Dr. Segler:
Today on the Doc On the Run Podcast we are talking with William Pullen the author of Running With Mindfulness about how Dynamic Running Therapy can improve low mood decrease anxiety decrease stress and help depression.
If you move, you’ll feel better, if you run, you’ll feel better.
If you’re listening to this I know this is a little bit about preaching to the choir. You and I both know that when we run we are going to feel better. But what happens when you get busy, or even worse you get injured and you’re not really able to run. Do you get bummed out? Do you get anxious? Do you get depressed?
If you think that has ever happened you at some point you were not imagining it.
Believe it or not that’s actually extremely common. Today we have a fantastic interview with William Pullen who literally wrote the book on Dynamic Running Therapy.
Today on the Doc On The Run Podcast, we are talking will William Pullen about about Dynamic Running Therapy.
William Pullen is a London based psychotherapist, author, app developer and founder of Dynamic Running Therapy. His focus is to spread the message that movement is medicine – for mind, body and soul. He maintains a private practice in London gives talks on mindfulness and mental health.
He has also written the book Running with Mindfulness: Dynamic Running Therapy to Improve Low-mood, Anxiety, Stress, and Depression. He also developed the Dynamic Running Therapy DRT app.
So William, welcome to the show…Thanks for coming on today!
William Pullen:
Thank you, Chris. It’s exciting to be here.
Dr. Segler:
I’m really glad we’re able to get you on the show! I have been trying to get you on the show for a long time. I know you’re really busy, and I really and truly do appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule to do this. So before we really get started here, maybe you could just give all of our listeners an idea about how you got introduced to running and how you sort of came to develop running as a therapeutic tool.?
William Pullen:
Okay. So about 11, 12 years ago, I’m in a relationship that goes south. I go south with it. I end up in therapy. Well, I ended up taking up running and therapy and taking antidepressants to try and get out of this terrible hole that I’m in. I noticed how effective the running is in tandem with the psychotherapy. It motivates me. It gives me reason to socialize, to get out of my flat. It makes me feel powerful and competent at something, even if it’s only an extra hundred meters a week. I trained to become a therapist. I decided to put the two together during my training, I came up with this idea, I call it dynamic running therapy. I then tried to roll it out, and then I get a book deal, and then I come onto your fantastic show. That’s where we are.
Dr. Segler:
Before we really delve into Dynamic Running Therapy or DRT in detail, maybe you could just share your definition of mindfulness and how mindfulness (or lack-thereof) is affecting us in the digital age where everything moves so fast.
William Pullen:
Oh, that’s a big one. I was a socialist or Marxist or something, I would say that the businesses out there, particularly online businesses, are intentionally tweaking our nervous system, overloading us in order to make us docile and needy and the perfect consumer who’s constantly buying new things and making them lots of money.
Mindfulness is a sort of antidote to that. It helps bring you back down into the here and now, it settles your nervous system. I don’t know. Is that even true? You’re the doctor. It settles you, it settles your heart rate, it settles all sorts of things. Does it settle your nervous system?
Dr. Segler:
It definitely does for sure. Even in the 80s, biofeedback was a big thing where that’s exactly what you would do. You would basically stay focused on the present and you could, you know, basically listen to your brainwaves more or less, or a certain representative sound of your brainwaves, and progressively through deliberate presence in the moment and relaxation could slow down your mental activity.
William Pullen:
Yeah. There we go. I’m never quite sure of exactly what the nervous system is. I know the rest of this stuff, I know all about the heart rates and stress levels and the hormones and whatnot. Anyway, in an age where you’ve got super computers working out how to manipulate you and to feeling the most anxious that you can, we need this more than ever. For me, mindfulness is a very simple practice, my own practice is 10 minutes a day. I sit there, mine’s a guided one, I listen to somebody talking to me about concentrating on my breath. And that’s what I do. I find at the end of it, my breath is really regulated.
It’s nice and low and smooth. I concentrate on removing all the stress that’s carried in my face. You know, you can notice yourself holding your face in a certain way, and you try to let go of that and then your face will hold itself in another way. You try to let go of that until finally in a few minutes you find wow, you now have a relaxed face. That often goes hand in hand with a sort of relaxed mind. So that’s why I think it’s so important. Wouldn’t you agree?
Dr. Segler:
No, I do agree. Absolutely. I think it’s huge, and it’s true. We have, you know, not just really smart people trying to figure out how to manipulate our behavior, but we have, like you say, super computers, you have artificial intelligence. They’re programs that are trying to figure out how to manipulate our behavior to keep us doing exactly the opposite of what mindfulness exercises really do. So it’s fascinating.
William Pullen:
Yeah. I was going to say, I also think that it perhaps counters some of the polarized thinking that you see, the black and white thinking, which, you know, in psychotherapy we see as a mark of trauma or of a developmental issue, something. In theory you’re supposed to get beyond that. Children are prone to black and white thinking, healthy adults are supposed to be lesser. And yet we seem to see as the currency of modern politics, don’t we?
Dr. Segler:
That’s true. Particularly in the United States, this is definitely the case. Yeah. So it’s true. It’s difficult, right? So we have all these problems we’re trying to work out and we’re trying to work them out in our heads, and sometimes we make that worse because of the overactivity. One of the things I know is that no matter what problem I might have spinning through my head when I head out for a run, that problem is always less of a problem, it seems to be smaller in size after I run.
So why do you think running makes us think so clearly? You know, right our perspectives and make us feel so good? Is it really endorphins which are responsible for this sort of runner’s high and the clarity that comes with thought after we run? What is it you think that really is responsible for that?
William Pullen:
It is of course the endorphins that make you high. Where the creativity piece comes from nobody’s quite sure, yet I don’t think. Stanford University just had some research coming out on just how effective it is as a creative practice. A lot of businesses in America are having walking meetings and running meetings, and they really are fantastic to sort of problem solve and work your way through these things. But the research seemed to show that it’s not all problems, or all kinds of problems that it’s good for. In fact, you don’t want something that’s highly detailed, you don’t want something that’s highly reductive, like trying to get down to discover the right sort of Algebraic equation, E equals MC squared, something like that. That’s not what it’s good for.
That you really do need to sit down with a pen and paper and just work on it yourself. It’s better for the sort of thing where you’ve got this problem which is trying to work out the nature of energy or whatever. You go running around and you do that kind of blue sky thinking and throwing ideas out. Am I the last person using that term, blue sky thinking?
Dr. Segler:
No, it’s good.
William Pullen:
Maybe. No, I must be right out there with one of the last ones, ton use the term blue sky thinking, but I’ll take it. Pink, red, green sky thinking. Anyway. Yeah, it’s fantastic for creativity, and I’ve certainly found that I go on a run and in the morning I may wake up, and I have something that’s troubling and something I don’t seem to be able to work out what end of it to start with. I don’t have any kind of process to go through with it. It just feels like some problem, and then by the end of the run, even though I haven’t consciously crunched anything during that run, I now seem to be in possession of a way forward.
I find that extraordinary. I find it miraculous. I’ve discussed it many times, and the best I can come up with myself is if I think that, it’s one of the reasons why, I’ll tell you more about what I do later on, but why I think dynamic running therapy works so well, because I think there’s something in the moving that changes us from a static, and if it’s for depression, the depressed person, but a static person holding a problem, whatever it may be, a business problem, any other kind. Once we start running, at the end of that running, I’m no longer static.
I am a person who has been doing and who has done. So I’m a doer, I’m a done-r, and that gives me a sense of momentum and confidence and movement. When I look at this problem that I wasn’t in possession of before. Before I was just a static person looking at a static problem. So I think it’s something about the perception. I think it’s something about who we become after we’ve run. I think it speaks to our DNA. At the end of a good run, you’re supposed to feel powerful, you’re supposed to feel like you earned the answers. Cause you do, guess what, you just together worked with three other people to chase down this kangaroo, and there’s supposed to be a reward in your system for that. And there is, and so that’s what I think it’s about.
Dr. Segler:
That is interesting. It’s not really just concentration, the sort of concentration when you get a resolution for problems, something like that. I watched your Ted Talk and you spoke about how you and a friend were running and how you noticed that there was this interesting ease of conversations during run. Why do you think it is so easy to hold an un-distracted conversation during a run?
William Pullen:
Well, this is something that Stanford University were also wondering, I think it’s something about prefrontal cortex and mopping up that kind of extra bit of self consciousness. I think running, the piece while you’re running along and it’s working out balance and pace and all those other things that you need to work on, which takes up a lot of brainpower, it mops up just enough so that the rest of it can be spent connecting to the person next to you. Then I think there’s all sorts of things around not facing each other, about being in something that’s physically collaborative. I think all of these things make for a powerful collaboration.
Dr. Segler:
That’s interesting. I mean maybe that has something, you know, some sort of relationship to golf. Like, you know, golf has long been known to, I don’t play golf, I’ve always been told I have to play golf because I’m a doctor. But I don’t want to play golf. I don’t play golf. But I know that for a long, long time it’s been a way for people to work together on the golf course, associate, and maybe it’s a similar thing where they are doing this physical activity that in some way distracts, like you said, just enough of the brain power that they can work more collaboratively. So maybe, you know, for those of us who are runners and do not like golf, maybe that is a similar thing that’s happening. I don’t know.
William Pullen:
Yeah, I think so. As I was mentioning before, it’s in our DNA. I mean it goes back hundreds of thousands of years when we were out on the Savannah, you know, before there was even, well actually around I suppose the advent of fire. That’s when we were cooking food. The only way to catch a small animal, which typically was faster than you, an antelope or something, was persistence hunting. They’ve got great acceleration but no stamina. So if you could line up three guys on your left and a couple of ladies on your right and start off across the Savanna and keep your eye on this animal, sooner or later it would just collapse, you know, halfway through.
We would run together. The procurement of food and running was a group effort.
In those developing societies, you need to decide how to split up that food. So you needed better language. There are all sorts of complex social skills that ultimately led to where we are now.
Dr. Segler:
Yeah, that’s interesting. We know that this has this clear mental effect, but one of the things I noticed in your Ted Talk, because you were talking about body language when people run, and when I watch a runner run, and I’m a sports medicine podiatrist, so I think about running biomechanics and what those things mean really mechanically kind of on the surface. So I’m always looking at running form and searching for patterns that might suggest a particular propensity for some injury pattern.
But as a running therapist, I would imagine you would see something completely different in the exact same runner because you’re looking for something that leads to sort of inner clues. So how does a runner’s form, or you could call it body language, how does that play into your analysis of someone while they’re running?
William Pullen:
Wow, that’s a really good question. We’re on a podcast, so I’m going to allow myself to talk in generalizations. Generally I think you can tell something about, and you must have found this in your work, I find that some people bounce a lot when they walk or run. Some people are leaning forward. These are often people who get ahead of themselves. Some people seem to sort of be leaning back, who may be slow to get going. When we talk about slow to get going, that might be in relationships or in work or whatever.
So what I’m doing is I watched those movements. I watch how their posture, what their general posture is, how their posture changes as we discuss things, if it does at all, but mostly I just feed it back to them and I say, you know, once we know each other well enough. Obviously might be a bit challenging before that.
I noticed that you are very fast to accelerate, or anger makes you accelerate a lot. I also noticed that you quickly stop again after that. I wonder if that speaks of how you are in relationships or what it’s like for you at work or something like that.
You know, in therapy you’re always just sort of stabbing around at things, and from that stabbing around comes all these different sort of points until finally you have a more accurate picture. So the body is just one of those points that you can gather information about.
Dr. Segler:
Interesting. Okay, so a different question for you though. All I do is help injured runners. One thing I have definitely noticed over the years is there’s this incredible propensity for injured runners to fall into the doldrums when they stop running. I mean, some of them really do even recognize in themselves a true state of clinical depression.
Some of them seek help for it, some of them don’t. Some of them think it will just go away when they start running again and they’re healed. What do you think is really responsible for the welling up of anxiety, sadness, depression, any of that that plagues injured runners who have to stop moving and stop all activity?
William Pullen:
Well, for a start running makes you feel great, doesn’t it? Physically, mentally, you get out. Not only do you get all of the vitamin D, nice suntan and fresh air and all the good biology coming off the trees. So I think you’ve got that. Obviously if I’ve got to go from that to being stuck in my flat because I’m injured, nobody wants to be stuck inside, or at least not for very long. It’s depressing, isn’t it? I mean, that’s doubly true if you’re somebody who’s used to being [inaudible 00:16:54], I suppose if you’re always used to being inside, maybe you wouldn’t. \
But runners, obviously you’re used to being outside. So I think there’s that, there’s that change. Then I dare say there’s a piece, whereby possibly some runners, and I count myself in this, run as a kind of therapy. Mental health therapy. If you don’t have that, then perhaps whatever you’re therapizing with the running then comes up to the surface, you know, and you find yourself distracted and upset by what are maybe either historical things or what are very real and very present things.
You know, for instance, if you’ve got a problem with your relationship with your partner, but every time it gets bad instead of having a fight with them or working it out, you go for a run, you feel better, you come back, you sit there quietly, and then you go to bed and hope it doesn’t happen again, that’s how you’re regulating your relationship. Well, yes. Great. You’ve stopped yourself from splitting up, but it may be that you’re never addressing what’s really wrong between the two of you. Suddenly when you get injured you’re just like, Oh god, I’ve got to sit here with this person and what am I going to say to them? I don’t know how to talk to them. I don’t know how to represent my own needs. Plus I know I’d been avoidant for three years, and I know they know I’ve been avoidant for three years. It’s a real I’m going to have to really face up to an awful lot in this moment. I’ve been trying to put this off for years. It’s just like, no, I’ll go for another run.
You do want to watch out I think with running that if you run a lot, and I run quite a fair bit, you really can feel so healthy in your body, for a certain amount of time so healthy in your mind that you really can keep an awful lot at bay. Maybe by the time you finally do stop one day, whatever it was that was troubling you might’ve gone. That’s kind of what you’re rolling the dice on, isn’t it?
Dr. Segler:
Right. I heard this great analogy one time, and this guy said basically, it’s sort of like you’re driving through life in a station wagon, as you’re driving along and all these little things come up and you just take them and you throw them over your shoulder into the backseat, and for years you’re just throwing things over your shoulder into the back seat and then suddenly you get into an accident and when you hit the brakes, everything comes flying forward and you finally realize that there’s something wrong with the driver. All this stuff is still there to deal with.
I think that that’s true. Maybe true with runners. There may be something to this. I have literally seen t-shirts people were wearing that say running is my therapy. So, you know, I don’t think that we have to sell the idea of running to runners to improve their mental and physical wellbeing. So many of us believe that it’s really what sustains us physically and mentally. It may be part of that, that it’s somewhat of, you know, sort of skipping over some of those things we might need to address. So maybe you could just share some insight regarding the importance of mindfulness exercises that include just sitting, just being, you know, talk about how those things differ. You know, just mindfulness exercises directly might differ from dynamic running therapy.
William Pullen:
Yeah. Well, dynamic running therapy, whether it’s the kind I do with a client, which is one on one, or whether it’s in the app or the book, where you’re just following some questions and running with some set questions and making a record of the answers, voice recordings on the app and writing in the book, there’s a component of that, of all of those examples of mindfulness, which is something I call the grounding process. It’s voluntary.
It’s not a critical part of the DRT process, but it’s a four step process, which I encourage people to do three lots of noticing what’s happening in your body, what’s happening in your mind, what’s happening around you. Each one is just an awareness, mindfulness exercise, just sort of sitting quietly and bringing your attention to those things for a minute or two.
Therapists talk a lot about just sitting with it, and I am a believer in just sitting with it, but I’m also a believer in doing something about it in general with people’s problems.
I’m a believer in people sitting with their problems, whatever it is. If you try to fix everything, if you try to avoid everything, then that thing just piles up, like in your brilliant comparison in the back of that car, you can’t out run it and you can’t keep on trying to fix it. All of these things will just pile this stuff up more. So I tell my clients, I’m like, listen, you’re better off just allow yourself to experience some emotional discomfort. By choice, I didn’t mean the stuff that you can’t avoid. I mean when it comes, sit there and for a minute, just see if you can bear it, see if it’s as bad as you think it is before you get up and make a coffee or go for a run or whatever it is. But then with the other hand I say to them, you know, also think about what this is all about, and then see if you can perhaps find out what things you can do in your life to change that.
Dr. Segler:
Yes…hat makes sense. I know that for many runners, like you say, I mean in large part some of the activity that we do may be avoidance, but you know, when people get injured and they’re forced to really cease all activity, or they’ve been told they have to stop all activity, it can be really detrimental and sort of shocking to their system.
I personally believe and part of my approach, I think one of the most useful and helpful tools for injured runners to recover is to increase their activity, to get them moving. Part of that is because, you know, we know people who are chronically active, who are athletes, when they stop all activity their cortisol levels go up, all their stress hormones, you know, you can measure the increase in stress hormone circulating in their systems and that doesn’t just make them anxious and depressed. It also really does inhibit the immune system.
So I always try to find ways to work with them to get them moving and strengthen and fortify everything else in the system without further injuring that one injured healing part, whether it’s a stress fracture of the Achilles tendon or whatever, that’s the only one thing that’s injured. So they can usually do lots of stuff to get moving and get back to running faster if he will do that.
Overwhelmingly though, when I do that, these runners seem to kind of turn a corner and they don’t just feel better, but they also start to heal faster is what it seems. What do you think is responsible for that shift? I mean, is it this thing that you just sort of mentioned that you’re actually taking action? Is it some sense of gaining control, or what do you really think it is that causes this physiologic improvement that happens after they have some sort of emotional shift? Is there something to that?
William Pullen:
Yeah, I think so. I can’t tell you where it comes from. All I can say is that I’ve seen it myself. I think a healthy body, healthy mind. My whole thing with DLT is that I’m essentially using running to help people cure their emotional problems because they both can be connected. If you can’t connect one, correct one, correct the other, and it’ll trickle down.
So people who are depressed, for instance, and feel powerless and feel that they can’t get anything right, well if you showed them that they can, they can get from A to B, we can increase your distance by 20 meters every week, although it’s most definitely not a training program, but by getting you from somewhere, people start to build up the confidence.
They’re just like, well god, yeah, I felt depressed and stuck before, but now I feel like actually I’m getting somewhere. All they’ve done is cross a field. But for them it’s like the Battle of Hastings. It becomes something massive, and it’s wonderful. That’s the great joy of my work I suppose. Just watching people helping themselves and using their own wits to do it.
Dr. Segler:
Yeah, it’s interesting, and I’ve heard this so many times from different authors who will talk about even in business, they’ll talk about you don’t understand it, you’re at work and you have sales goals or whatever, and some guy in the office will start a new training program and he will go to the gym and he will start going consistently. He notices these changes in himself and suddenly his business, you know, his sales numbers go up, everything goes up, everything starts to improve, his personal life improves. Everything just seems to fall along with some small change. I think it was Tony Robbins who said something to the effect of that a decision is made through action. If you decide that you want to do something but you’ve taken no action, you haven’t truly decided you want to do it. So maybe some of this actually does affect that in some way too.
William Pullen:
When you’re not, your nervous system kicks off and you end up with an excess of anxiety because it’s written into your DNA to alert you when you have become passive. Because guess what? Passive makes for a very sweet target, and you’re setting yourself up to be predated on by somebody in the community. You know, you’re appearing like a victim, you’re appearing weak and unspirited.
Historically, as you know, animals will always go after the weakest one in the group. You know you’re the weakest one. If you’re living a week life and you feel anxious, well that’s why. So get up, get strong, get doing something. Go to the gym. Learn Italian, build a bridge in Africa. Just do something that makes you feel like you are a doer.
Dr. Segler:
I listened to this interview recently and the guy being interviewed was a personal trainer, and it was fascinating to me because one of the things that he said was that when he’s looking to work with some prospective client who contacts them, he said basically, you know, he interviews them, you ask them lots of questions about what they eat, what kind of exercise they do, what their goals are and so on.
He then says that basically the one thing that decides whether or not he will work with a client is he tells them, “Okay, what I want you to do is tomorrow and every day I want you to get up and eat a healthy breakfast.” Doesn’t really matter what the healthy breakfast is, but what they perceive to be a healthy breakfast. However, and this is the trick, he said he requires of them that they make a healthy afternoon snack, prepare that snack before they prepare breakfast because he really believes that eating a healthy snack in the afternoon is crucial to maintaining your blood sugar and not slipping into unhealthy behaviors like eating some sweets in the office or something that is there.
He said that if he cannot get a client to agree to and take the action of preparing that healthy afternoon snack before they prepare breakfast every day, he knows they don’t have the discipline or the capability of taking actions to do all the other stuff he’s going to require of them later. So if they won’t do that, he just said, “Forget it. I can’t help you.” It’s just a small action. It’s literally like, you know, washing an apple or something. It’s not like they have to prepare some elaborate snack. It’s just a healthy snack, and he doesn’t even limit what that snack would be. That’s really it. He is certain that having people commit to a very, very small action initially will open the floodgates for an entire range of change that could happen after that.
William Pullen:
Yeah. Again, it’s kind of back to what I do. I understand depression, the mood as a kind of stuck-ness. It’s a kind of an inorganic state. The only things that don’t move are dead things, really. When somebody is stuck and they can’t do that one action, when you for whatever reason have chosen not to do that one action and you keep on making that decision because it’s now become habit, I think in the end you end up depressed.
Then it sort of compounds itself in all sorts of complex ways. It reinforces itself. The memory that it was this one thing that you did all these years ago, this one decision that you made to no longer do this or to believe this about yourself or others. You forget, or not making an afternoon meal, or being the person that doesn’t take advice from somebody on the phone and that they’ll do it their way.
For some people, the idea that they’ll take help from somebody on the phone, it’s like taking help from their wives. They don’t want any more of that, and now they’re stuck and they can’t even remember how they got stuck.
So for those people, my work is to either find out what it is about you that made you decide that you’re not going to do this, this, or this, or if we can’t work that out I’m quite happy just to get you moving in other areas of your life. Just mix things up, walk to work a different way. Join this group or club. Just do something that feels risky. Do something that feels different, just get them out of that rut.
Dr. Segler:
So it’s interesting because I think that a lot of runners I see, they feel somewhat victimized by this injury. I mean, let’s face it, if you don’t adhere to your training plan or you just start to get an injury and keep running anyway because you’re stubborn and you get a stress fracture, it really is your fault. You’re not a victim. I mean, nobody gets an over-training injury because of what someone else did to them.
Yet many runners really do feel sort of depressed and victimized, and they feel helpless and they feel stuck just like you said. A lot of times they blame the doctor who told them they have to stop running, who said, “No, you have to sit still and rest. You need to chill out. You’re an exercise addict. You just need to relax.” All of those sorts of things, it all makes them feel bad about themselves.
Maybe they really do understand the injury enough to believe that they won’t heal unless they sit still and let it heal and recover. But many of them, once they sort of get past that point, they have trouble getting going again. They are stuck.
So what advice would you have for runners who have been injured and are in the process of recovering, but they just feel stuck and they’re really kind of unable to get moving again?
What kind of action would you give them to get going?
William Pullen:
Download my app, get my book. I mean [inaudible 00:34:40], you listen to my Ted X Talk. My takeaway for everybody is, you know, do something small, incremental moves, you know, don’t start running. You can start walking. With my app you can walk and listen to a whole program on anxiety or 20 questions on depression. Or just mindful walking for running.
Getting moving, doing whatever you can, whatever it is, whether it’s an injury or relationship issue. Just pick something small and doable and focus on the here and now and not what you think is an enormous trial ahead of you. Just do what you can today and take a breather and just get into action and see where it leads you.
Dr. Segler:
That’s good advice for sure. So we’ll definitely put the links in there to the dynamic running therapy website where you can get and download the app.
This is really fascinating. It is interesting stuff and it does happen to lots of runners. I think there’s lots to consider, not just for runners who were injured, those of us who have been injured, but also to really give some thought to why it is some of us run so much. What it is that we’re sort of avoiding as a consequence of our own running.
Don’t get me wrong, I like to run, I run a lot. I’ve done 15 Ironman triathlons and I’m training for ultra marathons now, so I run a lot. But you know, there’s probably something to consider about why it is that I think I need to run that much. Right?
William Pullen:
That’s a lot of running!
Dr. Segler:
It’s a lot. It’s interesting to see that sort of stuff in other people, but it’s not so easy to see it in ourselves. So I think doing some of the things you’ve suggested and downloading DRT app to kind of work through some of these issues and take a look at them can be really helpful. So you know, I’m really grateful that you were able to take the time out of your schedule to come on the podcast.
I know you are in London and a long way from San Francisco. I’m glad we were able to work out the schedule so we could get you on. If any of our runners listening right now want to reach out to you personally and try to connect with you and get more on DRT and direction from you how can they find you? What’s the best way to reach out to you?
William Pullen:
Just before I answer that. Thank you, it’s been great being on your show. I just want to speak quickly to that person that’s running a lot.
Because I know a lot of your listeners, a lot of people who are running, particularly people who are trail runners and whatnot, I think part of why they’re running so many hours is not necessarily because they’ve got some big trauma hidden away or anything. As much as anything, I think it’s just a recognition that it feels so damn good to be out and about and that it is that you need to put in that many hours in nature to rebalance or whatever the word is, to balance out just how mad it is sitting around in offices and on social media. It’s the only thing that makes you human anymore, right?
Cause you can’t find it anywhere else except nature. So I think many of those people are some of the smartest people out there. Certainly it’s when I feel best, when I’m out and about. As for the question for my social media, my website is dynamicrunningtherapy.com. My Twitter is @PullenTherapy. People are welcome to try and get in touch with me there. Instagram d_runningtherapy. The app is called dynamic running therapy. The TEDX is called Movement is Medicine. The book is Running with Mindfulness.
Dr. Segler:
Any last pieces of advice for everyone out there? I mean, is there anything else that we need to think about as we head off and go get the DRT app?
William Pullen:
I would just say if anybody’s out there running right now, I’m jealous of you! I’m going to go out tomorrow morning.
Dr. Segler:
William, thank you again. I really appreciate you coming on the show and it really has been interesting getting a chance to talk to you. Thank you so much.
William Pullen:
Thank you, Christopher. Speak soon.
Dr. Segler:
Go to download the DRT app now… dynamicrunningtherapy.com
If you now someone who is sitting around, bummed out, or depressed…share this episode with them. Send it to them now!
Links and Resource mentioned in the show:
Dynamic Running Therapy website
http://dynamicrunningtherapy.com
DRT app:
Email William Pullen directly:
williampullen@hotmail.com
Follow William Pullen on Twitter:
@pullentherapy
Follow William Pullen on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/d_runningtherapy/
Join William Pullen on Facebook:
TedX Talk
Movement is Medicine William Pullen
Order the book Running With Mindfulness:
If you have a question that you would like answered as a future addition of the Doc On The Run Podcast, send it to me PodcastQuestion@docontherun.com. And then make sure you join me for the next edition of the Doc On The Run Podcast!
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