#1 - Why Talking Is Important

Welcome to Get Talking, a series of podcasts developed by the team at Get Mentally Healthy. Do you know how humans developed talking? Or why it's so important for our wellbeing? In this first episode Jason and Christine will answer those questions and discuss why it should be encoraged and the reasons to normalise talking about subjects such as mental health in the workplace. 

Transcript

Intro  00:00
Get Talking is a series of podcasts produced by the team at Get Mentally Healthy. This is an organisation set up to educate and open up discussion around mental health issues in the workplace. Our aim is to help companies improve wellbeing for their employees.

Opening Song  00:19

Jason Welch  00:32
Hello and welcome to Get Mentally Healthy's first ever podcast, which is quite exciting for us, especially given the circumstances we've faced in the past couple of months. We do hope you're all staying safe and well.  I'm Jason Welch. I founded Get Mentally Healthy just over 12 months after I personally had a breakdown and had to take a step back. I used the time to kind of really understand more about my physical and mental wellbeing. This was after 20 years spent working in corporates. I had various leadership roles, I had a good understanding of their cultures, some of their challenges, especially what the employees face on a day-to-day basis. And as I mentioned earlier, I've seen firsthand the impact of mental health, not only the impact it had on me, but also the knock-on effects it had on my family, in my case my wife, our four children, both our sets of parents, and also my brother. So that's why I find myself here today. I'd also like to introduce Christine, who is my business partner at Get Mentally Healthy, but perhaps Christine, it would be better if you introduced yourself and told us a bit more about yourself.

Christine Haworth-Staines  01:39
Yeah. Hi, Jason. I'm Christine Haworth-Staines, I'm a psychologist chartered in the UK and registered in France where I live and have worked for the past 15 years. I've many years of experience helping people overcome anxiety and psychological problems. On a personal note I'm married, with a family. I live in the French countryside, we have sheep, and chickens, and cats, and a dog. I love walking in the mountains, I love singing, but not at the same time (laughs), and I'm currently trying to learn the bass guitar. I'm a very big fan of Leonard Cohen, and of Lana Del Rey but I'm not really sure about what that says about me, so...

Jason Welch  02:24
Yeah, I won't comment there but thanks Christine (laughs). And now on to today's topic which is why talking is so important to our mental health. Given the recent events we've kind of all faced, you know, Christine and I got talking and we thought it was important to actually talk about the importance of talking for our mental health, as a relevant topic to begin our podcast journey. In today's world, you know, we tend to take speech for granted and I'm not sure how much we really understand about how it all began. So I guess Christine, a good place to start would be to understand more about why we speak. So my first question to you is, how has speech evolved in humans?

Christine Haworth-Staines  03:07
Wow, well...ok, that's certainly a big question for this first podcast. I'm not really sure how well equipped I am to answer how speech has evolved in humans very accurately but I'll give it a go. I mean, the main reason is that scientists are still debating this issue. But it's believed speech probably evolved around 150 thousand, 200 thousand years ago, at the time modern Homo sapiens evolved. Speech developed alonside art and music, and other abstract behaviours, and it's enable skills to be passed on, so for humans to be able to adapt to their environments, unlike other species. Humans have developed intellectually because they have this sophisticated language. I mean all animals communicate but they communicate very basic needs, such as hunger, or danger. But as humans, we communicate ideas.

Jason Welch  04:05
So hold on, let me just get this bit right, to make sure I've got a good understanding. What you're saying here is that speech has developed alongside our need to communicate ideas?

Christine Haworth-Staines  04:16
Exactly, yeah. There was a German biologist, Fitch, who identified this 'drive to share thoughts'. In fact there's a very long German name for this, I'm not gonna attempt to pronounce that right now. After saying that, I think what you might be more interested in is something called The Theory of Mind, which, I don't know, you may already have heard of it.

Jason Welch  04:40
No, I'll be honest, I haven't. So...so what's the Theory of Mind then?

Christine Haworth-Staines  04:44
Okay. Well, put simply, it's the fact that humans understand that other people have thoughts. There's actually an interesting test that's used to identify a developmental stage in children, and if I explain this to you, it might clarify what I'm trying to explain. A child will be shown a scene with two characters. So, imagine this: two characters, Sally and Ann. Now, Sally and Ann put a toy in a basket  and then Sally leaves the room and then Ann hides the toy in a box, she puts the toy somewhere else. Now, children under the age of four to sort of five years would reason, when asked, that when Sally comes back to the room she'll look for the toy in the box, that is, in the new place.

Jason Welch  05:34
Ok, that's actually quite interesting.

Christine Haworth-Staines  05:37
Yeah.

Jason Welch  05:38
So this experiment demonstrates that the child assumes that Sally knows what she knows, and then...therefore will go straight to the box to find the toy.

Christine Haworth-Staines  05:49
Exactly. It's...it's a developmental stage. It's reached about four or five, as I said, and it's what differentiates us from other species. So, children above that age would know that Sally wouldn't look for the toy in the box because she doesn't know the toy is in the box. So it's this ability to understand that others have thoughts...they have feelings, they have ideas, and these may be different to our own.

Jason Welch  06:20
Yeah, I guess this is what's gonna push us to communicate, because we know others are not necessarily thinking the same thing that we are.

Christine Haworth-Staines  06:30
Yeah. One of the very important ways we do this is through speech.

Jason Welch  06:37
So...we've established speech is important, but what does it have to do with our mental health?

Christine Haworth-Staines  06:45
Well, it allows us to communicate our needs. So...let's think about the baby at birth, okay, adults are all listening out, aren't they, for that first cry, to know the baby is well. They're really happy when they hear that first cry. However babies continue to communicate their needs to us by crying, but it's to sort of signal hunger, or pain, or, you know, discomfort of some sort.

Jason Welch  07:11
Yeah, I mean...I guess as a father of four I can certainly remember hoping to kind of hear that first cry but it wasn't too long, I was gonna say after a few days but I think it's probably more a day, I remember longing for that sign that they're actually sleeping (laughs).

Christine Haworth-Staines  07:25
I know, I remember that too! I remember that horrible, you know, in the middle of the night, you're fast asleep and then you hear that crying and you just wanna get back up under the duvet and...again, you know...

Jason Welch  07:35
It's your turn! It's your turn! (laughs)

Christine Haworth-Staines  07:40
Anyway, let's...ok, so forget the babies now. It doesn't end, does it? Even as adults, we have to communicate our needs, you know? If we want our needs met, we must communicate what does needs are. But there's another point here that I want to make, and that is, you know, that talking, that hearing of the voice of another, it's actually soothing. And again...ok, we'll go back to the babies, the babies and children. When we have young babies and children we do talk and we sing to them. It's soothing. And even as adults we like that reassurance of comforting words, that's spoken to us in a comforting tone of voice. Actually, in my own clinical practice I've noticed that my clients, they often report feeling better after just one session. You know, just talking for one session, and being heard, and listened to. I actually did some research during my... this was a long time ago, but during my Master's degree, that look at the effects of a single session, it was an assessment session of therapy, and the results were interesting because they found a positive effect, even though it was only an assessment, I mean, the actual therapy hadn't even, you know, begun properly. But it seems that just talking to someone, being listened to, being understood by somebody, and being spoken back to in a comforting way, it was enough to bring about really positive effects.

Jason Welch   09:05
Hang on, let me just recap there. What you're saying is that talking helps us to get what we want but also brings us comfort and reassurance?

Christine Haworth-Staines  09:18
Yeah.

Jason Welch  09:19
And this is because to hear a voice is soothing?

Christine Haworth-Staines  09:23
Yes. Well, unless you're being shouted at, of course, but...I supposed what I mean is that we use the human voice to comfort, to soothe. In a more general sense, I suppose what I'm really talking about, what we're referring to here are conversations that people have. You know, it's both talking and listening that are important, but you know, the topic of this podcast, what we're focusing on here, is the talking. There's some interesting research, actually, from Harvard University, that's looked at self-disclosure. And it seems that people really do like to talk about themselves. And some earlier research had analysed the contents of conversations and that indicated that around 60% of that content involved people talking about themselves. Now, the research team at Harvard tried to identify we...why, sorry, why poeple like doing this so much. So, through some clever experiments using MRI scans and such like, they observed that during this self-disclosure participants showed really high levels of activation in parts of the brain that are typically associated with reward and pleasurable feelings.

Jason Welch  10:35
Wow. So...so talking about oneself is good?

Christine Haworth-Staines  10:38
Yes.

Jason Welch  10:39
And yet all of us have met that annoying person who only talks about themselves. And then I'll just jump in there and...just in case any of my friends and family are listening, I know I can be that annoying person (laughs).

Christine Haworth-Staines  10:50
Well, I'm sure we all have been guilty of that. But we've got to recognise that other people like to talk about themselves too, so it's give and take, isn't it?

Jason Welch  10:57
Yeah...you know, I definitely agree with that, yeah.

Christine Haworth-Staines  11:00
Another thing is that talking actually allows social bonding. This is being very helpful from a survival perspective. I mean, think about, you know, today, with sort of the Covid-19 problem,. The authorities have had to communicate to us how to stay safe. But it's also helpful to personal growth, because, you know, when we're talking we receive feedback. So in fact humans are wired to talk, because it's really adaptive. And at the same time it's become pleasurable. It's in our genes.

Jason Welch  11:32
So, it's clear: we need to talk, we should be encouraging it, it helps our physical and our mental health, and it's also part of our personal development but also kind of part of our DNA.So, with all that said, why do we still not like to talk about our mental health?

Christine Haworth-Staines  11:49
Well, fear. You know, there remains, I mean, it's unfortunate but there remains a stigma around mental health issues, and that stigma creates fear. And it's normal that, you know, when we're afraid of something, we're gonna avoid it.

Jason Welch  12:03
Well, I guess...I still struggle with that, to understand it, to comprehend it, especially in this day and age when, you know, we're inundated with social media and relentless communication, it just seems a little bit ridiculous.

Christine Haworth-Staines  12:17
Yeah, well, I think it's because people often...they automatically think of mental illness. You know, when they hear the words 'mental health' what they compute is 'mental ill-health'. And when people think about mental ill-health, then...you know, they tend to think of locked psychiatric wards and terrible symptoms, you know, like psychosis, when some people might lose touch with reality. But most mental health difficulties don't involve these kind of massive personality disturbances or dangerous behaviours. So perhaps we just need to find different words. I mean, I'm hoping we're gonna desensitise to the words 'mental health', or 'mental ill-health', in the way we've desensitised to the word 'cancer'. I mean...you know, I remember my  mother not being able to say the word 'cancer', you know, in her days people would talk about the C-word. But, you know, that's changed, hasn't it, that's certainly changed now. I guess it's the fear of the unknown, it's a lack of knowledge.

Jason Welch  13:24
You know, I guess...from my perspective it's clear, especially with all that's been said today, you know...there's still plenty of work that needs to be done to educate people around mental health.

Christine Haworth-Staines  13:36
Absolutely. people need to be educated and encouraged to talk about it.

Jason Welch  13:42
So, what can companies do to help their employees and, you know, encourage that dialogue around mental health?

Christine Haworth-Staines  13:49
Well, firstly, normalise it. We are making progress in society as we can see in the press, and on TV...you know, these really famous people out there admitting to having had problems with their psychological health. Hmmm...perhaps that's a better term actually, 'psychological health'. It's really interesting, isn't it, that even then...well, I was hesitant to say 'mental health' in that context. I'm thinking about people like Prince Harry, Adele, Zayn Malik, JK Rowling. These people have all talked quite openly about their struggles with anxiety and depression. But I believe that, at work, there's a fear of admitting to this. It's a fear of being seen as weak, or incompetent, and a fear, ultimately, of losing one's job. So the more people in higher management can open up and discuss their struggles, and I'm pretty sure there's plenty of managers out there who have struggled themselves, the easier will be for their employees to open up. We have to create an environment where people are confident that they will not be discriminated against.

Jason Welch  15:00
That's quite valuable, I guess. So it's about the company's leadership setting the right environment, leading by example, you know, and seeing if they can get some of their team to stand up and share some honest truth about their own struggles, perhaps? You know...making it real, showing a level of vulnerability even, to help build trust. Then, I'm guessing, it's gonna help encourage others to have some open dialogue around the topic of mental health. I guess, from my side, I would also add that's about listening. I think it's also through my own experience, trying to create some sort of kind of culture where people can approach their managers without any kind of fear of judgement, you know...just kind of guaranteed support. I would also say that, you know, for many companies, that's gonna be quite a big step for them to take, but I am aware of several out there who have really started realising the importance of focusing on these areas with their employees. So, Christine, I think it's pretty much all we have time for today but before we end, I do wanna ask you one last question: so we've talked about the importance of talking for our mental health, but could you give our listeners three top tips to help them stay mentally healthy?

Christine Haworth-Staines  16:17
Yeah, ok...hmmm...three top tips, I think we're gonna need a little jingle there, Jason. (laughs) Jason's Jingles. (laughs) No, seriously...right, the first one that comes to my mind immediately is exercise. Move around regularly, and on a daily basis, even if it's just a short walk in your lunch break, whatever, or a little bit of gardening when you get home. Exercise is important, it releases endorphins...that's a natural antidepressant. Secondly, practice good sleep hygiene. And what I mean by that is: going to bed and getting up at similar times each day, you know, regular times. No caffeine from mid-afternoon, just setting a good routine. And finally, number three: if you drink alcohol, keep it within recommended limits, and try to have at least two completely alcohol-free days in a week.

Jason Welch  17:18
Brilliant, thank you. Three good top tips there, ones that I also try and keep to, so thanks very much for that. And thanks again for your time and sharing your knowledge today. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and I'm sure our listeners will enjoy the conversation.

Christine Haworth-Staines  17:36
Oh, you're welcome, and thanks for giving me the opportunity, I've enjoyed talking about talking. (laughs)

Outro   17:46
Thanks for taking the time to listen today. Please do get in touch and let us know your comments on today's conversation and also what topics you'd like to hear us discuss in the future. If you'd like to know more about Get Mentally Healthy please visit our website www.getmentallyhealthy.com We also use the website to publish any show notes, and you can also learn more about our services. Once again, thanks for listening!