there's so many experiences in sport that we can draw out, but there are a lot of these things that they almost exist. We call this knowledge in action. The knowledge is in the doing. So we take teamwork. We could be really a really good team work, a really good communicator, because we're on the pitch, we're doing it all the time and you come off and you say, well, what's good teamwork? And people can't articulate that they don't know because they're doing it. It's called tacit knowledge or knowledge in action. They're doing the thing. They don't necessarily know what they're doing.
Speaker 2:So part of the challenge is if we're going to help people transfer from youth sport into the workplace. But what about from one job into another job? What about when somebody has done 22 years in the military and now they're not, they're about to leave? How do we help people recognize the valuable experiences in one life domain that then can be used in another? So we have to get it out of them. Self reflection, some guided reflection from a coach. You can help them with some critical questions to facilitate or to stimulate that sort of reflective practice, that process of, well, what have I learned? That's really important. So just playing sports not going to probably do much. You have to know what you've learned.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost the implication of those lessons, the awareness of them, to be able to apply them outside of it. Yeah, I love it, mate, I could stay here all day, but I'm really aware that you've got so much experience to offer and I'd love to, in terms of the work that you do with other organizations, like the Dorators Projects and GazisLads, which one and this will help me decide the last part of our conversation, but which one do you see more beneficial in terms of helping people manage their stress or getting the foundations right in terms of managing workload? And I'm specifically like sleep. Which is more beneficial do you think to talk about in this moment? Sleep and rest or stress management, sleep?
Speaker 2:sleep. Yeah. So stress management and resilience we use different words ultimately mean the same thing the ability to respond to a stressor in a way that helps you. That's what resilience is. It's how do you respond to adversity and stressors in a way that keeps you on a path to where you want to be. That is built on rest and recovery. If you do not sleep sufficiently, we can go into the neuroscience of this, but probably not necessary. Just basically, your brain just doesn't function in the same way. If you compare someone who's sleep restricted and someone who isn't, the fundamental neurology or the neuroscience is different in terms of the functions of the brain. So stress management is Is of the brain, like your ability to think and respond is a brain function. It's thinking. So if the those electrically active parts your brain, the neurons and neurotransmitters, are not functioning in In the in the most optimal way, it's gonna be. It's gonna be manifested in in your ability to deal with stress. So sleep is fundamental, massive.
Speaker 1:Well, let's, let's go sleep then, mate, I'm not go to sleep.
Speaker 2:I'm Probably could not off to. I'm constantly tired.
Speaker 1:Um, what, what, what could be? What's the three most Fascinating things, or a couple of fascinating things about sleep that we might not necessarily connect in terms of why, why, why we need it, what, why it's good for us.
Speaker 2:The. I mean there's, there's tons, literally. I did a master's degree on sleep medicine. You could, you could. There's so much to go into this, but I think the the big thing is Um, so there's, you've got to value sleep first and foremost. I have worked with Many business people, people from your old world, who will say Four hours is enough, I'm fine, I'm four hours, I could do five hours, like I did my seniors, the Royal Marines seniors, like I've only got five hours in a whole week. And look how hard I am, look how good I am because I'm I'm able to do the job with so little sleep. So it's almost you want as a badge of honor, definitely, yeah. So I think, fundamentally, we need to move away from this idea of the sleepless elite, the, the stories of Margaret Thatcher Having four hours a night and Thomas Edison, who famously said that sleep is a throwback to our caveman days. It's like you know, it's a waste of time. We need to move away from that. And and when people can value sleep, that they can value the, the positive benefits of what happens when we choose sleep over other things, that that is fundamental.
Speaker 2:So people lose their sleep for various reasons and you can group them based on the reasons why. So, number one there's a medical reason that somebody's got this, that's not getting sufficient sleep. They may have obstructive sleep apnea, where they effectively stop breathing in sleep. They maybe have some kind of sleep so I rest. This leg syndrome that's waking them up might have a pain disorder that wakes them up. Um, insomnia. All these different medical reasons that are Are potentially interfering their disorders that are interfering with sleep. So that's one group of people. Now we can treat a lot of those disorders different pharmacological solutions or therapies depending on what the sleep disorder is. So sleep apnea, for example, you've probably heard of a CPAP machine, a continuous positive airway pressure so we can wear a mask. So there's treatments. That's one group.
Speaker 2:The next group is you'll recognize this is occupational sleep restriction that there's a requirement of the job that means that you need to Restrict sleep. You do in nights, like you. Maybe in the military We've got nighttime operations, but it could be somebody who works in ambulance, the police, um a delivery driver. You know someone who's just in this 24 seven economy. So their job is restricting their opportunity to sleep. People who are on call is a big one. So whether you, if you interview at home, if the beepers next to you pillow, we know that those people just don't get as good asleep. So there's occupational sleep restriction.
Speaker 2:The third group is Sleep procrastinators. What that means is that they are choosing to do something instead of go to bed. They are choosing to game into the early hours, they're choosing to just to crush a whole series of Netflix. They are making a choice and saying should I do one thing or over the other? Now, those are the people that I think we need to. We need to look at them. We can support people who've got sleep disorders with treatments.
Speaker 2:Occupational sleep restriction again, there are things we can do to support these people. Shift working isn't going anywhere, so we could need to try and make it as as best as we can. We need people to work nights, if you know, like, say, police, ambulance, frontline services. We need them so we can help them. But the big group who's maybe listening to to this podcast right now, are those people who Choose to do something instead of sleep, and we and we need to think about all how do we change that choice? So we need to increase the value. People need to understand what sleep is doing for them and when you start to increase the value of sleep, think about what do you care about, what's important to you, and then if you can show that sleep Is related to that thing that's important to you, it's much more likely that they're that they're going to change that behavior.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2:So that's the thing we want to try and value. We want to increase the value, promote the value of sleep so that people make those choices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. I read the, the Matthew Walker book. Yeah, I was sleeping. I listened to a couple of podcasts. Yeah, I'm in, I'm an instant convert. Have been for a while and it's one of the things, it's one of my basics when I was trying for Iron man. There's so many things I couldn't control, but I found that my preparation, how I turned up to training the night before and and, and, and, like I say, sleep and rest, even though I had two young kids was an absolutely fundamental. In fact, it was one of the things that limited me from moving up in terms of Volume of training, because I couldn't get the rest because of the work and young kids. Yeah, so definitely recognize that. Well. So a couple of things then people can do to to set themselves up. If we assume that they've got a belief that, yeah, it's gonna help me. Also, couple of things they can lean into to set themselves up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, good night, see, yeah, yeah, sure thing. So, like I say, sleeps, you know, if you live to the age of 90, you can spend 30 years doing it. You know, third, roughly a third of your life is going to be spent asleep. But I don't really deal with people who are actually asleep, because once, once, you're unconscious, that's not for me. Like I'm not, I don't work in a sleep lab, I don't deal with Um, like I don't, I don't monitor people who are actually asleep. I mean, I've done, I've seen that stuff, I know what it is, but I don't do that. The people I work with are awake. So I'm dealing with people who are, who are looking at me and conversing with me. They're not asleep.
Speaker 2:So the what, what I, what I focus on is well, what are you doing while you're awake that is potentially supporting good sleep and what's thwarting good sleep? So can we look at the pillars of good sleep and recognize where are those where the sledgehammers, what are knocking those pillars down? So that's what I focus on Fundamentally. Like I'm not a medical doctor, I don't prescribe sleep tablets. I'm not going to prescribe pharmacological treatments. They are available. They come with side effects. There, that's where you, if you've got a sleep problem, you doctors, someone to go and talk to. But I look at what's happening in the daytime and they're effectively there's something called the two process model of sleep regulation and arguably there's there's maybe a few more, there's potentially four processes, but there's three main ones. The two process model is your sleep pressure, you sleep, you drive to sleep and you circadian alerting system, you circadian with them and how they interact. So what happens as you, as you're awake? The longer you're awake, the longer you're awake, this, this homeostatic drive to sleep, builds up To a point where it's at its maximum. It builds in proportion to how long you've been awake. So the longer you're awake, the higher your drive. Think of it like Thirst. That's also a homeostatic system. The longer you go without water, the thirstier you get. So that sensation of thirst is then you then quench that that sensation by drinking. So the sleep is the same it builds, it builds, it builds, and then you, you quench that, that sleep, that sleep drive, by sleeping. So it washes it away as you sleep. So that builds up.
Speaker 2:The circadian alerting system is when the sun is up. We evolved on a planet with a predictable sun up, sun down pattern. So our physiology has evolved aligned with that. The sun up, sun down pattern, it. When we wake up, we get an alerting system, that that builds up gradually throughout the day, has a little dip just after lunch and then it peaks at around about Six o'clock, depending on the seasons, so mid, mid evening sort of thing, and then when the light goes down, when the solar day has ended We'd no longer get in light in our eyes that alert system dips. Now there's a golden window, so where there's a, there's the dipping of the circadian learning system Aligning with that peak in sleep pressure and you fall asleep. That that is the point at which you fall asleep.
Speaker 2:The third process is stress. We'll come back to stress in a second. But what we need to look at In, as as sleep drive is building throughout the day and the circadian alerting system is, is building and dropping throughout the day, we can try and understand what are people doing that are potentially Thwarting those processes. So sleep pressure is, is is chemical. It's based on the buildup of certain things within the brain, and certain things that we consume can stop those things from from building up properly.
Speaker 2:Caffeine is an obvious one. Caffeine is going to be blocking what we call these adenosine receptors. So through a quirk of nature, the caffeine molecule is the same shape as an adenosine molecule. So we've got adenosine receptors in the brain which are effectively clogged with caffeine. So the adenosine can't get in and it doesn't work in the same way. So that's why that's how caffeine works. So to drink in caffeine at certain times and certain dosages can affect that sleep pressure buildup. Other stimulants nicotine from vaping for example can can do the same sorts of things. Any other anphetamine stimulant drugs Cocaine for example is going to do a similar thing. It's going to create alertness.
Speaker 2:But if influence us our sleep drive, circadian rhythm, again it's. It's what we call an endogenous rhythm. It ticks insiders. Our body clocks are, are running Regardless of the environment that we're in, but they're not necessarily aligned with the environment that we're in. So we call this entrainment. So an example of when that entrainment isn't working, when we've got circadian misalignment, is jet lag. So when the internal body clock is not aligned with the external environment, the extreme version of that is jet lag. That's what we experience. So when we're not aligned it properly, we get that mint like a transient sort of jet lag sort of feeling. So we need to make sure we are setting that clock to the outside environment, and light is the big one.
Speaker 2:If you get light in your eyes early in the morning, you are, you are in training your internal rhythm to the external environment and then therefore the circadian Alerting system will be predictably dipping at around about 10 11 o'clock at night. At the same time the sleep pressure is built. So the the main things are get early morning light exposure, and I don't mean you know sitting, your office I mean the office I mean right now is not sufficiently well lit for circadian training. I can see things around me. It's light enough to see, but it's not light enough to entrain that rhythm. There's a different type of cell in your retina, the response to light. So we need to get outside, don't stare at the sun. But being outside is light enough, depending where you're looking. But if we're just walking down the beach, we're walking in a park, we're walking down the road, that's light enough. Even where I am today Exeter it's raiding, it's gray Outside is easily sufficiently bright. So get that early in the morning.
Speaker 2:Think about when we're taking in certain stimulants. I love a coffee Like I drink coffee all the time, every day. It's like it's literally a daily habit. But I try not to consume caffeine too late in the afternoon. In fact my cutoff is pretty much lunchtime. I don't tend to drink coffee at all in the afternoon.
Speaker 1:I've noticed that in me as well. I've dropped coffee, but even tea. Now I think it's starting to affect me later on in the night.
Speaker 2:Different people respond to caffeine in different ways. So it's very difficult to say a dosage, don't exceed a dosage, because it's different for different people. Some people can respond to caffeine on very small doses. Others, if you drink a lot of it, will have very little response to caffeine. Even if they are you know they're belt feeding espresso's all day. Some people just don't respond to it because they're habituated. They've got tolerance to caffeine. So think about when you're using it how much. So for me.
Speaker 2:I just don't consume caffeine after lunch because the half life of caffeine, the amount of time it takes to metabolize, is up to 10 hours for some people. So if you're putting down a coffee at three o'clock in the afternoon, if you are that person who's a very slow metabolizer, it's still active in your brain at the time you want to go to bed. And some people my parents say I can drink caffeine whenever and I still fall asleep. That just tells me that they're habituated to it. They don't get the alerting boost of caffeine anymore. But what you don't see is the effect that those caffeine molecules are having on the brain. They are interacting with other things in your brain and they are having an effect on your physiological sleep Even though you're asleep, but the type, the quality of the sleep is impaired if you've got a lot of caffeine in your system.
Speaker 2:Alcohol is a similar one, does the same similar sort of thing. So again, I'm not T-Total. I do drink occasionally socially, but I recognize that even one glass of wine, one pint, is gonna have an effect on my sleep. I might not notice it, but it is there. So if I know I've got something important to do the following day, it's just not gonna support the performance the following day. So you get the information and you make your choice, because that is the main thing.
Speaker 1:Love it, and I guess as well. The final bit for me is what jumps out is the discipline, then, to go to bed when you're feeling tired, rather than start scrolling or going onto screens and watching.
Speaker 2:Netflix. Like I said, it's just like thirst we know when we're thirsty, so we go and get a drink. You know when you're sleepy, so that's one thing that I think you might hear it on. I work in a different space to a lot of so-called sleep experts, or, like, I think of myself as a human performance specialist, and sleep is one of the tools that I have at my disposal to facilitate performance. But the people that I work with don't live on a. They don't have a super king bed. They don't have silk pajamas. They don't you know, they're not living in a five-star hotel.
Speaker 2:These people work in restricted environments. They you'll know what I'm talking about the uncomfortable places to sleep. They often are trying to sleep when the sun's up. They may be on a defense watch where it's a six on, six off pattern, so while working in an environment where the opportunities for sleep are not optimal. So what can we do in those situations to make a bad situation better? And it's different to just the generic sleep hygiene advice Eight hours a night, whatever, which you know we can challenge that. Not everyone needs eight hours. In fact, very few people do. It's more of a range. So we can start to look at how do we maximize opportunities when those opportunities are not optimal.
Speaker 1:Brilliant mate. I've got one more question and I'll start to wrap it up. If you've got time, yeah, go for it. And that was. I've got a mate who, on paper, does everything right in terms of sleep. He goes to bed early, he exercises, he tries to get up early, gets to light, eats cleanly, not too much caffeine, doesn't drink, that's not the problem. He'll go to bed around nine-ish, yet finds himself waking up and this is also relevant to me as well, actually, you know two or three o'clock in the morning and then struggles I can get back to sleep, even if it's I'm awake for a window and struggles to get back to sleep. What's potentially something he and I could look at in terms of if most if we assume most things on paper we're doing well, we can look at to help support us or at least my mates stay asleep longer, yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, coming back to those sleep experts, you tell you one of the things that you might hear or read about is having a consistent bedtime and wake time. While there is some wisdom in that, you've also got to recognize that, as I say, sleep is like thirst you get a sensation of thirst, you get a sensation of being sleepy. So if you, at nine pm, do not have that sensation to sleep, you are not sleepy. Don't go to bed. Like, go to bed when you're sleepy, that's when your body is telling you to fall asleep. You're getting that sensation of sleepiness. That's when you go to bed. Having a consistent wake time is helpful, but within reason, like don't feel like I have to get up at 6.55 on the nose every day. Have a range of approximately in a 20 minutes, either side of seven, for example. That's a consistent wake time within that sort of boundary. So, first of all, go to bed when you are tired. What you can sometimes see is that at nine pm, for example, if he's going to sleep at nine pm because of the belief that going to sleep early will be performance enhancing, but he's not necessarily sleepy enough, he's maybe not built a sufficient sleep drive. So what we might want to look at doing is maybe pushing bedtime slightly later to increase that sleep pressure, and then that will help consolidate that sleep over the long term period. So that could be one thing. Considering when is he sleepy? At nine, or is he going to bed because of the belief that early sleep is performance enhancing? So we could look at something like that.
Speaker 2:There's other things. There's something called a chronotype. So your chronotype is you may have heard of this idea of people being larks or owls morning person, evening person we can look at that. So this is not just what do you prefer, but when are you functioning optimally? Do you do better early in the morning? Do you do better late at night? If you went camping and all think you've got no light source, you've got no distractions, do you naturally wake up at four in the morning or do you naturally wake up at nine in the morning? Now, if somebody is an early riser I mean I went for a weekend away with some old work friends and we did some walks over Xmore and one of the guys would work up every morning at four and he was the same thing he just says I can't get back to sleep Every single night. We get back to our little Airbnb and he was spark out in front of the TV by eight o'clock. Now that tells me that I mean he'd had a few drinks, so he's probably a bit sedated. But that would suggest, or could suggest, and had not done a clinical assessment or diagnosis, but I think that might suggest that he could have an early morning chronotype and he therefore he falls asleep early in the evening.
Speaker 2:So what we can do then is we can artificially extend the day through using lights, through using like a therapy lamp, like a seasonal effective disorder lamp, where in the evening, when the sun's gone down, we can give him a light stimulus to what we call phase delay or phase advance, the circadian rhythm, so we can push his circadian day later into the evening. So then he's more alert, he doesn't. We call this dim light melatonin onset, which happens when the sun goes down. We're just moving that later in the day so that melatonin, which is a hormone that's produced as the sun comes down. It's not necessarily a sleep hormone per se, but it is related to the sleep process. It's like the start, like Matt Walker says, it's like the starter pistol of sleep, of the onset of sleep. It helps lower body temperature and initiate sleep. So if you can move that later again, it's gonna be combining with that building the sleep pressure. So he's now going to sleep at 11 instead of nine. That's when he's sleepy and it's just gonna help consolidate that block of sleep so that he'll likely wake up. Six, seven in the AM, still getting a sufficient duration. You're just shifting it forward. So that's. There are a couple of things, but it would be dependent on the individual and take that. It's not advice, like I'm just saying these are some of the things that you could do. If it's stress related, as I mentioned before, the other process is stress from an evolutionary point of view, sympathetic nervous system activation.
Speaker 2:A fight or flight response is a really good thing if you're about to be eaten by a predator, like if you've got somebody, like an animal, that could attack you. You don't want to be asleep because you're gonna die, you're gonna be attacked and you're gonna die. So a fight and flight response will keep you awake for that reason. So you can fight or you can run. Now the issue is that we get those same fight and flight responses from things that aren't gonna kill us emails, conversations, relationship issues, financial pressures, all these things that in the modern world are creating a fight and flight response. So that's gonna stop us sleeping.
Speaker 2:So what can happen sometimes is in the middle of the night you might wake up. We all wake up in the night, incidentally. We always have these periods of brief awakenings. We just don't tend to remember them. We go back to sleep very quickly. But if you do wake up you might then suddenly attach that awakening to the time. On a clock on the wall or something just creates a little hook. And now you awake proper awake, and now your brain starts worrying. Now, if you're now in a, you almost create a stress response because of the thoughts that you're having. So it's not that there's a predator about to kill you, but you're now thinking about that meeting. You're thinking about what someone said to you yesterday that's actually really bothered you, and now you've just got that worrying mind.
Speaker 2:So how do we help people quiet and down that worrying mind? How can we take thoughts out of your head and put them somewhere else? How do we block those thoughts? So we can use a journal, a diary you mentioned. Gaz Gaz talks about think with ink, get it out of your head, put it in a journal, write a to-do list. If you're planning, if your thoughts are about planning what to do, don't forget this. Don't forget that, rather than just trying to remember them, put them on paper, get them out of your head.
Speaker 2:If it's other types of thoughts, we can try and prevent those thoughts from getting in. And I think I use the analogy of a glass. Now, if you imagine your glass as your attentional capacity, it might be half full with thinking, with just well. In fact, at the middle of the night it's probably very empty. So what I'm saying is there's lots of capacity for things to come in. So what we need to do, we're not gonna put a cap on that glass. We can't stop things coming in, but we can fill that glass up so it's full with other thoughts.
Speaker 2:So what we can do is select certain types of thoughts. That's gonna fill our attentional capacity, because we can't think of two things at once. So if we've got thoughts that are just creeping into our brain, we can't stop thinking. Let's choose something else, something benign, counting back from. I mean, this is counting sheep. This is what this is. I mean, it's age old technique, but what we're doing is we're using, we're choosing to deploy our attention onto something that is not gonna create a sympathetic nervous system activation, something dull, counting backwards from a hundred, reciting a poem using the same word over and over again, like there's a professor, colin Espion, an insomnia expert at Oxford University. He talks about saying the word the, just like, literally count to three, say the one, two, three, the constantly, over and over and over again, and that is something that will help you fall asleep because you're filling your attentional capacity and stopping those other worrying thoughts getting into your brain.
Speaker 1:Love it, mate. Love it, martin, mate. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks so much for your wisdom there, mate. If people are interested in reaching out or finding out a bit more about you and your work, where can they get in touch with you, buddy?
Speaker 2:LinkedIn's probably the best place. There's lots of Martin Joneses in the world, so, martin I Jones, you'll probably find me. If you use my middle initial or go through the Doratis UKcom website, you can find me on there as well.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, mate. Thanks once again, all the best, and I look forward to potentially having another chatmaker. I think we just scratched the service, but I bet everyone says that to you, don't they? Happy to do it, happy to do it. Thanks, mate, all the best, thanks.