Empathy

The Richard Nicholls Mental Health Podcast

Richard Nicholls

Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Health & Fitness, Wellbeing, Education, Anxiety, Happiness, Self-improvement, Depression, Self Help, Psychology, Alternative Health, Counseling, Counselling

4.8 • 690 Ratings

🗓️ 1 May 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Send us a text I have a couple of catchphrases, or if you ask my wife I repeat myself a lot and can be boring and predictable, either way you'll often hear me say one particular phrase. "The brain can't separate fact from fiction." If you've got this far through my Podcast series and not heard me say that then I must boring after all because you clearly fell asleep, because I say it a lot. And for good reason. Support the show Join our Evolve to Thrive 6 month programme https://therapynatters...

Transcript

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0:00.0	And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development
0:08.2	podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.
0:16.7	I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols, and this episode is titled Empathy.
0:23.1	And if you're ready, we'll start the show.
0:29.9	Happy new month, everyone. How have things been for you? There's a lot of anxiety around at the minute. And if you need to steer clear of the news
0:41.0	for a bit, I wouldn't blame you. It can make us quite pessimistic about the future, the news.
0:47.6	When I think about the future, I do try to focus on the things I'd rather see happen than the
0:52.9	worst case scenario. And avoiding the news and filtering
0:56.6	social media really can help. If someone wants your attention, there's a fair chance. They're
1:03.0	going to do that with, at best, exaggeration, and at worst, blatant lies. And I don't know about you, but I want my brain filled with that sort of stuff as little as possible.
1:16.2	Avoiding it helps me to be the optimistic realist and keeps anxiety at bay.
1:21.0	Because if we constantly create a fictional world in our mind, it easily becomes the real world to us. Like I so often say,
1:29.6	the brain can't separate fact from fiction. Now, our intelligence can, our conscious, rational
1:36.8	thinking can, but our brain will still react to the input it gets. Now, that input can be from
1:43.2	thoughts or it can be from experiences and it's the
1:45.9	experiences I want to talk about today. The example I sometimes use when teaching people about
1:52.4	how stupid our brains are is watching things like you've been framed. When someone falls over and it
1:58.6	makes you go, oh, ow, I felt that.
2:04.7	Neurologists call it a response in the mirror neurons.
2:15.5	Mirror neurons are strings of brain connections in the prefrontal cortex that send signals to other areas of our brain based on what other people are doing. We have motor mirror neurons and sensory mirror neurons.
2:21.8	So there are neurons that fire off when we watch someone kick a ball,
2:25.5	and there are neurons that fire off when we watch somebody get kicked in the face.
	...

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