Managing stress naturally with Dr David Spiegel

Charlie: What do you do when you’re stressed out? I was talking to someone at work about this the other day, actually. He’s training to be a counsellor at the moment and he was talking about grounding yourself — when you’re stressed or in a high state of anxiety, you should have something you can go to that brings you back down. His is a pack of Wotsits, which I love. He said it’s like childhood nostalgia. Mine, I think, is actually just putting my pyjamas on and sitting on the sofa with the dogs. It’s very relaxing. Can’t be stressed when you’ve got a cocker spaniel one centimetre from your face, can you? What do you do when you’re stressed?

Greg: Just cry by myself.

Charlie: No, no, you don’t.

Greg: Cry into my pillow.

Charlie: No, you don’t.

Greg: This is The Method, a podcast from Thriva about what health looks like in the real world. I’m Dr Greg Potter — I’m a scientist and health and performance consultant.

Charlie: And I’m Charlie Edmondson. Whilst I love sports, I’m definitely not a science expert. I’ve got a regular job and I’m here to remind Greg of what life’s actually like when you’re not a nerd.

Greg: How dare you call me a nerd. On this show, we’ll work out some sustainable changes to your routine that will actually make a difference to your health. And to do that, we’ve got a simple three-step method. First, we bring an expert to unpack the science behind one key health question. Second, we provide some tips and habits you can try right now.

Charlie: And then finally, we put the practice to the test. Each week we’re going to hear from those who have tried and tested our recommendations to help turn a so-called ideal lifestyle into something that actually works for you.

Charlie: Good morning, Greg.

Greg: Good morning, Crumpet. How are you? You’re looking very fresh.

Charlie: No, you are lying. I’m in the trenches of marathon training. Is your training stressful?

Greg: I do find long runs where I haven’t got to worry about pace really quite therapeutic. I put an audio book on, and sometimes — I don’t know whether you’ve done this — like if you’re driving, you know when you get from A to B and you think, I don’t really remember any of it?

Charlie: Yeah, getting from A to B. I keep doing that on my long runs. The reason I asked, of course, is because I was trying to segue seamlessly into the subject of today’s conversation. Which is stress.

Greg: Yes. Today’s guest is David Spiegel, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he has spent decades researching the links between stress, health, sleep, trauma, and hypnosis.

Charlie: Is that your song for the day?

Greg: No, I’ve got another one for that. Obviously “Relax, Don’t Do It.”

Charlie: Obviously. That’s perfect. He’s published hundreds of scientific papers and books, and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. In short, he has spent a lifetime trying to understand how our minds and bodies interact.

Greg: My thoughts about how to cope with stress were strongly influenced by a good friend of mine who tragically passed away about a year and a half ago — Dr Simon Marshall. He, like many psychologists, used to speak about emotion-focused and problem-focused coping strategies. With problem-focused strategies, you’re trying to address the source of the stress directly. So if there’s something you can do about the stress — having a difficult conversation with someone, or better planning your finances — you can intervene there. But in some instances, you might be stressed about something that’s out of your control. That’s where emotion-focused coping strategies come into their own. The idea is that you’re not trying to address the source of the stress — you’re trying to improve how you respond to it. Adaptive options include different types of breathwork, mindfulness, meditation, exercise, and so on. And in general, it’s best to use a combination of both. The people who cope best with stress tend to use some combination of problem-focused and emotion-focused strategies. Our focus in today’s conversation is on non-medication ways to better cope with stress — after we first speak about the biology of stress and some of the many ways in which it affects us.

Charlie: Not drugs.

Greg: Not drugs. Shall we bring in David? He’s a doctor — actually, he’s more than a doctor. He’s a professor. This guy has more than 400 publications.

Charlie: Well, we should have a separate term for that.

Greg: Perfector? David Spiegel, the great man. Shall we bring him in?

Charlie: Let’s do it.

Greg: David, thanks so much for joining us. Since we’re speaking about stress today, which is intimately related to psychology, I’m going to ask a question that’s going to sound very Freudian: tell us about your parents. I ask because I believe they were your gateway to your work as a psychiatrist.

David: Yes, that’s true. I hope you’re not charging me a psychoanalytic fee for answering this question. Both of my parents were psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, and they told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be — and here I am. My father specialised in hypnosis because he was getting his psychoanalytic training in the 1940s. A Viennese refugee named Gustav Van Hoffenberg — a forensic psychiatrist — had escaped the Nazis and come to America. He couldn’t serve in the military, but he volunteered to teach young doctors hypnosis. He had a smallpox scar right in the middle of his forehead, and when he was interviewing prisoners, some of them would nod off and go into some kind of altered state that he then determined was the state of hypnosis. He learned about it, he taught it, our dinner table conversations were very interesting, and it got me — when I reached medical school — to take a course in hypnosis myself. I’ve been doing it ever since.

Greg: So today we’re going to be looking at the science of stress and techniques to help people cope better with it. But before we get into the mechanisms, could you explain what’s actually happening in our brains and bodies when we’re stressed?

David: When you’re stressed, your body goes into fight-or-flight mode. Your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, your muscles tense, you start to sweat. And what happens then is what I call the snowball effect — you notice that your body is reacting that way, and you start thinking, “Oh my God, this must be really bad.” So the thing that stressed you — whether it’s somebody yelling at you, a reckless driver, or a deadline you have to deal with — seems worse. You feel more anxious, and then your body reacts to that. Stress involves increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, and secretion of epinephrine and norepinephrine, which facilitate those kinds of body changes. One of the ways we use hypnosis to help people with stress is to start calming your body first, and then deal with the stressor. Normally, people think it’s the other way around — if I solve the problem, I’ll feel better. Well, that’s true, but if you’re too stressed out, you won’t be able to solve the problem.

Charlie: You just mentioned the secretion of two things I can’t even say. Back to you, David.

David: Epinephrine and norepinephrine.

Charlie: Yes. What are those?

David: They’re basically neurotransmitters — part of what we call the sympathetic nervous system. They’re secreted when you’re under stress, your heart rate and blood pressure go up, and they stimulate the fight-or-flight reaction. If you think about it, humans are actually quite fragile physical creatures. We’re not that big, we don’t run very fast, we don’t see that well, we don’t smell that well, we don’t hear that well — and we would not have survived to thrive on this planet had it not been for the fact that we have this big brain that helps us process a lot of information, filter in what we need to know, and filter out what we don’t. But we tend to react to all stressors as if they were physical stressors, and that’s a problem. Because if your boss gives you a new work assignment that you can’t possibly do, that’s not a physical reaction you need — it’s a psychological one. If your body is wasting time and energy by increasing heart rate and blood pressure and making you miserable, it’s detracting from your ability to deal with social, cognitive, and emotional problems. We’ve evolved to a point where physical threat is not the number one problem — it’s psychological stress, and learning how to manage that means managing your body’s reaction. The natural reaction is to be ready to fight, and that’s often not the right thing to do. The brain’s ability to reprocess stress and handle your body’s reaction is a tremendous adaptive advantage that people can benefit from learning to use.

Greg: I think your question, Charlie, might be a product of which side of the pond we’re on. When David says epinephrine and norepinephrine, to us that’s adrenaline and noradrenaline.

Charlie: Adrenaline and noradrenaline. Right. So when me and Greg have been chatting about today, he’s mentioned that we’ll be discussing hypnosis, which I know nothing about. I’m curious, David — from a scientific perspective, what sorts of problems has hypnosis actually been shown to help with?

David: Hypnosis is just a state of highly focused attention. It’s like getting so caught up in a good film that you forget you’re watching a film. Have you ever had that happen? You get completely absorbed in imagination, and it can be very useful and valuable. I’ll give you a recent example. If you watched the Winter Olympics, there was a figure skater who won the gold at the age of 16, and then she quit. She said, “I don’t want this to be all I do with my life.” But she came back, and she came back differently — much more focused on having a deep experience of expressing what her body wanted to do when she heard music she loved, rather than on winning a medal. And she said, “I visualise my entire programme multiple times before I do it. I also visualise the patterns of my breathing.” To me, that is a state of self-hypnosis. She’s intensely focused on the process and on engaging with her body, not on whether she’ll be on the podium at the end. There’s a part of the brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex — that’s roughly where willpower is processed. What we’ve been able to show is that a reduction in activity in the dorsal part of the anterior cingulate correlates very strongly with entering a state of hypnosis. When you go into hypnosis, you turn down activity in the salience network — the pattern-matching, threat-processing part of the brain. So people in hypnosis allow themselves to focus intently and feel more relaxed while they’re doing it.

Charlie: Yeah, and it’s funny — I’m marathon training at the moment, listening to a lot of audio books. My runs are 20 miles or more now, and sometimes I’ll chew through six or seven miles and not even really remember running. How have I got here? I’m so focused on what I’m listening to that you just switch off everything, but your body seems to remember what to do.

David: Exactly. Hypnosis isn’t some weird stage-show thing. It’s a naturally occurring state that many humans can experience, and it allows you to immerse yourself in an experience without worrying about the consequences or the outcome.

Greg: One of the issues in psychology research has been reproducibility — and that’s not exclusive to psychology. But it made me wonder whether a lot of the effectiveness of hypnosis is practitioner-dependent. I don’t want to flatter you excessively, but you have a remarkable voice, and you strike me as a very thoughtful practitioner. Does that affect how well it works, and does it make hypnosis hard to study?

David: It’s a very reasonable question, but I actually think a lot of what I’ve contributed to our understanding of hypnosis points in the opposite direction. All hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. And we know there are reliable individual differences in hypnotizability — I’ve had plenty of patients who come to see me, I test them, and their score is zero. I could talk at them all day and they would not enter a hypnotic state. In the past we used to blame the patient — “he’s resisting.” That’s not it. Some people have the ability and some don’t. What I try to do is identify how hypnotizable a person is. We have a test on our Reveri hypnosis app — it takes about six minutes, and you can find out how hypnotizable you are. And it’s a very stable trait. Over a 25-year interval, the test-retest reliability of hypnotizability is 0.7 — similar to IQ. So it’s not that I can hypnotise anyone. And if you go to stage shows, you’ll notice they don’t just pick anyone from the audience. The first half of the show is screening for the most highly hypnotizable people — roughly the top 10% — and then they can do all these tricks with them. But their real skill isn’t the hypnosis itself — it’s identifying who has the ability and teaching them how to use it.

Greg: And my understanding is that it’s extremely unlikely to cause harm. Are there any groups for whom it’s completely contraindicated?

David: There’s nobody for whom it’s completely contraindicated. It’s how you use it. When we started Reveri, I was very nervous about this — 30 years ago, I wouldn’t have dared build a hypnosis app you could just download and use. We’ve had about 1.2 million downloads, with around 35,000 people using it at any one time, and the number of problems that have come up is about 10. Which shocks me. There’s this prejudice in medicine that the only real treatments involve physical intervention — ingestion, injection, or incision — and these psychological approaches are either useless or dangerous. And yet, last year 118,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses, most of them from excessively large prescriptions after surgery. People don’t say “don’t take drugs because they’re dangerous” — they can be, and I prescribe medications myself — but hypnosis has never succeeded in killing anybody. We can get one in four people to stop smoking after a single session. That’s as good as you get with medications. Hypnosis can be extraordinarily helpful if people learn how to use it, and it is not at all dangerous.

Greg: For someone who feels constantly stressed and doesn’t know where to start, what would be a realistic first step?

David: Download the Reveri app — R-E-V-E-R-I, like “reverie” but without the E at the end — available on the App Store, Google Play, or at reveri.com. The first week is free. What we teach you to do is go into a state of self-hypnosis. You can do it very quickly, counting from one to three: look up, close your eyes, take a deep breath, breathe out, let your eyes relax, let your body float. Imagine you’re floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or in space. Once you’ve pictured a place where you naturally feel physically relaxed, the first lesson is: no matter how stressed you are, your body doesn’t have to be stressed with you. You use self-hypnosis to dissociate your physical reaction from your psychological problem — you get your body floating and comfortable, and then I have people picture on an imaginary screen one thing that’s troubling them, one stressor, while their body is floating. You learn that you can deal with the stressor without automatically triggering a fight-or-flight response. And then I say: now on the other side of the screen, picture one thing you can do to help with the problem. It may not be the best or only thing, but it’s one thing you can do. So you learn to better address the stressor while maintaining comfort in your body.

Greg: And does this work? Is there evidence for it?

David: Yes. We just published a paper in npj Digital Health — a Nature Publishing journal — which is an observational study of 83,000 Reveri users. In ten minutes, they had an average 15% reduction in stress. Four out of five had an immediate improvement, and every time they repeated the exercise, they got the same result — just as you would with an anti-anxiety medication. Only it isn’t a medication.

Greg: Congratulations. Seeing those data must be very rewarding — being able to help people at that scale, rather than one-on-one.

David: It is.

Greg: Thinking about other ways of helping people cope with stress — you’ve done research on different forms of breathing exercises and their effects on mental health. Are there any simple breathing exercises you’d recommend to listeners?

David: We have cyclic sighing and box breathing on the Reveri app, but some exercises are very simple to try on their own. Take stock for a moment of how stressed you’re feeling — give yourself a number from one to ten. Then try this: inhale starting with your abdomen, through your nose. Pause. Then fill your lungs completely through your nose. Then slowly exhale through your mouth.

Charlie: Some heavy breathing coming down the mic now.

David: Try it again. Inhale through your nose. Hold. Fill your lungs. Slow exhale through your mouth.

[Pause for breathing exercise]

David: How are you feeling now?

Charlie: Calm.

Greg: Yes. You notice a difference.

Charlie: A minute ago I was watching Greg Potter, and he was not doing this — he was not heavy breathing along with me and David.

Greg: I don’t need a breathing exercise when I listen to David’s voice. It’s very calming.

Charlie: David, you’re the David Attenborough of the psychiatry world.

David: That’s quite a compliment. So did you feel a difference, Charlie?

Charlie: Yes, very relaxing.

David: And there’s actually a physiological explanation. Normally, when someone’s anxious, you say “take a deep breath.” But that’s actually the wrong thing to do. When you take a deep breath and hold it, you reduce pressure in your lungs — the air rushes in, and that reduction in pressure in the chest cavity slightly reduces the return of blood from the superior vena cava into the heart. Veins, unlike arteries, don’t have muscles in the wall, so it’s a pressure difference that allows blood to flow. The heart gets a signal that less blood is coming in and pumps a little faster and harder. So each inhalation increases heart rate — that’s heart rate variability in action. What you’re doing with cyclic sighing is a quick inhale, then a long, slow measured exhale through your mouth. That increases blood flow to the heart, triggers parasympathetic activity, slows your heart rate, and lowers your blood pressure just a little. It helps your body very quickly shift into a parasympathetic mode where acetylcholine — rather than adrenaline — is the main neurotransmitter. When we’re anxious, we tend to hyperventilate, so we don’t have as good a flow of air as we could. Cyclic sighing can help you regulate your body and improve mood very quickly.

Greg: Is there a good time to do this — when you’re already stressed, or as a preventative measure?

David: Before it gets bad is probably best — when you’re just noticing stress starting to build. But once you get into the flow of activities during the day, it’s hard to remember. Sometimes I tell people to stop a meeting and say, “Excuse me, hold on a moment — I just need a minute.” Another approach is to do it first thing in the morning while you’re still in bed, to set yourself for the day. And whenever you start to feel worse, do a couple of cycles of cyclic sighing — you’ll find you’re quickly able to control your body’s arousal.

Greg: We’ve focused on hypnosis and slow-paced breathing because those are things you’ve published research on. But there are lots of other interventions that could help people feel less stressed — progressive muscle relaxation, different forms of meditation, and so on. Some of these can be combined. You’re also an expert in sleep, David — for chronic insomnia, relaxing music can be quite helpful. What do you think about combining things like music or relaxing scents with slow-paced breathing? In science we tend to study things in isolation to isolate effects, but could combining them produce additive benefits?

David: It could — it makes sense. Though one caveat: if you’re lying in bed at two in the morning trying to sleep and you have to get up to light a candle or go and find your lavender, you’re waking yourself up in the act of preparing. If you can set things up beforehand so they happen naturally, that’s fine. But the nice thing about self-hypnosis is you can just do it — without turning on the lights, without getting out of bed. I used to worry that the Reveri app wasn’t as good as being with me in person. And then I thought: if you wake up at three in the morning, the last thing you want is me in your bedroom telling you what to do.

[Laughter]

Charlie: Well, David, you never know.

David: Thank you, Charlie. But the point is: it may be different at different times of day. If a lavender smell helps you prepare for sleep before bed, set that up in advance. But don’t do anything that wakes yourself up in the process. If you do wake up in the night, first of all — don’t look at the clock. One of the worst mistakes people make with insomnia is noting the time, because that becomes an arousal cue. Instead, just say: I’m going to go somewhere I naturally feel relaxed and comfortable — imagine floating in a mountain lake, a warm bath, a hot tub. You can do that without turning on the lights, without getting out of bed, without arousing your body in any other way. It’s very important that your bedroom be a place of rest and pleasure, and nothing else. No laptop. Lights out. Combine making your environment optimally supportive of sleep with a practice — if you wake up or have trouble getting to sleep — that doesn’t require more arousal, but just helps you disconnect your worry from your physical state. That allows your parasympathetic nervous system to help you get back to sleep.

Greg: So we’ve gone through some of the practical tools for managing stress. Now we want to look at how they play out in real life. In the experience section, we hear from listeners. The first question is from Jane in Essex.

Jane (voice note): I really like magnesium. I’ve settled on magnesium taurate, which helps me sleep and calms the nervous system. However, it does give me really vivid dreams, so I wake up feeling a bit exhausted. There are so many different forms of magnesium out there, it’s hard to know which is right. With magnesium glycinate, I open a capsule and just put a little bit onto a spoonful of food — because if I have a whole capsule I get side effects — but it helps me sleep and I have a lovely sleep. Some more information on magnesium would be really helpful.

David: Well, Jane, I’m not an expert on supplements — we don’t offer them at our Centre for Integrative Medicine at Stanford — but as a physician, what it sounds like to me is that the magnesium, even when it gets you to sleep, is keeping you at a lighter level of sleep than you’d otherwise have. We dream every night — we have rapid eye movement sleep, dreaming sleep, every 90 minutes. What seems to be happening for you is that you’re being awakened from the middle of a dream. Normally, in the deeper stages of sleep, you don’t wake up during dreams. So I suspect the magnesium may be helping you get to sleep but interfering with the depth of sleep you achieve. Using a good deal less may be one way to manage that. My other recommendation would be to try Reveri — listen to my voice, and learn to imagine yourself floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or in space, and allow your body to connect with that sense of peace and comfort. I don’t think that will wake you up from your dream states.

Greg: I think Charlie and I can vouch for the calming effect of David’s voice. So maybe give that one a try, Jane.

Greg: The next question is from Polly in London. Polly asks: regarding stress in autistic individuals who don’t feel comfortable with meditation or formal therapy, are there other approaches supported by research that might help?

David: There’s a growing specialty around supporting people with autism, and it is a different way of being and thinking. Autistic people tend not to be comfortable with change or with shifting paradigms, which can be an obstacle to certain treatments. But there are very effective ways of helping people who think and feel differently. I would suggest getting to a specialist — there’s a growing group of practitioners who help autistic people think and feel differently, providing very structured approaches to things that tend to disturb and arouse them. They tend to find that even minor changes in experience can have major effects, and there are ways of buffering them from the consequences of that unwelcome arousal. By and large, autistic people tend not to be very hypnotizable, so hypnosis is less likely to be a useful addition to their care.

Greg: The next question is from Chris in Peterborough. Chris says: “I wake every morning in a very anxious state. I find it very difficult to stop being anxious about my anxiety, which can escalate into a feeling of panic. I’m on quite a bit of medication and have tried various breathing and other exercises, but I get overwhelmed by negative thoughts, which also manifest in physical symptoms — nervous stomach, lack of motivation, and a general feeling that I can’t break the cycle.” Chris hasn’t asked a specific question but is looking for some guidance on how to break that pattern.

David: It sounds like you have a serious mixture of anxiety and depression. You’re on a number of medications — I don’t know what they are. Some of the newer antidepressants also have anti-anxiety qualities, and the problem with chronic use of anti-anxiety medications is that they tend to be habit-forming — if you try to reduce them, you can get an amplification of your anxiety. Some antidepressants can address both. I would suggest seeing a good psychiatrist who can assess you and help with both the anxiety and the depression. They are very difficult to live with, but they are treatable. Some psychotherapy can also be genuinely helpful here. As an approach to the anxiety itself: being anxious about being anxious creates that snowball effect. So try to accept it for what it is, figure out what’s stimulating it, and get some help managing the symptoms.

Greg: The next question is from Ish. They’d like to know what the signs of stress are, because they often can’t tell when they’re stressed and tend to brush things off.

David: Stress isn’t all bad — it’s a warning signal that something may be wrong and you better do something about it. You’re actually quite fortunate if you don’t have that secondary physiological arousal that makes things worse. But what you may need to do is turn up your sensitivity a little — make yourself more attentive to signals that something may actually be wrong and may need addressing. There are a lot of people so consumed by anxiety that they can’t solve problems; you may be at the other end — not registering the problem when it’s staring you in the face. So try to pay a little more attention to what’s going on, and engage with a solution when you sense a threat coming.

Greg: We like to ask our guests for one key takeaway for our listeners. If there’s one thing they could implement or change, what would that be?

David: I would encourage people to mind their bodies too. Take advantage of this three-pound organ that sits on top of your body and use it to its fullest extent to help you manage pain, anxiety, stress, and insomnia. It provides us with an evolutionary advantage that we don’t fully take advantage of. Use it to help yourself live better, be happier, love better, enjoy life more. It’s there for the taking.

Greg: Amazing. Thank you so much, David. It was wonderful to have you on.

David: Terrific. It was lovely to chat. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Charlie.

Charlie: What are your key takeaways, Greg — apart from the fact that David has possibly the greatest voice on planet Earth?

Greg: I think he was slightly hypnotising me. I’ll show you my notepad — it just has his name at the top and the whole page is blank. I made no notes. But I think that’s actually a sign of a good conversation — I was just engrossed. I’m going to go away and do five minutes of breathing exercises a day for a month and see if that helps. Maybe not in the middle of a meeting, though. I might get asked to leave. What were your key takeaways?

Charlie: One of my takeaways is that there’s a big range of non-drug treatments that can be genuinely helpful. Going back to problem-focused strategies — David mentioned at the start that nowadays a lot of problems are more visible than ever because of media. We need to think carefully about how we interact with media. And that two-pronged approach — addressing the source of the problem on one side, and how we respond to it on the other — is a useful framework. Hypnosis is interesting because it can function as both a problem-focused and an emotion-focused strategy, which I found fascinating. David also noted that medication can be helpful and can save lives — and a lot of the things we discussed today can still be beneficial alongside it. There are minimal downsides to using things like slow-paced breathing or hypnotherapy as adjuncts. And finally: we’re all different. It’s worth experimenting to find adaptive, non-harmful ways to cope with stress that work for you. You might try one of these things and for whatever reason it doesn’t suit you — but there is a big range of options out there.

Greg: It’s fin lavender. I didn’t realise that was a recognised calming thing. I don’t think that would calm me — I hate the smell of lavender.

Charlie: That’s actually a good example of personalisation. But lavender and aromatherapy do seem to reduce anxiety. And is that why pillow spray always smells of lavender?

Greg: Yes, exactly. Lavender is slightly unusual in that when people take it as a dietary supplement it can also slightly reduce anxiety. There’s a particular product called Silexan that’s used for that. I mentioned it as an instance of something you could layer with other practices — like David said, it’s not really practical in the middle of the night if you’re already lying in bed. But maybe if you’ve got a pre-bed wind-down routine and you’re feeling worked up, you could put some music on in the background, use some aromatherapy, and do some slow-paced breathing. I suspect combining those things could be more beneficial than doing the breathing alone.

Charlie: You’ve been listening to The Method — Health in the Real World — a podcast brought to you by Thriva. If you don’t know about Thriva, it’s a health tracking platform that helps you see exactly where your health is heading, what to work on, and how to do so. We use painless at-home blood testing to show you what’s going on in your body, your results are analysed by accredited labs, and based on the tests you get personalised guidance from real doctors. People use Thriva like a compass — testing every few months to help steer their health to where they’d like it to be. It’s a great tool for feeling more empowered about your health and getting the information you need to make progress even when life is a bit hectic. Thriva also has great content to help you get to grips with complex health questions, exactly like what we try to do on this podcast, and all of that is free to access. So if you want to learn more, head over to thriva.co. And if you love the show, please subscribe — it takes just a few seconds and you won’t regret it. You can also leave us a review or write to us at themethod@thriva.co. Or if you’d rather send a voice note, we’d love to hear from you. Special thanks to the Thriva team and to Lower Street for helping us bring the show to life.

Greg: We are your hosts, Charlie Edmondson and Greg Potter, and we’ll see you next time.

Charlie: I think I might be a little bit in love with David.

Greg: No, no, no — I came onto him first. He’s mine.

Charlie: I think my flattery attempts were even greater than yours.

Greg: That might work against you, though. Nobody wants to seem desperate.