S2E6 - Beyond Hunted: Burnout, Gut Health & the Mind–Body Reset with Paul Cashmore (Part 2)

In Part 2 of our conversation with Channel 4’s Hunted hunter Paul Cashmore, we step away from the TV screens and go deep into the work that really lights him up – mental and physical health, NLP and full-body nervous system reset.

If Part 1 was about fame, ego and being “the guy off the telly”, this episode is where it all gets practical. Paul opens up about burnout, chronic stress and the moment his body literally forced him to stop. He shares how meditation, martial arts, Buddhist philosophy and neuroscience collided to shape his approach as a performance coach – and why so many clients now know him as the “NLP Ninja”.

We get into:

• What it actually means to reset your nervous system (and why most of us are stuck in permanent fight-or-flight)
• The link between stress, gut health, eczema, pain, fatigue and exhaustion
• Why your thoughts can create symptoms – and how they can also help release them
• The simple Venn diagram Paul uses with clients: past, environment, movement and nutrition
• How he blends NLP, coaching, PT and sound frequencies to help people let go of anxiety, trauma and old stories
• The deceptively simple question he always starts with: “What do you want?”

Paul also talks about being a “human guinea pig” for everything he teaches, why science-backed “woo” can be life-changing, and how tiny habits and small wins can start to pull you out of overwhelm.

👉 New here? This is Part 2 of Paul’s story – so if you haven’t already, go back to Part 1 to hear the journey from police officer to Hunted hunter and the hidden cost of being in the public eye.

Connect with Paul:
Website: paulcashmore.co.uk
Email: paul@paulcashmore.co.uk

If you know someone who’s burnt out, wired, stuck in their own head or constantly in “go mode”, share this episode with them – it might be the nudge they need to hit reset.

Got a story or a view? Email letstalk@whynotwhatif.com
– we might do a follow-up episode with your takes.

Got a story or a view? Email letstalk@whynotwhatif.com
— we might do a follow-up episode with your takes.

Chapters

• 3:02 From “therapist” to performance coach: how Paul really works
• 6:20 When high performance breaks you: Paul’s own burnout story
• 9:03 Phones, emails and constant alert: why modern life fries your nervous system
• 11:57 Meditation, monks and martial arts: the science behind staying calm
• 15:01 Being the human guinea pig: testing everything on himself first
• 17:55 Sound, frequencies and why “we’re all vibration”
• 21:02 The moment his body said “enough”: a life-changing wake-up call
• 24:00 Redefining success: what actually matters after burnout
• 25:32 Burnout vs balance: why hustle culture keeps winning
• 26:27 Buddhist philosophy, warriors and finding your own path
• 27:48 Meditation for people who “can’t sit still”
• 29:34 Placebo, nocebo and how your thoughts create symptoms
• 30:49 Mind–body connection 101: what your symptoms might be saying
• 32:34 Stress, gut issues, eczema and pain: what’s really going on
• 36:30 How to reset your nervous system (without moving to a cave)
• 40:51 Paul’s 4-part Venn diagram: past, environment, movement, nutrition
• 41:20 It starts with one question: “What do you want?”
• 44:29 Changing your language, changing your identity
• 48:20 Calm on the outside, chaos inside: managing the dual persona

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:03

Welcome to Why Not and What If. And I'm Siobhan Godden, a HR consultant, coach, and the one who listens through the noise to what really matters. Think of me as the calm to Andy's creative storm. Hi! This is Andy Kracknell, a creative whirlwind, destructor of dull thinking and allergic to doing things the usual way.

SPEAKER_01: 0:25

Thanks, Siobon. I'm also a marketing and communications consultant.

SPEAKER_02: 0:29

And this is the podcast where we explore the messy, magical intersection of life, work, leadership, and all the bits we're not supposed to talk about. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01: 0:43

So, Paul, thanks for joining us. It's good to have you on. Thanks for having me. So for anyone who does know you from Hunted, how do you introduce yourself these days?

SPEAKER_00: 0:55

Paul Cashmore off the telly.

SPEAKER_02: 0:57

Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:59

I've been do you know what? I've been called recently. I got called a therapist. I thought that's pretty cool. But to fit, I know I was like, okay, I can I like that. Put it down as a performance coach. I will I basically introduce myself to like I'm an NLP coach, but I've developed my own coaching technique and I've combined my meditation space and my my background in PT with NLP. So if they ask me, I just say performance coach because a lot of people, there's a can be a stigma around therapy, but most people will come to me under that umbrella. So I just say performance coach, because that's really kind of how it goes in and an LP practitioner, which is probably what I label myself as. But yeah, performance coach is really the label I think that sticks that I like. But I'm gonna roll with therapists if that's what people people prefer.

SPEAKER_02: 2:01

I think for me what I like about coach is it's quite forward thinking, isn't it? It's about moving on and how you want to be, whereas therapy can sometimes be a bit retrospective and it's good work to do on yourself, but depending on where you are in your journey, I think coaching and the coach kind of way is very formative about how you want to be, which is quite positive.

SPEAKER_00: 2:26

Yeah, so that there's obviously different there's different needs for people, there's different sources of help. For example, counselling cannot give you offer you a solution that is for you to have a safe space to be able to talk to somebody, which is great. There is NLP, which is not technically identified by the NHS, although there has been some training with NHS nurses. There is CBT, very similar, and obviously other forms of therapy, but then there's there's coaching. But I think for someone to say there's still a little bit of kind of reservation if someone says I'm going for therapy. So I've kind of stepped away from that because people like you, there's coaches out there, like you know, I mean Tony Robbins is like the pinnacle, isn't he? But he's not a therapist, but he can hone in and he trained in NLP sort of, I think back in the early 80s, and I've read I'm like a total just bookworm who will go in and read, and that really was the one that benefited me. So I'm I'm like a human guinea pig for all this stuff, whether it's meditation, whether it's gut health, whether it's trialling something else, whether it's looking into CBT, NLP, I've looked at all of them and I've just found that what works suits me and my style, what works for other people. Yet I do think in this space it's about your compatibility with the person you're you're with. So I could go and and and try CBT with say 10 different people, but I may gel and feel safe and have more rapport with one of them, and that's really where you're gonna click and it's gonna work and get the benefit from it. So Yeah, I'd say I was I'd say, well, I'm actually technically on my certification a master NLP practitioner.

SPEAKER_02: 4:17

Woohoo!

SPEAKER_00: 4:18

I know, right? I know, love that.

SPEAKER_02: 4:21

Looking at your background and some of your and we we talked a bit offline about some of the, you know, talking about warriors and things like that. You need to have bring something like that into it. You need to be like a, I don't know, a ninja coach or something. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: 4:36

Do you know what I'd love that? I'd love to do that. Probably why the go, is he is he wearing black?

SPEAKER_01: 4:40

All the time there's a guy on LinkedIn, and I'm just looking him up at the moment. He works in the print space. Oh, that's it, and he calls himself print lord. So we should call you NLP Ninja. NLP Ninja? I love that.

SPEAKER_00: 4:54

You heard it here first. I'm taking it, I'm gonna put it on LinkedIn. I'm gonna put it on LinkedIn. Well, that was the reason I'd came up with so one of the 30-day transformations I do, I I I give it Ronin 30. So Ronin is a masterless samurai warrior from from back in the day in Japan. And I like that. So you're not beholden to anybody. And Miyamoto Masashi, who was reading the book about, wrote the book about the book of five rings, was the greatest swordsman in Japan during that period of time. And equally so, would go and sit in his cave, and he's a learned Buddhist, he is a philosopher, a writer, so would go and retreat and be in a sense of peace and serenity and calm. So I thought, well, let's do that. Let's not kind of well, let's combine the two. Let's go, well, you can be a badass, you can be driven, you can be successful, you can earn money, you can do all this stuff, and equally so the fine balance, yin and yang, black and white, is you need to go and find a peace of calm. We can't be in a state of adrenaline and cortisol for two long periods of time. You you you'll just get adrenal fatigue and burn out, which I have, and I'm sure you guys probably have experienced all this as well, and people within your teams and your workforce have experienced. And have that balance. Life is a balance.

SPEAKER_02: 6:29

So And I think that's really interesting because it's almost like you're saying we've probably experienced that either ourselves or through through others, and absolutely have. And I I did get a burnout in COVID times that I didn't realise what it was at the time, but retrospectively I know what it was. But it's almost like we've as a human race, we've kind of forgotten some of those basics because the world moves so fast all the time now, and we're we're just on this treadmill without stopping, that we've lost some of those skills, I think, that we used to have.

SPEAKER_00: 7:01

Yes. People think that they should people wake up on a morning, they are straight away on their mobile phones. We do get a shot of court as all when we wake to wait to but to have that spike so dramatically because we're now checking our work emails, we're now in a straight of a state of anxiety straight away in the morning. We then may have our coffee, we then may rush, we may get one on the go, we then may get our children ready for school, and and we're just rushing around all the time. We get to work, stress, stress, stress. We're not designed that way. We're designed to have short bursts of it, and that's for a saber-toothed tiger. That's that's to go out and hunt and find. We're not to we're not supposed to be in that state all the time. And we've forgotten that. And we're addicted to these things. These are addictive, these these mobile phones. And just to take that time, so I talk about the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. And I know we're gonna we might I'll touch on this without kind of going ahead of myself, but that's why people's digestion is off. That's why people are reacting and getting eczema, that's why people are bloated, that's why people are exhausted, that's why people get muscular pains and fibromyalgia. And I've had people come and see me who can manifest pains, physical pains, from their own mind. The opposite of the placebo effect. Placebo effects, we can cure ourselves. We've seen it. I can give you a sugar pill, you believe it's true, the pain will go. It was developed, it was discovered, I think, in World War I, wasn't it, when they'd run out of morphine for the soldiers. And that's how the placebo effect came about. But then there's this, it was a phrase, the nocebo effect, you can manifest pain. And it's all from our thoughts, which is why I just became obsessed with our thoughts and meditations and and and looking into and speaking to monks and going into the Buddhist centres and speaking to them, wanted to know that, and then it was all about the martial artist, they're so calm, they can read you, they know what's coming beforehand, and any warrior or anything else, so you can be driven and successful, however you want to label success. Find that balance before you burn out. Because a lot of people will will have think they've got a thousand problems, and then when their health declines, they've only got one. I'm hoping it'll take over because I I don't I don't hunt is not going to be around forever. It won't be around forever. I do appreciate that everything's got a shelf life, probably including me.

SPEAKER_02: 9:45

Then we're jumping everywhere.

SPEAKER_00: 9:46

Yeah, they may find they may find someone else who's maybe a bit younger and kind of um you know take take my shoes and do you know, do a better job. Yeah, but that's that's down at Shine and Channel 4, I think. The the wellness arena, I explained it the other day. It's like a drug. It's like the best drug I could have ever imagined. And I guess reflect and on reflection, probably maybe even career-wise, I'd have you know done it back then. I'd always I think that's one of the reasons why I did the job I did in the first place was is just to help people and seeing that and seeing someone overcome maybe a tragedy or just need help in general. And when someone leaves me and they've overcome a major health anxiety and they're terrified of hospitals, and they've broke down in tears in front of me, and after so many sessions, they'll then go and have a laurenoscopy and have the camera put down their throat. But before that, couldn't step in inside a hospital is just an incredible feeling. It's just the most wonderful thing to hear, and someone to be able to let go of some past trauma of PTSD and not carry that around anymore. I I I didn't think I'd ever feel such elation. It almost sounds like it should be selfless, and it is, and I want to help people, but the feeling from it is just phenomenal. I can't I can give I've given talks to you know major companies. I was asked to give one in to the British Army to senior nurses. Well like KaiQ, this this is it's just the best feeling. I can't even even put it into words.

SPEAKER_02: 11:46

Is it the is it the helping other people that gives you that feeling, or is it something more than that? Or is it is it I mean you you talked a bit about how much you've learned and read and you and how that kind of almost motivates you and just drives you on because you're learning about all these things. Is that an element of why it's such a drug as well, would you say?

SPEAKER_00: 12:10

A lot of the everything that I've done that worked for me and I helped other people. It wasn't even in the career-wise, it was just people asking and and I'm going to try this, we'll do this, and this is kind of what this works, this is how the science works behind that, because I ended up going down a bit of a spiritual path, but then what I wanted to do was combine the spiritual element with science. Yeah. Science back it. So whether that's quantum physics, whether that whether that's the health or the brain scans or whatever whatever it is, you combine the two, people were seeing changes, and I'd just have calls and someone who was former RAF who he asked if he could FaceTime me and I said, Cool. And he'd been searching on Google if an insurance company would pay out if he ended his life.

SPEAKER_02: 13:02

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 13:04

And he didn't. And someone had called me late at night and who was close to that and didn't. And I I I walked well, they walked home whilst on the phone to me. I was quite far away. I said, I will drive down to you now. And they didn't. And someone will corner with anxiety, someone will book an appointment, and to see it and to think, I can and I can A, empathise with you, because I've been to places where I've been burnt out and thinking, crikey, this is not a good place to be. But if I can fix it and I know what works and I've done it myself and I can empathise with you, I can also pay it forward. I can teach you every single thing that I've ever learnt and I've ever gone and I've ever qualified it, and I've ever worked with other people, and just keep paying it forward, pay it forward, pay it forward. And just to have someone go, Thank you, I can't, thank you enough. Well, come and give me a hug.

SPEAKER_02: 14:05

See I just the best. It's absolutely it is absolutely huge. And I I I'm just fascinated with it's almost like a for me, it's almost like a full circle moment, because we talked a bit about how we've lost some of those natural skills that we had back in the day about mindfulness and and all of those things. And the bit that resonated with me that I I try and instill a little bit myself is this matching the spiritual with the science behind it, because there's a lot of things we might do, like meditation or mindfulness or whatever, that feels a bit woo and a bit um, and a lot of people dismiss it because it's just you know it's just mumbo jumbo things. But actually, now we're learning the science behind actually why these things work, but historically, we've just kind of believed it. We just knew it worked. We've lost we somehow along the way we got too much knowledge, I suppose, and then dismissed some of this stuff, and now we're coming back to it again because we almost relearning it. I find it I find that journey really fascinating.

SPEAKER_00: 15:08

Well, everyone who talks about the Buddha, I I basically say, look, the Buddha was a prince, the Buddha was a real guy.

SPEAKER_02: 15:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 15:16

And he gave up his worldly possessions and and lavish lifestyle to wanting to end suffering. He's seeing people suffer. Yeah. And he just knew, and even any religion, and you go back, and I I've read books like the Chibalian and all this kind of stuff, and Egypt and the mind, but he was basically just saying, look, the mind is everything what we think we become.

SPEAKER_02: 15:43

100%. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 15:44

When you go and look at brain scans now, and you've seen you've seen monks change their body, regulate their body temperature. You've seen Dr. Joe Dispenser who's done retreats on it, and people heal from various diseases that you think they're incurable, but modern science will call it spontaneous remission. And if you do brain scans and you're at high gamma and you're taking yourself to a theta-level brainwave state, which is almost just before we go to sleep and we wake up, where in that rest and digest period, you can't be in the sympathetic nervous system all the time. Your body isn't digesting, your gut health's shot. It's killing all the gut microbiome in there. So people are suffering and they don't know why, and they go, Well, I can't do that. It's woo-woo. Science has backed it now, so we know it works, but it's just even if you don't want to call it meditation, it's just take time out.

SPEAKER_02: 16:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 16:43

Recorded them. I had a guy and I didn't even expect it, and it kind of spurred me on. And he is a young lad, really struggling with anxiety and health anxiety. And super it got so emotional, sat with me, and I said, Look, anyone who comes and sees me, it's a safe space. It's a safe space. And we work through it, and I played certain sound frequencies which are shown to take your brain from a high gamma to a theater. There's certain frequencies. So there's some on my website now, and I talk over it, so I don't talk like that. I take my voice down and I kind of walk them through it and I guide them and do all this kind of stuff. And even I was shocked, I was like, no one's gonna listen, who's gonna want to listen to that? And I would do it. And I'd people come to me go, can you do it in the voice? I'll do it in the voice. Not my radio voice on an eye, which isn't this by the way. Which isn't the way I'm talking now. But then he asked, he said, Would I be able to get a copy of those sounds? And I was like, Yeah, sure, let me let me cut them down. I'll do it for five minutes. I'll do it a five-minute one. You can play it on your phone. And he said, Oh, would you be able to record your voice guiding me through it? And I was like, Well, surely then it works with people coming in. And that's where I recorded those modules that have I just soft launched yes yesterday the day before.

SPEAKER_02: 18:02

Oh wow, hot of the press.

SPEAKER_00: 18:04

Literally half the press, it's not really been advertised, I've not pushed it. Did one minor post on LinkedIn, soft launch, had some good feedback already, which is lovely. So there's modules on there of to stop self-sabotage, uh, um, how to activate atomic habits, how to sleep, get sleep, the gratitude shift, there's five to eight hertz on there. There's I've even put sounds of rain on there, and I've got requests coming in, and I'll record more and I'll add more as we go along. Which, if anyone wants to put in there, I collaborated with a an acupuncturist, which are just wonderful people called Learn to Heal, who are based in Portlandton. Well, beautiful people, and they've referred patients to me, and we've had some great success. So I gave they've got there's a code a code called Learn to Heal, which gives people 25% off, and it's the cost of a cappuccino where you can access so rather than have buying a cappuccino, you can listen to my voice.

SPEAKER_01: 19:08

When I see stuff around kind of frequencies and stuff, if you went back 10 years and told me that, I'll be going, oh what a load of crap, shut up. How can that, you know, have any kind of thing? But as time's gone on, and through my own experiences with therapy and stuff, it it this science backed, it works, right? So for skep for the skeptics that are still out there, what's your no-nonsense case for meditation and sound work? What what is it that where's the evidence and and what is it that really makes you believe this works? Because I'm bought hook, line, and sinker on that stuff, but I know there are people out there that aren't.

SPEAKER_00: 19:41

So I was I was kind of drawn to Buddhist monks and martial artists. You can see lots of they will go to temples and there'll be martial artists and they'll be Buddhist monks, and yet they've got this kind of demeanor, this very calm persona. And it was probably at the point when I was at my absolute most broken, my body was in so much pain when I was in my previous job, and I've told the the gun incident a few times, and that really what got caught me into people used to think you've got a guardian angel. You know that story, don't you?

SPEAKER_01: 20:19

No, I don't go on.

SPEAKER_00: 20:21

So people talk about energy and the law of attraction and everything else, and I used to go, no, same as you, don't believe any of this stuff whatsoever. Now I used to be a member of the robbery unit, robbery squad in London, and we were like the most effective unit at that period. And I used to think I was invincible, and I used to walk around, again, jeans, Abercrombie t-shirts, and we were sat in the office, and I just had this thing, and I asked, and I was like, What would you do to if someone pointed a gun at you? And I can't remember what the other people were saying, so what would you do? And I'd be like, I yeah, I'd run him over and everything else, right? Thinking the chances of that ever happening are but more chances of one of you winning the Euro millions four weeks in a row than that ever happening. So we're in the office and we've had this like this conversation, and there's normally two of us paired, and I was the driver, and I would go out and we had this silver voxel Vetra, and my partner would put the light on that something like the old Kojak series.

SPEAKER_02: 21:33

Oh wow. Did they actually do that? Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 21:36

So he would put the light on there. Absolutely. I'd I'd drive around at a you know rate of knots to get to where we need to go. And we had the ones hidden in the grill, and that was to get to point B. So in plain clothes, I don't have any bulletproof vests on, I just had a radio. And at that point, there was my my me, myself, my co-pilot, called my co-pilot, and a sergeant said, Can I come out with you for part of the day? And it was like, Yeah, yeah, great. Just got to drop one of the guys off. He had to go home, he was a half-day leave. So we drove to King's Cross, dropped him off, and as we've dropped him off, and we're at the st at the station, if you know London, Grazing Road is a one-way road that comes towards the station. And we were here, and it came over the radio that the TSG, which are the territorial support group, who go around in the big van, were chasing suspects towards Grazing Road. And we thought, oh great, we're here, we'll kind of head them off. Lights on the grill, light goes on top, drive against the traffic in grazing road, so they're kind of moving out of the way and kind of slow, you know, dodging the traffic going the wrong way. And I decide to park at a T junction and wait. And it's like, yes, yes, yes, coming down this road, coming this road. And that's the road that was coming towards where we were, where I stop, and then literally within seconds, it was bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Shots are fired. And people are scattering down the duck, you know, they're they're they're they're docking and everything else, and running around, and people are running around everywhere. And then there's this guy, and it's the gunman, he's got a handgun, he tries to hijack a London taxi on the black cabs. The cab driver comes, you know, hits the accelerator and comes round and drives away. And the gunman runs round, and I can see him, it's like almost like slow-mo runs in front of me. And I say to my mate, you know, you go, he takes the blue light off the top, and I forget the ones in the grill. And it's in slow-mo, and you're running it round in your head. And he's come round this way. And I hit the accelerator now and I and I and I turn it round to where he's pulling a guy off a motorbike to escape. He pulls the guy off the motorbike and is about to, you know, he's gonna go and pick the hidecoph floor. We're now probably about 20 metres distance between us. He is now aiming the gun right at us, and I hit the accelerator and I land the front tire vehicle on his chest. Thankfully, he didn't go any further. I'd have probably killed him, and then I reverse off, and everyone gets out and we detain him. By the grace of God, he's and I don't know how he even survived. No injuries. He's kind of still fighting, it was unbelievable. And then everyone's emerged and we've kind of cordoned it off and everything else. But um we get out, we had a video camera and thought, well, let's seal it all off, because there's gonna be well, we thought we'd presumably there were gonna be bullets and casings and things everywhere, but and as I've come round and I'm looking at the handgun on the floor, so that's a real gun. That's a magazine had come out, that's a real gun. And he'd actually run out of bullets when he's pointing the gun at us, and then you can see the door and those bullet holes in the door, and I was like, Crikey. We'd had a conversation about this. So I'd kind of was like listening, started listening to my gut and listening to to everything. But uh it was part of that unit that I was I was I was done, I was I was burnt out. I remember walking upstairs, my feet were in so much pain, my body was in pain, I I just felt horrific. I can't maintain I can't maintain this this level anymore. The team were then breaking off. Everyone's at the same level, everyone's burnt out. And I said, I need to do something about this. Kind of started reading books and kind of learning more and learning the meditation, met someone else, and I was like, still a bit kind of I almost I almost was I was very spiritual and I get it, but I dismiss it. I'm like, I'm supposed to be a rugby player, I'm supposed to be boxing, I'm supposed to be this, is what people expect of me. I can't be embracing spirituality and expect embracing all this. But I did. I thought, I'm doing it, I'm I'm I'm embracing it. But it was it was a bit late. I it was a it was I I'd hit a point and it badly affected, you know, my marriage and my children. You know, sadly that that that that ended and I probably partly well, I probably was well, I was old. Well, I I take full responsibility of it, but uh a very bitter taste in my mouth for uh allowing that, but being almost addicted to a job and addicted to adrenaline, which almost cost it cost me my it cost me my family, but it almost cost me my health, and people can have a thousand problems when your health declines, you're only one. So yeah, I started to do it and and and meditation, but um because of the way I am, I'm like, I'm learning everything now. I'm going full on in. I want to know everything. So I started doing it, and I was listening to different sound frequencies that have very slightly different hurts in each ear. I understood how the science can take your brainwaves from a high gamma to a theta level. I was, oh my god, this is so calming. And it was very difficult to begin with, but then I was learning the techniques of do you relax, relax the jaw, I'd listen to guided ones, any dominant thought that would come in, I'd go, okay, that's still there. And there was dominant thoughts. Oh wow, so there's that stuff going on from a long time ago. Not just now in my job, there's stuff that I've not and I've not let go from being a child. But okay, that needs to be addressed. So then I started reading books on NLP, meditation, I was obsessed with training and nutrition, probably went down bits too much, and just started reading and learning, and it worked for me. And I bought did my little uh my little bowl, the sounds of it, and I was like, oh, such a wonderful sound. And then I started learning about how these uh Tibetan singing bowls can cure migraines, and I wanted to learn about Reiki, and I was like, what's the body? And then finding the science of your body emits energy commensurable three feet from you. And that how the the I was reading books by Dr. Joe Despenser and I watched his documentary called Heal, which is just fascinating. And I just trialed things I just wasn't really sure what I was doing at the time. And it's gonna I'll give you something else. Someone used to have terrible, phenomenal migraines, like migraine, like horrific migraines. I was like, I wonder if I can take that away. Because I used to put my hands on my children's knees when they were having growing pains, and I'd say, look, daddy's gonna take this away from me, I'm gonna take that pain away from you. And and just like touch their knees. And I'm gonna put my hands on this person's head. Sounds it sounds really bad. I'm probably gonna get you crazy. And they did this, they went and inhaled and said, You took my migraine away from me. Now I don't believe at any point I took the migraine away. What I believe is which is where I went with everything, is I give you the belief that you can take it, that you took it away. The same as a placebo effect, the same as someone who comes to see you and they feel safe, and you give them that confidence, you Going to walk that path with them. They can do it. You can do it. Anyone can overcome and achieve anything. It's almost like you just need that person to encourage you and give you that sense of self-belief. So I don't think there's no I don't have any magical powers. All I do is give you the confidence and the belief to do it. The same as what was happening with me is I just refuse to accept it. I thought, well, I'm not going to accept that. I'm not going to accept that. And watch my heart rate drop to 39 and bounce to 179 and just go up. So I was having all sorts of tests going to the GP, going, this, what's going on? They're finding nothing, there's nothing wrong with me. What's wrong with me is my own thoughts, my own stress. And what you might what I discovered is what your brain does is it your amygdala part of the brain is your your smoke alarm. It's a threat detector. So if anything ever goes wrong, anything happens to us, we'd store it. And it's almost like a it's a safety mechanism, but almost like a miswire of of how we should be. Because yes, it's fine that if we keep standing up and banging our head, we shouldn't do it anymore. We remember that if we do this motion, we're gonna hurt our head, so we avoid it. But we're we're we're clocking all these things to avoid day in and day out, so it doesn't cause us any physical pain. We're worrying about something that may or may not happen tomorrow. And the chances are we overthink things and it's never gonna happen. We're tortured by our own thoughts. I was doing that, I was torturing myself with my own thoughts, and that's absolutely ludicrous to do. That's just self-harm.

SPEAKER_01: 32:04

People underestimate the power that human the human brain holds in self-management, which is exactly what you're talking about. You're taking that person's mind back to a primal state where they're focusing solely on the migraine, and that's allowing their brain to make the adjustments it needs to make to deal with the migraine. And that's your skill. That's what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00: 32:25

Yeah, thank you. I pray um I appreciate that. Thank you. A lot of it came, I didn't know what I was doing. I was kind of just had a feeling I thought you we can you can the power of your own self-belief is phenomenal. And if anyone's listening and they want to, you want to try to find it, I'm not sure if it's on Netflix, but the documentary called Here, that's just phenomenal. There's there's people on there with terrible skin conditions and and trapped trauma, and they've gone away and they've let go a lot of this trauma, and the physical ailments have gone. And it's a fascinating documentary. There's some really wonderful contributors on it. I'm I've watched it about five times, I think.

SPEAKER_02: 33:07

I'm gonna watch that. My daughter's got eczema, and I know it's linked to I can I can almost pinpoint it when she has a flare-up. Like something's happened at school or with friends or overthinking or whatever it might be that's that's triggered that. It's more so than environmental. And it is fascinating. I'm gonna watch that and I'm gonna I'm gonna share it with her. But I I I can relate to all of this. I had a on a personal story. So my my grandmother believed in healing. How you describe it, so she was quite spiritual, she wasn't really she was never religious, but she would do the healing thing and have hands on her and and she lived till she was 99, and she died at 99 because she chose to die. I mean for a woman when you're talking about mind over matter, she was at the the epitome of this because she got to 99 and she was like, I've had enough now. And she d and she died, and the doctors were like, Well, she died of old age, but they couldn't pinpoint anything. She literally chose, and and I fundamentally believe this, and she instilled some of the we didn't know what it was, she didn't have a name for it, it was just the way she lived her life. And I'll never forget when I was when I had my children, especially my son, as my firstborn going into labour, I did exactly what you described. Now there's things called hypnobirthing and stuff now, which I didn't know about at the time, and I didn't realise that's what I was doing. But literally, it was it was subconscious, but when I reflect back on it, what I had done is like I'd switched I switched off the bits that weren't necessary anymore. I was like, this is this is a very natural process, it's been done for millennial. My body knows better what's happening than my mind knows. So let's just trust it, basically. And I was in like a hypnotic state. I wasn't in the room, I had no idea what was going on around me, but out comes the baby. I kind of woke up, I was like, oh, there you go. I mean, that sounds really really it wasn't quite like that, obviously, but as an experience, it was quite it it changed me because it made me realise all this stuff that my grandmother would say to me, I was like, that's that's what's happening and I it in that moment it was like uh all right, I'm gonna need to go back to basics here because it was it was such a formative thing that was happening that if I'd consciously thought I thought I'm going to do, uh I would have challenged it in my own brain and overthought it and all those kind of things. But it's changed how I look at things now going forward, like pain or stress or anything like that. It's fundamentally changed, and it's uh it's what you're talking about there, but I didn't really understand the science behind it.

SPEAKER_00: 35:57

Stress is just stress is one of the biggest factors in so many illnesses and and pains and um and um and and life that we just need to reset sometime, like a router, unplug it, reset it. Yes, start and restart.

SPEAKER_01: 36:16

In real life terms, Paul, what does it mean to reset the nervous system? All questioned.

SPEAKER_00: 36:21

Oh, wow. So resetting it. So most people were living on adrenaline, caught as all those stress hormones flooding us. We're living on caffeine and coming home and having a glass of wine on an evening we think is gonna make us feel better. And when all those chemicals are getting pumped, they say there's arguments against adrenal fatigue, for and against. I'm gonna go for to get adrenal fatigue, adrenal glands are pumping out of these chemicals all the time, and we're exhausted. So when that sympathetic nervous system's firing and we've not got to rest and digest, and it's just constantly activated, we need to activate the parasympathetic. So we need to kind of come back into rest and digest and reset. So if that's activated all the time, the sympathetic is just on 100% maximum. You can't maintain that. You will burn out and you'll be exhausted, or you'll manifest something else: eczema, fibromyalgia, pains, whatever it may be. So we need to then go, we need to go opposite, we need to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and let our digestion sit. You've got microbiome, 90% of serotonin is made in the gut. I won't talk about SSRIs. I'm not a huge fan, but if you need to see a doctor, please do. I'm not giving any medical advice on that aspect. What about SRIs? Selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. But 90% of serotonin made in the gut, and there's there's an amino acid called tryptophan, cross the blood brain barrier and make you feel good. You can get that in food. So my thing is when you talk about a nervous system reset, it really is a body reset, it's a mind and body reset when we talk about the nervous system. I think so. My nervous system's gone, but now you're in sympathetic, you need to go parasympathetic. We need to kind of get those adrenal glands calm, you need to get your gut microbiome sorted because you'll just end up destroying it. Imagine it like a flourishing forest full of lovely wildlife and everything self-sufficient within there. And I and if you're in sympathetic and you're in stress mode all the time, that eventually will start dying, and some of those gut microbiomes that are essential to make you feel good and make your body function properly start to die off. So that's when people take probiotics, which are the gut microbiome. But when you feed them with prebiotics, you feed them with fiber, fermented foods, kimchi, all these good foods that will feed it'll feed your gut, which in which will, in retrospect, make your brain feel better, make you feel better, make your skin glow, make you glow. So that is really a system reset. When I talk about nervous system, I talk about a more mind and body, sort of internally. So this is why when I do, when I talk about say the NLP or the mind shift set, I brought in my PT training and the nutrition side of it to kind of go, it's not just one thing. If you I drew a Venn diagram, three circles overlapping, you in the middle, here is your past. If you're kind of feeling off kilter, there could be something that you're hanging on to and you're carrying that big rock on a stone, you're walking along and dragging it along. This circle here can be your environment, who you surround yourself with, what do you consume? Do you watch the news every evening? Who would who ignites you, who drains you? That's your environment. And this one is your movement and nutrition. Hyper, hyper important. Do you move? You don't have to be super athlete. Walking, one of the best things to do. Just walk. You can rack up 10 to 10k steps in next to no time. And what you feed your body nutritionally, very important. And and everything else are the stresses of life that kind of sit around this. So I would say for a nervous system reset is analyze those three things in that Venn diagram. Practice some mindfulness and reset your adrenal glands and just have a little look at what you're feeding your body both externally and internally.

SPEAKER_01: 40:56

People out there are listening and they want to come to you for advice. Where do you start with?

SPEAKER_00: 41:03

So one of the questions is I love this question. What do you want? Because if I if you say to them, say, what made you reach out to me? What do you what what do you want to achieve? And a lot of the time these people want peace or they want to let something go. It's normally something they're carrying and they want to let it go, or they're totally burnt out and their operating system of their mind is full. It's like a computer, it's full. But let's just say again, reset, pull out the router of a Wi-Fi, normally it gets work again, doesn't it? Reset your computer, close the tabs down, you've got too many tabs open. So it gives them silly little tools, list making. My post-it notes are over there. You write post-it, you get little tasks, you get small wins. Write a small win on a post-it note, like it could be, I don't know, make the bed on the morning. Achieve that, scrunch the post-it note up, throw it in the bin, you get a dopamine hit from it. So that's feel good. Very small little wins, small, get the small wins up. So I want to know what people what do they want to achieve and what are they looking for. And then we will just talk. So I give them, we have a call. Someone approaches me, we have a call first. Do we have some report kind of what it what is it you the end result you're looking for? And then they inevitably will tell me that they're carrying something from either childhood, they kind of never slept, they feel sad and anxious, and they they just want that feeling to go. They need those feelings to go and how to manage it. So I explain to them, okay, well, everything is fixable in my eyes, and believe that nothing is is not, is everything is fixable. And then they get a we work a bit we bes I bespoke it to them because some things might not work. I had a client come and see me who wasn't present, they're not in the present moment. And so what I did was I put the boxing gloves on them, on this on on my client, she's female, she's 60. I said, There's the boxing gloves I'm gonna hit the pads now. So they're releasing all this tension and hitting the pads, and and I'm like, where's your thought patterns now as we as we're doing it? What are you focusing on? Hitting the pads. You're now in the present moment now. So that is that is one example of yes, I can calm you and I can do these things, but sometimes I know I need to get your adrenaline up, I need to change your state into almost an excited state to feel pumped about life, to think I'm now gonna go and achieve this, and now I can take on this, I can confront this. I'm like, here we go, you're gonna hit that, and you're gonna do it. Find an anchor and you put them in a state and you tap them on the arm, it's called anchoring technique or something else, and it works. So I have a toolbox of tactics that I think how can I get you, how can I pull you out of this? Because a lot of people won't let things go because it's it's become their identity. I am an anxious person, I am this, I am de how you speak to yourself is doing it. So we change the language, which NLP is very good at. We change the language, we change how you speak to yourself, and it becomes rep and it becomes repetition. And then I give you almost give you, I almost really give people the confidence, I give them the tools, but I get people to answer the questions themselves, and then it becomes their result. You figure this result out now yourself, you just needed someone to help you, and now it's just clicked and then they go. It's kind of strange for me to see it. I get excited when I see it. I just say you've just answered the question yourself. There's your answer.

SPEAKER_02: 44:57

Do you ever find when you have that those first early sessions and they say to you this is what I want, do you find like halfway through that actually what they want is something different?

SPEAKER_00: 45:07

Sometimes, yes, because they'll be they'll they'll say they want to let it go, but they don't. And it the actual cause can be something different. So you can do a timeline, there's timeline therapy involved in NLP. So you can go at five years old, this happened, seven years old, someone said this to me, and they're still carrying that.

unknown: 45:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 45:27

12 years old, this happened, 14 years old, something happened with the parents, this happened with a job, someone did this. So then I can go, I make notes, and what they may do is they may just be be just telling me everything, and and and we will go from different port points of life, but I'm making notes and I'm joining the dots, and you'll see arrows on my notebook, and I'm pinpointing, then they'll say five words in a sentence, and I'm like, I've got it, and I highlight it and I circle it. I'm like, that's that's it. That's the moment there that's causing everything. And it could be something that someone had said to them, and it's caused them to procrastinate, to not do something, to hide away. And then we kind of reframe it then. So we can either go like a swish pattern. I won't say anything else, but you can kind of hold you visualize things in an LP, and this is the one that's causing you quite trauma, and then get you excited and build you up, and you put this one as being that one, and then you collapse it on top, or you use your ring as an anchor, so every time you kind of touch this and you hear something, it will bring you, it will make you feel better. So that's your anchor point.

SPEAKER_02: 46:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 46:42

It will rechange it and reframe what they're looking at. And if you disassociate from you, if you recall memories that are quite traumatic, you can relive those same emotions as if you are in that period of time. So we have to disassociate or disassociate you from it, and that normally works, and then we can almost reframe how they see it, how they see that 10-year-old child if they're 50 and they look back and they celebrate how successful they were and what it's how it's made them, and you know, we celebrate the wins and we change the language, so yeah, there is a lot, there is a lot of that, but really it's it's it's an investigation of a couple of sessions to really kind of delve in where they've got to trust me and feel safe. If if if if I'm not the right person, I'm su there is there is you know some great people out there that you may you may gel with. If you gel with me and we have rapport, you'll be you'll happily tell me everything. As you're in a safe space, and when then we can figure it out, and I'll walk the path with you until you want to call it a day on that.

SPEAKER_02: 47:59

My reflection on on our discussions is I think and I don't I'm interested to know actually if this is a learnt behaviour or if this is a natural you Paul, but you're very calming, and I imagine as a coach, this is an amazing superpower. But also as as a hunter, it's very disarming, I imagine, for people when you're interrogating them. So has is that something you've learned, or is that just your natural way?

SPEAKER_00: 48:26

Thank you for Shaban. That's Shabon, that's that's very kind. I I few to say that. No, I think I've always had that quite a I am two different people, I'm very calm. Someone says like bad Dr. Banner and Hulk. Someone someone said that the other day, I was laughing. You're like, you're Dr. Banner and Hulk is like Dr. Banner C is very calm, he's doing this kind of stuff, and then the other side comes out, which is the one who's just playing rugby or going, don't you screaming at you and terrifying people. But I love the fact that people would think I've got a calm persona and and and they can feel that energy and there is no stress, and I like to make people feel calm around me. And I certainly I'm like that 99% of the time anyway. Nothing really kind of phases me. If something happens, I'll fix it. If something goes wrong with a car and we're stuck, I'll fix it. If someone needs help, don't worry, we'll fix it. I say this phrase of going, if I don't know, I can't fix it. If you tell me, we'll fix it. I even used to say to my boys, guy, it doesn't matter if you've made a mistake, you've done something wrong, what I will promise you is I will never get cross if you tell me. And we can fix it. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone does something, don't hold on to it. People should listen to this should take that away as well, going, we all make mistakes. If we own it and we acknowledge it, we can avoid anxiety, we can afford avoid repercussions on these on anything. I do take that persona in there, will be a little bit of a smiling assassin. I do go in and kind of match, I will do the sneaky little NLP things, I'll match your body language, so I need to disarm you, I need to disarm you to get you talking, and I'll compliment and I'll be like, if they've got a dog, great. There is a very, very famous celebrity who I interrogated on the news series who has a dog, and the dog came and sat with me and sat by my feet. Totally in there. Someone's pet their dog, if their dog likes you, great, you've you've you've got it. So I do use that. I use either smiling assassin going in there, being nice, calm persona, keep that energy down. Once I've found it, then I'm basically going to tell you that you're all all over my radar, and you're gonna be the reason that they get caught and make them feel terrible.

SPEAKER_01: 51:14

So from police through to hunted and on to NLP, what was it we came up with for him? The ninja NLP Ninja, wasn't it? NLP Ninja, that's been Paul Cashmore. If you've got any questions or you want to get in touch, it's Paul at paulcashmore.co.uk. And uh yeah, we'll be back next week. Thank you, Paul. Cheers, guys. Well, that's it for this episode of Why Not and What If, where the conversations get messy, magical, and a little bit rebellious. If it made you think, laugh, or rage text your mate, job done. That's all we're here for. Got a topic you think we should dive into? Drop us a line at let's talk at why notwhatif.com. Seriously, your ideas fuel this chaos. And don't forget to follow, subscribe, chat about in your WhatsApp group on LinkedIn, and come back next week for more brutally honest, occasionally unended, and always human conversations. See you next time.