Quick Strolls – mental health

Dr Alex: My interest in mental health, I guess, probably started at university. I ended up in placement down in Truro for a period of time. I love the coast and I love being by the sea. I think it has an amazing power of healing, but for me at that time, I became a bit lost to myself. I'd been at med school for four years, and I don't know really what happened. I just stopped exercising. I wasn't going outside, I wasn't sleeping very well. I didn't see my friends. I lost interest in my studies, and I just became bit, I don't know, lost, I guess, in the world. And I kind of sat quietly with it for a long time. Well, what could I do? Because if I talk about it... well, I’m supposed to be a doctor, how can you possibly have any struggles? And really, I look back now quite sad that I even felt that way, to be honest. And, you know, I felt that I couldn't say anything. And I don't think that's a representation of the university standpoint. 

I think that was just kind of a general feeling in the medical world that, you know, doctors shouldn't ever struggle. So I kind of kept quiet, and eventually thought this was actually getting quite bad. So I spoke to my mum and said, Look, this is how I’m feeling. It was that kind of big, emotional, kind of outpouring. I felt fantastic afterwards. And then, she said you know, you're not doing anything that would make you feel good, which was pretty spot on. I wasn't actually doing anything that was conducive with happiness or health. So I said you're right. So what we'll do is we’ll talk every evening, about my thoughts, my feelings.

I planned my sleep routine to get up every morning at the same time, I started exercising with an exercise programme. I made a deal with myself to go for a walk half an hour every day, to walk and enjoy the actual nature that I was living in, to plan things with my friends and to start doing some hobbies again, like just start playing tennis again. 

And even though, at the start, I didn't really want to do it and I didn't have the energy to do it, within weeks, I was starting to feel better. And then months went by, and I was like, wow, I feel so much better from this. And I really learned. And I promised myself I wouldn't drop any of those things again, because I realised those things were like the investment in myself that allowed me to do everything else, and my university work in medicine just improved so much.

Fearne: I think most people in the public eye conflate other people's ideas with their own, and I've certainly done that, certainly in my 20s. I think you do feel like your personality is made up of just other people's opinions exclusively at times, so I've definitely had to really focus on that and make sure that I'm just going back to what I know to be the truth and and also being flexible in that way, because I don't even know exactly who I am and what I'm meant to be doing, and I want to be open minded about it all. 

Because I think as soon as we become too set in stone about ideas around ourselves, we get a bit stuck and probably a bit defensive, and we just become too wedded to the idea of, like, I am this, and you put all the different labels in place - I'm a mom, I'm a whatever you do for a living, I'm a friend. I'm bad at this, I'm good at that. So, you know, I think it's constantly, like a daily thing I have to work with, because I have people telling me what they think of me all the time, good and bad, and you almost have to ignore both, because I don't think it's particularly healthy to hugely take either of those ideas on, really, but it's much easier said than done. 

I think because I'd had a bad patch of mental health in my early 30s, I started to feel like I was moving out of that period with a bit more clarity. And, you know, I don't think, well for me personally, it's not like then I was fixed, you know, it was just like a feeling of, I think I'm ready for something a bit gentler, and just looking at what makes me feel really good, rather than being caught up in this vortex of having to just do stuff all the time and worrying what other people think about me or whatever it might be.

When you're out in a place like this, none of that stuff really matters. I mean, it doesn't matter anyway, but it really doesn't matter here, because these gorgeous, handsome trees don't care who I am or what I said or what I didn't do, and the deer that are chilling out under the tree, they don't give a toss if my project's done well or hasn't done well, or whatever it is, all the little parakeets, they're not judging me on any level. So I think it is a real grounding, sort of leveller.

Dr Allen: So it's lovely, you know, some people want to take a photo. Some people don't notice it. They're so in what they're in that they don't notice the view. They have their heads down, and that's something to notice as well. Some people are not having any sort of visual connection to the landscape. They're just pounding the trail. You know, we're just walking around and they're not looking. But that can tell you something about the person and where they're at in the in their lives, can't it? 

I know that if I'm walking through somewhere and I'm not paying it really any attention, I'm quite involved in my head at that point. I'm probably really busy with something, and I'm probably not in the best of places, or in the very least, I'm just very focused. And so that's telling you something about what it's like to be them in that moment.  

I would say one thing that I would encourage everyone to do is to go for a walk. And it's so painfully simple, but go for a walk and actually pay attention to the world. So leave your phone at home, maybe, or at least put it on flight mode, and listen to the ambient sounds of nature. They are very restorative. They're very calming on our nervous systems. They're really good at stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, and you're not going to notice the ambient sound or the colours if you're distracting yourself with other things. So I think a tech free walk once a week goes a long way.

So you can see it sort of opens up here fields. And we've got ryber castle up ahead, and it's just a really nice yeah, it's big sky, back out into big sky. There's a sort of sense of breathing in, and it's just a it's a change, isn't it? You come out and you can feel the wind. Now we're getting sort of hit by the elements a bit more. It's a change. And that's the thing to observe. It's gonna have different meanings for different people, and maybe no meanings at all, but it is a change you.