Transcriber: Clara Sanchez Garcia Reviewer: Hélène Vernet
So here we are,
at the end of our day.
And I was thinking:
what can I offer that’s going to be of real value?
So what I’d like to bring is a resilience practice
that you can do in about a minute or two,
that strengthens your ability to face challenges in your lives,
that improves your mood and boosts your energy.
How about that? Sounds good?
But to get there, it's helped if it’s supported by resilience thinking.
That’s what I want to talk about: resilience thinking, and...
I’m going to start with some bad news.
According to an editorial in the British Journal of Psychiatry,
the lifetime risk of depression in the western world
is now rated as one in two.
What that means is: about half of us here today
are likely to become depressed at some point in our lives.
So I’m thinking there’s a kind of line down in the middle, here.
That’s probably everyone over on this side.
Just imagine that, if everyone over on this side
was likely to become depressed.
Maybe you think you’re on the lucky side over there
but I’ve got bad news for you too.
(Laughter)
Because even bigger than the risk of depression
is the risk of subclinical depression.
That’s where it’s not so bad perhaps as to get a diagnosis of depression,
but you still feel like this.
That’s me,
feeling blue in a dip.
And it’s how most of us are likely to feel at some point,
at some points.
What I want to look at is what helps us climb out.
And that’s my job: I teach resilience skills.
I’d like to introduce the idea of a guiding thought,
I’ve got this thread here.
A guiding thought is a thread you follow
and when you follow it, it takes you somewhere different.
So I want to offer a guiding thread
for when you’re in a dip, to say to yourself:
"The natural antidepressant is something that we do."
I've a little poem I’m going to share with you.
It helps me remember when I’m down in a dip, think:
what do I need to remember? Here Is my poem.
"The natural antidepressant is something that you do.
It helps you climb out the dips when you’re feeling blue."
How's that? (Laughter)
That’s my poem and poems are like things that help us remember,
things that we draw upon, sayings that we call upon.
I want to look at how we do that
and I want to support that guiding thread of an idea,
So, the first step is this.
It’s to ask yourself:
"What would a story of resilience look like here?"
Maybe you’ve had a setback,
you’ve been ill or something’s gone wrong...
Just ask yourself:
"What would a story of resilience look like, here?"
Stories of resilience have a downslope of the difficulty.
But what makes it a story of resilience
is that there’s a response designed to lead to a better than expected outcome.
And that's what we’re looking at:
how can you have a response that leads to recovery?
That leads to regeneration?
When I think of stories of resilience, what I say to myself is:
"There’s what happens and there’s what happens next."
The best way to understand stories of resilience
is to identify inspiring examples.
So, I want to tell you one as an example I find inspiring.
There was a time when all of life on Earth was in danger.
Actually, it happened quite a number of times
and, as Carey was saying earlier today,
many people think we’re living in one of those times now.
But the time that I’m referring to happened 250 millions years ago,
during what we now call, "the Permian mass extinction event."
It’s also known as "the Great Dying"
because over 90 % of species living at that time
got Wooof! wiped out...
gone, extinct.
Okay, there’s what happens.
Now, what happens next is really extraordinary
because although we hear about the mass extinction events,
we don’t often hear as much about the mass recovery events.
After every mass extinction -
and there’ve been about five that we know of -
there has been an explosion of creativity of life afterwards.
Resilience is a powerful force of nature.
You can have a forest that’s wiped out in a wildfire
and it will grow back again.
Now, I mention the mass extinctions because you might think:
"250 million years ago, what’s that got to do with me?"
Do you know who was there?
Your ancestors, our ancestors.
And if we trace life back, you know, parent, parent, parent,
going back and going back, if we go back far enough -
and we can go back to those mass extinction events -
our ancestors lived through every one of them, long enough to reproduce.
And what they left us? They left us a legacy - and it’s in our DNA -
they left us a legacy of resilience.
It’s actually hardwired into us.
So, we tend to take it for granted that when you have a cold,
you actually get over it
because your body has a natural healing response.
When you break a bone, it grows back.
You can burn or have your skin cut and it grows back.
I can shave off my beard and it grows back.
There is tremendous resilience inside,
and we often don’t tend to assume that it applies to our heart and our mind
as well as our bones and our skin.
I don’t know if any of you have had a really bad day,
you felt really low, you’ve gone to bed and you slept it through,
and then the next day, you felt better.
That’s our natural antidepressant at work.
We have a natural healing response.
Now, you might think: "Well, I find for me, I find that comforting.
It’s comforting to know that’s happening in the background."
But also, it’s not always enough.
We can have those low dips and we can get stuck in them.
And that’s why, as well as innate inbuilt resilience,
we also need learned resilience.
This, I see, is where there’s been a breakthrough in science.
I want to show you what I see
as one of the most important graphs in psychology.
I don’t know if any of you studying psychology here have seen this.
Here we go.
This is a graph from a paper published by a team of psychologists
at the University of Pennsylvania over 20 years ago.
They taught resilience skills to school aged children.
They had a control group.
So, it was just 12 sessions of an hour and a half.
Here is one year afterwards.
One year afterwards, the dark line is the depression level
in the number of children scoring highly on a depression questionnaire
compared with the control group.
Here is two years later.
Two years later, the group who had the resilience training two years ago
were half as likely to show high levels of depression.
If that was a new pill, we might likely all be thinking about taking it,
if it can halve our risk of depression.
Now, you might think: "Well, okay, you know,
I can probably see what's this: all positive thinking,
classes in positive thinking."
It’s not.
It's not positive thinking: what they taught in those resilience classes
was something more powerful than positive thinking.
It’s flexible thinking.
I also want to talk about active hope and bring the two together.
So, in our evolution, we've got a flexible neck.
We can look up, we can look down.
We can look around. We can even look from unusual angles.
We can do the same with our minds.
We can look up, that’s positive thinking. What’s the best that can happen here?
These were questions taught
as a perspective check by those psychologists.
They asked people to ask three questions: "What’s the best that can happen here?"
"What’s the worse that can happen here?" That’s negative thinking.
And then look around and say, "What’s most likely to happen here?"
That’s realistic thinking.
Then, if you want to, you can look from an unusual angle
and that’s creative thinking.
What you're doing with flexible thinking is you're giving yourself maneuverability,
the ability to look from different angles.
I love positive thinking.
But if I went around this, like this all the time,
I’d be in danger of tripping over things that I might otherwise worry about.
Worry can be a way of alerting ourselves as to possible risks.
I want to tell you a story about a time when flexible thinking saved my life.
I used to work years ago as a medical doctor in hospitals.
I trained as a doctor about 30 years ago.
My first few years as a junior doctor, I used to work crazy hours,
like really crazy hours.
I worked over 165 hours in a week.
I worked over 104 hours in a single shift.
I had a contract that said I should be available for work
for an average of 88 hours.
Okay, positive thinking, look up. What’s the best that can happen here?
"Well maybe, I can change it."
So I joined the campaign, I became:
Doctor Yawn.
That’s me on the front page of the Daily Star.
I started a legal action and it did eventually win,
but it took such a long time that I became more exhausted,
more burnt out, more depressed.
There was even times
where I actually thought about killing myself.
A friend of mine talks about these years as the crying years.
It was a really awful time.
Positive thinking: go on holiday, catch up on sleep.
So I went on holiday and I did catch up on sleep a bit,
and you know what happened?
I fell asleep driving after a working week.
I'd worked about 112 hours in this week.
I went on holiday to Scotland.
I was driving up near the Grampian mountains.
My eyelids felt a little heavy, I opened them,
and I was on the wrong side of the road with a car speeding towards me.
I feared. The car went out of control, it crashed into a rock face.
I nearly became extinct.
My car did.
(Laughter)
It was a write-off.
Now, it’s really interesting here because...
Positive thinking: "Oh, it will be fine."
Not going to cut it here.
Negative thinking: "if I carry on this way,
I am going to crash in another way."
That’s what I thought.
I thought that the crash was a mirror of my life,
that if you just drive yourself on, and on, and on
and don’t stop when you need to, you’re going to crash.
And what that crash was for me was a wake-up call.
And here is the third step.
A third step of resilience thinking
is to recognize that crisis can be a turning point.
But you need to listen to the crisis.
You need to listen for what it has to tell you.
So, my crisis told me: "Get out, Chris!"
I handed in my resignation and I did catch up on sleep.
Months later, I was feeling a bit better, but not completely.
There is a danger of putting everything down to one cause.
My depression was all down to my hours.
Change my hours, catch up on sleep and I will be fine.
It wasn’t enough ; it was a step in the right direction,
but it wasn’t enough.
I hear the same a lot with depression.
It’s all down to get to the root cause.
It’s all down to chemical imbalance in the brain
or a trauma in early childhood.
But the trouble with “it’s all down to” is:
if you look at this diagram here and each square is a cause,
which square is the root cause of the circle?
It doesn’t work. They act together.
And that’s the way causes work with depression.
There’re many causes that act together.
The other side of this is that there are many causes of recovery
that can also act together.
And a diagram that I find immensely helpful here
and changed my whole practice of healthcare is this diagram here.
Life is a bit like rolling along in a little boat.
And there are times when your boat will crash into a rock like that.
On the whole, when you crash into a rock, - a rock is a problem:
it might be illness, depression ; it might be anything going wrong -
you often see someone who knows about that rock.
So if you’re depressed, you might see a psychologist, really helpful.
But, they can be a bit like geologists.
They know about the rock and it’s only part of the story.
The other side of the story is the water level,
which is a bit like your inner reserve,
and when your water level is low, you’re more likely to hit rocks.
When your water level is higher,
you’re more likely to float over rocks you might otherwise crash into.
So, resilience training is about looking at what pushes your water level up
and a question to ask yourself is: "How is my water level doing?"
That’s the step four.
Four groups of upward arrows I teach about in resilience training
are strategies.
Strategies are things we do: mindfulness meditation,
exercise, paying attention to diet, building positive relationships.
Then, there are also strengths like just acceptance, strengths,
the strength of acceptance - what’s happening is what’s happening -
acceptance and the strength of self-determination, commitment.
These are growable, growable things.
...Resources like inspiring TEDx Talks,
self-help books,
friends that you feel supported by,
pets to stroke, places that you feel safe.
Then, there’s insights.
Insights are the guiding ideas, the threads you pick up and follow
and they take you somewhere different.
Now, I think of these as a toolkit.
I think of it as the resilience toolkit of self-help SSRIs.
SSRI is: Strategies, Strengths, Resources, Insights.
This is what resilience training is about.
It is about developing your toolkit, developing your strategies.
So, I’d like to offer one now.
This is really what we’re building up to,
the idea that when you think about antidepressants,
there are tablets which have a valuable role
and there are also actions, actions you take.
We talk about the natural antidepressant:
you’re supporting your natural healing response
and you’re doing that with something you do.
A question is: have you taken your natural antidepressant today?
When you say "yes," you’ve taken steps.
So, I’m going to suggest that we do a natural antidepressant step now.
Are you up for that?
(Audience) Yes.
Okay, so I don’t know if you've heard this saying,
"Sitting is the new smoking."
Have you heard that? There’s actually a risk.
If you sit too much in a day, you’re more likely to get depressed and diabetes.
So, here’s the first step: it's just to take a stand,
and to swing your arms.
So, strategy "Standing up."
There's what I call, "The mystery swing factor,"
where you swing your arms.
And a great resource, in case you haven’t got one,
is a harmonica.
(Laughter)
So here’s the harmonica.
(Harmonica's tempo)
(Rhythmic clapping)
Great, okay. So, now we've got the insight.
This is what to remind yourself of, when you’re in a dip.
This strategy is called: "The reggae baseline of resilience."
(Laughter)
So, we go... Have we got the beat?
The beat is a great resource.
(Beat)
Okay.
(Beat)
(Beat and harmonica)
(Singing) Resilience,
resilience.
Crisis can be
a turning point.
Resilience,
resilience.
Crisis can be
a turning point.
Active hope!
Oh, oh! Active hope!
Yeah, Yeah! Yeah, yeah! Yeah, yeah! Active hope.
Ow! One, two, three, four! Active hope!
One, two, three!
The natural antidepressant
is something that we do.
It helps us climb out the dips, yeah!
when we’re feeling blue.
Thank youuu!
(Cheers) (Applause)