This episode is sponsored by BeaverFit.
And as always, this is another company
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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name's James Gearing
and this week it is my absolute honor
to welcome on the show, Swedish psychiatrist,
international bestselling author
and TV personality, Dr. Anders Hansson.
Now in this conversation, we discussed a host of topics.
From his childhood in Sweden,
his journey into psychiatry,
the detrimental impact of social media
on children and adults,
the importance of sleep,
ADHD,
the shame and guilt attached to mental ill health,
his latest book, The Happiness Cure and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation,
as I say every week, please just take a moment,
go to whichever app you listen to this on,
subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating
truly does elevate this podcast,
therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of almost 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share
these incredible men and women stories
so I can get them to every single person
on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So that being said, I introduce to you,
Dr. Anders Hansson, enjoy.
Well, Anders, I want to say two things.
Firstly, thank you to Karina for connecting us.
And secondly, to welcome you today
onto the Behind the Shield podcast.
Thank you, my pleasure.
It's nice to be here.
So where on planet earth are we finding you today?
I'm in Stockholm.
I'm in my apartment.
I live in Stockholm and I'm a psychiatrist
and I work part time as a clinician.
And the other half of my time is for writing
and then I write popular science books.
And I do some research at the Karolinska,
but my main job is to meet patients.
Beautiful.
Well, I would love to start the very beginning
of your story before we kind of enter the world
of psychology and psychiatry.
Tell me where you were born
and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic,
what your parents did, how many siblings?
I was born in Stockholm.
My mother was a nurse and father was a lawyer.
I had a rather normal upbringing, no big traumas.
I have a younger brother.
When I did not know what to do after high school,
I enjoyed lots of subjects.
So eventually I went into economics
and studied at Stockholm School of Economics
and did some internships at investment banks
and stuff like that when I was in my early 20s.
And then I realized I am not one of those guys.
That's not for me.
So then I went into medicine
and to finance my studies in medicine,
I started writing for a newspaper.
And then I discovered that I liked to write.
And I sort of found a passion in bringing scientific
knowledge, medical knowledge to the public
in a way that's easy to understand.
And that's what I've been continuing doing
in parallel to working as a psychiatrist.
And I do these books and I've done a number of TV programs
for Swedish television.
And I just love to present this knowledge.
I think there's so much power in this knowledge
and this knowledge can be so healing in itself.
It can be therapeutic, I think.
So that therefore I see great value in sort of trying
to educate people in these topics.
Absolutely.
Well, going back to your early years, the school years,
I've had a few people on here now from Scandinavia.
One of them is Pasi Solberg from Finland.
And when you look at just the health of the child
and a healthy education system,
a lot of times it's Scandinavia that does it very, very well.
So when you reflect now with this lens that you have
at your age, what were the good things about your schooling
when you were little and were there any cons
of the Swedish system back then?
What I'm very glad is that I had the chance
to change my mind.
I studied economics and I was almost finished
when I went into med school.
And it would be impossible to do that in the US
unless you have very rich parents.
But here you could do that.
Education is free in Sweden.
And I'm so glad about that.
About that part in Swedish schooling system.
So just to underline that,
if you go through the regular school system
then you go into higher education,
that's all funded by the government.
So Swedish men and women don't graduate from school
with crippling debt, is that correct?
That's correct.
You can borrow money from the state, so to speak,
in order to pay for your, as you study,
but that's for paying for food and rent and stuff like that.
So there's no tuition in Swedish universities.
And I think that's wonderful because that way
you make sure to use the human capital
that is obviously spread among different income groups.
No matter whether your parents can afford it or not,
you could still go to university.
That's fantastic.
What about sports?
What were you playing when you were a young man?
Football, soccer, and handball.
I love that.
I did that until I was about 15.
And then I picked it up.
I still do it.
And I play some tennis,
but I'm more and more afraid of injuries.
As you get older, the risk of injuries becomes more severe.
But I do that and I run.
I don't like to run, but I do it
because I know how incredibly important it is.
So I tried to maintain active, fiscally active.
I tried to do something almost every day,
but I would never dream of doing a marathon
or anything like that.
For me, exercise is about feeling as good as possible.
And functioning mentally as good as possible
because exercise has tremendous effect
on our cognitive abilities.
What about the kind of culture
of continuing to be active after school?
The reason I ask that, as we mentioned before we hit record,
I'm originally from England.
And at least when I was younger,
there wasn't this high, high level of performance
in high schools, unless you were an amazing footballer
or the specific sport.
But when you graduated, people would still play sports.
There will be pub leagues and local leagues.
So you'd see men in their 30s, 40s, 50s still playing.
In America, what I saw, and this is not everyone,
but a lot of them, they have this extremely high
performance level in school.
But then there's this massive drop off.
And I think it's because a lot of these young boys
and girls are physically and mentally burnt out
from this high level and they lost the joy
and even the physical capacity to play.
So what keeps Swedes playing after school?
Well, the sad truth is that most Swedes
don't play after school.
Physical activity has gone down in Sweden
and Sweden has become more like the US
in the sense that it's more competitive
in sports earlier in life.
You get picked to the soccer team, to the good team,
or either you're, or otherwise you're out
when you're 10 or 12.
And that was not the case when I grew up.
I think that's insane.
The role of physical activity is not to find
the next professional soccer player or whatever.
It's to feel as good as possible
and to function as good as possible.
Because exercise has nothing to do with sports really.
It's incredibly important for both the body and the brain.
And your habits of exercising are set in childhood.
They're not set in stone,
but childhood is very important for that.
And we've seen in Sweden that young Swedes,
children and teenagers don't exercise
as much as they used to.
And that's probably partly due to the screen time.
The screen takes six to seven hours
for every teenager on average.
And that means that you simply don't have the time for it.
When you look back now
from a children's mental health perspective,
what was in place then?
And again, has that devolved?
Because I know social media definitely comes up
over and over and over again
when I talk about challenges
for children's mental health in 2024.
Yeah, I mean, when I grew up, mental health was not discussed.
If I, at all, if I heard the word anxiety,
I thought of a movie of Ingmar Bergman
or something like that.
If I heard the word psychiatry,
I thought of padded rooms.
So, and one flew over the cuckoo's nest.
Those were the images that crept into mind.
And today that stigma has been reduced.
And that is fantastic.
More people are speaking about this.
So that is great.
And more people are seeking help.
The problem is that even though more children
and teenagers are seeking help,
they are feeling worse than they used to.
They're feeling worse than 10 or 20 years ago.
And that's not, you know, speculation.
That is actually a fact,
which is especially concerning given that more
and more are being prescribed medication
and more and more are given therapy.
And the part of your life where mental health
seems to have dropped the most is teen,
during your teenage years.
For girls between 12 to 14 and boys about 13 to 15.
That's probably because this is the time of puberty.
And in puberty, you want to belong to a group desperately.
And, you know, we have always compared ourselves
to one another.
That's something that humans have always done.
And we ask ourselves, do I belong to the group?
Am I good enough?
And that group was your tribe or your band
or your village for 99.9% of human history.
And when you and I grew up, that group was your class
and perhaps some other kids in school.
But that was about it.
And now you compare yourself to the entire planet.
You compare yourself to billions of people on Instagram
and TikTok and so on and so forth.
And there's always gonna be someone who's better than you,
who is better looking and smart or smarter
or richer or whatever.
And you get that signal fed into you six or seven hours
every day on your screen.
And that sense that it's registered in your brain
as I'm not good enough.
I don't belong in the group.
And to belong in the group has for almost
all previous generations of humans been as important
as having food.
And to be pushed out of the group meant mortal danger.
So that's why we feel so bad when we are excluded.
The brain is warning us that we are in lethal danger,
even though we of course we aren't anymore.
And when we expose ourselves to this,
we get the same signal.
I don't belong to a group.
And deep down in your brain,
that is registered as something that might be a threat
to your life, even though it isn't of course anymore.
And that's why we feel so bad about it.
So I think that a big part of why teenagers
are worse off than they used to is due to social media.
And this is also not speculation.
This is actually solid science now that this is the case.
And another reason is that when you spend six or seven hours
every day in front of a screen,
you don't do the things that protect your mental health.
And what is that?
Well, that's sleeping.
That is exercising.
And more than anything, that's meeting people in real life.
So all these three protective factors,
sleep, exercise, and meeting in real life,
they are being eroded in today's society
in a way that makes us more susceptible
to mental health problems.
Well, you just hit all the pillars of health
that affect the first responders
in military communities as well.
So we'll circle around that.
I wanna get to your entry into psychiatry first,
and then we'll revisit many things that you've just said.
So you mentioned about going to economics.
You mentioned being in an education system
that actually nurtures young men and women
to be able to be the contributing elements of society,
which I think is such an amazing model.
And the thing I think that would work here is,
yes, if you were gonna go to college
and just waste your time and drink every day,
then you should be given the bill at the end.
But if you're gonna go like my son is at the moment
and pursue it and be working every day,
then I don't think that we should be giving
these young men and women this immense debt
and starting them off on the back foot.
That being said though, you're in this great environment.
What made you shift to psychiatry
and then walk me through that journey
into that particular field?
I was in an autopsy room 24 years ago.
That was life-changing for me.
I stood and held a human brain in my hand.
And this, I remember this like yesterday still.
This is a very strong memory.
I'm holding this brain of a man who was 84.
And I realized at that moment
that everything he ever experienced,
every moment, every feeling, every memory
from the first childhood steps to his last dying day,
everything was in this object that I was now holding
in my hands.
And in a way, I was closer to his inner self
than he ever was himself.
And then in the next moment, I realized, of course,
that I have a brain and in my brain,
everything that I have experienced has occurred.
And then I decided I want to work with this organ.
And then I had two choices, neurology and psychiatry.
And neurology felt like it was headaches
and dementia and epilepsy.
It's a bit more than that,
but that's what my view were at the time.
And psychiatry felt that I felt that I had
sort of an existential dimension to it
that I was very attracted to.
So that's why I chose psychiatry.
And I never looked back.
I love my work.
How did you find yourself in the autopsy?
Were you supposed to be there or had you broken in?
No, I was there.
It's part of the scheme.
It was during my second term as a med school student.
But what I, I mean, I remember so strongly
that I could not grasp that your inner self, your soul,
your subjective experience is created
in something that looks like packed sausages.
It's really ugly.
It's not an attractive looking organ.
It doesn't pump like the heart,
doesn't do anything really.
It just sits there and it doesn't look
very impressive at all.
So I really thought about this.
How can your subjective experience be created
in this organ?
And I have no answer to that.
I don't think anyone has.
And I don't recommend anyone to think too much about it
because you will not get anywhere.
But what I really take away from that day
in the autopsy room was the fact
that the brain is an organ.
And just like the other organs, the heart, the kidneys,
the liver, it has not evolved the way it did by chance.
The brain doesn't show us the world, the way the world is.
It shows us the world the way we had to see the world
in order to survive.
It shows, the brain doesn't show ourselves as we are.
It shows ourselves as we had to see ourselves
in order to survive.
So the brain is not the passive middle step
that you could just skip
if you're interested in human nature.
It's not a neutral step that doesn't do anything.
It is by definition what human nature actually is.
So if you want to learn more about yourself
and about your behavior and about your feelings
and about human nature, you can't skip the brain.
That is something that I did not realize that day
in the autopsy room, but that has crept into me gradually
during the last two decades.
So walk me through that process then.
What was the initial kind of textbook entry to psychiatry?
And then when did you start kind of leaning
into this evolutionary side of it?
I was always interested in the big questions
and in the why questions.
And if you go to why questions in medicine,
you will end up in evolution.
That's just, I mean, we are the product of evolution.
And I asked so many questions,
so many colleagues and even patients,
why do we think we have a brain?
What's the brain's main job?
And some of them say, well, it's to experience things,
it's to feel things, it's to remember things,
it's to be creative.
And none of that is correct.
The brain's main job is to keep us alive.
The brain is a survival machine.
Its main job, the perfect brain is not the brain
that figures out the theory of relativity,
it's the brain that takes you to tomorrow alive.
And during 99.9% of all our history as a species,
half of all humans died before they became teenagers.
And they did not die from cardiovascular disease
or cancer or stroke, which is what kills us today,
but they died from dehydration, infections,
murder, bleeding, accidents.
And that means that you and I and all of your listeners
have behind them an unbroken line of survivors,
because all of our ancestors lived until they became adults.
Otherwise we would not be here, right?
And that means that we are the descendants of the humans
who did not die from infections, bleeding,
murder, accidents.
And therefore we have strong defense mechanisms
against infections, bleeding, murder, accidents.
But we don't have any defense mechanisms
against cardiovascular disease or cancer or stroke,
because these things have just killed us
for one or a couple of generations.
And through that lens, I look at anxiety, for instance,
because anxiety is basically stress in advance.
If my boss is yelling at me, I get stressed.
That's a threat here and now.
If I think maybe my boss will yell at me tomorrow,
that's a threat.
The same activity in the body, in the brain is activated,
but in stress due to a real threat here and now,
and in anxiety due to possible threat.
And the brain loves to portray things as possible threats.
Why?
Well, that's because half of all humans died
before they became teenagers.
And as I said, from accidents, bleeding, murder,
and infections, the ones who were carrying the disease
and the ones who were careful,
the ones who painted a very dark picture on the world,
who saw danger everywhere,
they had better chances of survival.
And they passed on their genes to us.
And since about 40% of your risk of becoming anxious
comes from your genes, that's the actual number,
it's not strange that there are people among us
who have anxiety.
What is strange is that there are people
who don't have anxiety,
and maybe they are the ones who should be diagnosed.
And then I always say that to my patients
that a strong pair of arms, they could lift heavy things
and a strong pair of legs can run fast,
but a strong brain is not the brain
that goes through periods of stress without being affected.
It's a brain that wants to keep you alive at all costs,
even though it means that you are anxious
or suffering from it.
Now, by this, I don't want to trivialize anxiety in any way
because anxiety is hell.
It can be devastating people's lives,
but just to shift perspective and realize
that you are not damaged good
because you're suffering from anxiety or PTSD
or anything similar,
it's your brain that wants to keep you alive.
And I think this is important
because we constantly tell stories about ourselves
and these stories becomes roadmaps on how we view our future.
And if we view ourselves as sick, broken,
or lacking a certain neurotransmitter in the brain,
we see ourselves as damaged goods.
And I have seen how it can be
almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I have anxiety disorder,
I can't have a normal relationship.
I have PTSD, I can't have normal work, et cetera.
And that is why it's important to understand
that the anxiety and the pressures for that matter
is evolutionary defense mechanisms
without which humans would not exist.
And these mechanisms can be fixed
and these mechanisms do not show
that you are broken or weak in any way.
I think that perspective shifting is very important.
There's so much in there again
that pertains to a lot of the things
that a lot of the people listening,
I wanna just kinda get your kind of journey
through psychiatry and again, circle around to many of those
because as you mentioned, PTSD or moral injury,
there's a lot of other layers
for the first responder in military
that the average person may not experience
in their lifespan.
When you entered the field and you started seeing patients,
what were the groups that you started working with?
And then were there any kind of aha moments
that the textbooks maybe weren't showing
some of the things that you were seeing
and hearing yourself?
Yeah, when you do your residency,
you work in different wards and you meet different patients.
I was mostly interested in schizophrenia
and psychotic disorders because it was so obvious
that something was wrong in the brain
and that something had to be fixed
at least partly by medication.
So I was very interested in that in the beginning.
But what I also realized was how common these issues are
and by that, I mean, depressions and anxiety.
There were people who I would not dream
have problems with this, who I saw
and who told me severe problems.
So then my takeaway message from that was the big stigma
around these diseases.
Everyone accepts that we are not in charge
of what happens in our kidneys, at least not fully,
or what happens in our stomach.
But for some reason, we believe that everything
that happens in our brains is within our power to change.
And so one must understand that the illnesses of the brain
is not just dementia or Parkinson's,
it's also depressions and anxiety.
And these states are very, very powerful.
You can never say to depressed patient
that pull yourself up.
That's as absurd as saying to someone with diabetes
that they should pull their blood sugar up.
It doesn't work like that.
So the stigma around these illnesses is still so big,
even though it's been reduced, it's still so big.
And there's still this narrative that you should be strong
and that you should not seek help and stuff like that.
And that nothing could be further from the truth.
And in Sweden, we have 1,500 deaths every year
due to suicide.
And a lot of those comes from people who are severely
depressed and have not seeked help.
And we still don't talk as much of suicide as we should.
We have about 300 deaths due to traffic in Sweden
and traffic safety is something that we talk a lot about,
but suicide is something that we hide under the blanket.
And sort of many people seems to believe
that it's a voluntary choice.
And it can be in some cases, of course,
but in most cases it's the result of an illness.
By that, I mean depression.
Absolutely.
Well, I know in America, it's basically 40,000
that we lose to suicide, which I would argue
were numbers that parallel early COVID.
Yet, as you said, there's no real exposure.
There's no counter on the news, for example.
But then if you extend into alcoholism and the opioid crisis
and all the other addiction side that is still part
of the mental health crisis, now you're getting
into the hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.
And again, it doesn't get any real discussion
or exposure at all, which is disgusting, I think.
Yeah, and I think that partly is because of this
misbelief that everything that happens in our head
is within our control.
If we commit suicide, we want to die.
We have made this philosophical decision
and no one can change that.
And that's just not as, it's not that simple.
When we are in a, during a severe depression,
your brain functions differently.
And I have seen that so many times as a psychiatrist,
who people who have been, they have been at the darkest point
in their whole lives, everything is black
and they just want to die.
And then after three or four weeks after they have gotten,
after treatment, they look upon it completely differently.
So we must understand that the brain is an organ
and it can be function less, better or worse,
so to speak, during different parts of your life.
And if it gets sick, the consequences can be lethal.
And my main advice here is seek help.
I can't emphasize that enough.
Seek help and seeking help is a sign of strength.
I've been doing this for eight years now.
I'm about to do, actually, this is probably roughly
the 1,000th interview that I've done.
So I am by no means an expert in anything,
but I've got to hear people from psychology and psychiatry,
but also hundreds of lived experience stories
and a lot of whom had near suicide.
Some even actually went through with their attempt
and survived.
And the darkness and the suffering that we kind of
are aware of seems to be out there,
but there's one other area that started surfacing
over and over and over again.
And it's basically being with nearly all of them,
which is also feeling a burden,
feeling like they are a burden to the people that they love.
And I started realizing that at that point,
the brain has literally become miswired
where their reality is skewed.
And you take someone who is a police officer or a firefighter
or a member of the military who's literally signed
on a piece of paper saying,
I will die for a complete stranger.
Now you get this perfect storm
of all the contributing factors.
And there's a belief that they are the cause
of their loved one's pain.
And if they selflessly take their own life,
their family would be happier.
Now, the thing is to the healthy mind, that makes no sense.
But to me, it reframes that suicide is cowardly selfish
to suicide is selfless and courageous
because that person truly believes
that they are the problem.
What about that perspective?
Have you heard that a lot on your end?
Yeah, I've heard that many times.
And it's a warning signal for suicide
when people in a depression goes towards this,
I am worthless.
I am this personality change
when they start to blaming themselves.
That's when they're entering a very dangerous part
of a stage in a depression.
I mean, a depression is basically
that everything feels pointless.
Things that you don't like to do feels pointless.
And this is nothing that goes on for a couple of days
because everyone has those days, but this goes on for months.
You are in a standstill, but if the pressures become deeper,
there's often a sort of self blame,
which I, as a psychiatrist, look very severely upon.
Then it must be treated.
Then one must do something.
And this goes away.
That's what I see over and over again.
When you get treatment, when you get medication
or therapy or exercise, or the best is to get all three
of them, it will start to go away.
And then you will look at it a couple of months later
and think, how could I, I mean, how was it possible
that I was so bad?
So yeah, but I guess you could see it the way you describe it
as well as an act of encouragement, but I would be,
I don't like to use the word courageous or brave or anything
in the context of suicide.
I see it more as a consequence of an illness.
Yeah, and I'm not talking about it being brave.
Again, it's not brave to the healthy mind.
It's not what we're supposed to do,
but I think that's just the belief system
because there's so many, the reason when there's stigma
is because there's judgment around suicide
and people say, how could you do that?
And there was a tragically perfect case to underline this.
We had two police officers about a year ago now,
a young couple, the man, the father took his own life first
and then I think it was barely a week
that the mother took their own life
and they had a baby boy.
So to the healthy mind, like what are you doing?
But at that point, one would assume again
that these same kinds of things were going through their head.
Now to the healthy person, of course,
now this poor child has got neither parents left
and they're very vulnerable
and hopefully they're being taken care of by a loved one.
But I think it just reframes that, how could they,
they were so selfish, think about the child
because as you said, at that point,
in their distorted reality,
they were thinking about the child, but in a different way.
And then you said about a warning sign,
this is what I've, I talk about this all the time now
because I think this is exactly that, it's a red flag
and that should be on the suicide posters
and the conversations.
If you are feeling like you're a burden
and your family would be better off without you,
that is absolutely the time to pick up the phone
and seek help.
Absolutely, that's a warning sign as clear
as if you're having chest pains.
Or if you have problem breathing during an infection
or something like that.
That is, and it goes back to my experience
in the autopsy room, I think,
we think that everything that goes on in our brains
is within our control, that we are the master of it.
And if we commit suicide, well, that means
that we have made a rational decision and we want to die.
And it's just not like that.
It's often a result of an illness.
And that's why you have to look at the brain as an organ.
And when you are in this state,
when you are in this black hole,
it's very, very difficult to see this from the side
because these are incredibly strong biological state
that doesn't get sort of tricked away by empty cliches.
Like it's gonna get better soon or pull yourself up.
It's not that simple.
So then you really have to trust it
that this is an illness.
Doesn't feel like that.
It doesn't feel like pneumonia or anything else,
but it is an illness and it will get better
if I get treatment.
And I sometimes people say, well, you know,
if you don't want to, if you have a loved one
who is in this state and they don't want to seek help,
well, then you have to help them.
Because everyone realized that if you have a loved one
who has broken his leg, he can't walk to the hospital.
You have to take him or her there.
And this is the same with this.
You have to get the people to seek help.
You have to drag them there almost.
That's what being a friend is about, isn't it?
You know, to take the real uncomfortable decisions.
Absolutely.
Well, I would love to kind of unpack
many of the contributing factors to anxiety and depression.
One of the realizations again, after, you know,
hundreds and hundreds of these conversations
was the impact of childhood trauma
on a lot of the people in uniform.
And the reason I say that is in the regular psychology world,
it seems like that's more addressed,
but what has happened is when you are a firefighter,
they focus on, oh, you had that horrible fire
or that horrible car crash,
and that must be why you're struggling.
And there's not a discussion of what happened
for the 18, 20 years before you ever put that uniform on
in the first place.
So talk to me about the elements of childhood
that can then contribute
to someone struggling later in life.
Yeah, so that goes back to the question
why we have a brain, and we have a brain,
the brain wants to keep us alive.
And it comes, as I said, about 40% of your risk,
whether you will be anxious or not, comes from your genes,
but the rest is, of course, from environment.
And if you grow up in an environment where you see danger,
where your parents don't take care of you and neglect you
or you witness abuse or things like that,
your brain is registering that as I will live
in an incredibly dangerous world, no one will help me.
And then, of course, the brain has to see even more danger.
It has to be even more vigilant for danger.
And that means that you have anxiety.
So the brain is adapting to its world, so to speak,
and that world, the world that you live in is,
part of it is set when you are a child, of course.
So it's not strange that you will become anxious
if you experience trauma as a child.
Then everyone is different.
Someone is more susceptible to this due to their genes,
and someone is less susceptible.
So you can't generalize about it too much.
But what I always say to patients who have traumatic memories
is that I try to remind them that memories are not there
for us to get a recollection of the past.
Memories are there to guide us here and now.
And if you have been in a traumatic experience as a child
or as an adult, the brain will pick up that memory,
constantly, because it wants to remind you,
don't do this again, don't get in this situation.
And if you are, for instance,
you have experienced something traumatic
when you were in the woods, for example,
then every time you walk into a forest
or every time you walk into to see a tree,
the brain will pick up that memory to remind you,
don't do this again.
It's trying to keep you alive, remember.
So I think post-traumatic stress can be a big problem
and post-traumatic stress can be seen as warning signals
and they come as flashbacks and they come as nightmares
and they're of course incredibly painful.
But to see them as warning signals shows
that the brain is not trying to hurt you.
It's not because you're weak,
it's because you have a very strong brain
that wants to protect you from this happening again.
And if it were to happen again,
you would have dealt with it the last time
because obviously you survived.
And this also gives us a clue to why therapy is so important
because as I said, the role of memories
is to guide us here and now.
And every time we bring up a memory, we think about it,
the state we are in in the moment
is rubbing itself off on the memory.
So if we think of a traumatic memory
in a state where we are calm,
the memory becomes slightly less traumatic.
And if we think of a memory in a state
where we are very anxious,
the memory will become more frightening to us.
So, and that is something that you exploit in therapy
for post-traumatic stress.
You talk about traumatic things
in a setting where you feel calm
and then it will rub off on the memory
and start to become less frightening
and then possibly more neutral.
And the question is then you might think,
why are we built that way?
That's rather strange.
And I think it has evolutionary reasons.
If you go into the woods and you get attacked by a bear
or a wolf or something,
then the brain creates a very strong memory of that event,
a memory in high resolution.
And every time you experience something
that is the least similar,
every time you go to the same place in the woods
or even see a tree,
that memory is triggered and you relive the experience.
Now, if you were to go back to the same place
in the woods again,
and there's no bear or there's no wolf this time,
then the memory will slightly change.
And if you go back a hundred times and nothing happens,
then the memory will become less threatening.
And that is because the role of memories are to guide us
in the here and now.
And if you have been to one place in the forest 100 times
and there's just been one attack of a bear,
there are good chances that there will not be an attack
the 101st time you get there.
So memories gets constantly updated
to be a good guide for the here and now.
And that is what you're exploiting
when you are talking about difficult things
in a setting where you feel safe,
such as talking about it to a friend or to a therapist.
And that's also why you should not hide bad,
put bad memories under a stone
or under the blanket, so to speak,
and not try to forget about them,
because then they will never change.
Then they will be set in stone.
One conversation that I absolutely love at the moment
when it comes to mental health,
certainly in the professions listening,
is the concept of post-traumatic growth.
I think when we talked about stigma,
we in our professions at least,
kind of got hung up on the word stigma.
We've got to smash the stigma.
And that doesn't talk about treatment modalities
and access to help and all these kinds of things,
but it also doesn't put hope into the conversation.
You're almost left with, well, kind of like you said,
I'm gonna live with my nightmares, my flashbacks,
and I'll get a dog and I'll get some pills
and I'll just stay there.
What I have witnessed from so many people
that have done the work and whatever their personal toolbox
has looked like, they've come through the other side
and they've become almost like a beacon of light
for other people.
And they seem like they are a better version of themselves,
a more resilient version.
And when you describe what you just did
and these flashbacks and things now just become
a little kind of a booklet of safety,
I can see how now the trauma becomes a strength.
So what is your kind of perspective on that?
I think it's true in many cases, but not always.
It depends on your personality.
Yes, some people can grow from this.
And in the long run, perhaps that group is rather big,
but short and middle term, it's not just, you know,
what doesn't kill you make you stronger.
It's not that simple, I think.
But I like the idea that there can be growth in it.
I certainly like that idea.
And I think it's true, but not for everyone.
Going back to the elements of childhood, two things.
Firstly, I've heard people now talking
with the whole epigenetics conversation now
that trauma can be in vitro or even one generation past
because if it's a female child, then they actually
have eggs at that point as well.
So from a genetics point of view,
from an unborn child point of view,
what is the impact of trauma on the mother
to even an unborn child and their kind of lifeline?
I don't know.
I haven't read the...
I haven't looked at those studies for the last five years.
I'm not sure.
But the idea here is that nature is tailoring us
to our surroundings.
So if we live in a dangerous world,
the threat sensitivity will be amped up
because no one will help us.
And I think the idea here is that you don't just
have your childhood, but you have your mother's
or father's lives or grandparents' lives.
All of that is showing what kind of world that you will live in.
So that if your mother experienced severe trauma,
that probably means that you will live in a dangerous world.
That would be sort of an evolutionary logic behind this.
But how much effect it has, I'm not up to that science.
So I don't dare to say.
But there's definitely logic behind it.
Well, switching then to people who are already born,
who are already alive.
I, again, it's just so interesting doing this podcast
because it's like a Venn diagram.
And you start to see overlaps.
And there's obviously truths amongst those.
Because these people are all walks of life,
all over the world.
But there's a romanticizing of the World War II generation.
In America, they call it the greatest generation.
They just came back from war.
They rolled up their sleeves.
And they went back to work.
And they were amazing.
But then when you start interviewing people,
and so if they're our age, it was usually grandparents,
you realize that granddad wasn't OK.
A lot of times, granddad was an alcoholic.
He was a domestic abuser.
He was all these things.
And again, we know why.
Because what happened in Europe, what happened in the Pacific
was absolutely horrendous.
And like you said, I'm sure they weren't
talking about moral injury and psychiatry back then.
So what I've seen, and it may go way past that,
is this multi-generational trauma certainly
steeped in World War II, if not prior to that.
What are you observing about that, the domino effect that's
still affecting us today in 2024?
Yeah, I've seen that many times, a social heritage that
goes through the generations.
And then it's very difficult to actually say what's
environment and what's genes.
Those effects are sometimes tricky to untangle.
But what I would like is that everyone who have a work where
they might experience severe trauma,
if you're a firefighter, if you're a police officer,
and so on, that you learn more about this.
Because if you experience something traumatic,
then it's good to know that, OK, now this
is a memory that my brain will replay for me,
not because I'm damaged, not because I'm broken,
because it's trying to help me to survive.
So I can almost expect this.
And if you then experience it, it becomes less threatening,
because you know what's coming.
So that's why I think it's important to spread
this knowledge to people who work in fields where they might
experience trauma.
One more area of childhood, then we'll move forward.
But it seems far less acute.
But when you start unpacking these people's early lives,
you realize that there's definitely
a subconscious detrimental element to it.
Is a child who was fostered, was adopted, one or both parents
may have walked out now they're living with grandparents.
This feeling of abandonment, this feeling of I'm not good
enough, seems to be very insidious,
but it's not easily identified to the average person.
Absolutely.
And I mean, if you think about it, it makes sense.
If you are abandoned, your brain, the growing brain,
gets the signal that the world that I will live in
is dangerous, and no one will take care of me.
So I have to see danger everywhere.
I have to plan for the worst all the time.
And to see danger everywhere, plan for the worst
all the time, that's what we call anxiety.
Why do you feel worthless?
I think that's a defense mechanism also,
because danger for humans was not just lions and tigers,
it was conflict with other humans.
And how do you save yourself from conflicts?
Well, you bow your head.
You say, I'm not good enough.
I'm not good.
I'm not going to avoid.
And then that's so if your self-confidence is eroded,
that can actually be a way to avoid a conflict.
And I think that's the reason why I think such an upbringing
can have consequences on your self-confidence.
And that's why it's so important to understand your brain
functioning this way, because if you do that,
you can sort of call the bluff of the brain.
You realize, it's just my brain who wants me to be afraid.
It's just my brain who gives me this bad self-confidence
because it wants to help me avoid conflict.
That doesn't make sense today in our world,
but for almost all previous generations of humans,
that made a lot of sense in terms of survival.
And remember, the brain has not changed,
or at least changed very little during the last 10,000 years.
We are still adapted to a life on the savanna.
And the main job, as I said, of the brain is to keep us alive.
And I think if you go in therapy,
regardless of what you're there for,
a big part of it is to see yourself from a distance,
to try to get a helicopter perspective on yourself.
And that's very difficult to do.
That's incredibly difficult.
And then you could use the brain as a vehicle
for seeing yourself from the side, so to speak.
Ah, it's just my brain who wants me to be afraid.
It's just my brain who gives me bad self-confidence
because it helped our previous generations to avoid conflict.
And then you call the bluff of the brain, so to speak.
I love that.
Absolutely.
Well, I know that you've written a book on ADHD.
I worked on summer camps in America.
It's actually the beginning of me moving over here.
It was an exchange program.
And the very first year, I remember,
I was friends with the nurse.
She was English as well.
And the first day the kids were there,
there was this line around the building.
This is 1994.
And I went in, I'm like, what's going on?
Is everyone ill?
And she said, no, it's for their Ritalin.
And I was like, well, what's Ritalin?
And she says, for ADD.
And I'm like, well, what's ADD?
I didn't know what it was.
And this, I mean, we're talking tens and tens and tens
of these campers lining up for their Ritalin.
And that blew me away.
Since then, as we've progressed forward,
this has become more and more of a conversation.
I would assume that there are groups
that are truly ADHD, that need medication.
I've had many adults on here who, you know,
they still take them to this day.
And then I would assume that some of them
were also related to diet, lack of exercise,
that kind of thing too.
So talk to me about the world of ADHD through your eyes.
Well, ADHD mean that you have problems with your focus.
You have problems concentrating.
And you are impulsive.
And you are hyperactive.
And this is, of course, not either or.
Everyone has more or less of these problems.
So I think we are all on an ADHD scale.
And what has happened during the last two decades
is that more people have been diagnosed.
That does not mean that there are more symptoms of ADHD.
That actually seems to be constant
during the last decades.
But more and more are being recognized and prescribed
with medication.
And in Sweden, about one in 10 teenage boys
are being prescribed with medication.
And medication can be good.
It can reduce the risk of injuries, of accidents,
of drug abuse.
So it can be good.
But I think maybe there's been too much focus on medication
and not other things.
And I know that some US states, 20% of all children
are being medicated.
So medication is a tricky question.
But I see ADHD through the lens of evolution.
And to constantly scan your surroundings,
to constantly see what's there, what's there, what's there,
that was probably very important for previous generations
of humans.
So ADHD, it's not strange that people have ADHD.
And what is interesting is that those individuals
are more creative.
That's been shown in many studies.
So there are advantages of it also.
And I think we need to look at those advantages
and not just see the problems.
And I wrote a book about that called Unlocking the ADHD
Advantage.
When I hear the autism conversation,
I feel it's the same thing.
Like you said, we're all on a spectrum.
But you've got the people who are truly autistic that
need the therapies and the medications if needed.
And then there's certainly on the other scale,
elements where maybe parenting exercise,
less sugar in their diet is also going
to help on the behavior side on that side.
Or I think behavior is the wrong word,
but the interaction side on that side.
With ADHD specifically, what are good medications
if someone is looking for that and they absolutely
are going to need prescriptions?
And then what are the holistic approaches
that can temper the negative side of ADHD
and help them focus on, for example, the creative side?
Well, the medication or the best medicines in general
are amphetamine based.
And they must be prescribed.
There are side effects to them.
So everyone must be very cautious about them.
They have to be followed up.
You have to check blood pressure.
You have to see whether the patient becomes anxious
and things like that.
They can be good for the most severe cases,
but I belong to the camp that doesn't
think that 10% or 20% of the population should have them.
I think that's too many.
So what else can they do?
Well, one thing is exercise.
Exercise improves our cognitive functions, as I said.
It makes us more focused.
And it particularly makes people with ADHD more focused.
They seem to benefit the most from exercise
in terms of increased focus.
And there has been studies that show
that if you exercise in the morning before school,
you can reduce the dose of ADHD medication.
You cannot take away the medication,
but you can reduce the dose.
So exercise is, in fact, a form of medication
for children and adults with ADHD.
Beautiful.
Well, staying with school age, I want
to progress onto this topic in the first responder professions
as well.
But with our children, talk to me
about the importance of sleep and their mental health.
Yeah, but for both children and adults,
sleep is, of course, incredibly important.
And the brain is not just resting when we are sleeping.
It's doing things that it can't do during the daytime.
And one of those things is to collect all the things
that you have experienced during the day
and decide what of these things, these experiences,
should I keep?
So it sorts through your short-term memories
from the day and decides which one should be long-term
memories.
And that is done primarily when we sleep.
And we also know that the brain is trying to understand,
what does the things that I experienced during the day
mean?
And in a very random way, it takes experiences from the day
and tries to combine that with things you
have experienced previously.
And this is probably why we dream.
And most of the dreams, we never dream exactly what
happened during the day.
It's sort of fragments from the day
that are put into previous experiences
in a very strange way that makes these lucid hallucinations
that we call dreams.
And they are important for creativity
because the brain is trying to make these weird connections.
And most of them are garbage.
But sometimes they are very important.
So sleeping is very important for creativity.
And it's also important for emotional stabilization.
And we know that because there's a part of the brain
called the amygdala.
And the amygdala is sort of the detector of threats.
And when we dream, the amygdala is active.
But at the same time, the level of substance
in the brain called noradrenaline is very low.
And that means that the brain is processing difficult things.
The amygdala is active in a state where the brain is calm.
And that's exactly what you're doing in therapy.
So there's no coincidence that sleep
has been called nightly therapy.
Now, if you look at what's happening during a normal night,
you go through four or five sleep stages or sleep cycles.
And each sleep cycle is about 90 minutes.
In the beginning, early in the night,
it's mostly deep sleep in each sleep cycle
and just a little dream sleep.
But late in the night, it's less deep sleep and more dream
sleep.
And that means that if you only sleep for five or six hours,
what you lose is the dream sleep.
And then you lose the creativity and the emotional stabilization.
And that basically means that you
could go on living with just four, five, or six hours
of sleep.
That's fine.
You will not get sick from it.
But you will not be as creative as you would have been.
And you will not be as stable emotionally
as you would have been.
And that is exactly why you should not jeopardize sleep.
When I studied economics, there was a sort of a cliche
that sleep is for wimps.
You could just sleep four or five hours.
And you could crank on your Excel spreadsheets.
And that might be fine if you're working in Excel spreadsheets.
And you don't need any creativity.
And you don't need this emotional stabilization.
But if you care about those things,
you should prioritize your sleep.
And of course, when we are in our teens,
it's especially important.
And the internal clock is sort of shifting
when we are in our teens.
So we become more night persons.
That happens gradually.
And then it becomes very difficult
to get up in the morning.
And there's actually a debate in Sweden
whether you should start school one hour later.
And instead of eight in the morning,
they are discussing whether they should start nine
because of this shift in teenage sleep-wake cycle.
My son's school has done exactly that.
I don't know if that was specifically
for this conversation or if it was more
to fit the buses around.
But I've been very, very lucky.
Since he was a baby, I put him in a bed at nine.
And it stayed all the way.
And he's 17 now.
And he still goes to bed.
He might stay up a little bit later now.
But that 9 o'clock star allowed him to have,
let's say it takes another hour for him to drift away.
By the time he's waking up at eight,
that's a full 10-hour sleep as a teenager.
So he's actually done very well in the morning.
But what's sad is our elementary school, the youngest ones,
used to be that they had to start at 7.40, I think.
So you've got these young children that are really
needing the sleep, really still growing.
And they're having to get up at 6.30 in the morning
to go to school, which is lunacy.
Yeah, it is.
And in Sweden, the number of teenagers
seeking help for sleeping problems
has increased by more than 1,000%
during the last two decades.
And that's just staggering.
And I think that screen time is at least partly
to blame for that.
Because so many people spend time
with their young people, and also adults,
spend time on their screens the hour before they go to sleep.
And some even bring the phone into the bed.
And to have all your friends, to have a casino,
to have all the world's entertainment in your bed,
you're not going to sleep if you have that.
And there was a study that showed
that teenagers who have the phone outside the bedroom
slept 22 minutes longer on average.
That was the average.
And that meant that some teenagers, for them,
it doesn't matter whether they had the phone beside the bed.
But for others, it made them sleep one hour less.
So my main advice to especially young people
who seek help for sleeping problems
is that get an old school alarm clock.
Get the phone out of the bedroom.
Try that first before even you think about any sleeping pills.
And learn more about sleep.
Because when you learn about that,
you understand that you're not going
to let some tech company jeopardize
this incredibly important process in your brain.
You would protect your sleep better
if you learn more about how important it is, I think.
Absolutely.
Well, speaking of that, that's a beautiful segue
into the first responder profession.
So in America, we work 24-hour shifts.
And most of the country works a 24-hour shift.
They have 48 hours.
And then they're back on the 24-hour shift for 20, 30 years.
So what is interesting when you talked about these memories
and you can down-regulate the response if you're
in a calm environment is a lot of us in very busy cities
and suburban areas, we will run through most of the night
as well.
But the pushback on giving firefighters more rest
and recovery is, oh, well, you sleep at the station.
But the irony is, when you are asleep in a fire station just
waiting for those alarms to scare the hell out of you
and you have to jump up and go, you're
never getting into that restorative sleep.
And you're actually, as you said,
you're reliving those memories.
But you're in a heightened state even when you're asleep.
So you add that three.
And then we have a recruitment crisis at the moment.
A lot of firefighters are being told, no, you can't go home.
You've got to work yet another day.
We're talking four days, four nights of the week
they're not sleeping.
And then the night before their shift,
a lot of us live a long way from the station
because we can't afford to live in the city.
And so you're getting up at 5 that morning
to go to the fire station.
So you've got so much disrupted sleep or sleep lost completely.
And that absolutely parallels or is
linear to the immense mental health crisis that we have.
Yes, and I remember while working in a hospital,
you don't sleep well there.
You sleep with one eye open, basically.
You don't get the deep sleep because you know
that the phone might ring any seconds.
And then so you will not get that much rest.
And I think if you take a step back,
and the stress system that we have in our body, which
is called the HPA axis, which means that when we get stressed,
the body mobilizes energy for fight and flight.
That's why your heart is beating stronger when you get stressed.
That's when your blood pressure rises because your muscles
need more blood.
To have that system on 24-7, it never evolved for that.
As a professor at Stanford said, you know,
stress during our evolutionary history,
that was four minutes of terror.
And then it's over, either for you or for your opponent.
And now we turn the same system on for 30-year-old mortgages.
So the way we experience stress in modern society
is absurd, I think.
It's not as intense for most people,
but it is for firefighters, of course.
But for the rest of us, it's not as intense
as it was for our ancestors.
But it just goes on and on and on and on.
And as a psychiatrist, I've realized that we can handle
a lot of stress, but we need recovery.
And especially if you experience such intense stress
as a firefighter or policeman, then you really
need that recovery.
And that recovery is not at the station
where you might be woken up any time.
Absolutely.
Yeah, there's, like I said, 24-48.
I'm trying to push the 24-72 to give them another 24-hour
period between each of the shifts.
Because now you would actually have one of those days,
you would go to sleep next to your wife or your husband
or whoever it is.
You'd wake up next to them.
You'd have a lazy morning with them.
And so you really have that recovery day.
The way we do it now, the first day off
isn't because you didn't leave till 8 in the morning.
So you work from midnight to 8.
So that's a full day there.
And you probably didn't sleep.
The second day is when you're ramping up
to get up at 5 o'clock the next morning to go back to work.
So getting my profession to understand
the ill effects of sleep deprivation
and how even economically they would save money giving them
more rest and recovery.
Because now you'd see a reduction
on injuries and heart disease and some
of the mental health issues.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
The recovery is so incredibly important.
As a psychiatrist, I take that very seriously.
I used to work very hard.
But I have just made, I mean, I protect my recovery
as a hawk these days because I see the consequences of not
getting it.
And burnouts are much easier to prevent than to treat.
And you get lots of warning signals on the way.
And what are those warning signals?
Well, that's irritability.
It could be anxiety, of course, sleeping problems, dizziness,
things like that.
Those are warning signals.
And that means that you have to unwind.
You have to protect your recovery.
And of course, that's easier said than done.
But you have to try to do that because it's easier
to prevent it than to treat it.
What are you seeing as far as chronic sleep deprivation
and the relationship to anxiety, depression, addiction,
those kind of things?
Well, when you work in an emergency ward
at the psychiatric emergency ward,
you realize that sleep is the first thing
that you have to stabilize if someone is really, really
bad in bad shape or anxious or depressed.
If that doesn't work, nothing works.
That's the first thing.
So of course, sleeping problems is contributing
to what we see today in terms of depressions and anxiety.
I can't give you a percentage number,
but it's always the first things that you need to stabilize.
Well, let's go to the therapeutic side then.
In the States, certainly, for example, in the VA,
our veterans here, I've heard over and over again
that they've gone in.
And again, I think this is really
indicative of a broken system, not so much a practitioner.
But prescriptions are given, and then they leave.
Of course, there is absolutely a place
where medicine should be prescribed.
And it might be long term.
But where I feel that there's a disconnect with medicine
as far as the psychiatric side here
is there's not an exit strategy.
There's not, let's use this medication
to get you stabilized, and then, as you said, therapies
and whatever the other parts of the toolbox would look like.
So ultimately, we can get you off antidepressants
or whatever it is.
So talk to me about your personal philosophy
or the Swedish model as far as the use of medication
in the mental health issues.
Yeah, so if you by medication mean
antidepressant medication, those are used for depressions.
And they're used for anxiety disorders,
such as PTSD or social phobia or a panic disorder.
They work well for a third of all patients.
They work OK for a third of all patients.
And they don't work for a third.
And which group does someone belong to?
You can't know that before.
There's no blood tests.
So you will have to test the medication.
If they work, you should continue
until you feel well and for another six months.
So you should not stop immediately when you feel well.
And that's because the ice that you are walking on
is thinner than it feels like.
But after being well for six months, then you should normally,
there might be exceptions, but normally you
should stop taking the medication.
Not immediately stop, but to lower the dose gradually.
And sometimes you have to do this gradual lowering
of the dose for three or four months.
It could be very, very, very slowly sometimes.
But it works most of the time.
It's fine.
But I don't think there's too many
who continues to be on antidepressant medication
just because they don't dare to remove it.
And that's probably not so good.
What we know is that exercise also
protects against depressions.
And exercise actually seems to give a better protection
against future depressions than continuing
with antidepressant medication.
So to my patients who have had severe depressions
and who don't want to discontinue antidepressant
medication, I always tell them that you should definitely
exercise.
That would give you more protection.
Well, we talked about the body's hundreds of thousands
of years of evolution, and then our diet has changed.
And now, for example, in America,
70% of our population is overweight,
of which about 40% is obese.
And a lot of them, and I know this
because I was a paramedic for a long time,
they are on these pills.
But what I see again is there isn't
here's a pill for your blood pressure or cholesterol.
But at the same time, we're going
to send you to a nutritionist or we're
going to get you a membership to a gym.
They don't have to pay for it, but that's
part of the treatment modality.
So like you said, you've got exercise, you've got sleep,
you've got hydration, you've got time outside.
And so the goal being, let's get your weight down,
let's get you off these blood pressure pills,
let's get you off these cholesterol pills,
we'll get your diabetes back because it is reversible
with a lot of people.
I see the same kind of philosophy
in the mental health space.
And again, I also understand in the American system
that a lot of these physicians only get about eight minutes
with every patient.
So again, the system is they're working in a broken system.
But when you are just giving an antidepressant
and they're not being told to find the other therapeutics,
including, as you said, exercise and some
of these other holistic elements,
to then address the underlying issue,
the pee beneath the mattress, and you're not
giving them a plan where they should ultimately
come off the antidepressants, just like you said,
I think that's where we're really dropping
the ball in America.
Yeah, we are dropping the ball in Sweden as well.
But I think we are so in Sweden, more than one in eight adults
are on antidepressant medication.
And it's probably a large group that
doesn't stop taking medication just because they're
afraid to do so.
And of course, in some cases, it might be good to continue.
So don't and your listeners cannot
have any advice on medication.
You must check it with your doctor.
But I think in general, one should
try to stop taking these medications after feeling well
for at least six months.
That's the general rule.
Then there are, of course, exceptions sometimes.
But too many people stay on them.
And of course, as you say, therapy
is incredibly important as well.
And exercise is incredibly important for both treating
and preventing anxiety and depressions.
And don't mix exercise with sports.
Exercise might be walking to work or riding your bike
to work or gardening or playing something like that
is also exercise.
But to get the best benefits in terms of prevention
of anxiety and depression, you should try to raise your pulse.
And in an ideal setting, you should try
to do that three times a week.
But if you can't do that or don't want to do that,
just fast walks are also important
and will give you some protections.
I've heard a lot of good things about EMDR, especially
when it's addressing an acute trauma, one
of those flashback nightmare type experiences.
What are the holistic, the non-medication therapies
that you're excited about today?
Are there any new innovations that you're
seeing in Sweden that seem to be working really well for people?
I don't know the science behind it, so I can't comment on it.
But cognitive behavioral therapy is what
I would recommend in general.
And I think when it comes to therapy,
that it boils down to personal chemistry.
So a good therapist for you might not
be a good therapist for me or vice versa.
So if you go to therapists, you feel that this doesn't work,
then it might be a good idea to try a new therapist
or another one or even another one.
Try three or four of them.
Because if you find the right one,
it can be life changing in a way that, according
to my experience, the effects are even bigger than medication
if you find the right therapist.
What about the conversation with psychedelics?
There's a movement, there's a groundswell here.
And I personally know a lot of first responders
and military members that tried other modalities.
And it was psychedelics that really opened the door.
It's not a magic pill by any means,
but it allowed them to access things that were buried
that then they would go into treatment or counseling with
and then discuss with their therapist.
So what's the conversation, if any, in Sweden?
The effects of psychedelics is definitely interesting.
But I want to see more large studies before I'm convinced.
And definitely before we'll enter the clinic.
There are studies conducted at the Karolinska
Institute in Stockholm on it.
They have not been published yet.
But in those studies, one is testing, I think,
LSD for treatment for depressions
that have been very difficult to treat.
So it's going to be interesting to see what those studies show.
But apart from that, I can't comment on this
because I don't know it well enough.
Beautiful.
Well, I want to circle around to something
that you said with children while we're
talking about the adults now in the first responder
professions.
You mentioned about social media.
Back in 100 years ago, our circle
would be our circle, our village, or as you said,
in the classroom, your classmates.
And then now we have this kind of window,
this portal to the world.
And I agree with you completely as far as that comparison side.
I think it can be very discouraging to a young child
to start painting or start playing football because they
see the world's best.
And they're like, well, I'm never
going to be able to do that.
And I think it can be inspiring.
And there's people that will teach you how to get there.
They have very positive use of social media.
But it can also be very discouraging too.
The tribal element, though, that I'm not good enough,
one of the things that, again, I think
is an elephant in the room in the first responder
and military mental health conversation,
aside from the sleep deprivation, is the organizational
betrayal.
So for example, you're a police officer.
You do everything that you are supposed to do.
It gets politicized.
It gets put in the news.
And then your agency fires you for doing the very things
that you were told to do.
For me, it's not the trauma that that police officer saw.
It's the actual tribe turning their back on them,
the very people that they swore to be a part of,
that they would risk their lives to protect their community,
has now turned their back.
So talk to me again, the evolutionary brain,
as far as that kind of tribal or organizational betrayal
effect on the mental health of an individual.
Yes, and I mean, humans did not survive by themselves.
To be excluded was as dangerous as not having food.
And to belong to a group was as important as having food.
And therefore, our brains want to belong
to a group at all costs.
And we are constantly monitoring each other.
We are checking each other's body postures,
and of course, what we say, and how we look at one another,
and so on.
And we constantly ask ourselves, am I part of the group?
Do I belong in a group?
And any signals that shows that we might be excluded
is something that is a severe warning signal to the brain,
that feels very painful.
And of course, we have all experienced that
when we ask ourselves, why haven't I
gotten this invitation to the wedding,
or this SMS about the party this weekend?
And this is actually not a big deal if you miss a wedding,
but it doesn't feel like it.
You feel like I'm excluded, and this is something
that we are so sensitive to because we needed
to belong to a group to survive.
And of course, if your group turns your back on you,
that's very painful, not because you're broken,
because that meant almost certain death
for our ancestors.
And this is the way we should see the comparison
on social media, I think.
When we get this signal, six, seven hours a day,
where people who are richer, smarter, more successful,
et cetera, than you are, that signals
that you are not part of the group.
You're not good enough for the group.
And deep down, that is calculated as something
that is extremely dangerous.
And that is why it's so painful for us.
And of course, we have always compared ourselves
during the last generations, at least.
We have had models and movie stars and people
who put an unobtainable level.
But we did not get that signal five, six, seven hours
every day.
And social media is becoming less social.
As you might know, people are using it less
to communicate with their friends and posting pictures,
and more just passively consuming content
that has been created and distributed by an AI.
So social media these days are more AI TV,
where we feel jealous because we're not good enough.
That's how I see the effect on loneliness
and mental comparison.
I see this through the lens of evolution.
Well, another area where this applies as well
is when a first responder retires, or they get hurt
and they can't do the job anymore,
or even ironically, when they promote an out of a fire
station into an office, an HQ.
And what's seemingly happening, and this
is kind of dovetailing off Sebastian Junger's book, Tribe,
is we were a part of that cohesive group for 10, 15, 20,
25 years of our life.
And then one day, that door closes behind us
on the fire station.
A new person is going to be sitting in the seat
that you sat.
And now you've lost that purpose.
You've lost that tribe.
And then a lot of us, if we're not careful,
that becomes our identity.
I am a firefighter.
That's all I was.
And so it's very, very jarring for our people
if they, like I said, get hurt, promote, or retire.
Yes, exactly.
And then you need other groups.
And then you have to realize that this is not
your only identity.
So just because this one is not as active anymore,
well, there might be other identities, other groups
that you need to belong to.
I think we also realized during COVID
that we could not replace meetings in real life
on screen.
There's something that is so lost when we meet in screens.
We're a lifesaver during COVID, but we all
felt lonely because we evolved to survive in a group.
And that's why these social drives in us
are so incredibly strong.
I saw a study recently done at Yale
where you had people solving a math problem.
First, they tested how good they were at math.
And then they were given a problem,
which was that you have a skin cream, and you apply it.
People use it to have bad skin.
And you have x number of people using the cream.
And of those, y number of people get the good effect.
And then you have to calculate how good is the skin cream,
how efficient is it?
And it turned out that the ones who were good at math,
they were good at solving this problem.
That's not strange.
Now, these participants were given a new problem.
And this time, it was if you punish crime more severely,
or sorry, if you restrict the access to guns,
what happens for criminality in a certain country?
So if, for instance, in the US, you have harder,
it's more difficult to get a hold of a gun,
what happens to criminality 20 years later?
This was actually the same problem mathematically
as whether the skin cream will work or not.
But this time, it's not skin cream.
It's something that is politically charged,
the way you view your ability to carry,
if you can carry a gun or not.
And now it turned out that mathematical ability had
no effect whatsoever on how good you were at solving the problem.
What affected that was where you stood politically.
Democrats had easier solving the problem
if it was constructed in such a way that restrictions on guns
gave less criminality.
And for Republicans, it was the other way around.
If the problem was constructed so that gun criminality did not
have an effect on criminal, gun restrictions did not
have any effect on criminality, the Republicans
solved the problem better.
So in other words, they solved the problem
if it was in line with the group's opinion.
And that shows that the brain can make itself more stupid,
so to speak, because it has already decided
what is the correct answer.
And the correct answer is what the group thinks.
The brain did not evolve to solve mathematical riddles.
It evolved to stay in a group.
And that shows so beautifully, I think,
that politics can make us more stupid.
We have already decided what the right answer is.
And that is what the group thinks.
So that shows that group belonging triumphs
logical thinking for most of us.
I am so glad that you said what you just said.
I think the perfect time, and this may not
have been the case in Sweden, but to see that high stress,
and I say tribalism in the negative context now,
getting in the way of critical thinking was COVID.
The whole time that that happened,
I was trying to put out good podcasts just like this.
And I'm talking about mental health and sleep
and nutrition and time in nature and all the things
that we can control that will make us healthier and more
resistant to a virus when we get it,
because it's going to come across us at some point.
There's no hiding from it.
And I was just, I mean, honestly, I
was disgusted at how easily people were divided
and how critical thinking was a rarity.
It was almost heresy to say that the ill health of an individual
was contributing to the death when they get this virus.
And how dare you suggest that my 300 pound grandmother with COPD
didn't die from the virus itself?
But you can affect that.
You can make her 280 pounds, and you can get her walking
and get her out in sunshine and all these things.
But again, you see it now.
We're about to go into the election season here in America.
And the middle of the road, what are the things that actually
affect people?
Education, safety, like I said, the obesity crisis,
the mental health crisis that we have, opioids, none of that
is there.
It's all, oh, this person did this, or this person did that.
And understanding the tribalism behind the psychology,
which is obviously very deliberate.
I mean, these people in these political parties
have psychologists that work for them to understand.
But this divide into tribes, pigeonhole people,
and then set them against each other,
it makes perfect psychological sense
how that everyone else is doing it, that mob mentality,
can actually be the enemy of critical thinking.
Yes, exactly.
And not because we're broken, but because we're
functioning the way we should.
We have a brain that wants to keep us alive.
And to be part of a group was incredibly important,
much more important than having the right opinion, et cetera.
So that's why we are so tribal, and that's
why our opinions are so dependent on a group.
And it's easy to theorize about these things
in a discussion like this, but my advice
is to really look at yourself from this perspective
and how much of your own opinions
are being pulled and swayed by these tribal parts
of our psychology.
I mean, when you start examining yourself self-critically,
you will see that this applies to me, too, of course.
I'm just like this.
But just to be aware of it is at least the first step
of becoming slightly detached yourself from it.
There's a phrase you are, I forget how it is now,
the sum total of the five people closest to you
or something like that.
So I think this can be used in a positive way.
If you start putting yourself into tribal groups
that are critical thinkers, that do enjoy exercise,
that are trying to abstain from alcohol, whatever it is,
I think you can use this very psychology in your favor then.
Yes, good point.
Absolutely.
There's two sides to the coin always.
And I mean, as I said, exercise is incredibly important for us.
At the same time, we're lazy.
We want to stay in the couch.
Why is that?
Well, that's because 99.9% of all previous generations
of humans did not die from overeating
or cardiovascular disease or cancer.
They died from starvation.
To eat everything you could find made a lot of sense,
especially if it contained a lot of calories.
And when that sort of craving for calories is put into a world,
well, there's abundance of calories,
then we will overeat.
And the amount of energy is not just dependent, of course,
on how much we eat, but also on how much energy we use.
And it costs energy to move.
That's why we want to be in the couch.
Don't waste your valuable energy.
Don't go running or something stupid like that.
That's why we're lazy by nature, not because we're broken,
but because we're functioning.
And someone might think, OK, but if you're overweight,
you obviously have excess calories.
There's no risk that you will starve to death
if you go for a run.
And the point is that during almost our entire history,
there wasn't any overweight humans at all.
Overweight and obesity was basically
non-existent problems.
But threatening starvation was a huge problem.
And that means that when we lose weight,
the body is trying to prevent that.
It's fighting that.
So when we lose weight, our hunger increases.
The basic metabolism, the amount of energy
that your body uses as a rest actually drops somewhat
when you lose weight.
And the amount of energy extracted from your bowels
increase when you lose weight.
And all of this is your body fighting threatening starvation,
even if it's from a high level, even if it's from obesity level,
it starts fighting starvation because it never
evolved to handle obesity.
And that means that we are lazy.
And I try to work my way around my laziness
by making an appointment to go for a run or a walk.
Because you don't want to be the one who always
breaks these appointments.
You don't want to be the one who says, ah, maybe
I have a little bit of cold.
Maybe it's sort of rainy outside.
We shouldn't do this.
No, if you made an appointment, you want to do it.
So therefore, I schedule these appointments with my friends.
And then that brings me out of the couch.
So in that sense, I think learning more
about the brain and not just how we function,
but why we function makes it possible for us
to build our way around the brain's Achilles' heels.
And I think that the more we learn about our biology,
the freer we become from our biology.
Absolutely.
Your new book is called The Happiness Cure.
So having written on various other elements
of mental health, what was it that spurred you
to write this book?
And then let's talk about what people can find.
Well, we have never lived longer than we do today.
We have never been wealthier than we are today
and healthier.
And still, so many seem to be struggling
with their mental health.
And in Sweden, one in eight adults
are on antidepressant medication.
And according to the World Health Organization,
280 million individuals suffer from a depression.
And according to the World Health Organization,
depression will cause more burden of disease
than any other form of disease during the coming decade.
And why is it that we have it so good, but still feel so bad?
That's the heart of the book.
And that's a question that I have
thought about my entire working life
and actually my entire adult life.
And gradually, I've come to realize
that if you want to understand it,
you have to start with the brain.
And this book starts by asking, what are feelings?
What are emotions?
Why do we have to feel anything?
And from that, it goes to anxiety
and shows that anxiety is something that is a defense
mechanism by the brain.
And it looks at depressions.
What are depressions?
And what causes them?
It looks at inflammation.
And inflammation is, as you might know,
the body's response to basically all.
If I scratch my bit like this, it becomes a slight inflammation.
If I have a cardiovascular heart attack,
I have inflammation in my coronary arteries and so on.
So it's a response in the body that is very, very general.
And inflammation probably evolved
to help us protect against virus and bacteria.
And if we have an infection in our bodies,
for instance, by COVID virus, the level of inflammation rises.
And that sends a signal to the brain,
which makes us feel crappy.
It makes us want to withdraw, to hide under the blanket.
And that is probably because when we have an infection,
the immune system uses a lot of energy.
And then we can't spend that energy on movement
or anything else.
So that the brain amps down or reduces our motivation
to move and to do anything, because it
wants to save energy to fight this infection.
That makes a lot of sense.
However, our modern lifestyle factors,
such as sitting too much, eating too much processed food,
sleeping too little, stressing too much,
also causes inflammation.
And here's the main point.
The brain cannot distinguish whether that inflammation comes
from an infection or from modern lifestyle factors.
It will reduce motivation.
And it will trigger this defense mechanism
that it once helped us preserve energy for the immune system.
That mechanism will be triggered by modern lifestyle factors.
And if you think this sounds like speculation,
that's a good point.
But actually, now it's been shown again and again
that about a third of all depressions
seems to come from increased levels of inflammation.
So it seems like an old defense mechanism
is going berserk in our modern society.
And that might be one of the reasons why we feel so bad,
even though we have it so good.
So that's one chapter of the book.
And I also, of course, look at what
we can do about the epidemic of mental illness.
And then I look at exercise and loneliness prevention.
And in the end, I look at the happiness, what it actually is,
and how we should view that from an evolutionary perspective.
So everything I've learned as a psychiatrist, as a clinician,
and in my other books, that led up to that book,
The Happiness Cure, which is the one that I'm most proud of.
There is a pursuit of happiness.
But I think we're so deep in the hole in many areas.
And like you said, just physically,
if we've got 70% overweight or obese, that means 70%
inflamed, if not more.
That means 70% that obviously are
going to be more challenged to have a good mental health.
Some might be absolutely fine and just in utopia.
But I would argue that if the body is already ailing,
that's going to be affecting the brain as well.
Yes, exactly.
And we tend to make the distinction between body
and brain, like there were brains that floated around
in a jar or something.
But the brain and the body is one in the same system.
And the brain evolved to regulate the body.
And as bodies became more complex and bigger
during evolutionary time, brains became bigger and more complex.
And the brain is using signals not just from our senses
but from the body to create feelings.
In every waking moment of our life,
it compiles the input from the senses, what we see and hear
and feel, with the internal information from the body.
And based on that, it creates a feeling
because it wants to tilt our behavior in such a way that
helped us survive.
And that tilting might be a feeling of hunger,
take care of your nutritional needs.
It might be a feeling of loneliness,
take care of your social needs, and so on and so forth.
But the internal state of our bodies
is incredibly important for our feelings.
And I think we have forgotten about that.
We have thought that the body is one thing
and the brain is one thing separately.
And if you want to affect the body, you could exercise.
But the brain is something different.
And it isn't.
It's one system.
When I first moved to America, there
was the old kind of praise, the American dream.
And that used to be just a plot of land
where you'd be growing your own food
and a place for your children and your dog to run around
and you're outside and you're in the dirt.
And you're cooking and you just, it's a community element.
By the time I moved to the US, it was before the crash.
And the American dream had become a 4,000 square foot
house, a Winnebago, like a camper van.
Jet skis.
And it was just this constant one-upmanship.
And so I think for a long time now,
Americans have always been presented with,
you don't have enough.
But if you had this, you'd be happy.
When you unpacked the world, the idea of happiness,
what were some of the kind of areas
that you realized were the actual important parts?
Well, happiness is a tricky topic to talk about
because it sounds like you're about to fall into a ditch
filled with wellness cliches.
But if you ask people what happiness is,
many of them seems to believe that it's feeling good
all the time, constant pleasure.
And if you have that definition, you will be disappointed
because positive feelings are supposed to be short-term.
They will soon go up in smoke.
The problem is that we are led to believe
that we could feel good all the time in advertisement
and on social media.
That means that we are comparing our inner self
to a goal that is basically unreachable.
And then we feel crappy.
We feel that we're broken.
If you use the definition on happiness
that is used in psychiatric research,
which is that you are contempt
with the long-term direction of your life.
If you use that definition, it's clear
that the most important thing for happiness
is relations, relations, and relations.
And this is not just something that I'm guessing.
This is the result of a study
that started in the 1930s at Harvard.
And when it was started, Harvard students
and people who lived in the Boston area were recruited
and they were followed with interviews
and with medical tests.
And when they got older, their kids were included
and even their grandchildren.
And this study has been going for 90 years now.
And I met with the current director,
Robert Waldinger at Harvard, fabulous guy.
And he said, we knew that relations would be important,
but not this important.
It keeps us healthy and it's in the end,
it's what makes us happy.
And when you think about it, it's not so strange
since we did not survive by ourselves.
That's why we suffer so much from loneliness.
So happiness is relations.
That's how I would summarize it.
I think we saw that playing out during COVID.
Families and friendships were told,
no, don't be around each other, make it virtual
or buy a giant plastic bag and hug each other through that.
Some of the ridiculous scenes that we saw, but it's true.
I mean, the incarceration model, ironically,
I think that showed how mentally damaging that is too
to just lock people in their homes where it was like a cell
and then keep them away from other people,
keep them away from these nurturing relationships.
So I think the pandemic gave us a kind of longitudinal study
on the detrimental effects of breaking relationships.
Yeah, absolutely. We all felt it.
But at the same time, you might argue,
why then are we not doing these things
that makes us happy in the end?
And it boils down to what I said in the beginning.
The brain's main job is not to make us happy,
it's to keep us alive.
And it wants to see danger everywhere
because that kept us alive.
It wants to eat everything because that kept us alive.
It doesn't want to use energy to move
unless we really have to.
Because that kept us alive.
And to constantly scan your surroundings,
something there, there, there, that's also kept us alive.
And that's something that is being exploited
by digital media in these days.
So we are driven, I think, by instincts.
And those instincts helped us to survive in a world
where there was very little resources.
But these are not the same instinct
that makes us happy in a world of overabundance.
That's what it all boils down to.
One more question, and I'll go to some closing questions.
If you were king for a day, what would you change
so that we could improve the chances of people
actually pursuing happiness?
I think if I were to do one thing, I would ban smoking.
I would face it out.
If I was just able to do one thing for you,
if I was just able to do one thing for human health,
that would probably be it.
Yeah, you can do lots of things, though.
What else would you change?
You're king. You can do whatever you want.
Oh, right. I could do anything.
I have to think about that.
I think we will look back at this period of our history
that we currently live in.
Future generations will think it was insane
to let these incredibly powerful digital technologies
directed to children and teenagers
to have them implemented without any regulation
and make them so addictive and so powerful
that children and teenagers, and for that, adults,
doesn't sleep anymore, doesn't meet anymore.
That would be very, very strange to future generations, I think.
So I would impose some kind of regulations on social media,
and I would make them, I think, to a larger degree responsible
for the kind of information that they are spreading
because I think it's starting to erode the fabric of society, actually.
It's not just that, but it's contributing to it.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.
And again, this is a reoccurring theme with a lot of people,
especially when we're talking about mental health.
The first of the closing questions, we talked about your books.
Is there a book or are there books written by other people
that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated?
Yeah, Robert Sapolsky at Stanford has written some great books,
especially Behave. That's fabulous.
I love Yuval Harari's books, and I also like Jared Diamond's book,
Guns, Germs and Steel, that came out in the 90s,
made me realize that you could, you know,
I was so impressed by people who took this mega, mega perspective
and tried to answer the really big questions.
That was such a book.
Richard Dawkins' books are very good as well.
Steven Pinker's books, well, those are your usual suspects.
Those are the ones that everyone recommends,
but that's for a good reason.
I've got Guns, Germs and Steel still sitting on my bookshelf unread.
I just finished writing my book,
so that's one of the ones I'm going to have to go back to then
because I've heard nothing but good things about it.
You should. You should absolutely do that.
So what about films and documentaries that you love?
I watch, I look at a lot of movies.
I saw one on Netflix about the First World War
that was fabulous called The Road to War.
And the First World War is such an interesting period
where no one wants to end up in this situation,
but it's just sort of a number of dominoes falling on top of one another,
and everyone seems to be sleepwalking into this catastrophe,
which defined the last century.
So that was a very good one.
And there was a good documentary, I think,
called Crime of the Century
about the opioid epidemic in the US and the Sackler family.
I read a book called Empire of Pain about it,
and it just made me furious to read.
Of course, furious on the producers of the opioids,
but also on the regulatory regulators who did not do their job,
and it costs hundreds of thousands of American lives.
So those I would recommend.
Thank you.
There's a great show called Dope Sick that they made about that story.
It's also very good.
With that, I just want to throw attention at you.
One of the kind of aha moments I had somewhat recently,
and it was off a comment of one of Joe Rogan's guests,
was a lot of us struggle.
How, for example, can the Sackler family sleep at night
knowing that hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from their products?
How can the head of cigarette companies,
the makers of weapons when we're going to wars
that maybe we should never have gone to in the first place,
how can they sleep at night counting their profits?
This guest, Sadguru, just made a kind of hint.
Well, they're struggling too.
And I never thought about that.
A fire chief that's totally opposing changing the work week
whilst they're burying their firefighters.
When you reflect on some of these individuals,
do you ever consider that maybe there's a mental health element there
and they've got unaddressed things, which is creating, in some cases,
really a kind of sociopathic presentation?
That's a very good question.
I mean, if you take psychopathy or narcissism,
these are partly genetic.
And you don't become a psychopath or a narcissist just by your gene.
You become vulnerable to it.
And if you grow up in a certain environment,
perhaps you're threatened or neglected,
then the ones with a vulnerability will become psychopaths
or sociopaths or narcissists.
So I think in a way, it's a defense mechanism of the brain
to put yourself, to as a psychopath, only look at yourself.
You don't care about anyone else.
So yes, I guess in a way you could see it through that lens,
but I also think that humans are incredibly good at rationalizing themselves.
If you're the CEO of these companies, you find ways to rationalize it.
You say, I get the salary so I could put my kids to school
and therefore I'm a good person because I care about my kids, etc.
We are incredibly good at rationalizing and making up excuses.
So yes, you have to see it that way too, I think.
I could never work for such a company,
but maybe again if I had been born in another family and had different genes,
it might have felt normal.
So free will is such a difficult topic.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here,
but my main point is that we are incredibly good at rationalizing ourselves.
I'm certain that the CEOs of tobacco companies can do that.
I think some of them might sleep very well at night
and are completely untouched by the damage that they're causing.
It's an interesting philosophy.
There's something that's new to me.
There's a phrase that people say, don't say what's wrong with you,
say what happened to you.
I think this is how did you get to the point where you could sleep
when your product kills hundreds of thousands of people?
Let's unpack that.
You're not actually living happiness yourself,
but it does reframe a political person or whatever it is.
Then maybe if we start really understanding that idea,
we can prevent these people from getting into these positions
until they get help, therapy, medication, whatever they need to be,
to refine their ethics,
and then maybe they'll be the head of a company that's doing good in the world.
Yeah, I think that's a much better perspective than just blaming.
But at the same time, having seen the consequences of tobacco and opioids,
it's difficult to take that perspective.
It demands a lot of you.
I get furious when I think about it.
So it's difficult.
Absolutely.
All right, well, the next question,
is there a person that you recommend to come on this podcast as a guest
to speak to the first responders, military, and associated professionals of the world?
Yeah, that one's easy.
Robert Sapolsky, he's at Stanford.
He's fabulous.
He's a fantastic person.
He's incredibly impressive.
He's a neuroscientist and a writer or author of popular science books
and a great thinker and just a great, great, great human being.
Beautiful. I'll have to work on getting him on then.
Thank you so much.
All right, well, then the very last question before we make sure
everyone knows where to find you and your books,
what do you do to decompress?
I read a lot and then I watch a lot of movies and then I play the guitar.
I started when I was in high school and it's just for fun.
So those are the three things.
And of course I exercise.
But I have seen so many cases of burnout as a psychiatrist.
And so I have taken it very, very seriously, my recovery very, very seriously.
And even though I love my work, I could work.
It's fantastic, but I still need the recovery.
And I've taken that seriously.
I found that even doing this and obviously I was a firefighter paramedic for 14 years.
But then doing this as well, some weeks, some of the stories that I'm hearing
are just incredibly deep and heartbreaking.
And I see it in myself, if I'm not careful, if there's too many of those close together,
it really takes a toll, that kind of secondary trauma.
So identifying that, and for me, ironically burnout, one of my big signs is my GI tract.
My guts will let me know if I'm getting close to burnout.
But yeah, understanding that just seeing or hearing sadness, being an empath,
that it takes a piece of you.
And if you're not kind of recharging.
Empathy is demanding.
To put yourself into someone else and try to see it from their perspective and feel their pain,
that's very demanding.
And then that's why you're in, if you work as a firefighter policeman
or if you work in healthcare, you need the rest because it takes more toll of you
than it would if you were in the Excel spreadsheet or something.
Then you don't need that empathy.
Well, your latest book is The Happiness Cure.
As we discussed, you've written several more prior to that.
Where are the best places to find the books?
And then are there any places online for people to find more about you and reach out to you?
Yeah, I have an Instagram account, Anders E. Hansen, and the books can be found on Amazon.
I have a homepage.
My publisher has fixed the homepage for me, drandershansen.com.
So there's information there as well.
Brilliant.
Well, I want to say thank you so much.
This has been such an amazing conversation.
We've picked apart so many different areas from elements that affect our children,
elements that affect the men and women in uniform, and then the retirees as well.
I'm excited to read your book.
I know it's on its way.
Karina said she'd sent it.
But I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time
and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
It was my pleasure. Thank you.