The Shannon Harvey Podcast

They're cheap, convenient, practically imperishable, and engineered to be irresistible. They're called "ultra processed foods" and in the midst of epidemics of diet-related chronic diseases, some nutrition scientists believe they are the smoking gun. In this week's podcast, Shannon Harvey talks with former New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, Michael Moss about his new best-selling book Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions. In this episode you'll hear; Why we're naturally drawn to foods high in salt, sugar and fat and how food companies exploit this. Why our willpower lets us down, even when we want to avoid eating junk food. How nostalgia plays a big role in the foods we crave. That processed food is engineered to be "craveable," aka – addictive. But it's not all bad because Michael also shares some simple life hacks to help us eat healthy food, more often.

Usually I share interviews with scientists doing research that can shed light on how we can live better, healthier lives. But this week you'll hear from a different kind of expert – a mindfulness teacher who has made a big impact on my life. Timothea Goddard led the eight week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course that I participated in during the production of my film My Year of Living Mindfully. Tim (as she's affectionately known to us Aussies) is a psychotherapist who has taught more than 2000 students and trained more than 200 new mindfulness teachers. But you might find what she has to say about mindfulness rather surprising. In this episode you'll hear – Why trying to find bliss in the present moment is a myth (and a problem, especially if you have anxiety, depression, trauma or chronic pain) How the marketing hype about mindfulness often gets it very wrong That pretty much everyone finds mindfulness training difficult and boring Why learning to turn towards our painful emotions and experiences can be life changing And that life sux, but why we shouldn't take it personally Tim offers mindfulness courses online and in person, and also runs retreats through her organisation Openground. She also runs rigorous mindfulness teacher certification courses through the Mindfulness Training Institute – Australia and New Zealand. If you'd like to know more about MBSR from the man who actually developed it, head to the very first episode of this podcast series and look for my interview with Jon Kabat Zinn.

In this episode I'm taking you inside my research files.   When I start to think about a new question or film project, I often don't really know where it's going to lead. Over the following weeks, months, or even years, I dive headfirst into the academic journals.    The process often feels like a journey of discovery – sometimes it's the evidence that amazes me and sometimes it's the people I get to talk to that leave a lasting impression on how I view the world.   One of those conversations happened late one night as I beamed into the Harvard Medical School to chat with Professor Robert Waldinger – the director of the longest ever study on life and happiness. As well as being a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard he's also a psychoanalyst and Zen priest.    At the time I had just published my first book, The Whole Health Life and was starting to contemplate what I would tackle next.   His online TED talk has now been watched by more than 37 million people world wide. It was called "What makes a good life?" And I wanted to know more.   The study he's oversees has been tracking the lives of two groups of men for over 75 years. It now follows the Baby Boomer children of the original participants to understand how childhood experience reaches across decades to affect health and wellbeing.    As you can imagine, the research data is an absolute treasure trove of knowledge about what matters most.

I know this sounds crazy but over the course of my latest project – My Year of Living MindfullyI spent more than $30,000 on scientific tests. A lot of people have asked me why I went to such lengths to get objective measures to see what, if anything, changed as a result of my daily mindfulness training. And my answer is simple. Because I believe that science matters. You can read a piece called Why I Stopped Looking for Miracles and Started Reading Scienceto get the full story on this, but in essence, it wasn't until I was in my late 20s, after I'd been sick with an autoimmune disease for a number of years that I finally realised that I needed to apply the critical thinking skills that I'd learned as a journalist to my health. And when it came to my experiment to see if daily mindfulness training could really improve my health and wellbeing – I felt that objective, hard science was important. This week's podcast episode is my extended interview with science journalist, Daniel Goleman, whose 1995 best-selling book, Emotional Intelligencehelped make the science of emotions mainstream. More recently Dan co-authored a book called Altered Traitswith neuroscientist Professor Richard Davidson, who was in episode four of my podcast. The two friends met in their university days at Harvard and in the book, wanted to set the record straight on what we do and do notknow about mindfulness. As a fellow journalist who has dedicated his life to writing about psychological science, Dan was a great starting point as I began to navigate my way through the sometimes murky waters of mindfulness research. As you'll hear throughout this interview, he also offers some helpful advice to people who are at just getting started with mindfulness training.

In this episode I'm talking with the self-compassion pioneer and researcher, Associate Professor Kirstin Neff from the University of Texas.   Although this interview was only briefly used in the documentary film that resulted from the year I spent delving into mindfulness (there was just so much ground to cover in just 96 minutes) it was nevertheless hugely influential on me, and I'm so pleased to be able to share it with you now.   You may have heard me explain before that I've come to realise that learning mindfulness – or training to be more aware – is actually a life skill, in the same way as something like reading is a skill.    By learning to read, a whole universe of possibility has opened up to me. But what I choose to do with that life-changing skill – what books or websites I read, which writers I trust or enjoy, what topics I choose, how I invest my time reading – for good or bad, for better or worse – that really matters.   Now, just as reading teaches me to understand words on a page, mindfulness teaches me to know how my mind works. And, like reading, the skill of mindful awareness isn't actually good or bad. But, what I choose to do with that awareness…  that is crucial.   Now for me, like so many other people who have started mindfulness training, one of the first things I became aware of was an incessant mean voice in my head, which took up residence at some point in my childhood.   My inner experience was actually awful. And I really needed to understand the function and purpose of this constant bombardment of self-criticism. So I turned to Kristen, who, fortunately, was the first person to be brave enough to put all this under a psychological microscope. 

If you're interested in learning how your brain works and how to use that knowledge to make healthy changes in your life, then this week's podcast is for you. This episode is my extended interview with Dr. Judson Brewer, who is an Associate Professor and the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University. You might remember a scene in my film, My Year of Living Mindfully, where I call Jud via Skype to ask if my insomnia has improved because of the placebo effect or if mindfulness has really started "working". As an addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies how we form unhealthy habits and routines, Jud is researching mindfulness-based techniques to help us change for good.

After listening to this week's podcast, I suspect that you won't be able to stop yourself from taking a moment to reflect on what really matters to you the most in life, on what is truly important to you... and why. This episode is with Professor Michael Stegor – a world-leading expert in finding meaning in life. He's the Founder and Director of the Center for Meaning and Purpose at the University of Colorado. Among other things in the interview we discuss: Why feeling that we have more meaning and purpose makes us biologically healthier The new research showing that helping our kids to find meaning from a young age is really important How to find meaning (even though it's different for everyone)  What I find interesting, when I look back to this conversation, is that although it didn't fit exactly into my investigative deep dive into mindfulness that ultimately came next for me – the interview was profoundly influential on everything I've done since and will do in the future. At the end you'll hear Mike reveal that he used to be a therapist, and I think you'll get a sense that he must have been really really good. He seems to just get people, and really understand what makes life worth living.

This conversation is another extended interview from my film My Year Of Living Mindfully. This time it is with Professor Richard Davidson, the Director of the Centre for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Maddison.    Richie is a trailblazing scientist who's published hundreds of scientific papers on the neural bases of emotion. His dedication to human well-being and relieving suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind would have made him a worthy interviewee in his own right and in this interview you'll hear about a pretty big breakthrough in the acceptance of using mindfulness in mainstream medicine. But I admit that I had a very specific reason for wanting to chat with Richie.    He pioneered the neuro-scientific study of Olympic-level meditators – people with over 10,000 hours of meditation practice under their belt. At a time when meditation was considered Californian hippie ju ju, this was important because if there was something different about the brains of meditators, it meant there was a 'there' there, to be studied and picked apart.    But what had caught my attention was that one of his early subjects was none other than the French cellular geneticist-turned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who I had met a few months before. When I chatted with Matthieu he was at the end of a gruelling four-day speaking tour of Australia. Despite his jet lag and 16-hour workday, his clear blue eyes twinkled with alertness and interest. I struck by how this 71-year old monk, whose busy schedule was a mix of regular international speaking tours, writing deadlines, and overseeing 200 humanitarian projects, could possibly juggle everything and still seem so… well… happy.    In fact, Matthieu has earned a place in popular media as the 'happiest man on earth' after neuroscientists published a series of seminal experiments involving his brain. When I met him in person, I didn't need to see the brain scans to know that there was a certain something about him.   I drove home from that interview thinking, "Was it possible for me, a stressed-out mother of two young kids, struggling with an autoimmune disease and insomnia to get even a fraction of that kind of ever-present joy by simply learning to train my mind?"   Fast forward a few months and there I was sitting across from Richie Davidson – one of the neuroscientists who had done those seminal brain scans on Matthieu. I finally had a chance to get an answer to my question.

Today's podcast interview is a little different from the first two. Although, like the others, this interview was done for my last documentary project, My Year of Living Mindfully, it isn't with someone who's specifically a mindfulness researcher.   It's with a scientist at the forefront of understanding the connection between our mind, body and health. If you've seen my first documentary, The Connection, you'll know that is a topic I'm really committed to understanding more.    I did this interview while I was still setting-up my ridiculously elaborate, hare brained experiment to see what would happen to my health and wellbeing if I meditated every day for a year.    It meant having to take a plane from my home in Sydney, Australia to the other side of the world, then taking another plane and yet another plane. Eventually I arrived at the Global Wellness Summit in Palm Beach, Florida, where Professor Elissa Epel, the Director of the Aging, Metabolism and Emotion Center at University of California San Francisco Medical School, was giving a key note speech about her research investigating how chronic stress can impact our health and biological ageing, and how activities like mindfulness may slow or even reverse those effects.   I knew the journey would be worth it because although Elissa and I hadn't met before, she had already made a big impression on how my own lifestyle was influencing my health. Among many other things, she co-authored a best-selling book called The Telomere Effect, with the Nobel prize winning molecular biologist, Elizabeth Blackburn.   Elissa's influential research demonstrating that mind-body activities like mindfulness training can slow down the rate at which our cells age, was the reason I'd enlisted the help of Associate Professor, Hilda Picket, from Sydney University's Children's Medical Research Institute. Hilda had already measured my telomeres from two control blood samples taken before I began meditating daily. I really wanted to know whether doing something with my mind could have downstream effects throughout my body, and impact my physical health.  

When I began my year-long documentary experiment to see what would happen to my health and wellbeing if I meditated every day for a year, a key motivating force was a special issue of The Lancet which declared that every country in the world is facing and failing to tackle a host of mental health issues. Crucially, the special issue was published before COVID19 changed the world and introduced a whole new range of global mental health challenges. This is why I'm especially keen to share this week's podcast with you. Now, more than ever, we need robust discussions about "the how" of both preventing and treating mental health problems. This podcast is my extended interview with Professor Willem Kuyken, who is the director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre and at the forefront of investigating how mindfulness can be used for mental health. Although mindfulness is sometimes dismissed as "woo woo" in medical circles, Willem's research has earned him a place among the Who's Who of influential scientists because his papers investigating mindfulness and depression have ranked him in the top one percent of researchers cited in the field.  In this podcast you'll hear: Why it's significant that a mindfulness intervention has been shown to be equal to medication for preventing recurrent depression If teaching mindfulness to teenagers can prevent them from developing depression later in life Why there's a good reason to be optimistic about mental health treatments in the future I hope you enjoy the extended interview with Willem. It's such a pleasure to be able to share the material that sadly hit the cutting room floor when I made my documentary My Year of Living Mindfully.