The Healing Power Of Music: How Your Favourite Songs Boost Your Mood, Mind & Mobility with Dr Daniel Levitin #623

In Parkinson's, inevitably many patients lose the ability to walk because that timing circuit has been degraded, the part that tells them to put one foot in front of the other, with a certain timing. So, music that has the same tempo as the walking speed, the gate of a Parkinson's patient, activates regions of the brain that are spared, and within a few seconds, the brain synchronizes to the beat of the music. And a Parkinson's patient listening to that can suddenly start to walk. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you have any good weeks so far. My name is Dr. Rungan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. Today's conversation is a meeting of two key areas in my life, music and medicine. Music has always been hugely meaningful to me. I've sung and played multiple instruments since I was a young boy and honestly, some of my happiest moments have been performing on stage, or simply losing myself in music. Now, we would if you don't play yourself, and after hearing this episode, that might change, most of us know intuitively that music just does something to us. The right track at the right time can suit you, energize you, or transport you back to another time. But here's where it gets even more interesting. In all my years as a clinician, music was never really discussed as a therapeutic tool. Drugs, nutrition, exercise, sure. But never music. Yet the more I've learnt about and experienced its effects, the more I've come to realise that we could be missing out on a powerful and beautiful form of healing. Music as medicine, it makes sense, doesn't it? And it's the title of a fascinating book by today's guest who first appeared on my podcast back in 2020. Dr. Daniel Leboton is a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, former record producer and musician, who's combined all those titles to become a scientific advocate for the primal therapeutic benefits of music. And his work is genuinely influencing public health policies around the world. So set back, relax, and listen. As we uncover the science behind that instinct, you've always felt that music is far more than simply entertainment or distraction. It can actually be one of the most powerful forms of medicine. Many of us will know that certain pieces of music can make us feel better. But one of the key messages I got from your book is that music can be considered a powerful form of medicine. So could you just sort of make that top-blind case? What is music actually doing to our brains? And how can we therefore consider it as a potential form of therapy for all kinds of different conditions, such as Parkinson's or MS or stuttering or Alzheimer's? I think just understanding some of the physiology would be really, really helpful. Right. So in the same way that medicine, drugs, caffeine, barbituates, drugs for schizophrenia, drugs for depression, in the same way that they don't all hit the same part of the brain, music doesn't, not every piece of music, it's the same part of the brain. Different music hits different parts of the brain. And I think perhaps the best way to unpack this conceptually is to take the case that you mentioned first, which is Parkinson's. So in Parkinsonism, what happens is the disease, degrades circuits in a region of the brain called the basal ganglia. And those circuits use dopamine to help them process the timing of what we call voluntary movements. So an involuntary movement is coughing or swallowing or hiccuping, start or reflects. But a voluntary movement is almost everything else we do. We feed ourselves, we walk, we exercise, those are voluntary movements. And in Parkinson's, inevitably many patients lose the ability to walk because that timing circuit has been degraded, the part that tells them to put one foot in front of the other with a certain timing. Because if you don't, you end up with both feet in the air at the same time or more commonly, both feet planted in the ground and you can't move either one. So music that has the same tempo as the walking speed, the gate of a Parkinson's patient, activates regions of the brain that are spared. And within a few seconds, the brain synchronizes to the beat of the music. And a Parkinson's patient listening to that can suddenly start to walk. As long as the music's playing and there's a form of therapy called rhythmic auditory stimulation therapy for Parkinson's where they listen to music 20 minutes a day for a couple of weeks and then they don't even need the music anymore because they've built supplementary circuits to help them walk. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. This idea that music has been in the music. It's own internal momentum. And it made me think of something that I think many of us experienced. So let's say in my family, for example, we could be listening to a tune in the car on the way home. Right? So then we stopped the car and we come in. Let's say we've been shopping and we unload the shopping bags. The music is not on anymore. Right? The car stopped the cars in the drive. And I found this with my kids sometimes that maybe five or ten minutes later, we start singing the same part of that song at the same time. It's as if we hit the chorus at the same time as if what you're saying about this internal momentum is that this is actually going on inside of us even when we're not listening to the music. Is that kind of one of the things that you're talking about here? Very much so. And this question we call as auditory imagery. This is the very first experiment I did when I was still in graduate school was asking people to remember songs that they hadn't heard in a while. And they sang them at the exact tempo of the song. Our memory for timing is exquisite. And we've now seen in a number of studies if you start playing a song and you turn it off. This happens to me when I drive through a tunnel. And the satellite radio can no longer reach. Right? Terrestrial radio still can reach, but the satellite doesn't. So when I emerge from the end of the tunnel, almost always I'm at the same part of the song that the satellite radio is. And that's not just me. This is a common phenomenon because we have timing circuits in the brain that govern everything from the release of hormones and digestive fluids and, you know, melatonin at night to help you sleep and rexid in the morning to help you wake up. And all of these kinds of things. The timing circuits are millions of years old evolutionarily. Yeah. I read in your book that music came before language in terms of our evolution, which is really interesting to think about. It's not said, if music really did come before language, what does that tell us about us and about the role that music can play in our lives? Well, to be fair, this is a controversial notion. Steven Pinker famously would claim that music is tricking a system that evolved for language. But the evidence that music came first is that the oldest artifacts we find in human and neanderthal burial sites are musical instruments. The parts of the brain that process music exclusively are phylogenetically older, they're evolutionarily older. And we know this because the cortex built from the center out. And so their music centers are deeper in. They're the most resistant to brain damage, whether it's caused by a trauma or a tumor or a stroke, music remains intact. And, you know, that's just some of the evidence that music was around first. And yeah, what that means is that music may be a more powerful way to achieve certain things than language. If I was out at the coast, looking at the waves and the sun were to set over the ocean, the sensation of calm, the colors and the rage of the waves, I'm trying to describe them as best I can in words. But if I put on the right piece of music, maybe Beethoven's sixth symphony, you know exactly what I'm feeling. Music has that power for emotional communication. And that's reflected in a bunch of neurochemical systems that are selectively responsive to music. Dopamine, dopamineurgic, serotonergic, we know that music can help relieve pain. My lab was the first to show that when you listen to music you like, opioids are produced in the brain, endogenous mu opioids, which are analgesics. Yeah. Which really goes back to the opening point, doesn't say about music being medicine. We know through that lens of endogenous opioids, people will talk about the runners high, won't they? They'll talk about exercise is good for you because, of course, there are many reasons for that. But one of them is because of the endogenous opioids, but music is doing the same thing yet, even though we know in cheerfully that the right kind of music can make us feel better, I don't think yet we've got to the point, certainly in a mainstream way, where music is thought of as therapy or thought of as medicine. And I guess my hope, and perhaps your hope when writing this book is that, you know, that might be something you can change. Absolutely. I mean, that's the reason I wrote the book. I read about 4,000 peer-reviewed articles and synthesized the information and what I thought was a fair and balanced way, trying to make the case for things where the evidence is in and then, you know, being frank where we don't have enough evidence. And so, my personal background in this is that when you and I first met, I had just worked for five years with the National Institutes of Health here in the US to develop a music as medicine grant program, and they gave away $40 million in research funds. And then I began working with the White House Science Office under the Biden administration to help promote the idea of music as medicine to lawmakers so that they could legislate your government support for it. And the result of those efforts have been remarkable. One is that in the US, the state of New Jersey, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the private ensures they're now cover music therapy. The state of Massachusetts, on the day I launched my book, sent a representative of the governor's office to my talk, to tell us that Massachusetts was now giving out vouchers for free music therapy. And then just three weeks ago, the Netherlands launched a music as medicine initiative through the Royal Family, the King and the Queen, announced an initiative on music as medicine. And I spoke there to help kick it off. So things are coming together. That concept music as therapy, I guess there are specific conditions where you will need a specific therapist to try and integrate music into your life in a certain way, which I definitely want to talk about. But in a much bigger and maybe more universal way, I think one of the messages from this book is that many of us, perhaps, have a deficiency of music in our lives. And perhaps correcting that deficiency might have all kinds of benefits. Is that fair? Would you say? I would. And just to get back to this notion that you raised that music may have proceeded language in the query, what does this mean? If you look at contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, they all have music as part of the woven into the fabric of daily life for rituals, for ceremonies, mothers singing to infants, work songs. And it seems as though we assume that hunter-gatherers that had been isolated from the West are living the way we were 40,000 or 60,000 years ago. And so we assume, anthropologists, archaeologists assume that that's the way things were. We always had music. And in our own recent history, my grandparents were children before there was electricity. So there was no radio. If you wanted to hear music, you had to play it yourself. And most people played an instrument in their generation. And nobody cared about whether they were any good or not. Not good enough. You never had that conversation. Entertainment the evening was you'd sit around with the family and you'd play guitars that you made out of cigar boxes or you'd play on cheap pianos that you found. Or you would just sing. Sing and sing and sing all night long. And you go back to hunter-gatherers. They tend to have their sleep divided where they'll sleep when it first gets dark, but they wake from midnight to three and they sing around a fire to ward off predators with the strength of their voices. So this music being part of our lives in a rich way is part of our evolutionary history. And what really put it into it was the development of concert halls in Europe about 500 years ago where we created a class of performers on a stage and a class of listeners. And pretty soon over the intervening years it became, oh well I'm not good enough. I'm never going to be an elephant's Gerald or an Adele so I won't bother to sing. But it's peculiar. Nobody says I'm never going to be a professional soccer player so why should I even play? Or I'm never going to be a Winston Churchill so why should I ever talk? But with music we say if I'm not going to be an expert at it I don't want to do it. I don't want to learn the instrument. It seems like a waste of time which is I think a ridiculous argument. It's enriching. Yeah I love this this idea that it used to be something that we all did. Humanity did. You did it with your tribe with your community with your family. And then my favorite chapter in your book is the final one. Music, medicine, mystery and possibility. It was so evocative down about what music is. And we all know that it does something to us that you can't always explain with words can you? You know if music just made you want to dance or be social if it acted as the same kind of icebreaker that alcohol does or party games do that would be pretty good. But for those of us who are sensitive to it it can evoke a sense of awe, a kind of spiritual or metaphysical state where we feel connected to the larger scope of humanity and to the universe at large. Music can invoke that. Other things can. Meditation, hallucinogenic drugs, you know various tragedies cause or joys cause us to enter that state. But the more we enter the state of awe the more we can relax because we see ourselves as small parts of a very complex universe and whatever is bothering us pales by comparison to the normity of things that are bothering other entities. I talk in my in the book that you and I last spoke about the changing mind. I relate the story of an experience I had with the Dalai Lama whose picture is on the wall here behind me where a woman came to him a pilgrim she had traveled for weeks barefoot to get to him for advice and she was falling apart. She had a lot of problems her family was sick and he helped her to meditate on the notion that there is no in the in the grand scheme of things in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition there is no I we are all connected. Now we we talk about this a lot a few of us ever feel that unless we have a moment of awe or hallucinogenic reverie or something but here he talked her through a meditation practice that she knew and she was hysterically crying and weeping and he gets her to meditate for about 45 seconds and she bursts out and laughter. Her ego dissolved she felt a sense of awe being with him perhaps but awe at the wonder of the universe and she was healed it was like those old you know southern Baptist things you know you couldn't walk and then you get up out of your chair it was extraordinary and music can have that same effect on us if we let it and art can in general I think you know the one epidemic that we're experiencing is we're all so productivity oriented perhaps over caffeinated as a society that we feel if we were to take five minutes off to just sit and stare we'd fall ten minutes behind in our work and so I've made it a point to put art where I can't miss it and I make it a point to experience it I'm going to turn the camera around here just to show you the office my home office this is a painting I have the Quebec countryside yeah and it's right across from my desk so when I'm stuck writing or something I can just look at it and it transports me you can't tell from the camera view but when I stare at it I get a sense of motion from those flowers in front and motion in the hills it feels like the grass is in the wind and then I have this Keith Herring right here which is just this delightful whimsical love kind of a thing out of a hand so and with music I got one of these wireless sound systems by Sonos where I can have music playing as I walk from the kitchen to the office or you know the bathroom and things like that and I make it a point to make playlists I tell the story in the book about the singer songwriter Joni Mitchell having a stroke and needing music to bring her back and fortunately she had effectively created a playlist of her 16 favorite songs and it makes me think that I'm going to come up with a playlist and attach it to my advanced medical directive so that if I'm in a coma people will know what to play be well the funny thing is you joking about that but I'm hearing it going that's actually a damn good idea I mean we know don't we that music can take us back to a different place we know that that you can hear a song and suddenly be transported 30 years back or whatever it might be I mean you know in the UK when you start university we call it Frasher's Week and the Frasher's Week song which is by a band called Supergrass came on the radio the other day I hadn't heard it in years but I was literally taken back to the first week of uni I can almost remember the weather and how I felt and what friends I was making and all that kind of stuff just from hearing a song so it totally seems really reasonable that actually as well as trying to put your affairs in order and things if something was to happen to me well maybe this playlist is going to rehabilitate me you know music literally as medicine and of course we know don't we with Alzheimer's sufferers sometimes music can be very powerful why don't you talk a little bit about the relationships between music and Alzheimer's beautiful segue there because my mind was going there too in the great minds think alike department the the case with Alzheimer's is that often and not just Alzheimer's but other forms of cognitive decline other forms of dementia at some point a patient may no longer recognize loved ones we've seen this happen a lot you've seen it in clinic I'm sure yeah or they don't even recognize themselves in a mirror they don't recognize the caregivers who have been coming in three times a day they don't recognize how the surroundings or how they got there everything is unfamiliar and patients tend to have one of two responses to this they either become very agitated because nothing makes sense or they fold in on themselves and kind of collapse and become almost catatonic because nothing makes sense in this world they're seeing but if we play the music from their youth the oldest stuff in your memory is the last step to go so if you play music from their youth from sort of the heyday of their listening life say let's say ages 11 to 18 they immediately get back and touch with that part of themselves they had lost and they can become verbal again when they were not verbal they can become activated and that can last for a day or two just from a few songs yeah it's amazing isn't it so it's interesting Dan as we'll have in this conversation I would say about two months ago I had John Bonjavi on my podcast he was in London and we went to a music studio and had a beautiful conversation and a little bit of perspective John was my childhood hero and you know I was a mega fan for many years I've seen them in concert over 30 times like a proper proper mega fan I remember in the preparation for that conversation I started re-listening to those albums of my youth slipy one wear and you jersey keep the faith these days all that stuff that I used to idolize and dream about when I was a kid and I think in 70 ways it just made me younger I felt again like I used to feel like I can take on the world I can do whatever I want I thought this is amazing just listening to music from my youth which had a very powerful effects on me literally had a profound impact on my state of being now I'm you know I don't really struggle with low mood or anything like that I'm pretty balanced and calm a lot of the time but I did feel that that music gave me a lift so what is it do you think that's so powerful about that time period today's episode is sponsored by Vivo Barefoot now one of the simplest ways to improve your whole body health is to start with your feet most of us don't realize this but 95% of us are born with healthy feet and by adulthood 77% of us have foot problems and a big reason is the shoes we wear modern shoes are rigid narrow and over cushions they disconnect us from the ground and weaken the very muscles that support our posture balance and movement that's why I've been wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for well over a decade now they're the opposite of conventional shoes Vivo's a design for fit flex and feel to let your feet do what human feet have evolved to do when you free your feet you free your whole body and studies have shown that wearing minimalist footwear like Vivo's can increase foot strength by up to 60% in just six months improving balance natural posture and the way in which you move if you've never tried barefoot footwear before Vivo make it really easy to do so they offer a 100 day money back trial so you can wear them live in them move naturally and if they're not for you you just send them back no risk at all so if you're curious to reconnect with your natural movement in 2026 and give your feet the freedom they're designed for try Vivo Barefoot and get 15% of your first order by heading to vvobefoot.com forward slash live more free your feet and the rest will follow today's episode is sponsored by peloton now we all know that moving our body is more is good for us but despite that knowledge many for spite at heart to actually implement and that's where the new peloton cross training bike plus powered by peloton IQ can really help it's built for fitness breakthroughs with real time insights and endless ways to move and you can go from cycling on the bike plus to strength training off it with one smooth spin of the swivel screen which offers endless ways to train for a well-rounded routine while you lift peloton IQ counts reps corrects your form I suggest new weights so you're always making progress towards your goals and peloton's movement tracking camera provides real time feedback so that you can train safer lift smarter and make every move count more with over 15 types of workouts expert instructors to keep you motivated and a personalized plan tailored to your goals the cross training bike plus takes the guesswork out of working out so that you can move freely and let peloton handle the rest let yourself ride lift stretch move and go explore the new peloton cross training bike plus at one peloton.co.uk that's o-n-e-p-e-l-o-t-o-n.co.uk and please note peloton all access membership is required to access all peloton content and applicable features on your peloton hardware well it is a property of human memory that first of all the things that we remember best in our lives are the things that had that delivered an emotional wallop the most emotional experiences are the what we remember most vividly and the reason is that if we were emotional about it it's an evolutionary signal that maybe this is something I need to pay attention to I almost fell off the roof I better be more careful I was really thirsty and I found this spring you know I need to remember where the spring is in case I get lost again so emotional stuff gets in there and it's recorded more vividly and then all the contextual information gets separate neurochemical tags for a memory so you're 16 years old you're driving in the summer maybe you're driving out to the beach there's a certain song playing on the radio there's a certain somebody sitting in the seat next to you there's some rain all those details are encoded both as a package but also as separately so you can access them you can say when's the last time I drove to the beach and all your beach memories come up or when's the last time you know what was I doing when I was 16 you know what was my first experience with a car all these are what we call retrieval cues but once you activate one node in this memory network all the other nodes start to light up and so if there was a time in your life when you were particularly challenged or depressed and you overcame it music that was around then can help you relive that experience if you choose to relive it if that sense that so many of us had as teenagers that I can do anything my life is all ahead of me yeah the most exciting parts are yet to come I can be a doctor or I can be a lawyer or I can be a truck driver if I want I can do anything I want to do that sense of boundless optimism existed alongside a musical soundtrack for most of us and the music can evoke that again could it also be if I think about what it's doing in let's say an outside as patients if music is something really mysterious that clearly can go beyond just mere language and words it can stir things deep inside of us it can take us to different parts of our life could it be that in outside was quite literally let's say you're 82 years old you know you feel stuck your memories going you may be not recognizing people you know your sense of who you are is different from how it was in the past very simplistically if you go back to the music if you're youth or even your 20s or your 30s is it that that music is literally taking a part of you back so you then experience the world kind of in a state in which you were back at that time I mean that seems overly simplistic to me but on one level it seems well maybe that's exactly what is happening well I think that's fair to say to different degrees and different people and it's it's got some commonalities with dreaming I mean I assume I'm I'm average and no different from anybody else and and I have these dreams where I'm suddenly back in high school and I didn't bring a number two pencil to the exam and I forgot to study and my whole grade is writing on this or you know I show a blade for a an exam in uni I imagine you have those dreams too these are these are connecting with the former self there is this odd aspect that appears to be uniquely human and my Kazanika has written about this as have other neurosinists we down done it the philosopher wrote about it as well we we stitched together a narrative of our lives without consciously trying to do so that creates continuity yeah oh yeah I'm that same person but we really are different people our brain chemistry's changing our experiences have changed us our brain connectivity has changed we are we are very different people than we were 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years ago but it and so these thinkers would say it's all an illusion that we think we're the same person because we're not but because we're these hyper analytic beings many of us find comfort in being able to stitch it together and and go back read old journal entries or meet old friends and and create that sense of continuity I'm now 68 years old and I find it especially valuable that I have friends that I knew when I was 13 not because they're my closest friends necessarily now we've changed and you'll follow different paths but because we knew the people we were back then and we liked those people and we like each other now and it's just this wonderful sense of you know what a ride this has been yeah what's the relationship between music and trauma um music can certainly in the in the along the lines we're talking about if if there was a piece of music playing around the time of a tragedy or a traumatic a personally traumatic event that can trigger a kind of post traumatic stress in the listener right if if you saw something horrific a car crash somebody you knew was in the car you saw a family member die of violent death there was music going on even not at that moment but in that period that song can really trigger you and it can take a lot of therapy to get over that but on the flip side we've seen that people who have severe trauma particularly soldiers in a rack in Afghanistan coming back having seen the most horrifying things the bodies of friends being blown apart you know um trying to carry them back out of a war zone and um veterans with post traumatic stress disorder often are debilitated and they're hyper vigilant the slightest sound in the environment you know sends them into a panic and there's a program here in the US called songwriting with soldiers were professional songwriters are paired with soldiers and they write a song about the traumatic event and what that does for the soldier is it gets the song outside and into the world so they can be more objective about it and there's something healing in the same way that journaling can be healing but now the song is an entity a living breathing entity and it's out there not in here and and many of them find it very therapeutic did you think it's unique to songwriting because as you say it it almost sounds like a form of journaling journaling is a way of course to get our thoughts down out of our mind and onto paper which can be incredibly beneficial but writing a song of course can do that as well do you think there's something unique about the song because of course there's the words but also the melody whereas we're journaling it's just the words well the thing the thing is a song is something you can memorize it's more highly structured than a journal entry it's got a rhyme scheme typically it's got a rhythm it's got a certain number of syllables per line and if you're lucky the melody and the words reinforce what another and so it's precisely you know it's like you were saying when you and your kids get home and the cars and the drive and then you're in the kitchen there's still a song playing in your head songs playing our heads and most of my friends these days those who are not neuroscientists are songwriters and almost every one of them is writing songs about some emotional experience that they're trying and often a sad experience a breakup a loss a loss of friends a loss of confidence a loss of health and those songs become therapeutic for them in the way they do for the soldiers yeah you mentioned that soldiers who have experienced PTSD have been teamed up with songwriters to write these songs which they found healing some people listening down might be thinking well I'm not a songwriter going back to what you said before about you know I'm not a musician you know I'm no good you know maybe I was told at school I wasn't good you know I never got picked for orchestra or choir or whatever so you have this negative view of yourself and music a lot of people will also say the hand yes songwriting sounds great but I'm not a songwriter I mean maybe I can get my head round journaling but I can't get my head round songwriting what would you say to that person well there are a number of ways to do it um I started writing songs when I was 16 I didn't know what I was doing yeah um the Beatles had to write a hundred songs they said before they got a good one um so you just have to keep doing it and now there are online songwriting courses on YouTube and you know but if all you can do is say the words and and warble out of melody and you don't even know how to play an instrument or write chords you can upload that to Suno and it'll turn it into a country song or a classic rock song or hip hop song and you can iterate it until you get the the features you like um I'm not recommending AI music as something that will be fulfilling I'm recommending it as a kind of a kick start as a um you know what what I've done as a songwriter and as I spent a lot of my career as a record producer working with songwriters you know they'd write a song and then we'd run it through different iterations we we'd get different musicians in or we'd do different styles let's try it as a colipso let's try it as a heavy metal let's see what works and you're using your ears and you're in real time to not to see necessarily what you think is going to sell the most records that never works but to see what feels truest to the artistic vision so you know saw AI software can help there a little bit um and in the same way that people now use AI to write I would never publish anything or put out to the world something that was AI written but I like it when AI will give me some suggestions and maybe out of 500 words that it writes there's one word in there that I can use that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise but I think the more I mean that's for people who that's an option um but another option is just to collaborate with somebody who plays an instrument and doesn't know how to write or water write you know in the section on songwriting in the book there were a couple of things I noted down you you mentioned a quote from Nick Cave the thing about writing a song is that it tells you something about yourself that you didn't know and then you specifically say down about you I don't write after I've understood something I write to help myself better understand it and to better explore my emotions and just to make sure this is really really applicable to everyone I honestly believe that that's what journaling does for so many people as well I do accept songwriting is different but for people who maybe are a bit intimidated by the thoughts of writing a song or don't have a friend who they can collaborate with journaling kind of can do a very similar thing you can find parts of yourself that you didn't know were in there just from start to write your thoughts down on a page can't you absolutely and and this is the the not well-known secret of all of all writers of either fiction or nonfiction is that most writers don't go into the article or the book knowing exactly what they're going to say or if they think they do it changes along the way there's something about the words staring back at you on the page and you realize oh well that that's what I thought I wanted to say but it's not very clear and it and it leaves a bunch of unanswered questions I and I don't know the answers to those I have to figure them out that comes in in professional writing like you do it comes in amateur writing for lack of a better word when we journal or you know jot down our thoughts on paper or speak them into voice memos it's it's an act of discovery not an act of dictation yeah I've heard you won't say that sad songs can be medicine when you're feeling depressed why is it do you think that when we're feeling low we also want to listen to songs that talk about feeling low as opposed to upbeat happy ones I think because most of the time when we're feeling low it's because in some sense we feel misunderstood by another person or by the world or we misunderstood ourselves and did something we didn't want to do or think we could do or should do and that feeling of being misunderstood if I put on at your sad you're low put on happy music that's just a bunch of people who don't understand you either but if I put on the right sad song there's this glint of recognition only my god that's they're talking about me that's how I feel and you know I'm no longer sitting at the edge of the cliff staring into the abyss by myself there's somebody here next to me who's put this whole experience to music and they came out the other side and turned it into great work of art that's that's uplifting I feel understood now yeah musical tastes are are quite unique aren't they I mean what you may enjoy listening to and you will connect with maybe different for what I might enjoy listening to or connect with and so thinking about this idea as music as medicine I really like this idea that let's say someone has depression always been diagnosed with depression we can't really prescribe this song for you to help you feel better because it may be that that song doesn't resonate with you I guess the point I'm trying to make is that if we're going to use music in a healing way for ourselves whether it be to lift our mood or lower stress or just know that there's other people out there in the world who feel the same way in which we do it's highly personal isn't it so could it be that one particular song someone finds calming works at the same time that same song could trigger anxiety for example than someone else oh absolutely we see that all the time I did a massive study of 20,000 listeners in in Europe back when UK was in Europe they were included in the study and we asked people what kinds of all kinds of questions 200 questions and one of them was what music do you listen to to relax and at the time you know relaxing music was you know enna or Bach maybe you know slow ballads by John Coltrane but then there was this cluster of people in Sweden who were listening to metal to relax and we got farther down the questionnaire what do you use to help yourself get out of bed in the morning or get through an exercise workout and the Swedes were listening to like you know Swedish speed metal to get them going and so regular old metal seemed relaxing to them by comparison ACDC Van Halen very tame compared to Swedish speed metal so it is very subjective there is no one song everybody likes there's no one song everybody hates and even if you have a set of favorite songs those may change throughout your lifetime you may get bored of them they just not they may not hit you right but you know since we're talking about this as music as medicine and since you are a medical doctor just for so our listeners will know if you go to your doctor and you complain to depression it's a lot of trial and error I mean even setting aside the 20 different forms of talk therapy that might be recommended they the medicinal side is okay well let's try Prozek and it'll take three months or so to see whether it's working and if it's not we can raise the dose and then you know well that doesn't work in six months in you say well we'll move to Zoloft well we'll move to Well butrin well we'll move to you know I mean it's it's constantly chasing the right concoction and music music is somewhat like that you've got to do some trial and error fortunately you don't have to wait three months to see with whether the song's gonna work you only have to wait three minutes and you can go through a bunch of things and many people have a strong intuition about what they like and don't like and they can immediately home in on it but there is a profession called music therapist it's a certification that is separate from being a therapist and they're a music therapist all over Europe and the UK and the US and Canada and and the Commonwealth and they they can help you to find music that will help you achieve your therapeutic goals whatever they are just as you were talking about there maybe 18 or 20 different forms of therapy and of course there's research on the various merits of certain types of therapy but there's a lot of research out the supporting that the most important thing is not the therapy but the therapist I'm glad you went there with that that's absolutely true it doesn't matter from the research it doesn't matter what school they were trained in if they were Freudian or Jungian or Gestalt or Adlerian or you know cognitive behavioral that what really matters is your relationship with the therapist and therefore we can apply that to the song what really matters is our relationship to the song not someone else's relationship as you just said you know these things are totally individual yeah the the other thing that matters is not just your personal relationship with the song but your relationship with the artist so you know you may find something appealing out of an unearthed bun jovy song because that voice and band is so familiar sounding to you that you're predisposed to it for me it wouldn't be bun jovy it would be Robert Smith and the cure but you know it's to each his own I have a friend who's a comedian named Dan Perraro he writes a syndicated comic strip called Bizarro that's been in newspapers all over the world for 30 years and he says as part of his standard routine I always hate it when I overhear somebody at the table next to me at the restaurant asked the waiter what do you recommend he says I don't have the same mouth and taste buds as the waiter what he likes has nothing to do with what I like yeah I love it it's so true and I've been thinking recently did you observe what happened with Oasis this summer you know they're one of the the biggest British rock bands of all time right right and they reformed and they were probably the hottest tickets not of the year off the decade or arguably off the millennium so far I mean it was like gold I so I think one and a half million people across the UK went to one of their concerts and I didn't I've seen them many times before but I was away in the summer and the reason I'm bringing this up is you write in a book about what actually happens when we listen to music with other people and you find a chapter you write that music is that phenomenal experience it music is rather unique in that it can be a communal experience and at the same time be very personal and the video footage of Oasis was really quite phenomenal people who went I've got really good friends who went they said wrong and it was like nothing else we've ever been to everyone was happy everyone was hugging each other there was no negativity that it was just pure joy and at the end of the night when they played champagne supernova one of their biggest hits you know with all the lights it's a dark British summer evening everyone's singing it would have been like a spiritual experience and I genuinely believe that a lot of people were having a nostalgia for a different time of their life you know in the 90s when life seemed a bit simpler there was no smartphones or social media we weren't as busy and as stressed out as we are today and I genuinely believe that maybe the Oasis concerts did more for the collective well-being of the UK than maybe anything else that year and I don't believe there's any drug on the planet or a prescribed drug on the planet that could probably do to people what they experience when they experience that collective effervescence in an arena with songs that they love and 80,000 other people around them also love that is healing isn't it yeah and and I just on the neurochemical side that experience releases oxytocin which is a neurochemical that helps you to feel more trustful and bonded it's the same chemical that's released during when two people are together and share an orgasm it bonds them together it was evolutions way of tricking the man to stick around is the way some biologists look at it and you get that sense of warm attachment from sharing music with others we don't know why but we talked earlier in the broadcast about how different neurochemical systems evolved to support different aspects of music and one of them is this social bonding probably owing to the I mean it is all evolutionary you know to set with modification and the adaptations that confer the greatest chance of survival are the ones that get passed on so you know those of our ancient ancestors who took found pleasure in singing around a campfire and therefore successfully warded off predators or neighboring tribes that might attack them while they were asleep they're the ones that lived the others all died out and so we are the legacy of people who liked hearing music collectively and I mean not to put too fine a point on it but none of us is descended from an ancestor who failed to reproduce yeah they succeeded in reproducing because of a number of qualities they had and one of them clearly was the ability to enjoy music together your lab I believe has studied goose bumps before and what actually causes goose bumps and I think it would be interesting to talk about that here because I do think that you know I appreciate you may not be in a racist fan but anyone who isn't their music will know the song champagne supernova it says magnificent song that in the right setting in a stadium would feel rather mystical and magical I imagine some people who heard that in that collective setting had goose bumps at the same time so what are goose bumps and what do we know about them so far? Today's episode is sponsored by The Way I have tried so many meditation apps over the years but I've never come across one as good or as effective as The Way I've been using most mornings for many months now and I absolutely love it I find it a fantastic way to start off each day and it has really helped me feel calmer relaxed and more present in fact I love this app so much that I recently decided to invest in the company and join them in their mission to get more people meditating I believe that more people meditating will help create a more compassionate world and as Adalo Lama himself said if every eight year old in the world is taught meditation we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation meditation has been shown to have all kinds of benefits reducing stress increasing calm improving focus and over time has even been shown to result in positive structural changes in the brain in areas linked to memory focus and emotional regulation but of course you only get those benefits if you actually do it and that's one of the main reasons I love The Way so much it makes it really easy to establish a meditation practice that sticks if you don't believe me I would encourage you to give it a try and find out for yourself in fact to help you do that the way are offering my podcast listeners an incredible third C free meditation sessions to get you started with your practice so you can try it out and see if you like it completely free of charge to take advantage all you have to do is go to the way app.com forward slash live more to get started I begin your journey towards peace calm and purpose today's episode is sponsored by a G1 a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over seven years now this is the time if you when our immune systems are under the most pressure between spending more time indoors travel and seasonal bugs it's natural to look for extra ways to support our immune defenses but most people don't want to juggle multiple pills they want something simple effective and easy to stick with. AG1 is a daily health drink that provides key immunity supporting nutrients vitamin C vitamin A zinc and selenium all of which contribute to the normal function of the immune system these nutrients are included in highly bioavailable forms meaning they are much easier for the body to absorb and use backed by clinical research expert formulation and continuous improvement AG1 has been in my own life for around seven years now and each batch is independently tested for quality and safety that's how they guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not and the best thing of course is that all this goodness comes in one convenient tasty daily serving for listeners of my podcast and for a limited time only get 10 free travel packs plus a free welcome kit including shaker canister and scoop when you sign up for a monthly subscription at drinkag1.com forward slash live more that feeling of the hair on the back of your neck standing up or that little shiver you get down your spine it's related to a sense of awe it's also related to surprise whether you know it or not and whether your musician or not when you're listening to music there are parts of your brain particularly in the pre-final cortex that are trying to track and predict track the music that's going on and has gone on and then predict what will come next if if if your brain is nothing else the human brain is a giant prediction machine it tries to figure out what's going to happen next and to do that it looks for patterns which is why on a cloudy day if you lie on your back and you look at the clouds you might see a rabbit or you know why when the ancient Greeks looked at the stars they saw a rye and the hunter and you know the earth's a major the big bear they a rye and the hunter doesn't really exist in the stars it's it's the human brain imposing order on something that's disordered and so that predictive device in particularly in a region called broadman area 47 is trying to figure out what's going to happen next in the music the composers job and the performers job to some extent is to reward your expectations enough of the time that you feel that there's a conversation going on it's almost like you're completing each other's sentences you and the composer but if if you're completing each other's sentences too much you get bored and so the composer and performers job is to surprise you every once in a while to not fulfill your prediction and if they can surprise you in a way that's extraordinarily pleasing that can lead to goose bumps and it will work even with the song you've heard a thousand times because schematically that song is different than the tens of thousands of songs you've heard before it and so even though the surprise in that particular song is anticipated it's still surprising compared to all the other songs you mentioned before that perhaps something has changed in modern society where because we're busier or we feel the pressure to perform and get through our email inbox and our to-do list that those opportunities for art that used to exist have in many ways been eroded in many of our lives one thing I've observed since the Covid pandemic is this collective inertia that's set in across society I really don't think we've fully recovered yet we've not gone back to doing the things that we did beforehand we've lost so much from not going back to these collective type of experiences whether it be yoga or concerts or watching a musical or whatever it might be is there something unique about doing this or listening to music with other people that we don't get from listening to music by ourselves and I guess the follow up to that is in a world of YouTube now where whatever concert you might want to go to someone's taken a high definition video recorder in and has uploaded it to YouTube right so the second part of that question is is there a difference do you think of watching a live experience of a concert on YouTube versus actually being in the concert hall yourself we don't have any research on this but I think the marketplace has decided for us as you note being able to listen to music at home through AirPods or whatever or to watch a YouTube video is always more convenient than going out somewhere and yet concert venues sell out it's it's it's part of it is being with others and feeling part of something larger than you because there are another thousand or 10,000 or 40,000 people there with you the same reason we go to see sporting events live is to be with other people it's even if you're watching at home people often have football parties yeah I know people with listening parties that seems not to have caught on in the same way but the other element is that in a live performance anything could happen certainly true to sporting event as well as at a music event you know you know they're not going to play it exactly the same way as you heard it on the record and that can be exciting but I think if it was just the collective experience of being with others and not also the live element of anything can happen some entrepreneur would have figured out that they can sell tickets to the O2 and just play records yeah but nobody wants to do that so there is something about live music that's different and I like to think it's that we feel some connection to the artist the artist is there they showed up for us yeah earlier on we spoke about Alzheimer's and in your book you write about Glenn Campbell and I'd love you to talk to us a little bit about Glenn and what do you think his story tells us about the brain so Glenn Campbell is an America anyway one of the most famous musicians he began as a member of what we call the wrecking crew which was a set of studio musicians that included him and how blame and Carol K and others who he was a guitarist and they played on a bunch of records by 60s groups that had the songwriting ability and singing but not necessarily the musicianship to make great records so I'm talking about records by the birds and the association the turtles the mamas and the poppas a lot of the Phil Spector recordings that this was kind of a house studio band Glenn was the guitar he played for the monkeys and and other groups and then he developed into a songwriter and solo artist had a TV series and had a number of massive hits in the on the country charts here in the US so he's somebody that's as well known here as say Adele or Oasis is known in the UK and he developed Dalles Hymers and decided that he wanted to do one last tour he loves performing and they could send a film crew out with him to document it I've seen the family got in touch with me around this time because of my research work and I saw the brain scans and when he was in the middle of the tour I would say half his brain was offline at that point and you there were vestiges of this apparent to an audience he would sometimes forget that he had just finished a song and maybe play it three times in a row he often didn't know what city he was in you know he'd say you know good evening Philadelphia when he was in St. Louis so you know that that sort of thing he had a teleprompter but many artists his age used teleprompters Mick Jaggers used in the prompter as far as I know so as his bono so that's all right you can't remember all the lyrics to the 500 songs you do yeah but and then off stage he didn't know where he was or what time of day it was and he didn't recognize people that he had known for decades but once the song started he played his brilliant as ever wow with have his brain missing he might still have been the best guitarist on the planet but what that tells us about him is that he had spent a lifetime building up what you and I would call cognitive reserve excess capacity excess redundant neural circuits in the same way that an athlete builds up muscle reserve so I like working out at the gym there's a guy there who can bench press 500 pounds I can't do that I can't even do 250 but on a bad day the guy who can do 500 can still do 250 so on a bad day Glenn Campbell could still play better than anybody else Tony Bennett went through the same thing as a singer when he had Alzheimer's this is well known the thing that we've practiced the most is something that can stay preserved and the take-home message for I think all our listeners here is if you don't play an instrument now it's never too late to start I know a lot of people in their 70s and 80s who started to play and if you do play an instrument or used to keep up with it not because it's you necessarily going to be that you're going out on tour but playing an instrument builds up cognitive reserve and motor reserve in ways that are helpful it builds up i hand coordination it builds up feedback loops where you're anticipating a sound you have to listen to it you have to adjust the sound it does all these things that are neuro protective for memory and for attention and you can't you can't prevent Alzheimer's but you can mask the symptoms of it for many years if you've got cognitive reserve yeah I love that that what the real take home for us to think about learning to play an instrument if we don't currently do or if we do just make sure we stay consistent with that and keep playing that's very practical Dan what about as a music listener let's say there's someone who's come across this conversation who doesn't really listen to music much anymore maybe they did as a teenager but for whatever reason they don't know they'll listen to the news or to podcasts about health or you know they're not listening to music anymore why do you think they might benefit from bringing more music into their lives well um i think through music i mean the big picture as i write about in the second to the last chapter the big picture is through engagement with the arts in general in music in particular we often can imagine the world different than it is that's what art does is it paints a picture of somebody wanted to join the interview that's okay i like not being the center of attention art can paint a picture of other lives of other ways of seeing things and um through imagining a different world the that act of imagination we can imagine a better world and it's only by imagining a better world that we can build it so i would say what's at stake here is the future of the society that you want if you're not engaged with the arts you're not going to have the imaginative strength to think about making things different and their things can always be made better it's so thought provoking what you've just said if we just continue with these super busy rational lives where we get through our emails do our job do our errands make sure the shopping's in or whatever be that's going to be one type of existence and of course for some people that they've got really tough lives and they're doing the best they can to make ends meet and to keep a roof over themselves and their family i understand that at the same time even if you can bring in some of the arts and of course through this conversation music into your life it does help you imagine it does take you out of your own existence and connect you to the world around you people sometimes do that through meditation right or through loving kindness meditation they might try and connect themselves to the world around them but music is also a powerful way of doing that and in your book you have all kinds of luminaries from the past talking about the benefits and the essential nature of music including Nietzsche who says life without music would be a mistake which i think says it all done i just want to talk about the song fast car by Tracy Chanman in your section on trauma you wrote quite a lot about this song it's of course a phenomenal song that stood the test of time what is it that you like so much about this song and why did you include it in your book it's a powerful expression of a person's emotional life whether it's autobiographical or not is not the point but i like songs that are little novellas little short stories that capture something very real and so Tracy is writing about a person bear may not be her who's in a dead end job in a small town and faced with a decision about whether to care for her alcoholic father or care for herself and she doesn't see any way out and somebody with a fast car we could be a man or a woman we don't know shows up and they dream of going to the city and getting better jobs and having a life there and they get there and whoever it was she went with is you're spending all his or her time at the bar not helping to raise the kids doesn't have any money and she finally says you know effectively i wish you'd just taken your fast car and kept on driving but what's so seductive about the song is the chorus i listened to that song for decades and i just liked the melody and i liked the words and i didn't really the story didn't really register with me because the chorus is so bouncy you know i remember when i was in your arms you know we were we were driving and speed so fast like as if i was drunk you know just yeah that feel good sort of you're just escaping yeah and it just sounds bouncy and intoxicatingly wonderful until you realize the darkness that's beneath it and so any great piece of art has these layers and these levels and it's a funny thing the the the bounciness of a melody and a rhythm can distract us and and in some way make the darker message more palatable one of the most famous songs of the last hundred years is Mac the Knife which most people will be familiar with was a big hit for Bobby Darren and Louis Armstrong and Elef its Gerald and but it's about a serial killer in the way that Maxwell's Civil Hammer by the Beatles a much loved song of theirs is about a serial killer so um it's uh it's a funny thing we we allow ourselves to surrender to the music and the lyrics kind of seep in i just saw an Instagram post that was really funny uh that during the 1969 the year the Beatles were breaking up Paul McCartney the captured was you know some therapists should have intervened uh and taken care of you know help take care of Paul McCartney psyche because in that same year he wrote this song about obsession oh darling uh a song about um legal problems and a breakup with two of us um a song about desolation with the log and winding road and then a song about a serial killer in Maxwell's Civil Hammer you know the the lyrics were telling you everything you needed to know about his emotional state but none of us noticed the cries for help yeah it's interesting what you're saying about fast car i was talking to my wife this morning about it we're both big Tracy Chapman fans and i said hey vid what do you like about the song and she said well first of all of the story i love Tracy's voice the emotion in her voice as she's singing it and i said what do you know about the story you know what do you what do you remember she goes well you know and she basically said accurately how it all starts and then how it changes at the end you know it's almost the punchline to the song when um you know she says take that fast car and just keep on driving right i like you Dan i don't think i'd fully registered the story i just loved it for years whereas my wife his lyrics more than i do i hear tunes and beats and she his words so that's who the interesting as well isn't said that we can have the same piece of music and take different things from it we all take different things from from songs um what am i my two of my favorite lyricists are Walter Becker and Donald Fagan of Steely Dan and they write their lyrics intentionally to be obtuse because they want people to read into it whatever they want Dylan said in his autobiography he tried to write out of both sides of his mouth he tried to write messages that were contradictory so that people could find in it their own truth he's not precious Dylan's not precious about insisting that people interpret the song the way he intended an opposite case is Joni Mitchell who is indignant if you interpret the song differently than she did she had a very particular thing in mind and um i mean i i think i i recognize her right and respect her right as an artist to say no the song doesn't mean that but on the other hand i think the beauty of songs is that people can find their own meaning in them the as as we do in poetry or as we do in paintings or film or dance the um we can project our lives on it or or we can allow a blank screen in our minds and hearts to have that song projected on it and it can mean what it means to us and that meaning can change i think that's that's part of the power of it and you know Joni may have had something in mind writing autobiographically and that's why she wrote it but it doesn't mean that my experience is going to be the same just because you know getting back to the waiter and the patron at the restaurant we don't have the same cent organs you know i'm the same mouth i want to finish off Dan talking about something that we touched upon at very times throughout this conversation in a what is music and it's called what is it really and in the final chapter of your book you quote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and you say that he viewed music as not merely a representation of the world but as an expression of the very will that drives everything in our corporeal and metaphysical worlds and then you say this distinction elevates music to a plane where it becomes not a mirror but a window into the deepest recesses of existence i love that it's so evocative but with that in mind is it reasonable that we can use science to study music well if you let me take let's do it as a counterfactual if you can't study music scientifically you can't study consciousness scientifically or emotions or feelings of awe or the origins of the universe i mean all these things are probably more complex and marvelous than we know and we probably understand one or two percent of it but that one or two percent we've understood has helped us to do things that were valuable to us like the in the you know the discovery of the germ theory of disease by semivice the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming that you know that's one or two percent of the equation but it's an important one or two percent now i don't know that we've benefited in practical ways from trying to understand the origins of the universe and the big bang but that you know the work that has come out of modern physics is helping us to better meet our energy demands as a culture and better better engineering and things like that have come about so that you know yeah it seems silly but cars are safer now than they were 50 years ago because of physics and engineering and you know the space program which seemed purely exploratory gave us things like kevlar and fire retardant materials so the nature of science as Einstein said is you don't know what you're going to find until you start looking for it it's not engineering that's what distinguishes science from engineering engineer is they build a bridge and it darn better be exactly as they thought it would be at the end when they started it but with scientific research if you don't if if you think you know what it is going into it then it's engineering not science yeah perhaps it's not that we shouldn't use science to study music but we should understand the limitations of what we find perhaps that is another way of looking at it would you say down having studied music you know you you are a musician yourself but you have studied this topic for many many years now has your research in any way changed the way you utilize music in your own life it has thank you for asking I am now more likely to write music or play music when I'm feeling off kilter because I feel like before I study the science it felt untested or frivolous or self-indulgent now I've got the rational basis for knowing how it works and so I allow myself to spend more time doing something that's not writing books or doing research or cleaning the house and the other thing that I learned I learned it from a jony Mitchell mentoring me in songwriting and from my friendship with sting which is that the discipline required to do music is much more than I acknowledged and it makes practice much more pleasurable for me knowing how hard they work they're craft yeah I love that Dan honestly I love talking to you I think the the book is absolutely phenomenal it's such a wonderful and original read I've thoroughly enjoyed making my through and I think I'll keep coming back to it over the coming years to finish off Dan if there was someone who is listening to us right now and they're struggling in their life they are struggling with meaning with purpose maybe they feel a bit stuck maybe they struggle with low mood some of the time and they're keen to bring music into their life but perhaps they never ever learned an instrument before what would you say to them well I mean certainly it's easy enough to piano's pianos are probably the easiest and keyboards are the easiest instrument to play I mean you're a guitarist and you know you have to build up calluses and it's hard to visualize the scale on a fingerboard because the strings are tuned to different pitches but on a piano and novice can make a sound as you can play a middle C as well as Arthur Rubenstein or as well as Elton John Stringing the notes together is much easier to learn and there's so many videos now on YouTube about how to play the piano and there's a lot of pianos people buy them keep an electronic keyboards I on Facebook marketplace or you know various neighborhood websites people are often giving them away or selling them for five cents on the dollar because they they don't play them anymore don't want them anymore and so it's the cost barrier to entry is very low and YouTube videos are very very helpful there's a song I wanted to play on the piano and I couldn't quite figure it out because the official sheet music for it is wrong which is often the case and it's buried in an arrangement so that I couldn't hear what the pianist was doing and the song I learned was Martha my dear by the Beatles upon a carton song and I take so much pleasure playing it now and it was a YouTube video that taught me so you would say to that person maybe start learning an instrument and if that feels like a step too far would you encourage him to start listening to more music or singing you know start singing along you don't have to have a great voice Leonard Conn and Springsteen and Bob Dylan showed us that just you know sing more sing along with the music you like yeah even if it next hour even if you're in the shower let music be thine medicine Dan it's been a real pleasure to talk to you thank you for making time thank you for the writing such a wonderful book and I hope we get to do this again sometime in person editor thank you again for your hospitality really hope you enjoyed that conversation do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life and also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else remember when you teach someone it only helps them it also helps you learn and retain the information now before you go just wanted to let you know about Friday 5 it's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness in that email I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else including health advice how to manage your time better interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect and I have to say in a world of endless emails it really is delightful that many if you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving so if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday you can sign up for free at doctorchatag.com forward slash Friday 5 now if you want new to my podcast you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been best sellers all over the world covering all kinds of different topics happiness food stress sleep behavior change and movement weight loss and so much more so please do take a moment to check them out they are all available as paperbacks ebooks and as audio books which I am narrating if you enjoyed today's episode it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family all either of you on Apple podcasts thank you so much for listening have a wonderful week and please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android all you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app and always remember you are the architect of your own health making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better you live more