S1E7 Building a daily meditation practice with Dr Craig Hassed

Geoff Allix   

Support for the living well with MS podcast is provided by Overcoming MS. A global charity registered in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, whose mission is to educate, support and empower people with MS in evidence based lifestyle and medication choices that can improve their health outcomes. Please visit our website at www.overcomingms.org to learn more about our work and hear directly from people around the world, about the positive impact Overcoming MS has made on their lives. Now, on to today’s episode.  Welcome back to the Overcoming MS Living Well with Multiple Sclerosis Podcast. I’m Geoff Allix and in this episode, we’ll be talking about the mindfulness pillar of the OMS programme. Joining me for this episode is Craig Hassed. Associate Professor Craig Hassed works at the department general practice and he is coordinator of mindfulness programmes at Monash University. His teaching, research and clinical interests include Mindfulness Based Stress Management, mind body medicine, meditation, health promotion, integrative medicine, and medical ethics. Craig is regularly invited to speak and run courses in his native Australia and overseas in health, professional and educational contexts. He was the founding president of the Australian Teachers of Meditation Association, and is a regular media commentator. He writes regularly for medical journals, and has published 11 books. Craig also featured in the documentary ‘The Connection’, about mind body medicine, and wrote the companion eBook, ‘The Mindfulness Manual’, and co-authored with Richard Chambers, the free online mindfulness course in collaboration with Monash University and FutureLearn. So, welcome Craig Hassed. The first thing I want to ask about: when I was going through the OMS book, I came to the mindfulness part of it and everything else was was very much scientific based, and that’s really what drew me to OMS. I sort of thought, well, mindfulness, is that really following this sort of scientific, evidence based approach? Can it really help me that much to do some meditation? So, I just wanted to ask about your thoughts on that: is it really following that evidence based approach? 

 

Dr. Craig Hassed   

Well, absolutely. In 2017, there were close to 1,000 new papers published in peer reviewed scientific journals on mindfulness. So far, in 2018, it probably looks by the end of the year, there’ll be another 1,300 papers published in peer reviewed journals. It’s literally going up exponentially. It started to take off in 1999 when the first papers on mindfulness based cognitive therapy, to prevent the relapse of depression, were published and considering depression is the biggest single burden of disease in developed countries, that was big news in healthcare. And so that’s pretty much when that exponential growth started to take off, in the number of published papers. Now, in terms of George writing the book for OMS, he’s really very much focusing on how much research is there on mindfulness for MS in particular, rather than looking at the broader applications of mindfulness and studies on conditions other than MS. So, George is very much focusing on the MS side of things. And there are a number of studies on that, but many more studies on more common conditions or conditions that tend to attract a lot more research dollars and attention. 

 Geoff Allix   

So actually, it’s not just the MS side of things as well. It’s just good for us in general. 

 Dr. Craig Hassed   

Yeah. And I mean, I can go into a number of these areas. Take something like depression, and people who learn mindfulness are much, much less likely to have further relapses into depression, and people with living with MS are more at risk of depression, not just because of the condition, but the effects that it has on a person’s life, but also some of the biological aspects of the effects on the brain can predispose a person with MS to depression, or coping with anxiety as well. Many, many dozens of studies on depression, anxiety, etc., but some of the interesting things that are particularly relevant, are looking at how if a person enhances their mental and emotional health, how it seems to have an effect on lowering the relapse rate for people who have MS. And that’s really starting to be explained pretty well by our understanding of the field of science called psychoneuroimmunology: how our mental and emotional state influences how our immune system works. And also epigenetics: how our state of mind actually changes the way that our DNA expresses itself. The studies that have looked at this have found that people with MS, who learn to enhance their mental and emotional health, seem to have less new lesions, when they’ve looked at scans or less relapses when they actually follow them over a period of time, than people who’ve got MS who are coping poor in terms of mental and emotional health and don’t do things to enhance their mental and emotional health. 

 Geoff Allix   

So what actually happens to the body when it is under stress and is not in a calm place? You know? 

 Dr. Craig Hassed   

If, for example, we’re walking through the jungle and a tiger steps out of the forest, and it is looking at us and sizing up lunch, then we have what’s called a ‘fight or flight response’. And that’s like our body going into a turbo charge sort of situation. It’s a little turbo charge button in our brain called the amygdala. So you perceive a threat and bang, the adrenaline and the cortisol and all these chemicals pump out and put our body into a totally different gear, to help us to get out of danger, hopefully, so we fight or we fly, or do both. Now, one of the changes that happens when we’re in that situation, is that there’s a range of chemicals pumped out interleukins and cytokines, these are fancy names for chemicals that actually change the functioning of our immune system. So these will give a short-term burst to our immunity, like it puts our immune system on high alert, which of course is pretty good if a target takes a bite out of you, but you get away, you want your immune cells to try and fight off the infection and so on. But these effects, if it goes on for more than just the immediate short-term, produces in our system psychological emotional stress and can actually lead to what’s called immune dysregulation. So we get more inflammation, but we get less defenses against coughs, colds and infections. Now how that comes about, really, with chronic stress is because it’s one thing when you’ve got a five minute fight or flight from a tiger, and then you switch the response off, and you gotta get back to back to basics and enjoy some time with the family, for example. But when we’re getting stressed and anticipating – ‘what if this happens?’, ‘what if that happens?’ – worrying about things in the future, or when we’re going over things that have happened in the past, you know, an argument we had with somebody, a decision we made 20 years ago – ‘I should have done this’, ‘why did I do that?’ – the vast majority of times we activate the fight or flight response, it’s got nothing to do with what’s happening in the present moment. If your listeners, for example, reflect on whether they’ve ever been awake at three in the morning, and not only awake, but awake and stressed and hassled and you know, under the pump, and just consider what life is throwing at you at three in the morning. Well, the chances are that it’s a soft mattress, a soft pillow, a warm dinner and a quiet room. I mean, life can’t get any more comfortable in that. And yet in our mind, in a world of pain, anticipating 100 days work in our head before we even get out of bed in the morning. And so when we activate that response, not over what’s happening in the present moment, but over our imagination, the mind projecting and we taking that imagination to be real, the body translates that into the fight or flight response. Adrenaline, cortisol, always things happening at the back all of these interleukins and cytokines, these chemicals that actually affect the immune system and are pumping out but they’ve got nowhere to go and nothing useful to do. That produces immune dysregulation: increased inflammation, which is a very bad thing for inflammatory conditions in autoimmune conditions, including MS, but also we get less defense against coughs, colds and infections. So we know that people who have MS, who have significantly higher rates of psychological emotional stress, who are more socially isolated, which of course affects our emotional health as well, who have major life stressors, but stressors that the person doesn’t feel like they’re dealing with well, all of those things can increase the number and severity of relapses. There was one interesting study that looked at people who’d experienced life stressors (some events happening in a person’s life for people with MS) and did it or didn’t it increase the number of relapses. And this study actually went a step further. What they actually found was that people who experienced life stressors, but experienced them in a positive way – what I mean by that is that the person perceived that the event drew on their resources, it was challenging, but they learned about themselves, they grew through their challenging experience – so they perceived it was a stressful, but positive challenge in their lives, as it was making them stronger, then those people actually had a reduced number of relapses. Whereas people experiencing the same kind of events but just perceived them in a very negative way – ‘this is awful’, ‘I wish it wasn’t happening’, ‘I can’t stand it’, ‘it’s happening and I feel helpless’, ‘I can’t do anything about it’, ‘it’s just wrecked my life’ – and so the person who would ruminate on it, get reactive, and not, in a way, turn the event to good effect, but they were the group that were much more at risk of having more relapses in the future. 

 

Geoff Allix   

Okay, so it’s really those long-term stressors that are the issue. So say, short-term stress might save you from a traffic accident, or a tiger, depending on where you live, and that’s not actually a problem, because that might save your life. It’s that long-term underlying ‘I hate my job’, relationship issues, something like that, those long-term underlying issues are the ones we really need to look out for. 

 Dr. Craig Hassed   

Yeah, it’s an interesting work on telomeres  (they’re bits of our DNA that are our best marker of our biological age, how fast we’re aging down to the level of the DNA of ourselves) and one study, just to illustrate that point, is that we know that psychological and emotional stress makes our DNA age fast and that increases the risk of various chronic illnesses by shortening the telomeres. One study was looking at African American men. Experiencing racial discrimination didn’t necessarily damage the DNA more, it more mattered how the person dealt with it. So in the study group they were looking at, if they experienced racial discrimination, but they internalized it, i.e. ruminate, get angry, relive it 100 times, 1,000 times, etc., then it had an effect that was measurable down to the DNA. Those who experienced it, but did not internalize it, did not keep reliving it and reactivating it, then it had no particularly negative effect. And I just mentioned that, not because it’s an MS study, but just to illustrate the poin:, it’s that rumination, it’s that internal reliving a stressful event 1,000 times, before it’s even happened and may never actually happen. That’s the kind of stress that we need to deal with. Now, when we’re worrying about the future, reliving the past, by definition, we’re not mindful i.e. we’re not grounded in the present moment. So we could be standing at our kitchen bench making a cup of tea, and there’s a tea bag, or a very nice herbal tea just there and we’re just jiggling a tea bag in the tea cup. And, if we’re mindful, well, that’s all that’s actually going on in the moment. If we’re not mindful, we’re probably arguing with somebody in our head and anticipating a conversation we’re gonna have later on and wondering how I’m going to get through all of the deadlines before the end of the week. So we turn simple moments into complicated moments, because we’re not mindful and we’re in what’s called default mode. That’s the mode of mind we go into when we’re not paying attention, and not grounded in the present moment. 

 Geoff Allix   

And as someone who’s an expert in this, do you still find that you’re always in the present moment? Because I still find all these thoughts that come in, they’re uninvited if you like, they just appear and it’s almost constantly. But yeah, during your tea bag stirring situation, where there’s nothing going on, that’s when they come in, when nothing else is really happening. Do you still find that? I mean, is it a continual thing that you need to always be aware of? 

 Dr. Craig Hassed   

Very much a work in progress. You know, somebody that many people would consider quite experienced in mindfulness, but that doesn’t mean that the mind doesn’t wander off. It doesn’t mean that worries don’t come into the mind. I think what happens with the experience over time is that we get better at noticing ‘oh, there’s worry again’, ‘oh, there’s distraction again’, ‘there’s rumination’, so we get better at noticing. And because we’ve actually noticed it a number of times and not going to be judgmental about it, it just got me curious to see if ‘oh, that’s, that’s a worried train of thought, I’ve gotten on that 1,000s of times’, ‘oh, yes, I’m really quite aware of where that goes, and the futility of it’, etc. So it gets easier to notice the trains of thought we get and it gets easier and easier, even when that train of thought comes into the mind to start to make a choice. But do I want to get on that train, that is to let the train come and go, without being moved by it. It’s not so much a problem that the thought comes into the mind. It’s what we do when it’s there. So we get better, in a sense, of being able to choose which trains of thought to get on and which ones to leave alone. Because occasionally, we do have useful thoughts, you know, about every 10 or 15 years, I say, with a tongue in cheek that we have a useful thought. And it’s worth giving attention to. But if we’re not mindful, we get on any old train of thought, and go wherever it goes. And it’s interesting, new studies on the brain show that mindfulness stimulates new brain cell growth and that includes executive functioning and memory circuits, and so on, it quietens down the amygdala, the stress center in the brain. But it also switches areas of the brain associated with what’s called self monitoring and cognitive control much more quickly. So over time, a person gets better at noticing, that’s the self monitoring, there’s worry, rumination is catastrophizing. So the person gets better at identifying cognitive control, which means a person’s more able to choose to engage with it, or leave it alone. And that starts to protect the person from getting on those anxiety provoking, or depressive, rumination type of trains of thought, to use that metaphor. 

 

Geoff Allix   

And if someone really can’t get out of anxiety or depression, or are just getting really worried and they just can’t deal with this long-term stress and get out of that worry, is it worth going on to do something like counseling or getting professional help to try and break them out of that cycle? 

 Dr. Craig Hassed   

Oh, by all means. If a person is dealing with any significant mental or emotional health issue, then by all means, get some support from a mental health professional. Even if a person’s not but just really wants the counseling and a sort of a sounding board to understand ourselves better. I mean, one of the things that was notable about George was that, you know, he’s clearly coping very well with it but then, but he really wanted to turn this adverse event to very good effect in his life, and to really be a stimulus to understand himself better, to really reflect on his life. I think that that is a very useful thing to do. So we might want to speak to a counselor, even if we don’t have anxiety or depression, but just if we want to come to understand ourselves better. And I think that mindfulness is something that can certainly very much help to facilitate that because we will start to notice more of what’s going on in our mind, if we practice mindfulness, we will start to notice the distractibility of the mind, we will start to notice the patterns of rumination and negative self talk that we’re constantly engaging in. And from a mindfulness perspective, it’s not just about noticing that. We need to develop the capacity to notice, but to practice not judging it, not having to criticize it, not having to elaborate on ‘why do I do that, I can’t stand that’, and getting reactive to it. So we learn to notice in a gentle, accepting, self compassionate kind of way. But having noticed that, we then need to exercise the ability to choose what to engage our attention with. So we might be walking along the street, and the mind wanders into worry or catastrophizing about something, and then we notice it: ‘oh, there it is again, that’s okay. I’m a human being, having a human moment. That’s okay.’ But we might just bring our attention back to just feeling the body walking, just feeling the temperature of the breeze just flying past us. We might just connect with the sounds of the birds that are singing in the tree. The senses, from a mindfulness perspective, are the gateway back to the present moment, back to reality, because we come out of this default mode thinking, worrying, ruminating, and that’s why it’s pretty much called coming to our senses. Because we just reconnect with what’s just happening in the present moment and come out of our dream world that we’re more often than not living in. 

 Geoff Allix   

There’s some other, I think probably connected things, that are talked about in the book as well, which I wanted to ask you about. One them was faith. It says that faith is a really useful thing. Now, what if we’re not religious? Is it something that would help to have a religious faith? Or is that unnecessary? And where does faith come into this sort of mind body connection? 

 

Dr. Craig Hassed   

Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of words we could use for this faith, spirituality, meaning. There’s a quote I often give, a Carl Jung quote: ‘the lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend’. And so whatever terms we feel comfortable with. I mean, a lot of people aren’t necessarily religious, but we could be spiritual or philosophical in a way where we look to understand the meaning in things, and we look to understand our place and connection with the people and the world around us. We seek to understand things in a deeper way. Many people could be religious, but maybe not very spiritual. That is, it’s just a dogma, and it’s not necessarily something that really enriches their life. But I do think that this sort of, whether we call it faith or spirituality, or philosophical perspective on life, or the the active search for meaning, I do think it is a basic human need. And what we know from the research that looks at a person’s coping with adversity in life, and especially a potentially debilitating condition like MS, or any other condition, or potentially life threatening condition, like cancer, for example, if a person has an active search for meaning, as spiritual, philosophical dimension to their lives, they cope better with it. They’re less likely to feel helpless and hopeless, and more likely to have better outcomes as well, particularly in terms of quality of life. And so I do think it’s one of those basic human needs, that often gets ignored until life comes along and gets a great big club and gives us a whack and wakes us up. And then all of a sudden, oh, what is really important to me what really matters in life, and I suppose that’s one of the ways in which adversity can be turned to good effect. 

 

Geoff Allix   

Okay, and another sort of connected things that we mentioned is keeping a diary. This is one I’m particularly bad at, actually, I keep meaning to do it, but haven’t got around to it. But it’s mentioned that keeping a diary can actually be a useful technique. Partly because you might track how you’re physically feeling – it was because of what I was eating or exercising or doing mindfulness techniques, or there is something that had a positive benefit – but apart from that, the actual act of keeping a diary itself can be beneficial. Is that something you’ve come across? 

 

Dr. Craig Hassed   

Yeah, it helps to deepen reflection. It helps us to, in a sense, get thoughts that rattle around in our head that we often ruminate on and put them down on paper and helps us to be a little bit more objective about them, to kind of get more perspective on them. So it can be a great way of helping to deepen learning and insight to understand ourselves better, I suppose, to get perspective and priorities in our life. And it’s one of the things that we do when we’re running programmes, mindfulness programmes for all of our medical students and physiotherapy students etc. at Monash, where it’s a part of core curriculum. One of the things we do is that the students keep a reflective diary. And it helps them to deepen their learning, helps them to be more reflective, helps them to acknowledge the things that are important to them, to acknowledge the lessons that they’re learning from their experience. So it’s can be a very excellent thing to do to spend some time on a regular basis to sit down, just quietly reflect and and get those thoughts onto onto paper, and really, I suppose, consider them in a deeper way. 

 

Geoff Allix   

Thanks. Yeah, I think I really must do that. It’s one of those things I should do, I should buy a nice diary. That would be the first step, I think. A question that comes up a lot: you see the term mindfulness, that used to always be meditation, and now mindfulness is used much more. Are they one in the same thing? Or is meditation a factor of mindfulness? Or vice versa? I know they’re just terms, but are they essentially the same thing? Or are they slightly different things? 

 

Dr. Craig Hassed   

Well, mindfulness, you could call a form of meditation. There is a form of meditation called mindfulness meditation, and there are a few variations on the theme. But it’s not just meditation. Mindfulness in its fullest sense also includes how we live. So to live more mindfully, like when we’re eating, to really taste our food, when we’re communicating, to pay attention to the person we’re speaking to, when we’re driving the car, to actually pay attention to what’s happening on the road, when we’re resting in bed, just to learn to rest, and just to be, without having to be somebody, be somewhere, be something. So mindfulness is as much a way of life as a form of meditation. People often break it down into the formal practice of mindfulness, which you could call mindfulness meditation. And that’s like the cornerstone of developing mindfulness: sitting in the chair, doing nothing other than practicing paying attention to being present in a mindful way. And then there’s the informal practice of mindfulness, and that’s what we do for the other 23 hours and how many minutes in the day, where we practice being present and engage. The thing is, it’s very revealing. Mindfulness is very revealing. It will show us stuff, I often draw the analogy with the matrix. In The Matrix (the film), you take the red pill and you wake up, you take the blue pill and stay asleep. And it’s pretty much like taking the red pill. So we do start to notice more. But it’s living mindful, there’s no point being mindful for five or 10 or 20 minutes or 30 minutes in our day, then being unmindful for the other 23 and a half hours in the day, because we’re missing our life. And we’re also often lapsing into patterns of rumination and worry, and complicating simple moments in our life and not enjoying and engaging with our life in the way that we can and should. 

 

Geoff Allix   

So, if we aim then to say, I did a half hour formal meditation a day, but then actually underlying the whole time trying to live more mindfully, is that the aim that we’re going for? 

 

Dr. Craig Hassed   

That’s right. So we take something like anxiety or depression, we’ve mentioned before, so a person sits in the chair, and notices that the mind just launches into worry, launches into negative self talk the whole time, that’s just two forms of default mode. And the person notices that, and practices being gentle with themselves, ‘it’s okay’, in a sense, they’re more accepting and gentler, a more self compassionate attitude with which they noticed that, but very gently, bringing the attention back to the body/the breath/whatever the person’s resting point for the attention is, and the mind goes off again, just practice very gently bringing it back. Off again, practicing bring it back. And so the person practices that, but then as they’re going about their day to day life, and sitting in the car, and not paying attention to where they’re driving because the mind thinks ‘Oh, I’ve got so much work to do today’, ‘oh, I hope this person doesn’t say this’, ‘I hope this doesn’t happen’. And all of a sudden, the person notices there is worry, there’s rumination. There it is, again. So just brings their attention back to looking at what’s happening in front of them, comes back to just feeling the steering wheel in their hand. So that the person develops the capacity throughout their life, to make a choice about what to give attention to, or what not to. There are things worth giving attention to, but the mind comes up with a lot of stuff that’s just either a waste of time or just downright harmful. And you see, the thing is, the life that we have, if we’re not paying attention, we’re missing. It’s like paying money to go to see a movie and just spending the whole time in a dream world and somebody says, ‘how was the movie?’, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t watch it. I was mentally somewhere else’. So we just pretty much waste our money. And so we have a life and that life is not just for enjoyment, but it’s also for learning. It’s also for insight, and we waste all that if we’re not mindful, if we’re not present and aware and attentive. 

 

Geoff Allix   

So if I’m planning half an hour to do this formal meditation part of that day – it was a good (it might have come from the OMS book) quote, where someone is saying, because I think the trouble is finding that half an hour in a busy life that most people in modern society lead. And there is a quote somewhere saying, ‘if you can’t find half an hour each day to meditate, you probably need to meditate for an hour’. Forget who the quote’s from. I would tend to follow an audio track while meditating, is that necessary? Or is it useful? Would you start out doing that? Do you still follow a guided meditation? Or can you eventually just do it on your own without that? Or where do you start with meditation? 

 

Dr. Craig Hassed   

Well, guided meditation can be very helpful, especially in the initial stages. I like to make a comparison, sorry for all these metaphors, but it’s a little bit like putting training wheels on the back of a bike. And those training wheels on the back help to keep balance and not fall off the bike. So the guided practice will tend to make it easier, and more often than not, more pleasant because the person guiding the practice is doing two main things: the first thing is that they’re providing reminders to just come back, to the body, to the breath, or whatever form of variation of a practice the person’s using. So there’s a reminder to come back. But the second thing is that, hopefully, the tone of the voice guiding the practice is being kind of gentle and nonreactive. It’s not like ‘bring thethe attention back! Work! If your mind goes off, that’s hopeless!’. The person, very gently ‘if you notice the attention wander, just noticing that very gently, allowing the attention to come back’. So it’s this non reactive attitudes been, in a sense internalized during the practice. Because what we’ve noticed is if we experience something like anxiety or anger, and we get frustrated and irritated and try desperately to make it go away, and get rid of it and fight with it, what we’ll notice is that it escalates, it takes it to a whole new level. And so we’re learning that attitude is really important. So, the guided practice helps, certainly. But ultimately, we want to be independent. We want to internalize that awareness and also internalize that non judgmental, self compassionate kind of attitude. When you practice without the guided practice, it’s oftentimes not quite as easy: mind goes off more, and we get a little bit more judgmental with ourselves. And so to that extent, it looks like that’s the less successful practice. But if we actually reframe it and say, well, training wheels on the bike training wheels off, which one’s easier and more pleasant on training wheels on which one’s going to train your balance more, training wheels off. So practicing without the guidance, once we’re familiar with it, the technique etc., is ultimately the best practice, even though it’s not always as easy as it is with a guided practice. Another important thing on this topic is that many people get very critical of themselves. So they try to practice it. And there’s some idea, I’m meant to be in a bubble of bliss, I’m meant to make all my distracted thoughts go away, I’m meant to just be totally calm and at peace, and one with the universe and everything else. And I sit down to practice mindfulness, and my mind is all over the shop, and get critical and judgmental about that. And then I tried it, it didn’t work for me, I tried it a couple of times, it didn’t work for me. And it really, in a sense, it’s not like that. I mean, imagine if a child took that attitude to learning to walk, you know, a child gets up to a full stand and then lets go of the table and falls on its backside. The child doesn’t go, ‘oh, can’t walk, it’s hopeless, I tried it. It doesn’t work, I think I’ll just have to sit here for the rest of my life because I can’t walk’. A child just sort of plops onto the backside, and then just presses up to a full stand again, lets go of the table, tries to take another step, plops on the backside. And the child’s just learning. Those falls are not signs that the child can’t walk. That’s just the stuff of learning. And so we shouldn’t be judgmental about whatever experience we have or think we should have. We just practice the process. We’re just patient with ourselves. We realize that it takes time like anything else. There’s expertise, it takes time to cultivate that. A child just gets back up and walks and then soon its walking, and then it’s toddling and then running and then doing all sorts of exceptional things over time. So we should be just very patient with ourselves and realize this is a process like anything else. It takes time to cultivate that, the capacity to do it. 

 

Geoff Allix   

And starting with the guided mindfulness sessions, there are, just to mention to everyone, quite a few guided sessions on the overcomingms.org website. And there’s various different lengths and subjects in there. So there’s quite a lot of resources there already. Also, I’d love to ask you to come back and do a guided session for the podcast in a few months time. Also, just to because I’ve come across a mindfulness course that you’ve been involved with at FutureLearn, which is a free mindfulness course that you can sign up to. I think when one course finishes, it just starts again, the next month or something… 

 

Dr. Craig Hassed   

It goes live three times a year. The introductory course is mindfulnes for well being and peak performance. And that’s a free four week, online course on the FutureLearn platform. But it goes live three times a year. And for those who’ve done that introductory course, then there’s maintaining a mindful life, which is a four week extension, which a person could do, which is free also. I’d suggest start off with the mindfulness for well being in peak performance one first, and then move on to the other one, which has got some topics that really do require a basic experience and mindfulness. But that’s a totally free course and there are some great resources as well. There was a big review of the best of all the mindfulness apps in the world in a journal, and the best in the world was the Headspace from the UK. And second was Smiling Mind, which is based in Melbourne. Those two, according to a whole range of criteria, were found to be the most excellent mindfulness apps. So those kinds of things can be great resources to use as well. 

 

Geoff Allix   

I think you’ve answered an awful lot of my questions. I do think it’s one of the things when you speak to people who’ve been on the OMS programme for quite a while, I think it’s the thing that most people find hardest to keep up with and that they would admit to letting slip a bit. The diet things quite easy, because you’re going to eat three times a day. So that’s a given. Exercise is quite like, ‘okay, I’ve got my sessions in the gym’, or whether it’s walking/running, you’ve kind of planned it. And I think it’s very easy to let the mindfulness slip. You think, ‘oh, actually, I’ve got this project to finish’ or something. So it’s really useful to hear all that evidence, and it really does – you know, there’s a lot of science behind it – help us. 

 

Dr. Craig Hassed   

Yeah, and if we’re very busy people with a full life, for example, then we need mindfulness even more. It’d be like saying, ‘well, look, I’ve got a lot of wood to chop, I haven’t got time to sit down and sharpen my axe’ and saying ‘well, wait a sec, you’ve got a lot of wood to chop, you need to take time to sit down and sharpen your axe’. The other thing is that when we’re trying to make other changes in our life, like changes to diet and exercise and so on, then cultivating some mindfulness makes those changes a lot easier. Getting the reins on the mind, is one of the most challenging things, but it’s the mind that really decides what food we put in the mouth, whether we smoke or don’t smoke, whether we get out of bed and exercise or don’t. It’s the mind that decides that. So getting the reins on the mind is really important to help to support all of the other essential pillars in the OMS programme. 

 

Geoff Allix   

Okay, with that, I think we’ve probably had a long enough session now. I’d just like to thank you very much for doing this session and joining me on this podcast. Craig Hassed, thank you very much for doing the mindfulness session. 

 

Dr. Craig Hassed   

It’s been a pleasure, Geoff. 

 

Geoff Allix   

With that, I’d like to thank you all for listening to this episode of Living Well with MS. Remember that there is a wealth of information at overcomingms.org. Once again, that’s overcomingms.org. There you can find OMS friendly recipes and exercise tips. Connect with other OMSers in your local area through our OMS Circles programme, and learn about the latest research going on in the MS world generally and related to OMS specifically. I encourage you to register on the site and stay informed about the latest news and updates. I also encourage you to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. And please feel free to share it with others who might find it of value. Let us know what you think about the podcast by leaving a review. And if you have ideas for future episodes, we’d love to hear from you. So please contact us via our website overcomingms.org Thanks again for listening, and for joining me on this journey to Overcoming MS and Living Well with Multiple Sclerosis. I’m Geoff Allix and I’ll see you next time.