The Shannon Harvey Podcast

They're cheap, convenient, practically imperishable, and engineered to be irresistible. They’re called "ultra processed foods" and in the midst of epidemics of diet-related chronic diseases, some nutrition scientists believe they are the smoking gun.

In this week's podcast, Shannon Harvey talks with former New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, Michael Moss about his new best-selling book Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions.

In this episode you'll hear;

• Why we're naturally drawn to foods high in salt, sugar and fat and how food companies exploit this.
• Why our willpower lets us down, even when we want to avoid eating junk food.
• How nostalgia plays a big role in the foods we crave.
• That processed food is engineered to be "craveable," aka – addictive.

But it's not all bad because Michael also shares some simple life hacks to help us eat healthy food, more often.

Usually I share interviews with scientists doing research that can shed light on how we can live better, healthier lives. But this week you'll hear from a different kind of expert – a mindfulness teacher who has made a big impact on my life.

Timothea Goddard led the eight week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course that I participated in during the production of my film My Year of Living Mindfully.

Tim (as she’s affectionately known to us Aussies) is a psychotherapist who has taught more than 2000 students and trained more than 200 new mindfulness teachers. But you might find what she has to say about mindfulness rather surprising.

In this episode you'll hear –

• Why trying to find bliss in the present moment is a myth (and a problem, especially if you have anxiety, depression, trauma or chronic pain)
• How the marketing hype about mindfulness often gets it very wrong
• That pretty much everyone finds mindfulness training difficult and boring
• Why learning to turn towards our painful emotions and experiences can be life changing
• And that life sux, but why we shouldn't take it personally

Tim offers mindfulness courses online and in person, and also runs retreats through her organisation Openground. She also runs rigorous mindfulness teacher certification courses through the Mindfulness Training Institute – Australia and New Zealand. If you’d like to know more about MBSR from the man who actually developed it, head to the very first episode of this podcast series and look for my interview with Jon Kabat Zinn.

I know this sounds crazy but over the course of my latest project – My Year of Living MindfullyI spent more than $30,000 on scientific tests. A lot of people have asked me why I went to such lengths to get objective measures to see what, if anything, changed as a result of my daily mindfulness training. And my answer is simple. Because I believe that science matters. You can read a piece called Why I Stopped Looking for Miracles and Started Reading Scienceto get the full story on this, but in essence, it wasn’t until I was in my late 20s, after I’d been sick with an autoimmune disease for a number of years that I finally realised that I needed to apply the critical thinking skills that I’d learned as a journalist to my health. And when it came to my experiment to see if daily mindfulness training could really improve my health and wellbeing – I felt that objective, hard science was important. This week's podcast episode is my extended interview with science journalist, Daniel Goleman, whose 1995 best-selling book, Emotional Intelligencehelped make the science of emotions mainstream. More recently Dan co-authored a book called Altered Traitswith neuroscientist Professor Richard Davidson, who was in episode four of my podcast. The two friends met in their university days at Harvard and in the book, wanted to set the record straight on what we do and do notknow about mindfulness. As a fellow journalist who has dedicated his life to writing about psychological science, Dan was a great starting point as I began to navigate my way through the sometimes murky waters of mindfulness research. As you’ll hear throughout this interview, he also offers some helpful advice to people who are at just getting started with mindfulness training.

If you're interested in learning how your brain works and how to use that knowledge to make healthy changes in your life, then this week's podcast is for you.

This episode is my extended interview with Dr. Judson Brewer, who is an Associate Professor and the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University.

You might remember a scene in my film, My Year of Living Mindfully, where I call Jud via Skype to ask if my insomnia has improved because of the placebo effect or if mindfulness has really started "working".

As an addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies how we form unhealthy habits and routines, Jud is researching mindfulness-based techniques to help us change for good.

After listening to this week's podcast, I suspect that you won't be able to stop yourself from taking a moment to reflect on what really matters to you the most in life, on what is truly important to you... and why.

This episode is with Professor Michael Stegor – a world-leading expert in finding meaning in life. He's the Founder and Director of the Center for Meaning and Purpose at the University of Colorado. Among other things in the interview we discuss:

• Why feeling that we have more meaning and purpose makes us biologically healthier
• The new research showing that helping our kids to find meaning from a young age is really important
• How to find meaning (even though it's different for everyone) 

What I find interesting, when I look back to this conversation, is that although it didn’t fit exactly into my investigative deep dive into mindfulness that ultimately came next for me – the interview was profoundly influential on everything I’ve done since and will do in the future. At the end you’ll hear Mike reveal that he used to be a therapist, and I think you’ll get a sense that he must have been really really good. He seems to just get people, and really understand what makes life worth living.

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.