Normalize It Forward | Spencer Ganus | College Students

 

College students have to juggle a lot of responsibilities every single day, and these go even beyond schoolwork. Some have extracurricular duties, while others have side hustles to focus on. Such hectic schedules push them to set aside self-care, and their mental health suffers the most. Marc Lehman sits down with actress Spencer Ganus, who guides high schoolers through college admissions. Talking all about her wellness blog and her own college experience, she discusses how young adults should handle the pressures of social media and the adverse impact of the pandemic. Spencer also explores the importance of time management, self-care, and being open-minded to exploring different passions.

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Mental Health Advice For College Students With Spencer Ganus

Welcome Spencer Lacey Ganus, who is an actress and voice actress. Two of her roles that she’s known for are through Comedy Central’s South Park as Ike as well as Elsa in Frozen. We are particularly interested in talking to Spencer about Spencer’s wellness and lifestyle, social media blog that she runs. Spencer, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Spencer Wellness

Thanks for being here with us. We’d love to touch on a number of different things, but Spencer, and in many ways, love to hear a little bit more about Spencer Wellness, your blog. It sounds so fascinating.

It sounds great. I grew up in a very wellness-oriented family. I have been drinking protein smoothies since I was like three years old, and I was raised in more of a health-conscious, wellness-oriented household, which inspired me to want to live my own healthier life. That particularly came to fruition when I was in college and as I was graduating college and living on my own for the first time, on my terms, when I had the opportunity to either continue on the path that I was so lucky to be raised on or do the thing that a lot of people do in their twenties, which does not prioritize their wellness maybe prioritize other things in their life.

I was excited about the opportunity to take life into my own hands and continue going down a path that I thought was intentional. In doing that, I decided to share my journey. It started by posting recipes that were healthy or desserts or smoothies or fun things I was making in the kitchen, honestly over the pandemic when I had some extra time. It has since evolved into a much more balanced lifestyle. It’s now what I like to talk about, and the biggest value that I embody with wellness is finding realistic wellness and balance as a young person. I’m not giving up eating cake and like, I have a whole cake business, ironically enough, that I post about on my wellness Instagram page. That’s not healthy at all.

 

Normalize It Forward | Spencer Ganus | College Students

 

It’s like real butter, real sugar, all the things but it’s a creative outlet for me. I love being able to think for people and beyond decorating it, it embodies my value of having your cake and eating it too, and balance and living in a way that encompasses wellness and intentionality, but also not giving up the things that you love because I would be happy doing that for the rest of my life, and I don’t think promoting that is positive.

That’s where the idea for my blog came about. I have an Instagram page called @HealthyWithSpence, and then on my TikTok, I started posting more. It’s a little sillier. My Instagram is probably more intentional with my content, but it’s been super fun. I have had some incredible opportunities to work with brands that I align with, whether it’s clothing brands and workout clothes, food brands, or going to some fun events in Los Angeles where there’s so much happening in the world of social media. I have made so many friends and amazing, real, authentic connections through this blog with other girls and boys and everyone who shares the same values as me. It’s fun.

Intentionality

I have 1,000 questions for you. First of all, your cakes are amazing. You are very talented. They are beautiful. I love how you said that. The word “intentional” is such an important word. As a therapist, I run a virtual practice called U Are Heard, and and my therapists, I see students all over the country with mental health needs I get asked all the time What is the hang-up of getting assistance from a young person getting help when they need it?

I find myself saying that all the time to young people If you need assistance, get it. If you know all that stuff. The intentional piece is so important because young individuals often aren’t very intentional, and they go with the flow, even if the flow isn’t healthy and I don’t mean to judge when I say that. I mean that sometimes that path takes a person down a difficult trail. I have seen students, for example, not getting enough rest. I have seen students not get any physical activity. I have seen students missing classes regularly, and you know where that’s headed but being intentional is such a big part of specifically directing your journey and pushing it in a positive fashion.

I graduated from Duke University a few years ago, and especially at a school like Duke that had so many incredible opportunities, it was easy to not rest. It was easy to say yes to so many things when you have multiple interests, like someone the way that I do. There were times when I was going down that path, I wasn’t the kid missing class, but I was the kid missing sleep to go to class and to go to other things, and my mental health fluctuated, whether it was being anxious or stressed or overwhelmed, and not being in my best functioning, mentally healthy headspace because of things like lack of sleep or even my eating habits, too. Throughout college, fluctuated. It was in the post-grad years that I feel I have been able to cultivate a lot more mindfulness and intentionality, given that it’s always a journey. We are always growing, but I understand, and that was and still is me as a young twenty-something post-grad student, for sure.

Self-Care

It is a journey. Let me ask you about an interesting topic, self-care. When you think about the broad topic of self-care, about eating, sleeping, exercise, but it’s when I say the phrase self-care, what do you think of?

I think of all those things, and I think of it even more so encompassing what fulfills me. For me, self-care isn’t the physical eating, sleeping, drinking enough water, taking care of myself in that way, but it’s in the way that I have gotten to know myself, where for me, self-care at times is being alone, recharging, taking time by myself and recharging that social battery, but I’m extroverted and for me, more often than not, self-care looks like cultivating a group of friends who recharge and fill me and making time in my schedule to see my friends but it sounds so silly, but when you are busy and you might have been careers the way that I am, whether it’s with my relationship or with my friends.

Self-care is not just about addressing the needs of your body. It is also about being alone and recharging yourself. Share on X

I feel like blocking that time in my schedule. It’s something that is an act of self-care. Finding a balance between my entrepreneurial freelance artist life and having a normal life of seeing my friends on the weekend, most of them do have 9:00 to 5:00s. That’s been a huge piece of self-care that when I sacrifice too much social time or too much alone time, I think my mental health suffers from that.

For me, self-care is building a life of things that fulfill me, whether it’s time alone, or time with friends, and then personally, creativity is a huge value of mine as a creative person, whether it’s making cakes like you said, or writing, or I’m a dancer as well, and moving my body is something that fulfills me, too. For me, self-care is not about eating, sleeping, or drinking water, but it’s about booking a dance class and going for a walk.

Doing something physically. Moving my body is important to me. Often, that is coupled with something creative that gets my brain stimulated in a way that’s fulfilling beyond what I do for work. The last piece of self-care for me is grounding and being in nature. Getting sunshine is important for my mental health, and for having met gray in Los Angeles. I will go touch some grass anyway.

Connecting with nature, I’m so lucky to live close to the beach-ish, and for me, going to see the ocean and being in nature, seeing trees, getting fresh air is something as simple as going on my patio for even ten minutes in the middle of my workday. Self-care for me encompasses beyond the physical things you think of when you think of wellness and well-being, but also building that life of things that you know recharge you and fulfill you, whether it’s friends, alone time, being in nature, creativity, or moving your body.

You’ve learned a lot over your teen years and developed into a person who knows what she needs and like you said, life is a journey. It doesn’t matter. Are you continuing to learn all of that? From young adults, I want to highlight what you said, recognizing what you need and so for you, it’s creativity for someone else, it may be a workout, but recognizing you as a person and saying, “What is it that Marc needs? What is it that Spencer needs?” Making it happen. Even if it’s simply getting outside, getting some fresh air, getting a walk in, and recognizing, “If I don’t do this somehow I’m impacting myself negatively.”

It builds up, and you don’t have time for certain things, and then you realize. For me, like even something as simple as “I haven’t seen a friend all week. Why am I sad? Why am I feeling lonely?” I will call a friend up. If I can’t see them in person, like make a connection with someone if that’s what feeds me and that’s what I need. Do it. Take the time and make the time to do it, but sometimes it’s easier said than done, and at all the different times your needs can change as you said. For me, my needs changed too, and checking in with yourself and being on that journey, figuring out what you need at this present moment is another factor of self-care. It’s like spending time with yourself and getting to know yourself what you need and what’s best for you in the present moment.

Normalize It Forward | Spencer Ganus | College Students

Young Adult And Mental Health

You had an interesting age in that you are out of college, but I can still consider you a young adult twenties and approaching, getting into your career spreading your wings, and getting into that age bracket where people start thinking about relationships and families and all that stuff and I’m wondering, when you think about young adults and the mental health of young adults, so anxiety and depression in particular. Anxiety and depression right now are at an all-time high. Anxiety in young adults and depression are the statistics that are through the roof. I’m wondering, when you hear me say that, why do you think that is?

Being a young adult and someone who also has dealt with and still sometimes deals with anxiety, I go to therapy too, and I have, but a lot of time working on myself to be the stable person that I am, but everyone has their days too. Someone who’s not an outsider and what you are talking about. There are so many factors, and I hate to say it because I work in social media, but I do think a factor not be factored, but a factor is the age of technology and the accessibility we have to seeing what we may not have, comparing ourselves to other people, comparing ourselves to even, for me, past versions of myself that I have posted about online that I have to live up to. That’s a very niche thing for me, but that affects my mental health, is living up to the standard that I have seen created online of this person who embodies wellness. What if I’m not feeling so hot one day?

Suddenly, if I am not embodying this thing that I’m promoting am I inauthentic and spiraling in that way? Technology has a big effect on all of us in some capacity, positively, connecting us to incredible sources of information and being a creative outlet. I have seen more positives than negatives from social media, being in the field that I’m in intentionally, but I do think it’s taken a toll on my mental health many times, I do think the pandemic also had an effect on us.

I didn’t walk across the stage when I graduated from Duke and all my hard work. I got lucky that I even sat at a graduation, but we sat in masks, 6 feet apart, on the football field. They never called my name. They never shook anyone’s hand, and my diploma was mailed to me. It didn’t feel like the same level of gratification in a silly way for all the work that I put in, and that was a big bummer and that’s not to say that your anxiety is a product of a particular event like that.

Living in the age of the pandemic, post-pandemic, combined with technology, combined with my generation especially, there’s a shift with Gen Z of people who are more entrepreneurial, and it’s more acceptable to be a full-time freelancers, to be balancing multiple jobs, to have a side hustle. It’s a common language among my generation, and as someone who does have a lot of different jobs, I’m busy. I have my hands in a lot of different things, and it’s like maybe it’s my circle in Los Angeles being a more artist and entrepreneurial-oriented city, but in this city, there’s a lot of pressure to have more than a 9:00 to 5:00. If you think you have a 9:00 to 5:00, that’s all you have a 9:00 to 5:00. Do you have a side hustle? What do you do with your free time? Do you have a hobby? You don’t have a hobby? It’s like you go from 9:00 to 5:00, or what else do you do? At this age, with, again, social media, there’s this pressure to monetize your free time, monetize all your hobbies.

The age of the post-pandemic made Generation Z more entrepreneurial. It is now more acceptable to be a full-time freelancer, balance multiple jobs, or have a side hustle. Share on X

I have put this pressure on myself, and that’s been a huge contributing factor to my anxiety, is that standard? I have stopped for myself the pressure I feel from my generation to constantly be achieving and doing and leveling up, and it’s positive and if it’s not taken too far, and when it’s taken too far, it can take a toll on mental health. That’s why my generation is suffering.

College Admission

I would agree. As a therapist, one of the things that I see is the measuring stick has become social media. Right now, with young people, social media doesn’t exist. You were compared to the people next to you, the people you heard about. Now, you are compared to 100 million of your closest friends on social media. It’s never enough. Someone could be working a zillion hours, and in some ways, it feels like, why aren’t you working a zillion and one? When you look at the definition of mental health or happiness, that takes away from your happiness. You have to go. I see it. It’s funny. I see it mentioned, Duke. I see it when kids are applying to college.

I work in college admissions, one of my million jobs, and let me tell you. It’s crazy.

Essay writing and all that stuff. For me, 4.0 used to be the highest. Then it went up to 4.3, and now it’s 4.6. I’m like, what does it stop at? At some point, you say, “This is a person who’s intelligent, obviously doing well in school, but they are not at the top of their game and everybody seems to be trying to get to that top,” which is a pressure cooker.

The funniest part is when kids get out of college, and you probably know this to be true because you’ve been out for a while now, everybody has a degree. When you get out of college, you are sitting in a room. Everyone’s got no one cares at that point. Are you this or that? What they care about is what kind of person you are, what you bring to the table, and how hard you can work. Social media has been harsh. COVID has been equally harsh. It makes me sad to hear that he didn’t get to walk across the stage because everybody who works hard like that deserves that. They deserve that attention.

That’s a silly thing to bring up as a thing that I don’t think cuts it off every day but that’s like a microcosm of college being like everything about the hard work and everything about the product, and the college admissions process too. Working with these students, there’s pressure. Do you think it’s the parents often? It’s the students even putting the pressure on themselves, and the friends leveling up next to them? “My friend got in here, and why didn’t I get in?” It’s breaking up friendships.

The list could go on about the college admissions process and I feel like I’m grateful. I work with a company that has strong, amazing values, and that’s why I work in this space. It’s because we do a lot of free essay reviews and amazing resources we offer for people who are underprivileged and I work with students on scholarships as well. The only reason I get excited to work in this space is to feel like I’m making an impact, even if it’s on a small scale, with students who either would have access to these resources and also students who wouldn’t and that’s helpful for me as someone who always wants to align with work that is aligned to my values, because that’s part of living intentionally. Even for you to be able to have a conversation with someone a couple of years younger and remind them, “You are supposed to be pursuing this to be happy.” That’s supposed to be part of the process. Let’s not lose that. I could see you doing that and doing a good job of that. I love you hearing all that.

Thank you. Teaching at a school right now in person, is my first day. There are big kids, and they are all awesome. I get to teach in person. It’s such a treat. I’m like, “The connectivity versus Zoom. It’s not the same.”

How old are the kids you are teaching?

These are mostly rising juniors and some seniors, so all college prep work, but a little bit more broad writing skills and writing a personal statement and what it’s like to learn to express yourself more in an essay over the course of the next two and a half weeks. We’ll be working together. It’s a pretty long time to get to know each other and hopefully make a real impact on their writing abilities and their lives.

Time management

Another area I wanted to ask you about in terms of wellness that goes, it’s not talked about nearly enough, is time management and I always feel like the students that I work with going into college, most of them don’t use calendars. Most of them don’t even use email, believe it or not. To introduce them to that and then to link it to, “The more management you use, I believe the more you can drive your anxiety down because you know what’s coming.” I’m curious, what are your thoughts about time management? Has that impacted you?

I agree with what you said about minimizing anxiety. If not for my calendar I use the iCal app because it’s on my phone and my computer I cannot imagine what I would do without my calendar. Having as many jobs as I do and still trying to have a social life and still trying to take time for myself, I could truly not function without my calendar and honestly, without reminders, I feel like I’m the person where, even talking to you about scheduling the Zoom interview, if I don’t respond to a text right away and I open it, I’ve forgotten about it and that’s the truth about myself.

The more you get to know yourself, the more you know what tools you need. For me, I use my notes app religiously. I always have a to-do list, and I check things off every day. What I’m doing if I didn’t have my notes app where I was writing to-do lists every day, I would not know what I was doing. If I wasn’t able to mark emails as flagged or unread texts that I haven’t responded to yet because I’m in the middle of something, I wouldn’t get to it. Some people are better at micromanaging little things like that, and maybe they have more capacity in their brain to multitask in that way, the way that I don’t but learning about myself, I have learned what systems help me with these little things.

The more you know yourself, the more you know what tools you need. Share on X

Those little things are a huge contributor to overall time management when you feel more organized and you are able to block your time and your week, that’s when you have the time for self-care. That’s the only way I could function doing all of these different types of endeavors that I’m doing. I have even imparted some of this idea of organization to the students that I work with. I use organizational platforms. It’s like an online software that is like a Google Drive meets the Notes app shared feature, like a co-work space. Monday is similar, or Asana like all those kinds of workspaces, but I use Notion to help my students stay organized. They always have a to-do list and know what our Zoom link is and when we are meeting. They know what their homework is and what my homework is for them. Organizational systems like that for all of my businesses to manage my time are crucial.

It’s a work in progress for me. I’m still a work in progress in every way, and there are days when I do get stuck scrolling. Sometimes I start looking for inspiration and then I end up on my phone for an hour, and I’m like, “That wasn’t part of the plan. Let’s readjust.” Time management is key for efficiency, trying to do multiple things, and minimizing your anxiety. To do those things efficiently you have to have time management.

You juggle a lot. You are an excellent example of that and as you mentioned, the entrepreneurial attitude of young adults nowadays, there are many more people out there doing that and doing all things.

In college too, I can’t imagine not having a calendar in college, because it’s the first time that your class schedule isn’t eight to three. Your parents drop you off and pick you up, or you drive yourself and drive yourself home, maybe a senior year of high school. In college, I was part of two dance groups. I was the vice president of the Buddhist Meditation Club. I did like everything I could do on campus because I was like,” I wanted to soak up the juice. I wanted to take advantage of my time there.”

If I wanted to go to a party with my friends but I had a midterm due, I wouldn’t have known my midterm was due if it wasn’t on my calendar. Finding those organizational structures sooner rather than later, in high school, I even had a calendar. I had a crazy agenda. My mom, luckily, helped me in doing that and was like, “Make your doctor appointments.” I made my appointments and I could drive when I had races. Those are the things that I was lucky to learn from a young age, learning sooner rather than later if you are learning for the first time in college, is a little tricky, but it’s still better to learn in college than when you are 25, you get the real job.

Normalize It Forward | Spencer Ganus | College Students

First Weeks At School

I don’t know if you remember your first couple of weeks at school. Do you remember your first couple of weeks? What was one of your big surprises that you got to school and you were like, “I didn’t see this coming?”

I did an amazing pre-orientation program that Duke offered. It was an arts camp. It was like a student. All my counselors were older students. It was all freshmen incoming, and they divided us into small groups. I had this opportunity to get eased into the college experience, and that was the first surprise. I thought I was going to show up and it was going to be first-day-of-school vibes, where I’m a little fish in a massive pond, where I knew nobody. I flew across the country. My parents said bye to me at the airport. I got on a plane and went from Los Angeles to Durham, North Carolina very differently. I didn’t know anybody, and I was at first surprised with how excited I was and not anxious, as someone who usually does run anxious for new experiences out of my control.

Instantly found people who I shared values within this art space, who I could connect with over things like music, dance, and acting. It felt like a safe space and that was a very unique college experience. A unique entry to college that not all students are offered, but that a lot of schools have orientation programs to ease freshmen. I recommend taking advantage of that and finding people who you vibe with, whether it’s through a particular part of that orientation like maybe there’s a part of the orientation that’s geared towards a particular interest of yours. Maybe you play a sport, and there’s a sports orientation.

Going to the orientation with what might be your people not to say they are going to be your best friends. I didn’t even end up staying friends with most people from my program, but I did find some of my best friends through that program. It was surprising off the bat to find people across the country amidst this massive environment. We are expected to feel so anxious and isolated, but I found people who I shared things with. Looking ahead, it was surprising to see I didn’t say that about all of them. It was like I had my freshman week friends, and some of them were freshman week friends.

I would say hi to all and that was it.  I was surprised and I wish I had been a bit less presumptuous of expecting to feel a negative way and a little more open-minded to knowing I might not feel anxious at all. I could get there and feel instantly comfortable and not feel like I wanted to run to the bathroom and throw up. That was not something that I ever thought would be an easy transition, and had I been more open-minded, the plane ride over would have been a little bearing.

Advice For Incoming College Students

That brings me to the last question I want to ask you. If you are talking directly to an incoming student, an incoming college kid, eighteen years old. All sorts of thoughts. Do you have a piece of advice?

Something that people told me that I didn’t believe when I got to college and this is specific but your major doesn’t determine everything, and what you choose to study does not determine your career. If you change your major, it’s not the end of the world. Every school has different protocols for certain applications that require you to pick majors in certain programs or are more competitive than others. Not saying it’s easy to go from being an engineer to an English major.

I do think that the pressure I felt to make a 5-year plan when I was 17 years old was pressure that I never needed to feel, with anxiety that I never needed to feel. I graduated. I studied literature, cultural studies, and philosophy. I co-published a book on the study of ethics, and now I’m working as an actress, a dancer, and a college counselor. I’m on your show. I’m doing all of these random careers that, frankly, mine are using my brain, talking to people, and learning to express myself. They have nothing to do.

Sorry, Mom and Dad, but for me the specific answer would be don’t stress so much about your major, or your five-year plan, all those little things are so insignificant in the grand scheme of your life. If you are going into a field that is technical, like learning how to do computer science to be a software engineer, try it, and if it doesn’t work out, you don’t have to do that for the rest of your life. You are not married to that but be open-minded with what you want to study.

Take it on a little bit of a larger scale generally being open-minded and knowing that things are going to work out, and things are not going to work out. You might think you met your husband during the first week of school, and then you realize you don’t think you like him at all. I think being open-minded, if I could go back in time and give my younger self advice, would be to roll with the punches and relax a little bit more. Enjoy it. People say it’s the best time of your life. Take those classes that you are like, “Maybe I want to study this. Maybe I don’t.” If it’s not that serious, if you don’t have it all figured out and that’s something I felt like I had to have a lot of things figured out because suddenly I wasn’t a kid anymore I was living across the country, and the pressure from the investment of the money and the investment of all the things that they make college out to be in the movies.

Enjoying it and remembering it’s supposed to be fun and educational. The last thing I will say is to take the opportunity to use college as your growth journey, battlefield, or frankly, you are going to get hit with a lot of things but using it not as a place to learn but as a trade school opportunity, but as a chance to learn about yourself and to grow. If the best thing out of college you get, besides your degree, is people skills and learning about yourself, then it was a successful college experience.

Use college not just as a place to learn but also as a chance to learn about yourself and to grow. Share on X

It’s not bad. It’s great advice. In many ways, you are saying, “Be willing to try new things,” and, “Attend new classes. Expand your horizons.” Most kids are going to school in different areas. Embrace that a bit. It sounds like a nice journey, and as you said, honestly, no one has a 100% lovely journey through college. There’s going to be tough days.

I call my parents more than once.

Episode Wrap-Up

In many ways, that’s typical. I always tell kids, I’m like, “You’d have to have a pretty awful house to not miss it at all when you go to college.” You are going to have some of that but the opportunity to open their world up in those ways is immense. I appreciate your time, Spencer. You are fantastic.

I appreciate you having me. Thank you so much. You’re awesome.  I love your mission and everything you stand for, so I’m happy to support you.

Can I put you on the spot for one second? Part of what we are doing in the show is asking people that we interview to nominate another individual so that we can continue the conversation. You need to talk about wellness, and I didn’t know if you had a friend, a co-worker, a relative, or someone.

Not to keep it in the family, but my mom nominated me. I have so much admiration for how she raised me, and the intentionality I live with is such a byproduct of the house that I was raised in by both my parents. My brother is someone who embodies the same spirit. He launched a business called Collegiate Mind Mastery. That’s all about baseball players going on the professional track who are any age, from elementary through high school, and even some college students he’s working with now too. All about everything and what it takes to be a collegiate athlete from mindset and mental health to physical health and nutrition and everything and he built such an amazing brand and program with that. He’s such an asset to chat with.

That would be great. What’s your brother’s first name?

His name is Tyler Ganus. His Instagram is @TylerGanus. If you want to check it out there. He’s a whole brand there too, but maybe that would be a nice conversation.

I appreciate you nominating him. I will reach out. Spencer, thank you so much for your time. You’ve been amazing. I love the fact that you represent both college as well as post-college, and you’ve been very honest about things. I want to just make a point of saying this there are so many times that I will interview someone and they give me this glossed-up version of everything is perfect, and we all know that the normalcy of life is that we have our ups and downs. The way you put it out there, that just works. Thanks again.

I’m so glad. Thank you so much for your time. You are not an awesome interviewer. I appreciate it and good luck with your show. Hopefully, you get in touch with my brother.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

Take care. Have a good rest of your day.

 

Important Links

 

About Spencer Lacey Ganus

Normalize It Forward | Spencer Ganus | College StudentsSpencer Lacey Ganus , who is an actress and voice actress. 2 of her roles She’s best known for are the Comedy Central television series, South Park As Ike as, as well as teen Elsa in frozen.

We are particularly interested to talk about healthy with Spence wellness and lifestyle social media blog that she currently runs.

 

 

Normalize It Forward | Penny Jarrett | Young Adults

 

Depression and anxiety are among the biggest mental health challenges being faced by most young adults right now. Wellness coach and therapeutic art practitioner Penny Jarrett is here to discuss how they can look after themselves better through self-care. Joining Marc Lehman, she discusses how social media and the internet greatly contribute to young people’s toxic self-comparison and limiting beliefs. Penny also underlines how positive affirmations and addressing unresolved dreams and trauma can unleash your greatest potential.

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Young Adults And Mental Health Care With Penny Jarrett

Welcome to the show. This is a show that talks openly about mental health and wellness. We are here to welcome Penny Jarrett. Penny is a mental health and wellness coach, a writer, a speaker, and a therapeutic art practitioner. She’s passionate about helping people overcome their challenges so that they can begin to live fulfilled lives, joy, and free of pain and confusion in the negative effects of trauma.

 

Normalize It Forward | Penny Jarrett | Young Adults

 

Penny, welcome. It is very nice to have you here.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Thank you. I don’t know if that intro did you justice, if there’s anything you’d like to add, or if that covered it well.

It was lovely. I was feeling good listening to you describe me. I was like, “Thank you.”

It certainly seems like you’ve done a lot of different things.

I was about to say that.

Self-Care

You sound busy, which is great. Busy is good. Certainly, everybody that comes to the show comes with a different perspective and a fresh view of things. Our main thrust is to try to talk more openly about health and wellness and try to get a good sense out as much as we can to role model for our young adults out there how important it is to talk openly. When it comes to mental health and wellness, there are a number of offshoot topics that, if it’s okay, I’d love to ask your perspective on, beginning with the topic of self-care. I’m wondering. When you hear the phrase self-care, what does self-care mean to you?

Self-care, to me, is an extension of true self-love. When everyone talks about self-love and self-care, there can be loud opinions when people express things and we cling to it. We don’t dig deeper and personalize it for ourselves all the time. Even the topics being talked about loudly are great. If we think about the fact that love is a verb and it’s something we do and it’s not just something we feel, it’s a beautiful feeling when you feel all that love.

To love ourselves is not always going to be a feeling. It’s not always going to be, “I’m finally accepting myself for my flaws. I love myself. I feel all of this warmth, compassion, and fondness for myself.” Having those feelings towards ourselves is amazing. It improves our self-esteem. It helps us take opportunities and believe in ourselves, but it’s not always the case.

There’s a huge amount of people who don’t naturally feel those ways about themselves. We might feel sometimes that the reasons behind that can be vanity so we feel ashamed to talk about it. It could be something that has happened in our past, a mistake we’ve made, or the way that we view our family. This is coming from my own personal experience, and everything I’m saying here as well.

When you don’t have those natural feelings of fondness for yourself, the least you can do is love yourself because you are yourself. People often go to confidence classes. They want to love themselves. They want to feel a certain way. The way you do it is by loving yourself because it doesn’t always come naturally. I feel like self-care is a way to love yourself, and there are ways to do that.

I speak a lot at different events and stuff. We say, “Self-care is not just face masks, but a big portion of it is.” I, at one point, was completely like, “With self-care, forget the face mask.” As my self-care and my own wellness journey have come I wouldn’t say 360 because it’s not back where it was but has gone a 180 and then loads of sparkles and glitter, I’ve had to come back to the face mask, chilling, looking after my physical body, and resting.

Before, self-care, to me, when I was at the beginning of my journey was setting boundaries, saying no, quitting people-pleasing, and doing all of these things that were showing me that I was always trying to fill everyone else’s cup up and not my own. As time has gone past and those things come second nature to me, and I’ve changed, I’ve had to come back to make sure I’m loving myself with long walks, time alone, time connecting with people if that’s the season I’m in, and spending twenty minutes to do something for my skin and put that first. When you struggle, those are the things that are neglected. In a nutshell, and I am the least nutshell-y person because I’m always going off on tangents, self-care is the act. It’s an extension of self-love.

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I talk to a lot of young adults. When it comes to things they can control versus things they can’t control, there are so many things they engage with in life that they can’t control. Self-care is one of those things that you can choose to do. You can choose to get enough sleep. You can choose to take those walks. You can choose to be good to your physical self. Setting boundaries is a topic by itself. We could talk about it for hours. It is protecting oneself, making sure that you’re not around toxic people, and you are saying no to people, which is okay to do. I love that. It’s such a big topic.

I try to promote the concept with young people of, “You have these choices. They’re not chosen for you. These are choices you have that you can do.” I’ve done the same throughout my own journey. We’ve learned a lot, and we’ll continue to learn. For young adults, in many ways, they’re almost beginning that journey and trying to figure that part out. Self-care, what a rich topic. I love your tangents. They’re great.

Thank you.

Mental Health

Mental health is such a weird topic. I feel like some people talk about it very openly and some people avoid the topic. Mental health, to me, is something we all have. Wellness is one of those things that fits in and, in some ways, is a solution or something that helps us that we can choose to have. Even seeing a therapist is a choice for many people. I don’t know how much of this you’re aware of, but with the population of young adults that I see in college, the anxiety levels and depression levels are through the roof. I wonder. In your viewpoint, what seems to be causing that?

Everybody who existed in the time when the internet didn’t, you don’t have to be a genius to point it out. If we think about anxiety and depression as an example and get really basic with it, I know it’s not basic or surface-level. I’ve experienced both at varying degrees, at times when I knew what they were and at times when I didn’t. That’s why these conversations are so important because going through something like anxiety and severe depression, not knowing what it is, is wild. These conversations are so important because you get to hear what people describe your experience. You can begin to come out of it.

If you think about anxiety, it is fear, and it’s not always warranted. It’s not always come from something. We often have difficult things we’ve been through or difficult experiences we’ve witnessed or endured, aka a pandemic, trauma in the household, stress, or different things we’ve gone through. We can then become protective and fearful about that happening again when it’s gone. For some people, they don’t. Some people are like, “That’s over. Let’s live.” Some of us become very hypervigilant and protective. We can’t move past that. We don’t always dig deep. That’s why therapy is amazing because your therapist asks you questions that help you to realize, “This fear that I’m holding, I am afraid of losing someone again. I am afraid of losing myself. I am afraid of dying.”

When you get down to it with anxiety, there’s a fear. It’s like, “I’m afraid of failure. I’m afraid of not living up to my own expectations or expectations of my parents,” but it’s never that loud. It’s always at the back but it steers the behavior and causes a constant knot. The truth is wellness is a solution but it’s also a destination. It’s a state. It’s a state of wellness, a state of well-being, and a state of joy, which we all have innately but don’t always access.

I go back to talking about the internet. When we’re over flooded with and over inundated with other people’s lives, other people’s successes, or other people’s smiles when we’re not happy, all of these things we compare naturally. We’re not sitting there saying, “Her life is better than mine. His girlfriend’s prettier than mine. His grades seem to be higher than mine.” You’re not doing it loud. It happens because we’re taking in all of this information so naturally. What that can cause is a constant fear that you will never live up to all of these things that you’re seeing. That’s one of the things.

Don’t get me wrong. I suffered from anxiety for years and it came from living in a traumatic environment, living in a dysfunctional home, and experiencing a lot of violence. I knew it was over. I knew nothing would make that lifestyle come back to me but I could not live freely. I had to really speak life over myself. I had to tell myself, “I am free,” regularly. I knew I was free, but my mind didn’t and my nervous system didn’t. I was as tight as a clenched fist for about six years. There are different sides.

If you think of what depression is and you break the word down, it is depressed. You pressed it down. What makes you feel heavy? What makes you feel like you are pressed down? What are these things? A lot of the time, when we dig deep and we get to some of the emotions attached, there’s a lot of bitterness, unforgiveness, and anger. There’s also a lot of grief and resentment for things that didn’t happen, things that we haven’t done yet, or talents that we’ve got inside of us that we’re not bringing out.

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I coach people. A funny story is I wanted to be a counselor but I found out that I wouldn’t be able to hug anyone. I thought, “I can’t have someone crying in my office and I can’t hug them.” I was like, “I’m going to be a life coach,” at the time. It was like, “You can’t hug and you can’t tell anyone your personal life? Forget it. I’ll be a coach.”

I’ve hugged plenty of clients.

I know. Whenever I tell my friends this story because I’ve got friends that work in the therapy field, they are like, “You can so hug.” I’m like, “You should have told me that in uni.” I work with a lot of people who have ADHD. Common symptoms are depression and anxiety. They go hand in hand a lot. Whenever I dug a little bit deeper in the first few sessions, I’m not kidding you that over the past couple of years, maybe 70% of the people that I’ve worked with that are being treated for depression or have obvious depression have something inside of them that they are not bringing out. It’s usually a hobby that could have turned into a career, a talent, or a skill that they didn’t think would make them money so they pushed it aside, or a dream.

It’s not all the time, don’t get me wrong. I know there are chemical imbalances. I know life happened. I know this stuff. A lot of them are ashamed to even admit that they’ve got this dream. Why? It’s because of the fear of not ever doing it or not ever realizing it. If I was to answer your question after that massive answer in a nutshell, crippling fear from unrealistic expectations and comparison contributes towards a lot of anxiety that isn’t like an anxiety disorder, which can come from trauma. I know sometimes things come out of nowhere and then are related, but this is in my mind and my experience. A lot of depression comes from unforgiveness. That includes not forgiving yourself for your mistakes and also dreams, talents, and gifts that haven’t been explored, played with, practiced, or used.

Normalize It Forward | Penny Jarrett | Young Adults
Young Adults: A lot of depression comes from unforgiveness, and that includes not forgiving yourself for your mistakes.

 

I’m thinking a lot about that answer because I see that a ton in my office.

I’m not saying these things cause all of it, but a lot of the intensity and severity of the amount of anxiety and depression people are experiencing would be less intense if those things were paid attention to.

I hear that.

They contribute massively.

Young Adults

To take it a step further, I find myself advocating for young adults to get assistance when they need it. What’s fascinating about the age bracket of 18 to 22, which are the college-aged kids, is it’s the lowest age bracket out there in the US for people getting assistance. When you look at statistics, in many cases certainly with anxiety and depression, they’re the highest individuals that have anxiety.

You’ve got this huge disparity. A lot of things can cause that to happen. When I’m working with a young person and they’re heading off to college, talk about ambiguity. They don’t know what’s coming. You really got me thinking about that unresolved idea of, “I have a thought, a talent, or something inside that I’ve been too afraid to go after.”

It could even be an identity.

They’re like, “I’ll move it to the side and not tell anybody.” What a concept. It’s tough being a young adult.

If I am honest, a lot of the people that I’ve had those conversations with are usually a little bit older because time is getting on and that causes more pressure. Even though we know that you are as young as you feel, you can start fresh anytime you want, life begins at 40, and all of those things, there is still that tick-tock that goes on in the back of the mind that time is getting on, they’ve missed the boat, and stuff like that. It does apply. It’s the feeling that you are not living out who you really are. It’s not behind all depression.

As much as I love the internet, with people seeing how quickly someone gets famous, how quickly someone gets this change in life, and with lots of young people being completely addicted to these apps, it’s also like, “That would never happen for me,” or, “That isn’t happening for me.” It’s stuff like that as well. Feeling that sense of purpose and getting an understanding of why you are here or what you want to do while you are here is part of it.

I’m with you on that. A lot of times in therapy, I find myself drawing some of those inner thoughts out from my patients around, “What is it that you want to do in life?” I always feel blessed that I found counseling because I really like helping people and I like coming to work. I work a lot but I enjoy what I do. I want that for all of my patients whatever field they choose to be in. I see so many people who are unhappy with their career choices. To your point, for young people to be thinking about if those things that they’ve pushed to the side are causing symptoms, whether it be anxiety, depression, or both, that they could be considering as an option to take a look at and go after.

Social Media

The internet is an interesting one, Social media in particular. It has certainly had its bad publicity and good publicity. I certainly use it plenty for advertising my services and so forth. For a lot of people, that has become a way to connect with services and try to figure out who’s got what out there. There is so much comparison that goes on, especially for young people. The comparison is never like, “I feel great about myself because I’ve looked at social media.” It’s always negative. It’s always like, “Now I don’t feel as good.” You said the individuals that you work with are a little bit older. I don’t feel like there is an age where that stops.

I don’t.

At 14, 18, or 25, there’s this comparison piece that doesn’t make people feel good about themselves. It makes them feel less. It makes them chase, want more, or feel really bad about themselves. There’s a piece to social media that, to me, is so unhealthy and not helpful for people.

That’s so true. It also breeds this automatic expectation that you are supposed to do things in order to receive validation or an opinion. If you’ve got a social media account and you depend on likes and comments for engagement and that’s all it’s about, then how do you separate that into real life? How do you then say to yourself, “I want to be a singer. No one in my family was a singer. Everyone was a doctor. It’s an easy route for me. I’m already in school, but I want to be a singer. The truth is, my family already thinks this.” It’s not like, “Let me try and maybe I’ll fail.” People aren’t even fully afraid of failing. They’re afraid of people saying bad things about them and not liking them.

Back in the day or not too far back in the day, you’d have to send a demo to an agent or a record label. You keep doing that and see if you’re good enough. Now, before you even get to that point or before you even gather the bravery or the contact to reach out to someone who could help you with your career, you’ve got the whole of the public that have access to you possibly telling you you’re not good enough. These people, you haven’t even got proof whether they can hear or not. They might be a robot who sends the same comment to 100 people a day. That could ruin everything for you. Growing resilience around what people think of you is so vital but so hard.

Growing resilience around what people think of you is so vital but also so hard. Share on X

It’s important to remind ourselves about the false sense that we get from social media. It’s great when someone feels good about those likes and that engagement. That’s wonderful, but it’s such a roller coaster. It’s not real. This is not real life. This is not Mark saying to Penny, “You’re a wonderful person.” That’s real life. That’s a conversation. It’s computers. It’s robotic. With AI, you don’t even know if it’s real.

If someone listens to a type of music I don’t like and they say my song is bad, I’d be like, “I don’t even like the same music as you so it’s bad to you. We don’t even like the same music. Our ears aren’t tuned the same. Talking in that sense of singers, I was saying that as an example of hobbies, it can be something like that. It is thinking that people are going to have opinions about something you are interested in or feeling that you have to post about it anyway. There are certain age groups or certain groups that are like, “You post about your stuff.” You don’t have to.

Exactly. There’s an option.

People don’t have to know every single thing about you. While you explore, try different things, get to know yourself, get to know what you like, and turn down the opinions of others, which is a big task and I know it’s not easy, try everything. Try all the things you’re interested in to see which one lights you up. You don’t have to share it on the internet and see which other people like before you decide.

That’s a great point. That’s the nice connection between mental health, wellness, and social media. Social media is all about other people’s opinions. Pick a topic. You’re going to find plenty of people who agree with you and plenty of people who disagree with you. That tug of war never ends up feeling good. We don’t get self-worth from that. It’s not real as opposed to finding people who care about you, finding friends, or finding people who would say to you, “If that’s an area you want to explore as a person, you should do that. I’m really proud of you. I’m happy for you. I’m this. I’m that.”

Your point about posting is so good. When I say that to young people, they look at me like, “I hadn’t really thought I had the option to not post.” There are certain things in this world that should remain private, in my opinion. When we talk about wellness and mental health, unfortunately, the numbers for young people are pretty ugly. The suicide rate is high. The anxiety rate is high. The depression rate is high.

The one big thing I’d love for people to walk away reading this episode thinking is, “We might need to do things a little bit differently. The way we’re approaching wellness might not be working.” Especially for young people, it might not be working as well as it could be. Maybe we need to have some parameters around social media. Maybe we need to be digging in a little bit deeper and exploring more with self-care. Maybe we need to be doing things a little bit differently to get a better effect rather than saying, “I’m depressed. That’s the way it is. Things will eventually get worse.” There’s a better way. That’s a thought.

I’m dealing with college campuses on a regular basis. I have 2 kids, 23 and 21. From my perspective as a parent, it becomes a little overwhelming to think there are so many kids out there with so many difficulties in the realm of mental health. I would love to help all of them but I can’t. Certainly, I would love for them to be able to take some information about things we’re talking about. I’ve had mentors in my life who along my journey have made suggestions and helped me improve things. I really feel that as much as I love listening to elderly people because I feel like I can learn from them, young people can learn from us and some of the things we’ve been through.

Advice To Young People

Let me ask you in that vein in terms of mentors you’ve had or in terms of suggestions that have been made to you or things that have been said to you along the way that you think would be helpful. Let’s say you were talking to a young person and you wanted them to know something that you’ve learned over time that you think would be really helpful. What would that be?

There are a couple. The first one that had an impact on me during my own mental health journey and moments of crisis was, “Don’t believe everything you think because not everything you think is real. It’s not because it’s a predominant loud thought in your mind that it means it’s real.” It sounds basic, but if you are having a moment where you are catastrophizing everything, where tomorrow feels scary, where your hope for your future spouse and whether you’re going to get married, whether you’re going to do well in your exams, or whatever it might be, whatever’s causing you to get out of this present moment and into the future and start ruminating the worst case scenario, landing somewhere, deciding that’s it, and struggling because of that idea or that thought, catch yourself and say, “Not everything is real.”

That is huge. That’s like half the population of young adults out there. What a great, simple, really important concept for people to know because it is, number one, so truthful, real, and simple.

How many times have we wasted weeks, years, or months worrying about something, looking down on ourselves, or even so much as not enjoying ourselves on vacation because we feel like we don’t look nice? We see the pictures and we look wonderful. We think, “If I knew I looked like that, I would’ve been having a great time.” This is what we go through.

Being present at the moment and saying to yourself, “Not everything is real. The catastrophe that I’m imagining for next year might happen or it might not, so I’m going to live like it won’t,” is powerful. It is that shift. It’s a really present thing to do. It’s not always easy, but there are things that can help. Another thing I would also say is we are not taught enough about the power of our words. Don’t believe everything you think because not everything you think is real. Also, your word is your weapon.

We are not taught enough about the power of our words. Your word is your weapon. Share on X

Tell me more about that.

I say that because we’ve all heard of positive affirmations. That’s one thing. They have the power to rewire your brain. I’ve got loads of stuff on this. If you’re struggling with low self-esteem or you’ve got some options to make based on your future and you don’t know where to go because you want to do all the things that people your age are doing where you want to have a relationship and you want to have fun but you also want to stay in because you don’t want to be judged or anything to go wrong, have a few phrases that you say to yourself about yourself which are true.

A lot of the stuff we’re worrying about are lies that we’re believing. A lot of them are, “We’re never going to this. We’re never going to that.” It’s always something that has no evidence. Say a few things to yourself, and it doesn’t always have to be at the same time. It’s not a ritual or anything like that. You say, “I’m capable of amazing things. I believe in myself. I love myself.” They’re simple.

You say, “I’m not saying that to myself. I’m going to feel stupid because I don’t love myself. I don’t believe in myself.” Keep saying that to yourself. Do you know why? It is because what you say affects what you hear, what you hear affects what you think, what you think affects what you believe, and what you believe affects how you behave. It is not woo-woo. It is not spiritual. It’s facts. Your words are so powerful. If you keep saying, “I’m never going to be able to,” then you’re not.

This is an example. I had a friend who used to be self-conscious about her weight. Every time we got on a bus or anything like that when we were teenagers, she used to say, “Watch out, fat girl coming through,” to be funny. She wasn’t ever sad. She’s got a good personality. She’s a really funny girl. She used to do that all the time. I thought, “She’s only doing that because she doesn’t want anyone else to think it. She’s saying it.” She was saying, “Fat girl coming through,” to the point where I believed her. I thought she was fat. She wasn’t.

It took for me to see pictures of us as teenagers for me to realize, “This girl used to speak so much badness over herself.” I’m not saying that being a certain weight is bad because it’s not. People are trying to put on weight. People are trying to lose weight. Some people like to be bigger. Some people like to be smaller. I’ve been both and I’ve enjoyed both at different times. It wasn’t because she said it in a bad way. That’s not even relevant. I believed her. She’s a friend of mine. I trust her. I believe her. I know she doesn’t lie to me. When she says that she’s fat, I believe her.

If you were to say to me, “Tell me about your friend so-and-so,” I would say, “She’s lovely. She’s a little bit on the chubby side and a bit overweight. She is beautiful.” I would describe her because it would be what’s in my mind. When I looked back on the pictures, she was as thin as a pin. I believed her. Even walking side by side, I felt like I was walking with a big person. I never was. Her words were so powerful that they convinced me, and I have my own set of eyes.

Words are very powerful, whether it be our inner words or our external words.

Everything. They’re formed. When they leave us, they have energy. They have activity. There was a professor or scientist. He’s a Japanese guy. When I talk about this to people, they’re like, “You have to really believe it.” I’m like, “It would help if you believe what you’re saying because that energy also has a transformative power regardless.” It doesn’t matter who it is. Your words are powerful.

If you want to get down to the basic science of it, this guy was trying to figure out why plants grow better when you sing to them or talk to them. He took all the elements over time. He took all the elements of a plant, put them under a microscope, and spoke. He said loving words over the particles of the leaf, the soil, and the water, figuring out why this is true and why when you talk to or sing to a plant, it grows better.

They get to the point where they put water under the microscope. When they said horrible things to the water, made horrible sounds, and said nasty things, the particles in the water were all jagged. They were spiky. They were bouncing off of each other in a non-peaceful way. When he said lovely things like, “You are my favorite plant. You are growing so beautifully. Look at you,” and sang, the particles were all smooth and they flowed like a wonderful dance with 70% water.

If you don’t want to believe in the power of having to really get into it, look in the mirror, and get all meditative, which you don’t, to speak life over yourself, you don’t have to do that. You have to make a decision. You’re like, “I heard on a podcast that if I want to improve my anxiety, I need to start speaking life over myself. I know it’s not going to change everything but I’m going to try.” If you say, “I am free from fear,” every morning ten times, the strength that rises up in you, you’ll feel it. If you don’t, remember that the water in you, which is loads, will change physically because of that. If your waters are like that, then you are like that.

It’s a great point. I love that. I like simple things, and young people typically do as well. Anything that they’re able to glean from this conversation is beneficial. Anxiety and depression are complex things, but there’s a simplicity to how we view ourselves and the things that we do. It is not hard. Those are not difficult things to challenge yourself with. Wait and see. Do it for a week. Try it.

That’s what I was going to say. They’re not going to solve everything. Don’t get me wrong, I know this. I was diagnosed with ADHD, CPTSD, anxiety, and depression. I was even told there could be other things. I was like, “I’ve had enough. I’ll stick with these ones and keep it moving.” I get it. I’ve had the intrusive thoughts I’ve had. There have been times when if I weren’t alone, I could have gotten sectioned. The way I was feeling and the things I was saying, it was by the grace of God that I didn’t and I was out of it before someone came along.

Episode Wrap-up

I’m so glad that’s the case. I appreciate your honesty and your genuineness. You’re a very kind human being and a caring and considerate individual. Honestly, I feel like in the bit of time we’ve talked, you’ve given us a lot to think about and a lot of really great suggestions. I truly appreciate you taking the time. Can I put you on the spot one last time?

Of course.

As part of the show, I like to ask individuals I interview to nominate somebody, whether it be a friend, a coworker, or a relative, to be interviewed next to keep the conversation moving forward. I wonder. Is there somebody in your world that you think would be helpful to have on the show?

I would say my husband because he has a health management company. It all started because his son fell ill and was going through a mental health struggle. That made him leave his job and put all his time into his son. He could be someone great, but I could list loads.

We’ll get that information offline. I appreciate the suggestion. I look forward to meeting with him. I really appreciate your time and your energy. Thank you for spending some time with us. I appreciate it.

It’s a pleasure. Enjoy the rest of your day.

You do the same. Take care.

Bye.

 

Important Links

 

About Penny Jarrett

Normalize It Forward | Penny Jarrett | Young AdultsI’m Penny and I am a woman on a mission to help heal the world by spreading as much joy as possible and encouraging people to truly understand and love themselves.

I am a wellness coach, therapeutic art practitioner, Content Creator, Podcaster, Writer, Speaker and all round Lover of Colour. Attached to each of these titles is an avenue I use to go about my mission.

 

 

Normalize It Forward | Eric Kussin | Mental Health

 

It is often said that one in five people suffer from mental health issues. This perspective is a bit flawed, because everyone is at risk of experiencing such internal battles no matter who they are. Marc Lehman discusses how we can reframe mental health and eliminate the backward understanding of its issues with Eric Kussin of the nonprofit organization #SameHere. Together, they explain how society and treatment must focus more on addressing one’s underlying trauma and less on being reactive to the disorders arising from it. Eric also emphasizes the impact of technology and social media on mental health, particularly for young people.

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Reframing Mental Health With Eric Kussin

Welcome to Normalize It Forward, the podcast that openly talks about mental health and wellness. We are welcomed by my friend and colleague Eric Kussin, who was, for over twenty years, a professional sports executive. He got his start at the NBA League office, working with the expansion Chicago Sky, and then the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. He switched over to the NHL, working with the New Jersey Devils and the Florida Panthers, becoming the league’s youngest chief revenue officer. Eric has had some difficulty since then with mental health, which we’ll get into in a bit, and that has led him to launch his latest business called Same Here Global. Welcome, Eric.

Thanks for having me.

I probably didn’t do it justice.

I’m sure anyone who watches any podcast or video, when your bio is getting read, you cringe a little bit because if it goes too much into detail, you’re like, I sound like this heady person, and then if it’s not detailed enough, you’re like, did they learn enough about me? There’s no right answer to how anyone’s introduced. Don’t feel weird about that. Though it’s interesting, though, as long as we’ve been friends, I got to call you out on this in a collegial way. My last name is pronounced “Cusin.” I like talking openly and transparently when I know people are going to be listening because it’s like, you can know someone forever and something as simple as that.

Eric Kussin

My name is Marc with a C, and everybody spells it with a K. I appreciate the correction. That’s important. You want your name to be said and spelled correctly. I’m glad you said something. Thank you. Eric, tell me, you have such a fascinating story. Anyone who knows Eric knows he’s not a heady person at all. You have such a huge heart. Every time we talk, it is very clear to me that your passion for helping people and working in the space of mental health and wellness is super high. Let’s start off, if we could, just tell us a little bit about Same Here.

 

Normalize It Forward | Eric Kussin | Mental Health

 

Same Here was born. Thank you for those comments, by the way, that means a lot. There’s a lot that happens in this space that I’ve been in, where, because mental health is becoming a bubble, people are realizing it applies to more and more people. My theory would be everyone, but there are a lot of people in this space who, quickly on the first phone call with them, they reach out to you on LinkedIn or get connected to you through a mutual friend.

Immediately, if you’re intuitive, you can tell that they’re in the space because there’s some endgame for them, or there’s a dollar sign that they’re chasing after, or, in this space, an exit strategy, which is a term that was foreign to me when I worked in sports, because you’re working for sports teams, you want to win titles. You didn’t have an exit game of like, “In 3 to 5 years, I want to make.” That wasn’t even something I thought about. Appreciate those comments because I’m in this space. When you ask about what Same Here is, it’s because of my own lived experience and how awful, and I say this in a loving way towards mental health professionals out there, because I don’t think it’s their fault. I think it’s a system issue. Am I allowed to curse or not?

You are, absolutely.

We have a very fucke*-up, backwards mental health care system that leads with disorder. The best analogy I can make is everyone on this planet is walking through a high school together. Over the loudspeaker, we’re hearing, “Third period, please go to your third-period classrooms.” Some people are jumping into science class, math class, English class. Most people, 80% of people, are going, “Why is someone even making an announcement over the loudspeaker? I’m just going to keep walking through the hallway because I’m around friends and talking.” That analogy is how we are looking at mental health as a society, who has it and has to go into the classrooms, the 20% of people in the year. The stat is 1 in 5 people have mental illness all the time, and then who doesn’t. They’re like, “Who gives a shi* that I’m in a class, we’re in a school. I don’t need to go into some separate subject because this doesn’t even apply to me.”

Same here was born out of my own lived experience, which we’ll get into. I didn’t think it applied to me because of the way it’s marketed. That’s a brilliantly deceptive marketing message by the pharmaceutical industry. Why is it brilliantly deceptive? Because when you make the topic binary, that there’s 1 in 5 people who have it, you make it reactive for the whole rest of society. They don’t think they have it, and guess what happens to that rest of society? Because we know stress and trauma are cumulative, they eventually do have it. You’ve got the 1 in 5s who feel like they’ve crossed the line and have symptoms, to go, “My life is falling apart, I feel awful, what do I do? What’s the fix?” We grow up getting strep throat, bronchitis, pneumonia, and going to the nice man or woman in the lab coat, and they give us the diagnosis and then the medication for it.

 

Normalize It Forward | Eric Kussin | Mental Health

 

That’s what we think we need to do, and then everyone else, where I fell into that category, doesn’t think they have it. I don’t have depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, an eating disorder, alcoholism, or addiction, all the names that get put together in, “Well, I don’t have that, so if I don’t have that, I’m fine.” What ends up happening is this concept of what stress and trauma are, which are the sources of really the things that I just described or just named, are symptoms. They’re not diseases. You don’t ever get to the source. You don’t think about that source because you start treating, “Oh, well, I got to find what is depression and how do I fix depression? How do I fix my anxiety issue?” Same Here was born off of crashing because of not knowing that and trauma building in my own personal life, leading to me realizing there has to be a complete reframe in the way that we discuss, talk about, and normalize mental health. We are way too focused on labeling and diagnosing and not focusing on the fact that everyone goes through challenges.

There has to be a complete reframe of how mental health is discussed. We are way too focused on labeling and diagnosing people instead on how everyone goes through challenges. Share on X

There’s divorce, job loss, breakup, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, bullying, cyberbullying, sickness of loved ones, loss of loved ones, caring for sick older parents, moving to a new market, and being the one who’s isolated and doesn’t make a lot of friends right away. That’s the human condition that changes our nervous system states, which leads to this dysregulation, which leads to these symptoms that are then called disorders. The problem is, since that’s not universally understood, people don’t think they have it. We have these awful outcomes where people die by suicide, die by overdose. Same here is meant to say, “Why same here?” You and I, we’re the same. We can say that to every person on the planet, that it’s 5 in 5, not 1 in 5, because Marc, you’re a human being. I’m a human being. Anyone who listens to this, you’re a human being as well.

You’ve been through one, some, or many of that list that I just shared of those challenging life events. That means your mental health has been negatively impacted in some way. That makes the topic applicable to every single one of us, and then it becomes less scary. We can talk about it openly and share what we all go through. That’s a lot different than going, “Alright, the group of anxious people stay here. The group of depressed people stay here in those classrooms.”

Only you guys could talk, only soldiers know what PTSD is. They need to stay on their own, because they fought a war. No one else understands. The mother who lost her child at a young age, that’s a pretty harsh war that she’s fighting. It breaks my heart that the relatability isn’t there. I gave a long description to you asking what it is, but I wanted there to be commonality and understanding why we need to reframe.

Responsibilities Of Parents

Eric, I have to say that resonates so deeply with me. I’m a family therapist by background. I work with young people. One thing that I just, for the longest time, honestly didn’t understand but am coming to understand over time is how parents will bring their kids to every place under the sun to get ready for college, except for a counselor. Except for the support that we know, statistically, when we look at kids on college campuses, they absolutely will need it. I saw a statistic the other day that said something like 86% of kids at some point will reach that level, whether it’s a diagnosis or, as I call it, subacute, right below.

I look at all of the kids that I’ve worked with over the years, and those kids will go to college. They’re feeling decent, they’ve got some symptoms of stress or anxiety, but then they go to college, and all of a sudden, those symptoms climb. Maybe they reach a point of diagnosis, maybe they don’t, but clearly, there are lots of kids out there on every college campus that need assistance. I think one of the biggest reasons why parents aren’t thinking about it is exactly what you just said. We’re a very reactive society when it comes to wellness.

One of the biggest pushes that I’ve been making, and really starting this conversation to do so, is to get families to understand we are all involved in this. Helping your son or helping your daughter create some momentum going to college, or going to high school, or even getting out of school, towards their self-care, towards their wellness, towards things they’re able to do to manage life stress. Because one thing we can predict, and we know, is life stress is coming. It’s coming, it comes for all of us. The question really is, how do you handle it?

The issue on the parent side of things, which is interesting, because your practice and having people come and raise their hand and say it, and I can share with people, I’m not being critical of anyone who’s averse to it, because I didn’t know that it applied to me until I was 34 and the crash happened. I’m putting myself, raising my hand, saying I’m in your category as either a sufferer or a parent who’s not talking about it. I get calls all the time from people who are parents, because my friends are parents’ ages, and I haven’t grown up yet to get to that point. They’re so quick to put explanations on others in a way that doesn’t relate to them and their own parenting skills.

“Eric, do you have someone that can work with my kid on the perfectionist attitude they have on the soccer field? Do you have someone who could deal with the repetitive thoughts that they’re having when they get up to the plate and they’re batting and they can’t get out of their own head?” It stems a little into the classroom also, but I see it a lot on the ball field. That’s a much easier thing for a parent to ask for help about because it doesn’t seem like, “I did it.”

No, this is my kid when they are on the field, or on the court, or on the ice, or in the classroom, they’re dealing with something because of the situation. As opposed to when parents go, “Okay, we lost Grandma Millie three months ago, and Johnny hasn’t been coming out of bed over the weekends, he’s sleeping in until 2:00 or 3:00 PM. Okay, you know, Cousin Sarah is sick, and we go into the hospital, and, you know, Johnny’s been quiet recently.” They don’t share that second part, and the reason is because, and I see it in my own parents, I’m being real with people.

It feels, to a parent, like you think that you failed your child, that it’s hard for them to deal with these life situation things. It’s much easier when you see them dealing with it in situational things that they’re trying to be ambitious about. “Oh, how do I get them to be better athletes? How do I get them to be better students?” But no, in my house, no, look, we’ve got this under control. What I say to parents, because it’s your audience, is there is no perfect way to parent. What we go through in life as human beings, starting as children growing up, you could be the greatest parent in the world. What goes on up here in our heads, it’s the way that we’re wired.

It’s the way that we experience the world. I think Brene Brown is the one who tells a story. She had a client who was 35 years old, a beautiful woman, like lit up a room. The woman was what clinical psychology would call severely depressed. She’s saying, in her head, Brene is thinking, “What could be wrong with this? This woman has everything. She’s beautiful. She’s wealthy.” They start talking about the history and the past. “Tell me about your friends growing up.”

What goes on in our heads is the way we experience the world. Share on X

“Oh, I had a best friend who lived across the street from me.” Oh, tell me about that best friend. “She was really smart. It was back in the days when we would put the report cards up on the magnets on the refrigerators. My friend was really smart. She was really smart. She was really smart.” Brene’s picking up on this. It’s like, “Well, tell me about your relationship with your parents.” She said, “My parents were so supportive that they told me how beautiful I was all the time. I was in beauty pageants.”

And it starts to click for Brene. This woman, when she was a girl, was watching her friend get patted on the back by her parents across the street, talking about how smart she was. But because her own parents were talking about how beautiful she was, more so than how smart she was, she developed her own complex that she was not a very smart individual.

That’s a perfect example, hopefully, for parents, that you could be loving, caring, and supportive. My parents were amazing. When my brother was sick, they were driving me to every single practice there was. I look back, and I’m like, “Did they have seven cars to get me to all these places?”

They were phenomenal at being there for me, at hugging me after an event. What they weren’t great at, because it wasn’t their skill set, maybe I’m airing too much dirty laundry here, but it’s reality, I’m doing it for the help of other parents. My parents were not very good at talking about what was going on, because they themselves, it hurt them to talk about it. If my brother was sick, my dad’s way of dealing with it was saying, “Todd’s going to be fine. The chemo is going to work great. Everything’s going to come out great.” My mom’s way of dealing with it was to go into silent treatment and she pretended it wasn’t happening, but she didn’t talk openly about it. She would just be very reserved about it.

When you’re an 8, 9, 10, or 11-year-old kid, and my little brother is six years younger than me, you have these thoughts in your head. You’re like, “What happens if my brother dies? Where will he go? Will I ever see him again?” There’s no answer for these things. If your parents aren’t openly talking about them, you’re going to sit with those thoughts circulating around in your brain, trying to figure out what the answers are.

You don’t feel like you have the opportunity to open up and share. I share that background so that parents understand bringing your kid to therapy is no different than getting your kid a baseball coach to do batting practice with. I’d argue it’s more important than the sport or the grades, because this is the foundational work. This is the plate on which everything else lives. I promise you that they’re going through a breakup they haven’t said anything about, or a friend who said something hurtful that they haven’t told you about because they’re ashamed to tell you about it. There are things that kids hold onto, and having that support system is so needed.

Parents must understand that bringing their kids to therapy is no different than getting them to a baseball practice. Share on X

Social Media And Internet

It’s amazing, Eric. I will say, I’m the first one to say, I’ve been a parent for a long time. My kids are 23 and 21. I find myself saying, as parents, we’re guessing all the time, and oftentimes we’re guessing, we’re doing a good job of our guessing. We’re certainly making mistakes. There’s no playbook. We’re doing what we think is right. Like you said, if, in your mind as a parent, you’re thinking, “Nope, I don’t think therapy is going to be helpful to my son or my daughter,” then they simply overlook it. But to your point, let’s face it.

We live in a world that is so different from when we were growing up. Whether it’s phones, social media, COVID, all of this stuff has just shifted life. For young people, it’s hard to even compare life as a young person versus when we were younger. Eric, when we were younger, let’s remember, I would call a friend, I would talk to their mom, I’d leave a message, I’d wait a couple of days. They may or may not call me back. It was so different back then.

If you think of the science of what’s happening because of phones, because of access to media. Let’s just not even take social media for a second. Let’s look at what happened in the Persian Gulf war. When we were growing up, the video person would take footage of this light in the sky that looked like it was on another planet. You’d get no HD, it was grainy footage. They’d mail it back to the studio to then air it the next day on the news. Meanwhile, these kids are looking on their phones, and in real time, not social media, they have CNN or Fox News, or whatever their choice is of what they listen to.

I’m not trying to make it partisan. They see faces of children being burned. They see limbs being taken off. That, combined with social media and the comparisons, combined with the way that social media is built like a slot machine for updates. The fact that in your phone, takes social media out of it again, you get text messages, you get direct messages, we had beepers growing up. You had to go and call on a pay phone. Your email comes in 30 in a minute, as opposed to 30 over the course of three days.

That sympathetic nervous system response of the alert message, it wasn’t in place the way it was for us. We had this thing when we were younger called boredom. Like, it’s a joke. When I share that with kids, and some of them get the joke and some don’t, I was like, “We would sit around each other’s houses and go, we just played that video game because we only have three of them. We’re bored of that one. Let’s go outside and play.” You had to search for the next dopamine hit, but you didn’t know it was dopamine back then.

Looking back on it, I want to go play spud. I want to go play dodgeball. It’s fun to do that with friends. Those kids don’t need that. It’s literally here, and then in it being here, their brain is going “ping” over and over and over again. That exhausts the nervous system. The nervous system can’t take that. This concept of chronic stress and trauma, the list that I gave earlier of the divorce and job loss and breakup and all those things, that’s just the baseline that’s then compounded by all this technology.

You add up all these things that are building and building and building inside of us. It’s definitely not the same. These kids are going through worse. We’re going through it as adults at the same time as them, but we at least have the luxury of remembering what the time was like before technology and going, “Okay.” This is weird to say, but it’s true. I’ll be proud of myself if I watch a movie on Netflix and don’t check my phone. To me, that’s meditative. Back when we were kids, our parents would go, “Get off the TV. You’re watching too much TV.”

It’s a luxury now to be able to spend time on TV and not check your email. That’s what we need kids doing more of. It’s uncommon upon our generation because you have baby boomers who probably the technology is not common to them the way it is to us. For those of us who are the generation above these Gen Z’s and these kids that are in, it’s on us to go, “We understand the technology. We understand what it does for us, but you only know the world through the lens of this technology. You don’t know the world when there’s a calmer state. We need to help you find that balance.”

Self-Care

That’s an excellent point. I find that so often when I talk to young people, they don’t have that frame of reference. Shifting into that, Eric, because it’s a really important topic, self-care. Self-care is something within mental health and wellness that gets talked about. Parents may get on their kids to do this or do that. I guess I wonder, when you think of self-care, what does that mean to you?

The plug for this, only because I believe it in my heart of hearts, there’s a campaign that goes on social media, “Self-care isn’t selfish.” My facetious comment to that is, your campaign is not a very good campaign if you need a campaign to explain your campaign. People think of, when they hear the term “self-care,” things like massage and bubble baths and candles. That’s an important piece of a self-care routine. That’s why that phrase “self-care isn’t selfish” is there for you because it makes it seem like, “I’m doing stuff for me.”

Self-care is really work. That’s why we call it STAR, which is stress and trauma active release and rewiring, a gym for the brain. You got to make people understand new concepts, you have to make it analogous to existing concepts that they already do understand. We understand that the body falls apart over time if we don’t get to the gym and do something about it. If we don’t eat well, that means there’s work to do for our body to stay in decent shape. Obviously, there’s different levels of that, some people want to look like Mr. or Mrs. Olympian.

Some people just want to be able to live an active lifestyle where they can walk around the block without getting winded. That’s your choice of where you want to be on that. That same concept should be understood for mental health, that there’s work that I need to do in order to keep this in a decent place. It’s sad that that’s not the common understanding. The reason it’s not the common understanding is because there’s a pill for that. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m in the 4-in-5, nothing’s wrong. I cross over into the 1-in-5. What do I need that fixes me? That’s like dealing with your heart health by saying, “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

I’m not taking a look at the scale as the weight goes up and up and up and up. “Oh, wow, I just had these pains in my left side of my chest. Let me go to the doctor and get the statin drug.” That’s not a way to live healthy. You need to get on the treadmill. You need to walk around the block. You need to get yourself active. When I think of self-care, I think of work. People don’t like hearing the term “work,” but you have to be specific with them and direct with them and say, “You want to feel a certain way.”

It takes a certain amount of work to get to feeling that way. We’ll make it fun. We won’t make it like what you were talking about, where people dread sometimes having the therapy session. We’ll give you mind-body practices. We’ll give you exercises that enable you to feel like you’re doing something that’s active, that’s moving the body. To not do anything is a recipe for disaster, and I’m a perfect example of that.

I like how you said that, Eric. I think many of us are, honestly, because that becomes the default of, like, okay, we’re feeling a little lazy, a little sluggish. We’re just going to default back to that. I’m a big fan of making sure young people and adults have actual ideas and things as they’re listening to conversations like this as takeaways. It’s like, okay, you know, what can I do? Okay. Eric’s talking, Marc’s talking, what can I do? The typical kid, when they go to a college campus, you said it best with the heart issues, they’re not paying attention to needing to do anything until they’re having that really bad issue.

Until their anxiety is at an 8 out of 10 and they’re feeling really awful, they may not choose to do anything, kind of the proactive-reactive. I’ll just throw this out. I’m a huge fan, obviously, of being proactive and recognizing, hey, if we just take care of ourselves, even if we’re doing one thing each day, getting good rest, getting some physical activity, don’t climb Mount Everest, just get some physical activity, eating a decent meal. We all have the ability to make those choices. I’m throwing it out because, to me, as far as self-care goes, if we make those choices, we’re taking care of ourselves and we avoid those issues. If we’re not, we’re waiting for them to come.

Also, obviously, I’m living in an idealistic world that I know we’re ten years away from this understanding. When we were in the 1980s going to the gym for the first time, there were charts on every single wall showing you what each piece of equipment did. There weren’t many colors that the printers could print with, so they were made out of brown. They showed the muscle groups in the body. If you lift like this, you’re working out the bicep muscle. There’s a misunderstanding with mental health that when your mental health is off, it’s strictly this thing called the chemical imbalance. Let’s put chemicals in to balance out the imbalance.

When the reality is your amygdala starts to become over-functioned. It starts sending beta and gamma waves out throughout the rest of your body and telling your HPA axis, “We got to start shooting cortisol throughout our adrenals so that the rest of the body gets into an activation mode.” Our vagus nerve starts to lose vagal tone. It goes from being this rubber band to being more strict like this because we’re holding ourselves like this all the time. Our gut becomes porous, and we start to get gut overgrowth as well as gut dysbiosis. I’m throwing out geeky science terms for a reason.

Those are the equivalent of the muscle parts that we saw in those pictures in the 1980s that got us doing the exercises for it to become second nature for us to know, “Okay, if I want bigger shoulders, I do these things called shoulder flies or shoulder presses. That’s my deltoid muscle.” We need people to understand that the events of stress and trauma start to impact the structures in our body. The structures in the body, there are exercises, when you ask about self-care, I’m diving deeper into it, that I can do, what does tapping do on what meridians are and what even are meridians and how do meridians start to get clogged? What does havening do on that amygdala function to start to dampen those beta and gamma waves and start to get it going in alpha wavelength? If we don’t understand those things, one, what are we doing?

You don’t go to the gym and run on a treadmill, not knowing why you run on the treadmill and just sweat. You run on the treadmill because you go, “It increases my cardiovascular health. I’m allowed to, I’m able to, I should say allowed to, I’m able to run and walk longer distances. I can pick up my kids when I want to. Maybe I’ll have this benefit of losing weight because there’s a caloric deficit versus what I ate. Sure, I’ll go on the treadmill,” and then we get on the treadmill. We don’t have that in mental health with the exercise. We have, and you’ve seen the meme, and I hate the meme, and it devalues what you all do as practitioners.

It’s a person sitting across the couch from a practitioner. The person has all these tangled-up balls of yarn in their head. You, the practitioner, are the one that’s untangling them and putting them into new separate colors. That is telling people you need to go to Marc so that Marc can fix you with his magical powers. That’s not how therapy works. It’s not how self-care works. It’s Marc’s giving you the tools for you to do the work. You understand how to work on yourself so that you have control and agency in this. We’re far away from that because, I beat a dead horse on the pharmaceutical industry, but we have a system, and it goes back to me saying that our mental health system is fucke* up, we have a system that works for a lot of people.

If CBT and DBT, not to knock them because they’re great, but if those are the gold standards in what you do when you go to a therapist, and med management is the gold standard when you go to get medication, and it stays within that, what that does is keep a recurring revenue model of patients continuing coming back. Why is that going to change when the system is based on that? It’s not going to change. We got a ways to go in terms of educating people and getting the folks like you and the folks who are part of Dr. Plainer Same or Psych Alliance to go, “Guys, there’s ways for you to actually get to the source and start to heal so that you can start to do some of these things on your own. You don’t have to be in therapy with me forever.”

Not that being in therapy is a bad thing. Do maintenance therapy once a month, like have a person that you check in with, do it through telehealth, but I’ll land the plane on that comment with this, I think of the show The Jeffersons, and I remember a scene, it was a scene in every single sitcom we had growing up. Helen is the neighbor, and Weezy Jefferson goes, “Oh, Helen, you’re looking great lately.” She made some comment like, “It only took me 30 years and my entire life savings of therapy to get to this place.” It was a joke back then, but it’s real. It’s like you’re putting that much time and effort and money into feeling better to get to this place. It makes no freaking sense. How do we learn the exercise and the practices so that we can start to take more of the control along with the guide from the therapist?

Stigma Of Trauma

I think you make a number of good points, Eric. I want to just expand on one for a moment. I run into a lot of parents that, when you use the word trauma, it got me thinking. I run into a lot of parents that will say, “Well, my son or my daughter, they haven’t been traumatized. They haven’t had this. They haven’t had that.” I sat back and watched the shi* show that went on on college campuses last spring, and how college campuses couldn’t get encampments off campus and all of that. I remember seeing an interview with a young person. He was a freshman, I won’t mention the school’s name, but he was a freshman.

He was being interviewed, and he looked right at the camera and said, “This wasn’t on the tour.” I thought, spot on, my man. Like, you know what? It wasn’t. There’s stuff happening for young people we can’t predict. I can’t tell you how many times, Eric, and it’s really sad. I’ll get in a meeting with a young person and say, “How was your week?” They’ll say, “Not very good. Someone killed themselves in my building this weekend.” They didn’t even know the person, but it’s a contemporary. Those are all traumas.

Look at what your comment ties back to what we were talking about with parents’ readiness and willingness to bring their kids to therapy. Saying, “My child’s never been through anything traumatic,” is a protection mechanism of the parents saying, “I’ve never put them through anything traumatic.” They want to believe that they’ve created this cocoon around their kids. That’s why I brought up the Brené Brown examples. You don’t know what’s going on in your kids’ minds. It starts with helping a parent to understand trauma is not specifically an event that was awful that happened. Trauma is anything that they experienced that overwhelmed their ability to cope in the moment. That could be applied to anything, like being broken up with.

Trauma is not specifically an awful event that happened. It is an experience that overwhelms your ability to cope in the moment. Share on X

If you’re fourteen years old and what they call puppy love, which is a bullshi* term for it because that’s trying to minimize what someone felt, that’s the first time a human being fell in love with someone, even if it was a three-week relationship. That person gets broken up with, and what kids do, that boy or that girl is seen with someone else right away. That crushes that person. The ability to feel in that moment and cope with that experience of being crushed, the child doesn’t have those, and then all of a sudden, they think, “I can’t tell my mom or my dad about this because it seems weird that I got dumped and I’m a loser,” and that is trauma.

I give that example, and I’m sure you give these examples when you speak with clients who come in, because we have to normalize that trauma is not someone’s head went through a windshield. That’s one thing that’s possible, but there’s so many other traumas that happen that is that inability to cope in the moment and being overwhelmed by it. That should not be something that we’re shamed of. That should be something, if anything, that’s a badge of honor, that we’ve been able to overcome and get to this point that we’re at, given what we’ve had to live through.

We have to normalize that trauma is not as if someone’s head went through the windshield. Share on X

Eric, I have to say, it’s a great segue. I have told so many people over the years about Same Year, and it’s amazing to me how many people, the next time back in my office, will remark on 5 and 5 because it resonates. It resonates with people to say, “You know what? I’m a human being. Eric’s a human being. They’re human beings. We are all susceptible to shi*. It just happens.” I think when we get to that place, we normalize this conversation and bring it into a focus of, guess what? We don’t have to be scared of this, but we do have to deal with it. It’s really important.

The 5 and 5 thing, which is funny, is because people will skeptically, when they come back to me, and I’m of the belief that 1 in 5 is a planted statistic because of the deceptive marketing that I shared, and then I’ll say, “Well, in a space where people are looking for there to be improvement, don’t you think instead of continuously saying 1 in 5, they might say things like, Great news. We’re down to 19.3% instead of 20%?” You’d never hear that movement. They’re like, “Yeah, but Eric, wouldn’t that be better if it was 3 in 5, 4 in 5, like, because then more people would think to get help?” I say, “No, the second you make it binary, it doesn’t matter if it’s 4.9 in 5 or 5 out of 5, you’re telling a group of people they don’t have it.”

That’s why I disrespect, with all respect, the NAMI’s of the world and the Mental Health Americas of the world, because they’ve started to use the “everyone has mental health” message, but it’s always coupled with “1 in 5 people have mental illness.” The reason they’re doing that is because they’ve got a group of people they’ve protected, that have donated to them, that are the parents of the quote, mentally ill group that think, yeah, everyone has mental health, but my kid has it worse. Your group sticks up for my kid. My comment to society, that group of people, and everyone else is this concept, the stigma that everyone talks about and bandies about is on every single podcast, that never goes away if you keep people in separate groups. If you want to say, “you have it worse,” congratulations, like you can make that claim all you want, but what’s that?

It’s not a contest.

It’s not a contest. If you want to even hold onto it as a contest and believe, because of your symptoms, I’m someone who was in bed for two and a half years, couldn’t function, I don’t want that to be the understanding that I had it worse than other people, because then the person who only has it for three days instead of two and a half years will never relate to me. We have to be on the same team. If not, that concept of stigma never goes away. When Kevin Love says, “I had anxiety and a panic attack, and I ran off the basketball court,” and Michael Phelps says, “I had depression and suicidal ideations,” and Simone Biles says, “I had depression. I had to pull out of the Olympics,” that’s not normalization. The reason that’s not normalization is because it’s doubling down on the existing erroneous message that all mental health is if you have a disorder.

We need Michael Phelps and Kevin Love and Simone Biles to talk about what they went through in their life so that we can show we all go through things. Simone Biles’ story is a lot stronger when she talks about the rape with Larry Nassar. I know it’s very difficult to discuss, but she has talked about it openly at some points, her brother being on trial for triple murder. Those are things that are traumatic to our system that, “Oh, my brother got in legal trouble,” “Oh, my friend was the victim of rape,” or “I was the victim of sexual abuse.” That’s relatable in a way that labels are not.

Subacute

Here’s the thing. I can only say, as a therapist, Eric, that so often I’ll have a family come into my office, and there’s an identified patient. “My son, my daughter has Asperger’s, or has this, or has that.” As a therapist, you just become attuned to watching for certain things. Quite frankly, I would say a very large portion of our population is what I would call subacute.

They don’t meet the criteria for the DSM, but do they have symptoms? What the fuc* is the difference? Honestly, I’m the first one to say it. What’s the difference? To me, if you need some assistance, number one, get it. Number two, look at that and say, hey, we can all live a happier lifestyle. We should be talking about it more. We should be making decisions on a regular basis for our wellness, and we should stop shaming everybody.

 

Normalize It Forward | Eric Kussin | Mental Health

 

What you’re describing there is why the continuum model, I think, is so important and why we use the scale. In polyvagal, they call it ventral vagal, sympathetic, dorsal vagal. We call it thriving, gliding, surviving, fluctuating, struggling, sinking. I ran through that quickly just to say the fluctuating and the struggling, which are to the right before the final place to the right, which is sinking. Fluctuating and struggling is what I would agree with you on as where most people live. It’s over-sympathetic nervous system dysregulation, where, whatever their genetic makeup is, that increase in sympathetic response has been going on, and they’ve been thinking about things over and over again.

They’ve been through a lot of difficult events in their life. They’re starting to see, based genetically on how they’re wired, those symptoms start to manifest. For someone, it looks like the way they get through the day is washing their hands fifteen times. For another person, it looks like, I know I’m talking about OCD things, but they get sweaty palms before they go into a meeting. As long as they wipe their hands off and clean them off, they go into the meeting, and they can feel more confident. We have to start to notice those things as signs of dysregulation that’s leading towards, to your point, what modern psychology would call clinically depressed or anxious.

We just call it sinking, which is you’re at this place where the sympathetic response has been going on for so long that your neural pathways have been wired in that way, where you’re stuck in that spot. It’s hard to get out of this spot unless you’re given the tools from someone like a Marc who can help you get out of it. You get to use those tools throughout the rest of your life to start to keep yourself out of those ruts. If you see it on a continuum, you at least can go, I’m moving to that place. My thoughts, my feelings, my behaviors are changing to that spot. At sixteen years old, when the ambulance would go by, when I was playing basketball Saturday and Sunday, every single weekend, it was two miles away from my house.

My brain kept going, that ambulance is going to be at my house when I get home. It’s going to be at my house when I get home. That is subacute in the place that you’re describing it. That’s what we would call on our scale, either fluctuating or struggling, depending on having those repetitive thought patterns over and over again of catastrophizing, that I didn’t know at the time that that was a maladaptive thought pattern. I just thought it makes sense because my brother’s been sick a lot before. That thought’s still in my head. That doesn’t mean it’s healthy, and we should keep it there. We should do something about it. That’s why we wait and we wait and wait until these crashes happen.

Episode Wrap-up

You make an excellent point. I push the concept of being proactive because we don’t have to wait. As parents, I think it’s important for parents to hear that message. As you mentioned before, typically parents wouldn’t see symptoms in their young kid, let’s say physical symptoms in their young kid, and ignore them and let them build up and wait and wait until they have a heart attack. Why would they do that in this case? Look, first of all, I have to say, I could talk to you all day long, Eric. I think your passion and mine are definitely in line. I really appreciate, number one, your time and your energy. If you guys haven’t seen Eric’s Instagram, check him out. Your videos of you’re sitting in small chairs for an individual like yourself, Eric, are hysterical.

You can laugh out loud. You do so much good work out there, Eric, really. I want to point people to you. I want people to understand what Same Here is. More importantly, I want to normalize this conversation. I want wellness. I want mental health to be out there. I want people understanding the more we’re able to talk and share situations and stories and be honest, which you are all the time. I really appreciate that. The more we’re able to guide this conversation in a healthier manner. Thank you. Thank you so much for all of that.

I’m glad you’re doing these podcasts. I think the more people encourage other people to continue to listen to your podcast here and then encourage people to have these conversations like we’re having with each other, because it doesn’t normalize on its own. Campaigns do not normalize. I appreciate you saying 5 and 5. I think that helps us start the conversation.

We need people who are peer support advocates who get out there and go, this is my stuff. I’m not ashamed of it, and you probably have that stuff too. Let’s talk about it. If all you need to do is just listen to me, that’s fine. I don’t need you to say anything back to me, but just hear what I have to say, and eventually, you’re going to feel comfortable enough opening up to me.

I really appreciate your message, Eric. If I could put you on the spot as well for a moment, Normalize It Forward. The concept behind it is what I’d like to do is ask if you had an individual in your world, either a friend, coworker, or relative, that you think would be helpful for me to interview next so that the conversation could continue. I’d love to just get your thoughts on that. Anybody come to mind?

It must be serendipitous that you asked that question at this time, because my phone rang as you were asking the question. There’s a guy who’s got a good following too for you in terms of how to help with the reach of your podcast. His name is Ryan Phillips. He was a professional hockey player. Didn’t make it to the NHL ranks, but sexual abuse, abuse by coaches, and has been through a rigmarole of different treatments and been all over the country, been all over the world.

He’s Canadian-based when I say all over the country. He did a bike tour all over Canada, but he’s one of the few people who I’ve spoken with who, from a lived experience perspective, he just lets it rip and there’s no guard up whatsoever. He’ll tell you what he’s felt and what he’s been through. He’s a good soul and a good person who wants to help people.

Awesome. I appreciate it. We’ll connect, get his information, and get him on here because he certainly sounds like a valuable individual to continue this conversation. Once again, Eric, thanks for your time. Thanks for your energy. I really appreciate it. We’ll talk soon.

Awesome. Thanks, Marc.

Take care.

 

About Eric Kussin

Normalize It Forward | Eric Kussin | Mental HealthEric Kussin is a magna cum laude grad of Cornell University and 20+ year professional sports executive, who got his start at the NBA League Office. After five years with the League, he went the team business route and rose the ranks with the expansion Chicago Sky, and then the NBA’s Phoenix Suns.

He then switched over to the NHL, working with the New Jersey Devils, & Florida Panthers, becoming the League’s youngest Chief Revenue Officer. However, a debilitating mental health crisis stopped Eric’s career and life in its tracks for over two and a half years. After many failed treatment modalities, he was lucky enough to learn healing practices that enabled him to dig out of his abyss, and found a higher calling, launching a non-profit at the end of 2017 called, #SameHere – The Global Mental Health Movement. #SameHere’s Alliance is comprised of athletes and celebrities, along with media members, expert practitioners, advocates, and everyday heroes who’ve come together to make talking about mental health a common topic for “5 out of 5” of us.

Their #SameHere Movement has swept across college campuses in the US from Cornell to USC, K-12’s, Corporate Offices from CNBC to JPM Chase, Professional Sports Teams from the Golden State Warriors to the New York Mets, and military & first responder groups from the NYPD to the DOD. The Movement has recently begun to expand globally as well, with events in markets outside of the US. Eric hosts a podcast called “We’re All A Little ‘Crazy’” with NHL great Theo Fleury, and has launched an app called the: SameHere Scale to normalize emotional health monitoring & daily check-ins. To “keep his foot in sports,” Eric consults for a number of professional sports teams and leagues, guiding their ticket and sponsorship sales and retention efforts.

Normalize It Forward | Leon Logothetis | Kindness

 

Leon Logothetis, also known as “Leon the Kindness Guy,” is a global adventurer, motivational speaker, and author best known for his work in spreading kindness and human connection. Formerly a successful stockbroker, Leon left his career to embark on a journey around the world, relying solely on the kindness of strangers for food, shelter, and transportation. His experiences led to the creation of the Netflix series The Kindness Diaries, where he shares powerful stories of compassion and generosity. Leon now dedicates his life to inspiring others to lead with kindness, showing how small acts of goodwill can create lasting change in the world.

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Spreading Kindness One Mile At A Time: Leon Logothetis’ Inspiring Journey

Kindness

We’re joined by Leon. I’m going to allow you to introduce yourself because in all honesty, I’ve read a lot about you but I’m sure I’m going to screw it up somehow by talking about your experiences. Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

First of all, thanks for having me on. I used to be a broker in the City of London. This is going to be the short version. I had everything you could want on the outside but on the inside, I felt very broken. I ended up quitting my job after watching the movie the Motorcycle Diaries, which is about a man traveling around South America relying on kindness.

It inspired me and moved me to realize it was another way to live. I started traveling around the world, relying on kindness, meeting all these amazing people, being inspired and hopefully, inspiring some people along the way. I ended up moving to Los Angeles, did a couple of TV shows, wrote a few books, a documentary and here we are. That’s the very short version.

I appreciate it. I have to say, in our area, we’re not able to get the Kindness Diaries on Discovery Plus but I have done my research and watched many videos of you on YouTube. What an amazing story and what an interesting thing to focus on kindness. Why kindness?

The easy ask to is that when I grew up, I felt a lack of kindness. I always had this urge to go on adventures. I created this show and this life, whereby I went on adventures. It was all about relating to people from a place of the heart, generosity, and love giving and receiving.

 

Normalize It Forward | Leon Logothetis | Kindness

 

Leon Logothetis, the Kindness Guy, otherwise known on social media. I referenced your show the Kindness Diaries for those of you that are able to view it online. I strongly suggest you do. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen a bunch of clips of it on YouTube and it looks fascinating. Very moving. One story after another. I’m not sure if you’re able to sum up your takeaway from all of those experiences. Can you tell us a bit about how that kindness has impacted you?

The Kindness Diaries was when I purchased a vintage emoji bike with a sidecar. I drove it from Los Angeles all the way around the world back to Los Angeles with no money, no food, no gas, and no place to stay. All I had was relying on the kindness of strangers. People always say to me, “What was the one thing you learned?”

I learned many things but the main thing I learned was that we’re all the same irrespective of religion, how much money we have, and how cool we think we are or think we’re not. At base, we just want to be seen, heard and be loved. It took me traveling the world, becoming part of so many different cultures and meeting so many different people to realize that one simple thing. That we’re at the base of our humanity the same.

Super well played. Very hard to sum up but you did a great job now doing that and I agree. In the world we live in, there’s so much conflict, opinion, and difference. I always find and always say this out loud even in session as a family therapist to patients of mine, “Kindness is free.” It doesn’t cost you a dime. It’s an option that so many of us overlook. The core piece that I took away from watching so many of your videos is just that basicness of being a human being and recognizing that, as you said, we all just want to be seen and not overlooked and treated well.

 

Normalize It Forward | Leon Logothetis | Kindness

 

Often, that option is sitting right there in front of us. I applaud you. Your work that you’ve put together, your Kindness Diaries in general, which I just heard was a proof for season 3. Congratulations. Your general demeanor around this topic, Leon, is admirable. I think there’s so much to this conversation around kindness that again people overlook. Yet, here we are talking about mental health and wellness. To me, it’s one of the pillars that can’t be overlooked because without kindness, we don’t have that connection with other people.

We all know what it feels like to be treated in a kind way, hopefully. We all certainly know how it feels to be treated in an unkind way. No one’s perfect. This isn’t about Leon being a perfect human being and being the kindest guy and always being kind. Sometimes, I’m not. That’s just life. It’s about making a commitment to how you show up. Showing up as best as you can and as often as you can.

Self-Care

I love the way you put that. It brings us into one of the large topics I talk about here is self-care, what is self-care and what does that mean to you. Can I throw that at you? What does self-care mean to you, Leon?

Self-care is treating myself the way I would want to treat someone else. Share on X

Treating myself in a way that I would want to treat someone else. Often, we treat ourselves in ways that we would never let someone else treat us, calm, meditative, with love, with respect, dignity and grace. It doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, I talk to myself, I’ll wake up and I’ll do the opposite of that. I’ll be like, “If someone else treated me this way, would I accept that? No, so why are you doing it yourself?”

I like how you said that. It feels like an option. As you mentioned a moment ago, it’s a work in progress for all of us. As long as we’re on that track and we’re working toward it. As long as we’re aware of it and we see it as an option. We can always change course if we need to and as you said, what a great question. Why would we allow ourselves to do that if we wouldn’t allow other people to? What a great point.

From my point of view, Leon, I’m a family therapist. I see a lot of individuals in my office, mostly young adults and normalize it forward is to me was created based on the concept of so many young people not doing these things. We as older adults need to be role models and get young people to recognize that these are achievable things. These are options and choices that we all can be making. Honestly, if we don’t, our mental health suffers.

Mental Health

If we’re not taking good care, not getting good sleep, not getting some physical activity, and not eating decently, our mental health is impacted. Therefore, we’re not feeling so good about ourselves. That brings me to my next question to you and that is mental health. We hear that phrase thrown around a lot. What do you think of when you hear the phrase metal health, Leon?

Most of us or many of us do not have a good relationship with our mental health meaning that we’re broken. Society has broken us in many ways, some more so than others. If we can have the desire to make our mental health as good as we can, then things will change. Most of us don’t even focus on our mental health. We only focus on it when we’re broken and shattered into millions of little pieces. Whereby, mental health is a daily thing that we have to look at and deal with. Sometimes, it feels so insurmountable. We don’t deal with it until it’s too late or not necessarily too late but it’s at a point where it’s become very difficult to deal with.

 

Normalize It Forward | Leon Logothetis | Kindness

 

Certainly, with young people. I see that all the time. When I get a call from a parent and they say things to me like, “This, this, and this already happened.” “My son has failed out of school and their home.” One of my first thoughts is, “Why didn’t you call me three months ago?” You’re 100% right, most people don’t want to focus on their mental health until they have no choice or until they have to. You made a choice to leave an occupational path because of an inner desire that you had to change things up. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

It goes back to what I said about the mental health piece. It became so desperate internally that I felt like I had no choice. That was a good thing because had it not become that desperate, I probably would still be doing it but now at this point, there would be a moment where it would all implode. It was something that I felt very strongly about. I wanted to live as peacefully, as calmly, and as freely as I possibly could and I certainly wasn’t doing that. It was like the pain that pushed me. The pain pushed me to change.

I’m thankful. I think many people are thankful, Leon, because you’ve done a lot of amazing things since then. Let’s not overlook the fact that just showing us the kindness in other people and where that exists all over the world and the opportunity where we all have. Even on a daily basis to hold the door or to say something kind or to be complementary to somebody and the impact that those words have on a person. Sometimes sustained throughout the rest of their day or even further than that.

I think about the impact of the unkind words and turning the news on and being told that we’re different and that person is a disgrace or whatever it is. It happens all the time. We are being bombarded with negativity. Therefore, that’s how we are living.

Think about the impact of unkind words. We are being bombarded with negativity, and therefore that's how we are living. Share on X

Wellness

I think you’re right. Here we are, we’re progressing in the states here toward another election. I do worry about that. I worry about how that message, those negative messages impact not only adults but also young adults and their general wellbeing. Wellness is a topic that is broad. Wellness and mental health, it’s in there. There’s lots of things that fit in there but wellness is one of those topics that’s super broad.

As you mentioned, people take care of certain aspects of their wellness. They are certainly things that are overlooked with regards to wellness. When you think about freeing yourself, your journey and things that you’ve learned through other people, when you think about that word wellness and the importance of it. What comes to mind?

There’s physical wellness, so looking after yourself physically. There’s mental wellness. The chances are, if you go to the movies and watch a horror movie. You’re going to come out not feeling particularly good. If you go to the movie and watch a movie about love, humanity and about hope. You’re going to feel better. Be very careful what you put into your system. We put a lot of bad stuff into our system without even realizing what we’re doing.

These things alone. These things are social media. I use social media for my business, I’m there. Some of the things I come across are just disturbing. You think about what that does to a young person’s psyche. They’re just looking at it. Unfortunately, this society was different many years ago. We were in school. Students now, over 70% of kids have tremendous amounts of anxiety. Very few of those kids get helped.

To your point from earlier, something like 11% of kids nationally get assistance. A big part of that is based on what you said earlier, which is kids wait and wait until things get bad. I’m not even so sure it’s just kids. Adults sometimes do that as well. I’ll have an adult come into my office and they’re clearly in mouth pain. I’ll say to them, “What’s wrong?” They say, “My mouth has been bothering me for weeks.” I said, “Have you been to the dentist?” “Not yet.” “Why not?  What are you waiting for?” That happens with physical and mental health. In addition to people waiting, are there other reasons in your mind that people don’t address these things that they let them fester?

It’s painful to address it. It’s easy to turn on Netflix.

That’s for sure.

You look at your phone. It’s easier to do that or to eat something or to take a drink or to do a drug than to sit and face yourself. That’s the hardest thing to do. That’s why people don’t do it. Also, we live in a culture where it’s instant gratification. You know better than I do that to heal doesn’t happen instantly. It takes time and dedication. That’s why people don’t do it and that’s why the people who do it are the ones who are in desperate need more often than not.

That’s a great point and often overlooked, the simplicity of how hard it is. Caring for yourself has gotten a bad name over the years. When you use the word selfish, a lot of people think negatively. How do we explain things like going to our doctor for an annual exam or going and getting our teeth cleaned or doing things that we’re supposed to do to maintain ourselves. Those are positive things and yet sometimes people label those things in a very selfish manner. It’s confusing.

As a young adult, what do I do and what do I not do? You’re right, I do think we live in a world where we avoid things that are hard. Things that take a lot of energy and take a lot of our time, even though they’re important. We tend to avoid those things. You’re 100%. It brings me back to this show and the conversation around mental health, wellness, and the importance of us talking about it. The importance of us trying to figure out where we start. Maybe kindness, Leon, is the place we start because kindness is one of those things.

Even if we’re feeling bad, we can always send a kind message to somebody. Whether it be electronically or out loud or even through our behavior. As I said, over the years, I’m a door holder. I like to hold doors for people, especially when I go get my coffee. I’m just amazed at people’s response by holding the door and waiting there for a bit. They’re so profusely excited when they get to the door. I’m like, “I didn’t do much.” They’re like, “You did.”

Advice For Young Adults

Those actions that people could be doing, those kind acts where it doesn’t take much but as you said, it could set the course for that person for the rest of the day and maybe even longer. That’s a great place for us to start. If you were talking directly to a young adult nowadays, picture a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old or a 21-year-old person who’s struggling with some of these things.

Maybe in a way where they’re feeling broken. Maybe in a way where they’re contemplating. What should they do about this? I feel Leon, so many people in life I’ve been given such good suggestions from people over the years. I’ve had some good mentors guide me and make suggestions. I’m wondering what suggestions might you offer a young person if they’re in that particular spot?

Find one person who you feel safe with and share everything with them because part of the challenge is we don’t speak. We let it fester and then it destroys us. Maybe you don’t want to share everything. That’s okay, but share something. Share. Let it out.

Find one person with whom you feel safe and share everything with them. Maybe you don't want to share everything, and that's okay, but share something. Let it out. Share on X

That’s immense. That’s a great suggestion and especially for men because I find that so often men hold it all in. For some reason young men, they’ve been given that message if that’s what we’re supposed to do. As a human being, I don’t care if you’re male female. To me, our bodies don’t like that. At some point, our cup runs over. We can’t hold all of that in but I love what you said. Whether it’s a friend, a therapist, a parent, a coach, or a teacher. It doesn’t even matter as long as they’re willing to listen. In one word, share. I love that.

Share your pain.

I have a funny feeling you have lots of stories that you’ve learned over the years in your travels, Leon. We’d love to one day pick your brain and hear about them. In all honesty, in watching each of your experiences and I’m sitting at my computer listening to what you said and what they’ve said, every single one of them touched me. Every single one of them just brought emotion out.

I would encourage all of our listeners to go on and do their homework and watch your videos and your show because to me it teaches a lot about humanity, about people and what brings us all together as you started with. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. One of the other things I like to do in these episodes is just because I want the conversation to continue. I know I’m putting him on the spot when I do this, but I asked that if you have somebody and your network, whether it be a friend, a relative or a co-worker that you would like to nominate to normalize it forward to keep the conversation going. I would love to interview that person. Anybody come to mind, Leon?

I do. We’ve been working on a documentary called the Kindness Within. It will be coming out soon. The guy I have in mind was the writer and one of the producers. He’s one of the wisest and kindest men I know. His name is Alpha. I would love to put you in touch with him so you can interview him.

I look forward to that and have you shoot me as information offline. Is it too early to ask, where can our viewers watch this when it does come out?

The movie hasn’t come out yet. If you go to KindnessWithin.com, you can see the trailer and you can see everything that the movies are about.

I can’t encourage our readers enough to do that. you’re a unique individual, Leon. You’re a trailblazer around this concept, what a basic easy important concept of kindness. Thank you so much for joining us and for your time and energy. I appreciate it.

No worries. Thanks for having me.

We’ll talk to you soon. Take care.

 

Important Links

Normalize It Forward | Kami Evans | Mental Health

 

Normalize that it’s okay to ask for help. In this episode, Kami Evans, community leader and Republican candidate for State Senate in District 26, joins us to discuss the critical role mental health plays in building a stronger, healthier community. Kami shares her passion for advocating mental health, supporting families, and fostering open conversations about emotional challenges, especially for young people facing the pressures of modern life. From the importance of listening to small moments to taking steps toward self-care, this conversation offers practical advice and inspiration for creating a supportive environment where everyone can thrive.

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Normalize Asking For Help: On Mental Health And Wellness With Kami Evans

Welcome to Normalize It Forward, the show that openly talks about mental health and wellness. We are here to welcome Kami Evans, a community leader and the Republican candidate for State Senate in District 26. Kami is not only committed to local control, public safety, and fiscal responsibility, but she’s also a very passionate advocate for mental health. She understands the critical role mental health plays in our community’s well-being and is determined to ensure that our schools, our families, and public services are provided with the necessary support they need. With a focus on supporting families with additional needs, enhancing education, and making sure every voice in District 26 is heard in Hartford, Kami is here to share her vision for a stronger and healthier community. Kami, welcome. It’s nice to see you. How are you?

I’m doing well. Thank you so much. I appreciate that wonderful opening. It’s incredibly important to me. I’m looking forward to this discussion.

Mental Health Of Young Adults

I am as well. This is such an important topic to be talking about, as both you and I are parents of young adults. Nowadays, there are so many young adults out there with mental health issues and struggles. I always point out as well that, as a therapist, there are young adults out there who have symptoms, even if they haven’t had an actual diagnosis, but they’re struggling with day-to-day stress and day-to-day doings. Let’s face it, it’s hard to be a teen nowadays.

When everybody is watching every move and sharing every post that has been filtered and managed, I wish there was an opportunity for there to be a campaign of like, “This is the real me. This is what I look like,” and normalizing that. I love what you’re doing because you’re getting the word out to have a conversation.

That’s so important.

 

Normalize It Forward | Kami Evans | Mental Health

 

It was wonderful the way the Olympics tackled mental health this year with Phelps and Simone Biles. People need to know that it’s okay. It’s okay to be okay. It’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to ask for support. Conversations need to be had before it’s too late.

It's okay to be okay. It's okay to not be okay. It's okay to ask for support. Conversations need to be had before it's too late. Share on X

I love that genuine side they were able to put out there. Unfortunately, our community was touched by a tragedy. We lost a young adult. It’s a not-so-gentle reminder that we’re talking about these things for a good reason. When a young adult passes away, they’re permanently missing from our community. It’s that message of “This is why we do what we do.” There are people out there that are struggling.

There are people out there that aren’t saying anything and they need to be because you know what? There are plenty of good people out there who will help them and will understand, at the very least, simply listen. One of the biggest reasons why I named this podcast Normalize It Forward is I want people to understand that it is very normal. Statistically speaking, it’s normal to have emotional issues as a young person.

A lot of times I speak to my daughters about growing up in Stanford and the struggles and challenges I had. I’ve gone through them. I survived them and I managed it. I want them to know that the challenges they have or are experiencing, “You will get through them. Let’s give you better tools to cope. Let’s support you.”

I even tell them, “If you have a friend who needs to talk, make sure you’re available to talk.” If they need a grownup but don’t feel comfortable, I welcome them to come speak to me if they’d like to, or find a grownup that can help guide them. It’s a lot of trust to allow them to be vulnerable and share information that they’re not sure they can share. When we start sharing our stories and our conversations about things that we had success with and things we had challenges with, they realize, “Wow, really?” So far, they only have 16, 18, or 20 years of experience. That’s it.

We forget sometimes as adults that they don’t have a history in their heads of a time when phones didn’t exist or social media didn’t exist. We do, but they do not. The advantage in some ways that we have is we can see the impact of some of these things. I love what you said. All adults can make themselves available to young adults. You don’t have to be a therapist. You don’t have to be a skilled professional. If you can listen, which we all do, you can make yourself available. If more adults did what you said, we would have fewer kids suffering in silence.

I always tell my friends, “You have to listen to the small stuff.” Sometimes our kids are sharing things that may be a little random or things where you’re like, “Why are they telling me this?” It’s the gateway to share the big stuff, the heavy stuff. They’re trying to test the waters. You can’t just jump in the pool. You have to test the waters. Sometimes when my children or even their friends are talking, I’m listening. I’m not sure why they’re telling me that. Twenty minutes into it, they’re like, “By the way, this happened.” I’m like, “Okay.” I always tell my co-parent, myself, and my ex with my kids that we have to listen to the small stuff to get the big stuff.

Self-Care

I like the way you said that. One of the things I talk to a lot of young people about is self-care. I look at self-care in a certain way. It’s a topic that I feel people have access to, and people can choose to treat themselves properly or not. When I throw out the phrase self-care for a young adult, what does that mean to you, Kami?

For me, it’s taking a moment and looking inward. There are so many things we have access to in the state of Connecticut. There are so many things we have access to in America. If we take a moment to be grateful for those things to remind us of everything that we have, and then acknowledge that there will always be challenges. I never want to minimize somebody’s challenge or something that they’re going through, but if we do a little spot check like, “Okay, this is what’s going right. This is where I want to improve. Who can help me get there? What can I do to make myself feel good?”

I posted about going and seeing the horses just to get out of my head. With my campaign, there are a lot of moving parts. I’m not invincible. I’m human. There are days when I’m taking my dog for an extra long walk. I’m going to go. This poor dog’s going to be fit as a fiddle. We take that extra loop so I can put some space between myself and whatever is occupying my mind.

That’s such a great suggestion, take a moment. In this hustle-bustle world, you and I are always so busy, and so are most people nowadays. Take a moment. I’m watching kids that I work with. They’re moving into college, their schedules are changing, and their classes are picking up. Just like we do, they have the opportunity to take a moment and take that breath. If horses are your thing, great. If you like to go for a walk, go for that walk. If you like to do yoga, go do that. Take that moment because our brains need it. Our brains require it in many ways. Here’s the thing, Kami, and I know you know this. If we don’t do it for ourselves, nobody else will.

 

Normalize It Forward | Kami Evans | Mental Health

 

I tell my kids, “No one is going to love you more than you. I love you more than anything, but no one is going to look out for you more than yourself.”

No one's going to love you more than you. Share on X

That’s so important. In the world of young adults, certainly on the college level, anxiety and depression are at an all-time high these days, and so many kids aren’t able to pull back. As you said, Kami, take a breath, take a moment, and recognize that, in many cases, this too shall pass. This is a moment in our world. It may feel like a large moment. It’s a moment in the movie of our life. It’s a square and it’s going to pass.

Mental Health Care Tips

For young adults, that moment may feel anxiety-provoking and very depressing. As a parent and an advocate for mental health, when you think about things kids can do to help themselves, whether it be to relieve those symptoms or put a smile on their face, what’s your go-to? What do you recommend? What do you suggest?

Journaling is so important. This is one concept that I like to do with a lot of people. When I’m working, I always like to write everything that I’ve accomplished. That can even go as far back as learning to walk at eight months old or playing the flute. It could be anything. Sometimes we move so fast that we forget everything that we’ve accomplished. Rode a bike. I don’t care if you were 5 or 15 when you learned to ride a bike. You learned to do that.

Sometimes we move so fast, we forget everything that we've accomplished. Share on X

Put that all down on a sheet of paper and then you could even think about people who have motivated and inspired you. We’re on LinkedIn. There are a lot of very inspirational people on LinkedIn. Every now and then, I will comment on their posts. I’ll tag them or I’ll email them. Surprisingly, they get back. I’ve been communicating with Lydia Finette, who is an auctioneer. She’s written two books and she’s quite inspiring.

Even one time, Ariana Huffington. I was like, “When I grow up, I want to be on it.” She commented back. We’re all interconnected. Everybody that has had success, it’s not overnight. Everybody wants to help other people succeed. Why wouldn’t I want someone to succeed? I want everyone to do well. To be a part of that journey is incredibly exciting.

Your suggestion of writing is awesome. In some ways, it’s a lost art to put a pen to paper and be able to do that. I recommend it all the time to young people to get out of their heads. If young people aren’t interested in writing, they can always use their phones and dictate a journal. There are some great opportunities through apps to do that for a young person. I love that. It untangles the difficulties that the person might be dealing with. In addition, your comment about what we’ve achieved, big or small, is so important because we’ve all achieved something. We tend to overlook our achievements and wait for the next thing. It’s like, “Okay, I did this. Now what?”

Perfect examples are in the Olympics. When they were getting gold medals or whatever medals they were getting, people asked, “What are you going to do next?” I was so proud of them for saying, “Can I enjoy this?” Thank you. I would say, “I’m so proud of you for doing that,” and sit in that for a minute. We are so efficient. We are so fast. We’re able to do a lot of things in a very short amount of time. Because we have that capacity, we should indulge in self-care moments and opportunities. I have one friend who calls me about once a week to check-in. That inspires me to check in on other people too. It’s like, “I see you. I hear you. You are heard. I’m letting you know that I’m here.” It’s quite important. Check in not a text but an actual call. It’s perfect.

We live in this hustle-bustle world where we feel like we don’t have time to do that, but we do. We have time to do that. We have time to check in on people. Whether we’re a young adult or an older adult, that concept of checking in means the world to that person. You never know when we’re going to be in that position or where we need people to check in on us. That’s what makes the world go around, that human, that kindness piece. We can give kindness. We can give that. I feel like that’s part of wellness. I feel like being kind and giving that spirit off to people and realizing we can make the world a better place by checking in on others.

I always tell people, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” That’s all. If you do good, I do good. We’re all doing good. It’s great.

Approaching School

It’s hard to be a young person. I think it’s in what we’re doing in many of those cases. Let’s say I’m checking in on you or you’re checking in on me, Kami. We’re role-modeling for our kids to say, “Adults know how to do that. Kids can too.” It’s easier because they’re checking in through text. You can check in on your friends, especially if you know a friend is having a hard time. I see it all the time in my office. Hard times are being had by all. It’s difficult. It’s difficult being a young adult. We’re fast approaching the end of summer here. We’re fast approaching the beginning of the fall. How are your kids approaching school? How are they feeling about school starting up?

There are a lot of things that they need to do before school starts. Everybody has their summer reading and wrapping up. I told them, “Set up your rooms so you’re ahead of the game. Get into the rhythm of having things organized and peaceful for you.” I understand that a lot of times there’s comfort in the chaos for some reason for some kids because it’s more creative and there’s comfort. At least have a section to set up to have peace.

I moved to a very small house. I’m in an apartment. It’s 850 square feet, a cottage in Westport. I love it. It’s good because every single piece of this home has a purpose. The one thing I always tell my kids is, “Go with purpose. Make sure that everything you’re doing has a reason.” We lived in that 6,000 to 7,000 square foot home, with 200 pairs of shoes and everything, which is great. That’s beautiful for the people who have access to that. This is quite impactful here. I’m looking around because I’m in my house.

 

Normalize It Forward | Kami Evans | Mental Health

 

There’s one thing I can say about you, Kami. I was so excited when I heard you were running for District 26 because you represent change. I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years, and I haven’t seen someone go after change like you do. You tackle it. You have a spirit about you, and you care about people. I want to highlight that last one because not everybody does, and you do. You care about how other people do, whether other people are smiling or other people are doing well. If they’re not, you try to think of ways to help them. For that, I compliment you. I admire that aspect of you. For those voters who are tuning in, I want you guys to know who Kami is. You must understand that side. Kami, that’s unique and special. That’s important.

Thank you. I appreciate that. A lot of that has to do with having the opportunity to be on both sides of being applauded for whatever I did and also being isolated for whatever I did or whoever I am. To understand both sides of that spectrum is not lost on me. Running for State Senate is a heavy lift, but I’m doing what I continue to do, keep an eye on and look out for my communities. I appreciate that. Thank you. Hopefully, I get up to Hartford, and you and I will meet up.

I would love to. This has been awesome. I know you’re busy. I appreciate you taking some time out for my audience and talking about this vital topic of mental health and wellness. It’s something near and dear to me, and I watch people go through difficulties. I truly believe we’re all susceptible. Life is a bit of a roller coaster. We go through it sometimes, and there are times when we’re feeling stable.

I wanted to share that the kids are all going back to school, especially going off to university. I would like to encourage them to register to vote, but also get their support plan, especially going off for their freshman year. Get your support group of people. Find out how you can take care of yourself when you’re away from home. Even if you’re a star at home, you need to make sure you have that same level of support when you go off to school.

Good suggestion, Kami. It is so huge. Regarding the concept of the roller coaster, we can predict that people have difficulty at times when they’re away from home, and you don’t know when that’s going to happen. It could happen the first semester, it could happen later on. But you’re 100% right. Having a go-to, knowing where you can go when you experience some difficulties and need assistance is probably even more important than knowing your go-to.

It’s like rolling it back to the first step of being willing to ask for help because so many kids aren’t for lots of reasons. Let’s face it, we all need help from time to time. If students can get that concept and realize, “You know what? If I need help, here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s my plan.” What a great thought going into college because so many kids end up needing to use that plan. It’s important to have one in advance. 

In that vein, Normalize It Forward is a concept that I want to continue the conversation. I know that you’re always willing to have future conversations, Kami. I typically ask people to nominate a friend, a coworker, a relative, or someone who they think would be helpful to have on the show and continue to talk about mental health and wellness. Do you have somebody in mind that you’d like to recommend?

I think the woman who runs the gymnastics and training academy works with a lot of young adults. I think she has 250 coaches who work under her in three locations. Darcy Riehl Appleby, I will send her info. She’s phenomenal. I think that she is a good person to have a conversation about.

Certainly, someone who’s around a lot of young adults. I appreciate that and look forward to having Darcy on. We’ll talk about how to connect with her offline, but I appreciate your recommendation. I appreciate your time and energy. Kami, I’d like to wish you good luck with the process. We’re rooting for you up here in Northern Connecticut.

Thank you so much. I feel like I’m already winning because I’m in. You’re already winning. I appreciate that.

Have a wonderful day. Good to talk to you.

Take care. Bye.

 

Important Links

 

About Kami Evans

Normalize It Forward | Kami Evans | Mental HealthKami Evans is a community leader and the Republican candidate for State Senate in District 26.

Kami is not only committed to local control, public safety, and fiscal responsibility, but she’s also a passionate advocate for mental health.

She understands the critical role mental health plays in our community’s well-being and is determined to ensure that our schools, families, and public services provide the necessary support. With a focus on supporting families with additional needs, enhancing education, and making sure every voice in District 26 is heard in Hartford, Kami is here to share her vision for a stronger, healthier community.

Normalize It Forward | Bradley Ganus | Mental Health

 

Marc Lehman delves into an open discussion about mental health and wellness with Ellen Bradley Ganus, online business expert, entrepreneur, athlete, and network. Ellen explains why self-care, consistent incremental efforts, and strict time management are crucial in maintaining sound mental health and finding genuine joy every single day. She also talks about the importance of embracing mindfulness practices and the right way to balance eating, sleeping, and exercising to secure significant personal growth.

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Mental Health And Wellness With Ellen Bradley Ganus

Welcome, everybody. This is a day where we’re going to talk about mental health and wellness. This project is called Normalize It Forward. We are welcomed by a fantastic guest, Ellen Bradley Ganus.

 

Normalize It Forward | Bradley Ganus | Mental Health

 

Ellen Bradley Ganus

Ellen, I have to say that as I was reviewing all of the things that you’ve done, online business expert, entrepreneur, athlete, and networker, you are a super passionate individual and, certainly, mom is at the top of the list. You’ve done so many different things. I wonder if I could toss a ball to you and have you tell us a little bit about who Ellen Bradley Ganus is.

For the sake of the readers and the subject at hand, which is all about mental health and wellness for families, children, and so on and so forth, I do many different things. However, everything is motivated by my love of family and wanting to be the best mother that I could be. My children are grown. It is my son’s birthday. He’s 22. My daughter is 25. Even though they’re no longer living at home, we still work and cultivate this relationship at every new stage of life.

My background is as an actress. I’ve been in the arts my whole life. I met my husband on a TV show when I was eighteen at Northwestern University. I have had what feels like so many lives since then. For the last couple of years, I’ve had the great pleasure of aligning with a health and wellness company that has allowed me to provide solutions for people who are looking for foundational elements to living their best life. Meaning, they want to look better, they want to feel better, and they want to be better. 

What I learned over the last few decades is that when we don’t have the key nutrients in our body working right, it doesn’t matter how many affirmations we do or how many counselors we see. If we’re going home and we’re relying on that bag of Fritos, you are what you eat. Part of mental wellness, as it relates to what I’ve done, is really about that nutritional foundation for well-being.

I still work in the arts. I’m a flamenco dancer by night. I’m producing a film. I’m still acting. I’ve always had a love of personal development in every aspect of it, which led me to become a triathlete in the sports world and then allowed me to continue to be physical and active in the dancing world. The last few decades though relative to nutrition and mental wellness have been my great focus.

You’re a person who whenever I’ve asked you what you’re up to, you never say, “Hanging around.” You’re always doing things, which is great. You’re doing wonderful things.

Thank you.

Self-Care

That leads us to the first topic I wanted to chat about, which is self-care. Self-care is so important when it comes to mental health and wellness. I’m curious to throw the topic out to you and ask what self-care is and why it is so important.

Self-care is everything about cultivating a great relationship with yourself. People have it backward. We’re seeking outside validation on a regular basis, especially with social media, likes, comments, and what’s the interaction there. The reality is if we don’t have a relationship with ourselves, if we don’t feel good when the door closes, or if we don’t feel good when we are alone and we can’t enjoy being alone, then we’re not going to have very successful relationships outside of self. Self-care is honoring yourself, being true to yourself, and building a relationship with yourself where you’re able to identify the pain, able to identify the joy, and able to make strategic changes in your daily routines to stay better attached to that path that is helping you live your best life.

I love that. Self-care is one of those things that everybody defines a little differently. You’re right. In many ways, we’ve got decisions to make as a human being. Some of those decisions that we make aren’t healthy. Some of them are. For some reason, selfishness has gotten such a negative tone in our community that it makes it hard sometimes for people, especially parents, to step out and go to the gym, go to a therapist, or do things that we know to be healthy for them.

When you’re exhausted, stressed out, and not taking care of yourself as a parent, you cannot be patient with your kids. You cannot be as loving as you’re capable of being. If you don’t feel good, how can you behave like you are feeling good?

When parents are exhausted, stressed out, and not taking care of themselves, they cannot be patient with your kids. Share on X

No doubt.

It really comes down to sharpening the saw. When we take care of ourselves, we’re in a better place to take care of others.

My next thought about self-care is the fundamentals that I talk about. I know you feel so passionate about eating, sleeping, and exercising. You’re so passionate about doing those things and managing all three. I feel like every human being, including me, has trouble managing all three on a regular basis but we know in the backs of our brains, that’s the key. If we can do those three things, we’re generally in a healthier place. I’ll ask you. Why is it so hard to manage all three? 

Nobody could do everything all at once. What they say is the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. It has to do with understanding that if we’re consistent, even if it’s 1% a day, that 1% can grow into 2%, 3%, 4%, or 5%. It all starts with very small incremental changes, but the key is consistency. If you think of your life like a pizza pie and you divide it into sections, ask yourself, “How much am I moving? Am I sitting at a desk all day? Am I not moving my body? Am I not helping my cardiovascular health? Am I not getting that blood through my body so that my muscles feel agile and good?”

Our vitality is directly connected to movement. It doesn’t mean that you have to be a triathlete. It doesn’t mean that you have to compete in anything. It means that every day, you do something, even if it begins with taking a walk. When you talk about how you manage it, you manage it by focusing on those different slices of the pizza pie a little bit each day and maybe eliminating a little bit of sugar in your diet.

It doesn’t mean you’re going to make a whole different dietary change. Maybe start with one thing. It may be eliminating a little bit of white flour or a little bit of sugar, having your protein before your carbs, or decreasing a little bit of the calories that you’re taking in a day. Choose one aspect of eating. Choose one aspect of exercise. Help yourself go to bed maybe fifteen minutes earlier than you would’ve. Maybe go to bed earlier but also wake up fifteen minutes earlier. How can you give yourself more time in the day? Especially busy families, You have to find the time that everybody else doesn’t need us. It’s the consistency of small incremental changes and then focusing on all those different aspects of self-care.

You said it really well. Your kids are very similarly aged to my kids. We’ve been through that rollercoaster if we don’t have a moment to do these things. I love how you said that. Do it 1 bit at a time or 1 step at a time so it’s not so overwhelming. Let’s face it. When we’re overwhelmed, we throw our hands up and don’t do anything, right?

That’s right. Fear, uncertainty, and overwhelm lead to the same thing, which is inaction. You have to break that cycle. You have to do some sort of pattern interrupt to get you out of that. It also has a lot to do with who you hang around with and what your circle is like.

 

Normalize It Forward | Bradley Ganus | Mental Health

 

Mental Health

No doubt. Healthier individuals tend to breed healthier individuals. The more people surround themselves with like-minded individuals that way, the healthier they become. Speaking of health, the phrase mental health, I’m always fascinated by this. When I say mental health, what do you think of?

I think of my ability to process life, engage with life, and be joyful in life on a regular basis.

That’s a really good definition. Often, I interact with young adults or their parents. Physical health, we got it covered. Everybody knows what physical health is. When we get a broken leg, we go to the doctor. We got that. When it comes to mental health, anxiety and depression are at an all-time high for young people. My area of work is often on college campuses. To me, the amount of kids that are either anxious or depressed is overwhelming. It’s going up each year for lots of different reasons. I wonder from your perspective what you think some of the causes might be that have led to such incremental rises in mental health for kids.

There is so little human interaction. We are being machine-taught. We’re socializing on machines. It has completely broken down the ability for people to know how to communicate and know how to express themselves on all levels. It has skewed our ability to trust because we don’t even know what it is to have a real relationship. We’re measuring relationships by, “Who ghosted me this week?” That has led to where we are. We’re living in unprecedented times politically. With good reason, people are stressed. It’s a very difficult time.

I want to share something with you that I wasn’t going to bring up, but it’s important as a mother, as we talk about anxiety, and as we talk about moving forward. This is why his birthdays are always so special to our family. When my son was two years old, he had a vaccine for diphtheria and tetanus. I was on the National Vaccine Association. I was trying to help the Vaccine Association make vaccines safer for children.

Mental health is one’s ability to process life, engage with life, and be joyful in life on a regular basis. Share on X

In an ironic moment, we took this vaccine, and then two days later, my son’s bone marrow stopped working. We were hospitalized at Children’s Hospital in ICU for a four-year journey. He had no white cells. He had no red cells. He had no platelets. If you touched him, he would bleed to death. The only opportunity for him to stay alive was, at that time, a bone marrow donation which had to be from a sibling. My daughter wasn’t a match.

When we talk about stress, I’m sure that every parent here can only imagine what it would be like to be faced with a two-year-old in a hospital with a PICC line to his heart and not knowing if each day is going to be the last. My daughter was in kindergarten. We lived every single day not knowing what the next day would bring.

Honestly, he’s a miracle. We did forms of chemo that took his body down to nothing, and then slowly, reticulocytes and red cells came back. A lot of gratitude, a lot of life, and a lot of trying to figure out how to move forward from there, releasing the fear of what we experienced and deciding how we are going to live our life and what’s important. Everybody has to say to themselves, “What’s important to me? What brings me joy? How is it that I am contributing to my family, my friends, my community, and the world?” It’s through our contribution and sense of purpose that we can rise above everything.

It was coming out of that journey that made me link arms with this company that was forming in order to educate about the perils of toxicity in our world. By cleansing the body at a cellular level and rebuilding the body, we had a better chance of staying alive. I made that my mission. That turned into the whole nutrition of how we feel, how we look, and all of this stuff that I talked about.

Coming out of that was a complete paradigm shift. Everybody needs a personal paradigm shift. They need an exploration of that inventory of, “Where have I been? How am I feeling? What’s got to change?” It’s up to us to make those changes. When it comes to children, the adults in their lives who love them have to be the ones to foster communication and try to dig in and find out what’s going on in their lives.

When we got out of the hospital, I wanted to expose my children to everything. I wanted to uncover their talents. They were never on screens. They were never playing video games. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that, but everything in moderation. We started teaching my son piano from the hospital bed. He and my daughter ended up being concert pianists. We gave him dance classes. He then started playing baseball. He’s playing for the Big 10 at Northwestern, hoping for his final year for a draft. He ended up playing in the Pan American Games representing Team USA at twelve.

My point is to expose them to things that they love and then help them stay the course and develop those talents. While other kids were getting bored and existing on social media platforms, they were busy honing a craft. They were busy getting better at something they enjoyed. They were entering into their own competitions to test their skill levels and give themselves a way in which to compete against themselves.

They were interacting with other kids that were doing similar things. We were interacting with other families that had that same priority. I know it’s more difficult now than it was then because everything is machines now, but you’ve got to find your space to play a sport, play an instrument, dance to a song, go out with a friend, or have conversations. That’s what most people are choosing to not do. 

That’s very well said. First of all, thank you so much for sharing that story with all of us. What is your son’s first name, if you don’t mind me asking?

 

Normalize It Forward | Bradley Ganus | Mental Health

 

His Name is Tyler.

Let’s celebrate his birthday. Happy birthday, Tyler. What an amazing, resilient young man and resilient family. You guys have been through a lot. I like so much of what you had to say. I told you that I wrote down passionate. When I was talking about you, I wrote down passionate. She’s passionate. As a mom and as a parent, you said it best. We have moved away from this type of interaction, this direct interaction.

I’m a virtual therapist. I see people in my office and I see people online. I’m the first one to say nothing’s going to replace in-person connection. When I talk to young people and they won’t go into a store to talk to a store manager about employment opportunities, it makes me sad. I also know, and you know this, that when kids go off to college and they don’t have that ability to talk to people, how do we as adults expect them to make friends? Let’s say you got a social kid in high school. They go from a bunch in high school to none. They go to college and it’s a whole new world. I agree with you.

Happiness And Challenges

One of the biggest reasons why we’re here is I want to normalize the conversation and get young people and parents to understand it’s okay to have struggles and challenges. What’s more important is what are you doing about them and what steps are you taking to help find your happiness in this world. Happiness comes in all different sizes and shapes.

It has to be defined by the individual. What makes each person happy is going to be different. A large part of mental wellness relative to everything we’re talking about is mindfulness. I raised my kids as yogis. We’re all yogis. Meditation was a part of our life from the minute we were born. I highly recommend that as something to explore.

There are great apps like Balance. You can still get it for free. It’s guided visualizations. They even have sensorial meditations where your phone will vibrate in your hands according to the gongs, according to the storms, and according to whatever the ambient meditation is. It’s such a great way to get your feet wet. Even if you don’t know anything about it, start some practice of getting quiet with yourself.

Time Management

It’s a tool. Let’s face it. We could all use additional tools. Clearly, every kid goes to school with their phone in their pocket, so to have an app on that phone that teaches them how to do things like that is great. Lots of people aren’t experienced with that. I appreciate the suggestion. That’s fantastic. The more tools kids can have, the greater their wellness gets and things like going off to school don’t have to be so daunting. You mentioned mindfulness. Time management is also a part of wellness. Let me ask this. What are some things as an individual you do to manage your time?

I always make my schedule the night before and always leave space in the day for the unexpected and welcome unexpected miracles. I try to not overschedule. I leave what I call blank space. I make my schedule the night before and time block according to activities. Time blocking might be the first two hours of the day for my meditation, my workout, my journaling, and my gratitude. That’s uninterrupted no matter what. You have to have the time blocks that are non-negotiables for yourself.

I’m an entrepreneur. It’s a little bit different from a corporate job. If you have a corporate job, you’re going to have a task list and you’re going to have when you arrive, when you go home, and what your check off for the day is. For me, it’s about what are my income-producing activities, what is growing my pipeline, and all the different aspects of what completes my day. I made a schedule the night before. I time block. I make sure there’s empty space in the day. Every night before I go to bed, I do the same thing so that I have a schedule. Some people feel like, “If I make a schedule, I’m going to feel like I’m in jail,” or something. When you make a schedule, it gives you more free time.

I agree. It gives you the bumpers of the day. I’m 100% on board with what you said. Let me ask you this. You said your kids are 23 and 20.

22 and 25.

Out of curiosity,  from your own observation, what do they do for time management?

They do the same thing. I have a list from my son in elementary school. At the end of the list, he would always put, “Have fun!” They took great responsibility for how they were planning their day. My daughter, Spencer, worked really well with calendars and stickers, making it visually appealing.  She could see, “This is going to be one of my dance classes,” and she could look forward to that. If she had a paper that was due and maybe she was having to put time into something she didn’t want to do, she could always look at the schedule and know it was coming. The key is the night before planning the day. You won’t have your activities for the month but nailing down that daily schedule the night before is everything.

The key to time management is planning the night before. Nailing down that daily schedule the night before is everything. Share on X

It’s a great suggestion. I love that you make time for things that pop up unexpectedly. I love what your son did when he wrote, “Have fun!” If we’re not having fun in our day, we’re missing out. Tomorrow’s another day, but guess what? We can have fun. Making some time, making some space, and making it important to take care of ourselves, which is so unbelievably important.

Ellen’s Nominee

This has been awesome. I appreciate you making the time. I know you’re busy and this is such a great topic to talk through. I feel like you and I could talk for hours about this, but I know we don’t have hours. Let me ask you this. Part of the project of the show is that I’d like to continue the conversation. One of the things I’m asking everybody is to nominate a friend, a coworker, or a relative that you think would be helpful to talk to and interview on this platform and discuss health and wellness. Do you have anyone in your circle that you think would be helpful for you?

It would be terrific if you wanted to interview my daughter. When she was thirteen, we did a campaign called Bridging the Gap. This was about the relevance of young people’s voices as well as the relevance of the middle-aged. We’re living in a world right now where young people who have access to everything sometimes feel that the adults in their lives don’t have important messages anymore. They can figure it out and they can find it on their own.

Through the campaign I did with my daughter and the work we did when she was younger, there was this very interesting place where we met in the middle. We respect each other, listen to each other, and learn from each other. As a philosophy major and literature major, she’s got a wide net of education and experience that will lend to sharing some really important thoughts about the world as a young person but also someone who has grown up in a family that was extremely mindful that also went through some very difficult challenges. I would suggest a conversation with my daughter.

Episode Wrap-up

I would love that. You’ve got my information. Put her in touch with me. We’ll set something up. The life of a young person, and sometimes, I feel like a dinosaur when I say this, is so different from our generation. When you look at the things they go through and the challenges that they have. One of the biggest reasons why I love working with young adults is helping them through that process. I really appreciate it. I look forward to meeting with her and interviewing her. Thank you so much for your time and energy. Have a wonderful rest of your day.  I’ll talk to you soon.

Thank you for having me. Take care.

 

Important Links

Normalize It Forward | Randy Spelling | Self Care

 

Self-care is not selfish. It’s essential. In this episode, life coach Randy Spelling joins Marc Lehman for a candid conversation about self-care and mental health. They dive deep into how self-care is more than just indulgent moments; it encompasses setting boundaries and finding simple joys like a refreshing walk to clear the mind. They discuss the challenges faced by today’s youth, including rising anxiety levels and the impact of digital communication on real-life interactions. Tune in for insights that inspire a healthier, more fulfilling life!

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Embracing Life’s Challenges Through Self-Care With Randy Spelling

Introduction

We are meeting with Randy Spelling. Randy, thank you so much for joining us and taking the time. How’s the weather out your way?

It’s beautiful. It’s probably in the high 70s. It’s going to be in the low 80s. I can’t complain. What about you?

It’s a little warmer than that. It’s about 95 out here. A little warmer than I would prefer but that’s okay, indoor and air conditioning. We’re all good. Out this way, we usually get those temperatures a bit in the summertime. Randy, let me introduce you a bit and I’d love to hear a little bit more about who we are and what you do. Randy is a life coach. I know you’re a former actor. Randy, I have just to admit, I turned on to your show which I love, by the way. Randy runs a show with Brian Austin Green and I believe Brian’s fiancé, Sharna Burgess. It’s called Oldish. We would love to hear more about that and other things that you’re up to you.

I’ve known Brian for what feels like 30 years, but we’ve known each other a long time. He called me out of the blue and said, “I’m watching your videos on Instagram and I’m inspired. Would you do a show with me? I have this idea.” It was to make an impact, reach people, and answer questions that at this age, we say that it’s not an age but it’s seasoned in life that you get to where you start to ask, what is this all about? Why am I here? Is this it? Can I make my days better? Can I do something to feel better?

A lot of what I’m sure we’re going to talk about is normalizing things such as having a bad day, being down, and is there some form of depression. We’re not diagnosing anything but we’re bringing on experts. I’m helping people to have the conversation, ask the right questions and also have some fun and entertainment value while doing it, but to start to tackle like how do I feel better on a daily basis? We know that if we feel better on a daily basis and we get more exercise, if we do some of the things that we know we should be doing and we check those boxes. It adds up no matter what age you are living a better life.

 

Normalize It Forward | Randy Spelling | Self Care

 

Self-Care

No doubt. I couldn’t have said it better and you’re right. What brings us together is the topic of mental health and wellness. No matter how old you are, everybody is susceptible and impacted in some way. Our challenge literally every day in our world is, what are some of those things that you can do? Even small things that you can do to take care and to let yourself feel better and ideally have a better path toward things. That brings me to my first topic I want to ask you about self-care, which I know you know a ton about. I wanted to ask you just your thoughts of like, when you hear the phrase self-care, what do you think of?

When I hear self-care, I think of ways to love myself more. I think of setting boundaries because boundaries are a huge form of self-care. It’s like self-care luxury getting in a bubble bath or getting a massage or getting your nails done. Self-care could be anything. For instance, I came in from work and jumped in to do dishes and dinner with my family. There were about four questions coming at me at once.

 

Normalize It Forward | Randy Spelling | Self Care

 

At some point, my daughter was trying to make this new dish that she wanted to make. The kitchen was a mess and she said, “We don’t have this ingredient.” I said, “That’s okay. I’ll go to the store.” She said, “No, you don’t have to do it.” I said, “I want to do it. I need a walk.” I walked to the store and that four-minute walk was myself there because I could feel the tensity and the stress rising in me. I knew that that wouldn’t end.

It’s free and simple. I walked to the store but I used that for a minute to decompress, to take a look at trees. It sounds like a platitude here, but it’s amazing how getting out of your walls, prompts and voices can connect you to something different. That’s all we need, a rain change, a focus change, or a perspective change and that works wonders.

It’s amazing how getting out of your walls, prompts, and voices can connect you to something different. Share on X

You’re 100% right. As a therapist, I talk a lot about the five senses. The way we make sense of our world is through those five senses. If we shift and we change one of them, that’s why listening to music, going for a car ride or a walk and doing those things can make us feel different and oftentimes, better. Self-care comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes. Some of the little things that you just talked about, it was overlooked a lot by people.

 

Normalize It Forward | Randy Spelling | Self Care

 

Simply setting those limits because like you, sometimes people will come home and they just simply want to be with their family. They don’t want to answer business calls or respond to emails. They want to have some time with their family. In order to do that, you have to go back to setting those limits. It becomes important.

It’s so funny when we talk about these self-care moments, whether they’re small things of going for a walk. It’s something I was saying to my daughter is just talking and saying how you feel is a form of self-care. Saying, “I’m struggling with something.” That’s huge to get out and you see this in your work. Writing is important. Talking is important. Getting anything out of your head and onto drawing, painting, or writing. Getting it out in some form is so incredibly impactful because otherwise, it’s like a pinball. It keeps going round and round and creates this pattern of pressure cooker.

We are self-caring but it’s like you can self-care in the wrong way and you can self-care in the right way. What I mean by that is reaching for your phone. We’re trying to self-care and self-soothe at that moment. It just might not lead to the feeling that you want. Vices and addiction or things like that. People reach for a drink or a cigarette or something.

That, funny enough, is someone trying to practice self-care. “I’m stressed.” “I had a hard day.” “Let me pour myself a cocktail.” That takes the edge off. It’s the way that we talked about it. After a while, when someone’s reaching for a drink and there’s no judgment here. It’s like every single day if you’re reaching for a drink to take the edge off. There can be other ways to do that. It just becomes the habituative.

Very well said. It’s important for people to think of it that way. As you said, there are things to reach for that are healthy and maybe aren’t but I do agree. Anxiety level is in everybody. I treat young adults. Anxiety levels in young adults are so high these days. Way higher than when we were kids. It becomes important to do what you said. It’s to figure out what works best for you.

I have some kids on college campuses. They’ll throw their earbuds in and they’ll walk further. Great. It clears your head. I have some kids that will smoke pot. Again, as you said, not the greatest option but they’re reaching for something to try to figure out a way to care for themselves. Ultimately, what they’re trying to do is to relieve stress.

Youth Anxiety

I want to ask you a question because I’m seeing this, too. I think everyone is starting to see this explosion of anxiety kids. It is amazing to hear the conversations, which I’m thankful for in one sense that there are these conversations happening. It’s more mainstream that kids can say, “I’m feeling anxious or I want to fidget with something or something’s not right.” It’s happening so much. It’s so prevalent. What do you think this is from?

It’s funny. It’s one of the questions I want to ask you.

We’ll ping pong.

I would answer by adding to it and then answering the question. That is, this generation is growing up with so much more around them. Here’s a great example. If you said to most people in their 40s and 50s, “When you were in high school, did you know of anybody who either tried to hurt themselves or completed taking their own life?” They would probably say no. Nowadays, if you say to a kid in their teams that same question. Not only did they know somebody. They’ve got several people on that list. That’s just the reality of their world.

They’re growing up around a lot more extreme depression, extreme anxiety, and extreme anxiety. I certainly don’t think phones have helped. In many ways, phones have created a lot of intensity for kids that isn’t necessary. Quite honestly, I would say to you, right back at what you said earlier. The fact that kids don’t interact this way as much as they had when we were younger has created a tremendous amount of stress and strain.

If I say to a kid, “You’re sixteen, let’s talk about going into a store to apply for a job or you’re nineteen, let’s talk about going back to see a professor for office hours or you’re 21, let’s talk about networking with someone in business.” Kids will frequently push back at me because they don’t like that direct interaction. They’d rather Snapchat or text. They like indirect interaction. Unfortunately, that creates a lot of pressure, stress, and strain. In life, you just simply need to be able to have that interaction. There’s certain things that require it and when those scenarios come up for kids, it’s hard.

Do you think that there’s anxiety and angst around having to have those interactions and it feels so uncomfortable that they’d rather just not engage at all?

I see it all the time. Here’s a great example. Kids go to college. You have a random roommate. That’s terrifying to some kids. You have all these random people in the hallways they don’t know. They’re going from a group of kids they knew in high school to nobody. That’s terrifying to most kids. Believe it or not, Randy, when I treat kids that go to college. They’re more worried about that than they thought about their classes.

I’m not surprised. Do you know how the whole introvert and extrovert thing became popular? You see phases. It’s like gaslighting. In the last couple of years, it is like all the rage and narcissism. I started to watch these trends having done this now for a long time. Introvert, extrovert, and empath became big thing. It’s interesting because this always existed. You have people who are more introverted. People who are more extroverted, but because of phones, the way that kids are communicating through text and not picking up the phone and talking and sitting in person.

It blew my mind. I was telling the story. I was talking to a teenager and she was showing me Snapchat. I wasn’t that familiar with it. I was asking these questions and she said, “This is how we hang out.” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “We’ll be at a coffee shop. My friends and I will sit in a semi-circle or a circle all on Snapchat.” Their snapping. Whatever you call it, snapping each other in the circle. That isn’t mind blowing, so I wonder.

In terms of normalizing conversations, normalizing the fact that it can feel normal to be anxious about social situation. I feel anxious about social situations sometimes. I don’t like small talk. I can connect with people well. When I’m in a big party, the idea of going up to anyone and talking, I don’t love but I thought there was something wrong with me. I created a story around it and then narrative. Now, I made a deficit.

In terms of normalizing conversations, we should normalize the fact that it can feel normal to be anxious about social situations. Share on X

I’m not going to want to step foot at a party for a long time because I was like, “There’s something wrong with me.” I’m bad or I’m not enough or I’m comparing to other people. Having more conversations like this and being able to say yes. For some people, this is easier. This is a skill. It takes practice. Other people are feeling this way and kick up the dust a little around this. We can normalize it and say, “Hey.” Not only is it normal. There’s tools for this.

You use the right word, skill. There are a lot of kids out there. I find most kids out there have to work at this. It’s not a natural thing to do. I’m still thinking about that example you gave. I picture a kid with like five phones at a table. We were groomed as kids to go out and play in the neighborhood and interact. Kids don’t do that anymore. When they get to a situation like a high school or a college. That is terrifying because they don’t have a lot of experience with it.

Here’s the cool thing. If they’re able to hang in there and give themselves and practice it, if you will, each day and have a willingness to join a club or join an activity and say hello. Even small little things instead of someone walking by you in the hallway. Say hi. Interact with them. Take those small steps. You start to see that kid begin to build that skill set, which is amazing. It’s truly amazing.

I have an idea. I think we should do a social experiment and have some tech that pops up emojis. AI is all the big rage. I would love to see the social experiment of kids who feel uncomfortable engaging in real life being able to communicate with emojis and they can talk. I wonder because everything is through text and there’s so much emoji and abbreviations. If that were a part of live interaction, would it make it more comfortable because it brings some of the comfort of the screen and the hiding behind in the way of communicating in real life?

It’s an interesting point. I certainly have kids with their parents. I’ll say sometimes, “Communication is important even if you have to start with text. Let’s start somewhere.” That becomes a pathway. You may be on to something. There are a lot of kids out there with social anxiety and just a resistance if you will to that connection.

You might be onto something. You might be a good link for some kids to be able to be able to make. I will say this, Randy, without something like that. Those kids that just walk by a kid in the hallway will literally sit down next to a kid in the classroom and not say a word. Those kids aren’t building that skill set and remain unhappy. You can see why a lot of young people struggle with that.

Post-COVID Wellness

Another interesting topic. You talk about trends. People talk about post-COVID constantly. I get it. That turned our world upside down and it affected things. Many individuals were in their homes and isolated. Many people lost family members and their jobs. It was a topsy-turvy time for the entire country. World, in many cases. When you think about wellness and you think about how wellness has changed from your perspective since COVID?

The landscape has changed a lot. I went from doing a lot of things in person, speaking gigs and whatever to doing mostly online. That has changed. Here’s how I see it. It’s like if you hear loud noises, if you’re around someone who yells a lot and you don’t like it. You might not know how it’s affecting you, but after a while even when there’s no yelling anymore. When you hear a loud noise, your nervous system flinches. Is it going to be someone yelling? Is it something bad? Am I in danger?

We all have enough information some more than others about trauma because that seems to be such a hot topic. It’s like there’s this trauma response that got activated through COVID. It hasn’t stopped because once it gets activated, then you have the political landscape. You have all of the polarization in everything. You have wars. You have live direct feeds of people being attacked or murdered. All these things, unfortunately, that are happening but the live feeds of seeing is just reactivating the fear and the stress response.

I feel like everyone is walking around like this, but the sun’s out. It’s just like we go back to life as normal. There’s all of these things happening in the background that are causing so much static. If we’re looking for solutions here, I tell people weekly, there’s no shame in turning off the news feed. You’re not a bad human being for not watching 24/7. Some people are like, “I’m being silent.” No, you’re taking care of yourself.

If you’re not taking care of yourself, it can be very hard for you to take care of those around you if you’re a parent or you’re a partner or you have to do things in the world. That’s okay. We talked about self-care. Go out and go for a walk. Unplug if you need to. Say no to things more. Say yes to things that fill you up and light you up. We have to prioritize this and put it like this. When you have a health crisis, you prioritize things pretty quickly.

I’m not labeling here. I think to a degree, we all can contend with having a health crisis. Some are more on the spectrum than others. Some are more in dire need, but if we look at it like this, I am having a health crisis. What do I need to do to care for myself better? What do I need to do to lower the threshold of stress because there is just too much? Even if you can’t see it, it’s not invisible. It doesn’t just go off and eaters. It has Innovative affecting and you will start seeing health things, unfortunately, in the coming months or years. We have to lower this threshold of stress because it’s too high for most people.

I would agree. I’m thinking about that. You mentioned the election. As I mentioned before, I treat a lot of kids on college campuses. In the last few months before their semesters ended, there were encampments popping up all over college campuses and talk about unpredictable. One kid said to me, “I didn’t see this on the tour.” These are scary things that are in their world that they have no control over.

Advice For Young People

To your point, trying to figure out something they do have control over and ways to manage that becomes critical. It just becomes so important. Probably a good segue. Let me ask you this. I feel like for many adults, our journey in life has involved a lot of suggestions and advice from people. I know, for me, I had several important mentors along the way that guided me well. Randy, if you were talking to young people directly. Is there a piece of advice that you’d want them thinking about and considering?

There’s so much. I think talking and expressing yourself cannot be overestimated. It just can’t. Daily, I have people of all ages who I’ll ask a question. They have probably thought about the answer a million times but saying it and hearing themselves say it out loud like we talked about. It gets it out of their head. Once it’s out, then they have the ability to go, “Do I want to read and digest that or not?” It’s like regurgitating something and going, “That’s what was in there? I don’t know if I wanted to do that.” Please don’t overestimate the power of speaking in witness of people.

Talking and expressing yourself cannot be overestimated. Share on X

That can be a mentor, a therapist, a coach, friends, or family. Friends and family are always the best depending on how support is and non-neutral or neutral they can be but still, it is so vital. Another piece of advice I would say is just from growing older and yes, I have the show called Oldish, things change by decade. They do. I have two daughters and I will tell you what they go through as a kid and in middle school, coaching people and watching teens 20s or 30s. What you care about in high school, in your twenties starts to change as you change and grow.

There is a shedding like snakes and lizards when they shed their skin. You do shed skin over time. I hope to instill hope in the fact of waiting in the idea that if you can get through, if you can navigate through, learn some tools, regulate yourself, and navigate things better things can and will usually do get better if you’re just practicing a little awareness. Putting your head in the sand and not dealing with anything that you have to deal with yourself. You’ll have to deal with it at some point. Practicing a little awareness like we’re talking about and moving through. You will get to a different rest and then a different raft. All of the sudden, you’re on an island and, all of a sudden, you’re on land. You’re like, “I’m building a house.”

Moving in a good direction. I love that. That was a tough question I asked and you handled it well, Randy. The power of conversation is so important. I just find so many young people tend to hold everything up and in their hearts. They don’t let it out. What they often find, especially in my office, is when they do, now we can massage it, work with it, talk it through and come up with solutions.

It doesn’t have to be a therapist. It can be a coach. It can be as you mentioned a family member or a friend. It could be a lot of people, but find your person. Finding your person is so important. Randy, let me ask you this because I don’t want to take too much of your time. Part of the conversation what normalizes it forward is I hope to continue the conversation. I hope to help normalize mental health and wellness and give people an understanding of we are all susceptible. We are all dealing with these things. The more we talk about them, the easier they become. I often will ask for someone to nominate a friend, a co-worker, a relative, or someone who you think might be helpful for me to interview next so the conversation can continue. Can I put you on the spot and ask?

I have a friend in colleague and I just saw something that she posted. I thought of her. Her name is Sura Kim. Her handle is Surah Flow. She has been a coach for a long time and she’s moved into the meditation space. What I love about the work that she does is it’s approachable. One thing that I hear literally at least three times a week, “I know I should meditate more.” People always have this idea that meditation is such a staple of wellness, which it should be but the way to approach it feels so daunting. I love the work that she’s doing because it’s approachable and easy. I think it could help a lot of people.

I appreciate it. I find you tremendously approachable. Thank you so much for that. I will reach out to her and connect. Randy, please tell our readers where can they find you? Where can they find your show?

You could find me on Instagram at @RandySpelling. I have many offerings and things on my website. It’s RandySpelling.com and the show is Oldish. You could read it anywhere. We have a website where you can get more footage and different things. It’s on OldishPodcast.com and the first episode of Season Two comes out soon.

I can’t wait. I’ve been watching it. I’m excited to see Season Two. Randy, thank you so much for your time, energy, and your thoughts. I appreciate it.

Thank you. You, too. Good to talk with you.

Thank you. Take care.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

 

About Randy Spelling

Normalize It Forward | Randy Spelling | Self CareRandy Spelling is an American life coach, author, and former actor, best known for his work in helping individuals find purpose, fulfillment, and balance in their lives. As the son of legendary television producer Aaron Spelling, Randy grew up in the entertainment industry but later shifted his focus to personal development and wellness.

Through his coaching business, Randy Spelling Coaching, he guides clients in overcoming obstacles, building self-awareness, and achieving personal and professional growth. His approach emphasizes mindfulness, self-discovery, and practical strategies for living a more meaningful and authentic life.

NIF - Normalize It Forward - Marc Lehman | Melissa Bernstein | Mental Wellness

 

Just as we prioritize physical health, it’s equally important to invest in our mental wellness. In this episode, Marc Lehman talks with Melissa Bernstein, co-founder of Lifelines, about the importance of mental wellness for young adults. Melissa discusses the societal pressures that can lead to an existential crisis and emphasizes the importance of authentic connections for a fulfilling life. She offers practical tips for parents and educators to support young people’s mental well-being through self-care, meaningful connections, and pursuing passions. Whether you’re a college student, a supportive parent, or prioritizing your mental health, this episode offers valuable guidance and inspiration.

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the episode here

 

Nurturing Mental Wellness In Adolescents: Melissa Bernstein’s Guide To Supporting Their Growth

Lifelines

We will be meeting with Melissa Bernstein. I’m excited to talk to Melissa about adolescent mental wellness. I hope everybody is doing well. Melissa Bernstein, welcome. I’m very excited to talk to you. I thought maybe what we could do to kick things off a little bit is talk a little bit about Melissa and Doug and then give us a little background on that. Also, certainly a little background on Lifelines, what that is and what you’re currently doing. Is it okay if I put you in the hot seat?

No, it’s fine.

Maybe just tell us a little bit about Melissa and Doug, Lifelines and what you’re doing. I’ll throw a little bit of information in about U Are Heard. I do have some questions, so certainly afterwards we’ll get into that.

Doug and I, I think when we grew up the conventional path for your livelihood was to go business or law or medicine. It was very pre-professional and we both went that path. Not because it was what our soul wanted us to do but because society was like, “Go that path.” He went into advertising and I went into investment banking of all things. After a very short time, we were both miserable. He was more suited for what he did but I am a like white space creative who loves words and notes. Numbers don’t do anything for me.

I became disillusioned and fell into an existential crisis like, “What am I doing each day?” Doug, thank goodness for him, we were dating. I was probably 21 and he was 23 at the time. We’re like, “There has to be something better than this.” We went away for a weekend in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts and we decided we’re not leaving until we decide what can get us out of bed each day. We decided that we wanted to do something that involved children. Without him, I never would have had the courage to leave even though I was so miserable. I think I might have stayed there if he had given me the courage to leave with him.

 

NIF - Normalize It Forward - Marc Lehman | Melissa Bernstein | Mental Wellness

 

Awesome story and taking from that, Melissa, for all of the young people that are watching or re-watching this, pay attention to your passion. It’s important.

It’s so true. We were told, “Don’t listen to your passion. Follow what gives you a solid stable career.” When you do that, when you deny your soul, it’s going to sneak up on you and you won’t have a choice. We were just dating. We weren’t in any position. Nobody started companies back then but we pulled our meager savings and decided to make products for children.

That’s awesome. You’re very humble. Your products are and were amazing. Most people I know when I mentioned to them Melissa and Doug, they know exactly what I’m talking about and always have a story. I’m sure you’ve heard millions of them. Many amazing things that you guys created and so many homes that you impacted with a variety of things that you guys made over the years. Now, this was when, Melissa? Give me a time frame.

This was in 1988. How crazy is that? We just celebrated our anniversary.

Congratulations. That’s awesome. An amazing accomplishment and amazing business. As I said, impacting families and children everywhere. I’m curious, out of that, you’ve developed Lifelines. When did Lifelines begin?

It began in 2020. It mirrored my own personal journey because Melissa and Doug had been the most magical experience ever but it was no longer an entrepreneurial venture. It wasn’t no longer a white space innovative company because we were 1,000 people. It became like a pretty big business. We didn’t know how to do that. We weren’t good at doing that and we didn’t want to operate a big business that was beholden to a lot of different things but it happened.

We still would have stayed there. I’m sure, but it so happened that we knew that there were better people to run the company. I was also going on my own mental health journey that led me to develop Lifelines. It wasn’t meant to be another company. In fact, the one thing Doug and I said is we will never and we put never in bold caps and underlined it. We will never start another company. The fact that we are doing this again and now have like 40 plus people on our team is insane. We both are insane.

It’s passion driven and experience driven. Sometimes when you get involved in these things, that’s how they develop. Let’s talk a little bit about what Lifelines is.

Lifelines was my chapter two. My chapter two was that I had been harboring a lot of mental health issues. I am creative and that came with a very stigmatizing personality that made me hypersensitive in many different areas. My whole life, I was ashamed by those hypersensitivities because if I was allowed to do what I naturally do. I be muttering to myself like a headband in some corner because I’m an idea person. I see ideas, words, and notes in my head but I trained myself because I got a message very early.

I also ponder dark things. I go very low and have had meeting crises and fall into a nihilistic tendency, which we can talk about. It’s part of my imagining in being able to ponder higher realities. I think about meetings and deep things like that a lot. When I got the message early on that like, “Do not show that dark side to the world because nobody wants to hear it, Melissa. Go out and play and be like the other kids.”

I remember even as a toddler thinking like, “Don’t they realize I want to go out and play and be carefree?” I can’t. I’m feeling this despair that’s raging through me and nobody seems to care. I worked myself into a person that would be acceptable by societal standards. That involved three Ps. It involved pleasing, which I became the ultimate pleaser. Putting myself not even on the list and becoming a martyr serving to the extent that everyone needed me and loved how I supported them but never asking for anything in return. Which leads you to martyrdom which is a deep undercurrent of resentment.

I became a perfectionist who felt like I had to be perfect in everything, my performance, behavior, and looks. Anything short of exemplary was a failure and that leads to an otter breakdown because perfectionism is inhuman and we are imperfect as humans and then performance. I became the ultimate actress who could put on a show and convince people that I was happy, go lucky and carefree when inside I was very much the opposite.

I was able to put on that façade through my 20s and 30s. That was who I was. I didn’t even realize I was putting on a façade. That became my persona but in my 40s, right around like 2018, probably. I started feeling that cry of my authentic soul to be seen. I kept saying, “Shut up, Soul. You’re going to stay out there.” It wouldn’t listen to me. It kept saying, “I need to become authentic and I need to express my truth.” It got so loud that I ultimately went on a show and expressed this.

I started to have these revelations that I suffered from something called Existential Depression, which is like a crisis of meeting which we can talk about and I bared my soul. That led to the beginning of Lifelines because Lifelines is my memoir that I wrote after I did the show and received hundreds of the most powerful soulful letters, I’d ever gotten in my life of people saying, “Oh my gosh, you gave voice to something I’ve experienced my whole life. I’ve never had the courage to share.” I thought if I could show people they’re not alone and let them see that someone who on the face of it and looks like she has everything is still struggling every single day, even now. Maybe I can help them to find their light in the midst of a lot of darkness.

I applaud you over and over again. Number one, when you and I first met, Melissa, one of the connections I made as well, “This is such an authentic person.” I know you’ve done a lot of work in your own journey to get there. You talked about the mask that you wore or wore in the past. I think that Lifelines as well as many other things that are out there for young people are so important for individuals to recognize that we can do two things in life. We can pretend all the time or we can become our authentic self. When a person works and a lot of times goes through therapy to get to that place, it is extremely powerful. I applaud you for being as open as you are about your own journey and certainly, appreciate all of that.

I have no choice now. I’m so glad I did it. You don’t realize how exhausting it is to live a lie. People I speak with who are in a state of despair always use the same word which is exhausted and it was. It’s exhausting because you’re putting on a show to hide your truth. You have to keep yourself quiet with all your energy.

Mental Health Challenges

You know a bit about what I do and with U Are Heard, me and my stuff are constantly working with the young adults. That’s a good segue into talking about wellness because to me, one of my big motivators when I first started many years ago was looking at the statistics of how many young adults don’t get help. I was shocked at this huge gap and then started to look into why. You’d come up with things like this stigma which makes sense, a person’s stigma and the community stigma. You look at access to care and all of the things that probably don’t surprise you.

You look at the concept of it’s easier to just keep moving on or at least people say it is. I know over the years, thousands of kids that have taken a step, whether it’s an email or phone call or gone to a counseling center and they haven’t had a good experience. What do they do? They do nothing and they keep trudging. As parents, providers, and adults in the community, we’re looking at this huge population of young adults that need services and aren’t getting them.

Again, I come back to your ability to be so authentic. It’s a role model on many levels for people to say, “We’re all human beings. We are all susceptible.” I tell people all the time. I’ve been to therapy myself several times. I’ve done my own work. The second we get to a place where like, “Not me.” We’re wrong. We’re missing something. We’re all susceptible.

Moving into that topic, I’m curious to ask you. We’re living in a complicated time as you know and the suicide rate for young people has gone up tremendously statistically ten years ago is number twelve. It’s now number two in terms of leading cause of death for young people. Anxiety and depression as you know, since COVID has exponentially gone up. I’m curious to ask you, when you think about the biggest stressors that you notice for young adults. What comes to mind?

This is directly related to Lifelines because our inaugural partner is Barnes & Noble College. We’re part of their Be Well, Be You initiative which is exactly about wellbeing and tools for wellbeing. They shared a whole bunch of stats with us from inside higher Ed. They did a lot of surveys and 83% of students are saying that stress is negatively impacting their college experience.

According to that survey, they say that pressure to perform is number one. Now, I see another stat that talks about money and other things, but the pressure to perform is a scary one. When did learning become secondary to performance? It’s so insane that they’re so worried about grades that they can’t even enjoy learning about new things. It’s sad.

I know. Somewhat rhetorical I know when you said it but I’ll answer you by saying when I look at middle school and high school kids, it starts way back then. Where there’s this concept of, if I’m not taking 5 million AP classes. When you and I were in school, straight As was a 4.0. That’s like average now. It’s like I get a 4 or 6, weighted, and unweighted. There’s all this terminology. To me, we live in a bit of a world where good is not good enough.

It’s so true. We’ve gotten so caught up in the extrinsic that the extrinsic, the things we do for joy in meeting are completely lost. I have six children. I have had the children experience. We had a bunch of six graders over. I remember they were like sitting in a circle and they were talking about the pressure they felt to get into college.

They’re in 6th grade.

I was like, “Oh my Gosh, are you guys feeling that?” They were like, “Yes, we’re so terrified.” They’re like, “First, you got to get in the honors classes then you got it.” They already had the path and it looked more terrifying to them in 6th grade. In Melissa and Doug, I talked a lot about play and how play became something that parents didn’t believe in because it wasn’t a skill that you could put on a resume and this idea of making these children adults.

When they’re now little kids, we’re professionalizing everything they do and making it into these route scheduled activities. We’re basically taking the joy out of life. By the time they get to college, they’re burned out and exhausted. A lot of them are depressed because they don’t even know who they are and what they want to do with their lives. They have no passion for anything.

It’s funny you should say that because I often thought in my town, when I was younger in 6th grade, we went up to the junior high school and then recess was gone. People would say, “How was school? How was junior high school?” I said, “It stinks because I miss recess. That was like my favorite time of the day.” Back then, you’d ask kids and that’s what they’d say. They’d say recess, gym or lunch. Nowadays, it just gets absorbed.

I’ve met kids in Junior High School, 7th and 8th grade where they’re not taking lunch. They’re taking a class. The concept of, I like how he said that it’s very accurate, we’re taking away the fun. I worked hard as a therapist when I’m talking to kids. We do four things. There’s a formula I developed when it comes to college. There are four things that all kids need to do in order to succeed and have a smile on their face.

It’s funny, Melissa, two of the four things are so social. When I talked to parents about that, they’re aghast like I’ve got academic in there. That’s one, but I want kids to have fun. I want kids as human beings. We need to find a way to let the steam out and enjoy ourselves. Otherwise, we become anxious, depressed or both.

One of the most profound things I’ve read is the surgeon general’s report on loneliness. It came out a few months ago and said that loneliness is an epidemic. If you read his report, I suggest everybody read it. It is so mind blowing. The group that is the loneliest is 18 to 24 year olds in the throws of college. There’s a whole process and I’ve written a practice for myself called practice makes purpose, which talks about you can’t even make those authentic connections until you begin to discover who you are.

 

NIF - Normalize It Forward - Marc Lehman | Melissa Bernstein | Mental Wellness

 

One of the problems with college students is even though there are among thousands of peers because most of them have never had a childhood. They’ve been resuming their whole lives. They’ve never done that inward journey to discover who they are, what they love, and what their passions are. Their friendships and connections are also inauthentic and are filling them up in the way that true connections are. They may not be alone but they’re still lonely in the midst of having all these superficial inauthentic connections.

Role Of Parents

It’s a great point. That’s the exact word, superficial. They may have people around them, but they’re not actual friends or deep friendships with those connections. I see that all the time with kids. It’s funny, for the high school kids transitioning into college, all they want is to have that group around them. In some ways, kids don’t necessarily even care if they’re deeply connected friendships. They just want those people around them so they’re not feeling that loneliness. That’s a fascinating comment about loneliness. Let me ask you this, as a mom of six, what can we do as parents? What can we do to assist our kid’s mental Wellness? What do you think?

It’s the hardest thing to do ever, but Young said it many years ago. He said the biggest threat to children are their parents’ unrealized dreams. The best thing we can do is allow our children to be who they truly authentically are. Try hard not to pressure them to be something that they can or don’t want to be. When you allow your kids to flourish, and I’m not saying you give them gentle guidance. You don’t let them do whatever they want but you let them follow their passions.

You don’t push them into hockey because you were a hockey player who didn’t get their due. You don’t force them to play year-round sports if they don’t want to. That’s hard for parents and it was hard for me. I learned by screwing it up a lot of times. That’s why I joke, we had to have six children because I messed up so many times that we need to keep having more to fix the problem.

That’s how we learn.

The last two, I’ve become much better at allowing them to be who they are. It’s giving me such joy. They’re not traditional learners. They don’t go to the high-pressure school but they’ve found their people and a place where they belong. It makes me feel so gratified to know that I got my ego out of it and allowed them to do what they wanted to do.

Very well said. I feel like I say this all the time because I watch staff members in high school, families throughout middle in high school. I watched them helping their kids tour schools and pick schools.

Doing their work for them. How many parents are doing their kid’s papers for them? A lot.

Very rarely do they ask the basic question, are you happy? The answer for most kids, they’ll say, “Probably not.”

It’s because the parents aren’t happy. As much as I went into parenthood saying, “I want the best for my kids. I want them to be who they are.” I had so many expectations. I’m shocked when I thought about it and I saw the way I was pushing my kids in ways that I wanted them to be to de-validate my ego. It was horrifying.

I had an experience with my very first one where I pushed him. I was a classical guitarist who thought about playing professionally. I ended up giving it up to go to college and I was pushing my son to play classical guitar not realizing it. Totally unconsciously. One day, I noticed he wasn’t practicing at all. I’d take him to his lessons and he’d be hanging his head one day. He came up to me and said, “Mom, I have to tell you something.” I was like, “What, sweetie?” He looked so depressed and started crying. He said, “I’m a baseball player. Not a guitar player.”

I didn’t even hear it the first time. I was like, “What did you say?” He said, “I’m a baseball player. Not a guitar player,” and my heart broke. I was literally like, “Oh my gosh, me.” I’m the play advocate and I messed up my kid. I pushed him to do something that he hated. We ended at that day and he did love baseball. Baseball, by the way, also became professionalized. By the time he thought about playing in college, he was so brutal over making it a job that the same thing happened. We messed up our kids and it’s inadvertent. We love them. We’re trying to do our best but it messes with their head when they’re trying to live out our dreams.

We love our kids, and we’re trying to do our best but it messes with their heads when they’re trying to live out our dreams.

I take so many things from that but one of which is we’re going to make mistakes. It’s important for us to learn from them. I also think that it’s important for us to listen to our kids because a lot of times our kids will give suggestions. They may say it once and as you said, “I didn’t hear it the first time.” It’s very important to listen to our kids because they’re going to talk a little bit about what their passions are and their passions may be very different from ours and that’s okay.

The funny thing is we want this homogeneity but the truth is, the weirder and more different they are, like the more exciting it may be. My kids that have had the strangest passions are the ones who are, I’d say the most authentically, that they themselves and have done the coolest things in life.

They’re interesting also because it’s like something that maybe we don’t know about.

Also, if you understand creativity. It’s about collecting ingredients in very diverse domains and mixing them into a recipe that becomes this like secret sauce. You think like, “My kid’s interested in that. What good is that going to serve them in life?” Inaugural to them being a truly innovative and creative person. Unfortunately, you go into parenthood with no skill. Zero training.

We have to do more than to adopt a pet then have a kid. Trust me, I’ve adopted a lot of pets, the rigor. What’s our house going to like? With kids, you don’t do anything. You’re a flawed person. I’m speaking of myself. I’m a flawed person so, of course, I’m going to make all these mistakes with my kids. If I had known some of these things, I’m sure I would have been better served.

Life is a journey and part of our process to learn from all those things. If you think about it way back when we learned math, spelling, and handwriting and all those fun things. The only way you learn is by making mistakes.

 

NIF - Normalize It Forward - Marc Lehman | Melissa Bernstein | Mental Wellness

 

Trial and error.

Addressing The Routine Of Young Adults

Why would parenting be any different? I’m curious about your thoughts. Wellness is a topic that I’m around all the time and I talk to students about all the time. It’s one that I find the treadmill of life talking about before. Kids are just in this routine. They’re doing everything they can to get the best grades they can get and open up the best opportunities they can get, but they’re not thinking about their wellness.

They’re not getting enough rest, not eating, and not hydrating. They’re not seeing a counselor when they need to and not exercising. They’re not doing the basics. I know one of the philosophies behind what you guys do in Lifelines is wellness. I’m curious, when you think about young people and the easy things that some of them may be able to do that maybe they’re not. What comes to mind?

In my journey, I realized that I can’t just wing this. I’m too much at risk of going low or going high and not coming back like to Earth. I created a framework for myself that’s in the form of a practice called Practice Makes Purpose. That’s what I’m talking about when I go to speak to college students. It’s basically four branches in the metaphor of a tree that helped nurture your physical wellbeing.

Practice makes purpose.

It’s self-care. It’s your mental wellbeing through grounding, detaching from thought, and coming back to the present moment. It’s emotional wellbeing through connecting to yourself first. Only once you have connected and can love yourself, can you connect to that greater group. We call it our grove because it’s trees. The last piece is our spiritual well being, which is a combination of two wings of a bird. One is play and one is purpose. To sore like a bird, you have to have pretty equal measures of play which leads to joy and purpose which leads to meaning.

It’s through being able to satiate your physical needs, being able to get out of the past and the future and come home to the present moment. It’s being able to understand who I am. What are my unique gifts I want to share with the world? Connect to people who want to be your tribe in that and then ultimately, how do I take that gift I have transcended myself to engage in purpose? Also, how do I measure that with ample amount of play that brings my life joy and doesn’t give me empathy fatigue from too much purpose.

I love that. What a great framework. Wonderful. It captures a little bit of everything. As I’m listening to it, I’m noticing not once did you say cell phones or social media, which is good. Number two, I’m thinking the word balance. It comes through as you’re talking about all these things and trying to strike that balance. Very often do I see young people playing too much or not playing enough. I know students that are in the library way too much 8 or 9 hours a day.

I think that’s why when they’re in high school, when you’re seeing them before they go to college. This is what happened to me because I had a complete breakdown in college and so are a few of my kids. The reason is because they go to college without any practice at all. It’s becoming all about social and academic. If one or both of those fails, then they’ll fall into an abyss of nothingness because you don’t know. It’s hard if you don’t schedule it and create a very deliberate practice. It usually doesn’t happen and then you wonder why you’re falling so low. It’s like because I’m not sleeping, as you said. I’m eating horribly. I’m not doing anything that’s bringing me joy. Everything is extrinsic and you can start to see.

It’s a great point. For those parents that are reading, I want to make the point added on to that, Melissa. There are some basic things in high school before they get to college they can begin to do because these are all things, whether it’s self-care, eating, sleeping, exercise, journaling, learning about nutrition, or organization, checking your email each day, or having a good system going into college. I love how you said scheduling time, whether it be time to get productive things done. Even scheduling time to have fun, I know that sounds weird but that way, you know it won’t go anywhere. You know it’s there.

I even tell that to my kids because they get very panicked about all the stuff they have to do. I’m always saying, “Break it into bite-sized chunks and reward yourself. Say, ‘If I finish these first two pages of my paper, I can go for a walk. I can even watch a show that I like.’ Make it a reward system,” which doesn’t make it overwhelming and allows you to give yourself the breaks that you desperately want.

Also, motivates you. Let’s face it, kids need that. I like what you said earlier, the commentary around the surgeon general’s thoughts around loneliness. In college, the stakes are high. I don’t think parents recognize that going in. There’s tuition, grades and everything’s new. Kids that I work with, as you said when they fail something, their first thought is, “My life is over.” My first thought is, “No, it’s just beginning. This is an opportunity,” but nobody’s ever said that to them because it’s just push.

What they’ve done to get into college, they’re already exhausted. They basically pulled out all the stops like postering themselves to get to the space and now it’s only just beginning, the competition. Everybody’s at that level and suddenly it’s like, “I have four more years of this?” It could be overwhelming to some.

It’s funny, I had a very similar story. My son is a junior in college. When he was in 6th grade, he took a math class that he qualified for. It was a 7th grade math class. I find myself sitting in this presentation in 6th grade. The parents are all in 6th grade. All of a sudden, the presentation which was the PowerPoint shifts into AP and honors like their life. I’m like, “We’re still talking about eleven-year-olds. What’s going on?”

I went up to the presenter afterwards and I said to him, “I’m a little blown away,” but that’s an indicator. That happens in a lot of towns. There’s a track that gets set up and until the parents say, “I don’t want my kids playing six sports every season or doing every activity under the sun.” I met a kid who told me he had done every activity offered at his high school. How does he even have time for that?

That’s the other thing that I tell so many kids. They missed the point. Colleges don’t do that. They want you to show that you are passionate about something and get into it. They much rather see that than act like you’re trying a little of everything because that shows that you have no passion and you’re stopping. It’s much more important. If we stopped thinking about the goal and lived in the verb. We’re living in the now like what college you’re in as opposed to realizing that the journey is the path.

In Buddhism, the journey is supposed to be the path. This journey is awful. Everybody is suffering so much to get to something that’s going to spark more suffering. We have to say to them, “I get that you’re in a system that is valuing this.” Some would say, when you have children, a lot of play experts Peter Gray, one of my favorites says, “Before you have children, you should think about the community you want to raise them in and what their values are.”

As my daughter said to me many times, “In the community we are in, Mom, we can’t not care.” Every time I said, “Don’t worry about your grade. They don’t matter.” One of my daughters said, “We have like three streaming apps of GPA at our high school. Literally, it’s telling you your rank on every test you upload. I can’t not care. This is the town I’m in.” Which horrified me. Those decisions, if you want to make them, you can make them early earlier on. Visit your schools and see what messages they’re giving. Choose a different path because it is hard. If you’re in a community, that’s the path every single kid is on. Yes, you could be like, “It doesn’t matter. I’m fine with whatever you do,” but it’s harder.

It’s a great point. As graphic as this commentary is, I can’t tell you how many kids that are number one in their class over the years that I’ve hospitalized for severe eating disorders, severe depression, and severe anxiety.

I was there. I was one of those kids. I was a complete and utter mess. I had a horrible eating disorder because that stuff just makes you feel like the bar keeps getting higher and you can never reach it.

Looking at ways in which parents can help kids enjoy life, have fun, put a smile on their face, and not be so intense. Maybe take a break from the treadmill that school creates. All of those things are important and a lot of it’s done through role modeling.

I was going to say the exact thing. If we are showing ourselves to be uptight, intense and worrying all the time then what are we showing them? We do have to model that. It’s okay to mess up. One thing my husband has done well. Not what one of many things but one thing he’s done especially well is he was a horrible student. He always shared stories and his mother would get so angry because they lived with us for a while.

As parents, we do have to model that it’s okay to mess up.

He would always when he failed stuff and got C’s. He’s been so successful, but I always love those stories because he was showing them like it’s okay. He went to a very average State University and he’s done anything he ever dreamed of and having gone to a different school wouldn’t have changed that at all. I always love the fact that he was that voice of reason like, “Look at me. I didn’t mind.

A good example. Again, sometimes families and kids will merge the concept of success and happiness. The kids will say, “I have to go to a certain school. I have to get a certain GPA. I have to do this. I have to do that.” I have to say to them, “That’s just school. That’s your education. That’s not life. That’s not success. Your life, your occupational path starts after that.” A lot of that comes down to hard work and passion. How passionate are you?

Your point, Melissa, from earlier is a great one. Students in the family are finding that their passion is going down and down as they are taxed and stressed through college. That’s not helpful because then they hit the working world with no energy toward what they want to do. It’s important for families to put some energy into that.

I was going to say there’s this amazing graph in meaning logo therapy which has scaling two through meaning which has axes. One is happiness and despair. The other is success and failure. It shows that they’re separate completely separate axes. It’s all about how you perceive it because many of the most successful people, the number one in their classes, are utterly miserable. Many people who’ve experienced failures learn from them and they’re the biggest gifts ever. If you’re thinking that they’re on the same plane, they’re not. It’s important to realize that because it frames that when we say we’re trying to strive for success. It means that we might get there and we will be happy at all.

I can’t tell you how many examples I’ve seen of that in my career. I’ve seen so many adults that are surprised by that. They are successful but they’re so unhappy. For families, it’s important to acknowledge and to recognize we’re living in a bit of a different world. Not only is success, as you were saying, in a lot of communities top of the list. There’s a competition. We’re also living in a world where mental wellness isn’t great.

We haven’t rebounded since COVID the way I don’t think anyone’s wanted to. It’s important for families to be thinking about that. As a therapist, I’m biased but for kids, if they’re sparking symptoms and having difficulty, letting them know, “Not only is there help out there. There’s help that looks differently than it used to.” It used to be, I’m going to go and speak to a 110 year old person with a huge long beard. I’m being a little extreme, but you know what I mean.

The way in which helped looks different. Giving young people that ability to say, “It exists. You just have to decide if that’s something you want.” In so many instances, Lifelines being a great example of this. Help doesn’t necessarily mean sitting down with a counselor in an office to talk through things. A lot of help is acknowledging that there’s a journey that needs to occur and you’re deciding not to right now but it doesn’t mean that you can’t.

Exactly. It’s about the tools that are there. A lot of times kids aren’t ready or they don’t think they want it. I believe you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make a drink having been a parent for somebody years, but having them know that these are the tools and they’re right here when you need them is one of the most important things we can do as parents and not stigmatize them saying like, “I went to therapy. Here’s some tools. This is a great place to go if you need it. Please, let me know if you need something. Don’t suffer in silence.”

I’m just looking at the time, Melissa and we had talked about seeing each other for twenty minutes. I feel like I could talk to you forever on this topic. I want to thank you for your time and acknowledge that you took some time out of your day-to-day. I appreciate it. For those that are out there that have interest, please educate yourself and look up Lifelines because it’s an amazing program out there that Melissa is working hard at developing. Thank you so much.

What you’re doing it U Are Heard is so amazing. From the time I met you I knew Mark is going to change the world one person at a time and that’s the best way to do it. Please support him as well.

Thank you so much, Melissa. We’ll talk to you soon. Be well.

Take care, everyone. Thanks for reading.

 

Important Links

 

About Melissa Bernstein

NIF - Normalize It Forward - Marc Lehman | Melissa Bernstein | Mental WellnessMelissa Bernstein is the co-founder of Melissa & Doug, a leading toy company renowned for its educational and creative products. As an entrepreneur, inventor, and author, she has dedicated her career to inspiring creativity and play in children through the toys her company produces. Beyond her success in business, Melissa is also an advocate for mental health. In 2020, she launched Lifelines, a platform focused on supporting mental well-being, inspired by her own lifelong struggles with existential depression and anxiety. Through Lifelines, she offers resources, tools, and community support to help others navigate their inner challenges and find meaning.

 

 

NIF - Normalize It Forward - Marc Lehman | Dave Briggs | Mental Health

 

Dave Briggs, a seasoned national broadcaster, joins Normalize It Forward podcast to discuss his personal journey with mental health and wellness. In this candid conversation, Dave shares how he navigated anxiety and depression, emphasizing the importance of self-care and the role of therapy in his healing process. Tune in as Dave reflects on the evolution of mental health discussions, the impact of COVID-19 on our collective well-being, and the need for more accessible mental health resources.

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Navigating Mental Health In The Age Of Screens: Dave Briggs On Self-Care, Media, And The Impact Of COVID

Welcome to Normalize It Forward, the show that openly talks about mental health and wellness. We are here with Dave Briggs. Dave, thank you for joining us. Dave is a long-time national broadcaster, having anchored at major networks including Fox News, CNN, NBC Sports, and Yahoo Sports. He has also played a news anchor on Season 4 of HBO’s Succession. He’s anchoring for Cheddar Business News at NYSE, and creating content wherever he can all around Connecticut. Dave, welcome.

 

NIF - Normalize It Forward - Marc Lehman | Dave Briggs | Mental Health

 

Good to see you, my friend. It’s a pleasure being here. I often joke that I ran out of real networks so I started working at a fake one, ATN, on Succession but I think about every network I’ve worked at in some capacity.

I’ve seen lots of your work over time and certainly admire it for several reasons. You’re on the other end of the mic today but we’ll be talking about one of my favorite topics, mental health, and wellness. As you know, I’m a Family Therapist and work with young adults who head off to college. These days, the support that’s needed in young adults’ lives to manage their mental health and wellness is immense. 

We’re living through a pretty difficult time for many. All the more reason we have these conversations and try to continue to have these conversations to be role models for our youth. Let me kick things off and ask this. Self-care is one of those topics. It’s a big topic within wellness that a lot of people talk about. I’m curious about your thoughts on what self-care means to Dave.

Self-Care And Its Importance In Mental Health

It has taken me about 47 years to begin to figure that out and I’m still not there. I had always employed various elements of self-care but never figured out that I needed all of the above and then some. I’ve always exercised and I thought that would be enough. A couple of years ago, I added meditation, journaling, and counseling. Therapy is a part of that journey. 

What I realized is if I’m not doing all of the above at least 3 out of 4 or 5, I struggle. In particular, meditation and exercise, if I don’t do one of those things, I’m completely out of balance with my mental health. Certainly, therapy and journaling help. Those other things are complementary. If I’m not doing at least two plus of those things, everything is a mess. I’m learning a lot all the time about my mental health journey because I wish that I’d have understood what I had twenty years ago was anxiety. 

I wish I had understood twenty years ago that I was prone to depression. Thankfully, my realization of those things early has helped me identify them in one of my kids. Honestly, in having those discussions, that child has helped me better understand some things about mental health and has taught me things that I didn’t know. It’s been quite a journey and one that honestly evolves every day. Sometimes you just fall apart. 

Our kids are our best teachers. Life is a journey and we’re learning all the time. I’m glad that you brought up youth or young people. As you mentioned, a lot of young people in high school and college feel like they have it down. They’re getting okay rest. They’re getting some exercise here and there but they’re not forced to lean on self-care quite the way maybe adults are to manage things. 

Sometimes for the first time, it’s in college for kids where they feel, “My stress level is overwhelming and something isn’t right here.” To your point, they have to find their own space. For some people, they love yoga and some people love meditation. Some people love car rides. Some people love therapy. Some people love journaling, and the list goes on.

There are so many different ways to take care. I learned over time as a therapist and as an individual that you have to pick some. They won’t just show up at your door. You have to go get them and figure out what you like and what works best for you on your journey. Self-care is an interesting topic. I find that the conversation around wellness can be uncomfortable for some. Mental health to me, the more I talk to people, the more I realize that everybody is susceptible. Everybody is dealing with things at varying levels. Some people are more open to it than others. What has been your experience as you’ve been out and about with people in public? 

Honestly, I am surprised at how innate these things are or are not. I can see that. I pretty much see everything through the perspective of being a parent and that’s why I appreciate what you do and how you do it. For example, my eldest child, my eighteen-year-old daughter, it’s innate in her to have anxiety and to have a bit of depression. Unfortunately, she is exactly like her dad. 

Whereas, my son who is sixteen is exactly like his mom. I can say right now, he will not know anxiety and depression and these things. I’m astonished at those things. You have little control over them. That has taken me a long time to realize that a lot of these problems are innate in us or they’re not. My wife is the first one to admit that it took her a long time to understand what I was going through because she always wakes up and is happy. 

It’s hard for someone like that to understand someone like me who tends to wake up blue, who tends to see the dark side or focus on the negative, and it takes a lot of work to get to where she wakes up every day. That has been an interesting part of my mental health journey, and as a couple, realizing that we wake up in different worlds.

That’s amazing to me to see and it’s been difficult, but I suppose it helped me deal with a lot of other people. What I have noticed in recent years is that men talking about mental health has come 180 degrees in the last couple of years and that I am grateful for. I remember the day that I came out on Instagram that I was depressed. People couldn’t believe that a man, crying on Instagram and admitting it. 

Men talking about mental health has literally turned 180 degrees in the last couple of years. Share on X

A lot of mainstream television shows and athletes have normalized men dealing with mental health issues. Those two things have been instrumental. I don’t know if you watched Ted Lasso. That show dealt with mental health head-on with the signature main character, Coach Lasso and the Suits, which was on the USA, one of the longest surviving shows in the last 25 years. The main character, Harvey, dealt with mental health and straight-on had panic attacks. He was like the bastion of manhood. It’s a good time that mainstream media and our role models and athletes are beginning to normalize these conversations. 

The Impact Of COVID On Mental Health And Social Media’s Role

I can’t agree more with you. It’s funny in some ways how it has taken us as men longer to be able to get to that place, but I’m glad we have in many cases because as human beings, we’re all susceptible. As you were talking earlier, some people are built in a way. Like allergies or anything else, we’re built in a way we’re more prone to depression. We are more prone to anxiety. 

For those people to have to hide that and for those people to have to pretend on a day-in and day-out basis only makes their scenario ten times worse. I’m super thankful for people like you because I feel like when you have made more public conversation around things like mental health, that is something that has ripple effects. Let’s face it, social media gets seen by lots of people.

I think that kid sitting in their dorm room at nineteen years old feeling like they’re the only one on a college campus who’s depressed and overwhelmed sees some of that and can recognize that there are things that can be done. I constantly find myself saying, “You’re never alone.” There are people around. Some people will contact you, hound you, and be on you because they want to help. There are plenty of people out there who want to help. I’m curious because a lot of people talk about things like social media and things like COVID as game changers for mental health. How do you feel about the subject of mental health and wellness has changed since COVID?

The subject has come miles and miles in terms of being a mainstream discussion. The reason I’m wearing this T-shirt, which is Anger, the emotion from the Inside Out. I came from the movie Inside Out 2, the number one movie in America, which is all about our mental health and handling Anxiety, Joy, Sadness, Embarrassment, Envy, and Boredom. 

That movie alone will change this conversation because it puts it in the mainstream. Families are seeing this movie together. Millions of people are seeing this movie and probably having mental health discussions before or after the film. I think that is helpful, but you asked about COVID. COVID was devastating for our mental health. 

That seemed to be the root of my real mental health struggles. Part of that was losing a job during COVID, but it was that being at home, feeling depressed, and being stuck that started this in me. I’ve seen it in kids all over town, in particular here in Westport, Connecticut. COVID spiked mental health issues around the country. 

In towns like this, it cuts back on socialization and development. It added screens to our lives. It increased the amount of time we all spend on screens and social media. On one hand, we’re in a much better place because of mainstream conversations like the Inside Out and the television shows I mentioned. On the other hand, I know that prescriptions for mental health medication have spiked. 

COVID-19 spiked mental health issues around the country. It limited opportunities for socialization and development and increased our reliance on screens. Share on X

On one hand, you might say that’s great because we’re treating it. I think that’s a result of our mental health being in a much worse place than it was before COVID. That is sad because we’re short on competent mental health counselors, therapists, psychologists, and therapists like yourself. We’re desperately short. Things like BetterHelp are helping, but I don’t think we have nearly enough infrastructure to handle the mental health crisis that’s going on that the surgeon general talks about often. 

The Pressure Of Mental Health On College Campuses

I tend to agree. Having talked to many college campuses in the last year imposed the concept that we need to change the way we look at this. It’s not just brick-and-mortar counseling centers that can be helpful to kids. You’ve got lots of adults on lots of campuses who can lend an ear, who can simply be a mentor, who can be a guide, or who can listen. 

You see these things popping up that colleges are reaching for nowadays because they are desperate. They’ve got many kids walking around nowadays with their struggles. The word that no one wants to talk about is suicide. The suicide rate is way higher than most people realize in the last ten years. It’s climbed to the second spot for young people in terms of cause of death.

Nobody wants to talk about it because it’s an ugly word and it’s a horrible concept and an awful thing but it is a reality that is connected to this conversation of mental health and wellness. That to me is significant. Things like this movie you are referencing to me are fantastic because they bring the conversation around the basis of our emotions. Things that people don’t want to talk about but need to. 

It’s okay to feel this way and it’s okay to feel that way because we’re all human beings. We could either ignore it and not talk about it. We could try to address it. I agree. Post-COVID, I feel like those numbers have all shot up in the wrong way in some cases. It puts some pressure on places like colleges and universities, and even counseling centers around the country to think about, “Are there ways we can do this differently so that we can help the general public better?” There are many more individuals struggling and not enough providers. 

As someone who recently did the college visit tour with my daughter, who is going to the University of Chicago next year. We probably went to a dozen schools that we visited more than most. That gives you a good sample size for my next point, which is I can only remember one that emphasized mental health and mental health professionals, talking about it and mental health breaks in a building they had, and that was Yale.

Kudos to Yale. I know a lot of people have issues with how they’ve handled things over the last six months to a year regarding other issues. They wear it on their sleeve how they encounter mental health struggles head-on. They provide counseling. They provide help. They provide break space. The downside is that was the only school that I remember. These are high-pressure schools that my daughter is going into like in Chicago. We went to North Carolina, Harvard, and MIT. That was the only one that seemed to understand the mental health crisis that these types of high-performing students are undergoing right now. It’s a little scary that more schools aren’t doing more. 

That’s significant. For our audience’s sake, recognizing that isn’t more part of the tour because lots of parents aren’t thinking about that. They’re thinking about how to design their dorm room, what majors they want, do they have access to a city, what computer to buy, and all that stuff, which is all important as well. However, when your child gets to school and if they have struggles and you haven’t investigated that as an option for them, they’re going to be stuck behind the eight ball. 

Parents want to be thinking about that because as the numbers dictate, the statistics show us that there are lots of kids out there on college campuses with struggles. Dave, if you’re talking directly to a young person in college who’s starting to have symptoms of either depression or anxiety, what advice would you offer them?

Social Media And Its Detrimental Effects On Mental Health

A lot of them, first off, need to prepare for it well before that now, even if they’re happy or even if they’ve never dealt with it. I guess my advice would precede that because a lot of kids come from towns like this one, where it is a wonderful place to grow up. I’m thrilled that my kids got to grow up here. On the other hand, kids that did grow up here didn’t go through a lot of adversity because it is a wonderful upbringing in towns like Darien, Westport, Greenwich, Weston Wilton, you name it. 

They’re going to deal with a lot of adversity that they’ve never seen or dealt with. They’re going to get, God forbid, a B-minus or a C on a report card. They’re going to deal with terrible social situations, not getting in the sorority they want to, not getting in the fraternity they want to. I know that’s not likely that students catch this message before they deal with anxiety and depression, but I hope they’re prepared for those moments and knowing that there are people to talk to. 

Bring a toolbox to college, which is someone you can talk to, ideally a best friend, if not a therapist. Learn how to meditate now because that will help you deal with stress. Find a workout strategy and exercise. That doesn’t have to be going to the gym. I have a daughter who had never been to the gym before in her life until she joined two weeks ago and now has been every day since because she suddenly realized, “This is the best outlet for my stress and anxiety.” It doesn’t have to be the treadmill or weights. It might be going to Lake Mohegan and taking a walk because you hear the river, you smell the trees, you hear the birds, and you see dogs.

Find what works for you now so you know how to handle it then and things that clear your mind. That’s going to be something different for everyone. It might be meditation. It might be taking a walk. It might be going to the gym. Let’s hope that they don’t make having a drink part of that routine. I am guilty as charged but don’t think Mom and Dad are a great example that they come home from work and have a cocktail because that would be the worst road to go down as an eighteen-year-old kid. 

 

NIF - Normalize It Forward - Marc Lehman | Dave Briggs | Mental Health

 

Let’s face it. There are easy options. Kids find pot, kids find drinks, kids find this, and kids find that but to your point, it’s not going to resolve anything. It’s a temporary solution to a much larger issue. I appreciate your suggestions. You offer some good insight for young people to hear about. The takeaway in many cases is finding something that matches you, or finding something that works for you. If you haven’t found it with your first, second, or third choices, keep looking because there are options out there that will help. 

I always use the word, willing. You have to be willing to try things and maybe leave your comfort zone to do it because you never know what club, activity, or things you try that exist. As corny as it may sound, go try it and see how it feels. If it feels good, keep doing it. It’s good for your mental health and your well-being. I’m curious to ask you about one other topic. Social media is a big topic for young people and older people. It has its benefits and has its drawbacks. I’m wondering your thoughts on that as associated with wellness.

The US Surgeon General, Vivek Murphy, said recently that it should come with a warning label. I strongly support that mission. I fear that it might not make as big a difference as we hope, but at the very least, it might make parents open their eyes. I see there’s a growing movement to ban phones in schools, which is a tremendous idea. New York and Los Angeles are going in that direction.

There’s a movement for parents to keep kids off of social media and off of smartphones until thirteen, which I also strongly support. This comes from someone who spends ten-plus hours a day on their phone, has three kids who are on their phones all the time, and has a twelve-year-old who has been on social media for a couple of years. “Pot calling the kettle black,” I understand that. Genie is out of the bottle.

I think we can get it back in. Social media is extraordinarily harmful to our kids. As a parent, I can say this, having seen it firsthand. It is much more serious a deal for daughters than it is for sons. Parents, you should know that. I am not being sexist. I have two daughters and I have one son. The pressure on young girls is 20X what it is with these young men.

Go look at what the boys can wear to school. Sweatpants, gross t-shirts, and these boys don’t even comb their hair. The girls are under so much pressure to be thin, look cute, and have those pictures match on Instagram. As long as you can keep your kids off of social media, please do it. You have to do this together. You have to talk to 4, 5, or 6 parents. The parents of your daughters or son’s friend. That’s the only way to do it because you cannot keep your kid off social media if they’re the only one. Don’t do that to them. That’s not fair.

As long as you can keep your kids off of social media, please do it. Share on X

I probably shouldn’t elaborate, but I do have a kid who I believe Instagram caused an eating disorder. That was the leading factor. This cost parents their lives. I’m thankful it didn’t for us. This gets me a little emotional. We were on it. We were determined to stamp this out, get counseling every day, and talk to her. We never ignored this for one second. I quit a job that I was doing in another state because I knew we needed to be here and focus on this every minute of every day, but I don’t think parents have any idea how much harm it’s causing. 

It’s destructive. You hit on two important pieces. The body image piece for females is immense. As you’re talking, I’m thinking this is a formula for anxiety for kids. It churns anxiety and makes kids feel less valued, which is crazy. It’s crazy that it has come to this but your message is important.

I’m hoping my audience can hear it and think about it. Dave, you hit on such an important topic, to band together with friends’ parents. If you do this with just your kid, you’re going to constantly hear about all of the other friends that they’re around and their availability on social media. Be wise and be smart. Times are changing for us as parents and for kids, and we have to stay up to date with that stuff and do what we can to protect our young ones.

I will add that I know you don’t want to snoop but believe me, you better snoop. I wish I had. You have to follow them and that’s part of the contract. If they don’t let you follow them, they’re not on it because you need to be looking at these comments. We were a little late in that regard, but I’ve talked to a lot of parents who have done that since learning from us and seen some of it before it became a problem. Read those comments, and see who’s following them and who they’re following. It’s part of the contract. 

I don’t love that we’re on Life 360 and Find Me, Find My iPhone. We see where our kids are going every minute. Again, it’s part of the contract. We can’t put that genie back in the bottle. You got to snoop around a little bit. If anyone wants to talk to me about any of these things, I’m an open book. I will answer every DM on Instagram. That’s the best place to get me. I’m happy to talk to anyone about the mental health of our kids or pressures. I’m here. 

I appreciate it, Dave. I know you’re a busy guy. I appreciate your honesty around this topic. Especially for men, this is a hard thing to talk about. Especially when it hits our kids, we’re protective of our kids and we want our kids to be happy. That’s all we want. We want them to be happy and safe. There are things we need to be doing.

As parents and as individuals, the reason I created Normalize It Forward is I want there to be more conversation around these hard topics. Mental health is not easy to talk about. Wellness is not easy to talk about, but it does help when we try to have a conversation and kids hear us talking about it. Kids hear us and recognize, “These parents understand that this is impacting us and this is big in our community amongst young adults.” 

 

 

I appreciate your time and your energy around this, Dave. The other thing that I’ve been doing, I don’t want to put you on the spot here, but I’ve been asking people to nominate someone, a friend, a coworker, or a relative who you think would be helpful for me to interview in this particular area around mental health and wellness to continue and keep the conversation moving forward. Any thoughts? Any ideas? 

I’ll put her on the spot because she is one of my favorite human beings in this space and has been a therapist at times for me. She’s an actress, Stephanie Shostak, who is probably very busy and tough to pin down but I will help you apply pressure to my friend Steph because her voice in this mental health conversation has been extraordinary. 

Fantastic. That is the right person to nominate and keep this conversation going. Again, I appreciate your time and energy. Thank you very much. Have yourself a wonderful rest of the evening. 

You’re the best. Thank you. 

Take care. Bye, Dave

 

Important Links

 

About Dave Briggs

NIF - Normalize It Forward - Marc Lehman | Dave Briggs | Mental HealthDave Briggs is a seasoned television host and journalist, known for his work across major news networks. He has co-anchored programs on CNN, NBC Sports, and Fox News, including co-hosting Fox & Friends Weekend. With a focus on sports, politics, and breaking news, Dave has built a diverse broadcasting career. He also served as a host for NBC’s coverage of the 2016 Rio Olympics. Beyond news, Dave is recognized for his engaging interviewing style and ability to cover a wide range of topics, from major sporting events to national political issues.

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