Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Instinct Assurance Podcast. I'm your host, Dawn Cross, and today I'll be discussing links between mental and physical health with Amber Johnston, founder of Healthy Mind Psychology.
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[00:00:22] Speaker B: Again, if I can get you to start off, if you introduce yourself and what you get up to in your job, sure.
[00:00:28] Speaker C: My name is Dr. Amber Johnston. I'm a clinical psychologist in neuropsychology. So what that means is I studied as a clinical psychologist, but I ended up specializing in working with those who have had a brain injury or accidents to their brain. And most of what that does is it helps people when they're in hospital and rehabilitation. But over the years of doing that, I found that actually the way that the brain works is, is just wild and wonderful. And I should. We could all use much more understanding of how our brain is working both with us and against us in ways that we don't fully get put down to our own kind of personality and characteristics, as opposed to understanding that the brain has been learning our whole lives. So it sets us up to do things in certain ways that aren't entirely our, you know, fault.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: But.
[00:01:20] Speaker C: But we do have a lot that we could do to help it shape and help it move forward to get more of what we're looking for. So it's taking the neuropsychology concepts of life after injury and trying to apply it a little bit more into everyday person to person living.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: That sounds amazing. So how did healthy mind psychology come to be then? Was it just like a brainchild that was like, I really need to kind of start working on this?
[00:01:44] Speaker C: Well, I think it was something along those lines. I was working in a neuro rehab unit in a hospital, and they were just trying to set this thing up. So my job was really getting the whole unit up and going, but just on the side, I just thought I would pop downstairs and just begin a little bit of private work, especially in the beginning for those people who were coming into the unit once they discharged to have a place to come back and still get some of that therapy and the adjustment after injury. And what ended up happening is I had more consultants within the bigger hospital system that were just saying, you know, I could really use some psychology support around people with these different medical conditions, in particular chronic pain or autoimmune disorders. And with that, it started to just naturally evolve into more people who were having some physical health difficulties. They were emotionally struggling with that. So it went from, you know, big, deep brain injury to more physical health stuff. And, and it just kind of kept going into those that were just struggling almost day to day with different health complaints and starting to understand the physical symptoms that manifest when we have a lot of emotional distress and burnout. And that picture became wider and wider. So we started to have more and more clients come in. And then I went to my wider network to start setting up a team to help meet that demand.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: Amazing. So how can practitioners consider mental wellness as well as the physical when it comes to your patients? Because as far as I'm aware, you know, they're very much linked through one another, like on a deep level.
[00:03:27] Speaker C: Well, that's the thing. I think one of the biggest problems we have is that in the medical community, we still think of it as the body and the brain, this divide that happens. And it's just nonsense. And it's just, you know, when you really think about it, you wonder where this even comes from. Your brain is constantly interpreting everything that's happening within your body. It has to. That's how we keep ourselves safe and alive. And it's something called interoception, which is the actual sensory experience of recognizing what's happening within our body and making sense of it and then doing something that normally helps it. Now, we're not always that good at this, so interoception for, say, hunger signal, well, then we often will go eat. But again, our brain misinterprets things all the time. So a lot of times when we feel hungry, we're actually dehydrated and we should be drinking a lot of water instead. And these are just ways that we have these signals that are coming through in this back and forth that's happening all the time. If we went down a completely different route, we also talk about things that happen in our mind. So when we have different experiences, different, different thoughts, different engagements with other people, our body will respond to the way that we are seeing and interpreting that. So not only do we have the sensory information that we're taking in about those interactions, but we also have the thoughts that we have around those interactions that will then create a whole physical response. And normally that can be through either resting and relaxing, enjoying, you know, really nice social interactions, which are quite restorative for our system, or it could be a stress response, release of adrenaline, release of cortisol. And that can happen just by us thinking something, not even having any of those interactions in the real world in the moment. And if we really understand that our thoughts can cause our heart to shift for our blood to change in our digestive tract for our muscles to tense and relax just by the way that our mind is moving suddenly. We really, really cannot separate what is physical and what's mental. It just makes no sense at all. They are all one system. And I guess what happens in medical conditions is that you can find over time, not. I mean, not all. I mean, everything has its own reasons for why, you know, medical conditions develop. But for a chunk of medical conditions, we can see it as wear and tear of our whole body system with the stress response that it's been having burnout. Just, again, a lot of things that we're trying to take in and manage in one time, and our system gets exhausted. And then we have physical symptoms that are to show that. But we can trace that, you know, immediately back to environment or our mindset that's really having that big role in that physical condition.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: What would you say is some, like, the physical signs and. Because, you know, especially for anyone listening who. Well, with a lot of patients, like GPs or nurses, that sort of thing, like, what would you say would be some very key signifiers that maybe to look out for, especially when dealing with patients that have, you know, maybe an injury. But there's. There's more at play.
[00:06:40] Speaker C: Oh, it's really tough because, you know, one of the big things you'll notice with those in the. In the helping profession is that they're naturally there trying to give. They give so much. Um, and there's something called vicarious trauma that can happen, which is you just taking on so much empathy, which is different than compassion. So empathy is when you're really feeling and going through all the stress and the emotions that somebody else is experiencing. Where compassion is the idea that you just have so much love and kindness that you're trying to put forward. And actually that's often a lot easier to do, even though, again, anything that you're doing for too much can be exhausting. So for some people who are maybe noticing that they're just not able to give as much as they used to, or they feel that they're burdened so much, what that can mean is they can feel much heavier, they can be lacking in energy, they can be lacking in interest, suddenly much more apathetic, much more not really having the same care that they used to, they might notice just symptoms that they have. A lot of times you'll have difficult. Excuse me, you have difficulties in your stomach system, you know, so that won't just be the digestive tract working as well as it normally does. One of the theories around that is that when you're in a high stress state and you're in fight or flight response, it's not the time for you to be digesting. So if you're in that state often or coming in and out of it often, your whole digestive tract can really suffer from that. Experience things like headache and migraine. Again, sleep, sleep, how much sleep you're able to perform. So again when people are in these heightened stress states, they just can't turn off, they don't know how to shut down their body in the same way, so their sleep suffers just because they can't actually feel safe enough to bring the system down to rest. So these are all a few of the things but I think the biggest one is you're looking for changes in what your interests are, how much engagement you want to have, what your energy levels are, are you taking care of yourself, are you actually exercising, are you eating well or are you just going to quick comfort places? So places that are either doom scrolling just to escape your mind or is it that you're eating a lot because it just feels good or eating very little at all because you just don't have the stomach to. Which again when you're not digesting properly, some people completely lose their appetite and then they're not getting in good nutrients to keep up the energy that they're needed to do. All the things that they're trying to.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Do is quite phenomenal as well. How much it can affect your physical body linked obviously with the mental side of things. You know, there's, you know, another example I can think of is like, you know, when you are nervous it gets to a point where like you maybe you might actually physically shake or you know, you're feeling so worried about something that actually you can, you know like the term feeling your stomach churn and everything else because obviously your body's feeling it on a massive level. And I think sometimes that people forget that. It's, it's that interconnectedness and also it's also I think your body trying to tell you there's something wrong within your mind and there's, there's something up and you're not feeling quite okay as well, which is, you know, some people forget to look for those indicators. And you know, why, why am I feeling so lethargic? It's like, oh yeah, well actually you've not been sleeping well.
[00:09:59] Speaker C: Well that's it, that's the interoception which I feel like people often don't even have time or know to, to pay any attention to. There's a lot of information that our body's trying to give us about what states we're in. In fact all emotions, emotions. The theory is emotion is nothing more than a physical body state or the way that the mind is interpreting what's going on around us in this, in our current surroundings. So it's giving us a warning. So how many people actually take those warnings and think well, what can I do about this now? The truth is some people will naturally get themselves into a stress state about something that really isn't that problematic in the, in the moment. It's actually much more innocuous. But it's something that people could get there because it's been practiced over time or they have reasons in their past to be more hyper vigilant to stressors that could be major traumas or it could be something that we call little T's which are things that are there. They don't have the same, same like objective understanding of what a major trauma is. So people often feel that they're not really worthy of talking about or definitely not worthy of getting help about. Yet these are little things that have happened that have had big impact on their sense of safety, their sense of identity, their sense of inclusive inclusion with a social support group or the fear of being rejected, the fear of being, you know, taken as being invaluable or unworthy.
There's lots of reasons why we can have these little teas that can build up or can even be just some from our past that are particularly difficult or hurtful for us to have dealt with. We don't really feel like they're, they really count that much. It's not like anybody died. It's not like you know, there's any major event. So we invalidate the value of those in shaping our brain to then try and under. So our brain is then shaped to try and understand what's going to be dangerous in the world around us moving forward. And some of those seminal moments will create us to be more likely to be reactive and have more stress on a day to day basis.
Catastrophizing is a big one. You know, I'm sure you may have come across that before. It's just the idea that we try and keep ourselves safe by thinking of every worst case scenario possible. And all that happens is we can't solve all of those awful scenarios that are very unlikely to happen, but we think about them all and then get ourselves in a physical state that's exhausted by all these potential Bad things that will, you know, unlikely to happen, but we can't manage them beforehand. Yet most people will say, well, I do it because I want to be prepared or I want to avoid disappointment. That's another big one too. Avoiding disappointment by thinking of all the worst case scenarios. It keeps us not only, you know, feeling low, but then inactive. We want to avoid a lot of things and then it grows. Our brain thinks, okay, well, we escape that danger by thinking of all the worst things possible and then being inactive and staying at home alone. And that makes us more likely to do that again. It works, so to speak.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: Definitely. What's like a surprising thing about how the mental and physical health, like, so maybe something surprising you've come across during your, your time at work.
[00:13:28] Speaker C: That's an interesting question.
I don't know if it's surprising, but I think a lot of people don't necessarily think about how. Because the brain is.
It's been learning across all of our lives. It makes it a predictive machine. So it is constantly trying to predict what's going to happen next and if it can predict accurately. This is really efficient. And this is going to be why we tend to go into habitual behavior and activity. Why that's so much easier than trying to start new, you know, anything. New goals, new habits, new behaviors. Trying to do new things takes a lot of energy and we have to be rested, we have to be up for it, we have to have motivation. A lot of times we need to set goals and it's really difficult to maintain that same energy time after time after time to get it into a habit. As soon as we start feeling ill, as soon as we're tired, as soon as we are emotionally upset with something or had an argument with a spouse or whatever else, we are much more likely to go back to the energy efficient way of doing things, which are the old habits, the old behaviors. So if we understand that, that the brain is trying to save its energy and therefore it's trying to do things as it always has done it because, because that's going to be the easiest way forward, it can help us understand why we find it so difficult to make changes that are good for us even, even when we desperately want to make those changes, we can get into some of those hurdles. And this is one of the really important reasons why that is.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: Definitely. Is there anything else you'd like to add before you wrap up the episode today?
[00:15:21] Speaker C: I guess one of the things that I really just like to put out there is why therapy can be so, so Beneficial for everybody. I think there's a lot of views out there that in order to access therapy, it's something that you need to be bad enough that you need to have mental health diagnoses, that there, you know, is a stigma still around who's, who's it for and, you know, what's it appropriate? And is a therapist going to look at me and be like, why are you here? You're wasting my time. I get that from so many people that they fear that if they go into a therapist's office with a real intention to improve themselves or to learn about themselves or to think about their thinking and their behavior, that a therapist will think that they're just, you know, wasting their time. And that's so far from the truth. So I guess that's just a really important message I want to get out there is that, you know, therapy is there for anybody to work on their mind and their brain and their behavior and their emotions. State, state the same way that you go to physical trainers to work on your body. You know, it's just having a little bit of guidance from somebody who hopefully has a lot of experience in the field that can help you make the changes that you want to make to hit your goals and that should be available for everybody if they're willing to put in that time and effort to do so.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: That's definitely true. I agree. I would say, well, brilliant. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your expertise and knowledge and a bit of your time.
[00:16:49] Speaker C: Well, thank you for having me.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Thank you to my guest today, Amber, chatting about your expertise when it comes to considering the mental links with physical health and signs to spot it. If you're interested in her clinic please click the link in the description.
I have been your host Allcross and tune in next week for another episode.
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