Mental Health Awareness Week: Dr Julia Jones

Dr Julia Jones, neuroscientist and author, joins the 'Off the top of your head' podcast to share the neuroscience behind why movement matters to our mental health and how we can 'hack' our routines to help.

Transcript

Simon Blake

Welcome, Julia. Could you just tell us a bit about yourself? Tell the listeners who you are.

Dr Julia Jones

Yeah. So, I'm Julia Jones. And 30 years ago, I began my professional career as a sport and exercise scientist. At that time in the early 90s, I was shown during a visit to a U.S. Navy seals base how to use music to have various effects on brain and body, which I'm sure we'll dig into. But over more recent years, I moved across through sports psychology with Olympic teams, then into applied neuroscience through nutrition science, looking at genetic science to try and understand why everything we've been doing for decades hasn't been working. And that's led me to a very different place today than where I started.

Simon Blake

I am. Right now, your work is?

Dr Julia Jones

Well, so, so I'm very firmly looking at habit hacking and the five-year research project that I've completed last year looking at why 50 years of huge diet and fitness trends had not had any impact on the on the spiralling. Health crisis. And looking at the fact that anything that involves a lot of effort or a lot of cost is almost impossible for most people to maintain for a lifetime.

Simon Blake

OK, great. Thank you. So, let's just this podcast is obviously part of our series going out for mental Health Awareness Week and this year's theme is about movement. So, moving for mental health; When you hear that, what do, what does that mean to you? What do you connect?

Dr Julia Jones

It means something completely different to me now than when I was a sport and exercise scientist, you know, going and working within the fitness sector and the gym sector and telling everyone that they needed to do that. Because ultimately if you look at it from an evolutionary perspective, we didn't really evolve the neurological circuits to make us go to the gym or make us go and do high intensity exercise. 

That movement was initiated by the drive to find food, the drive to find other humans to reproduce, and so those activities do have a reward circuit in the in the brain and movement was almost the byproduct product of doing those other activities. 

So now movement to me is how can you naturally build that into your day, whether that's using the stairs instead of the lift, using a standing desk if you can, going and doing walking meetings, right? 

Think things that are really low effort that you can just build in automatically.

Simon Blake

What I'm really interested in is, is when it comes to neuroscience, it feels to me as though there are some basics that we just need to understand about a what it is and what we need to understand about our brain and our body. In order that we can all take steps to build movement into, are they understanding why, what why we're doing it and what we're trying to achieve?

Dr Julia Jones

Yeah, I mean, so neuroscience is looking at the brain studying the brain, how it works, how it evolved. And that word (evolved) is crucial in this context that we're talking about because the brain has evolved over a very ridiculously long period of time. And we have inherited this out-of-date operating system that was designed at a time where we had to go searching for food, so movement was built into built into that activity because we had to go wandering around looking for it, running after it if it was alive. We had to go, you know, in, in search of other humans where a lot of this is evolutionary. 

And so, we are now living in a modern world where we don't have to do any of that. We don't have to. We don't have to move if we don't want to move. We don't have to. And that does not align with the way that this whole circuitry operates. You know, the brain is, is through the motor cortex is initiating every movement and every fibre throughout every body, every muscle, all of our actions are driven by these primaeval circuits that were automated for movement because it was an automatic part of being alive. 

If you did not go out and engage in movement to go and search for food, then you would starve. So, there are survival mechanisms in place that absolutely do not work in the modern world that we live in. And I think that once you start to understand how this ancient brain was designed in to be in an outdoor environment with access to daylight, with access different temperatures. Searching for lots of different plants, diversity of plants that we used to eat and most of that eating would have happened in the daylight hours. Then it starts to become very obvious as to why none of that is operational now in in modern life, because we invented ways to save us the hassle of doing all of that, and now we're paying the penalty.

Simon Blake

And so, given all of that, why is it so important that we do move for our mental health now and take different steps, as you say before you had to move to get food in order to survive or to see other people. But right now, we know that movement is important for our mental health. And that's because the ancient, you know, because of the way our brain is wired, even though you described it as an outdated system, but we still got to, yeah, make sure that we respond to that.

Dr Julia Jones

Exactly. We're not going to be able to upgrade it in our lifetime. So, we have to figure out how to how to enable it to opt to, to work as it was intended. So, we know that movement would have been automatic. And so, we didn't have the brain circuits to drive us to, to be motivated. Many people find it very, very difficult to stay motivated for a lifetime to engage in any kind of movement. But we know that it's essential for circulation because the not just all the cells in the body, but the brain needs that constant circulation of fuels and blood to operate, and the digestive system and you know every everything else; everything is compromised if we don’t move.

Simon Blake

So, I think what I'm taking from you is (it’s the) little things, often, that get everything moving. Built into our everyday as much as possible is incredibly important. So, when we're thinking about moving mental health doesn't have too big, but it does have to be often.

Dr Julia Jones

It’s got to be the new normal forever. And that's the thing, right? If you make, if you choose some things that are low effort, then you will be able to maintain them for the rest of your life. And that's the key. That's where a lot of the previous things have failed. Because they become a fad. That's because they're high effort or they involve expense, which people can't maintain for a lifetime, and they only have the impact if you do them all the time forever. And so, choosing things that are low effort and affordable are much more likely to be sustained.

Simon Blake

And so, if you think about that in the context of work and how work is changing. If you had top tips for people to ensure that they're able to process work information well, you know that they are able to create boundaries from the phone and they're able to be prepared for meetings, able to help ideas join together. What would you be advising?

Dr Julia Jones

I mean, from a movement point of view I hacked my environment. You know, now that we're hybrid and we're working from home so, so, so hacking. 

Simon Blake

Can you just tell people what the hack is first just to check?

Dr Julia Jones

So, when you think of a life hack, so you know, here's a perfect way of folding AT shirt in a certain way or this is the, you know, easiest and most efficient way to get a stone out of an avocado or something like that. A little a trick kind of thing that is highly efficient. A hack when you, when you look at it from a biological sense, is something that is really, really easy to insert within your daily life, but it's it optimises, some kind of underlying biology. 

So if you think of movement, you know, how can you, how can you change some existing habits so that you're getting movement into the day so that you can boost that focus so that you can keep anxiety levels low. Try and keep energy levels high and there are some really simple things that I hope are going to become the new normal when it comes to office culture, because they can could have a phenomenal impact. 
 
 And one is we're all on video calls now, but they could so easily just become audio calls so that people could do walking meetings. We've got not noise cancelling ear pods now you know it's very easy to be engaged in those conversations while you're outdoors, walking, getting movement, getting daylight, which we're desperate for. So that's a very simple. 

Saying that that I think that workplaces should really be thinking about things like standing desks as well. Breath work is a really simple one to think about in terms of while you're doing certain activities or at a standing desk. It's very easy to insert a bit. Breath working even when you're in a zoom. I do it during zoom meetings. Often it's just slowing my breath down.

Simon Blake

And what benefit do you does that give?

Dr Julia Jones

So you're trying to, if you think about the circulatory system, the heart and lungs, it's all intertwined with the autonomic nervous system. So, if you can slow your breath down and help reduce that, that sympathetic nervous system effect, lower the blood pressure just to enable that circulatory system to operate in a relaxed environment rather than in a stressed environment, which we often don't realise when we are in a stressed environment. 

If you start monitoring it with like the ring that I wear, or you'd be really shocked at how often you're activating that sympathetic nervous system without even feeling stressed at a physiological level, it is stressed. 

So again, you know from a movement point of view standing desks, I put my printer upstairs, so it used to be next to me on the desk, but then I moved it upstairs. So, if I'm printing out something, then you have to go upstairs, you know, simple things like walking up the escalator instead of standing on the right, which is what the sign tells you to do. The sign tells you stand on the right, and we all dutifully do so. But you could just as easily walk on the left. So, yeah, small changes you know can make a really big difference.

Simon Blake

And I think that's what's so interesting about this as a theme for this this year, isn't it? Which is, you know, moving for mental health and how in a world where most people, when asked how they are, they'll tell you busy. Is how we make it something that integrates into our lives. Are there places that it is made easy?

Dr Julia Jones

Aside from my own website, you mean? 😊

Simon Blake

Well, we'll link your website in the in the notes. 😊

Dr Julia Jones

I mean honestly it is overwhelming out there, it's it is that is part of the problem is that there is now so much stuff online. And I, you know, we started teaching 25 different hacks during the research project and three kept coming out as ones that even a year later people were still doing it. 

I'd meet them, ‘Yeah, I'm still doing the late breakfast, you know, still doing the faster and still doing the breathing’. And now I only teach those three things because even just learning a handful of critical things around nutrition, fasting, breathwork and the impact of daylight on sleep will transform wellness. Absolutely. Without doubt. You know there's so many evidence based clinical trials that show that.

Simon Blake

So, is that the take home message less is more?

Dr Julia Jones

Is more, less is definitely more.

Simon Blake

And find the ones which work for you?

Dr Julia Jones

Yeah, low effort, affordable, because those are the only ones that are likely to be maintained for a lifetime.