Books That Make You Think - Stolen Focus Part 2: Nutrition and attention in our practices and marketingWelcome 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 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stolen-Focus-Why-Cant-Attention/dp/1526620227/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1UQ59MDYHWS7Y&keywords=stolen+focus&qid=1645092020&sprefix=stolen+focus%2Caps%2C72&sr=8-1 (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