 I think that's what I do. I wait for something bad to happen, which like, what kind of life is that? I don't know if any of this is making any sense. Swoop, aka Spanky Valentine, just made her follow-up video discussing how she's still struggling with her mental illness, but she actually has some great tips for overcoming depression and anxiety. It's up everybody. This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. If you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health and what I like to do is pull different topics from the YouTube community to try to teach you how to improve your mental and emotional well-being. So if you're into that kind of stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. So real quick, before I jump into the amazingness that is Swoop, I do want to do a not sponsored plug real quick. So BetterHelp is online therapy. They do help support the channel through an affiliate link, but they reached out and let me know that they're actually providing free therapy to anybody who has been affected by the California wildfires. So even if you're not somebody who's been affected and you know somebody who has been affected by the California wildfires, let them know. All right, I will provide the link down below where you can get all the information. It's very simple. You just go, you fill out this little questionnaire just so they can verify that you're actually from California, you were affected by the wildfires. But the other thing is too, this is 100% free for three months, okay? And this isn't even like the trial membership, like you don't even have to put in your card information. BetterHelp is doing this just to give back to everybody who's been affected by the California wildfires. And a lot of these things can cause things like trauma and anxiety, depression, all sorts of stuff. So if you know somebody in California who was affected by this, please share this link with them. All right, so Swoop, amazing gal, amazing, amazing woman. Did I ever tell you that I got the chance to meet her at Vid Summit a couple months ago when I was in LA? Look, that's us right there. She made a video that actually won an award at Buffer Fest, you know, talking about her anxiety and like it was really powerful and amazing and I did a reaction video to it. But anyway, she just did a follow-up to it talking about how she's still struggling. So what I want to do is kind of break that thing down and discuss like different things that I still deal with and how I overcome them, some great points that Swoop brought up and hopefully you can learn some things to help overcome your depression and anxiety little step-by-step-by-step. And the reality is my brain did its thing, got the better of me and literally the very next day after winning that award, I went into one of my dark moments and my brain was like, well yeah, you won something, you got acknowledged for something that's great, that's cool finally, but like you'll probably never live up to it again or you may never do anything that good again or maybe they made a mistake. Right here, she's talking about that imposter syndrome, right, like Swoop won this award, like she's at the top of the world and so many people are coming up to her and thanking her and when I watched it, there were so many people who were touched by her film, but there's something in our brain that tells us that we're not good enough and this is something that I deal with, that I struggle with and something that I haven't made a video on but I'll touch on it right now is I try to find a balance between humility and confidence, right, because there's this very, very fine line between like confidence and cockiness and I never want to get to this point where I'm like, oh, I'm this big awesome guy and all this other stuff like even some of the attention I get just because my channel is growing like makes me uncomfortable because my ego wants me to think that I am just, I don't know, the bee's knees, if you will, but at the same time like Swoop's talking about we can't just beat ourselves up so we got to find this kind of balance where we're confident in what we're doing we need to know that we do deserve these successes but without becoming a jerk about it. But would you just, if you're comfortable, leave a comment right now and tell me something that you have been struggling with. Well, Swoop, here's the answer to that question. I actually commented on the video about this, like something that I've been struggling with is just everything's been going really well and let's just talk about the YouTube channel specifically like my channel has pretty much doubled in size in the last month, month and a half and I'm just waiting for it. I'm just waiting for it to all stop and go away. Like something that Swoop talked about was, you know, after she won that award she was like, oh, this is the thing this is gonna keep me happy for so long and like I am just always waiting. I'm like, okay, when's this gonna stop? When's this gonna slow down? Like sometimes I actually just want it to stop just so I can be like, okay, good. It's over with. It's kind of like jump scares in a scary movie. I'm not a huge fan of scary movies but I just want them to just come out. I want them to scale the crap out of me just to get it over with. It's very easy, at least for me, to hold on to the dark stuff, the dark side of things because that's where I've lived for so much of my life and that's where I feel I'm only worthy of the bad things and so when the good things happen I don't allow myself. I just don't allow it for me. It's like I mentally am like yeah but I'm not deserving somehow. What she's talking about right there I can relate and I don't know if you can too. It's something that I actually forgot about for a long time so my life was always just pure chaos. Pure chaos, you know, growing up, you know, just having an alcoholic mom and my dad was constantly working and I never knew like we were gonna have money to pay the bills and just so many things like my life was constantly chaotic and I've talked about this in some of my relationship videos like I used to date women who would make my life chaotic right and something that I found was six and a half years ago when I started working on my mental health I got really uncomfortable. I would actually start to get anxiety when everything was fine. Like when everything was good I would start to freak out. Like my brain would like it tries to find something to freak out about and it can't and it's this really weird feeling and if you want to help me not feel crazy let me know if you've ever experienced that as well but anyways the one way that I overcame this was just like reminding myself over and over and over like you see a lot of people say it's okay to not be okay it's also okay to be okay all right like remember that remind yourself that like it's okay because sometimes like you know I cover a lot of youtubers and talk about their crazy hectic lives or whatever it is and some people stay stay that way because they're comfortable in it they don't know how to live another way so something I had to do to start fixing my mental health was learning how to be comfortable with everything just being chill. I have learned at this point that I have a level of just work related PTSD from what happened with my last channel and all of the years that I put into that and the just terrible thing that happened there work related PTSD girl me too so I touched on this a little bit in the video I did about Shane and Ryland the other day but this is for a variety of different reasons like I remember you know 2008 when the economy went like terrible I was working in the car dealership industry car dealerships were getting shut down left and right people are getting laid off but even more so like I was a drug addict and alcoholic for near a decade I got fired so many times so many times so now today that I'm like clean sober a good employee a hard worker I still have that that part of my brain that thinks I'm always going to be in trouble so whenever I get like an email from my boss or a text or my boss is calling me my brain goes a million miles a minute like what did I do what did I do like the worst thing ever is like hey um can we talk you know and like the worst thing is like beyond that is like when they're like hey can we meet tomorrow and now I have like 24 hours to stress and freak out about this so something that I have to do is kind of like what I've talked about with relationships I think I mentioned in the Shane and Ryland video I can't bring that baggage from my past work situations into the new one I can't do that or it's going to drive me absolutely nuts and sometimes what I have to do is sit down and either write it down on paper or just go through in my head and separate the truth from the false like when my boss wants to see me like and my brain's like you're going to get fired Chris and how are you going to you know pay your bills how are you going to feed your son how are you going to do this right I have to remind myself like Chris you've been working really hard you've been you haven't screwed anything up so I have to remind myself the truth of the situation because my brain likes to think up all sorts of crazy stuff when I get anxious I've been learning so much more about mental health lately and just how mine has just not been in a good place for a very very long time and I was neglecting it for so long it's it's been rough it's been really rough I'm also learning just how much I wear myself down with self-hate and I wonder if you guys can relate to that as well yes like I can relate to this so Swoop has been you know on this kind of journey of like self-discovery and learning more about mental health and the importance of it for me I can relate to this when it comes to mindfulness and the way I often explain this is I found mindfulness meditation when I was about three years sober so on a scale of one to ten on a scale of one to ten I thought my life was at like an eight right things are going really good but when I found mindfulness meditation and actually started practicing it what I realized was my life wasn't at an eight my life was actually at like a six because it was still pretty hectic I had a lot of difficulty managing my emotions but then once I started practicing it went up to a nine okay so like this is something like some of us we think everything's fine we think everything's okay one of the reasons I have this channel is to explain that mental health is a lot more than just not having a mental disorder right like we need to learn like no we don't have to be angry all the time no we don't have to be nervous all the time no we don't have to have our emotions fly all over the place all the time like yeah some of this is normal but there's always room for improving our mental health and I didn't even realize that until just a few years ago and that's one of the reasons I started this channel to teach you that there's always room to grow when it comes to your mental health I'm learning now that when I have these like great moments and things that happen to just really allow myself to live in that great moment and not beat myself up so much or start anticipating when the bad's gonna happen again right there it helps me circle back to what I was explaining earlier when I answer that question like I'm waiting for all this stuff to just stop I'm waiting for my videos to quit getting views I'm waiting for subscribers to quit going up I'm waiting for people to quit liking my videos whatever it is right so what swoop is talking about is mindfulness mindfulness is a practice of being in the present moment okay I cannot constantly worry about what has not happened yet if things are good right now I need to embrace it and that's what you need to do too if things are going good right now maybe it's today or just in this moment if just in this moment things are going good for you like just bathing at basket it'd be like okay things are good right now like just enjoy it while it's there all right but we can't constantly keep future tripping and saying when's this gonna fail when's this gonna fail because this is something that you know if you're somebody like me who used to self-sabotage a lot what happens is is that we create this self-fulfilling prophecy right we expect something terrible to happen and on a subconscious level we're actually setting ourselves up to fail so what I want you to start working on is being okay with things being good right now and just enjoying it even if it's just for this one minute let me say this while while I know that so much of my life has been just living in that darkness has been lost in darkness I'm I'm just I'm ready for a change and I want to finally step into that light and to just take life for all that it has to offer that sounds pretty good and last but not least I love how she ended this video like you all of you it's time for a change it is time for a change right we talk about the problem but focus on the solution how long have you been sitting in the problem maybe as you're watching this right now you've been sitting in the problem for hours or maybe days now it's time to get into the solution okay so what I want you to do down in the comments below let me know how today you are gonna get into the solution all right but anyways I'm gonna link over to Swoop's video she is amazing and next time in LA hopefully her and I get to collab she is such an awesome woman go subscribe to her channel she's doing amazing things she suck is such an awesome film creator I am so jealous but anyways go check out her channel but that's all I got for you with this video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you're new make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I make a ton of videos and a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon you are all awesome if you would like to become a patron to get exclusive content click or tap right there and don't forget there's a link down below for free therapy for anybody affected by the California wildfires down in the description all right thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time