Video Transcript: Opportunity of Mental Health Issues

Now we're in week eight. Welcome back now. We are going to be start talking  about some different opportunities that there are in mental health issues. We  worked on some really deep, ethereal work. Last time today, this is much more  tangible, straightforward, cool stuff, not nearly as deep. That's the stuff I actually  love. But these are just great habits and great things and great tools that we pick up. So let's jump in. We had the gift of disorientation. Last time we talked about  this breaking down and this building up, you're probably really sick of that slide.  We had the gift of reorientation, that gift of being built back up, that gift of  learning what it is anew, that things that we're going through, but I want to say  there's some other things that we learn with mental health issues that aren't  necessarily just these issues of, who am I? Who is God? Some of it has to deal  with how we take care of ourselves and how we move forward with our lives,  and the habits that we pick up along the way, and those things change us as  much as the deeper work that we do. So let's jump in things like physical care.  We talked in the very beginning about self care and how important it was to  exercise. Well, if you build the habit of exercise because it takes care of your  brain, makes it a lot easier to exercise, to take care of your body, because you're already taking care of your brain. In my case, I run and I run because it makes  me happy and it makes my brain feel better, not because I want to be in the best shape of my life, so I take care of myself, because my brain demands it. I get  the extra added bonus that then my body likes it too. It's pretty great. We also  talked about sleep, how important it is to get the right amount of sleep. I'm just  going to leave that there for a second with you, because puppies are great. How important it is to get the right amount of sleep, how important is to take care of  your body, how God demands Sabbath, how you need to make it a habit to rest  and relax and slow down. This is something you need to engage in regularly to  make sure that you can continue to move and continue to be ready for the  things that you want to do right. Rest is what allows us to fully engage in the  parts of life that we want to fully engage with that takes good rest. Next, we  talked about diet. Talked about eating right. I talked about my love of vegetables. This looks so yummy to me, I would take all the vegetables. We talked about  how important it is to eat well and take care of ourselves so that our meds work,  but it also forms a habit. If I eat well, my body is going to do better. I'm going to  have less inflammation in my body. I'm going to have more ability to feel better  because I'm eating regularly and I'm eating things that take care of me right.  Long term, this will do me a lot more favors than just helping my mental health.  But what if there's even more than that in the power of habit? Charles Duhigg  talks about what habits do, and one of the things he talks about is Keystone  Habits, and those are our habits that change other habits. For instance, if a  person wants to lose weight, they can cut calories out of their diet, and they can  lose weight, they can also decide that they are going to exercise. They might  have other plans too, like trying a different diet, doing intermittent fasting, 

whatever they decide to do. There's lots of things that you can do, but what's  interesting is there are also Keystone Habits. These are the things that if  someone changes something, it ends up changing a lot of things, because it  creates a domino effect, and one habit changes another habit changes another  habit changes another habit. What's interesting is one of those Keystone Habits  that changes things is exercise, but if you exercise, it. Changes how your body  functions, and it starts demanding different, more nutritious food. When you start exercising, it changes your diet. When you start changing your exercise, and  your diet also changes your sleep patterns, because you're able to fall asleep  easier at night, and your body will demand sleep. It'll also sleep deeper, so you'll wake up more refreshed, and that changes how you feel, and that changes how  you function. And all of a sudden you've got this domino effect that has gone  downhill, because you changed one thing, the only thing that you consciously  changed was, I'm going to exercise every day, and everything else falls down  from there. So a really important thing with mental health issues is that you will  necessarily form Keystone Habits, and they are just to make sure that your  meds work. How great is that you also form other Keystone Habits that have  nothing to do with your meds, but you will require in order for you to keep  reaping the benefits, in order for you to find stability and live a thriving life,  because with mental health issues, there are just things that you have to do so  you have opportunities to learn long term skills that end up compounding on  each other over time and getting better and better and better, precisely because  they will make you well in the short term. Now in the power of habit, Charles  Duhigg talks about the key to changing habits, and the key is this, the golden  rule, as he calls it. The Golden Rule has influenced treatment for alcoholism,  obesity, obsessive compulsive disorders and hundreds of other destructive  behaviors, and understanding it can help anyone change their own habits. This  is the key. The cue for an old activity is the key to the new habit. There's always  a cue to a behavior. So if you are a smoker, the habit might be, I reach in my  pocket, the habit might be the the cue might be the break bell goes off at work  that it's time for a smoke break. Whatever that cue is, when you make this  behavior happen, that cue has to change in order for it to start doing a new  thing. For me, I have specific cues that kind of set me up in my day that end up  being kind of silly, but they work for me. One of my keys is that, or one of my  cues is that I keep a journal right next to my bed, and I don't journal before I go  to sleep, because I'm a morning person. I really am just ready to go to sleep as  soon as I can. It's because in the morning, when I wake up, the first thing I can  do, I can hit my journal for a couple minutes and kind of empty out my head a  little bit and start feeling great about my day. One of my other cues, I don't allow  myself to eat breakfast until I exercise most days, and that's because if I eat  breakfast first, I feel like I'm going to throw up. So I just have a cue built in my  workout stuff. A lot of the time I'll leave next to my bed so that I can just crawl out

of bed, find my stuff, do my thing, get going straight ahead in the morning,  whatever your cue is towards an old habit. It needs to be a cue towards a new  habit, right? So think about your cues. Think about the things that drive you. You might have a habit that I you name it, drink six cups of coffee in the day. Why do  you drink six cups of coffee? Because these cues affect me. Okay, well, you'll  have to slowly reduce that, because that's quite a dependency. And as you do,  you'll develop new cues, and they'll do different things. Maybe instead of saying, hey, I need to drink six cups of coffee, you'll be able to say, hey, I need to say,  hey, I need to drink six cups of lemon water. Great. Do it whatever it is that  makes you happy, but the cue can form an old habit into a new habit. Maybe  that cue is, hey, I know that I know that I need to eat breakfast every morning, so I need to take my meds, do whatever you need to do to make those habits  happen for wellness. But then something great happens. As you grab onto those cues and change them from old habits to new habits, you get a compounding  effect. the momentum of habits, some habits have the power to start a chain  reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. Some  habits, in others' words, matter more than remaking businesses and lives. And  then, a huge body of studies has shown that small wins have enormous power  and influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of small victories. Small  wins are a steady application of a small advantage. Okay, so what happens is  you gain an advantage all of a sudden, now you're eating better. Your body feels a little bit better, so you can improve in another area. Because you have more  energy at work, you're able to apply yourself a little more because you have  more energy, because you're exercising, you're able to apply yourself a little  more because you're sleeping better, your medications are working better. So  you're able to apply yourself a little bit more to something else. And these habits  slowly build on each other, one after another, after another, after another, and  they form momentum. In a business world, sometimes they call it the flywheel  effect. It takes a lot of energy to get it moving. A flywheel is transfers energy  from your engine towards the rest of your car, and that flywheel it takes a long  time to get going because it's heavy and it spins, but then once you get your  flywheel moving, it maintains a lot of momentum and it keeps moving. And that  same thing is true of habits. They take a lot of time and energy to get them  going, but once they get going, they move a lot of stuff. He continues. So what  are the implications around self care? What if I take care of myself and suddenly that improves how the rest of my life is going? That improves my work, that  improves my attitudes, that improves how well I'm doing as a person, improves  everything, and it started just because I needed my meds to work better. How  about my routine? What if I improve my routine and start seeing Steady Habits  grow and develop out of that routine? What happens if it happens because of  exercise and I hit a keystone habit that changes another habit, changes another  habit, changes another habit, and all of a sudden I see this incredible 

momentum built because I did something, and I can apply that momentum  towards other things in my life. What if it's because of diet, and now I'm feeling  better, so I'm able to apply that advantage. What if it's because of community  that I feel more known and more understood, and so I'm able to know and more  deeply understand? I'm able to fully, more fully, step into who I am and more  fully help others experience who they are. I'm able to be in relationship more  deeply and more fully as I get more understanding of myself through this  process, and that advantage keeps building. What about therapy? My stuff isn't  holding me back anymore. My childhood trauma isn't holding me back. My  preconceived notions of myself aren't holding me back. The things that have  broken me aren't holding me back, and suddenly I'm able to apply that  advantage. And what if reconnection and reintegration are in that same space?  What I want to point out for you is that mental health, in some ways, just in  habits and the way you live your life is an incredible opportunity. A lot of people  will never want to go see a therapist. If you're forced to see a therapist, you can  form a habit around it where you continue to improve. A lot of people will never  want to do the work of reconnection and reintegration. Once you start that work,  you have the opportunity to continue in what we call that hermeneutical spiral,  that how art, how what we know of God informs how we read, informs how we  know God informs how we read. And so I just keep knowing God better and  better as I get to re know him and begin to reintegrate. These are amazing  opportunities that a lot of people never take advantage of, because they never  have something that disorients them enough that they can reorient towards  something else? So take advantage of it. This is a great opportunity to do really  hard, really, really great work. So I want you to think a little bit of self work as a  habit. What self work do you want to do, and how could that continue to improve you? You don't need to play this out long term. You don't need to figure out how  this is going to impact your life in every way, shape and form. In fact, I think that  would probably be a waste of time for a lot of people, because to come up with  this huge amount and then find out that if you can only keep a habit for the next  week, it doesn't really matter, because it won't have time to move downhill.  Instead, I would ask you to fully invest in doing one thing. Well, just one thing. If  you say, Hey, I'm going to read every night because I want to know more about  me and more about what's going on with this mental illness. Do it. If you say,  hey, I need to sleep better. So I'm going to work on turning off my technology  three hours before bed, keeping my technology away from me, and keeping  blue lights away from me, and trying to see if I can sleep a little better. Do it. If  you want to whatever your self work is, you know the work you need to do, but  go ahead and leverage it start. I think this is really what happens at the  beginning of the year with new year's resolutions. Every year, we have the  opportunity to leverage something new to push ourselves into self work that we  wanted to do before, and now we just have this clean break every year where 

we can make it happen. The great thing for you is that you do not need new  years to make that work happen. As I record this now, it's March. This is a long  time before New Year's, but if you want to make that happen right now, you can  make the changes the disorientation will do you the favor of helping you get  started with something you didn't know you could do, and then you can start  climbing up and who knows where you're going to end up. So instead of seeing  mental illness as just a terrible thing, I would like you as a pastor or as a faith  leader or as somebody who is working with people to start seeing this as an  opportunity, because it will help them grow if they're willing to build the habits  around becoming healthier. Hey, while you're at it, you may as well build some  habits for yourself to help you get healthier too. Hopefully you can get  disoriented enough to do that for yourself next week, we are talking a little bit  about what about another topic altogether. We're talking about post traumatic  growth. We're talking about how things change us and how we grow out of those things. This is actually some of the scientific litter literature on trauma. It's really  cool stuff. So I will see you then.