[Music] Hello I’m Marcus Railton and this is the Scotscare podcast. Scotscare is the only charity dedicated to helping disadvantaged Scots in London through a range of support including mental health therapy, financial grants, advocacy, sheltered housing for older Scots, job coaching, social events, befriending and support for Children and Families. The Charity’s been running for 400 years to help break the cycle of poverty experienced by some Scots.
In this series of the scotscare podcast I’ll be chatting to celebrities and supporters of the charity that have also forged a life in the capital away from home and about the ups and downs that can bring.
Scotscare: supporting Scots away from home in London.
On the podcast this week is Fiona McKinnon a mental Wellness expert, who develops products and exercises that reduce stress and reinforce the benefits of mindfulness mental health has never been more important that it is now in our 24 7 ridiculously fast-paced world and I’m delighted to be chatting with her today
[Music] Working to make London life better for Scots and their children
Hi Fiona
Hello Marcus lovely to meet you
Can I start with a quote from yourself which I really liked it kind of really resonated with me we’ve never been more educated stimulated and exhausted and I completely agree is the world becoming more stressful it certainly
feels that way doesn’t it I I you know that is basically the start of our our mission and and why moments actually exist is is that exact line that you just quoted and it’s it’s the truth um if you think about it technology is a wonderful thing but it’s also meant that
we are able to be constantly on call there’s something literally in our hands
that is demanding our attention be taken away from what we’re doing at that very
moment and transported somewhere else so in short yes I believe that that is true
that we’ve never been more connected which is a wonderful thing but also
distracted and exhausted I’m not that old I turned 50 this year so but I do
remember I used to go to work and you know this is when we had email and stuff but once I left work I would leave the
email and I didn’t have a mobile phone and we would leave that behind and people would not contact me to the next
the next day but over the last 10 or 15 years I don’t remember the last time I actually switched off and I don’t
remember you know what I do first in the morning is that I get up and have a Wii or is it that I check my mobile phone
and I bet the answer to that question is your phone which I’m sure it is for for
someone else so I I’m a similar age to you Marcus I remember going to work in fact I went to University without a
mobile phone and studied and I went to this thing called the library and read books which I’m sure is a foreign
concept to many now as well but I can actually remember the smartphone and and that moment of
feeling the change of not just having a fund and and being able to answer email
but to your point having something that that opened up everything to you in terms of communication in the palm of
your hand and interestingly when I felt it and when I noticed it was not through
work uh but it was in the relationship that I was in and I realized that I’d lost the
other person because now you have a reason to be distracted even when you’re sitting on
the sofa with someone next to you you’re not fully present and it’s not just about how we use technology in our
workplace but it’s also how much it’s distracted us from our life and living
as well I think we’re all so guilty of that my I I am guilty of it my wife is
even more guilty of it we if we watch Netflix at night I must spend 40 of the
time rewinding because she’s missed something because she’s on her phone and I I think it’s just the way we live and
I try to sit down with my 13 year old boy to watch a football match that was last year and I hope it wasn’t Scotland
that probably deserves to be that was something else in hand well he he’s he thinks of himself as English so let’s
not I just can’t that’s you know that’s okay another thing completely but we sat down and within 20 minutes his phone was
out and he was on the phone and he was completely and utterly distracted I do worry that my kids have no Focus anymore
because of this that’s always been pulled away from them to do something else and something short as well Well
here here’s the news flash everybody um multitasking is not a thing it’s not possible for us to be fully
engaged in more than one thing in a moment and and restart shows that even having your
phone next to you never mind picking it up um distracts you for 23 minutes from
what you were doing previously on average so if you’re just constantly picking up the phone it means you’re
never fully present in your the task at hand and that is what mindfulness
and what we do is is really all about mindfulness is simply about being 100
focused in the task at hand without judgment and without distraction this
isn’t a new thing though is it Fiona because when we look at I went to Glasgow University as well um and I did philosophy here which was
hugely useful uh going forward you’ve opened up a world of jobs to me but I remember reading Plato at University and
he was talking about the theory of the forums he was talking about just one thing that’s what man needs as in humans
not just man man needs one thing to concentrate and they will be happy and I saw we’ve obviously been talking about
this for thousands of years that’s the thing everything that that we do and I
have personally felt has helped me is centuries old thousands of years old
it’s it’s proven it’s scientific because it’s how our minds and bodies actually
work we’ve not reinvented some way you know we
um we have a nervous system and it is triggered by different different things
and it’s soothed by different techniques and one of our most powerful things that we own is our breath and just being able
to take conscious breaths calves our nervous system it stimulates our vagus nerve it supports our
digestion it supports our brain function and by learning to do these simple
things which were already pre-programmed and wired to do but we’ve just forgotten
how to do them or we’ve become too distracted and really understanding how our bodies feel
and then that’s where we can get into you know what is dis-ease I.E we’re not we’re not making it easy for ourselves
and that’s where we can create physical as well as mental problems within within
our own systems and our own bodies and you’ve spent a lot of years at the sharp end of business you were looking
at other people’s businesses working for your own business working for big corporates what so what was the crunch point for you where you said I’m not
going to do this anymore so I’d say there’s a number of different things and and they slowly built up over
time so for me uh I was in the online advertising and media world for over 20
years um it was called New Media back in the day when I joined it because Internet advertising was a was a newfangled thing
um and I primarily work for startups so there was a mentality of you know you roll your sleeves up and you get on with
whatever you need to do to make the business succeed I was very fortunate to have Global roles so my time was spent
on airplanes more than anything else um and it got to the point where I just
was just always on basically just as we were saying there and I didn’t have the
wherewithal to understand how that was physically and mentally impacting me I
didn’t know the warning signs um you know burnout was not something that you talked about it was something
that was seen to be avoided at all costs so you covered it up and you worked extra hours and there’s also a little
bit um not the subject for today but there was a bit of you know that kind of only female at the table needing to be seen
to be strong and just getting on with things and after I would say probably
four or five years of pushing myself to the limits I had a physical and mental
um breakdown um were you a warrior while this was going on or of you I mean I I’ve worried
from like since I was a little child if I’ve got nothing to worry about I worry about the fact I’ve got nothing to worry about so were you worrying and coping or
were you coping and then you went off a cliff no my default setting was
um was fear was worrying was needing to be perfect
was um doing anything I could to be accepted um but within that I was compromising my
own personal boundaries and my own personal happiness and I just didn’t know how to say
to express any of that so I would say fear which then manifested itself and
being angry about things I had a great sense of Injustice about the world and unfairness
um which um created a lot of anxiety and stress
um within my system do you think anger gets stored up in your body do you think it’s one of these things that kind of
gets pushed down further and further until it just comes out anger or and or
grief absolutely um and interestingly grief and anger
find themselves in the body in very similar places which is in your in your lungs
in your chest um and when you start to tune into how
your body’s feeling your body can really tell you which emotion it is that you are you are feeling at that time and and
one of the concerns just going back quickly Marcus to um technology one of the concerns I really have about
the increase in technology driven well-being apps and wearable technology
is that we’re looking at our watches and our phones to understand how we’re feeling
and we’re not really using our own guidance system which is our body to go hang on a minute what is this that I’m
feeling and is what and and more importantly why why am I feeling angry why am I feeling anxious why am I you
know and that excitement and anxiety are very closely linked and connected emotions and how we feel them in our
bodies so having a piece of technology tell you that you’re having an emotional reaction is is not as helpful as us
being able to feel it for ourselves and question okay hang on a minute why am I feeling this way and that’s my real
worry that we’ve become over reliant on technology to say hey fee you’ve had a bad night’s sleep and then I immediately
start my day going oh god I’ve had a bad night’s sleep what does that mean for the rest of my day rather than me saying
I’m a bit tired today what can I do to help protect myself do I need to do a little
bit less should I go for a walk uh should I do a bit of meditation what might be helpful maybe I’ll just have a
cup of coffee you know but I think that over-reliance and technology and understanding our emotional reaction is
it’s a worrying Trend I see we’re absolutely obsessed by data everyone’s obsessed by data all the time recording
their existence and recording data even to the point where you know I go out cycling quite a lot and a lot of the
guys I cycle with who are the same age as me they have these computers on the bike that record how many miles to do
and how many calories are doing how many watts they burn and there are 50 year old blocks they’re never going to ride
the Tour de France I do not know why they need why don’t they just look around and stop looking down at these tiny computers full of useless data
Scots care supporting Scots away from home in London
the World Health Organization states that one in four of us will have mental health issues in a lifetime 25 that’s an
unacceptable statistic surely yes it is and actually I’m I hate to say
it but I’m surprised it’s not higher um because it depends what you you mean
by mental health obviously there’s that more um serious mental health issues and but
there’s also the life-changing issues that are caused by daily Stress
and Anxiety and not being able to manage that which then can benefit given words like manifest itself into
being those more serious conditions and so actually I’m surprised it’s not higher because it’s thought that
three-quarters of us suffer from workplace Stress and Anxiety every year
so that’s that’s interesting isn’t it so in your when you work for your company and you you go into corporates and you
address these issues do you first of all I wanted to ask you do you see like an
edge split or do you see a gender split uh females more stressed than males or
young people with all this economic uncertainty that’s going on at the moment are they more terrified of the
world going forward than older people who may have a mortgage and are more settled so first I would say that it
important and we don’t see it seems more stressed than other everybody’s
journey and emotions are are valid in in their own right so I don’t think it’s a
case of saying that there’s you know there’s one more than another what I would say is that women are more likely
to talk about their emotional well-being
they’re more likely to talk amongst friends they’re more likely to be open and vulnerable than men so the male
statistic May well be hiding more men that are actually feeling these
emotions they’re just less likely to express them more to recognize that that is what they’re going through and when
you look at the statistics around the the you know biggest cause of death in in men particularly around the ages of
40 and 50 it’s suicide and there’s no denying that it’s a huge huge issue in
in society today and and it’s only getting worse I would also say in
something very close to my heart is that there’s also a real issue around
addiction and alcoholism in that older age bracket again around the sort of 40
and 50 year olds wear that inability to self-regulate that emotion from a
a mindset perspective then you know is is hidden by addictions yeah I think
drinking too much booze is very easy to justify I think I do on occasion I say
oh do you know what I’ve I’ve had a tough work day or I’ve you know the kids are killing me and I will just go to the
fridge and reach for a beer and you know I also think I’m predisposed to being you know my family and being Scottish
but you know booze is a real problem isn’t it it really is and um I’m three years sober
um which I’m achieved that and and practicing meditation and the two things are very linked have literally changed
my life and I’ve changed my outlook and I’m very passionate about supporting people who are sober curious you know
it’s not about stopping if if you don’t have a problem that’s not at all what what I’m saying it’s just about
understanding why you might be drinking is it covering something up is it covering up anxieties stress
um and then inability you know unhappiness at work in relationships there tends to be a trigger and a reason
behind those behaviors and you know addiction can be in other things as well it’s not just about booze it can be an
exercise it can be you know in gaming if you’re looking at kids there can be
other things that that cause that addictive behavior but it’s usually because of a mindset shift or something
that you know you’re looking um to occupy your mind when you gave up booze was a a case of you felt you were
drinking too much or did you think do you know what I need just to get healthy or what was the kind of uh the Catalyst
for it meditation through becoming more mindful through understanding
my body and my mind better through those practices I realized that a big reason if I go
back to the aforementioned stress uh um and burnout at work I realized that
the online advertising industry the advertising industry you know Mad Men the booze culture the 24 7. the the
drinking and the drinking to excess was a big part of my break time and my
fear and anxiety and ability to kind of feel in control was being controlled by
by drinking success and you know from the outside people wouldn’t have thought I was an alcoholic but I started to
piece together and appreciate the connection between my binge drinking between my ability not to control it the
desire to escape kind of reality in those moments and also using it as a social Crux was was not serving me and I
made a conscious decision that I needed to remove that anxiety from my life and
and that started with um with started with stopping basically and
do you sleep better now oh yes I think alcohol does that I know even one or two beers it really kills my
I mean I don’t sleep very well but you know one or two beers and it just you know I’m I’m awake on off and on the
whole night it’s not it’s not good how was the decision I used to have to make well I have a drink or while I sleep I
mean how crazy is that that is you still drink coffee oh yes that’s my one Vice I need I need
my coffee in the morning I love it yeah I try these days to get up and not go
straight to the coffee machine I you know I do try to have a glass of water or just move around a bit you know in order to just kind of hydrate my body a
little bit before I get on the coffee and I I have tried to just limit it because I was up at four or five cups a
day and then feeling jittery and not sleeping you know so um can I come back to um the question that you asked about age because
um I do think it’s really important to recognize our teenagers and our younger
um generation as well and how much covet has impacted them and
that locked down and and also to recognize that their lives are
different to when we grew up and technology and connection and social media and comparison and
also the openness about talking about mental health are very different from growing up in the 70s and 80s
um and I do think that there is additional pressures and anxieties
and a real lack of one-to-one connection that that generation are missing that
is creating a real swell of mental health issues right now
I mean I have Rose tinted glasses but do you think it’s a Simplicity that they’re missing I mean I’d love to see that you
know I’d love to see everybody just put down their phones and go out and connect and and run around outside and you know
kick a ball against the wall and show up when they said they were going to show up and meet people casually and have
those incidental conversations but I I don’t think we can go back to that and as I say technology is not always a bad
thing there’s some amazing things that that has enabled us to do and the way that we communicate with each other so
it’s not about throwing that out it’s it’s really about learning how to add
value from that technology and not for it to be the way that we live our lives so I guess and yes I’m agreeing with
your Simplicity is it the heart of it um but I I’m I don’t have the answer to
how we get back to that and it’s not a case of going back we can times are very different it’s about finding a new way
for young people to be able to find that human emotional connection because at
the end of the day that’s the most important thing and that is what I feel we’ve lost Scots care
[Music] and when you go into the workplace do you find that work employers are more
open to taking breaks and being Mindful and protecting the mental health of the
workers do is there anywhere you where you’ve walked into and thought this culture is still toxic or is there much
more a culture of embracing it I would say that there is an increase in
Awareness for companies to look after the whole person that walks through the
door and not just the person that does the role and while they’re sitting in the office because let’s face it we are
the same person and it’s not like we switch our minds off from what’s going on at home when we walk through an
office door and and vice versa when we leave so there’s definitely an increased responsibility that companies are
recognizing that they support the person and their whole life
um when they walk into the office because let’s face it happier healthier
more mindful employees make for more
productivity better decisions and therefore better business so it’s definitely in a company’s interest to
look after the whole person that walks in the door however I believe that there is still a
great deal of lip service and not reality um and practice that is happening so
companies will say yes we have an app that allows our employees to to do a
meditation in the morning yet they aren’t changing the way that they do
performance reviews their interview processes very stressful it’s not
welcoming there’s no onboarding there’s no ongoing support when someone might
have gone through grief for example loss of a loved one so there’s a lot to do still in terms of actually impacting
cultural change within organizations but the signs are good that we’re
starting to have those conversations it is anything anything is a good step forward but I do understand what you
mean when you talk about lip service you know I used to work for a company and they had this the they initiated this
thing called 10 time and it was 10 of your working week you had to get out of the business and go to an art gallery or
or go to go to something else or go to the cinema and come back with that knowledge because they believe that what
you went away and did would be great for the company and I remember I did it once
and as soon as I got back into the office my boss went Where Have You Been what so it was it was very much lip
service you know uh it’s so true and I I worked for a company that um actually
hired brene Brown who I absolutely love to come and do uh talk anyone that’s
listening that hasn’t listened to her Ted Talk look it up on Netflix she talks about vulnerability and shame
um and particularly in the workplace and so she was helping us through a merger
and she talked about being open and she talks about you know how to show up and
be vulnerable and yet the the Mortal um or the company culture of which there
were posters all over the organization was more fun less fear and that’s what
we genuinely believed was a positive message for the culture of the organization and I just thought what
does more fun mean and why is there any fear and what was less of it mean and so
actually when I saw that every day it just made me think this is a fear-based culture at the opposite effect yeah it’s
horrible that’s like the phrase compulsory fun you will have fun today exactly first fun looking at the other
side of it I’ve watched in big big companies and and then I go into like my son’s school and sometimes I just think
maybe there’s too much tolerance that people are indulged that we live in a
society that’s maybe too woke or that everybody needs a label do you think there’s there’s a case for saying no you
there is nothing wrong here you just need to knuckle down a little bit when I think about that
um what comes to mind is the word selfish and to some people that can be really
triggering they see it as a bad thing and they think oh my gosh I don’t want to be labored labeled selfish
however if we just think about it for a moment and it’s about putting the self first
if we don’t put our own oxygen masks on we can’t really serve others so if being self-indulgent is me taking
a little bit of time in my day to just look after myself so that I show up and I’m kinder to the people around me
I’m better able to be more considered about how I go about
my day um then I think that’s a great thing and um I think that labeling people selfish
for thinking that or seeing that as self-indulgent is is a big barrier to
why perhaps men in particular don’t want to talk about feeling that they need help and support so I encourage you know
put your own oxygen mask on first um and that isn’t being self-indulgent
that’s actually being a better person and showing up more for the people around you something
that you said that I read was that you keep a diary can you explain to me how
that works how that helps your your mental state or your mindfulness yeah so so being Scottish and Living in America
being told that I needed to journal and I just thought well what a lot of rubbish that is I’m not gonna Journal
I’m not a 13 year old girl with a pink diary how on Earth can that help me
um but it all started about 10 years ago and I used to find that when I was traveling and particularly when I was
flying I would just have these moments where you know I wasn’t contact nobody could contact me and I just had a little
bit of peace and quiet and I just started to write about whatever came into my head and so there wasn’t really
any structure to it but I would just found it really helpful and it’s it’s almost cathartic so if you think about
praying or if you have any kind of faith-based practice that you have that
kind of cathartic moment of being able to say things out loud you almost then start to unlock something in your mind
where you start to problem solve or it feels a bit of a relief that you’ve got things out and I find being able to
write was a real way to release that and then just recently
um so during lockdown um I cared for my father who was terminally ill and I found that
writing every day at the end of the day no matter what time of the day or night that was when I eventually got to bed
if I reframed my day from a place of gratitude it completely
re-wired my brain to see things from a different perspective as my head hit the pillow so that’s the practice that I
have kept going now for I guess it must be around three years where every day I
just write down I am grateful for and I just sort of scan my day and my mind and
I pick out things from having a cup of coffee speaking to Marcus Sun was
shining you know just whatever comes to mind but there’s always something you can find in your day to be grateful for
it even and especially when circumstances around you might be challenging
um and it means that I’m now able to reflect back on that time looking after my dad before he passed from a place of
gratitude and it’s just completely changed my outlook it means that when I
end my day I’m basically seeing it from a good place I did want to ask you that
I I was wondering did it help you um process your grief my my dad passed
away the start of covert and uh didn’t get to see him didn’t get to have a funeral and I still have days that are
massively overwhelming because there was no kind of process done there there’s no such closure and I just wonder if if you
writing and being with your dad helped you to kind of process that grief as you moved on
I feel it it really really did and I’m I’m sorry for your loss too and it was
even harder in 2020 you know because Dad has such a small funeral as well we
weren’t able to get together as a family and and there’s just additional challenges there that everyone
experienced through that period but I do feel that that writing it down
really has helped me um and also sharing with people that
time that grief and being open about it has really helped me as well and find a
community of people that have that shared experience um and you know there’s different things
that work for different people but in short yes it it was the thing that I
believed um really helped me just find that peace you know been able to say I’m so
grateful for the time we have for that I’m so grateful to be there with them and and it really does help rewire your
brain some more positive positive place because we’re predisposal I can’t speak today you know what I’m
trying to say yeah predisposed thank you very much um to think negatively 80 of our daily
thoughts are negative so if I can just rewire a few of those every day from a more positive perspective I’m helping
build my brain every day now on social media you do a lot of breathing exercises that you put up there and and
I follow them and they genuinely work with me you know uh we’re almost out of time but I just wondered is there
something you could do for us now just give us one minute 90 seconds of peace to help us at the end of this interview
yeah absolutely um as I said up front the the biggest powerful superpower we have is is our
breath because it helps calm our nervous system and just gives us that window to
to think and to move forward and all we have to do is learn to breathe into our
bellies um and I so we’re directing our breath and in our diaphragm it immediately
gives us more oxygen it opens our chest and is really kind of creates a sense of
Cam and the other thing is that we don’t have to take big huge deep gulps of breath we can do this really softly and
quietly and actually that can create a more powerful inward thinking moment so
let’s just do this now we’ll just breathe in for the count of five out for the count of five just for three
rounds of breath um and I’ll just guide you through that and I find if you close your eyes again
just sends a little message to your body that it’s time just to to take a moment
so if you’re ready close your eyes
and let’s just breathe out fully letting our belly
drop back down and then as we breathe in to
three push your belly out and exhale
to three four five inhale pushing your belly out as
that breath moves down through your lungs and exhale let it all go drop in your
shoulders and your belly falling down breathe in
softly quietly
and breathe out
and keeping your eyes closed just let your breath return back to normal
and quietly and softly open your eyes and just appreciate that
short moment of Cam you can create in your body in your mind
Fiona thank you for that thank you well you come back again because I’ve got about 200 more
questions for you I would absolutely love to because I’ve
got about 200 other things that I could talk about too Fiona McKinnon thanks for being on the
Scots gear podcast today thank you very much have a great day Scott’s care for Scots in London in need
[Music] Hello I’m Marcus Railton and this is the Scotscare podcast. Scotscare is the only charity dedicated to helping disadvantaged Scots in London through a range of support including mental health therapy, financial grants, advocacy, sheltered housing for older Scots, job coaching, social events, befriending and support for Children and Families. The Charity’s been running for 400 years to help break the cycle of poverty experienced by some Scots.