Self-Regulation with Dr Polly McGee

In this episode of the One Health Podcast Wellbeing Series, Dorian Broomhall gets to know Dr Polly McGee, Psychotherapist and Neuroleadership Consultant from Second Mountain Co.

In this episode, Polly describes the autonomic nervous system and explains how its branches shape our responses to situations, whether that’s a car crash or a meeting.

Polly also provides advice on how we can regulate our autonomic nervous systems in the short and long term.

Transcript

Dorian Broomhall:

Welcome to the One Health Podcast. This episode was recorded on the land of the Palawa people, I acknowledge and pay respect to all Tasmanian Aboriginal people and to their deep history of storytelling. My name's Dorian Broomhall and I'm the manager of Culture and Wellbeing for the Department of Health here in lutruwita, Tasmania. For this episode of the podcast we went outside of the department and spoke with Dr. Polly McGee, who's a psychotherapist and neuroleadership consultant from Second Mountain Co. In our conversation, Polly describes the autonomic nervous system, they explained how its branches shape our responses to certain situations, whether that's a car crash or perhaps a meeting, maybe even a meeting that's a car crash. And they then talk us through what we can do to regulate this system in both the short and the long term.

A word of warning: In this episode some of the terms that we use might be a little bit more complicated than we have in previous podcast episodes. With that in mind, it might not be a bad idea to take the odd note or possibly consider listening back to the episode again. There's an enormous amount there to explore and I hope it's useful for you. So, let's get into it.

I'd love, to begin with, to hear a little bit about what it is that you actually do. We see Dr. Polly McGee, and then a whole bunch of things that you might do are after that, how do you describe yourself as what you do?

Dr. Polly McGee:

Well, in the simplest form I like to say I'm an all-purpose human being, because I have this conversation often as a multipotentialite who's reached quite a few potentials. How I would describe myself professionally is, I'm a neuroleadership programme designer and facilitator. And what that means when you break it down is that I design leadership programmes and deliver leadership programmes that look to the basic fundaments of how the human organism operates in terms of how do we then translate that into behaviour and leadership and culture, individually and also on scale.

Dorian Broomhall:

And talk to me about your PhD.

Dr. Polly McGee:

My PhD has nothing to do at all with any of my career-based things because I followed it, it's what I like to call an interest based nervous system moment, so my PhD is on language and linguistics and the power of how we name things. And so specifically it's on looking at talking about the non-binary gendered body as a place of power. When we are in a liminal place we can't attach any meaning and knowledge to it, in the unknown unknown, a lot more things can get done.

Dorian Broomhall:

That is super fascinating. And I know on one hand you say, well, it's not super related, but it's entirely related. I think that the language that we use, the way that we describe things, especially when we're talking about things that are difficult, is really interesting. What led you to being an all-purpose human being who has reached multiple potentials?

Dr. Polly McGee:

I think what led me there probably, I would say retrospectively now, was that my brain is hardwired for curiosity. And so I've always had an approach of, I don't know, but I'm going to learn. And so if someone asked me to do something, I'd be like, oh yes, of course I can do that. And then I'd quickly build the plane until I flew it. So I followed my curiosity my whole life and my whole career, which has meant that I've done a lot of different things. So there's the layer of the all-purpose human being, which is that, show me a thing and I'll do it. But there's also another underpinning of that which really drives my world, which is this deep desire to understand the meaning and purpose behind why people are in the world and doing what they're doing. So when I'm an all-purpose human being, it means what I'm looking for is to understand how to, in a service-based way, help you find that purpose and potential and that flourishing. And for me, is that I'm in service to humanity as part of my purpose of being in the world.

Dorian Broomhall:

So I'm really lucky in that I get to meet quite a lot of people in the work that I do. And I've been very lucky that I've been exposed to some really interesting people in previous roles, and I've met some people that really properly understand how humans work. You have a deeper understanding of that, as best I can tell, than pretty much anybody else that I've come across. What drew you to wanting to learn about how we actually work?

Dr. Polly McGee:

It's a super interesting rabbit hole for me because I really kind of reverse engineered that knowledge, whereas a lot of people might've started with neurobiology, because I had no interest in science and no background in it. I was coming at it from a very much humanistic person-centred, how do we get people to be flourishing? So in this world of leadership that I work in, over years of working in leadership and people and culture, I kept on seeing the impediments to people's success on the one hand, and I would now sort of say flourishing, because it's a whole person it's not just in a workplace context, always seemed to be coming up against almost an invisible barrier. And so I became really interested in, how do we unlock the things that hold us back? And I went down a lot of different pathways, but one of them was, I started doing a lot of breathwork training because what we recognised was that with particular breathing patterns, people were able to shift really significant blocks and I would say traumas, and so I did a lot of breathwork.

And because I was training in breathwork and I was delivering breathwork and I was doing therapeutic breathwork for people, I was like, I really need to understand what is going on on the inside. And as I said, I had previously no real interest in science or neurobiology, and then the more I learned, the more fascinating it was and the more it really started to tie in with some very contemporary science. And a lot of what we know in the neuroscience world has really come out in the last five to 10 years, because we've got the technology to be able to actually see inside. Which sits in this beautiful parallel with a lot of the wisdom traditions who have always known, who can't pinpoint it to a research paper.

Because I've got such a deep interest in Ayurveda and yoga and Hinduism and those ways of thinking, together it was really interesting to look at. Okay, so when we bring these schools of thought in, in a complete way of understanding the human, not only am I able to say, okay, I can tell you technically what the cascade of things happening inside you is to make this happen, but I can also put some more context around it, which is like, oh, and so how does that connect to things which might be more ineffable? Making you the you-est you can be or making you a more whole person. Which, as I said, is much more what I'm interested in, but you need to know how the bits fit together to get to that end point.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, fascinating. I love that idea of going, I didn't set out to be an expert, so to speak, and what you found as you explored that implicit knowledge and you put language around it, made connections, and then obviously you've learned to be able to communicate about it really, really well. So if we think about all of that then, I'm going to go the other way around in my questioning here, what's the purpose of that knowledge? What's that for? What's that useful for?

Dr. Polly McGee:

What I absolutely know for sure, particularly when it comes to humans and who we are in the world, is that when we have an acute sense of self-awareness, we are able to move through the world in a way which is much smoother, much more connected and much more pleasurable. So for me the end point was, that if I knew what was going on and I knew what was driving behaviour, and I had a sense of not only being able to know that in a cognitive sense, I could cognize it but I could also, in a felt sense, experience the tiny moments when my system was shifting into change. Or be able to help people to understand what the state change looked and felt like before it fully blew into a behavioural affect.

That was the thing that really fascinated me, because if I have that self-awareness, when I have a response in my body, not only can I understand that the response is going to result in this, it means I can catch it and I don't take it out on you. And I don't take my inside workings into a place where I'm potentially going to cause damage or harm or not take accountability and ownership for my behaviour. So this to me was really fascinating. I think as humans we often go through the world feeling buffeted, feeling like the world's done to us, feeling like we don't have power and agency. And what's fascinating to me about the autonomic nervous system and the neurobiology of what makes us human is, yes, the autonomic is autonomic, it happens on its own, but we have a level of control over it.

And breathwork got me there, because breathwork was one of the ways that they realised that even though we breathe our heartbeats, we move through the systems of the system, when we actually do certain things, we can change the speed, we can change the rate. And when they discovered that, it's like, oh, actually we've got a lot more control than we think we have. When we have control and agency return to ourselves, we are able to really move through the world as competent individual humans, not looking for someone else to take responsibility for us. Most empowering thing possible, full self-efficacy gained.

Dorian Broomhall:

This comes to that idea then, I think, that gets thrown around about self-regulation. You've taken it a whole bunch further than that to go, well, what's that for when I'm really well regulated and I am able to move through the world, this is then what happens. If you personally have a feeling of, oh, I think something's bubbling up here for me, or whatever metaphor might be, how do you know? How do you self calibrate that for you? Where is it in your body?

Dr. Polly McGee:

I just want to just step back one little bit for that, the important thing is, until we slow down enough and we recognise the power of our felt sense in the body versus our thoughts and our executive function storytelling, we need to feel first and then we need to understand. So we need to be able to slow down enough to notice what is happening in the system and where you feel it. And where I personally might feel it will be very much determined by what's the situation that I am experiencing that has moved my nervous system into a place where it perceives there is a lack of safety, there's a danger, or has taken me to a place where I'm having a protective response, what I would call a protective response.

And because I've taken the time to connect the sense and the feeling with the, what's just happened? Or, what am I perceiving is happening? Then I'm able to work out whether I'm having a sympathetic nervous system response, whether I'm moving towards fight or flight, moving into a more elevated, aggressive, I'm going to take this down feeling, or whether I'm moving into a passive, immobilised, collapsed emotional response, which would sit lower in my gut.

But the key thing is, we all feel it differently but we feel it in the zones of our body. And the more key thing is, that we feel it. So we are very much, in the West, also in society, we don't get trained a lot about our body and our senses, we're really kind of cut off at the neck. So we really think that the head's everything, the brain's everything, the mind's everything, this is the pinnacle we've reached as a species. The reality is that we are largely driven by an architecture of neurobiology which is many millions of years old, which is still responding in the way that it did from the outset, before we were these very evolved humans. So we have to listen to that first because that is the first warning sign. We are designed as mammals to survive, that's all we do. Everything else sits around that, day to day, we're just surviving.

Our bodies will tell us when we are thriving and when we're not thriving. What's a danger, what's not a danger. And then when we can understand that, we can make sense of that, and then we can actually move ourselves up in our nervous system to a place where we are able to get out of that survival. But we have to know what's happening first, because if we don't, it can easily cascade into a much more fully blown survival response. So for me, back to several questions ago, I'm interested in catching it so I'm interested in being very self-aware of sensation, and then I'm interested in being able to know how to work myself to a place where I can regulate quickly. But it doesn't happen all the time, like everyone else, I've got a system that sometimes will be just like, not having any of that, and there I am having a meltdown.

Dorian Broomhall:

And I think it's important to remember that the sympathetic nervous system especially, has such an important role to play. And so this idea that you're talking about, I'll use the word of patterns, that our unconscious has evolved to detect patterns before our conscious brain could possibly make sense of it. And a simple example is, if someone runs out in front of your car when you're driving it, your conscious brain is not going to make sense of that until after you've hit the brake, and you'll be elevated, and all of that will happen, and that's an important response. And that's actually what's going to keep not only us, but possibly someone else, safe in that moment. If those sorts of things happen for you, what do you do next?

Dr. Polly McGee:

So let's look at two examples, because I think that's a really good example, but that's an example where you are in a really known known situation of a hard sympathetic nervous system response. And let's maybe unpack that a little bit more as well. So if we think about our nervous systems and our autonomic nervous systems, we've got two main branches. We've got a sympathetic nervous system and a parasympathetic nervous system, which in itself has two branches. So the original early parasympathetic nervous system responsible for rest and digest, it sits in our gut. Sympathetic nervous system, sits across our chest and heart and regulates mobility, it's a mobilisation response. Upper parasympathetic feature of our evolution as humans is where we have executive function, where we have language, where we have all of those things that separate us out from our mammalian stuff. So we are designed to mobilise for protective affect generally, which could be things like running after some pray and eating it, or stopping someone jumping out in front of our car.

So when that happens, the sympathetic nervous system will spontaneously, instantaneously, release adrenaline, cortisol and a number of other hormones which will mobilise our system. It's like you are literally propelled into action in your body, because that's what we need to do. And the thing I think is so interesting in terms of that, talking about valorization of our brains, we don't need the thinking part of us, we need a responsive part, but we need to be able to come into a super sharp focus. When those hormones are released into our system it takes about 14 minutes, it's very precise, 14 minutes for those hormones and chemicals to move around the system. They need to move out of the system as well because we don't want to have a super high loading of these very responsive chemicals in our body.

So in the question of, what would I do? Because I know what to do to move those things out, there's only three ways that we can release adrenaline and cortisol from the system, the primary one is on the outbreath. They are mobilised into droplets of moisture, sorry COVID. And so the thing that I would do is I would take deep inhalation through my nose and I would breathe out through my mouth. Inhaling through the nose will activate my parasympathetic nervous system to take me back to a place of calm, the outbreath will release, in the residue, so about 70% of the residues will come out on the outbreath. Once I had sat there and also tried to make meaning of what had just happened, because that's a really important part of the process of regulation, is that the body's got its response, I need to be able to cognize what has happened. Oh, that person ran out. This is the situation. Am I safe? Is all my stuff there? So I would work on that, kind of just making an assessment of what's gone on.

Ideally, I would be talking to someone else, I'd be in connection with another human and I'd be debriefing that stuff out as well, or I'd be demobilising that experience. One of the things that is incredibly helpful, if I really needed to shift things out, would be to stand up and shake and twitch my muscles as much as possible because that's the other place that adrenaline and cortisol gets stuck, is in our big muscle groups. So the three ways we can release it, one's on the breath, one is through excretion, so sweat, tears, which is why often people will spontaneously cry when they have a shock, because the body needs to rid itself. So I breathe, I see if I need to have a little cry, I would try and find a human I could connect with so I could come back into a place of not feeling isolated and alone and not being able to make sense or meaning from it, and then I would allow myself a space of slowness and nurture of some sort.

And again, this is all contingent on if I was going to step myself through what I'd do to be able to do that sort of regulation. So we've got a known known, we've got a release of chemicals and hormones into the body, and we have got a way of deescalating in our nervous system to bring us back to a place of regulation. And then I'd ideally go about my day without there being a casualty stuck to the front of my Jeep.

In the second scenario, so it's a very known known, then I think the thing I'm very interested in is not so much those known known big T traumas, as we would call them, where we are having a nervous system response in relation to something very clear in front of us. What I'm interested in are the moments where I would come into a meeting and I would suddenly feel my system going into some kind of a nervous system response, usually a sympathetic one, but it can also be a situation where I'm going into a parasympathetic collapse. And so I would be wanting to think, okay, what is happening in this room? What is happening between me and the other humans? Because in a relational sense, everything is always happening between us and someone else.

And this is where a lot of our response will sit, encoded in our nervous systems, in how we understand what safety is. And when I say understand, I'm talking very much on a neurobiological level, not on a thinking level. What I've experienced throughout the whole spectrum of my life, from conception to the moment I'm at now, has informed the neural pathways I've developed to allow me to move through the world, being able to discern safety, not safety.

So for me, I've walked into a room and I'm suddenly having a response that I can feel myself moving into a place of, I'm not sure about this. Is this safe? Is this not safe? I can then, when I have that sensation, think, okay, so is there someone in the room who represents a situation I've been unsafe with before? And again, if we talk in a gendered sense, there are many women who have been in situations where they are unsafe with certain people and in certain situations. I can also think, okay, so in a survival sense, if I'm coming into a meeting, I'm standing in front of a room full of people, one of the things that as a human mammal I'm most terrified of, is being disconnected from the group of mammals who in a primitive sense would have kept me safe. If I stand there in front of them in all my vulnerability about to say something of great pith and moment that may or may not be rejected or accepted by the group, my system's saying to me, hey, do you really want to do this?

Are you better off just sitting with them, just being safe in that pack? If I separate myself from the pack, I'll have a response. It's really helpful to think about this in terms of that mammalian response rather than the human response. Because quite often if we're unaware of it, we won't even know what's happening. Someone will say, oh, I'd rather die than public speak. And that's why, because in a really old primitive sense, if you were isolated up the front on your own, you probably would die or you'd have a much better chance of someone attacking you or isolating you or moving you away from the pack, so we go back to that default.

So in that situation where I've got a subtle response that's happening, maybe I'm feeling really agitated, nervous, I'm starting to sweat, I'm getting a bit prickly, I'm having that sympathetic nervous system response where I'm moving into a, am I going to get a full blow of adrenaline and cortisol, or am I just getting primed? Or I might suddenly be like, what was I going to say? Why am I even here? If I'm moving into that lower parasympathetic where my executive function's going offline, I don't need it. I need to fight. I need to flight or I need to freeze. So knowing that I have to do something before I came into the situation, I might've primed myself with a pump by breathing really slowly, by coming into self, by checking in my system and thinking, okay, what am I feeling?

Am I well fed? Am I well watered? Am I well regulated for this thing? Am I prepared? Am I oxygenated? Am I walking in and am I connecting with other humans? And am I able to tell my system that yes, I'm doing something that might take courage, it might take vulnerability, it might take me to the edge of my physiological response, but with some deep breaths, with knowing that generally humans are good, we are here as a pack and everyone has our best interests at heart, I can then carry on. And then I've brought myself back into regulation.

But if I haven't got that amount of steps and that awareness, it's really easy for me to either go into a full kind of panic or into a full collapse, which we often see when people are not aware. And as I said, self-awareness is the key to leadership, because if I go into a full-blown sympathetic response in a meeting, in a performance management review, in a presentation, whatever it is, I'm not going to be able to think straight. I'm not going to be able to access all of the intellect and intelligence I've got. I'm not going to be able to get my point across because all my system will be doing is saying, how quickly can you get out of here? Or, do you need to punch that person? Or, do you need to fall to the ground? Which doesn't make for great communication, doesn't make for great connection, doesn't make for great learning, doesn't make for great working out problems, solving problems, doesn't make for great dealings in the very complex world we live in.

So again, we want to lead people, or we want to be people with other people when we can self-regulate, when we can keep ourselves in a place where we are able to come from a place of not survival, a place of calm and a place of curiosity and a place of connection, everything changes. And the more I'm like that, it means the less you are going to feel like there's something going on, I better get elevated too, and that person's getting elevated. The more we're like, oh yeah, we're all calm. What is it we're doing? We're doing that thing. Great. Now I'm enthusiastic. Now I'm in. And now I've got the wherewithal to really be truly in my prime, with my executive function, with all my evolutionary bits intact.

Dorian Broomhall:

What's, I think, most amazing about all of that, is that 99% of it is happening completely without our knowledge, all the time. Just because you, Polly, have got the language around it, have thought about it from those perspectives, and others who've got the language probably will think about that as well, whether you like it or not, it's absolutely happening. And there are things that we can do as you've well identified, and if you haven't thought about it like that, you've got 14 minutes after you've had a sympathetic response then and you've got 45 minutes of this meeting left, you might be having a bad time.

I want to take everything that you just said, which for me is what I'd call a short-term response or a short-term strategy around regulation if something goes wrong, or to prevent something going wrong because you've got that awareness of that sympathetic response. If we consider then that all of us have got a certain baseline perhaps of self-regulation that over a larger timescale can be cultivated, something that personally I think about quite a lot, what's your approach to doing that? I think that you're someone that spends quite a lot of time considering how you could show up and perform in whatever performance might be. One month before that performance you might already be thinking about how you're starting to prepare. What are you thinking about for that longer timescale regulation?

Dr. Polly McGee:

You're giving me way too much credit for actually preparing, I just usually show up, but I practise every single day. And again, I can't move around the world talking about what I talk about if I am constantly reacting, because, the inauthenticity of that. So for me, it makes sense that I need to be able to have a pretty rigid and ongoing practise. So my answer to you is that one of the things that has been the most valuable in my life has been cultivating a sense of calm and cultivating a sense of interior awareness to allow me to explore. Do things which are really unknown and terrifying to my system and train my system to know that it's all right to have that feeling, but I can still do what I need to do.

So every time we do anything, any experience we have, we're building a neural pathway. And this is where the most effective way to self-regulate on the long term is a very specific practise that doesn't have to be done for long periods of time, it just has to be done regularly. As an organism we love consistency and we will love building strong neural pathways, like muscles, it's the same sort of metaphor. So I've had a very consistent practise of meditation. You know, all the things people will roll their eyes at. Because I meditate every single day without failure, it is an absolute non-negotiable. I pay attention to what is happening in my system and so I can recognise... As I said, it's not like I'm always the zen-est Dalai Lama in the world, like everyone else I get completely knocked out of shape by things. But then rather than collapsing into the emotion, I'm able to get curious about it really quickly, oh, what happened?

And then the answer to me is, oh, I need to go back in and do some more work. So my answer is that I breathe a lot and I do it consciously. I meditate a lot and I learn how to be still. I pay attention to myself and I pay attention to other people, and I pay attention to what's happening between us. I read voraciously around these topics because it's changing so often, and so I self educate as well. So I have all the tools I need in a knowledge base that I can then put into practise in my system. But really it's the simplicity of, I do the same thing every day. And by doing the same thing every day, I'm able to have a dialogue with my system that when it starts to move out of regulation, it's like, oh, we know how to do this together and we can come back into regulation.

And it's really small and simple. And my invitation to people would be to think about the things that you do repetitively. How many of them are bringing you closer to regulation, closer to self, closer to authenticity, closer to that sense of you being really strongly you in the world. How many of them are taking you away to numb you or to calm you down in a way that's outside of your system and then start moving from one to the other? If you're spending a lot of time in a passive engagement with Netflix, in a semi-passive engagement with scrolling through social media, with things that you are doing to dampen your feeling, my invitation to you is, get very good at discomfort. When we can hold discomfort in our bodies because we are able to know what it feels like and invite that in, the scope of what we can do in our lives is much, much bigger.

So the practise in many ways, of meditation, which is why people really hate doing it, is that when we calm down and we quieten down, there is nothing to take away the sense of discomfort. So we would, as many wisdom teachers say, we befriend it. But what we feel, because we don't like feeling like that, our nervous systems hate discomfort, we look outside of ourselves to calm it down rather than going, this is going to pass. All of those hackneyed sayings, this too will pass, make friends with your emotions, they're there because when you actually do the practise of that regularly, nothing's outside of your control and nothing's scary. Yes, things might happen, but the only thing that's happening in the control piece is our reaction. We can't control what's going on around us. We can't control the humans in our lives. We can't really control anything except how do we react to it?

And if we can get quickly back to curiosity and be like, well, that's interesting that that mountain just fell on top of me. Oh, that's interesting, what can I do next? What can I do to change this? Oh, now I can do something. So it's an inside job, one hundred percent. Small practises to bring you into a deep awareness of the feeling of what it is to be you when you're at your baseline and what it is to be you when you are the most flow filled, joy filled, flourishing, connected, feeling like this is the day of days. If you know what that feeling is for you, and if you know what the baseline of a just getting by is, you can start to move yourself up the scale to that upper part as much as possible with you in control of that.

Dorian Broomhall:

One brief challenge and one final question. The brief challenge is, whilst you might say that you don't prepare for specific events, as I might have implied, your way of being as you've just described that is that you are then prepared for whatever might need to come up. And if you've got that baseline and that regular practise, then you are prepared for whatever might come up.

And then the final question that I've got for you before we wrap this up is that, if there was somebody who knew that they needed to make some changes and perhaps are listening to this to start to think about, well, what changes should I make? Because it all seems a bit overwhelming and all of this talk about all of these things sounds really difficult. What would be the first small suggestion or the first small step you would suggest that somebody takes?

Dr. Polly McGee:

The first thing I would suggest is that no matter what you do, you come to it from a place of self-love and self-compassion. Self-compassion is really important because we're all going to have things that we want to change and we can change them in small quantities. So the first thing to do is, whatever it is that you feel like you want to make any kind of movement on, come to it from a place of compassion. Get really acquainted with the sensations of your body, and when you feel things, breathe very quietly into them and be curious about that.

You don't have to do anything big. Yes, there are all the things out there, self-educate, understand the feeling of your body. And that's the thing most of us don't really know because we spend a lot of time not being in our bodies, not being acquainted with that. Just feel how you feel and notice when you feel better and notice the things that take you to what's feeling better and take you to what's feeling worse, and do a little bit of that every day. And my catchphrase for life is, when you stay ready, you don't have to get ready.

Dorian Broomhall:

Love it. Start with where you are. Be aware of where you are, and make some choices from there. Polly, thank you very much.

…

Wow, so listening back to that conversation again, realising that I need to listen to the conversation again, and I'm the person that had the conversation in the first place, is quite interesting. There's quite a lot of content that was covered in a very short space of time with Polly in that conversation. And if some of it went over your head, that's entirely reasonable. What I would say though, I think that with more exposure to these concepts and this language, it doesn't take long for these ideas to become really, really clear and understandable for all of us. And I do think that it's foundational learning that we need to find a way to be able to communicate clearly so everybody gets a sense of what it means to actually be human.

I think one of the really key parts there is this idea of tuning into our own body and knowing the feeling of what a protective response might be in the body, being able to specifically identify what that feeling is, remembering that we're really designed and hardwired for safety. So as a human, if we feel a little bit of that feeling coming up and we can identify that, that can be an opportunity for us to possibly make a different choice. Any mobilisation or response or dysregulation or whatever word you might like to use, any one of them may have a positive intention.

And I think that that's also really important to remember, if someone's blowing up and maybe blowing up at you, realising that there's possibly a positive intention for that and that there's a need for that person to get to a place of safety is quite a profound reframe on how we might think about conflict or disagreement both in the workplace, in our lives generally.

We've been working with Polly to develop what we've termed a relational first aid, and more of this work will come out over time through the work that we're doing, through our critical and cumulative incident response protocol. I look forward to being able to share more of that with you soon.

And yet again, there's another reminder for Dorian to take up meditation. And I apologise to anybody who has been playing along with this saga, I still have not done it, and I appreciate this, yet again, part of the universe telling me that I need to do it. So thanks again to Dr. Polly McGee for taking the time to speak with us and to you for listening. I hope you did find something in the conversation that you can take away and apply into your own work and life, I certainly did. Join me again for our next episode where I speak with exercise physiologist, Andrew Bonsey.