Willem Kuyken, PhD (#02)

07/09/20 • 38 min

When I began my year-long documentary experiment to see what would happen to my health and wellbeing if I meditated every day for a year, a key motivating force was a special issue of The Lancet which declared that every country in the world is facing and failing to tackle a host of mental health issues.

Crucially, the special issue was published before COVID19 changed the world and introduced a whole new range of global mental health challenges.

This is why I'm especially keen to share this week's podcast with you. Now, more than ever, we need robust discussions about "the how" of both preventing and treating mental health problems.

This podcast is my extended interview with Professor Willem Kuyken, who is the director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre and at the forefront of investigating how mindfulness can be used for mental health.

Although mindfulness is sometimes dismissed as "woo woo" in medical circles, Willem's research has earned him a place among the Who’s Who of influential scientists because his papers investigating mindfulness and depression have ranked him in the top one percent of researchers cited in the field.

In this podcast you'll hear:

Why it's significant that a mindfulness intervention has been shown to be equal to medication for preventing recurrent depression
If teaching mindfulness to teenagers can prevent them from developing depression later in life
Why there's a good reason to be optimistic about mental health treatments in the future

I hope you enjoy the extended interview with Willem. It's such a pleasure to be able to share the material that sadly hit the cutting room floor when I made my documentary My Year of Living Mindfully.

Crucially, the special issue was published before COVID19 changed the world and introduced a whole new range of global mental health challenges.

This is why I'm especially keen to share this week's podcast with you. Now, more than ever, we need robust discussions about "the how" of both preventing and treating mental health problems.

In this podcast you'll hear:

Why it's significant that a mindfulness intervention has been shown to be equal to medication for preventing recurrent depression
If teaching mindfulness to teenagers can prevent them from developing depression later in life
Why there's a good reason to be optimistic about mental health treatments in the future

Previous Episode

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD (#01)

In today’s episode you’ll be hearing what happened when I chatted to Jon Kabat-Zinn - who many people consider to be the father of mindfulness in the West. This was a key interview that I did during the production of my latest documentary called My Year of Living Mindfully. To give some context to this conversation. I was inspired to make the film for two reasons. Firstly I wanted to turn my mind to the mental health epidemic. After I made my first film The Connection I was acutely aware of the importance of looking after my mental wellbeing as well as my physical wellbeing. And I knew from a special issue of the leading medical journal, The Lancet, that every country in the world is facing and failing to tackle a host of mental health problems. And secondly on a personal level I was struggling. I had just had my second child, I was overwhelmed with insomnia, and I was dealing with chronic pain from my autoimmune disease that causes arthritis throughout my body. So I went in search of the mental equivalent of a daily 30-minute workout, or the mind’s five servings of fruit and vegetables a day. – Something that I could do, and something I could teach my kids, to protect, nurture and nourish our minds. And that’s how I landed on mindfulness. Jon was the first interviewee on my list. Jon is a mindfulness luminary because in the late 1970s, he developed an eight-week program called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction or MBSR. It was designed to offer hope to chronically ill people for whom conventional medicine had done all it could. MBSR has been shown to improve everything from anxiety and depression, to quality of life and burnout these days is embedded into the fabric of many hospitals, schools and even parliaments. In the last three years alone, hundreds of scientists have published studies to investigate what MBSR does and for whom.

Next Episode

Elissa Epel, PhD (#03)

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