Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcription has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show on UK Health Radio. My name’s Robin Daly and I’m the show host as well as the founder of the UK charity of the same name, Yes to Life. Yes to Life has been supporting the cause of integrative medicine for cancer for 20 years now, helping people to understand the many options they have to improve their own quality of life and treatment outcomes.

Robin Daly
So we’ve been working for 20 years in this field now and as part of marking our 20th anniversary, we’re focusing each month on one aspect of integrative medicine for cancer. This month it’s mind -body medicine.

Robin Daly
A relatively recent science is not addressed in any meaningful way by conventional medicine, but is a central part of integrative medicine. Our lead advisor to the charity on mind -body medicine is Dr.

Robin Daly
Sam Watts, an Ayurvedic doctor and founder of Mind Body Medical. So he’s ideally placed to be my guest to look into all the latest on mind -body medicine. Sam, absolutely great to have you back as my guest again on the Yes2Life show.

Sam Watts
Well, it’s great to be here. Thank you for inviting me back to have a chat today. Really appreciate it.

Robin Daly
So today we’re focusing on an aspect of care that these days is receiving increasing attention from the scientific community, mind body medicine. I’m delighted to say you’ve recently taken on the role of lead advisor to your life on mind body medicine, so you’re perfectly placed for today’s investigation.

Robin Daly
So mind body medicine was barely a thing when you started out, but it’s now got itself a proper scientific label along the way, psychoneuroimmunology or PNI for people who can’t remember all that. And it’s made the journey from outright woo -woo through soft science, you know, culled from kind of patient feedback and stuff to today we got hard science at testing lab results.

Robin Daly
So it is a great journey. I wondered if you could start out by giving us a summary of where you

Sam Watts
we’ve got to, you know, and maybe it’s a slight stretch, but almost to a paradigm changing place. I think if you look through the lens of the science, I think it’s hard to refute that as a concept. Because like you say, you go back even eight or nine years, and yes, there was evidence, and yes, there was this growing view that our beliefs that our outlook and our mindset was important, but no one quite realised anything and how significant that view was where,

Sam Watts
like you say, the advent of PNI and the explosion of that and, you know, not just at the cellular level, not just looking at how this affects our cells, but right down to the genetic level. This is affecting the way the body’s working right to the core of how our body works.

Sam Watts
And, you know, we’re at a point now where I don’t think it’s the luxury reserve of those who are knowledgeable about it or who have read about it, it needs to be a mandatory part of the survivorship package.

Sam Watts
It needs to be exposed to everyone, known about why everyone and propagated to everyone who’s living with cancer, because I think, you know, the science shows that it can make a profound impact on survivorship.

Sam Watts
And I’ve seen that play out myself in, you know, hundreds of people over the years. So I think we’ve got to a place where the evidence is so compelling and so robust that this has to be almost shouted from the rooftops that if you’re living with cancer or someone you know is, these are techniques and practices that are evidence -based and they really do need to be adopted and integrated.

Sam Watts
And yeah, I think we’re getting to a point now where lots of the integrative sensors are spreading that message. So I think the exposure of it is growing exponentially, but it still needs to be faster.

Sam Watts
It still needs to be more widespread, I think.

Robin Daly
Well, initially, it was always on the end of the list, wasn’t it, the things we do, you know, as a little mind body at the end of the list, you know, a little bolt on extra, but you’re right, the science is showing like it’s a lot more important than being at the end of the list.

Robin Daly
So, you know, I know you’re very engaged in series of medicine. So I imagine it’s really hard in the sciences to get into underpinning so much of what you do. And it also seems like it’s one of the areas that actually gained incredibility from the pandemic, in particular, from the effects of the lockdown restrictions.

Robin Daly
Do you want to say a bit about the key health issues that were highlighted by the restrictions and the kind of pervasive mindset of the lockdown?

Sam Watts
Yeah, I think there were a few good things that came out of that lockdown, weren’t there? That was in many ways one of them because there was such a unique situation to find humanity in, wasn’t there?

Sam Watts
Suddenly we’ve got pretty much the global population and environment that we’re not designed for, we’re not evolved for. Now we’re being founded with no autonomy over how we manage that and we look at then the links between that situation and mental illnesses ranging from the more severe clinical rates of depression, but all the way through to the more endemic prevalence of things like overwhelm,

Sam Watts
stress, anxiety, hyperactivity, almost feeling like a caged animal. And the power of mind -body medicine as a discipline now is recognizing that yes, all of that, every belief, every thought, every attitude, everything we experience in our mind, yes, it affects the mind and it affects our views and our beliefs, but every single emotion or thought -belief attitude that we have in our mind will always,

Sam Watts
always unequivocally be replicated and mirrored in the body. We know that. So when we had billions of people experiencing those kinds of emotional states, it was a no -brainer scientifically that there was going to be a corresponding decline in pretty much every health variable that was looked at.

Sam Watts
If you could look at the correlation data with immune status, with inflammatory status, you look at the rates of things like inflammatory bowel disease is coming out of the pandemic, all of these kinds of things.

Sam Watts
You obviously can’t isolate pure causality and say that it was the mindset that caused those, but it was definitely an exacerbating factor, particularly on the really powerful mechanisms in the body relevant to things like immunity.

Sam Watts
Probably more, again, like you said, PNI, psychoneuroimmunology, the immune system bears the brunt of the mechanisms of mind -body medicine. But the beauty of that is that it’s the double -edged sword.

Sam Watts
It can be very harming to the immune system, or it can be very, very empowering for the immune system. And obviously in the arena of cancer, that’s not a line that we can afford to straddle. We can’t afford to be letting our emotional outlook have a suppressing effect on our immunity.

Sam Watts
We need to be mobilizing that in the direction of optimal immune status. So yeah, I think one of the things that that COVID pandemic did was allow people themselves, not just the scientific community, but people themselves to say, when I am feeling, when I recognize that overwhelm or that anxiety or that stress kicking in, yes, it’s important to rectify that so that I feel better in myself, but it’s just as important to rectify that because of my bodily health in the same way,

Sam Watts
at the same level, that eating a healthy diet is and exercising. These mind -body mechanisms are just as powerful upon the way our body’s working. And the COVID pandemic was a way of betraying that. You could never replicate or create a scientific study because of the numbers involved.

Sam Watts
So it was a very unique situation. And it really brought into, I think, into the forefront of people’s consciousness, just how important this mechanism and this process is.

Robin Daly
Yeah, a fascinating time, but it’s interesting when you say that this is a double -edged sword, and much as all these things can suppress our immune system, we can actually look to elevate our immune system by taking the right actions, which enhance our nature, if you like, and will actually improve our situation.

Robin Daly
So that’s the good news. Okay, so what I’d like to do now is establish the scope of what nowadays goes under the banner of mind -body medicine. Until fairly recently, the only approaches that had any credibility in the realms of mental health were drugs or talking therapies.

Robin Daly
That was about it. But now it’s well accepted that many factors play into our mental and emotional, and therefore our physical, well -being. So would you mind giving us a round -up of the key areas that now come under scrutiny as factors potentially affecting our well -being?

Sam Watts
I think the obvious one, I guess the celebrity in that context is meditation, because it’s got the biggest foundation and evidence that goes back the furthest, right back to John Kabat -Zinn, who was the one that really brought it from the east into academic clinical medicine.

Sam Watts
We now know there are overwhelmingly powerful studies that show that in big cohorts of people in a replicable way, meditation will often outperform antidepressants and anti -anxiety meds in terms of improving mental health outcomes.

Sam Watts
And again, whenever we’re talking about those outcomes, we always need to remember that’s reflected in the body. So yeah, we know now in the cancer arena, specifically, we know that meditation has been clinically proven to optimize immune counts in people with cancer going through cancer treatment post -recovery.

Sam Watts
We know it affects the inflammatory status. We know it affects, you know, digestive variables. The full gamma of mechanisms really that are relevant to survivorship, there’s a lot of data now to show that meditation can impact upon those.

Sam Watts
So I think that’s very much the celebrity of the mind -body medicine research, and that’s good now. It’s kind of like what you said at the start, even 15 years ago. It was still quite, you know, you were sitting close to the wind if you started talking about how could we use meditation in the context of survivorship, whereas now it’s almost malpractice to not talk about that.

Sam Watts
You know, the number of grants and the number of funding bodies that are practically seeking to test this. And the majority of the time, the evidence is saying the same thing, but it doesn’t matter whether you look at psychological outcomes, physiological outcomes, immunological outcomes, cancer -specific outcomes, almost all of those are improved by regular meditation practice.

Sam Watts
And I think the genetic and the hormonal research that underpins that mechanism is mind -blowing, and maybe we can touch on that later. So I think meditation is the big one, but there are other ones that perhaps aren’t so well known that I think potentially could offer even more value.

Sam Watts
And I think guided mental imagery is one of the practices that every single person I’ve ever worked with who has cancer, you know, I’ve spoken to them about because, you know, there was, and I’m sure lots of listeners probably have heard of him, Dr.

Sam Watts
Carl Simonson who was an American radio oncologist. He got a little bit disillusioned with purely conventional care and started to investigate, you know, why is it that across a cohort of people he was treated, the same diagnosis, the same prognosis, the same kind of age bracket, some did very well and some didn’t.

Sam Watts
And the only delineating factor between those two cohorts was that the people who survived very well were the ones with the very positive, empowered, hopeful mindset. And the ones that did horror had the more disempowered mindset.

Sam Watts
So that then led to him really dead. This is back in the 70s. So he was a very maverick, open -minded oncologist and he said, well, I need to harness this. I need to, we can’t let this go under the radar.

Sam Watts
We need to bring this into the light. And he landed on guided mental imagery, GMI, as the technique that he thought offered the most value. And he’s got a book called Getting Well Again. And anyone listening to this, I would wholeheartedly recommend reading that book because he talks about a study they did with medically incurable individuals, people with a medically incurable cancer.

Sam Watts
And they had nine independent oncologists reviewing their data. So they came to a mean prognosis and most of them, it was a prognosis of no more than I think it was 15 months. And then he took hold of those people and managed them using what is now called the Simonton method, you know, and about just under 50% of those people had even gone into full remission or were still alive five years later.

Sam Watts
And that’s not to say the imagery was the sole thing that facilitated that response, but he does say it was a predictive variable. And that that really sent shockwaves around the medical literature back then.

Sam Watts
And it still is because if you fast forward from then to now and you look at an almost snapshot of the guided imagery data in specifically in cancer, it applies everywhere. You can look at it in heart disease and Parkinson’s.

Sam Watts
But if you look at it in cancer, you see like what you see with meditation, we now know that imagery can you can use imagery to specifically increase immune counts. We know it can affect immune status in the tumor microenvironment.

Sam Watts
It’s linked to reduced chemotherapy side effects. It goes on and on and on. And I think the mechanisms, the science around how because because the risk is with this, I think that people think about imagery and it falls into that woo woo crackery wishful thinking, how can an image in my mind create a physiological response?

Sam Watts
And a lot of people don’t buy into it. If you don’t buy into it, you don’t practice it. If you don’t practice it, you don’t get the results. But actually, if you understand the mechanism in the research, it’s as it’s as clearly documented as gravity.

Sam Watts
It’s not a case of could it might it will it work? We know that when you can create very, very detailed, accurate, meaningful images, you can see that inducing a change in the body at the at the hormonal level, at the immune level, at the functional level, which is exactly what psychoneuro immunology is.

Sam Watts
So I think as a as a practice, it guided mental imagery, the Simonton framework is is hardly known about at all in Europe, Germany, it’s quite big. But in Britain, you know, I would say less than 10 percent of the people I work with professionally or living with cancer have heard of it.

Sam Watts
And that, to me, is not an acceptable place to be. We need everyone to be knowing of this. So about this. So I think meditation and imagery, you know, are are almost mandatory components of a survivorship protocol.

Sam Watts
And then you’ve got other things that I think are fascinating that are breaking through now, even simple things like journaling. So there’s very fascinating research showing that just three minutes of journaling in the morning around what you’re grateful for this coming day, what you’re looking forward to this living this this coming day, the kind of mindset you want to cultivate the people you’re looking forward to seeing,

Sam Watts
just free writing around what you’re looking forward to this day. And then three minutes in the evening around what you’re grateful for over the previous day that’s just been can induce, you know, really quite profound changes in our neurochemistry and neurobiology, our levels of gratitude, which are correlated to immune changes.

Sam Watts
So that’s six minutes of practice or a quantifiable change. So, you know, journaling, gratitude practices, you know, even vision boarding, all of these things are coming into that arena. But I think in terms of gain for effort in terms of scientific weight, the meditation and the imagery work are where it’s most exciting.

Robin Daly
very interesting so those things are like direct means if you like to work on your mental state which will then go on and influence your physiological state now there there are other things you can do which are going to affect your mental state so sort of one step further away which would be I’m thinking of things like you know stress management or activities such as going out in nature these things are well known to have an influence on our mental state I mean obviously walking in nature has got a physical aspect as well it’s going to be good for your health but it’s typically talked about as most powerful in terms of its way can change your mental state so those are kind of one step removed from these direct sort of images say working with directly with your mental state but are they also considered mind -body medicine yeah

Sam Watts
I mean, it falls into that gray area. There’s actually a neurologist in America called Dr. Rudy Tanzan. He says, everything is mind -body medicine. Because every experience you cultivate from the moment you wake, you open your eyes to the moment you go to bed, it’s gonna leave an imprint on your mind.

Sam Watts
And that imprint, it’s gonna always unequivocally without exception leave an imprint on your body. So getting up and it’s a beautiful sunrise or a cloudy day, that’s mind -body medicine, going out for a walk in nature.

Sam Watts
Even if you don’t move, you sit on a bench and you stare at a beautiful view or a beautiful beach or anything, that’s medicine because what happens when you look at those kinds of vistas and views, you feel uplifted.

Sam Watts
And if you feel that uplifted in your mind, that is gonna be replicated in our cellular behavior and our immune system is gonna be uplifted and our blood status and all these kinds of things. So if you really extrapolate it out, everything really falls under the banner of PNI or mind -body medicine because everything has an impact upon our mental state, whether we know of it or not.

Sam Watts
I think the trick of mind -body medicine is how do we move as much of our daily experience from a subconscious, not really aware of it into a conscious place. What do I do this day that’s gonna saturate my mindset with positivity rather than negativity?

Sam Watts
What things suck the life out of me? What people suck the life out of me? What things do I love doing? What things make me feel alive? Obvious passions, interests, because the more you engage in those things, the more alive we feel and the more alive we feel, the more alive ourselves feel.

Sam Watts
And that’s why I think it’s really interesting, again, expanding the lens out, the research around something called hikigai, which I’m sure a lot of people probably would have heard about. It’s a Japanese term for, it translates as why I get up in the morning.

Sam Watts
So my meaning, my purpose. And what we know is that living with hikigai, living with a sense of meaning and purpose is a clinical predictor of better longevity. And I think that’s not that new now as a concept.

Sam Watts
Well, what is new is the second wave of research, looking at why, and the best theories are that when you’re living with meaning and purpose, your life is more than just you. You’re doing something that’s bigger.

Sam Watts
What does that do? It makes us feel excited and positive. And we wanna jump out, but in the morning, we wanna get living. And the body has no choice but to respond to that in a way that says, okay, well, if you wanna get busy living and really doing things, I need to make sure that as a body, I can facilitate that.

Sam Watts
And you see, there’s been phenomenal work looking at the cultivation, helping people to cultivate a clearer sense of hikigai, meaning and purpose and correlating that to salivary cortisol, fatigue and energy levels, sleep quality, all of these kinds of things.

Sam Watts
And you see, unequivocally, and I’m sure everyone can recognize that in themselves. When you’ve got something to look forward to in a day or a week, you feel much more youthful and energized. But once it passes, maybe you’ll slump back into a slightly lower level of vitality, that’s mind -body medicine.

Sam Watts
It’s your body replicating what you’re experiencing looking forward to. So yes, forest bathing, nature immersion, a picnic with the person you love, all of these things are mind -body medicine because of the way it’s gonna be replicated.

Sam Watts
So it’s a really fascinating concept because in theory, it envelops every aspect and every facet of our life. So it’s a big old topic.

Robin Daly
It was the pandemic that made me think of that relationship with nature thing, because of course that came up a lot in the pandemic, and in fact, it was recognized that people have got to be able to get out into nature, otherwise they’re going to get bonkers.

Robin Daly
And so they sort of allowed people to go out in the green, and it’s quite a step change out of thinking actually acknowledging that human beings need nature in that way.

Sam Watts
Yeah, I think there’s a concept called the paleolithic genome, which again is gaining quite a lot of traction, which is this idea that when we evolved, when Homo sapiens stood up from Homo erectus 200 ,000 years ago in Tanzania, and our genome was laid down, about between 80 and 85%, generally speaking, of that genome that controlled us when we were living in the wild, are still active in our body now,

Sam Watts
still controlling us now. But you think back to any sense the Stone Age Revolution 10 ,000 years ago before that, we were still hunter -gatherers, we were still deeply connected with the seasons, with the natural world, we understood bird song, your animal tracks, wild food.

Sam Watts
And what they’re saying now is that that genome needs that stimuli to feel safe and kind of alive. When you pick up a human being and put it in an urban environment, that genome isn’t getting that stimulation that it evolved in.

Sam Watts
And when you put a person back into the natural world, we’ve got 200 ,000 years of evolution that says, this is what I recognize, this is what I need to feel balanced and kind of my best self. And I think it makes a lot of sense.

Sam Watts
I think everyone would probably recognize that when we get out in the natural world, we do feel better. And it’s a very strong argument that that’s a genetic driver because of our evolutionary history.

Sam Watts
And that’s what we saw in the pandemic. So I think it’s, yeah, again, it’s all, there’s so many more levels to this than it seems on the surface.

Robin Daly
I think so yeah I mean it seems to me that the whole relationship with nature is a very much bigger thing because it kind of addresses us as our identity is nature we are nature and that that’s why we have this need and also it highlights our relationship with our environment how we’re absolutely not separable from our environment which can become all too unclear when we’re just in an urban environment and we cut ourselves off from it we can think that stuff’s just a menace trying to encourage our lives you know rather than being the thing that keeps us alive you know that supports us and that we are so important yeah very important so can we just come back to you were saying about this meaning and purpose I think that’s a fascinating one and you were saying well first of all people with cancer it can be a big deal kind of people are faced with a diagnosis of cancer the whole life falls apart and they can begin quite easily find themselves in that what’s the point of it all place and especially with the number of difficulties that come along at the same time so but meaning and purpose is so important to life as you say it is it is pretty much the same thing as the will to live isn’t it they’re both in the same territory so you’re if you haven’t got much so you haven’t got much will to live so you were talking about actually encouraging that encouraging meaning purpose in people how

Sam Watts
I just backtrack a little bit and just talk about a brilliant example I’ve got of this. When we were running survivorship group sessions at Crawley Hospital, I met a guy there who came along. He was the only guy in a room of about 15 women, which is quite common, but he had stage four prostate cancer.

Sam Watts
And he was this idea of ECAPs, exceptional cancer patients, people that are living way longer and healthier than they should be. He was about three and a half years after his best case prognosis. He was really fit, really thriving.

Sam Watts
And he kept his light under a bushel, but when he turned out, he was a really high level competitive vegetable grower. And he had won national titles in virtually every vegetable. The only one he’d ever won was the biggest marrow.

Sam Watts
And he said to me verbatim, I refuse to die. I refuse to succumb to this until like I remember what it was, like an 18 inch marrow. And I met his wife and his wife said, she used to love it every autumn when he hadn’t done it because she would bet her bottom donor that he had at least another year.

Sam Watts
And I never forget that because it was this real life example of what the science says that when it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter where it’s climbing Mount Everest, sitting around the world growing a marrow.

Sam Watts
If you have that, if you have that association with something that’s deeply meaningful to you, your body will have to respond and every exceptional cancer patient that I’ve ever met, almost without exception, I try to think has, I can’t really think of someone to mine now, but everyone who I’ve met, who’s exceptional, has always, always, always had a deeply meaningful sense of why, who they are and what they’re living for and why,

Sam Watts
why they want to live as opposed to why they don’t want to die. There’s how do you, how do you cultivate it? There’s been a few studies looking at mechanisms for facilitating that and a good one, one of the most common ones is to, again, journaling can help with this because it can allow you to tease it apart, is if money was no object and within the parameters of your skill set, like I’d love to play rugby for England,

Sam Watts
but that’s never going to happen. So it has to be, it has to be really in a real life context, but if money was no object, how would you choose to spend your life? What, what does optimal look like? You wake up in the morning and even, they even do techniques with that vision boarding, say it’s a Monday morning or a Sunday night, you’ve got the whole week ahead of you.

Sam Watts
What does absolutely perfect look like for you in terms of your work, the type of work, the hours of work, your recreation, your hobbies, what, you know, what, how would you choose to spend that week?

Sam Watts
And then correlating that with how you’re currently living and then they call it closing the gap. So you look at your ideal, you look at your current and you say, okay, well, I can’t, I might not be able to make the full jump between what I’ve got and what I want because I’ve got to pay the mortgage or I’ve got this, that and the other, but you can always close the gap.

Sam Watts
So there’s always things that you can do to make your real life now closer to your hypothetical ideal. And that closing the gap technique, you know, we’ve run sessions on that into quite big groups of people with cancer and also in corporate settings.

Sam Watts
And once you start really ruminating on that, I had quite a profound impact upon me actually many decades or over a decade ago now and with our conference around this, because you don’t often, I don’t think we’re necessarily taught to be really introspective around our lives.

Sam Watts
We just kind of not bumble through, but I don’t think many people intuitively dig deep into how do we actually engineer a life that is deeply meaningful to me. And I remember coming back from that conference on the airplane and thinking, I need to really do this.

Sam Watts
I need to, I can’t afford to waste life bumbling through without having a really clear sense of what does perfect look like to me. And, you know, the second technique to closing the gap between the current and the hypothetical, every day you can do that.

Sam Watts
You know, I can think of an example of someone at Barclays bank who said that he’d love to be, he went to fine art college, he’d love to be, you know, an artist, but he couldn’t because he had three kids, he had a big mortgage, all the rest of it.

Sam Watts
But he said, what I can do is I can protect two nights a week rather than coming home and, you know, jumping on the sofa with a glass of wine and just zoning out. I could say, right, Tuesday and Thursday, from when I get home to putting the kids to bed, I’m going to protect two hours to paint.

Sam Watts
And just that small act reawakened this energy in him because he was living more of a Ziggy guy. So that’s the first technique. The second technique is something called day stacking, which is almost looking at the next quarter or the next six months and say, between now or even next year, whatever time frame you set between now and that time point, what things can I do that will allow me to progress more towards that Hickey guy?

Sam Watts
Yeah. How can I make sure, yes, I can do things every day, but what’s the bigger picture? How can I make sure that I’m continually moving into where I want to be consciously engineering that rather than just going with the flow?

Sam Watts
And I think in the arena of answer, I think this is a huge topic because particularly in more advanced cancers, because I think like you said at the start, Robin, someone looks you in the eye and says, I’m sorry, Mr.

Sam Watts
Jones, you’ve got 12 months to live. what happens, that sense of self, your very sense of self is threatened, isn’t it? You’re facing your mortality head on. And the most important thing you can do at that point is to say, you know, I accept your opinion and I accept your statistics and I respect you for telling me them, but I choose my own reality.

Sam Watts
And that reality is I’m going to be here in 5, 7, 10 years. And this is how I’m going to achieve that. And a big part of that reality change is how do I, in my mind, create such deeply meaningful goals, purposes, aims, ambitions, that I’m going to saturate the chemistry of my body in a way that every cell and every peptide that that cell secretes is secreting a message that says, I will all be here in 5 years because I’ve got to,

Sam Watts
or one year, whatever it is, I’ve got to fulfill that objective that’s that meaningful to me. And I think more than anything else at that point, and not just in terminal, you know, incurable cancers, but at any point, that sense of, I’m going to shape my own reality, I’m going to engineer my own reality, and this is how I’m going to do it.

Sam Watts
And just that act of empowerment, I think has perhaps more of a transformative impact upon our health than, I don’t know, I mean, personally speaking, perhaps than anything else, not that we want to isolate it, we want everything at once, but, and one of the things I would recommend, you know, is reading, I’m sure lots of people would have read it, but Victor Frankel’s book has got a book called A Man’s Search for Meaning.

Sam Watts
He was a psychiatrist, Jewish psychiatrist in Auschwitz. And that’s such a unique setting, because he was a psychiatrist trained in Freudian psychoanalysis, living in a concentration camp, trying to understand how do I, how can I use my mind to change this reality so that I can thrive and get out to see my wife and kids.

Sam Watts
And his whole book, and he did, he did survive, and he did thrive, and he came out and he had the highest body weight, he got out of that concentration camp, he had the least infections, and his whole focus was work, his obsession after coming out of there was that the human being has an unquestionable, unequivocal ability to change their reality through changing their perspective.

Sam Watts
And if you change your perspective, if you change your reality, then that reality not just changes your experience of life, it changes your body’s ability to cope. And he said, if that works in something as base as a concentration camp, it’s probably going to work anywhere else.

Sam Watts
And he applied that to stroke rehab, to cancer, to childhood bereavement, to all of these, you know, horrific arenas. And, you know, it works. And that change of reality, I think a big part of that change of reality, creating our own reality, is to have a need to know what that looks like, what’s best case.

Sam Watts
And that’s why the Hickey guy research and concept is so, so powerful. And it’s such an important one to propagate and empower people with. Thank you.

Robin Daly
Fascinating. What a great stuff. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, very much, you know, you’re right, people don’t put the attention on that stuff and just actually putting attention on it is enormously powerful.

Robin Daly
And then, of course, taking steps to move towards it is, I mean, that’s empowerment is you’ve gone from being a victim of circumstance to being somebody who’s going somewhere. And yeah, I can well imagine what a difference that makes, but great to have some actual sort of thinking behind, well, how you do this, how you get meaning and purpose, because it can be pretty intangible stuff to somebody who hasn’t got it,

Robin Daly
isn’t it, meaning and purpose, you know, where’s that going to come from? Yeah, it is a plan. I think that’s fantastically useful. Yeah. Okay, well, there’s one other thing I’d like to talk about a bit today, we’ve got a little bit more time.

Robin Daly
And that’s about the power of our social and intimate relationships. Because, again, that’s, you know, something that affects us very much on an emotional and mental level. And, but it’s now shown, of course, this does have a massive effect on us physiologically, we actually, the people who live longest have good social circle, you know.

Robin Daly
And here we are, we’re living in what I call deeply fragmented times, we got families spread out around the globe, a job is for a year or two, you know, not like a lifetime, like was common, you know, we move home chasing after the jobs, we’ve got an epidemic of loneliness and isolation that the pandemic only made it worse.

Robin Daly
I got social media driving it, people don’t share their meals, their transport, their entertainment, in fact, you know, all sorts of things that used to be meal and not anymore. And this is also in the intimate relationships as well.

Robin Daly
There are very few long term committed relationships around to even see as examples of what’s possible. So cancer, another thing that brings enormous feeling of isolation into it. So what can we do about this?

Robin Daly
And we know that good social circle intimate relationships is a healthy place to be, given all that circumstances, what can we do?

Sam Watts
And yeah, I mean, I think again, it’s been interesting, quite a little work done around that. And I think, I think, I think that all roads lead to seem to lead to Rome with this. And it seems to be awareness.

Sam Watts
And there’s a beautiful model, which is, as you increase your awareness, you can make better choices. And if you make better choices, you’ll always get better outcomes in any arena of life. And, and lots of the psychosocial research around this, around isolation, loneliness, in the context of health, and some of that is specifically in the context of cancer.

Sam Watts
It looks at the subconscious behaviors. And it’s quite depressing in a way, because of how easy it is to slip into that and how unaware we are. And they’ve conducted studies where they’ve asked, you know, husbands and wives and their children, you know, to document the way they behave.

Sam Watts
And, and the the person’s perspective of what they’ve done compared to the other people’s perspective of what they’ve done are vastly different. So the person will think they say, yeah, I have dinner with my family, five days a week.

Sam Watts
That’s what they’ll then you look at that, you know, that’s brilliant, you don’t make people do that. Then you ask the children, and they say, well, we have dinner, but we’re sat in the living room watching telly, we don’t, it’s not, it’s not a conversation, we’re not connecting.

Sam Watts
So I think the first thing here is awareness of, you know, what, what, in the same way, being aware of Dom, a hickey guy rather, or lack of, you know, how are my relationships in the broadest sense? Have I got friends, I can trust, have I got a good connection with my husband or wife or partner, with my children, with my work colleagues, and if there isn’t, then understanding what, okay, it’s not necessarily a problem,

Sam Watts
but it’s something I need to remedy. And I can think of, again, another man from a survivorship group who was going through a really difficult time with his wife. And he said, we haven’t had, you know, a major bust up or argument, no one’s had an affair, we’re just we’re just not connected anymore, we just don’t, we just don’t, we just don’t connect, we don’t get on.

Sam Watts
And then through talking through what their weeks look like, it was almost impossible that they could get on because they weren’t spending any time together. And as soon as they he was aware of the fact that the reason they were deteriorating was because they weren’t connect, they weren’t spending time together, that awareness allowed them to make a choice.

Sam Watts
Let’s before we even think about separating or this, that and the other. Let’s just do a six month commitment where we’re going to say twice a week, we’re going to have a digital free dinner in the end, then once every weekend, we’re going to do saying as a couple, okay.

Sam Watts
And within about six weeks, he came into the room, yeah, and beaming and he said, I feel like we’re on our honeymoon again. And they still loved each other, they they hadn’t, their love was as strong as what it was, you know, when they first got married, it’s just because they weren’t doing anything together.

Sam Watts
And I think but you can’t make the change until you’re aware of what’s gone wrong. So I think, you know that and this is this is mind body medicine, mind body medicine is is being aware is the awareness of how we’re thinking, acting, behaving in the knowledge that every one of those variables is going to either help or harm us.

Sam Watts
So when it comes to relationships, intimacy connection, you know, which like you say, we know is linked to longevity, we know it’s linked to better health status. It’s analyzing it, reviewing it, how is my, you know, emotional life and its broadest sense, what’s strong, what’s weak, almost do they call it an emotional audit and saying, okay, well, you know, I’ve got my friendships about like social groups,

Sam Watts
great, you see them every week. But, you know, I’m with my 15 year old teenage daughter, I feel like we’ve lost something. Okay, well, that’s fine. How do you get it back? What choices can you make to repair that?

Sam Watts
So I think I genuinely think the solution to that is awareness because awareness is what initiates change. And again, like you said, just that act of empowerment, taking control of the situation, rather than being a helpless victim, this relationship is falling apart.

Sam Watts
It’s that sense of, okay, it’s falling apart, but I’m going to fix it. And this is how I’m going to fix it x, y and z. And just that simple act of documenting a way out changes the situation. So I think you can’t delineate any, any part of mind body medicine from the conscious awareness of what’s working and what isn’t particularly in the arena of your relationships.

Robin Daly
So good advice. So actually take a long hard look, see what’s really going on as a way of beginning to tackle hopelessness or disempowerment in any situation. Great. You’re such a mind of great practical advice.

Robin Daly
Good science to back it up a lot is brilliant to talk to you. We’re just about out of time. I wanted to ask you though, I know you’ve got a book other way. I’m very much looking forward to seeing it and certainly if you wanted to get back on the show to talk about it, but I wonder whether you want to give listeners a little taste like what the title is, whether they might be expected to be able to buy it and what it’s going to cover.

Robin Daly
Thank you.

Sam Watts
Thank you. Yeah, yeah. So the book’s hopefully coming out. I spoke to the publishers last week, it’s coming out in mid February as it stands now. It was called, initially it was called Becoming Exceptional, but now it’s going to be called, we think, the Ayurvedic Approach to Cancer.

Sam Watts
And in short, it’s a dovetailing of how the evidence -based practices that Ayurveda uses to optimise survivorship, and how that dovetails with the best research around the Western exceptional cancer survivorship research, in terms of better quality and quantity of life, and how evidence -based Ayurveda can be used to facilitate that survivorship model.

Sam Watts
And it’s got a lot in there. So I just hope, hopefully, we just wanted to provide a bit of a roadmap and a bit of a framework for people to mobilise that empowerment. That’s kind of motivation behind it.

Sam Watts
So yeah, it should be out in February.

Robin Daly
Brilliant. Well, there’s so much wisdom in Ayurveda and tying it through to all our modern knowledge in that way, fantastic thing to do. So really look forward to that and you will definitely be back on the show telling us more about it when it’s published.

Robin Daly
Thanks very much for today.

Sam Watts
Thank you for having me. It’s been a real privilege. Thank you.

Robin Daly
Do check out Sam’s website, that’s mind -body -medical .co .uk, mind -body -medical .co .uk, where you can pre -order your copy of the IVADIC approach to cancer. I’m in no doubt that it will be an extraordinarily valuable contribution to the arena of integrative cancer care. Thanks for listening.