- [Announcer] If you or someone you know is in crisis, help is available.
Call or text 988 to be connected to trained counselors from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Free and confidential support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the United States.
If it is an emergency, please call 911.
For more information, visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
(gentle piano music) - [Announcer] More people around the globe Googled how to maintain mental health in 2021 than ever before.
Between the pandemic, politics, and personal matters, we're stressed out.
The whole planet is stressed out.
We asked local and national experts for their advice and the research behind it.
Breathing intentionally, being mindful, exercise, connection, creativity, those aren't just buzzwords.
They're science-based strategies to help us build resilience.
Sometimes the little things can make a big impact.
Let's start with a little thing.
- So maybe you're feeling a high sense of isolation.
And so your rumination is, "I have no one.
I'm all alone.
I'll always be alone."
And that's just going through your mind.
If you're a Brene Brown fan, she talks a lot about narrative therapy and the story I'm telling myself.
So one of the things you could do is you could say, "Okay, I feel really afraid.
What is the story I'm telling myself right now?"
"This is never going to get better.
I'm going to be alone forever," right?
"I am never going to have connections again.
I don't even know how to be a person anymore."
Right?
The story I'm telling myself affects the way that I understand the anxiety.
And so you can say, "What's the story I'm telling myself right now?"
And you can think of an alternate truth.
What else might be true?
You don't even have to come up with what is true.
Just something else that could weaken the story that you're telling yourself.
An example of the story I tell myself might be I come home from work and my husband is saying, he's telling me all about his day, and then I try to tell him, and he stops listening.
The story I'm telling myself could be, "He doesn't even care about me."
And that story makes me think I'm invaluable, like, not valuable, that I'm not important in the relationship, that the relationship doesn't matter to him.
I can spiral in a hurry.
But what if instead the story that I'm telling myself is, "Wow, he's really had a hard day, he's having a hard time listening.
Let me try to listen to him a little bit more.
Maybe then he'll have the space for me."
Or maybe that gives me a chance to say, "You're not listening very well.
Can I tell you what I'm thinking, or do you need some space to listen later?"
- A lot of people are talking about isolation as a result of the pandemic, but that really was probably the key problem before the pandemic.
Isolation is a terrible thing.
Isolation causes us to go within our, you know, when we can't bounce ourselves off of other people in the world, we tend to think that we're the terrible ones.
Or sometimes we think that we're the awesome ones.
I know, you know, that works out well, too.
But it's not realistic as long as you're operating in a vacuum.
And isolation has become a problem that, it's not new, but it's devastating for people.
- I know that I've had friends that, when they start to isolate themselves, that's when it starts to see, that's sort of a warning sign.
That's the dashboard start, starting to say, "This is maybe not good for you.
Maybe check in with somebody."
Because the problem about isolation is it's a cycle, because the more you isolate, the more you feel like you need to isolate, and the more afraid you get of then reaching out to anybody.
- I think all of us felt more vulnerable, but we didn't want to add to anybody's feelings either.
You know?
And so that isolation creeps in, and you turn to coping skills that maybe aren't as healthy.
- Isolation is critical to substance use.
It's been said that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it's connection.
Now we find that people who are in active substance abuse are disconnected, and what more disconnecting thing could there be than a global pandemic that tells you to go home and you know, don't see your, the people you care about?
- Us as humans, our biggest desire is to be connected with other humans.
And so with that, sometimes those desires can override sometimes what is healthy for us.
And so having good boundaries is so incredibly important, not just for teens, but for adults as well, of making sure like, hey, these people that I have close to me, like, are they people who are lifting me up, who are investing into me, who are pouring into me, and I in return am also pouring into them as well?
- We have an epidemic of loneliness?
Because we have organized our society to be able to be with our devices, be productive.
And also the other thing, interesting thing too, you know, I grew up in a small town, and I think one thing when you grow up in a small town, you've got to not make people too mad, 'cause you're going see them again, right?
You know, you can only get so mad 'cause you're stuck with each other, 'cause that's the store.
So you may not like the guy who owns that store, but that's the store, so you're going to go there unless you want to drive 30 miles.
When you move to a bigger city, or the city gets bigger, or you got three stores now, you don't have to see that guy anymore.
We can get away from each other now way easier than we could a generation ago, and that's a problem.
And I think the pandemic showed us that, wow, you know, we actually do want other people around.
So hopefully it showed us that, you know, we can reach out and make those connections.
And we need to.
- I think for the most part, for me, it's having a support system, whatever that looks like.
And so we need our village, we need work people, we need our family, our friends.
And when you don't have that, there is a huge void.
- Connection is important.
We, again, we were not made to be alone in this world.
So I believe, even if that looks, like, hey, you know, calling up a friend and saying, "Hey, you want to go grab some coffee, or you just want to go out for a walk around the park?"
That's important.
That's huge.
People need to know that somebody else cares about them in some way.
(gentle guitar music) - And a lot of my patients have come in and talked about those feelings of loneliness.
And it's not just, "I'm alone all the time," but it's, "I'm disconnected."
They're lacking the connection, because even when you're alone, if you're able to reach out by some of these other means and still feel that you're connected to your people, to your tribe, then it's not so hard to bear.
But I think, again, it's important to look at changes from baseline.
If someone used to always come to, you know, happy hour on Wednesday and bowling on Friday and church on Sunday, and suddenly they're not making any of those events, that's a significant change.
And maybe it's because of something else going on in their life, maybe they're super busy with work, and there's nothing concerning about it, but maybe it's because suddenly none of those things feel fun anymore.
They're just not getting joy out of it.
And that's actually called anhedonia, and is one of the big symptoms of depression, when we're not able to find joy in the things that we love to do.
So sometimes withdrawing from our friends and our loved ones, our social activities is a sign of depression.
Sometimes it's a sign of anxiety.
We don't want to be around others.
We're afraid people are going to judge us for one reason or another.
Or, there's just too many people, and that can be overwhelming.
I'm an introvert.
I love going home and being alone and being quiet.
And for me, that's restorative, but we're all different in how we like to be and the things that fill our cup and recharge our batteries.
And so for some people, that alone time and that quiet time is actually very draining to them.
So I think knowing yourself and knowing your baseline is an important part of measuring where we are with these other components of it.
- [Announcer] Warning signs of social isolation include avoiding social interactions, including those that were once enjoyable and canceling plans frequently and feeling relief when plans are canceled.
(gentle piano music) - When I first started, I didn't have any grandchildren.
So my husband would laugh and say, "This was my grandkid fix."
I'm Judy Solomon, and I am retired, and I cuddle at the Northwest Texas Hospital NICU.
It is a volunteer program that allows volunteers to come in and hold and cuddle babies.
It allows the parents to be able to stay home with other siblings or if they live far away, they have somebody that will take the place of holding and cuddling while they're not able to be there.
(gentle guitar music) It relieves the nurses of some of the added stress 'cause they have more than more baby to be tending to, plus all of their charting duties.
And so it provides extra hands and laps and love for the nurses as well.
And then ultimately it helps the babies.
Yes, it's important because the babies, part of their healing is to be held and cuddled and loved on, and the bonding, you know, that takes place.
And it helps their heart rates and their breathing and just relaxes them and allows them to just enjoy being held.
And I started even before I retired.
I was still school teaching and I'd go in afternoons, and it was amazing how much it did just for me to go in there.
I might have had a stressful day at work and just to sit and hold and relax with the baby allowed me to be still and take some breaths and relax.
And it was good for both of us.
(chuckles) Gives you a sense of purpose of being able to help other people, and it blesses me as much as it does them.
- Volunteerism is a big thing.
Having a reason to plant your feet on the floor and get up in the morning.
During the lockdowns and, and when people just kind of started isolating in their homes, that purpose was taken away.
I mean, you have to have purpose and you have to have hope.
- [Announcer] Research shows volunteering can lower levels of anxiety and depression by helping people feel more connected and increasing self-esteem, empathy and trust in others.
Most common misconception of a mental health struggle?
- Common misconception of a mental health struggle is that if you need somebody to talk to about something, you must be crazy.
- So when Betty Ford, you know, told the world that she had breast cancer in the '70s, we didn't talk about breast cancer because it was a death sentence.
You know, like "don't (shushing) don't say the C word, don't get them down."
You know, so we don't want to talk about mental illness 'cause we don't think you can get better.
We don't know that 2/3 of people with depression get better.
You know, we don't know that over half of people with psychosis get better, and a third get so much better that they're actually no longer experiencing psychosis, a third.
So like, is that most?
No.
I mean, we'd be better if it's way better, but, like, most people with pancreatic cancer do not get better.
And and we don't stigmatize that.
We are scared, we don't want it, but we buckle down and we help each other through it.
So I think we need to have the hope that we're gonna get better.
And I think hope that you can get better is the biggest antidote to stigma.
- So about six years ago, I was kind of at the lowest point of my life.
And I realized I had to reach out to someone for help.
And so I went to therapy, and in doing that I was able to finally normalize depression and anxiety and realize that it wasn't something that I could just control with my brain and decide that I wasn't going to be unhappy today.
And, and because of that, I was then able to take all of the tools that I learned through therapy and then be able to apply them as we moved into the pandemic last year.
And I do believe that helped me, you know, get through.
- I tell 'em my story.
Yeah.
I tell 'em how it was really hard for me.
I put it off from years and I could have been happy.
And when I finally got help, what a relief it was.
And some people get their diagnosis, and they're, they, it's like grieving, and they take it real hard.
But by the time I finally got my diagnosis, it was relief.
Yeah, because now I was gonna start feeling better.
That's the way I saw it.
- I was really mad at myself for letting, for masking my symptoms 'cause I didn't want to stand out or be different.
(gentle piano music) I was really mad at myself for doing that because I could have helped someone, or I could have got diagnosed way earlier with ADHD.
- A lot of people keep their troubles inside because, you know, they don't want their buddies to know or their friends to know or sometimes even their family.
They don't want their family to know that they're struggling.
And that really is the beauty of therapists because we don't know any of those people.
So people come to us and they get to share all their stuff, and we don't hold it against anybody or them.
- We say a lot in our business, mental health is health.
And so we can't just treat from here up and hope somebody else picks up the rest because it's a whole experience.
And I think we have to instill with people that there is hope and there is recovery.
- What gives me hope?
I think looking at the mental health peers that I'm working with and seeing that there's a possibility that they can recover, and that they're doing things in their lives.
I mean, their hope gives me hope.
It's kind of, it spreads, it's contagious.
- I think seeing other people that have made it through mental illness and have survived and have gone on and had big careers in spite of a mental diagnosis.
Yeah, when I see that - that you can still pursue your dreams, that gives me hope.
- I see other peers that have the capacity and resilience to recover.
That makes me believe maybe I've got a shot at it, too.
That makes me happy.
You know, that gives me hope.
(gentle guitar music) - August 14th, 2014, I was in bed.
I was sound asleep.
And all of a sudden, I got this, like, nudge.
And I was, like, "What was that?"
Like, not a physical nudge, it was like a spiritual nudge.
You know?
So I tried to just shrug it off and go back to sleep.
And it just kept on and kept on, I was like, "Fine, I'll get up," because this nudge was telling me, "Go tell people they matter."
And I was like, "I have no idea how to make that happen.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
I don't know what that means."
And so, but it just was on loop, on a loop in my head.
And I was like, "Okay."
So I texted my cousin, I was like, "So I think I'm supposed to go tell people they matter.
Do you wanna come with me?"
And he's like, "Yeah, sure."
So I went and I picked him up.
I said, "I don't know what we're supposed to do.
I think that we're supposed to go to this store here and get some, like, poster board and some markers and just write a message."
And so we did.
And the first message that I put on poster boards, mine said, "You are enough."
And then my cousin put you, "You matter."
And so we did that for most of the day.
And then I thought, because it was just poster board, our hands are very sweaty.
(chuckles) And so it started tearing up and stuff.
And I was like, "This is not gonna work.
I'm supposed to do this long term."
So I went and got a whiteboard and I said, I started writing down "you are enough," and I was like, I got that nudge again, that's not what you're supposed to tell people.
You're supposed to tell people that they are important.
So you write "you are important" on this board.
That's what you're telling people.
And I was like, "Sure, okay."
(chuckles) So I did.
And one particular young man who, he saw my sign, and he was here in Amarillo just hanging out with a friend, I believe.
And he's from Spearman.
And he had written out a suicide note to die that night.
Then he saw my sign, and he, um, he went immediately back to Spearman.
They were having this Christian rap performance in a little theater area.
And so he got up on stage and told them that he had planned on dying, killing himself that night, and he saw my sign and it stopped him.
It blows my mind how much people reacted and responded to that.
I have video clips of people telling me that they had wanted to die and they saw the sign, and it stopped them from wanting to die.
They had high anxiety and just didn't know what to do.
And it gave them hope and all of these things.
There's something very special about seeing people and letting people know that they are seen and that they're heard regardless of who they are.
So many people don't like themselves, period, for whatever reason.
And it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter race.
It doesn't matter gender, sexual orientation, religion.
It doesn't matter because I've talked to people from all different places.
Nobody's ever told them that they matter or that they're important.
And, you know, to me it was just three little words on a whiteboard.
(gentle piano music) To other people, it was life saving.
- [Announcer] Next time on The Little Things.
- I think if there's been one thing that's been good that's come out of the pandemic, though, is that we're having more of these conversations, and that's what's most exciting to me, is that we're really in a zeitgeist right now for mental health, and that's, we're changing how people perceive it, how people gain access to it and also trying to develop more quality and equitable services.
- Younger people seem much more willing and open to talk about mental illness and the treatments that they're undergoing, and, "Hey, do you know what my therapist told me?"
Which is such a shift from what we're seeing with some of our older patients who, I have folks who don't even like to come into our building because they're like, "What if someone sees me?"
And that's that internalized stigma.
- And I think that's what I would like for people to know is that you don't necessarily get to choose your depression or anxiety or whatever mental illness.
But you can choose how to deal with it appropriately, so that you can live a healthy life.
- As things turn a little more back to normal, all of a sudden, what we imagine is that we should be able to function at the exact level as we did before.
So I think we have to be really grace-filled with ourselves as we build stamina again to relationships and tasks and just being around people.