Dismantle.Repair

As we find ourselves in what is probably the strangest period of many of our lives, I am inspired to revive this blog, which I’m alarmed to find I haven’t posted on regularly for 2 & a half years! With the COVID pandemic and related distancing measures in full swing, it’s not so much the thought of having time on my hands that brings me here, but the wish to express what I hope you’ll find to be some pertinent thoughts on the situation.

I remember talking to a Buddhist once about my despair at the way we humans are treating the planet - plastic waste, endless short journeys by car and the like – and she consoled me with a perspective from Buddhism that we must allow nature to run its course: if the earth needs to destroy itself in order to start again and rejuvenate, then so be it. The universe as we know it stands as just a speck in time against backdrop of forever. In the grand scheme of things, it is nothing. All will be well.

Indeed, all it takes is a perusal of the opening chapter of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything to discover how tiny and insignificant the size and lifespan of our planet (let alone ourselves) is when stacked up against infinity and eternity. And indeed I found a certain comfort in adopting the perspective that, however messed up the world becomes during my lifetime, it won’t always be that way.

However, I’ve continued to experience increasing dismay at the state of affairs: extortionate prices to travel sustainably on public transport; having to visit 2-3 stores for the weekly shop to get both value and minimal packaging; an ongoing obsession and preoccupation with (sole-occupncy) car use… Whilst heartened by conscious living (tackling plastic waste in particular) becoming ever more present in the public psyche, I can’t help but feel it’s too little too late.

Enter global pandemic. For all the chaos and heartache caused by the current state of affairs, a common theme in our collective coping mechanisms seems to be 'finding the positives'. From the appearance of Facebook pages dedicated to acts of kindness, to reports of wildlife returning to previously-too-polluted places, the world really is embracing the happy by-products of a challenging situation. On a more individual level, I think we’re all counting our blessings and finding heightened appreciation of life’s small pleasures.

As the pandemic unfolds and its more favourable consequences transpire, I become increasingly convinced that nature really does know what it’s doing with this one. Yes, it will be hideous. Lots of people will die; everyone will suffer in some way or another; some countries, areas & groups will be hit particularly hard. But inevitably, we will come out of the other side changed. By ‘we’ I mean as individuals, societies and as a whole world. Perhaps this was just the catalyst to accelerate some cultural changes that were sorely needed. I like to use the term “societal recalibration” to describe this. To explain further, allow me to present some examples of things that deeply trouble me about modern (British) life and how the present situation contributes to putting them right.

Travel & environment:

I’ve already hinted at my level of dismay about the tendency to get in our cars and drive everywhere, often with only one person per vehicle (I use ‘our’ in the widest sense to reflect the nation as opposed to a group that specifically includes me!). Added to that, the financial and practical ease with which we can hop on and off planes like there’s no tomorrow is deeply disturbing when you consider the environmental consequences of this. I heard that one person flying from London to New York is the equivalent, in carbon emission terms, of the average individual’s car use for a whole year. A WHOLE YEAR! Multiply that by the number of people on that flight and the number of flights taking off daily, and the scale of the problem becomes incomputable to the human brain.

           

The good news is that this tragic circumstance is being partially reversed by the current lockdown on movement & travel. Stories of swans returning to the canals in Venice, for instance, illustrates the substantial impact that just a few weeks of changed behaviour can have. Now of course, the current limitation on transport can’t be maintained, but if each one of us were more thoughtful in our choices in the long-term – a short journey by bike here, a local weekend away instead of jet-setting to wherever is cheapest there – imagine the impact we could have on saving the planet. Immense.

Health & lifestyle:

90% of people in the UK are putting their health at risk by either smoking, having a poor diet, not being active enough or drinking too much. Some 70% have at least 2 of those risk factors, and over two-thirds of the population is overweight. Alcohol consumption is glamorised to the extent that even the most reserved of ‘normal’ social drinkers are often well-over the threshold of the increased-risk-to-health category. The advent of processed foods, motor vehicles, cheap booze, ‘smart’ technology that enables us to do anything & everything without leaving our sofas, and a whole host of other cultural and technological changes, are essentially slowly killing us. Usually the easy thing to do is the unhealthy one, and we’re in a terrible state because of it.

Enter a semi-lockdown state though and all of a sudden the population of joggers and walkers has quadrupled in my local area. As an aside, I’m proud of the UK Government (and I don’t think I’ve ever said that before!) for taking such a balanced public health approach to all this and continuing to encourage people to get out and exercise whilst maintaining social distancing and sheltering in place the rest of the time. Since this is one of the very few legitimate reasons for leaving the house, it seems that people who you couldn’t usually get to exercise if you paid them have realised that getting out and moving isn’t so bad after all. Others still are adopting home-workout routines they’d never normally have thought to do, in a bid to not go stir-crazy with all that time in the house. It seems that this phase has enabled many people to discover all the wellbeing benefits of exercise, and I hope this will help instil some long-term healthy changes and improved population wellbeing.

Sense of community:

It breaks my heart to think that we have almost no sense of community these days. People don’t know their neighbours; we rush around cities refusing to make eye contact with each other; many of us don’t know who we’d turn to in our local area if we needed help. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that social isolation (and its direct & indirect effects) is a bigger killer than any of the lifestyle factors mentioned above, with the scale and severity of the situation described in detail by an excellent report by the Eden Project.

I’m sure you’ll agree that the way people have pulled together during this time has been astounding. The NHS made a call for volunteers this week hoping to get 250 thousand sign-ups over the course of a few days. In less than 24 hours, 405 thousand people had registered their interest. Similarly in my local area, I’ve signed up to be part of a co-ordinated ‘community response’ to the crisis; I’ve not been offered any work yet as they’ve been so inundated with volunteers that it’s taking days & days to simply collate the details and work out who can do what. On a smaller scale, I went for a run this morning and was amazed how every single person I passed – from a distance of course! – offered a smile, wave, nod or ‘hello’. (It’s not rare for this to happen normally, but you don’t usually find that every person you cross will interact with you!) I am hopeful that whenever we return to some kind of normal, an enhanced sense of community will remain as a legacy to these times.

Pace of life:

Perhaps the thing I struggle most with in daily life is time pressure: what with work, socialising, fitness, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and general life-admin (lifemin!), there never seems enough time to get everything done (and this is coming from someone who in ‘normal’ life is largely absent from social media and rarely works more than her allotted 37 hours per week!). British life seems to have become something of a competition about who can be busiest all the time. Our diaries are so crammed you have to do things like plan dinner with a friend several months in advance, or block out time specifically to do nothing. My best friend, a Brit who lives in Italy where people simply take life as it comes, finds this particularly baffling. And she’s right; it’s stressful and encroaches on our ability to live spontaneously and simply enjoy the moment or see where the wind takes us. I often find myself grappling with the desire to ‘make the most of life’ versus a hankering for a simpler way of being, and wish I could find the ideal balance between the two.

As my mum said of our current situation, “I think it’s nature’s way of getting us all to slow down”. Having time to reflect, take stock, reconnect with ourselves and simply relax could do us all the world of good. We’ll find more time for things that usually go on the backburner, like reading, crafts and catching up with loved ones. We’ll realise we don’t need to be rushing around like headless chickens all the time, and that joy can be found in the simplest of pursuits. We may even find that a simpler life has healing qualities beyond that any type of therapy or medication could ever bring. I saw a quote on social media this weekend that nicely summed it up: Before rushing back to normal life, take time to consider which parts of it are worth rushing back to.

So there you have it, the bright side of what is in many ways a very dark period. If the world needs to dismantle itself temporarily in order to repair, our sacrifices will be worth making.

Note: if you’re curious about the title of this post, I committed when I started this blog that the vast majority of posts would be named from a song title or lyric. Dismantle.Repair is a song by a favourite band of mine and my brothers, Anberlin. Whilst the song itself isn’t particularly pertinent to the theme of the piece, I felt the title was rather apt and summed up the overarching point I was making rather nicely.   

Stuck in This Paradox

I recently read about the results of a survey on public attitudes about the NHS. There were two main results that were most striking for me: first, out of a list of eight options, people rated public health interventions – those that maintain wellness and prevent ill health – lowest, in terms of priority for NHS spending. To me this suggests that the general public is not well educated on the benefits of preventive measures: by prioritising treatment over prevention, we are missing the point that the need for treatment is reduced by effective prevention.

In an interesting twist though, here is the other result that grabbed my attention: when asked whether particular types of treatment should be rationed by the NHS, people were least likely to agree that bariatric surgery and liver transplants for alcoholics should be given freely for all (conversely, people were most likely to agree that drugs should always be given to extend life by less than 6 months in terminal illnesses). In other words, it seems that there is something of a tendency to believe that conditions most obviously associated with lifestyle factors are less deserving of free treatment. It also implies an attitude that people are, at least in part, responsible for their own health, and perhaps should not be offered treatment so freely for conditions that are seen to be more avoidable.

So, how does one minimise their chances of needing such treatment? By having a healthy lifestyle. And how do we improve people’s chances of having a healthy lifestyle? Preventative measures that help maintain wellbeing and promote good health! It seems there is a bit of a mismatch between these two key results of the survey, and one that should perhaps be addressed by educating more widely on the benefits of such interventions.

The Psychologist: 'unlocking the social cure'

Such a lot of money is being spent on transforming the NHS right now, to respond to the increasing demands of poor health on a population level. Aside from the obvious ones, more illnesses than we realise have their roots, to some extent, in lifestyle choices and social connection (or lack of). It is frustrating to know that so much could be achieved by investing more in social and public health measures, yet the immediate pressures placed on our health services make is almost impossible to invest proportionately in these. Even if we did, it seems the fallout would be massive: how dare we spend so much on the thing ranked bottom of the public list in terms of health spending priorities?!

How do we address this issue? I certainly don’t claim to know the answers, but I think those doing good work need to keep chipping away at it and perhaps the scales will eventually tip. I’m particularly impressed the examples given in May’s special issue of The Psychologist on the ‘social cure’ approach to health and wellbeing. I hope to see more and more of this type of work in the coming months and years. If we continue to tackle the deepest roots of poor health and wellbeing, little by little, perhaps we can ultimately ease the burden on the NHS and on people’s lives. It’s a conundrum that won’t be easy to solve, but I plan to do my best to do my bit.

The Adventure: The Power of Outdoor Activities to Boost Wellbeing

Enjoying the great outdoors during my time in the USA

One of my favourite things is meeting people who are as passionate about wellbeing as I am, and those who are doing inspiring things to help others to be happy and healthy. By happy coincidence I had such a person host me through Airbnb on my recent tour across the United States: through her personal experience of discovering the value of a healthy lifestyle, Nashville-based fitness fanatic Nikki is on a mission to support her fellow Americans to do the same. Recognising the benefits of outdoor exercise for health and wellbeing, her organisation Always Forward Adventure Fitness (AF2) seeks to provide the information and inspiration needed to promote widespread use of one of our best (and best value) assets – The Great Outdoors – as a tool to boost our health and happiness.

Inspired by this initiative and keen to share some reflections from my own experience, I wrote a guest piece for the AF2 blog, which you can read here. I talk about my endeavours to stay healthy during three months of American travel, and introduce GoodGym, a wonderful UK example of using physical activity for wellbeing, in the hope that we might soon see a similar initiative across the pond.

The evidence base for the benefits of outdoor activity is rapidly growing, with Intelligent Health being a leading source of information, evidence and innovative interventions in the field. Founder Dr William Bird tells the story much better than I would, so I’ll leave you in his capable hands should you wish to find out more about this important and fascinating topic. 

Food of Love

I recently visited Food Matters Live, a huge conference / exhibition bringing together people and organisations with an interest in building a sustainably healthy food landscape across the world. Hundreds of businesses showcased innovative food products and services, whilst the conferences and seminars offered copious food for thought on topics like the obesity management, clean label food, sports nutrition and sustainability. Given my interest in healthy lifestyles and keenness to discover new ways to bring good nutrition to my life, it was a no-brainer that this might be an enjoyable event for me, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Aside from being introduced to loads of amazing new nutrition products (and a few free samples!), I left the event feeling my appetite for deep thinking had been whet as well. Working as a health coach, I spend a fair bit of my time thinking about what makes people tick when it comes to achieving / maintaining a healthy weight, and, more importantly, how the heck we might go about getting people living well on a population-level scale. This was the focus of many of the discussions at Food Matters Live, with one panel session in particular getting the cogs whirring for me: a forum on the psychology of food choice.

Yes, somewhat counter-intuitively, the answers to these big questions about population-level change start with the individual, with the internal factors that influence what and how we choose to eat. Eloquently stated by Bee Wilson at this event, we humans have an ‘invariably complex relationship with food’ and are ‘prisoners of’ this when we make food choices. In other words, our choices are deeply intertwined with our emotions, memories and experiences, such that it’s often impossible to separate these. However, as Pierre Chardon notes, we often forget that our food choices are tied up with our emotions, instead rationalising that we ‘were hungry’ or ‘liked’ the food we chose.

In reality, the complex underlying processes that influence our food choices include our upbringing (with messages such as ‘you should always clear you plate’ being particularly problematic), the variety of foods we have been exposed to across the life-course, the effects of traumatic events, and our emotional states at any given time. Many of these things we have no control over, yet some of us are more health-conscious and seemingly in control of our diets than others. Bee Wilson commented on this, noting that she used to fall into the latter camp and now considers herself fortunate to be in the former. Why is this? What makes some of us more aware and able to control what we eat than others, and what gives us the ability (or not) to change this?

As one of those people who has made this transition, this got me thinking about my own passage to conscious living and healthy eating. How did this process begin? What triggered it? Which of my personal qualities and past experiences were instrumental in making this happen, and how? In what ways do all of these factors interact with each other? I certainly don’t purport to know all the answers to these questions, at least not fully, but I have some thoughts that I feel ultimately shed light not just on my own experience but on one of the keys to a widespread shift towards healthier living on a global scale.

My own quest to live more healthily began 5 or 6 years ago with a desperate attempt to feel better after a relationship breakup. I did some reading online about ways to boost my mood, and quickly started to learn of the impact nutrition has on our mental state. I began eating

Eating more raw vegan food is one of the steps I've taken to a healthier me

more of the foods that were said to improve mood, and this proved to be the start of an ongoing and unending search for the healthiest possible version of myself. I became interested more widely in the functions that different foods fulfil, and in the other ways in which my lifestyle would impact my mind and body. Bit by bit I built (what Derren Brown would describe in his fantastic book Happy as) a ‘considered life’ filled with meaningful pursuits and healthy choices.

This rings true of the experience of Bee Wilson who I mentioned earlier. She described her own transition from health unconscious to healthy eater as being a ‘meal by meal’ process - an incremental lifestyle change – ‘not just going on a diet’. This, I think, is the crux. On top of our individual psychology often being stacked against us, and an obesogenic environment tending to steer us towards less healthy choices, we are bombarded with messages that ‘dieting’ is the road to health. Cut out this food group; take that supplement; buy those meal replacement shakes. The result? Aside from those of us who have made a concerted effort or simply been lucky enough to enter the world of healthy lifestyle enlightenment, we are left with unrealistic expectations, unsustainable diet plans and no solid knowledge of what our bodies actually need.

Being plastered with unrealistic and inaccurate messages only serves to further embed the often unhealthy relationship with and thoughts/feelings about food. The losing battle we’re already fighting becomes tougher and tougher, and we fall deeper and deeper into habitually poor lifestyle choices. That is, until something clicks, snaps us out of it, puts us on the road to control over our own lives and health. That thing will be different for all of us; for me it was improving my mood, for other it’ll be looking better, some people will look to be alive for longer to see their kids grow up. The common denominator is that we will only ever change if something is intrinsically valuable to us.

Healthy choices come from within

So what’s the answer? It’ll be invariably complex; in fact there are likely to be infinite combinations of solutions to suit each individual. Each of us needs to find our own ways of connecting to what’s important to us, engaging with healthy lifestyles and doing what we can to work with our inner psychology and the outer environment. Culturally, unfortunately the odds will continue to be stacked against us if something doesn’t change. Instead of being told what plan we should be following, which foods we should be cutting out, how many meals we should be replacing with shakes, we needs to find these individual paths. As a health coach I love that I get the opportunity to work with people to help them to understand the healthy eating guidelines and work out individual action plans that work for them. To start bringing this holistic, person-centred approach to the masses is the challenge, and I’m not quite sure where we start with that in a world where capitalism and commercialism rules the roost. If you have any thoughts as to how we move forward with this, I’d love to hear from you.