Good evening and welcome to our final session, and we just give people the normal amount of time to come in as. You finish your tea and you. Settle yourself comfortably for session 6 and today is, I think it's quite exciting.

I've got quite excited putting this together because . I, I, I really wanted to try and integrate your workplace a little bit more into this afternoon, this evening session. And because it's about bringing neuroscience based strategies into our everyday.

And I thought, well, we've talked an awful lot about you guys as individuals, as humans, but we haven't really explored about integrating this stuff into what you do as vets when you're, when you're in work. I suppose a lot of it has made that assumption that you will sort of get up early and try and get out and get sun on your face and maybe exercise in the morning, as we've spoken about. But tonight's session is very much around, and how can we make this work for you, in your workplace as well, really integrating some of these strategies into our everyday.

And a welcome to people that are accessing via the recordings as well. It's nice to know you're there and, . Do give feedback, do let us know how it's going, what changes you're making, cos, and if you need any support or help or you need to email me, remember that's very doable.

You just contact Dawn via the webinar then she gets everything to me. She's an absolute star. So as always, although tonight I think is a very hopeful session, it really is, .

We, we must acknowledge that from time to time things get tough and sometimes when things get tough, we shrink into a very shrunken, quiet, withdrawn place, and that doesn't work. We've got to reach out and you guys are able to reach out. And use Vett life as much as you can.

Use your GPs. Don't buy into some of that rhetoric that you'll never get a GP appointment. If you phone up your GP practise and say that you're having a mental health crisis and you need an emergency appointment, you'll get one.

And I think it's really important to remind people of that because we buy into these urban myths all too soon. And these are the same stories that are probably being told in public about oh you'll never be able to see a vet anymore, not since COVID. And these stories gain traction, and some of them are so untrue.

So, let's have a think about integrating this stuff into our everyday. And the main way to do this, you know, and we're gonna look at some new stuff, but is to . Think about, well, you've been on this six week course with Mike, and you've started, you've started, learning, you've started practising, you've started trying things out, and by now you may have a sense of, at the moment, what's working from what we've shared with you, what's actually working.

And if we're gonna keep this going. Then there are 2 things that we can do. Broadly speaking, and the first one is to find a mindful way of stopping.

Throughout your every day and we'll come to that a little bit later in today's webinar. The other Thing that we can do From a neurological perspective is to stop and to consciously look at what you're doing. So let's take that first one.

Will you keep using physiological size throughout your day? In order to create enough calm. To recognise that you're going into an old brain new brain loop and to Interject there and to find a better, kinder, more compassionate dialogue with your old and new brain.

And if you are doing that sometimes what we need to do. Is we need to stop. At some point during the day and remind ourselves about how good it feels when we reestablish that.

Executive control. How lovely it is. To experience a genuine Oasis of calm.

In what is otherwise a fraught and busy day perhaps. And if you are Dampening down your frontal cortex by getting really good at naming emotion, spotting it, naming it really accurately, you know, stopping it, is it anxiety or is this excitement and naming this stuff accurately, knowing that if it's difficult. Interruptive, emotionally harmful.

Emotion that's showing up, just by naming it is gonna dampen down that frontal cortex. So again to stop. And to Just spend some time.

Connecting with Well, how does it feel? To be a human being who is more responsive and less reactive to stress. What am I noticing about me?

Speak to the people around us is really powerful. Are you noticing the shifts in me? Are you noticing that I'm calmer, that I'm less reactive, that I'm breathing, that I'm not looking for reassurance, because these are the rewards, and what we know is no human behaviour is maintained unless there's a reward.

At the At the, at the end of it, we need reward, you know. So will you keep working with the somatic experiencing? Will you keep using that safe place that we find?

And again stopping, how does it feel? To just be feeling. Safer more often.

Feels lovely Now remember I do. All of this stuff as much as I can. And with as much diligence as I can muster, and what I tend to do is find that some of this stuff works much better for me.

Than others for a while and then something else. Brings dividends and rewards, but I keep the practise going because we've got one life, haven't we, and by harnessing neuroscience to manage our stress, we can manage our stress, but we can also enhance our lives. And by enhancing our lives, it's rare that I meet somebody who is really.

Living a very Happy, meaningful, full, smiley life who is also struggling with stress, the two just don't sit well together. So moving towards. Contentment and happiness and meaning in life is in itself a huge buffer for the experience of stress.

Are you waking? Feeling restored. We need to stop and we need to recognise this.

Are you getting that glymphatic clearance that we spoke about? By Sleeping in a room that's properly dark by Changing our habits by waking up early and exercising by triggering our cortisol early in the day which seems to Which does advantageously affect our diurnal rhythms and allows us to sleep and get proper deep wave sleep at night. Are we observing some of that sleep hygiene, the neuroscience based sleep hygiene?

Are we using NSDR? When we've had a night and we don't feel as restored. How we Waking in the mornings feeling calmer, connecting with that cause there's reward in that too.

And are we beginning to build? Regular short meditative practise because if you are, you will start to experience greater executive control. You will find that you make better choices that you stop and consider more, that you experience genuine prosocial changes in your behaviour that bring the rewards that humans so need.

And If you are adding in the NSDR and combining that with perhaps. Three stage breathing space. Maybe I am really enjoying because I am so enjoying that spacetime bridging meditation at the moment, getting such a lot of pleasure from it actually that it's really easy to build up to 13 minutes in a day if we find meditative practises that work for us.

And over the course of these 6 weeks I've shared with you. A number of these that when combined, build a very, very powerful new daily practise. So How are you going to remember?

To stop. And harness this neuroscience that we've shared. Well, I reckon that I'm going to introduce you, remind you maybe even if you've worked with me before, of my absolute go to mindfulness strategy which I've been using for about.

15 years now. Every day of my life, and I used to use my phone and if my phone made a sort of bong gong sound which was very zen, that would give me a trigger to, do a bold, and I've changed that now to. A new Rule And when I say rule, I never beat myself up if I haven't got time or it's inconvenient to do a bold.

However, the rule of thumb is, Mike, whenever you have a drink. You make yourself a drink or someone makes a drink for you if you're lucky enough to be in that situation. Stop and do a bold.

And I really recommend this because. There used to be this old neuroscience myth that it takes, between 21 and 28 days to develop a new habit. I hope one of the things I've done on our course is debunk some of those, Pop psychology, neurological, beliefs that get traded in, they're so inaccurate, left brain, right brain, lizard brain, all that sort of old stuff.

What I hope we've tried to do here is bring some accuracy from research, from neurological studies, principally from those brilliant neuroimaging studies, which we'll look at more today. And what we absolutely know from these studies is that. If we can Find a way to stop and remind ourselves to do stuff.

We can build habits. Now wait for it. It might take as long as.

Maybe even over 100, 100 days before a new habit becomes something that you don't have to think about. You just find yourself doing this stuff. So maybe even up to 100 hours and don't be disheartened by that.

See it as a challenge, see it as a and and the way to do it, I believe is bold. So what you do is And I'd really encourage you to do this is when you make yourself a drink at whatever time it is that you make yourself that drink or a drink is made for you. Give yourself the gift of about one.

For 1.5 minutes. And as you get that drink, you stop.

And you use your physiological sigh just one, and the beauty of the physiological sigh is that you're able to achieve that parasympathetic nervous system. Ah, With just one Good physiological sigh. So if you remember we'd take that double inhale.

And then a long sighing exhale. And we wait until we have expended the air from our lungs on the exhale. And we find that calm, and we move into our observing self and the observing self is when we sort of step out and look at ourselves with a benign.

Benevolent compassionate curiosity. And we just allowed our inner experience to just enter it. What's going on with me?

Right now, what am I doing? How have I been? How am I functioning?

And then we'd lean right in and we ask ourselves, Mike Scanlon. Are you actually taking time? To look after you Are you Acting In a way that is wise.

That is Mitochondrally charging your system rather than mitochondrally draining your system. What are you doing? And is it working?

So we take a breath, we move into our observing selves. From our observing elves we lean right in to what we are doing. And then we make a decision.

Do I need to keep doing? What I'm doing, do I need to keep acting in the way I am? Do I need to keep functioning the way I've functioned?

And the last Hour or so since my last bold. Or do I need to make some changes? And if we need to make changes, make changes that take you closer to who you want to be.

Values and make changes that are Neurologically wise. And if we're able to do that, if we're able to use bold and build that into our everyday. Then Those 100 days will flash past and before you know it.

Because you've been integrating this stuff. Mindfully, deliberately on purpose, experiencing the value of it maybe connecting with the rewards that you are getting from this shift. You will become.

A better Functioning human being. And That's gotta be worth doing. It's gotta be worth doing.

So You'll see this, and this is about . Involving your colleagues. Over the last few years, 1015 years that I've been working with vets, I've seen so, it's sort of .

The news has got around that might works well with vets, which has been just wonderful for me, in my career, and I've been very lucky to have had this association with vets over my career, and I've, I've really enjoyed working with the veterinary profession. And one thing I've learned about the veterinary profession is you guys get stuck ruminating. And you guys are competitive, broadly speaking, you're very similar to GPs and that competitive.

Nature linked with this capacity to get stuck with. Trying to solve problems using only your intellect using just you almost as though it would be a deficit in character to seek help. And from a neurological perspective, findings from Fink as far back as 2010, which look, even then 2010 was evidence from an FMRI study, neuroimaging.

And this neuroimaging study was really rather wonderful and what it showed is that the problem with Solo problem solving. Is that when we stop and we try. To find solutions, our brain seems to throw up a mixture of barriers and it seems to throw up.

Only the solutions that we've found. In the past The same solutions our brain seems to go and in some sort of approach to try and be efficient pulls up the same old solutions and almost bars and blocks us from finding newer, more novel associations that might help us problem solve afresh anew. And what this study found was that.

When you try and. Problem solve. On your own And when you try and problem solve on your own in a heightened level of stress and with a sense of hurry up.

To find the solution to this flipping issue that is causing me distress. All that happens is that the cerebellum becomes deactivated, so that part of our brain that allows us to think broadly allows us to think, freely, that allows us to have a sense of, a whole smorgasbord of ideas that flood our mind is just shut down. However, If we get together.

With our colleagues and we say I've got a bit of a problem here with this issue. Could we have 5 minutes of problem solving together as a team in a team meeting where we bring problems to team meetings to To our colleagues, and as soon as we do this, as soon as we start to work with other people, this FNFRI, this FMRI study clearly showed that there was a deactivation. That was there previously becomes much less.

When we involve others. So Our cerebellum actually after a while of working with other people is triggered into greater activation, and this brain response means that a whole range of ideas, not just those of your colleagues but your own, start to bubble and start to become activated. And what think EL, cos I'm not even gonna try and some of those names, what Think and EA found was that teams that regularly problem solve together thrive.

They really thrive. So maybe something to consider as we go forward. So in preparing for this final session, what I wanted to find.

Was Neuro Science Approaches. That would work quickly. Efficiently and would fit into the lives of very busy veterinarians who are already.

Rolling their eyes when Mike Scanlon says to them, Come on, guys, it's just 13 minutes a day. Come on guys, get up, get outside. Within the first hour of waking, get that sunlight into your face, into your, get, get your retinal activation going.

Exercise in the morning doesn't have to be long. Ideally it could be vigorous, but a walk would be lovely. Drink your coffee in the mornings.

You know, stimulate that, take a cold shower. And you roll your eyes, and here he is asking us to do more. And if I am, and if we are, it has to be efficient, doesn't it?

Or vets just won't do it. So Gratitude And The problem with a lot of this stuff is that. You will have seen So many, I'm sure because it's everywhere at the moment.

Gratitude is so good for us. The problem with this sort of pop psychology is that it doesn't tell us exactly how. You're going to use gratitude to.

Fire those neural connections to the bliss centre of the brain. It doesn't explain how we're gonna enhance our dopamine and serotonin, particularly serotonin. It doesn't tell us how by engaging with gratitude, we're going to experience an amygdalic.

Relax, because you are. And it doesn't tell us how we're going to. Be much more succinct and able to cognitively restructure those wildly unhelpful thoughts that our old and new brain loops send us.

It just tells us you need to develop a gratitude habit. Now that's as, as, as, as. Just so, so unhelpful.

We need to be really. Quite Exact because. There is Really good evidence now that a regular, and by this I mean at least 3 days a week, we need to do this.

Can shift that prosocial circuit so that we can find ways that We can use gratitude. To make a significant difference. To both our happiness.

And to dampen down our threat brain. So how are we gonna do this? Well, I'm going to ask you To be really Just wait with me cause I'm gonna take you through a little bit of the science of this because the main.

Neuromodulators associated with gratitude is of course serotonin. And the serotonin is released from your raf nucleus, OK, RAPE, and this is responsible for increasing the activity of the neurocircuits that lend themselves to these particular types of enhancing experiences. The one we're looking at is developing a gratitude practise.

So Forget about the slide for a moment as I just take you through this. The study came from the work of Fox etal, including a really, a really top, top scientist, a neuroscientist who has really devoted much of his life into exploring the neural correlates of gratitude, and this is Damasio, and Fox led this particular research, but Damasio is the Is the scientist that's really explored this stuff and what they found is that. When people experience something that makes them feel gratitude.

Wait for it, even if it's. At a shallow level. Or a deep level.

Just Experiencing something by which you feel a sense of gratitude for it. They observed activation of that frontal cortex, particularly the ACC and the medial front prefrontal cortex, Essentially the area of the brain that is responsible for context. And this is really important for gratitude because the, anterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex.

Sets context, literally define the meaning of the experience that you are having, and this is the bit that gets activated when we . When we develop a very potent form of gratitude practise now. Absolutely, this is, this is important.

This isn't a gratitude practise I'm talking about here, where you give gratitude. That's just rather a lovely thing to do as humans, or express gratitude to others. We get the real neural shift, we get the real .

Neuromodulator, . Activation when we receive gratitude when we receive thanks so. We get prefrontal activation.

When listening to a letter of gratitude read aloud by a coworker. And we witness it. So what they did, the Damasio experiment, is they had coworkers write their colleagues a letter of gratitude of thanks, and it had to be genuine to another coworker.

Ideally, and this is where the dopamine shift happens, because when it comes as a surprise, we get a greater dopamine shift. The brain loves surprises, and the brain absolutely loves positive surprises. You know, if we know we're gonna get a gift, we're pleased.

If we don't know we're gonna get a gift and it arrives suddenly, we're really pleased. You know, interesting, isn't it? And what they did was they sat down.

Together the coworker and the worker, and they wired them up to an FMRI scanner and they observed the brain activity as the letter of thank you was being read and received and what it showed was really robust effects on these prefrontal cortexes. That pointed irrefutably to the fact that receiving gratitude is much more potent in terms of the positive shifts and as the slide says, you know, if you are someone who writes good letter. You could Develop a very prosocial habit of when somebody in your team, somebody in your life.

Even your partner, for God's sake here, you know, is write them a letter of gratitude, you know, and by doing that you are giving a neuroscience gift because when they read it back they will get. Such a neural shift from it and if they then Use that experience, that thanks, and they. Connect with it regularly, they might have the beginnings of a gratitude practise, but let's.

Let's look at this because you know what? If we can exchange gratitude, we can observe someone else getting help. Someone else giving help weirdly just observing that in another human being allows us to experience that feeling of a genuine neuro.

Circuit lift. So what Damasio did was he took this research just a bit further, because Damasio kind of reckoned that the problem with this is, is that, you know, for many people who want to experience these positive effects of gratitude. Well, you know, it's not gonna be that advantageous to just sit around waiting, hoping that someone's gonna write you a letter saying you were wonderful and thank you for it.

You know, that that, even vets, I, I'll bet you guys get a lot of, thank you, you were rather wonderful. I don't know how many letters you get from your . The, the, the owners of the animals that you look after from your clients.

But if you do, never let them go, go by the wayside anymore because what Damasio did was he actually. Put people into the neuroimaging, . Circuitry and then He got these people to listen to stories about other people's lives, and these stories were all similar in that they had a conveyance of struggle.

The subjects in these stories firstly talked about the horrible, difficult situations that they endured. But they focused, they really focused in these stories on the small but highly significant features of their story. That led them to feel genuine.

Deep, deep. Meaningful gratitude embedded in these stories. Now we know the human brains so oriented towards storytelling from the moment we're born till the moment we die, we just love stories.

So what's important about the stories in Damasio's work wasn't just that the people came out the other side of difficulty, wasn't just that the the the story was, interesting and exciting. It was that. The neural circuits associated with these prosocial behaviours and with gratitude become robustly active when they just feel, wait for it guys, an affiliation with the person telling the story.

They start to feel some resonance with that, so you don't need. Necessarily to wait for somebody to send you a letter of thanks. If you're getting them, fantastic.

But we don't need to get them. What we can do is find a really powerful story, a really powerful story, and we can use that story in a really useful way. So The protocol is this.

And it's one that you need to repeat over and over again. And why I say this, why I think it really fits with that, is that what the science seems to show. Is that when you I I'm gonna suggest that.

Probably you guys as that. You may not need to go and find. A story that you viscerally connect to.

Of somebody going through a difficult time and then being really helped and feeling huge gratitude for being helped. I'm gonna bet that you get a fair few. Cause I know I've written to my vet, Billy the Mindful Dog, when he was, a pup, somehow poisoned himself with, rat poison, and, the vet just went above and beyond.

He was only about a few months old. The vet went above and beyond to, save him, and he's 10.5 now and still, hugely important in my life, and I wrote the vet a long.

Long letter of gratitude about. Just how grateful I was and just how important Billy was to us and the family and what a difference that vet had made to our lives by taking the time to save him and. I, I'm guessing you guys might be able to do that.

What you need to do is you need to stop and deliberately on purpose, recall. A story when somebody has been properly thankful and grateful for something that you did. And You need to embed yourself in that story.

If you can't connect with a story about the emotional experience of someone else receiving help and feeling gratitude, the story you select doesn't have to have any semblance to your own life experience, it just has to move you. But ideally, this will be a story where you have had gratitude. Somebody has been incredibly grateful to you.

Now this is the beauty of this. What you do Is once you've spent 5 minutes. Reimmersing yourself into that story.

Just take some short notes, some bullet pointed notes. List them out on a sheet of paper or in your phone, and it is really important, Fox and Damasio, and all of Damasio's research shows that you do need to write this down. You need to take some short notes and list out on that piece of paper on your phone, what the struggle was.

The struggle was this . This 3 month old. Poynter had swallowed rat poison.

It was the The fellow's daughter's dog and the daughter hadn't slept and was in terrible, terrible shame that she'd allowed the dog to do it, you know, really immerse yourself in this story and then and I was able to help and what I did was I reckoned this and I checked this and I did this and I did that. And that dog survived and they were so grateful for it. So you write that down.

And then just in bullets, you write down how it feels to to connect with that story emotionally right now. So first set of bullets. What the struggle was, what help it was that these people got, ideally this is help from you.

Then you write down how connecting. With that impacts on you emotionally. So you get that story down.

And essentially, do you know what, that simple list of bullet points serves as your shorthand really for . Getting into Damasio's neurology of gratitude, it mimics. Pretty exactly what's been done in most of these studies.

We know That this Gratitude practise I'm suggesting here. Literally, if you can do this 3 to 5 minutes. It spend 3 to 5 minutes with your bullet points of your meaningful story.

You don't even need to keep changing it. You can change it if another thing happens. It might be interesting to change it and to work with a new story.

However, in 3 to 5 minutes. Why I think this is so staggeringly important, is you get such a lot of neural, connection from this, that is, prefrontal cortex oriented, that is. Just harnessing that neuroscience, that, serotonergic shift, you know.

At a very, very powerful level, and it only takes 3 to 5 minutes. Probably 3 times a week. And in doing this, you can become happier humans.

Now we do know this has to have just, just 3 sorts of features. It has to be grounded in a story. Probably a story that you've embedded in.

At least once, and then you need this shorthand version, the so-called bullet points, so that you can literally drop in. To this gratitude experience, so that you don't have to recount the whole story again each time. The story should be one in which you are genuinely thanked for something and it made you feel good, or it could be a story about someone else genuinely experiencing thanks.

And your gratitude practise can be. 60 seconds. Up to about 5 minutes a day.

Do you know, it can be quick. Or it can be Up to 5 minutes a day, and we need to do it probably 3 times a week. The other benefits of this are that in another study it showed that when you do this it really dampens down amygdalic activity, i.e., the threat pain becomes nullified, and the other side of it is if you want to.

Developed to become a more empathic person, this gratitude practise I'm sharing with you today is also going to be very effective, especially this narrative type approach when you're using someone else's narrative of receiving gratitude. As a way to tap into your own, so there is merit of maybe having your own story. And somebody else's story.

But you play with it, see what you find, and make it work for you. And I, I, I, I love this because. It's, it's a couple of minutes, 3 times a week, and in doing so, you're gonna make such a shift to.

Those all important. Neuromodulators, you know, and this is, . This, this could be really and can be, and I've experienced this myself as a clinician, really, really enhancing and life changing.

And so quick. So my hope is That You'll start problem solving. In teams, my hope is actually that maybe we start writing to our colleagues a little bit more when they have thanked us.

You know, maybe we need to embed some of this stuff into the practise of our veterinary teams. We can make such a difference. So my hope is that this course has genuinely actually given you a thirst, because I think it's so exciting, it's so .

I love it because it's so embedded in science, isn't it? A real thirst for continuing our work to live calmer, kinder, more self compassion oriented lives. And the way to remind yourself to do it every day is to use that bold that we looked at earlier.

So keep breathing well, that says breathing. It's meant to say breathing. Remember to keep a warm, wise dialogue going with your old and your new brain.

You've got a safe place, use it. Get used to sitting with your anxiety. Enjoy somatic experiencing.

Go on to the internet maybe find some other somatic experiencing for anxiety, audiophiles. There's a few of them about. Remember just 13 minutes of mindfulness will make a difference and mix it up 3 stage breathing space, time space bridging, somatic experience the NSDR safe place meditating.

Build exercise into your morning routine outside in the sunlight within an hour of waking up. Try to relax when you go to bed at night. Don't try to sleep.

Make use of NSDR. Start problem solving. Together With others, stop trying to do it on your own.

It's not kind. And build A neurologically oriented gratitude practise. Because This stuff works, you know, and so much of what I used to do.

When I first started sort of 30 years ago in mental health, I look back on and I just think. Do you know we did that and we advocated that and so much of it had no science. It just sort of felt like it ought to work and we don't need to be .

So Miss Misguided any more. Some of what we thought worked actually did work weirdly, but a fair chunk of it didn't. But we now are much better at knowing what works.

And we do need to use it, it's so important. So I see we've had a couple of. Mentions can we get the links to the YouTube videos from this course and I've received, yeah, .

I think Dawn's saying, Steve, if you can confirm your email, she'll make sure you get all of those. That would, that would, that would be really helpful. I've loved this course.

I, I really have, and it's been such a, a, a, a good course for me because, as I said to you before, I've been doing this. Although I'm sort of entering retirement, I've been doing this . Neuroscience study myself, .

At postgraduate level and exploring this stuff. With and, and, and sharing it, has, has been lovely for me. So thank you so much for, being with me on this course.

And I want to finish by, . A brief word about mitochondria. If we think of mitochondria as bat trees.

And as batteries that can be recharged, but are frequently. Drained. And if we can.

Make dietary changes, metabolic changes, which is not for Mike Scanlon to share with you guys tonight, but I've read a really life changing. Brilliant book recently that has. Led me towards.

Really enjoying listen to this enjoying intermittent fasting. And thinking about the way I live my life in terms of . In terms of mitochondrial recharge, and I found this book by Christopher M.

Palmer. You sort of finish it and just think, God, I wish he'd written that 20 odd years ago, because this is going to revolutionise. Mental health.

And mental health interventions going forward. It's one of those . Real context changing books and it's a really good read.

So my final gift to you all tonight is thank you, be kind to yourself and read brain energy. And You'll see that a lot of what we've done on our course over the past 6 weeks makes so much sense. And add to it.

With More lifestyle changes. That actually work. So my hope is, guys, that you'll.

Going towards this, spring. And New hope New beginnings. Spring's a perfect time.

To start to unleash these new habits on the world. To spring into. A better way of being.

So I'll wait and see if anyone's got any questions at all, and remember, if you get away tomorrow at some point and you say, do you know, I wouldn't mind . I wouldn't mind hearing a bit more about that gratitude practise. Let me contact that mic and see what he's got for us.

I gladly, . Help out in that way or in any way I can so. Last thank you and.

If you've got any questions for me, otherwise, it's great being with you for this last 6 weeks, . I hope to do more with the webinar that at some point in the future. I think it will be aligned to what we've done today.

Maybe a session. Once I've really assimilated and made sense of mitochondrial charge, we'll find a way of harnessing that. But otherwise, thank you all so much and good night.