Why would you ski to the North Pole?

“I was the only human being in an area one-and-a-half times the size of America, five-and-a-half thousand square miles.

“It’s a journey that is right at the limit of human capability. I skied the equivalent of 31 marathons back to back, 800 miles in 10 weeks. And I was dragging all the food I needed, the supplies, the equipment, sleeping bag… everything I needed for nearly three months.”

On May 11, 2004, the English explorer Ben Saunders reached the Geographic North Pole, becoming only the fourth person ever to have got there in a solo expedition. He was dragging 180kg of food and fuel in two sledges, and had to navigate sub-zero temperatures, headwinds, ridges and hills formed by the ice and stretches of freezing open water.

Even he admits the expedition was “bonkers”… so why on earth did he do it?

It may be a similar question to why Shackleton went to Antarctica, or why Irish explorers Mike O’Shea and Clare O’Leary attempted to be the first Irish team to walk to the North Pole in 2012.

It’s the question Saunders attempts to answer in a TED talk called ‘Why Did I Ski to the North Pole’, which he gave a few months after successfully returning to the UK.

“I’m not an explorer in the traditional sense, I’m not skiing along drawing maps. Everyone knows where the North Pole is,” he said.

“This for me is a chance to explore and really push the limits of my own potential and see how far they stretch.”

“And on a wider scale it amazes me how many people go through life just scratching the surface of their potential, just doing three or four or five per cent of what they’re truly capable of. On a wider scale I hoped this journey was a chance to inspire other people to think about what they want to do with their potential, and what they want to do with the tiny amount of time we each have on this planet.”

Tapping in to your own potential doesn’t have to be about breaking records. You don’t have to become the fastest person to sail round the world, trek to the north pole or climb Everest in order to achieve something that matters. As mentioned in previous blogs, you are enough already and there is no need to reinvent yourself.

Success is about building on your own capabilities, not comparing yourself (more often than not unfavourably) to the achievements of others. For Ben Saunders, pushing himself meant skiing to the North Pole. For you, it might be running 5k, hitting a goal with a new language, getting to the supermarket on your own, or remembering to put the bins out on the right day four times in a row.

As Ben Saunders ends his TED talk: “I think if I’ve learned anything it’s this: that you’re the only person who decides how far you go and what you’re capable of.”

Looking good, feeling great

The advice that “when you look good, you feel good” is too often touted by beauty salons and make-up manufacturers only interested in selling you their services. It can be a shallow concept - or even a harmful one, when appearance or body image image takes on too much importance and becomes an obsession. 

But without going that far, there is truth in the idea that taking care of yourself and making sure you look presentable can be a benefit to your mental health. This doesn’t mean wearing a ridiculously expensive suit, spending all your time in the gym or slathering on layer upon layer of makeup, but simply a moderate commitment to presentability. 

There has been some research into the area, and one 2015 study led by Abraham Rutchick at California State University found that wearing formal clothing changes the way people think and makes them feel more powerful. 

Good-looking formal clothing  has been in the news recently, as Meghan Markle has released a new clothing line in partnership with charity Smart Works. For every item in the five-piece line purchased, the same item will be donated to the charity to be worn by a woman in long-term unemployment at a job interview. The idea is to create a sense of community between women helping women, and empower long-term unemployed women to feel more confident. 

The Princes Trust, a UK-based charity working with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds has long been offering a similar service, providing grants to young people for smart new clothes to help them ace that interview.

It’s not just clothes which are important for looking and feeling good. Another UK charity, ‘Look Good Feel Better’, runs workshops for cancer patients offering beauty treatments and advice for taking care of their appearance. “The effect a Workshop has on appearance and confidence is life enhancing during such a difficult time,” says Dr Natalie Doyle, a Nurse Consultant. “It allows people to take control of how they look and feel, when everything else feels like it’s outside of their control.”

Dr Doyle makes an important point about taking care of your appearance helping you to feel in control, and it can be applied to anyone, whether they are struggling with cancer, Chronic Pain, or any other illness. It’s worth making that extra effort to find a new pair of trousers that you feel comfortable in, to iron that crumpled shirt, or get that haircut you’ve been putting off for so long. And remember, you don’t need to look good for anyone else, just for you!

Ready, check, go!

The long summer days are beginning to fade, and while we have high hopes for September sun there’s no denying that Autumn is almost upon us. To me though, there’s comfort to be found in the rhythm of the seasons and the ‘back to school’ feeling of September – whatever your age!

It’s not surprising that many of us associate routine and comfort with feeling safe. What is surprising is that until recently medical operations were not subject to routine, and there were many negative consequences as a result. In June 2008 the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the surgical safety checklist. It is: 'a simple tool designed to improve communication and teamwork by bringing together the surgeons, anaesthesia providers and nurses involved in care to confirm that critical safety measures are performed before, during and after an operation'.

The American surgeon Atul Gawande explains in his TED talk how his team were asked to look into why the mortality rate was so high in surgical operations. He recognised that surgeons were expertly skilled and brilliantly trained so the usual solution of introducing more training was not appropriate. So what could be?

He looked at other highly skilled professions for ideas and came across an unusual improvement; the introduction of a checklist for pilots. It was devised after a test flight in 1935 went wrong, and two pilots died in the resulting crash. Afterwards engineers were shocked to realise there had been no mechanical error – the pilots, operating a cutting edge new system, had made a mistake despite both being very experienced. As a result, management introduced the pre-flight checklist, and there were no more accidents in that model due to human error.

Gawande makes a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don’t know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). He comes to the conclusion that experts need checklists - written guidelines that walk them through the key steps in any complex procedure. His research team has taken this idea, developed a safe surgery checklist, and applied it around the world, with staggering success.

Between October 2007 and September 2008, the effect of the checklist was studied in eight hospitals in eight cities across the world. Researchers found the use of the checklist reduced the rate of deaths and surgical complications by more than one-third across all eight pilot hospitals.

Further improvements include cost savings and better communication between staff members, and similar checklists are now also in use in a range of other clinical areas, including childbirth, emergency departments, and intensive care units.

As you detect the first signs of Autumn, perhaps now is a good time to think about checklists and routine. You most likely have everyday tasks or moments in which you need to remember a set of steps or list of items. It may seem unnecessary or simplistic, but how much weight would a checklist take off your shoulders? Sometimes the simplest solutions are the most effective.

Have you taken your culture vitamins?

Most people agree that culture is good for us. But have you ever thought about culture as something necessary to treat a specific problem, something that can be prescribed? That’s exactly what Denmark’s Kuturvitaminer or ‘Culture Vitamins’ program does.

Part funded by the Danish health authority and organised by local jobcentres, Culture Vitamins facilitates engagement in cultural activities for people who are unemployed or on state sick leave. It’s currently in trial stage, with pilot schemes operating in the municipalities of Aalborg, Silkeborg, Nyborg and Vordingborg.

Participants, many of whom are struggling with stress, anxiety or depression, complete a 10-week culture crash course in the local area. They take part in two or three activities a week, with eight different options for activities in total. These include singing and listening to music as a group, and participants are also taken to Aalborg Symphony Orchestra rehearsals and performances. The group visits the local art museum and takes part in creative workshops, as well as going to the  theatre. They are also given coaching sessions from actors about body language, to increase their confidence in job interviews.

According to the program conveners, many students have gained in energy and self-confidence, strengthened their ability to establish and maintain relationships, and been able to complete internships or enter the job market again. Students get a break from their illness, and end up with more self-care and more energy, they say.  The process helps to remove focus from the disease and instead create new self-images of people with skills, who want something from life.

There are likely three reasons why the program is so successful. The first is the exposure to culture, to art or music or theatre, and it’s hard to say how large a share of the success culture is responsible for. The others are the sense of community created by experiencing culture as a group, which helps to tackle loneliness and isolation; and the structure of having a set number of excursions at a set time each week, organised and facilitated by someone else.

I think all three are probably responsible for the good results felt by program participants, and all three could be replicated by the rest of us, whether by scheduling regular visits to the nearest museum or art gallery or by making the effort to join a choir, team or community group.

The unexpected superpower

“Let me persuade you to follow my example, and take a turn about the room – I assure you it is very refreshing after sitting so long in one attitude.”

This, said by Miss Bingley to Miss Bennet, is one of my favourite lines from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. If you aren’t familiar with the book, or with any of Austen’s work, this is quite a good example of a lot of the subject matter: two young women taking a walk together so they can gossip about eligible young men, in this case rather bizarrely around the inside of a sitting room.

A life spent doing nothing but trying to get yourself married off does have its drawbacks, but one advantage of these young ladies over most people’s lives today is that they got a lot more walking done. Books from the period are full of episodes of the upper classes ‘taking exercise’, around their enormous estates. While most of us don’t have several acres of land to proudly survey, we can get just as much benefit from walking in public parks or along busy city pavements.

We already know that walking is beneficial – it’s a good form of exercise, and also involves getting outside for some fresh air. But Shane O’Mara, Professor of Experimental Brain Research at Trinity’s Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin, has gone further in his research to try and explain exactly what walking does to the brain and why we should do more of it. He believes walking can improve brain activity, and even called it a ‘superpower’ in a recent interview with the Guardian UK!

“One of the great overlooked superpowers we have is that, when we get up and walk, our senses are sharpened,” he said. “Rhythms that would previously be quiet suddenly come to life, and the way our brain interacts with our body changes.”

O’Mara points to great thinkers and writers who used walking as a means to generate ideas, including Bertrand Russell, William Rowan Hamilton and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Some people don’t consider walking ‘proper’ exercise, but O’Mara argues that what we really need is to be more active generally over the course of the day. It doesn’t make any sense, for example, to go to the gym for an hour in the morning, then sit still at a desk all day. If you have an office job it’s important to make sure you move around – get some water, go to the loo, or go and visit a colleague rather than sending yet another email!

It may seem counter-productive to take time away from your desk, but research suggests it will make you work better. “Getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful,” O’Mara said. “My notion – and we need to test this – is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources.”

A lot more research is needed on the benefits of walking, but there’s already overwhelming evidence that is does improve brain activity. Have you ever had a difficult email to send, problem to solve or decision to make, and found yourself going for a walk to think about it? O’Mara’s research may go some way to explaining why this is effective. You can read more about it in his recently-published book, In Praise of Walking.

Stop searching for your passion

Have you found your passion yet? 

If not don’t worry, there are hundreds of books, talks, and articles out there to help you on your way - there’s even a WikiHow page on how to find your passion, featuring a self-help guru and a ‘vision board’!

From every side we’re bombarded with the idea that we need to ‘find our passion’, as if everyone has one, immovable thing they’re passionate about locked inside them just waiting to spring out when we eventually discover the key.

 This interpretation of finding one all consuming passion is very similar to the idea of finding ‘the one’ - that there is only one romantic partner out there for us, and we won’t be happy until we’ve found them. But just like relationships are about falling in love with someone who is compatible with you, ‘passion’ is about developing feeling for something already in your life. Passions align with personal beliefs and values, and people are likely to feel passionately about more than one thing.

 Passions can also change over time. There is still a pervasive idea that you need to find your passion as soon as possible, and follow it for the rest of your life. This can create huge pressure, especially on young people entering work for the first time who feel they have to immediately find a job they want to do for the rest of their lives. It can also bring misery a few years down the line, as those a decade or two into their working lives think they’ve ‘failed’ if they haven’t yet found their passion.

 As Terri Trespicio says in her TED talk ‘Stop Searching for Your Passion’, “passion is not a plan, it’s a feeling. And feelings change.”

 Like many graduates, when Trespicio left university she was paralysed by the feeling that she had to take a job that led her to her passion.

 “I was turning away perfectly good full-time jobs. Why? Because I was afraid. I was sure that I would pick the wrong one and get on the wrong train headed to the wrong future. My mother begged me, she said, “please, take a job, any job. You’re not going to be stuck, you’re stuck now! You don’t create your life first, and then live it. You create it by living it, not agonizing about it.”

 Trespicio’s mother was right, of course. The idea of ‘finding your passion’ is outdated, as these days most people change jobs and even industries several times during their working lives. In addition, it’s easier than ever to discover a new hobby or interest later in life. Trespicio points out it’s also elitist, as only the most privileged have the luxury of being able to think about passion when choosing a career, rather than just paying the bills.

 “Passion is not a job, a sport, or a hobby,” Trespicio says. “It is the full force of your attention and energy that you give to whatever is right in front of you. And if you’re so busy looking for this passion, you could miss opportunities that change your life.”

 Passion is not something you uncover within you by reading a self-help book or going on a weekend retreat, passion is something you discover by doing things and realising the effect they have on you.

 Everyone needs time for reflection to consider what they feel passionately about, and our life experiences shape what we feel. It takes time to recognise what brings us joy - working out the basics of earning a living and developing a social life come first.

 Trespicio’s final word of advice rings true: “Don’t wait… Just start doing. Because to live a life full of meaning and value you don’t follow your passion, your passion follows you.”

Mindful Injury Recovery and learning to move without fear

This week’s blog is a little different, as I want to tell you about an interview I did recently with Maya Novak, an Injury Recovery Expert and Mindset Coach. The interview was part of her Mindful Injury Recovery World Summit, during which she interviewed 25 specialists in different fields from around the world, from doctors to physiotherapists to dietitians to… me!

Maya came to her field after a rock climbing accident in 2012. At first she hoped it was a bad sprain, but it turned out the ankle was broken, and doctors repeatedly told her that the injury would have debilitating and lasting effects.  

After nine months Maya was still in pain, and had become terrified that she would never fully recover. 

 However, this was not the case. In the end Maya completely recovered, and can now walk, run and move without pain. She was inspired by her experience to develop a Mindful Injury Recovery technique that she now uses to help other people recover from injury. 

During our eighty-minute interview, Maya and I covered many topics related to injury, recovery, and resolving chronic pain. The full interview is available to purchase either as a video or audio file here. 

 Below is an abridged excerpt from the interview, where Maya and I discuss pain medication. 

Maya: What do you say to someone who has had pain for, let’s say eight months, after a serious injury. Would you say that by then it’s essential to start looking into other things [such as Resolving Chronic Pain]? Or is it enough to wait for another few months and then maybe it will get better? 

Mags: One of the things about people coming to me is that sometimes they’ve gone to every person they can think of, but they have felt they’re not progressing, that they’re not healing.  I’m constantly taken aback by how people know themselves. It’s like a gut reaction: ‘This does not suit me. I’m not progressing here. I need to find a different route.’ So if someone had a serious injury, as you just stated, and they weren’t getting anywhere, doing this work on balancing the autonomic nervous system can do no harm. So they could do that alongside whatever else they were doing. 

Maya: Being in chronic pain, many people use medication. So when a person comes to you, and if they’re on pain medication, do you suggest they stop using it so that they can really start observing the body? Because pain medication is kind of numbing you, so you actually don’t know what is happening. What is your approach to this?

Mags:  I have a very open approach to pain medication. I feel I have to defend it on occasion because if someone is taking pain medication and it numbs the pain it allows them to move. 

One of the things I feel passionately about is that if I can restore someone’s confidence in moving, they will initiate a reduction in their pain medication when they are ready. But often health practitioners have suggested that movement should be restricted because of pain, and what that can do is perhaps make someone quite anxious and nervous about moving.  A lot of my experience of this is about low back pain with people explaining to me that their back is fragile, and I will reply ‘no, your spine is a robust bit of kit. It’s there to bend. If you look at the biomechanical structure of the spine, it’s designed to move, and it will support you.’ For someone to rediscover that that’s true, and then to be able to do gentle safe movement it can restore their faith in movement. If they manage to do that partly because of the pain medication, that’s actually fine because then they will find that they’ve got more confidence in their own body. That, to me is a great starting point.

Whose Life Are You Leading?

“Craig was a poster child for the post-Princeton urban-professional dream. He was getting an MBA and had a job as a vice president at Continental Bank, and he and [his partner] had bought a nice condo in Hyde Park. He wore tailored suits and had driven over for dinner in his red Porsche 944 Turbo.”

It sounds like a dream life, doesn’t it? A good job, a stable relationship, a nice place to live and money left over for expensive clothes and other luxuries. This is an extract from Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming, in which she describes her brother Craig in his early professional life.

But the next sentence reveals something else: “I didn’t know it then, but none of this made him happy.”

It might be surprising to some of you that this high-flying lifestyle wasn’t making Craig happy, but most likely you already knew that money doesn’t bring happiness. What surprised me about this sentence is actually the first part – Michelle had no idea that her brother was unhappy.

She was also unhappy at this time herself, as she describes: “I wasn’t happy with my job, or even with my chosen profession - that I was seriously unhappy, in fact […] I was desperate to make a major change but worried about not making enough money if I did.”

So why did neither brother or sister acknowledge their unhappiness and resolve to make changes?

“Knowing how thrilled our father was by what his kids had managed to accomplish, neither of us ever brought up our discontent over dinner.”

Both children were desperately unhappy with the versions of life they had pursued, but couldn’t bring themselves to say anything because of their father’s pride in those very versions of life.

This can happen to all of us. After all, if you love someone, a partner, a good friend, or a relative it is natural to consider their opinion. In particular parents can have tremendous influence, often far more than they intend, as in the above case of Michelle Obama. If they have given you a great or reasonable start in life to the best of their abilities, how could you not make sure that your life fits the image that will make them most proud?

Unfortunately, something is eventually bound to crack. As we are told by countless coming-of-age books and films, pursuing someone else’s dreams can only get you so far. Eventually there comes a point at which the unhappiness you buried in a bid to make someone proud bubbles up to the surface. This can be more injurious than disappointing a loved one ever could be.

Of course it’s tempting to try and make others proud: it’s a way of showing your love, gratitude or respect for them. And it may make them wonderfully happy in the short term. But in the long run, it has potential to cause more harm than good.

What we know deep down is that our lifestyle and chosen profession needs to align with our ambitions and principles. However, it's not easy. To follow your own path takes courage, and a leap of faith. Belief in yourself. Being true to your own aspirations, respecting what you feel, cultivating your own skills, and identifying values you want to adhere to. It means committing to your own moral compass. Perhaps those same people who love and care about you, whose opinion may have swayed you in the past, would be simply delighted to see you navigate your own route and thrive?  

What does exercise actually do for mental health?

A month ago in this blog I wrote about running a marathon, and the huge benefit I found that it had on my stress levels and overall well being. Thank you to all of you who have been in touch to share your own experiences of the effect of exercise on both physical well being and your mental health, and to those who have asked me more about the research surrounding this effect.

There have been a huge number of studies over the years, and I encourage you to do your own research and draw your own conclusions. That said, here are a few which I have found particularly striking in my own reading around the subject recently.

Exercise and Working Memory

A 2008 paper published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology details an experiment run by Sian Beilock and Ben Sibley into the effect of exercise on working memory. About 50 undergraduate students were asked to take a series of tests which evaluated their working memory. In one task, called Operation Span Task, students were instructed to solve a maths problem which appeared on a screen followed by a word. The students were to read aloud and solve each maths problem, then to read aloud the word and remember it. The sum and the word then disappeared from the screen. After a series of between three and five problems, students were asked to recall the words in the order they appeared. This was to test working memory: how well students could hold information in their memory while doing something else. After this initial test of working memory was completed, students were told to run on a treadmill for half an hour, at 60 to 80 percent of their maximum effort. The organisers then asked subjects to take part in another round of the test, and measured the change in working memory. They discovered that those who had showed the least amount of working memory to begin with experienced the greatest increase after exercise.

Exercise and Depression

A revolutionary study in 1999 by researchers at Duke University found that exercise is better than the SSRI drug sertraline at treating depression. In the study, called Standard Medical Intervention and Long-term Exercise and nicknamed SMILE for short, 156 patients were divided into three groups. Over a period of sixteen weeks, one group was prescribed sertraline, one group exercise, and one group a combination of the two. The exercise group took part in supervised walking or jogging at 70-85% effort for 30 minutes three times a week. Results showed that all three groups showed a drop in depression, with about half of each group in complete remission after sixteen weeks. The leader of the study concluded that in the short term exercise was as effective as the drug at treating depression. However, six months after the study finished, the researchers returned to the subjects to see how they were doing, and concluded that in the longer term exercise could be labelled as even better than the drug at treating depression. Only 30% of the exercise group still had symptoms of depression, compared to about 50% of both the medication group and the combined group.

Other Benefits

There has also been some research to suggest that exercise might be able to slow down the development of dementia, although this is not yet conclusive. Exercise has been shown to improve sleep – both in terms of falling asleep faster and sleeping longer and better.

The evidence for exercise as a benefit to mental wellbeing is overwhelming. It should be noted though that the benefits of exercise are increased when the subject enjoys the activity, and that too much exercise at too high an intensity can cause both physical and psychological harm. As with anything else, its best undertaken in healthy moderation, and under the advice of a doctor where necessary.

We'll look in more detail at physical well being and feeling good about your body through exercise later. For the time being I'm happy to say I didn't disgrace myself in the Edinburgh 10k a couple of weeks ago… although there is plenty of room for improvement!

The letter you will never send

Have you ever written a letter you never intended to send? A love-letter to the person you couldn’t reveal your feelings to, or a heat-of-the-moment scrawl letting out all the anger you felt towards someone who caused you pain?

Unsent letters are a widely-used tool for helping people to process emotions. They are one variation of a treatment method called expressive writing, which has been the subject of more than 200 academic studies. One particular researcher has produced a huge body of work on the subject: James Pennebaker, a social psychologist who is currently the Regents Centennial Chair of Psychology at the University of Texas.

The beauty of writing unsent letters is that it allows you to vent all the frustration and anger you might feel towards a certain person or group, without causing any damage in cases where confronting the person in question would be unhelpful or harmful.

There are other forms of expressive writing: some involve writing down feelings about or memories of traumatic incidents, some just entail writing a paragraph about your day. ‘Journaling’, which has become increasingly popular of late, is also a form of expressive writing.

I often advise clients that they might find expressive writing exercises helpful. This can come in any form, but there are three key components which I advise. Firstly, the writing should be done by hand. This differentiates the activity from work, which many of us do on a laptop or computer. Not involving your phone will also help you to write with fewer interruptions, and have less of a negative impact on your sleep, if you choose to write before bed.

Secondly, you should destroy the piece of paper after writing on it. This doesn’t apply to all forms of expressive writing – journaling, for instance, relies on keeping the pages instead. But I find that writing and then destroying what you’ve written can be a wonderful aide to letting go of unhelpful thoughts, whether you scratch a line through the words on the page, crumple it into a ball, rip it up, throw it in the bin, or even burn it, if you have a safe method of doing so!

Finally, writing sessions should be regular. I don’t advise carrying a notebook around and jotting thoughts down as they occur to you throughout the day, rather the point of this exercise is that you set time aside regularly to do it. I find it best to dedicate a few minutes every day, which quickly forms a habit. It’s important to give yourself a time limit, of perhaps ten or twenty minutes – this encourages you to start writing immediately, and that way your thoughts are expressed without being filtered.

Good luck with your writing, and let us know how it goes in the comments!