In this episode, Caroline Williams shares how moving your body can free your mind as she dives into the surprising science of movement and mental health. Caroline spent years studying the brain until she realized she was ignoring half the equation. She explains how movement of all kinds, walking, stretching, dancing, and even laughter can reshape our emotional landscape.
Key Takeaways:
- The connection between physical movement and mental health.
- The role of interoception in understanding bodily sensations and emotions.
- Evolutionary perspectives on the brain’s function related to movement.
- The impact of physical activity on brain chemistry and emotional well-being.
- The importance of posture and its influence on emotional states.
- The benefits of strength training for mood and self-esteem.
- The decline in physical strength among youth and its implications for mental health.
- The concept of “movement snacks” and integrating small bursts of activity into daily life.
- The relationship between dance, rhythm, and emotional connection.
- The significance of breath control and its effects on relaxation and mental clarity.
Caroline Williams is a science journalist and editor. She’s a consultant for and a regular contributor to New Scientist. Her new work has also appeared in The Guardian, the Boston Globe, BBC Future, and BBC Earth among others.
Caroline Williams: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Caroline Williams, check out these other episodes:
Understanding Choice Points for Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise with Michelle Segar
The Science of Breathing with James Nestor
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Episode Transcript:
Caroline Williams 00:00:00 It’s the most common beat in Western pop music, and it’s also this resonant frequency at which if you just let people walk, that’s what they will go to. And if you get people to tap along to a beat in a lab, that’s also the beat that they are most accurate at.
Chris Forbes 00:00:21 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:06 What if one of the most effective tools for your mental health was your body, not as a replacement for therapy or medication, but as something with profound power in its own right? For me, if I could only choose one intervention for my mood, for my mental health, it would probably be exercise.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:26 And today’s guest, Carolyn Williams, helps explain why. As a science journalist, she spent years studying the brain until she realized she was ignoring half the equation. In this conversation, we’ll explore how movement of all kinds walking, stretching, dancing, even laughter can reshape our emotional landscape. I’m Erik Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Caroline, welcome to the show.
Caroline Williams 00:01:52 Hello. Thank you very much for having me.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:54 I’m excited to talk to you about your book. It’s called move. How the new Science of Body Movement Can Set Your Mind free. And listeners know I am a big proponent of moving my body primarily in order to make my mind feel better. So we’ll get into all that in a little bit. But let’s start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:31 And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Caroline Williams 00:02:46 I think it’s a really fascinating one, because not only is it true in life, but in science, you know, there’s a real basis for this. Before I got really into movement, my career, 20 years or so as a science journalist, was looking at the plasticity of the human brain and how it changes. And it really is true that what we do, the way we behave, the way we think gets written into our brains in, you know, physical connections between neurons and in the pathways. And, you know, as you sort of walk these paths through your brain, they become more, more.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:22 Worn.
Caroline Williams 00:03:22 In, worn in. Yeah. That’s the word I’m thinking of indented, but that’s not really the word, I mean, but yeah, they, they become like, like pass through long grass, they become better traveled.
Caroline Williams 00:03:32 And so, yeah, it’s absolutely true that, that if you choose to be positive and to choose kindness and compassion, that’s been shown many times that that can actually change the way that your brain works and the way you live your life. So there really is something solid behind that. And that’s sort of the way I like to operate. I guess I’m a bit of a natural skeptic. I want to look for the science, look for, you know, where the evidence lies. And it absolutely does back that up for sure. So I try to live that way myself.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:01 Yeah, I was reflecting earlier today on, you know, I occasionally just somewhat jokingly say like, well, I’m just a bag of chemicals, right? Like, yeah, at the end of the day, we’ve got neurotransmitters and we’ve got hormones and we’ve got electrical connections and synapses, and it’s just all very physical. You know, it has a very physical element to it. It’s chemicals, all that sort of stuff.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:25 And yet those things both control how we feel. And then also the things that we do can change those chemicals. There’s just such an interesting interaction between the two that you would think like, well, if it’s all chemicals, then the way to intervene is chemically, but not necessarily. And your book is a big testament to that, that there are ways of changing what’s happening inside not just our body, but our brain through the way we move.
Caroline Williams 00:04:53 Absolutely. I mean, that’s one of the things that got me started on this whole thing. I’ve been so interested for many years in what’s happening in the brain and how to, you know, change brain chemistry, how to change the way you think and feel focused on the brain. And then it sort of became obvious to me that thinking of your brain is if it’s not attached to the rest of you is kind of weird. And of course, there’s all this pipework that, you know, all the blood flow packed with hormones and, and all kinds of other stuff, and that all the wiring and the electrical activity that’s going up and down our nerves, that all impacts what happens chemically, physically, and as a result, emotionally and the way that we are able to think.
Caroline Williams 00:05:33 So obviously what happens below the neck matters for how we think and feel. And going on from that, it became quite obvious that things that we do to our bodies can change that chemical environment and change the electrical environment. And as has a knock on effect on everything. So. So in a way it’s liberating because you can then use your body as an extension to, to to sort of tweak these parameters and change the way that you feel and the way that life feels to you as well, you sort of outlook on the world.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:03 Yeah. I always find it funny when people talk about like the brain body connection as if they discovered something radical like, oh, I mean, obviously it’s it’s always been connected. You know, I’m not quite sure how we got to. It’s so disconnected. I had a strangely I’m taking things off topic here. Sort of. Not really. I had an epiphany about a week and a half ago. I was doing Loving Kindness meditation, and it was a guided meditation.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:30 And the leader of the meditation instructed you to try and notice where in your body you’re feeling this thing happen. And I realized where I was feeling it mostly was my face, and I had been discounting the face as part of my body for a long time. Every time I was told, look for where this emotion is in your body. If I noticed it in my face, I was like, no, that’s my head. Where’s in my body?
Caroline Williams 00:06:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:57 But I had this moment where I was like a dummy. Hey, your face.
Caroline Williams 00:07:01 Your face is part of your body.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:03 Is part of your body. It is an emotional center. It’s where I happen to feel a lot of things. And that’s sort of on topic as far as the brain body connection.
Caroline Williams 00:07:13 No, I mean, it’s really relevant because a lot of people struggle to tune in to where these feelings are. So there’s this thing called alexithymia where people aren’t able to put names to their emotions. And if you can’t do that, then it’s really hard to regulate your emotions.
Caroline Williams 00:07:29 So, so things like meditation and, you know, checking in with your body can be a way of sort of tuning in and going, okay, so I’m feeling this right now. I wonder how I can change what I’m doing with my body or, you know, with my face, which is part of my body. And how that can then have a feedback that will maybe make me feel differently. So yeah, that’s really, really relevant. And so that came up quite a lot in my research, that being able to tune into your body and know what it needs and know what your entire body, brain, mind needs is, is a really important skill. And because and often if we’re so sedentary, we’re so disconnected from our body, we’re up in our heads all the time that we don’t often make that connection. So. So it’s a really important aspect of tuning in to your body.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:14 Yeah. So let’s start with talking a little bit about what the brain evolved to do. And I’d also like to talk a little bit about what certain people think the brain is doing, what its role is. Can we talk about those two things real quickly before we move into the specifics of movement?
Caroline Williams 00:08:33 Absolutely. Because this this is where it all comes back to. So we tend to have this idea that brains are there for thinking, and, you know, working stuff out. But actually, if you look way back in our evolutionary history, not every organism on the planet has a brain. Even a lot of animals don’t have brains. And at some point, evolution had to make a decision whether our brains were worth investing in or not. And there’s this very well known neuroscientist called Rodolfo Linas from Colombia. And he pointed out that there’s this creature called the sea squirt. In their adult form, they just look like sort of bagpipes stuck to the bottom of the ocean. And they suck in water through one pipe and they blow it out through the other, and they don’t move. But in their young form, in the larval form, they’re sort of like tadpoles. They swim around the ocean, and their job in life is to find a place on the ocean to attach and live out the rest of their lives.
Caroline Williams 00:09:25 And when they’re in this juvenile stage, they have sort of a very basic brain. And the reason for this is that it needs to coordinate its movements away from things that are harmful and towards rewards. So it’s a basic system. What will kill me, what will help me pass on my genes. And so this basic brain is connected to its basic tail and it swims around. When this larva finds the perfect spot, it attaches basically by gluing its head to a rock. And one of the first things it does is reabsorb its entire nervous system. And it never makes any decisions ever again. So Lina said, well, this just goes to show what a brain is for. A brain is for informing your movements in the world so that it can increase your chances of survival by taking you towards things that will keep you alive and taking you away from things that will kill you. And if you’re not going to move, then you don’t need the brain. And you know they’re expensive bits of kit, they’re high energy and they take a lot to run.
Caroline Williams 00:10:22 And so yeah, from right early on, brains were there to inform our movements in the world. And you can see that everything that’s been added on later right up to our, you know, our clever emotions, you know, if that emotion comes from the words and the Latin for to move away from something. So emotions inform us about what we need to get away from and what we need to get to. So everything else that’s come since then has been about informing our movements in the world, which is something that you don’t often think about. You think brains. Yes, we’ve got a cracking brain for for thinking of very clever thoughts. But at the basis of it, our brains are there to help us move sensibly.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:01 Yeah, I love that analogy of the sea squirt. It explains a lot about the editor of this podcast, Chris also, and what what has happened to him. I think basically what you said is once they stop moving, they basically just get rid of their brain. They just don’t have it anymore.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:15 Yeah, yeah.
Caroline Williams 00:11:16 Yeah, yeah. It just gets recycled because the energy can be reused for something else. And, you know, I’m not saying that a poor editor, I’m sure he’s a lovely man. Very clever man.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:25 Let’s just say he doesn’t move much and he’s not very smart. I’m just making some connections here.
Caroline Williams 00:11:30 I wouldn’t like to comment, but. But it’s true that, you know, in humans, especially this, use it or lose it Nature of our brains became even more sort of tied together in the point of our evolution, when we became hunters and gatherers, because then, you know, our ancestors could maybe sit around in trees munching on fruit and get away with it. And they were absolutely fine when we started moving further afield and looking for food. We had to evolve to be able to stand on our feet and walk long distances and, you know, forage far and wide and hunt. But we also needed to be able to work together to bring down prey, because humans are quite puny, really.
Caroline Williams 00:12:10 You know, we’re not very fast. We’re not very strong. We also needed to be able to, you know, communicate, to work together, to remember the way home. There’s a lot of cognitive work that goes into being a hunter gatherer. And so there’s this idea that that once we started taking this, this way of life, our physiology type together, moving around, being active with the health of our brain. And that explains why, you know, we’ve known for a long time that physical activity prompts the brain to be particularly plastic. It adds more connections. It adds more blood flow. You know, everything works better when you’ve been active. And the reason for that is because these two things go together. That point in our evolution, it stopped being optional to move because if we don’t move as much as our evolutionary history says we should, then the brain starts making savings. And over a lifetime that can be quite significant. So, you know, there is these quite frightening statistics that 13% of Alzheimer’s cases can be traced to a sedentary lifestyle.
Caroline Williams 00:13:07 So over your lifespan, you know, if you’re too sedentary, yeah, that can have a real impact on how your brain ages.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:14 Yeah, Alzheimer’s is a topic near and dear to my heart and my partner Jenny’s heart. Her mom is deep in that disease now, so brain health in general is better with movement. Lots of studies show that I want to pivot a little bit to mental health now, which is similar but slightly different. You say that poor mental health might be part of the price we pay for a cushy life of sofas and supermarkets?
Caroline Williams 00:13:42 Yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day, we are the only creatures on the planet where movement is optional. You know, we can get food, we can find a mate, we can entertain ourselves. We can do everything we like from sitting down and just moving our thumbs and fingers a little bit if we want to. So we have to seek it out. And, you know, statistics suggest that by and large we don’t.
Caroline Williams 00:14:03 And also in working life nowadays, you know, even for people who write about movement for a living, spend a lot of time sitting in this very chair and not moving. So we have to seek it out if we’re going to do it. And obviously, there’s been a real change over over the past decades. We move a lot less than even sort of our parents generation. And we have seen this catastrophic rising in mental ill health and loneliness and all these other sort of things. And clearly, there’s more than one thing going on. I’m not saying. Oh, well, that’s, you know, a straight line between our sedentary lifestyles and mental health. But given that we have got this trend and we know that movement and exercise, even just going for a walk is really, really important and really good boost for mental health, as is strength training. That’s a really, really important one that a lot of people neglect. Being physically stronger has been shown really, really conclusively to help with anxiety and depression and just make people feel more powerful in the world and able to cope that this is measured psychologists call global self-efficacy.
Caroline Williams 00:15:06 And that’s just basically a way of saying, I feel like I can handle stuff. And when people have improved their physical strength through through weight training or body weight training, they do feel more capable. So I think there’s a real role to play in becoming more active in particular ways as well. That could really improve people’s mental health.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:27 I’m going to jump backwards a little bit. Maybe I want to talk a little bit about interception and what it is, and how that leads to what certain scientists call a global emotional moment, and then link in how movement ties into that.
Caroline Williams 00:15:41 Yeah. So interception is sort of a little known sense that we have, and it’s the sense of the internal state of our body. So rather than thinking of, you know, the brain is the master computer that sort of just sends messages downstream. Interception is about a crosstalk between the body and the brain. So you think of the brain more as a sort of facilitator. That sort of takes all the information that’s coming in about, you know, what hormones are in the blood, whether you’re hungry, whether you’re thirsty, whether you’re feeling, whether the fight or flight responses kicked in, you know, all these kinds of things that are going on, even down to our heartbeat.
Caroline Williams 00:16:20 You know, the way that we’re digesting our food, all this information is being passed back and forth, brain and body all the time. And what we know is that slight differences in the messages that are going from the body, these introspective messages can really affect mental health. And there’s this whole body of research now that suggests that some people are more or less sensitive to their introspective signals, and that can make you more or less susceptible to things like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, all kinds of mental health issues. And it’s involved in things like autism and ADHD and all these kinds of things. The global emotional moment is basically your brain’s picture, you know, taking in all this information. So there’s a part of the brain called the insula that takes all this information and puts it all together and comes up with a sense of how I feel now and the I bit of it than me. The sense of self comes from these bodily signals, and putting them all together brings this global emotional moment. And so it stands to reason that if you do anything to change these messages, then that global emotional moment will change.
Caroline Williams 00:17:28 And so I think tweaking the dials is something that could really benefit people. As I said earlier, tuning in, doing something to change the messages and that will change the way you feel in the moment, but also in the long term. So the strength stuff is really interesting because the idea behind why strength might make you feel more capable is that you’re upgrading these introspective signals from your muscles and from your bones that are just maybe giving this unconscious sense that I’m strong. It’s fine. You can stand down the anxiety because if anything happens, I can handle it. And maybe that’s what explains the very strong link between increased strength and feeling more powerful.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:05 Yeah, I think this is a really important topic. This idea of interception and signals coming from the body that we aggregate them generally, and it creates this global emotional moment because I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about to thoughts cause emotions do emotions cause thought. And you know, it’s a big debate a lot in psychology. And I think the answer is, as near as I can tell, it’s a bidirectional relationship.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:30 I almost more and more I’m starting to go. Are they even different or are they co arise. Yeah. The thing that first got me really going wait I’m not sure that thought always causes emotion is because I was able to notice very clearly. Some days I would wake up and I would just immediately feel a certain way before I’d had any thought. And then it felt like every thought got filtered through that feeling. And that’s what you’re describing. That global emotional moment is sort of like the weather that’s inside. Yeah. Our brain. Yeah. And then our thoughts can’t help but to some degree be influenced by that weather.
Caroline Williams 00:19:10 Yeah. So one way I thought I heard it described I really like is background music. It’s sort of like the background music to our lives. So like when you’re watching a film, you know, you’re watching a horror film and you can’t quite work out why you’re feeling on edge, but it’s the background movement that’s kind of making you nervous. Yeah. And yeah, by changing these introspective messages, you can change the background music on your life so that rather than feeling like, oh God, you know, you know, you can actually do something that makes everything feel a bit more positive and feel a bit more possible.
Caroline Williams 00:19:41 That’s what the power of moving can do in the moment and long term, that if you can change those messages, then in general, your background movement, your life will be better and will be happier, will be more capable.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:51 Yeah. We interviewed it’s been years ago, a woman named Michelle Seeger, and she had done some writing on movement and how it makes us feel. And she said something. I won’t get it exactly right, but it’s stuck with me all these years, all these interviews, which is like, if your body doesn’t feel good, your brain, your mental state, you’re going to feel like shit. The flavor of that may depend on your particular neuroses and conditioning, but if the body is out of whack, it’s going to influence it. And I think that’s what we’re saying with interception. What you’re saying is when we move, it helps the body be in a better place. And thus the messages that we’re getting in the brain are better changing that background music to something that is more enjoyable.
Caroline Williams 00:20:35 Yeah. And in sort of ways that you can’t even put your finger on. Yeah. So just like, you know, when you’re feeling down and, and depressed and miserable, sometimes you don’t know why. Yeah. you know, but if you can improve the background messages, then you can just feel okay. Yeah. For reasons like you don’t have to dwell on you just feel okay, and you’re bumbling along through your life and everything is groovy. So yeah, there’s a lot you can do. And I think it was not really a surprise to me when I started thinking of movement this way. It was sort of a penny dropping, like, well, of course I never feel more like myself than when I’m halfway through a yoga class or, you know, on a long walk or or, you know, kayaking or just doing something active. I know who I am, I feel good, I know what I’m capable of. And everything’s great if I’m slumped down. Not moved. I mean, I had to isolate for ten days when I had Covid.
Caroline Williams 00:21:23 Oh my goodness, I was the worst version of myself ever. I mean, in theory, I could have written several books in that time, but. Well, not really, but, you know, I could have done a lot of work, but I was so miserable. I was so lethargic, you know? And I think if anyone who is quite active sort of knows this in themselves, but it’s kind of interesting to put the science and the philosophy behind it and say, yeah, for me that means there are good reasons to seek it out and to not be lazy even though it’s comfortable.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:49 Yeah. This speaks to two of the mantras that I use on the show the most. One is depression. Hate’s a moving target. It has always been true in my case. And then the other is sometimes you can’t think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking, right? And it speaks to the fact that the action in this case we’re talking about movement.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:07 The actual physical movement changes the way we think. Yeah. Versus just sitting there trying to feel better and think better. Sometimes it just doesn’t work.
Caroline Williams 00:22:17 So my previous book, Override My Plastic Brain in the US was all about trying to think, you know, trying to do something to my brain to change my brain’s workings, you know, to make me less anxious, to make me more creative, to, you know, to change various things. And especially when it came to anxiety, the thing that bugged me about it is that most of the treatments revolve around thinking your way out of it. Thinking I feel anxious about this. Well, logically, that shouldn’t be the case. I can tell myself that I don’t need to be anxious about this and that. That’s not how it works when you’re living it, you can’t think your way out of it. Of course, there’s the issue with things like depression that getting moving in the first place.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:55 Yes.
Caroline Williams 00:22:56 Is a problem. And really interesting research that I found was one of the first signs that an antidepressant medication is starting to work is that people have an increase in voluntary movement, so people want to move more.
Caroline Williams 00:23:08 And then that starts off the, you know, the nice cycle of upward movement, hopefully. But yeah, I think it’s absolutely true that if you can get over that barrier and get yourself moving, then you’re off and you’re off and running. And that’s been shown time and again. Yeah, I wish I had an easy answer to how to get off the chair in the first place, but.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:26 I know that is a cruel irony of really severe depression, is that, yeah, one of the things that might help you a lot is one of the things that’s very hardest to do, which is, you know, why really learning to start small can be helpful. Like how, you know, what’s the what’s the littlest thing I can do with physical activity? The thing I’ve noticed a lot is that let’s say I’m thinking, all right, I need to do a 45 minute bike ride. And my brain thinks about that, and it thinks about the amount of energy a 45 minute bike ride takes.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:59 It knows what it takes. It’s done it. It’s like, okay, that’s a lot of energy. And it compares it to what it feels currently. And it’s like, that’s not doable. Yeah. Which is why the strategy of like, all right, Eric, just put on your bike shoes. Get in the other room. Works. Yeah, this is my own sort of interpretation of what I think is happening in my brain. But my brain is going, oh. Bike shoes are, you know, one unit of energy. You’ve got one unit of energy. I can do it that way until at some juncture, the energy starts to generate from the workout itself and propels me. So that strategy has saved me more times than I can count.
Caroline Williams 00:24:38 I’ve been quite slack on the getting out of bed and doing early morning yoga of late, but I was regularly getting up at six and going sort of half an hour down the road and doing an hour and a half of yoga in the morning.
Caroline Williams 00:24:48 And the way I managed to do that was when I woke up and groaned. Getting out of bed is my least favorite thing in the world. I should just say to myself, tuck and roll. And I would just tuck, roll out of bed and go tuck.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:00 And roll and that’s good.
Caroline Williams 00:25:01 Yeah, tuck and roll hasn’t worked for me that well recently. But now I do go out on a lot of bike rides with friends and having them appear at the door and say, why aren’t you ready? to spur me into action? So, yeah, it’s either pressure from outside or some sneaky strategy can be the way. But, you know, one of the people I met during the research for the book was Marcus Watney, who’s an ultra marathon runner who has suffered with depression his entire adult life. And even he said to me, I just couldn’t understand, how can I push myself to run an ultra marathon over several days when my feet are bleeding and I’m absolutely exhausted? And yet sometimes I can’t get myself out of this depression? You know, I’ve clearly got the strength of mind to do that.
Caroline Williams 00:25:42 Why can’t I do that? So even the best movers struggle with it.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:15 Let’s move into talking about some specific types of movements. One of the things I loved about this book is you set it up as globally, movement is really good for us, but then we kind of go through different types of movement and some of the specific benefits. So let’s talk a little bit about walking. What did you find most fascinating about the research you did into walking?
Caroline Williams 00:26:37 For most people it’s, you know, such an accessible thing that most people can do. I was surprised at how it was such a multi-use tool. So there’s the research into creativity. So, you know, just in a brain focused sense, we know that when activity is turned down in the frontal parts of the brain, which is the bit behind the forehead, that we tend to think less in straight lines, you know, that’s the part of the brain that kind of keeps us tethered and keeps pulling us back and says, don’t be daft, that won’t work.
Caroline Williams 00:27:04 And, you know, keeps us with the obvious options. And we know that, you know, artificially turning down activity in that brain region makes you more creative. We also know that walking does something very similar to this brain region. And so if you go out at a sort of a moderate pace where you’re not having to expend much effort, you’re just sort of meandering, and that tends to turn down this thinking bit of the brain. And the brain goes wide. And that’s been shown to increase creativity. So we have this idea, I think, in modern society, that if we need to work and come up with something new, we need to sit at our desks and bang our head against the desk until we come up with a great idea. I mean, that’s completely not the way we should be doing it. Science says go for a walk and go for a wander. And I think we need to sort of, you know, rebrand working is something that can be done on the move.
Caroline Williams 00:27:50 So that’s one way of using walking that’s really, really easy. And it sort of spills over for about 20 experiments, like for about 20 minutes after you come back for the walk. So have a brainstorming meeting, go out for a wander, come back, and you should have better ideas. Is another way. Is that faster, more brisk walk? So there was some really intriguing research. I came across this this great guy called Dick green, who started off looking at pipe works in oil fields and then turned his attention to pipe work of the human body into the blood vessels. And it’s, you know, I guess it’s sort of the same thing, really. And he found that we essentially have these pressure sensors on our feet. And then when we’re putting weight on our feet and walking, that sort of sets up turbulence in the, in the blood vessels, which adds up to a boost of blood to the brain. And I guess that’s in a way that’s not that surprising. That’s why you feel a bit more alert when you’ve been up on your feet and moving.
Caroline Williams 00:28:39 But he found this sweet spot where our footsteps are at 120 steps per minute, and our heart rate is also at 120 beats per minute. And our heart rate and our footsteps synchronize. And this gives you the best boost of blood to the brain, something like 20%. The even cooler thing about this is that 120 beats per minute. It’s the most common beat in Western pop music. And it’s also sort of this resonant frequency at which if you just let people walk, that’s what they will go to. And if you get people to tap along to a beat in a lab, that’s also the beat that they are most accurate at. There’s something magic about there’s 120 beats per minute. The good thing about it being common in music, you can Google any of your favorite genre of movement and 120 beats per minute, and you can find the music that you can step in time to and just get going. And it seems to make, you know, when your heartbeat gets into synchrony, that’s when you get a boost.
Caroline Williams 00:29:34 So, you know, he doesn’t have firm data that this is what happens in your brain works better. But what he says is it could really account for this feeling of well-being we get when we’re out and moving briskly. So if you want to, not necessarily think broad thoughts, you want to get out there. And after a period of sitting and getting lethargic, you want to g yourself up again and get back in the room. Then going for a very quick stomp is a really effective way of doing that.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:02 At 120 beats per minute, I love that. Yes, there is another idea in that section on walking that says our bones are in constant conversation with our brains. What does that mean? That’s an intriguing statement.
Caroline Williams 00:30:15 I know, because we tend to think of our bones as being these sort of dry, dusty sticks that hold us up and that they don’t do very much. But in reality, they are a living tissue that’s constantly being built up. If we stress them by by putting weight on them or they get broken down, if we’re not putting weight on them and, you know, we start to lose bone density.
Caroline Williams 00:30:35 And when we’re actually building up bone, there is a hormone released from that bone that goes into the blood, and it doesn’t actually have anything to do with the bone building process. What it seems to do is travel to the brain. It sort of docks onto the part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is important for memory. And it’s been shown in in experiments to Improve memory and just make the brain function better. It seems to have an effect on anxiety as well. So this is all sort of connected again. So when we’re putting weight on our bones, we’re strengthening our bones. We’re making our body more able to move us around, away from danger towards rewards. It’s also giving a boost to our brain to learn better and to retain information better. To me, that was a really surprising one. You know, you think of hormones, you think of glands. You know, you think of, you know, all different kinds of things. You don’t think of your bones as secreting hormones that help your brain to work properly, but they absolutely do.
Caroline Williams 00:31:29 So this is really interesting research that we’re now looking into it in terms of cognitive aging, because the bad news is that when you get to about middle age, the production of this hormone osteo calcium drops off. And so you have to do a lot of weight bearing exercise to keep that going, which is, you know, that’s something that’s very important, especially for women in middle age when estrogen starts to drop off, it needs to happen anyway. But this is another reason to keep your bones healthy and to do that weight bearing exercise, not only will you feel better, your brain might work better as well. So yeah, that was a real surprising one for me.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:01 And by weight bearing exercise, in this case we mean walking. Walking is a weight bearing exercise.
Caroline Williams 00:32:06 Yeah. I mean anything that’s holding up your own weight against gravity and moving counts as weight bearing exercise. So we don’t know yet. It’s too early in the research to know whether, you know, adding ankle weights while you go for a walk, you know, gives you, you know, more osteo cassin or whatever.
Caroline Williams 00:32:20 So any form of weight bearing exercise, we don’t know whether more is better, but I would probably suspect that more is better. But I don’t have any data to back that up. So don’t quote me on it. But yeah, I mean what’s the worst that can happen? You can move better, get stronger. all good things come from that.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:34 Yeah. It makes me feel like I need to walk more. My primary cardio exercise is now this peloton bike, which I love and has been great for my amount of time I spend doing cardio and a lot of different things. But it is not, as you say, a weight bearing exercise in the same way. And the other thing about it is it’s not outdoors.
Caroline Williams 00:32:54 Yeah. And, you know, there’s other stuff. This isn’t in the book, but I’ve written about balance and researchers who were working on, you know, our balance is another thing that declines with age. And being on a stationary bike is great for cardio, but if you’re on an actual bike, you’re having to fight gravity and you’re having to keep yourself upright.
Caroline Williams 00:33:10 So being on a stationary bike or a treadmill doesn’t tax your brain in quite the same way as being out in the real world and dodging obstacles and having to look over your shoulder and that kind of thing.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:20 Yeah. Yeah. You write that depressed people walk differently than non depressed people more slowly, hardly moving their arms and assuming a slump posture with their eyes to the floor. I was really struck by that last part, the eyes to the floor thing. I’ve been doing something the last, I don’t know, month or so. It’s called the Alexander Technique. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across it.
Caroline Williams 00:33:40 Yeah, I don’t know much about it, but I have heard of it.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:42 I don’t either still after a month. But part of what the Alexander Technique is trying to do is to get you to recognize Sort of your habitual patterns of use, your body being, you know, the main one, and undo those by sort of letting them go. But one of the things that my Alexander Technique instructor has pointed out to me is that my natural use is head down slightly, looking more towards the floor.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:12 That’s sort of where I naturally orient. And as I’ve started to pay closer attention to that, I’m like, yeah, even when walking, I’m kind of a little bit of that head down. So I was struck by that eyes to the floor piece. You actually talk about it also in the section about core exercises. Also that this is another thing, but I was really struck by that because like I said, it was just pointed out to me this week that I do that.
Caroline Williams 00:34:33 Yeah, I do it too. I catch myself all the time and I have to remind myself, look up, you know, look out at the world and, you know, head up posture matters. Yeah. And that’s another thing. The sort of the core research is, is really interesting. And the effects of just changing the way again. It’s the messages that your body is sending about how you feel. And you know, we know that slumped posture. You know, everything from, you know, a defeated chimpanzee will will sit and slump down and sort of broadcast the message, leave me alone, I give up.
Caroline Williams 00:35:07 that sort of come through to us as well. But the benefit of being a human is we can reflect on that and we can change it. And then we feed back that, you know, the body then tells the brain, okay, you’re setting up straight. You must be feeling better. and there’s some really interesting research into what causes that. And I don’t know whether your listeners will probably know about Amy Cuddy’s power posing research that she got a really hard time because she then linked changes in posture, changes in hormones in the body that hasn’t been backed up by other research. But the fact of posture affecting the way you feel has been backed up many, many, many times. So we’re just still looking for the, you know, the killer mechanism that explains exactly. So, I mean, there’s one potential one that I know in the book, which is really interesting to me for the same reasons I was talking about, like thinking your way out of stress, because there are links that have emerged between like neural links, literally wiring pathways between the adrenal glands that pump out stress hormones and the parts of the brain that control movement.
Caroline Williams 00:36:08 So it’s like this strip of brain tissue across sort of where your headphones go across the top of your head. And these wires from the adrenal glands end up in the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement of the core. So the trunk muscles, the ones that keep you upright or not upright. And it’s really interesting. There’s something to do with movement. There’s something to do with this movement of this midsection of your body and the posture that you keep. It’s linked in with the stress system. And so to me that suggests that rather than having to think your way out of a stressful situation, there’s something you can do with your body. You can strengthen that core, you can change your posture, you can take control and tell yourself via your body that everything’s all right and that you can stand down this stress response. So to me, I mean, I’m hoping that there’s going to be more research in this area. You know, they’re working very hard on it. That will show us exactly how to do that.
Caroline Williams 00:36:58 But but this link, given that we know that posture makes you feel better and that these links are there, it would suggest quite strongly that having strong core, a good posture can, you know, really effectively change the way you feel and how you deal with stress.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:12 In that section on core, you talk about that neural pathway, but you also say that it’s the area of the body where most of our internal organs are found, which means it’s the point of origin for a lot of our inter perceptive messages that we were talking about earlier. And so that that area being, you know, in good shape, so to speak, might improve the way we feel also in that way because the intercepted messages.
Caroline Williams 00:37:40 Yeah. And then there’s this also idea that, you know, this area of the body because the organs are there. So these, you know, the messages from the heart, from the lungs, you know, everything is coming from the stomach, everything’s coming from this region that maybe this sort of is a focal point.
Caroline Williams 00:37:55 So there’s one neuroscientist who thinks that this is why we have this sense of being in our bodies and looking out of it, because these intercepted messages are in our sort of core of our body. So there’s something special about our trunk because that’s where we are in, in some ways. so I think that’s a really interesting viewpoint. You know, a lot of people think, oh, the me is in my head, behind my eyes, actually, maybe a lot of me is is in my mid section of my body where all the important stuff. But the brain is important too. But you know, the other important stuff.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:26 Is there’s a lot of other important stuff. Yes. Yeah. Let’s hit strength training a little bit more. You hit on it to some degree, but there have been studies that compare different forms of exercise or they show and you write about that. Strength training is faster and more powerful effects on self-esteem.
Caroline Williams 00:38:45 Yeah, yeah. So this was one of the things that really surprised me because, you know, everyone knows cardio makes you feel good, gets the blood pumping, endorphins, blah, blah, blah.
Caroline Williams 00:38:53 But studies have shown that strength training alone, regardless of whether you’re doing cardio or other forms of exercise, do lift mood. They help you feel more powerful and more capable in your life. So, and that’s one area that I think is quite easy to neglect. You know, you can go out and do or go for a run. You can go and cycle or swim or whatever. But but actually focusing on your physical strength is something that’s easy to miss. And it’s really important, and especially in young people, because there’s evidence that young people are less strong than they were ten years ago, as are a lot of adults as well. And that, you know, maybe that’s feeding into some of the anxiety issues that we’re seeing in young people. And, you know, that they’re they’re feeling really under pressure, unable to cope. So, you know, giving them strength at an early age can hopefully give them some tools to take forward into their adult life and feel confident and feel that they matter and that they’ve got something to offer the world.
Caroline Williams 00:39:51 So so is something that we’re missing out on. And I think we could definitely do better with.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:55 Yeah. The studies that you referenced were a little bit staggering, depending on how you measure strength. We’re talking about a 20 to 30% decrease in youth since the year 2000. That is not very long ago.
Caroline Williams 00:40:08 I know it’s kind of terrifying really. You know, I have a 12 year old and I think, oh, luckily he’s a fidget like I am. So he’s always on the move and doing stuff. But but yeah, I mean it’s still very easy to go through school and come out the other end and feel that physical activity and movement is not for you, and you’re not a sporty kid and you’re not very strong, and that’s really got to change. It’s not helpful because those kids then leave, and then they’re not the ones who who seek out movement in adulthood. And you know, when you really have to seek it out because you haven’t got the time anymore, like you did when you were a kid.
Caroline Williams 00:40:41 Yeah. So I think we need to, to do better for children in schools. You know, we’re cutting down on p time. We’re cutting down on break time, recess time. And kids aren’t playing outside like they used to. They’re not walking to school like they used to. yeah. Yeah, there’s all kinds of things that they’re not doing that are playing into this. And I think, really needs to be urgently looked at.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:02 Yeah. And as you said, strength training is one of the easiest areas to let go. Like I mentioned, the cardio bike that I have sitting next to me here, I just use it a lot and I love it. Strength training has proven to be more challenging for me to do consistently. What’s actually worked for me is I found I’ve really needed a trainer, someone virtually, and luckily I’m in a position where I’m able to afford that from time to time. But yeah, it is. It’s a harder thing for me to motivate myself to do and to know, like, what’s the right level? How much should I be doing? There’s more nuance to it.
Caroline Williams 00:41:38 Yeah, it’s not obvious, is it? Going for a run. You know, when you’re breathless and you know you can go a bit further than you did last time? It’s a bit tricky, but, I mean, it doesn’t always have to be using weights and in a gym or, you know, doing anything like that. We can build stuff into our lives. So I try and make an effort now so you can’t see from the screen. But I’m actually really small. I’m four foot 11. I’m quite slight. If I’m out somewhere and someone say if I’m carrying something and someone says, can I help you with that? I always say, no, no, I’m fine. You know, I’m making an effort to to carry things because that’s really important that you can use what strength you have and keep it going. So it can be as simple as as choosing to carry your shopping home, choosing to lift and carry stuff rather than putting it in a shopping trolley. You know, we can build these things into our lives and after a while they become habits.
Caroline Williams 00:42:23 So that’s another way of doing it. For people who aren’t necessarily into getting into Lycra and lifting weights and don’t because a lot of people don’t feel comfortable.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:32 I’m not in Lycra. That’s. I’m not wearing Lycra. Yeah, not. I’m telling you.
Caroline Williams 00:42:37 I know.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:39 Chris. On the other hand, Chris is. No.
Caroline Williams 00:42:42 Poor Chris, he’s loving the Lycra. Well, he’s halfway there then.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:45 He’s wearing Lycra, but he’s not. Yeah, he’s halfway there, but he’s not moving. Really tight Lycra in this case.
Caroline Williams 00:42:53 Yeah. I mean, it can also be body weight exercise as well, because, you know, I spent some time with the move knit community who are interested in using your body in a sort of human animal kind of way. So they don’t lift weights, they lift boulders, they don’t, you know, sweat. They don’t go to a swimming pool. They might swim in a river, you know, things like crawling. I spent a morning crawling in a park in London.
Caroline Williams 00:43:14 My goodness. I mean, I really could not move. The next day I.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:17 Had to go.
Caroline Williams 00:43:18 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was quite incredible. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be that complicated. And even so, the main change that I’ve made to my working life to get more movement in is rather than sitting at my desk all day. I spent a lot more time sitting on the floor because the one thing about sitting on the floor, you have to get up and you know your leg pressing your entire body weight every time you do that. And if you’re like me and you keep forgetting you’ve lost your pen, it’s upstairs. You have to run upstairs. Get it up, down, up, down. Yep. And in studies of, you know, people in the blue zones, you may have come across places in the world where people are far more likely to live to 100 than anywhere else. So studies of these people, you know, there’s lots of factors that seem to feed into their long lifespan.
Caroline Williams 00:44:00 But one of them is that they have movement as part of their everyday life. So these little old ladies in Okinawa and Japan, they have low tables and they’re constantly hopping up and down from these low tables and, you know, going out gardening and foraging and bending down and stretching up. So sort of building that kind of stuff into your life can, can actually improve your strength. And, you know, they call them movement snacks in movement, which I love because it’s a bit like, you know, when you’re sitting eating snacks, you know, they add up in terms of calories without you really noticing. and that can have a real physical effect. It’s the same for movement snacks. They add up over time. You don’t notice that you’re popping up and down from the floor, but you’re still strengthening your legs. You’re still improving your overall strength, so it all counts. And the less you’re doing in the first place, the more a small amount will have an impact. So it doesn’t have to be going out and becoming Arnie, getting really big bulging muscles.
Caroline Williams 00:44:50 And in fact, that’s the other thing about strength training. The improvements in mental health and in feeling more confident and powerful. They happened before any physical changes were detectable in the muscles. So it’s not even that you have to build more muscle. It’s just letting your body know that you can do it and that the strength is there and it sort of releases a bit of latent potential that you didn’t necessarily know you had. So yeah, you don’t need to get buff. That’s not necessary at all.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:35 All right. Dance. Let’s talk about dance. Of all the exercises that we’ve talked about, probably the least number of listeners are doing.
Caroline Williams 00:45:44 Yeah. Yeah. Very, very few people dance. And when we get to adulthood, we seem to stop dancing, which is a real shame. And it’s a really fundamental part of what it means to be human. So no other creatures dance. Or if they do, they’re dancing at a different rhythm that we can’t work out. But they don’t dance like we do to the beats, the 120 beats per minute like we do.
Caroline Williams 00:46:05 And there are lots of theories about why that is, that humans as dancers. And one of the things is that it helps us bond. You know, this whole point of needing each other and needing to be socially bonded. Dance is a way of bringing us together. And so the idea behind this is that when we moving, you know, we have these so proprioceptive inputs Is that so that’s a slightly different to interception. It’s it’s the bodily sense of where our body is in space without having to look. And that’s an important thing of knowing who I am and where I end. And you begin. So when we’re moving, we have this proprioceptive sense of where our body is in space. If we’re moving in synchrony with somebody else, then the information about their body movements coming in through our other senses, our brains get confused. They can’t really separate the two. And so this sort of breaks down the barrier between me and you, and we start to feel more connected. And there’s all these intriguing experiments where they get people to move in time together, and then they get them to do kind of gambling tasks, and they can either stuff each other’s chances of winning or they can cooperate, and everyone goes home happier.
Caroline Williams 00:47:06 And people are far more likely to cooperate with each other when they’ve moved together first. So there’s something about being a human, caring about other humans, feeling connected that moving together just makes happen naturally. So yeah, it can be embarrassing to dance with other people, but it doesn’t have to be dance. It could be yoga, it could be Tai chi. It could be an aerobics class, you know, it could be all kinds of ways moving in synchrony with other people. But it’s something I think we’re missing out on. Definitely. And and you can actually get the same effect on your own. So I spoke to this neuroscientist called Peter Janata who he works on the psychology of the groove, which is, you know, getting into the groove of music and feeling like you can’t help but move your body to it. And he says that when you’re listening to music that’s made by other humans moving their bodies, that’s how the sound is getting creative. You’re moving along with that. It’s kind of like an invitation to join in with the band.
Caroline Williams 00:47:58 And so you’re moving to the movements of other people, and you can still get this sort of sense that you’re part of something bigger than yourself. So, so even dancing alone in your kitchen, which I do quite a lot of, can help you feel connected to other people in society. So that’s, to me, is the most important reason to sort of get over ourselves and dance a little bit more.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:18 In this science of the groove, he surveyed a wide number of people about the Grooviest song, and regardless of their musical interest, one song kind of came out head and shoulders above the rest. What was it? Let’s give the listeners a second to guess you guess listeners. Yeah, I guess. What do you think is the most grooviest song? I’ll tell you, it is not groove is in the heart by delight, so you can take that one off your list, even though it’s pretty groovy.
Caroline Williams 00:48:45 It’s probably up there, though.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:47 It might be. All right. Now you can tell us.
Caroline Williams 00:48:49 Okay, okay. I think everyone who ever heard this will get it immediately. It’s Superstition by Stevie Wonder. And the reason why maybe is because it’s got this syncopated beat. So you’re not just stomping along to the beat, which does do something amazing to us. We sort of we feel connected to the beat. We feel empowered that we’re going along to it and we get this boost of dopamine. We feel good. But the syncopated beat, it’s sort of like a secret rhythm. We can decode it, and then we can sort of roll our hips and move the arms around, and then you kind of feel groovy. I mean, it’s a it’s an old, It’s an outdated word, but we’re bringing it back for neuroscience. And one idea about, you know, why this makes us feel good is that there are the balance. Organs of our inner ear are connected to the limbic system, which is the brain’s sort of emotional control senses. So when we’re sort of dancing, we’re sort of almost falling and catching ourselves.
Caroline Williams 00:49:39 And the syncopated beat gives us this is a bit like, you know, in the same way a joke makes us laugh because it sets up expectations and it violates it. You know, it pulls out the rug from under our feet, and we laugh because it’s funny. The same sort of thing happens when we’re trying to follow a syncopated beat. We’re almost falling over and we catch ourselves and we feel good. And so we have this kind of lovely feeling that we just feel amazing. And that’s where we can’t help but move our bodies to it. So I love that. I can’t resist superstition. That was played a lot in my university years and it gets me grooving every time.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:07 So yeah, dancing is good. I’ve taken up the occasional just put it on a song and you might call what I’m doing jumping around more than dancing, perhaps my old punk rock days, But hey, you know, it does work.
Caroline Williams 00:50:19 Well that works. The sensitivity of the kind of gravity detectors in our ears, they’re very sensitive to up and down movements.
Caroline Williams 00:50:25 So that’s why, you know, when especially when it’s loud. There’s this thing called the rock and roll threshold where when the music is above this threshold, I think it’s 120dB. I could be remembering it wrong. But anyway, when it’s loud enough, people start moving and they can’t help but Bob and you know, even if it’s just a stomp of the feet and a bounce of the head, you can’t help it. And so, you know, sort of pogoing along. It’s the sort of dancing that you could do anywhere in the world if someone was drumming and you wouldn’t look daft. It’s the kind of, you know, the toddlers do when they first start moving with the beat before they realize they’re supposed to be embarrassed and they’re supposed to not do that, you know, stomping around and, you know, bashing the air with your fists. It makes you feel good. So, yeah, you can do it by yourself. It’s okay. Yeah. and it still works. I actually had the most embarrassing experience joining in with a freeform dance group that I went to, sort of as part of my research, and it was.
Caroline Williams 00:51:15 It was pretty embarrassing, the whole thing when we were wafting around, you know, just as your body wants to. And you and I was like, my body doesn’t want to move. My body wants to go home. This is awful. But when the beats got going and, you know, the whole room was just stomping along, it was amazing. And and by the end of it, I had this sense that I wasn’t moving my legs and arms. They were moving me. I was just along for the ride, and it was just this amazing feeling. I was on a total high of a days afterwards. And you know, this was how we got out of our minds and just enjoyed being rather than thinking before, you know, we invented other ways of getting out of our minds. And it works and it’s free and you can do it and you can still drive home afterwards. So yeah, it was a bit of an eye opener for me. I have to say.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:56 I did a conscious movement free form movement class virtually.
Caroline Williams 00:52:02 And did you keep your camera on?
Eric Zimmer 00:52:03 Yeah, yeah we did. And my partner was here with me and yeah, that’s a strange experience, you know, like just move in the way your body wants to move like you. I was like, my body wants to hide in a chair in the corner the minute you’ve suggested this. Yes, exactly.
Caroline Williams 00:52:19 Don’t ask my body. It has no idea.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:21 Yeah, but yeah. Over time, I began to unwind a little bit and enjoy it.
Caroline Williams 00:52:26 Yeah. I mean, I sort of had to work with myself because I was hanging on to the radiator in the corner of this sort of drafty village hall. And I thought, you know, seriously, the only way you’re going to look ridiculous in this situation is to stand there and not do anything. These people don’t know you. I mean, I had quite a few friends that said, I’ll come with you. That sounds funny. I’m like, no, that’s exactly.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:42 What I’m.
Caroline Williams 00:52:42 Going on my.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:44 Own. That’s what I was saying. Having my partner here in the house with me almost made it worse. You know, it would have been easier with a group of strangers. You did another of the things that I suspect would be really great, but watching it from the outside, it looks painful to even be a part of, which is laughter. Yoga.
Caroline Williams 00:53:03 Yeah, yeah, even even. He even gives me a nervous laugh just even thinking about it. But yeah, but I mean, the reason for doing laughter yoga is that studies suggest that laughing, a proper belly laugh is a better workout for your abs, for your core, than crunches. So, I mean, ideally you would have friends that make you absolutely crack up a lot and, you know, make your belly sore at the end of it. But if not, then laughter yoga isn’t is another way of going about it. But yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:36 You still you still look skeptical. Yeah, I don’t get the sense you’re going back.
Caroline Williams 00:53:41 No, no, I don’t really think that is my thing. Luckily, I have very funny friends and a funny husband and a funny child and a dog that I could either laugh or cry at most of the time because he’s such a ridiculous animal.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:51 But what kind of dog? Now, I got to ask. We’ve talked about him twice now.
Caroline Williams 00:53:54 Yeah, he is a collie crossed with a New Zealand hunter, which is basically they took Welsh collies to New Zealand and thought, we need a bigger dog that can be more demanding. It can run up mountains and it can bark at the top of its lungs for 14 hours straight. So he’s quite demanding.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:12 Wow.
Caroline Williams 00:54:12 Yeah. I don’t know what I do know what I was thinking, I was thinking, I want a dog and I like collies. And I didn’t really read up enough about Hunter ways. I don’t recommend it unless you really want to run up and down hills. But he’s great. He gets you great character, he gets me moving.
Caroline Williams 00:54:26 And you know, there’s really no option if you’ve got someone he doesn’t do what my previous dog did, which is just come and stare at you until you take him out for a walk. You can ignore a stare. He will come and literally bark in your face until you go. Fine, fine. I’ll take you out. So yeah, it’s not negotiable for him at all. And seeing him, you know, I was saying before about, you know, if other animals dance, maybe we just can’t tune into it when he gets together with other herding breeds that it’s like they they click into each other, right? Okay. You go on the inside, I’ll go on the outside and you just run in circles and it’s like a form of dance, and you can see that they just feel amazing when they’re doing it. So maybe we just can’t tune in.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:00 I’ve had mutts in the past that have a significant amount of collie in them. The herding instinct is fascinating to watch in them.
Caroline Williams 00:55:06 Yeah, it’s very strange, isn’t it?
Eric Zimmer 00:55:08 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:08 I have a Boston terrier. She’s old, but she’s still active. And she does. I call it her ball or her bone dance. She. She loves her ball. And sometimes she loves a bone. And basically she just gets on her back and rolls, like, I mean, she doesn’t roll. She gets on her back and wiggles on top of this thing she loves. Just over and over and over and over again. I mean, it looks to all the world like she is dancing.
Caroline Williams 00:55:33 Yeah, we call it doggy breakdancing. Yeah, Django does that too. My dog does that too. He likes likes a bit of breakdancing and he usually teams it with her. It’s like he’s singing and dancing when he’s doing it. Yeah. You have to be a mad dog person to understand.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:47 I know, I know. We’re going to we’re going to have to pivot here so that we don’t turn this entire show into dogs. Stretching is another part of the book, another type of movement.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:56 So I want to make sure people get all of them. We’ve got walking, strength training, dance, the core stretching. But where we’re going to end is breath control. I’ve been very interested in breathwork over the last year. We had James Nestor on who wrote a great book about the breath. And but you brought up some really great things there also, and I wanted to start with, meditation. And the most common style of meditation probably is to sit and just follow your breath. Don’t control it, just follow it and observe it. But you talk about how a scientist or two got interested in, hey, what’s happening in the benefits of meditation? Is it something to do with what’s being done with the mind, or is it something to do with what’s being done with the breath? Can you share a little bit more about that?
Caroline Williams 00:56:44 Yes, this was sort of trying to tease apart whether it’s the act of mentally focusing on the breath that gives you these sort of changes in brain function and the way that you feel, or whether it’s something to do with the breathing.
Caroline Williams 00:56:57 And it’s really interesting that the actual act of breathing through your nose in and out, through your nose, what you’re basically doing is harnessing your brainwaves and sort of taking their rhythm under control, which sounds completely out there, but it kind of makes sense when you think about the way that the brain works. And again, it’s all about getting information from your environment and then using that sensibly to improve your chances of survival. So when you’re taking your breath through your nose, there’s a lot of information about the environment, how safe or rewarding it is in in that. And so this information goes to the the olfactory cortex, which is sort of at the top of the nose. And then to make use of that information, what you then need to do is to get other brain areas. So the bits that are to do with memory, to make sense of what this information means, and then emotional responses, you know, does this make me scared? Does this make me happy? Whatever. And for all those different brain regions to talk to each other, they need to be on the same brainwave frequency.
Caroline Williams 00:57:55 And so as a result of that working of the brain, when we breathe in and out through our nose, the whole brain starts to synchronize and beat to the same rhythm. And when we slow down our breathing, that has the effect of slowing down brainwaves as they propagate through the brain. So even as I’m saying this, it sounds so far fetched, but this is what studies are showing with EEG, which is looking at the frequency of brainwaves across the brain. And so when you really, really slow it down. So this particular experiment was looking at when you slow your breath down to three breaths per minute. So that’s really quite difficult to keep up. In fact, in the study, a few of the volunteers actually fell asleep during the study because they were so relaxed they just drifted off. But that can sort of take you into this altered state of consciousness, where you are more in a sense of of being rather than thinking, you know. I’m not big on sitting around. This explains why all these expert meditators commit to all this, sitting around and breathing slowly, and can actually do this for this long because it takes you to this amazing state of just being and being at one with the universe.
Caroline Williams 00:59:03 I haven’t managed it myself, but it seems worth aiming for to me. I would definitely fall asleep. Sleeping is like my my thing. I can definitely fall asleep anywhere but at different rates. You know, six breaths per minute is a lot easier to do, and that’s if you get people to breathe at different rates. The one that they tend to say that was the most comfortable and relaxing is six breaths per minute. And interestingly, in studies of things like chanting, reciting the rosary in Latin, sort of these sort of prayer based practices, studies of those have found that it tends to naturally make people’s breath go to six breaths per minute. So it’s almost like humanities worked out that this is how you feel good. This is how you feel calm and held and looked after. So breathing at six breaths per minute has all kinds of benefits. It fills your lungs more effectively. It activates the vagus nerve, which calms the whole nervous system down. And so it’s just this very easy. I mean, it doesn’t even feature when you think about movement, but this is a voluntary movement that our species can do and not many others can to sort of override just the in and out of oxygen into our bodies and to take control.
Caroline Williams 01:00:09 And that can change the way that we feel. And it’s such a simple thing. You don’t have to be fit. You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to be able. Anyone can do it. It’s really, really important thing to do. And we don’t know yet how important it is or whether it makes any difference if you do that breathing whilst moving. So I find that when I’m breathing and moving, that’s how I get myself into that kind of calm state is by doing yoga and focusing on breathing. But it seems that there is a small amount of evidence that it might be even more effective if you’re moving and breathing at calm rate at the same time. So you maybe hit more of these buttons. You get the core exercise, you get the strength, you get the breathing, you get the stretching. All of these things in one.
Eric Zimmer 01:00:52 Yeah. That’s one of the things about yoga that when I take it in a class that I wish is that it would slow down, you know, because you’re moving on the in and the outbreath, you know, is that the movement would span a longer breath.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:05 More to that, you know, 5 in 5 out count, which is, yeah, that’s what six breaths per minute works out to. Right. Five on the inhale, five on the exhale.
Caroline Williams 01:01:14 So the kind of yoga that I really fell in love with sort of about ten years ago, more than that now is Ashtanga. And you don’t follow the instructor.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:22 You do your own pace, right.
Caroline Williams 01:01:23 You do your own pace. And that’s when it really clicked for me that I wasn’t breathing. Now breathe out. Now I was like, well, how do you know when my lungs are full? You know, but if you’re doing it at your own pace, you can really you can really feel it when you get going. I have got into that state of being and just calm and awareness of my body, and it’s an amazing feeling. And you don’t necessarily get that if somebody is dictating your breath.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:46 That’s right.
Caroline Williams 01:01:47 That’s.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:47 Right. Yeah, yeah. I always find that I’m like, the speed is off for me.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:51 Yeah, I found the six breaths per minute. I think certain people call it coherent breathing. Fascinating that that is the rate that ties to a lot of ancient prayer type practices. And then three breaths per minute does take a little bit of effort. But it’s interesting. I’m practicing a little bit differently now, but for a while I was a very focused Zen Buddhist. So I was was really doing that type of meditation. But if you go back further into the Zen tradition, there is talk about controlling your breath in a way that doesn’t typically show up in what we think about with meditation. And it was about this very light. So you’re not moving a lot of air, but you’re doing it, you know, closer to what you’re describing, which is that, you know, three breaths per minute.
Caroline Williams 01:02:39 That’s really interesting. So yeah, you don’t have to be sort of huffing and puffing and making a real effort, but what you’re doing is sort of taking control and sort of controlling the rate.
Caroline Williams 01:02:48 Yeah. The research which suggests that what you’re doing is really sort of slowing down the activity of the brain, and then that can get you into this state of Zen. I guess, you know, the state of being and being one with the universe.
Eric Zimmer 01:03:00 Yeah. And I think that’s what makes slow breathing hard for a lot of people is we tend to equate slow breathing with deep breathing, which we then sort of naturally equate with moving a lot of air. So there’s this like, you know, this strong. Yeah. You can’t inhale that forcefully for 10s. Like it doesn’t work that way. It’s a much lighter moving less air. Over a longer period of time. Anyway, thank you so much, Caroline, for coming on the show. Thank you so much for this wonderful book that teaches us so much about how to move. And you’ve just got a line which is basically the message is move more in your brain will thank you in the long run and in the short run.
Caroline Williams 01:03:40 Absolutely. Yeah.
Caroline Williams 01:03:42 Yeah. Your life will will be better. Yeah. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? You’ve moved.
Eric Zimmer 01:03:46 You’ve you get healthier.
Caroline Williams 01:03:48 You’ve had a good time. Yeah. You can always sit down afterwards. Yeah. And, you know, at the end of the book, I talk about rest and the importance of rest. It’s not about necessarily getting more exercise in. It’s about moving your body around more. And it doesn’t have to hurt. You don’t even have to change your clothes and shoes. You just have to remember that you’re an animal that needs to move and stretch and breathe and make sure that you do that.
Eric Zimmer 01:04:08 Well, thank you so much.
Caroline Williams 01:04:09 Thank you very much for having me. It’s been lovely to talk to you. I think I’ve learnt a lot too.
