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Aug. 5, 2013 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:19
Edition 119 - Mindfulness

Find out how top Doctor Craig Hassed thinks changing your mindset could greatly benefit yourhealth and wellbeing…

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thanks for coming back to the show and thank you for your emails, which are now reaching me nice and safely.
I've had lots of emails in the last couple of weeks.
You might remember on the last edition of the show, we mentioned that there was a problem with emails sent to the show around about the first week in July.
Some of those emails have disappeared into cyberspace.
We had some technical issues that were not down to us to do with the link between the website and one of my email addresses.
Now that's been sorted and your emails will reach me.
But if you had sent me an email during that first period of July, maybe the last day or two of June 2, and you didn't get a reply, that could be the reason.
So please try again.
And I'm really sorry we had that problem.
It's now sorted.
Interesting times here.
What have we got in the news?
Well, the first stem cell research burger has been cooked and prepared.
And they're talking about more genetically created meat, artificially made meat to feed the burgeoning population of this planet.
Now, on one side, that's a good thing, because more and more people are going to need food, and more and more people are going to demand meat.
And how exactly without filling the planet with creatures are we going to provide that?
So that sounds like a good thing, but I just hope that they fully research this stuff to make sure that it is absolutely safe.
Let's see what happens in the fullness of time.
What else is happening?
Tension increasing between the UK and Spain.
This has crept up on us in the last few days.
It's all to do with Gibraltar.
If you live in America or in Canada, you may not know this.
Down at the very foot of Spain, just before you get to Africa, there is a tiny little outcrop of rock called Gibraltar.
And it's been British for a very long time, and the people there want to stay that way.
The Spanish see things differently, and there's always been a lot of tension between the two sides, and they sometimes do the Spanish create problems crossing the border.
Either way, sometimes there are very, very long waits at the border crossing at La Linea.
I've actually been there and endured this.
Now there are two sides to every story, and the Spanish say this rock is ours, and the people who live on Gibraltar say we want to be British.
I'm not going to go into that debate, but the tension is increasing, and now the Spanish are talking about levying some kind of fee to cross the border.
And the British are saying, oh no, you don't.
So we're watching that situation.
The weather here in the UK, I'm becoming like a weather forecaster.
I tell you about it every time, but it's still continuing warm here.
We've had really, really hot weather.
We've had some rain to break it up, but it's still really humid.
And I think we've got some more weeks of that to go.
So I'll keep you posted on the weather.
But I really, I've discovered that as much as I like the good weather, I don't do humidity like this.
I find that really hard to take.
I love heat, but not humidity.
Now, if you want to make a donation to this show, there's a very good reason why I'm mentioning this right now.
But the way to make donations is to go to the website, www.theunexplained.tv, our marvelous website designed by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
On the website, there's a link.
All you've got to do is click it and you can make a donation to the show.
And the reason why I say that is that donations are absolutely vital.
These are hard times and I want to keep this work going because it's very important to me.
And thankfully, you tell me that you enjoy it.
But your donations are really vital.
So if you can make a donation to the show, please do.
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Now this time around, the show that I'm going to do for you is a bit of a walk on the wild side, but hell, we like that anyway.
I'm doing this show because of my sister, Beryl, who I don't think I've ever mentioned by name on this show, but there we go, that's her name.
She recently went to hear a guy talk, an Australian guy called Craig Hassed, who talked about a concept that he's got called mindfulness that can apparently improve your life.
Now, my sister has advised me to talk to this man, and that's what we're about to do.
And I'm sure when my sister hears this, she would say if I'd taken her advice more often in life, I'd have done an awful lot better.
But hell, that's brothers and sisters for you, isn't it?
But anyway, this is not the kind of stuff that I normally do.
However, I'm significantly impressed by reading of this guy's work and what he does.
He's at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
He was visiting the UK.
I'm not sure whether he also got to the US, but we'll ask him about his travel plans when we get him on here.
So we're going to talk mindfulness with Craig Hassed at Monash University, and let's see where we go with this.
I think we could all do with a little bit of improvement in these hard times.
So if this can improve your life and make you less stressed and make things better, that'd be great.
Now, you know that I could fill this show 10 times over, weekly, with people who promise ways to improve your life.
So as I say, it's not something that I normally do, but I want to make an exception in this case.
David Icke, definitely coming mid-August.
Paul Hellier, a strong possibility now.
Watch this space.
And some other things, too, that I think might blow your socks off coming soon.
All right, let's cross to Melbourne, Australia now.
Late at night as I record this here in the UK, early in the morning, tomorrow, in fact, in Melbourne, Australia.
And Craig Hassard, how are you?
I'm very well.
Thank you, Howard.
Nice to talk to you.
It's always a bit of a lottery when you do these digital hookups from the northern hemisphere down to the southern hemisphere.
But I don't know if you noticed this, Craig, but they seem to be getting better all the time, don't they?
They do, which is good for me because I'm certainly not one of the most expert people with all of this technology in the world.
Well, you know, I wouldn't exactly say that I'm an expert, but it is getting easier for all of us to do this.
Now then, I'm taking a bit of a step into, not exactly the dark, but a bit of a walk on the wild side.
My sister came to hear you speak near Oxford, I believe it was, about three weeks ago when you were visiting the UK.
And she just simply sent me, and my sister's not a great one for long emails.
She just sent me this very short email saying, you have to get this guy on.
And that's how I came to email you, and that's how we came to be doing this.
So that's the genesis of all of this.
What were you doing in the UK?
Well, there are a few reasons that I was in the UK.
One was to help run a retreat for a lifestyle approach for people living with MS. We've been running programs in Australia and New Zealand for a number of years with Professor George Jelinek, and these programs are called Overcoming MS. And so we ran, there was interest in having these retreats in the UK as well.
So we had the first of the week-long retreats there and then a public event on MS. And I was very much speaking about the mind, body and mindfulness aspects of the lifestyle management of MS. In my life, I've known a couple of people who've had multiple sclerosis.
It has presented them with unique and very difficult challenges, challenges that these people have been able to surmount, but it's not easy.
Yes.
And there's some evidence coming through from this program that a very comprehensive approach to lifestyle management has been associated with not just holding off the symptoms, but for a significant proportion of people, improvement in symptoms, which is very interesting.
And then after that, the events that your sister would have been at were some talks I was invited to give outside of Oxford on mindfulness.
And mindfulness is both a form of meditation and it's also a way of living and a foundation for approach to psychotherapy these days as well.
So speaking about mindfulness.
Now, we've got to say that you don't come at this from the point of view of somebody who's just kind of discovered this in a magazine and decided to talk about it.
You're a doctor.
Yes, that's right.
In fact, I discovered it, I suppose, in my teenage years when I was trying to deal with my own stresses and pressures of studies at school and university.
And I just sort of intuitively started practicing things that really helped me to cope with the pressure and to stay focused.
And I didn't know what it was that I was practicing.
I thought it was, well, meditation, sitting still, just watching, not getting too caught up in my thoughts.
But I was pretty much just practicing mindfulness at that time.
But it was later when I became a doctor and I had a lot of interest intuitively in the mind-to-body relationship and started teaching at Monash University in Melbourne in 1989.
And I was very interested to introduce some of these kinds of things into the medical course.
Now, just to explain to people up here who may not know, and I've only recently discovered this, and I should know better because I've been to Australia, but Monash University is the biggest university in Australia, isn't it?
That's right.
We've got about 75,000 students at Monash.
And I teach in the medical faculty.
And we have about, I think it's something around 530, 540 first-year medical students every year.
And it's a five-year course.
So there's well over 2,500 medical students.
That's a lot of people.
That's right.
It's quite a big university.
And so over the years, these elements of mindfulness and lifestyle management, what we call the health enhancement program has been introduced as core curriculum.
And some of the meetings I had in the UK as well were universities over there interested in introducing similar programs into medical curriculum.
Well, I want to unpick in some detail this idea of mindfulness, which is the thing that my sister in her very short email said, you've got to get this man on and you've got to talk about this.
But the first thing we have to say is that you're working on what seems to me to be almost, to quote a phrase from Star Trek, the final frontier, because yes, we can go into space and we can plumb the depths of the oceans and we can discover what's down there, the Great Barrier Reef and all the rest of it.
And it's all amazing, isn't it?
But the final frontier of exploration is actually ourselves, isn't it?
Absolutely.
I couldn't agree with you more.
And very often, we're the thing that we understand least if we don't take the time to stop and to be with ourselves and to start to notice our own minds and bodies and how we relate to the world around us.
People who know me know that I'm a journalist and I worked on the radio doing that for years.
I'm not really a person who is impressed by things which are in Inverted Commas New Agey.
I don't do those things.
But increasingly, as I've looked into life and the way that we're living it these days, it seems to me, and it's not just me, it's people who talk to me, people I know, grounded people, that we are getting further away from ourselves, from our connection with what makes us tick and what ties us to the rest of, you know, the rest of everything.
Yes.
And I think, too, that this expresses itself in lots of ways.
And one of them is looking at the figures on the burden of illness in developed countries like Australia and UK.
And depression is in their process of overtaking heart disease as the developed world's number one burden of disease.
And the predictions are by the year 2030, if the trends continue for a little bit longer, that it's going to be way up in front.
And I think this sort of sense of depression and alienation from ourselves and lack of connection to the world around us and looking for happiness in more superficial ways is really expressing itself in the rates of mental illness and also the pace of modern life and the distractedness.
It's bizarre, though, isn't it, Craig, that we have everything now.
We are able to do things.
We're doing one of them right now by talking 12,000 miles, 20,000 kilometers, whatever that might be, right across oceans and right across the earth.
We can do stuff that we couldn't even have imagined.
And yet, so many people don't seem to be happy.
There just doesn't seem to be fulfillment for people anymore.
Yes.
And because if economic affluence was the cause of happiness, for example, we should be, relative to any other historical period, we should be out of our brains with happiness.
But of course, we're not because happiness is not just about economic affluence.
There was a very interesting study that just came out last week, and it was looking at these sort of genetic markers of inflammation, which is a Major sort of marker of health and chronic illness, and looking at people who had happiness through just pleasure and enjoyment in day-to-day life.
So, just I'm talking about just sort of happiness as just pleasure, and that was actually not associated with all of these good markers of health, but people who defined happiness more as a broader concept of meaning and engagement.
It included things that are pleasurable in life, but it was a much broader view of happiness.
Those people had all of these genetic markers that they are measuring were actually, and markers of inflammation were actually far more positive in that group.
So these sort of, I think we really do have to broaden our view of what happiness is and about being in the present moment, about being engaged, having a life of meaning, a life of connection.
There's a lot of very serious science which is starting to show that this is very important for our physical health too.
So working in the medical field as you do, you're seeing more and more people, presumably who the root cause of what they think ails them is not stuff that they might think is what ails them.
It's not some kind of physical malaise that they might have.
It's a disconnect.
Yes, and mind you, the mental and emotional disconnect does have effects on our physical health as well.
And so the two are very much interrelated.
But I'm just taking the stress and the pressure of day-to-day life.
I mean, we do have a stress response or fight-of-flight response, which is pretty good to switch on when we need to get away from a tiger or a shark or something else like that.
But when we're anticipating and worrying and replaying the past and anticipating the future and so distracted in our own heads, we're very often, and also multitasking, trying to keep so many balls in the air at the same time.
Well, then very often we're activating this stress response on a low level day in and day out.
And that comes at a significant cost.
It produces a wear and tear on our system called allostatic lobe.
And that's associated with accelerated aging and poor immunity and increased risk of heart disease.
And also it ages our brain faster, too.
Now, we have to remind people who are listening to this around the world, who may be skeptical, that as we said a couple of minutes ago, you're a doctor and you've got no financial interest, I would guess, in promoting this stuff.
You're interested in the research.
And I just want to differentiate you from the kind of people who appear on American radio before dawn on Sunday mornings selling stuff.
Well, yes.
I mean, there's all of the science and people can look at that as well.
I think that's one of the reasons why people are interested in mindfulness these days, say when it's presented, as I was speaking when your sister was in the audience at the time, is that to actually go to all the refereed medical journals and to actually see what they say.
And the research on mindfulness has gone so far.
For example, Elizabeth Blackburn is an Australian lady who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2009.
And she discovered telomeres, which is like a, is really emerging as a marker of our genetic aging.
And it seems to be a predictor of the risk of the illnesses, chronic illnesses we associate with aging.
And we now know that things like stress and anxiety, depression, high levels of anger and hostility, a disposition towards pessimism, poor sleep, unhealthy lifestyle, these things are associated with accelerated aging of our telomeres and our DNA.
But on the other side of that, of course, exercise and health and nutrition and so on are associated with better telomeres and slower aging, but also things like mindfulness training.
And Elizabeth Blackburn and a group have done three trials now to show that mindfulness meditation actually stimulates the repair enzymes right at the core of the cells and that are associated with a slower rate of genetic aging.
I mean, I guess you're not saying that you can overcome the effects of too much stress, like me, too much black coffee, bad diet, not enough sleep, all the rest of it.
You can't, I presume, counteract all of that by doing this mindfulness technique, which we will explain in a second in full.
Yes.
Well, what they've found is that it stimulates the repair enzyme.
So these telomeres on the end of our DNA are like the little plastic bits on the end of your shoelaces that stop your shoelace from unraveling.
And as we age, those telomeres get worn away and worn away and shorter and shorter.
And the shorter they are, essentially the older we are as far as our DNA is concerned.
And there's a little repair enzyme which really doesn't work too well after we're born.
It sort of pretty much sits dormant most of the time.
But that enzyme, if it's active, is actually trying to keep the telomeres long and in good nick.
And what they've actually found is that the mindfulness training stimulates the activity of that repair enzyme, telomerase, which is trying to rebuild the telomeres.
So can we put right all of this, this is amazing, can we put right all of the damage that we might have done through our high-stress, unhealthy lifestyle here?
Well, that would be a little bit hypothetical.
And you have to sort of say that in a sense, we probably can't reverse aging.
That is, if we do enough of all of this stuff, all of a sudden we'll stop looking like we're, say, I'm 53.
All of a sudden, I'll start looking like I'm 20 again.
But what we can do, it seems, is to put the aging process on a much slower trajectory.
And because we know that if a person, for example, has high demands in their day-to-day life that they're coping poorly with, and say the first studies were done on premenopausal women, by the early 40s they were 9 to 17 years older as far as their DNA was concerned compared to women who had their same demands but were coping well with them.
And so it's like that acceleration in aging.
It's like putting on the brakes, as it were, on the speed of that process progressing.
And are some people, presumably They are, but you tell me, are some people more susceptible to that kind of damage than others?
Yeah, well, people who it's not just have high demands in day-to-day life but are coping poorly with them.
But even high levels of stress for women during pregnancy is already having an effect on the genetic markers in the offspring and the development of the fetal brain.
So the mental and emotional health of the mother is also very important for the development of the fetus and its future.
So if we're talking about a career woman who's quite rightly pursuing her career, living her life, wants to have a child, wants to work right up to the last minute in this whatever high-stress occupation it might be, then it sounds to me as if to avoid passing on this problem, not only giving herself a problem, but passing it on to the baby, it really is vital that the woman in particular does something about it.
Yes, and it's not like to say, oh, shouldn't have a career or shouldn't work, but it's like if going to take on these various demands, you need to be very conscious of developing the balance and the skills in life that are going to help you to meet those demands happily and to know how to pace yourself, to know when to start, when to stop, and to look after yourself in a whole variety of ways.
Because just ignoring self-care and just the chronic stresses and strains and to not learn to deal with those better and to cope with them better does leave ourselves, but also in the context of talking about offspring can leave the offspring much more vulnerable as well.
Okay, we have to explain the big word now, mindfulness.
New word to a lot of people.
What is that?
That's your concept and that's the thing that you're telling us about, but what is it?
Well, I won't claim the concept as mine because in the sense that it's something that's been of interest to people for thousands of years, but in pretty much all the great wisdom traditions for a long time.
But a simple way of thinking about mindfulness is that it's a way of being.
It's perhaps kind of a definition of attention training is one way of thinking about it.
So it's really learning to be present, paying attention to the moment, engaging with the world around us, which is in contrasted to the common sort of mental state that we experience of being preoccupied about the future and imagining and catastrophizing about events that haven't happened yet or living in the past or being distracted and so on.
So this is going to be news to a lot of people who think that what ails us in our heads is often the torment that we go through inside in the brain.
And you're asking us to connect with what is happening in the real world, which might be a very busy world, but you're asking us to be present in the moment and to connect with what we see rather than going off into all kinds of thoughts that may be distracting and damaging.
Yeah, so you take perhaps a person who's got a lot of demands at work.
And so, and there's a whole lot of deadlines that get put in front of the person, and all of a sudden the pressure and the stress goes up.
Now, two people could respond very differently to that.
One person, and this would be the common thing I'm sure that many of the listeners could relate to, is that we can sit there and we can just feel overwhelmed.
The pressure, how am I going to get through all of this?
Will I reach the deadlines?
Why don't I?
What does everybody think if I don't?
Why am I even doing this job?
I wish I wasn't.
I wish it was the weekend.
I wish I wasn't here.
And even if we sort of in amongst all of that, we find it hard to prioritise which one first, hard to focus, hard to be efficient.
And we're doing one thing, but we're thinking about the 10 others we've still got to get to before the end of the day.
And so this is a sort of like a semi-distracted but sort of stressed and anxious state that I'm sure a lot of us could relate to.
Now, the one who might sort of be in that kind of situation but be more mindful, all of this stuff might appear in front of them, a lot of deadlines all of a sudden, might even notice a wave of apprehension about it, but is able to just observe the response, observe the reaction, not to get swept away by it, to sit, to just settle for a few moments, to gather themselves, and then just to look at what's in front of them.
Okay, what's priority number one?
That just sounds to me like another way of saying take a deep breath.
Yes, I think that's an aspect of it because deep breathing is a great way of engaging the attention.
So instead of getting swept away in this tidal wave of emotion that you might feel, as you said, you've got to take this step back and think, okay, what I'm feeling now, and I've had, you know, I have to say, I've worked in very high stress environments all of my career, and I know that gut-wrenching feeling where there are just too many things to do and there's not enough time to do them.
God, I've had that enough times.
And I think maybe I've done that over the years to an extent, not very well.
But you do think to yourself, okay, my body is just reacting to this.
And from what I think you've just said is that you have to be aware of that response in your body and not allow it to go into a sort of negative feedback cycle.
You have to know that that's what your body does and stop it somehow.
Yes.
Well, when we're experiencing things, say, physically or mentally and emotionally, when we experience things that we find very uncomfortable, and it's very easy to get preoccupied about them, for the attention to fixate on them, for us to get to suppress them, to fight with them, to try and make them go away.
And the more that we get reactive to the thoughts and feelings and experiences that we find uncomfortable, the more we actually get preoccupied and our attention fixates on them to the point that we find it hard to engage our attention on what's actually going on in front of us.
I see.
so it's better not to notice them.
Well, to notice them, but without...
To be able to notice the thought, feeling, sensation, but like a train of thought is don't have to fight with the train because it's there, But just don't have to get on the train to allow that sort of thought or feeling to just sort of ebb and flow without getting caught up in it, but to very gently engage the attention on what's relevant in front of us at that very moment.
And if it's job number one, priority number one, to engage the attention with that.
And as soon as the mind gets preoccupied about the future and about jobs number two, three, four, five, etc., to just notice, unhook the attention from that, re-engage the attention with the priority number one.
So it's sort of like the attention training, the practicing of paying attention to the body and the breath in the meditation practice is like a transferable skill of being able to engage attention in whatever needs our attention in our day-to-day life.
And you're saying that at the time you feel this stress, you have to be able to almost meditate.
Well, yeah.
And in a way, life becomes like a moving meditation where the focus of your attention is what's happening within you, around you, in the present moment.
Now, so life, in a sense, becomes like a moving meditation, if you like.
Any athlete who describes experiences of being in the zone or a flow state, you're in a sense describing a meditative or a highly mindful state.
But a very important aspect of being present and attentive in a mindful kind of way also implies an attitude of acceptance or non-reactivity.
That just because we're paying attention doesn't mean that everything we're going to experience is the way that we want it to be or that every experience is going to be pleasant or easy.
But if we can learn to be patient with and less reactive to some of the things that we find uncomfortable, it reduces the intrusiveness of those things quite significantly.
And how do you get to the stage where you're able to put yourself in that stressful situation, like say a busy news desk, which is the one that I know?
What kind of work have you got to do on yourself to get to the point where you can handle that better?
Well, it takes quite a lot of practice and a fair bit of courage.
Say when the sort of field of research that has created more interest in the mindfulness field than probably anything else is when the study started to come through in the early 2000s on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is like a particular, I don't know, a particular kind of emphasis on mindfulness training and how it might apply to dealing with depression.
And because a person's practicing being mindful doesn't mean that the depressive thought or the depressive emotion may not still come in, because it probably will.
But the person is learning to observe those and relate to those thoughts in a different way.
Now, normally what happens when a person, say, with depression, experiences depressive thoughts or depressive emotions, starts to become highly judgmental about themselves for experiencing them, hates the fact that they're there, reacts, suppresses them.
And the more that one fights with and relates to those thoughts and feelings in that kind of way, the more the attention fixates on them, the more that a person has a sense of being overwhelmed by them.
And they actually stay.
They actually, it's almost like we meditate on those negative thoughts and emotions.
And when a person learns mindfulness, and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is like an extension of that, one's practicing being day by day, week by week, is practicing, noticing when those thoughts and feelings arise and being less reactive to them, not having to suppress them, but at the same time, not having to have the attention preoccupied by them.
So to notice them, but to be able to exercise a choice about, is that really where I want my attention to be right now?
Noticing the depressive rumination.
And depressive rumination is just a form of what's called the fault mode of mind.
It's like the mind just goes into its default state and so on.
It's just noticing, oh, there's that pattern of thought again.
That's all right.
Don't even have to think that it shouldn't be there.
But I'm just more interested in this at the moment, which is might be just making a cup of tea just to engage the attention with that.
Might be having a conversation with somebody just to gently re-engage the attention with that.
Might be driving the car just to gently bring the attention back to that.
So it's like to just gently re-engage the attention back with the present moment.
So it's the attitude of acceptance and non-reactivity which helps to reduce the intrusiveness of these thoughts and feelings when they arise.
You make it sound really easy.
I bet it's not.
Yeah, I like to make a distinction between something that is simple in the sense that the principle is very, very simple, but it is not easy.
It really does require some patience and practice.
And in the context of things like severe chronic pain or depression or significant anxiety, et cetera, or coping with cancer, this is not easy.
This requires some careful guidance and support of learning to apply the process so that the person takes this capacity wherever they go in their day-to-day life.
See, the problem is if somebody's depressed, then especially in these straightened times, they might well be depressed by loss of a job, loss of earnings.
Am I going to be able to support myself six months from now with no money coming in and all the rest of it?
You're not going to be able to take away the problem, are you?
Well, no, but certainly if there are things that need attention in our day-to-day life, then they desperately need attention.
So to be mindful is not a way of distracting ourselves from our worries.
But worrying about a problem is a distraction in itself.
So we could be thinking, oh no, what's going to be happening in a month or a year from now?
And, you know, worried to the point of distraction, we find it hard to get motivated and engaged with the demands and the issues that we need to engage with.
I don't know if you've been in this situation, but say a stressed out executive comes to you and they're perhaps working in a high-tech industry and the pace of everything's getting faster and faster and faster every year.
What can you do for them?
What would be the first line of attack that you would have to help that person if you could?
Well, I think now starting by training oneself in mindfulness meditation is a good place now to learn to engage attention to be present with the body with the breathing but the important thing is to take that mindfulness take that attentiveness take that moment by moment presence back into work because for example many people notice when the pressure builds up that they spend a lot of time worrying overthinking things over planning
For example, worry does a good impersonation of planning and preparation.
You know, a person might have an upcoming presentation at their work, and maybe they've prepared their presentation, or maybe they're in the process of preparing it.
But there's a difference between focusing on preparation, which is a present moment activity, and worrying about how it's going to go.
Oh, what if this happens?
What if it doesn't go well?
What if I get asked a question and I don't know the answer?
Okay, well, there's one that I can bring to you about that.
I used to do, for about eight years, I did the live commentary on a live television show, the British Comedy Awards.
Huge television show here.
Masses of pressure, and I did it up until about 2009.
And big show, one night before Christmas, I used to like to go through my material, because they used to let me write my own notes, and I used to just talk around those notes when I was on the air on this show.
I found that my stress, and believe me, you could feel sick in your stomach before doing that thing, because it's such a big gig, and if it goes wrong, it can be very bad for you.
So you've got to get it right.
I used to go through my material, and I used to find that that calmed me down.
I'd do that four, five, six times, and then again just before going on to do it.
I found that routine was almost like some kind of repeating a mantra.
Yes, and what you're doing there when you're getting your attention on your notes, on the preparation, the things that might be useful to say, and you're focusing your attention on practicing and rehearsing that and so on, that's a mindful activity.
That's useful preparation.
And the sense of feeling calmer in large part is because you've actually been cultivating quite a mindful state when you've been doing that.
What is different to that is when the mind distracts.
So there we are.
We need to prepare, and we're finding it hard to actually get very focused, because the mind's slipping off into worry.
Oh, what if it all goes wrong?
What if this happens?
What if that happens?
So worrying is not the same as planning and preparation.
Say in the context of a student at school, and they've got exams coming up, so your students at school would have had their exams a few months ago.
That's right.
And so there's a difference between focusing on the study that a student needs to do, which is a very present moment, mindful thing to do when you're trying to prepare for an exam.
That is very different to worrying about how the exam's going to go.
I noticed myself when I was doing my year 12 exams that early in the year, I was so worried about how I was going to go at the end of the year, I found it hard to actually get very focused on the study I needed to do to prepare for those exams.
The more I was able to notice, and that didn't make sense to me, to be so worried about how something's going to go that I couldn't actually efficiently and effectively prepare for it.
But what I noticed was the more I just stop, just pay attention to what's in front of me, the book, the notes that are there, engage with the maths problem or the physics problem that I'm trying to learn about, the more I engage my attention with what was in front of me, all of a sudden I noticed, oh, I'm not worrying anymore.
And I also started to feel much more productive.
There's a difference between preparing for something and worrying about it.
In the one, we're paying attention to what's relevant in the present moment.
In the other one, we're projecting into a future and living a future that hasn't even happened yet.
We're living it in our imaginations.
And one of the absolute hallmarks of being unmindful is we start to lose the capacity to distinguish between what's present moment reality and what is imagination taken to be real.
When I was a student broadcaster, I remember interviewing in a very posh hotel in London, the global president of the Dale Carnegie organization, you know, the how to make friends and influence people organization.
And he said to me, most important thing, Howard, you've got to remember this.
And I've never forgotten it.
He said, how do you tackle a problem?
And I said, well, you know, you just get into it.
He said, no, you've got to do it in bite-sized pieces.
He said, how do you eat an elephant?
And I said, well, how do you eat an elephant?
He said, in bite-sized pieces, chunk by chunk.
What's the difference between what you've just been telling me about, Craig, and what that man said all those years ago?
Well, I think that's a very important part.
I think it's entirely consistent with that.
It's like mindfully just taking one step at a time.
And each step is very achievable.
It's just one step.
But very much what happens is that we, you know, we could be running a marathon just one step at a time, but we worry about how much further I've got to go.
That places an incredible amount of burden.
Might as well put a 20-kilo pack on our shoulders, worrying about how far we've got to go when actually all we need to do moment by moment is just take one step at a time.
i think it's very consistent with what we're talking about here and that's what people who learn to manage pressure say in in corporate environments or in as doctors in clinical environments and so on are very much able to engage attention in the future without getting too caught up with the what-ifs and maybes.
Now mind you, a capacity to prepare for the future includes being able to envisage this could happen, that could happen.
But there's a difference between doing that in a mindful, objective, constructive way and the mind in a very distractive way, just worrying all the time.
Or the mind just going into the past and betting ourselves up over a past experience by reliving it constantly is very different to mindfully reflecting on a past experience, learning something from it and moving on.
Right.
This sounds to me like some very solid basic psychology that you're telling me about here.
Yeah, mindfulness is really starting to change many approaches to various forms of psychotherapy.
So, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, for example, for depression, has had major effects on reducing relapse rates for people, even who have had multiple episodes of depression before.
And there are a lot of variations on the theme, mindfulness-based stress reduction, was the original sort of mindfulness programs developed by John Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts in the late 70s, early 80s.
He was working with severe chronic stress and major chronic pain syndromes over there at the time when they were first doing their research.
And then, but of course, there's acceptance commitment therapy and dialectical behavior therapy and a lot of other forms of therapy are actually based on mindfulness principles now.
A lot of doctors around the world hand out antidepressant pills like sweets, especially these days.
Doctors have no time to see you.
Certainly in our health service here, they're very hard pushed.
And quite often, from the reports I hear, a lot of people just go to the doctor, tell them, look, I'm having trouble dealing with whatever it might be.
And out comes the prescription, and there you go, you're on the pills.
This to me sounds like a way that you might be able to reduce the need to prescribe.
Well, absolutely.
What you want to do with mindfulness training is to put into the person's own hands their capacity to be aware and to understand themselves better and also to have the self-sufficiency of being able to manage the situation themselves.
So you really want to help a person to be much more self-reliant in how they manage depression, anxiety, pain, etc.
And one of these things that you were talking to me about, if I've got this right, it seems to be a very basic thing that you're put into that situation that's going to make you stressed or depressed or both.
Just simply having the thought, hold on, I know what's happening here, that's enough to start you off on the right track by the sounds of it.
It's the fact that some people let themselves get into this spiral.
Most people let themselves get into a spiral and they never actually hit the pause button to do that.
Yes, that's right.
You see, say take somebody with anxiety and they're working at work and the anxiety could have been going for years, but they start to learn mindfulness and all of a sudden they're at work and they start to notice they're slipping into worry again.
Oh, and it's like they're able to notice it.
Oh, there's the worry again.
Now, as soon as a person is conscious or aware in the moment of what's going on in their own minds, then the window of opportunity to choose opens up.
Oh, is that really where I want my attention to be right now?
I've gotten on that train of thought a number of times and I know where that train goes.
I think I might just gently re-engage my attention with the job I'm doing now.
And it's like the person's able to actually recognize and self-correct.
And this is a very important capacity to have and the person takes it if they practice mindfulness.
It actually awakens the areas of the brain and the prefrontal cortex that are associated both with attention regulation, with executive functioning, with working memory, with decision making, with emotional regulation.
All of these areas in this very important executive functioning area of our brain actually get a real workout and start to actually work a whole lot better.
And are you saying going back to the beginning of our conversation, is this stuff also repairing our DNA like we talked about half an hour ago?
Not just repairing our DNA, it seems to be actually repairing our brains as well.
Because the studies, the neuroscience on this shows that it doesn't just help those areas of the brain to actually work better.
It's been associated with thickening of the grey matter in those very important areas and the memory centers of the brain as well.
So that is, it seems to actually be reversing to some extent the age-related decline or the thinning of the grey matter that happens with age and it seems to actually be reversing that to some extent.
This is amazing stuff.
How come more people around the world are not talking about this?
How come more medically qualified people, prominent people like you, are not actually promoting this?
Because if you think about the amount our National Health Service in the UK could save if people took all of this stuff on board, it must be phenomenal.
Well, yes, I think too much of the biomedical model is always thinking about a drug to do something that we actually need to be doing in simpler ways that actually address the problems.
Because we know that if we're stressed, anxious, and just churning our minds in a very distracted kind of way all the time, we know that's associated with accelerated aging on DNA and brain and everything else.
Well, things like mindfulness are actually getting to the cause of the problem and addressing it at its cause.
Trying to get a drug, for example, and it's been very unsuccessful, but getting a drug to try and reduce the rate of dementia has been a very unfruitful search so far.
But we know a lot about the causes of dementia and mindfulness training seems to be doing something very healthy for the brain.
The brain needs engagement, it needs connection, it needs creativity.
This is mindfulness, if you like, is very healthy exercise for the brain.
Have you just said that modern living and the stress of it and the pressure of it, the way we all have to live our lives, is that, do you believe, feeding this epidemic of dementia and Alzheimer's that we seem to be facing now?
Yes, modern lifestyle, pretty much all the risk factors for heart disease are also the risk factors for dementia as well.
And also what we do in our leisure time is very important too for the brain.
So if we have essentially very, very passive leisure activities as the predominant thing that we do in our leisure time, and the number one passive leisure activity is watching television, but have very little in our lives that is creative, that is interactive, not a lot of social interaction, not a lot of things that are actually mentally stimulating.
If we have that over a long period of time, then it's been well established that this is associated with more rapid aging of the brain and higher rates of dementia.
Conversely, people who have a lot of things that are interesting and engaging, even into old age.
So people in a study recently, I was looking at the brains of people in their mid-70s who had very interesting and stimulating and engaging interactive things that they had in their lives.
They had brains that looked very much like the people in their 20s.
The brain needs exercise as much as the body does.
And exercise for the brain in a healthy way is not worry, but is engagement and creativity and interaction and mental stimulation.
That's fascinating, that those things that some of us do and enjoy could actually be good for us in the long run.
That's right.
And we know, we can sort of feel it intuitively in ourselves.
Well, science has really just come a long way in recent times with our understanding of neuroplasticity.
And it was a medical fact for, which wasn't a fact actually for about 100 years that the brain doesn't make new brain cells.
We now know that it can.
There are stem cells sitting around in the brain that can be stimulated into activity in all sorts of ways, say through mindfulness, through physical exercise.
When we learn something, so when we learn a new skill, it stimulates those areas of the brain to make more connections and to stimulate new cell growth.
So we're only just starting to learn what the full therapeutic potential of all of this is.
But the brain and the whole body, for example, and our DNA has greater capacities for self-regeneration and repair than we've given it credit for.
We don't know yet the full therapeutic potential.
All we know is that the signpost is pointing in a very interesting direction.
And this could be, from what you've said, the most important medical topic there's ever been, because here's the key, if what you say is right, and the research you told me about sounds very impressive.
This could be the key to defeating just about everything up to and including the thing that gets many people at the end, the dementia.
Yes, I think that mindfulness is the single most important generic skill we ever learn, but it makes a lot of other particular things a whole lot more possible.
The problem with it is, though, and the thing that has always over the years, and I say this against myself because it's a flaw in me, I think, that's always sent me screaming for the exit, is this word meditation.
Few times in my life, I've had people try to teach me it, and I am not, as far as I know, I am impervious to being taught meditation because I just simply cannot be still for that length of time.
And when you say still, do you mean what trying to clear your mind?
Yeah, I can remember sitting there with a very, a very good lady who's still working in this field called Sue Washington in Liverpool.
And Sue, I'd interviewed, and she said, let me try this on you.
And she, and look, I was probably, was I 23, was I 22?
I can remember sitting back in this consulting room in a very comfortable chair that reclined.
And we were trying to get me to focus on the different parts of my body and calm them all down individually.
And it worked up to a point, but I was never really susceptible to it.
I think that would go for a lot of people.
Yes.
And I think that there's a lot in the both in the teaching and in the patience and perseverance with the process, because it's a skill.
I mean, imagine if we sort of were 11 months old and we stand up and we take our first couple of steps and fall on our backside.
If we said, oh, you know, oh, I can't walk, I think I'll just sit here sort of thing.
I mean, children don't have that attitude to walking.
They just get back up and walk.
But I think very often as adults, we don't appreciate that a skill like mindfulness and attention as we become less and less mindful as we age to actually start to practice being more mindful is a skill that really requires quite a lot of patience and practice.
Now one of the big challenges that many people face is we sit down in a chair and tune into the body because the body's in the present moment, helps to bring the mind into the present moment, we start to notice how active the mind is, how many thoughts are going through our head.
And if we think, oh, those thoughts shouldn't be there, I've got to get rid of them, I'm meant to make my mind go blank, I'm meant to have laser-like focus on my breathing and it keeps on wandering off, if we get annoyed with ourselves, then mindfulness feels like a very difficult and frustrating practice.
If, however, we just realize, oh gee, I'm just starting to notice how busy the mind is, I'm just starting to notice how distractible the mind is, but we take a soften our attitude to that, oh, that's okay, just noticing that, just gently re-engaging the attention, then it's not necessarily a problem that the mind remains active.
It's the attitude that we take to it that determines whether it's just something that we're noticing or if we take a reactive attitude to it, it becomes a stressor.
So in a sense, it's like we do start to notice how many trains of thought are going through our mind.
From a mindfulness perspective, it's not trying to stop the trains or even standing in front of them, trying to get rid of them, fighting with them, but just learning that we can actually practice exercising a choice about whether or not we get on that train.
In a sense, the stillness of meditation is not trying to suppress or fight with that mental activity, but just learning that we just don't have to react to it when it's there.
What's your definition of the word meditation?
Well, I think the thing that all meditative practices have in common is that they're all mental disciplines and they involve training attention in one way or another.
Implicit in it, as well as the attitude that we've been talking about as well, of acceptance.
But they're all mental disciplines that involve training attention.
Now, in mindfulness, using the body and the breath, essentially using the senses, which are, as we say, coming to our senses or getting in touch.
But other forms of meditation use other things as well, like mantra and so on.
But they all pretty much involve mental disciplines that involve training attention.
Right.
And a lot of it is from what you said about your attitude and being able to change your attitude.
And I think the big thing that a lot of people, including me, are going to take away from this is that that change of attitude to these stresses and things that occur can have benefits beyond our wildest imaginations.
We can only talk about ourselves.
And my listeners know that I had a problem over the last year.
It took me off the radio, stopped me working.
And I'm only just getting back to things or beginning to try to.
I got a virus that left me with tinnitus ringing in the ears.
For a broadcaster, that's just desperate.
And I freaked about This, panicked for months and months and months.
Every time I'd hear the ringing, you know, it's there all the time.
I'd get more and more stressed.
And what I've had to do over these months and months and months of this, and no physician's been able to do it for me, I've had to change my attitude to it so that I zone it out and I don't react to it.
My reaction to my problem sounds like what you've just been talking to me about.
Sounds to me, Howard, like you've been practicing some of the principles of mindfulness, because that's been found to be the most effective treatment for tinnitus is one, for the attention not to be fixated on it, to notice that it's there without getting fixated on it.
And secondly, to just gently re-engage the attention with something else.
So the attitude and the attention is very important.
Funny you should say that because I can actually hear it.
Now that we've said the word, of course I can hear it now, but my reaction to it isn't, oh my God, there's the tinnitus.
It's just, yeah, that's that.
Now back to the conversation.
That's right.
Well, you're practicing principles of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.
The tinnitus, in your experience, could easily be what's happening in terms of the presence of depressive thoughts or feelings or anxious feelings.
And it's cultivating that same attitude and response that you're describing to the tinnitus with those other things as well.
You talk in a very, very calm way about things that are massively important from what I'm just coming to understand from the words that you've said to me.
Massively important for the entire human race.
Yeah, I think collectively we're living in a very distracted time.
And I think this sort of movement back towards mindfulness is like a redressing that kind of imbalance in a way.
I think there's a real need for it across the world, particularly the developed world.
And what are you doing to get the message out?
Well, apart from two days a week at Monash now, I'm purely doing mindfulness training for staff and students.
And so because to me to educate a new generation to understand the importance of this and to have the skills in this area is very important because they'll be the future researchers,
leaders that will be helping to build a more mindful society or to teach, become teachers and teach in a more mindful kind of way in education settings or in corporate environments to help workplaces to be more friendly for the workers and to create mindful working environments for them.
So to me, to educate a new generation is a very important place to start and also particularly for the doctors as well.
So at Monash University, a six-week mindfulness program is core curriculum for all of our medical students and now the physiotherapy and nursing students and other students as well as in other faculties are starting to take on mindfulness as a part of the core training,
core professional training to, you know, because if we ignore our personal developments and just think that learning to be a professional is about the technical skills and knowledge that we need, then I think we're missing the most important part of what it means to educate a professional to move out into a demanding career and environment in the future.
So that's the sort of where I guess I'm spending a lot of my time working at Monash.
But outside of Monash, I do a lot of work with other groups as well.
Like the other day I was speaking to judges at the Magistrates College and last night to school about mindfulness and education.
And what use to a judge would be mindfulness?
Because I would have thought a judge is the most mindful person there is.
You would want them to be certainly because they need to hear the evidence because if they're not paying attention to the evidence I don't know what the decision would be made on.
But it's both from a perspective of mental health and managing the huge workloads and demands that the judges have.
So that's a very important point of engagement as to how to help them to perform in a sustainable way in a very demanding career.
And secondly, there's a whole area that looks at what I mentioned before about executive functioning, so processing information, making decisions.
And there's an interesting area in medicine, but also now in other fields as well, of being aware of our own biases.
That very often we step into situations with unconscious biases and assumptions about them, which actually stop us from looking at the situation in front of us on its merits.
So the technical terms for that are confirmation bias and anchoring bias.
And if we're mindful, if we're aware, we step into a situation and the mind makes an assumption about something.
Oh, this person's guilty.
Oh, wait a sec.
That's just an assumption.
I haven't actually heard the person or heard the evidence yet.
For a doctor, for example, step in, oh, it's just another kid with a cold.
Oh, wait a sec.
I haven't looked at this child yet.
That's just an assumption.
So if a person's aware or mindful, they're able to notice the assumption, but not to take an assumption as fact and to remain objective and actually engage with the evidence in front of them.
So this is a very important higher cognitive skill, if you like, for, say, judges or for doctors and professionals working in very challenging and complex environments.
We talked about the pace of this modern world.
Do you believe that there will always be the ability for people who've been trained in what you've talked about, there'll always be the possibility to overcome increasing levels of stress, pressure, and speed?
Or is there a point at which the human being will simply not be able to cope with it?
I think that there'll be an outbreak of sanity at some stage or other.
And it'll be in a few different ways.
One, we'll just slow the pace of things down in terms of the frenetic fear and so on that's very often driving this sort of pace.
the funny thing is that being able to slow down a bit doesn't mean being less productive.
In fact, it means the opposite.
Better attention is associated with better productivity and less errors.
But also, there's a certain amount of pressure that's from the situations around us, but the far greater amount of pressure is the amount of pressure we project onto situations.
And that's really where we need to start to work, to actually notice that very often we're in a situation and we project in the attitude we take to the situation, we actually generate much more pressure on ourselves than we need to.
So to learn to pace ourselves, as you said before, to take things step by step and moment by moment, throughout the day, throughout the life, it's a very important skill to learn.
I used to find when I was doing broadcasting when I was quite young at it all, that there was like a plateau.
A certain amount of stress was a good thing and made me focus on the task.
But once I got to that plateau and once I got beyond that, then I reached a point where it was feeding back on me and impeding what I was doing and making me worse.
Yes, yes.
I think you're describing some of the important elements of what's called the stress performance curve.
So sort of no stress apathy kind of state is not a very productive state.
And so we often need a bit of stress to lift us out of that.
And so we often notice a bit of stress and the performance goes up.
But it gets to a point and as you describe, more stress actually drops the performance.
The interesting paradox is that when people are actually performing at their peak, so if you ever ask an athlete, for example, to describe times when they're in the zone, when they're performing at their peak, they describe an interesting sort of state.
And that is a state of just such complete engagement with the process that they're engaged in, that there is no room in their thinking for worry about the outcome.
It's an incredibly low stress state.
A person describes being very calm despite the fact that there might be intense activity taking place around them.
There's this combination of responsiveness that in a calm, the mind is very clear.
There's a sort of a sense of enjoyment and mastery and reaction time seems to increase.
Now when athletes are in the zone, they're actually in their most mindful state.
And we should understand, I think, that if we associate that the only driver of performance is stress, then we'll pretty much sooner or later take ourselves over the top of that stress performance curve.
But if we actually understand there is a third option, and that is low stress, but high engagement or attentiveness, then that's a high performance but low stress situation.
That's mindfulness.
And that is the most sustainable model of performance.
If we've got big demands day by day, we really need to learn to function in that kind of way so that we can front up each day and do the job that we need to do.
Sounds like for some of my life, and I'm no paragon, I think I might have done this for some of the big tasks that I've faced where I thought, how the hell am I going to do this?
And suddenly you go into this, I can remember covering the Queen Mother's funeral on British radio, and I had to do news bulletins for a whole variety of stations, and I had to do it all by myself and edit all of this sound material, write a script, and do it on loads of radio stations up and down the country.
And before I went into work, I thought, how the hell am I going to do this?
And I found myself getting into the zone and everything seemed to slow down.
And I was only aware of the task in hand.
And at the end of the day, I wasn't even sure how I'd done it all.
And yet I had.
And I was told that I did it to a very good level, which is great.
And I think I only did that by going into some kind of zone that I didn't understand.
I do now, having talked to you a bit more.
I think that is something that I've been doing.
Maybe a lot of people do.
Could do with doing it better, though.
Yes, and I think that we all have mindful moments.
We all have these kinds of experiences.
But we never sort of stop to say, what's my experience teaching me?
What's this showing me?
How can I cultivate that?
And because we all intuitively know what it feels like, but don't often sort of think, well, how do I develop it?
I can remember when I went into my intern year, and a weekend on at that time was a 64-hour shift without sleep.
Wow.
So that was a weekend on all Saturday, all Sunday, right through into late into Monday.
And of course, you had your two working weeks either side of that weekend shift as well.
And I decided to do an experiment, stepping into that environment.
And the experiment was that I was just going to pay attention to one thing at a time, whatever priority number one was, that's where I give my attention.
And not to waste a molecule of energy in worrying about how long I've still got to go or how much work I've still got to do is just to pace myself moment by moment and not burn up any excess energy, just to do one thing at a time.
And if I ever had a moment between activities, I'd just stop and just take a few seconds of one of those deep breaths and just to breathe out any tension, any stress, and just pace myself like that.
Now, in a sense, without having training and mindfulness at the time, I was pretty much intuitively practicing that, but I was surprised how good I could feel at the end of the 64-hour shift without sleep.
But mind you, that's a ridiculous thing to do to doctors anyway, and they don't do that anymore because, you know, to survive those kinds of things and the error rates that are potentially associated with that sort of sleep deprivation makes no sense at all in hospitals.
Well, I think in some training regimes up here in the northern hemisphere, up here in the UK, I think that still is happening, but I think they're getting to grips with it in some places.
Fascinating to talk to you, Craig.
I could talk to you all day about this stuff.
And it is, on one level, very simple, and yet it's the most fundamental thing, I think.
And that's why it's not the usual run-of-the-mill stuff that I talk about on this show.
But I did think it was important to do this.
And I'm glad that we have.
If people who are listening to this now want to know more about you and your work and mindfulness, where do they go and what do they do?
Well, there are some very good websites that the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness and Bangor University has a very internationally respected mindfulness center as well.
So there's interesting things to read there.
There are books on mindfulness.
Mindfulness for Life is one of the books that I published recently.
And it looks at the various applications of mindfulness, or if a person wants to look at, say, depression, there's a book, Mindfulness, The Mindful Way Through Depression, or there's books on mindful education.
So it depends on what a person's interested in, but there's a lot of literature in the field now.
And I think it's good to sort of look at the science of it as well, because we don't want to just be convinced because it sounds good.
We also want to know, well, you know, is there evidence for its various applications as well?
So the better books will also have, you know, the evidence in them as well and to show how things work.
But there should be plenty if a person starts to look around.
There's should be plenty to look at and to read on mindfulness to extend their interest further.
And learning this stuff is literally the journey of a lifetime.
Now, we have to say, I'm recording this late night in the UK, but it's breakfast time where you are in Melbourne and your working day hasn't even begun, has it?
After I finish speaking to you, I'm going to do a four-hour program this morning with HR, so human resources, four-hour mindfulness program, then to give a lecture to the physiotherapy students on mindfulness on another campus and then back to the main campus to take a program for staff there as well.
So I'm going to have a full day of training ahead of me, Howard, but I'm looking forward to it.
And you sound massively calm about it.
Listen, thank you very much for giving me an hour of your time, Craig.
And let's see if we can teach more people to be mindful because by the sounds of it, it's pretty crucial.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you, Howard.
Thank you, Craig Hassed, very much.
And the concept of mindfulness, I hope you found that useful.
Let me know what you think about this.
And like I say, this is not the kind of topic that I normally do here.
But the great thing about the unexplained is, and here comes that word again that I've used before here, it's a smorgasbord.
It's a great mix of all kinds of things.
And some of them are going to absolutely hit the dartboard.
They're going to hit the target.
And they're going to chime with you and you love them.
And some of them, well, maybe not.
But that's the great thing about doing a show like this because there isn't somebody, a man or a manager or somebody like that controlling what we do.
We just do what you want to do and what I want to do.
And it really is as easy as that.
That kind of democracy in this day and age, you just don't get.
Please give me your feedback on the show, www.theunexplained.tv, the website designed by Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
And if you want to make a donation to the show, that is the place to do it, as well as give me feedback, www.theunexplained.tv.
Like I said at the top of this show, David Icke coming soon.
Possibly Paul Hellier, former Defense Minister of Canada, who believes that UFOs could well be real.
He's going to be on the show.
And many, many other good topics we're going to cover here, too.
Let me have your guest suggestions and we can build those in as well.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained, and I will return to you very soon.
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