Books That Make You Think - Stolen Focus Part 2: Nutrition and attention in our practices and marketing

Welcome to this week's Books That Make You Think. It's a moment in your week where you get to pause and reflect on a new book which I have found really interesting, and it's a bit of space for us to think about the implications of new books on our practice and on our marketing efforts as well. So I hope this feels like a little bit of a moment of luxury, where you actually get to reflect on some of the information that we're bombarded with in our daily lives, because if you're anything like me, it can feel like I read a lot of stuff, and I hear a lot of stuff, but I don't actually have that much time to reflect on it. So I hope that these little segments of your week will give you a bit of thinking space and a bit of time to reflect on some of the cool new stuff that is out there. 

This month we are focusing on Johann Hari: Stolen Focus, and this week I wanted to talk about the chapter on nutrition and pollution, and the fact that he presents a lot of very compelling evidence that the food that we eat and the environment that we live in is having a huge impact on our ability to pay attention, which in turn has a huge impact on all aspects of our mental health; everything from depression all the way through to neuro developmental conditions that can be diagnosed like ADHD. I won't go into all of the research that he cites, but it is very compelling, and it certainly convinced me that I need to be paying a bit more attention to my client's nutrition, and knowing where to point them for that, because I'm not a nutritionist, and I'm not going to become a nutritionist. But if we know realistically that nutrition and the environment are playing a huge role in mental health and the way that our clients are able to pay attention, then surely we need to be addressing that in our work directly. So I thought, what could that look like practically? How could I include this new knowledge in my clinical practice, and how can I also incorporate it into my marketing strategy? And one of the things that I thought of was, firstly, about formulation. And I think we always say that we try and formulate in a bio psycho social way, or at least a lot of us say that, but actually I've never drilled down too much into my client’s eating habits. I don't ask my clients routinely if they come to me with, you know, birth trauma, postnatal depression, that kind of thing, I'm not saying what food are you putting in your body? And maybe I should be. So that could be an element of it, adding that stuff into our formulation. Maybe formulating, if we know that somebody lives in a very built up area where there's lots of pollution, and then incorporating that into our formulation, that that might be making it more difficult for them to do the mindfulness activities that we are setting for them, for example, and setting that expectation with people, I think it's part of a compassionate response to acknowledge that we are living in quite a toxic environment in terms of our food being very super processed, and full of chemicals that make it hard for us to pay attention, and our cars churning out chemicals, plastics churning out chemicals, which make it difficult for us to pay attention, and just having that compassion that, okay, we're going to try and learn mindfulness here, and that's got loads of benefits that you will have already talked with your client about, but you are kind of running up an escalator that's going in the opposite direction, because of the environmental stresses that are on you, and acknowledging that and making it clear that you're asking them to do something really difficult. So thinking about one to one therapy, incorporating that into my formulation, and having clear referral pathways that I can send people to. If we identify nutrition is likely to be an issue, then I can refer them on to a nutritionist, so I need to make that relationship with a local nutritionist that I trust, or an online nutritionist for my online clients, that I can then refer them on quickly and easily and demonstrate to them that that is of equal importance with the work that they're doing with me. So that's something that I'm going to look into personally. 

Similarly, for the environmental stuff, there's not a lot that your individual client can do about environmental pollution. There's not very much that I can do as an individual clinician about pollution. But what I might do is look into some local activism that I could become involved with. There are always petitions in my area about pollution, about particular projects that other social enterprises that are focused on environmental causes are working on. And actually, if I know that this is really critical to mental health, maybe I should be playing a role in some of those projects. 

So those are the clinical implications as far as I can see them. Because I think we do need to respect in our clinical work that there is a hierarchy of needs. I think every clinical approach acknowledges that you need good building blocks to wellbeing, and the food that you're putting into your body and the environment that you live in are two pretty crucial building blocks in your mental health, and if they're not there or if they're not supporting you, then we need to address those first. So I think our clinical work should be reflecting that. 

Those are some of the practical ways that I might change my clinical practice, or adapt it slightly as a result of reading this book. But it also struck me that there are implications of this knowledge for the way that we market ourselves and the way that we reach out to people in the first place. Anybody who's done Psychology Business School with me knows that I've always been a big advocate for marketing through relationships, building up your network of other related professionals, who you can refer people to and who will refer people to your practice. I think that is a really valuable way of spending your time if you've got a limited amount of time to spend on marketing; I would always recommend building up those relationships first and foremost. But the added benefit of doing that is that it gives you this obvious pathway to send people on if you identify that actually their individual experience, their individual thoughts and emotions, and the stuff that we can deal with in the therapy room is not really the biggest piece of the puzzle for them, so I think it has that added benefit. Also, if you think about it, if you have a strong relationship with all of those other professionals, then we're sending the message to the public that mental health shouldn't be considered in a silo. It sends the message that we are holistic creatures, who need to be considered as mind, body and environment. I think that's a message that a lot of us believe in, but actually we market ourselves in such a way that it sends the message to people that mental health is its own discrete thing. Now, if that's not what you believe, then what better way to market yourself than alongside professionals that deal with the body and the environment and nutrition. It strikes me as a much more coherent message given what I say to my clients when they get into my therapy room. I’m always telling my clients that they need to pay attention to their bodies as well as their minds, but perhaps if I'm not positioning myself alongside other clinicians who do focus on those areas, I'm actually sending the message that you can just come here and think about your mental health in isolation. So I think from a messaging point of view, perhaps viewing yourself as part of that wider community of health and alternative professionals could actually be really helpful to the way that your clients end up viewing their mental health. I think that's really exciting. 

So how do you do that practically, if we want to build up that network with other related professionals? Well, the first thing you can do is reach out to people on LinkedIn. That's an easy win, because you can search for professional groups on there, and you can search by location, so you could set up coffees with physio-therapists and nutritionists in your area tomorrow, if you wanted to do that. Another really good way of doing this is to go to your local networking events. You will find mental health professionals tend to be really underrepresented at local business networking events. It was very rare for me to come across another qualified psychologist or a qualified therapist at a networking event. However, you will meet loads of people that do things like physiotherapy, nutritional advice, chiropractors; they tend to go to these business networking events, and I think we should be there too. It's a great way of developing those relationships because if somebody meets you and speaks to you, they get a really good sense of what it would be like to work with you, and they're much more likely to feel confident to refer to you. Likewise, I do not refer to professionals that I don't know, I don't like doing that. So you need to build up that network of people that you know, like and trust, that you can then refer your clients to, so it works in both directions. Another thing that you should be thinking about doing to build up these connections with allied professionals, is building up your repertoire of guest appearances. So that could be writing guest blogs, it could be going into other people's Facebook communities to give a bit of mental health advice, you could do a little talk, a little Facebook Live, or you could just be in there commenting on people's threads