 I think we need to be more careful than ever with this stuff, with the media that we consume, and I would put social media in that bucket as well. You know, cause that's a whole other thing. You're just looking at a bunch of curated, filtered stories about your friends and their perfect lives, right? The quote unquote perfect lives. And it can have a similarly distorting and disempowering impact on us as well. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. We talk a lot about self-care. We hear self-care in modern media and typically that involves, you know, exercise and nutrition, but not as much time as really spent on mental health. So what are those things we can do to practice self-care for our mental health, again, to avoid the red line situation? I think there's a few different things you can do. You know, part of it is things you can start doing and part of things that you can stop doing. In terms of things that you can start doing that are really important. And this is all about habits. I think like daily habits are much more important than big grand gestures, right? One of the most basic ones we look at as mental health professionals is just social context, right? Like how often do you spend time with people you love? How often are you able to speak with them, see them? You know what I mean? And your friends and people you care about. A lot of us have been dealing with the isolation of pandemic in ways that we can overcome that. So that's a number one, I would say. I think exercise and movement are hugely important. So powerful and changing your mind state, right? Like if you're feeling down and stressed out and if you're intensely anxious, go at least for a walk. Go walk around, better yet, go for a run. Those kinds of things are really powerful. Meditation, this is one of those things like mindfulness types of practices, like meditation and yoga and Tai Chi and stuff like that. I'm so happy to see these things getting much more accepted and popular. I feel like 10, 15 years ago it was like, ew, what is that? There was kind of a weird thing around it, but now it's so widely adopted and so incredibly powerful. The most difficult thing with meditation that I see is like people have a hard time implementing it. And I know I struggled for many years to have a consistent meditation practice. And this is something where I think if you can do it even one minute a day, one, two, five minutes a day, just to make a practice of just sitting down and just getting focused on your breathing gives you a bit of a touch point. And then it's easier to expand on that to 10 minutes or 20 or whatever more if you're gonna do that, but consistency is hugely important. And those are, getting nature is another big one. Just getting outside, being around trees or whatever kind of nature you have near you is incredibly important. I live in the middle of Oakland and like got all these buildings around. So really important to me to make a point every day to go be around greenery at some point every day. The other thing in terms of like what I said there are things you can stop doing. And we were talking a little bit about this at the beginning, but taking control of your media environment is incredibly important right now. You know, times are really hard. There's a lot going on in the world. That Bob Marley song, so much trouble in the world. You know, that's what we're going through right now. And if you just passively receive that all the time it can be really bad for you. This is just from personal experience. There was a while there where my routine was like to wake up and jump onto Twitter and just like, what are today's arguments? You know, what are, give me some takes and give me some arguments and some back and forth. And it wasn't serving me well because what would happen is I would get to my calls at 8.39 in the morning and sit down and I'd be all irritable and amped up and I would feel super powerless about all this stuff going on and what's the worst atrocity and all this stuff. And at a certain point I decided to take kind of I did a cold reset where I just stepped away from all the news for about a month and a half and was just like, I'm just not even gonna go there. And then when I re-engaged with it it was in a much more conscious way where like today I'll go on Twitter or I'll read the news or I'll do whatever but I'm much more aware of how this is affecting me. And I noticed if I start to get into that doom loop where I'm just looking for something that's gonna make me feel anxious or if I'm looking for outrage, I kind of go, okay, I got to step on this because it's not gonna work, it's not good. Johnny's smiling, he has a lot to say about those empty media calories. Oh yeah, I mean, for social, I mean, Twitter is certainly my favorite just because it's certainly fun and I have a lot of laughs on it but the downside of it is can be overwhelming and as much as entertainment as it can be it can definitely work you up. Evolution around, okay, I'm gonna consume the news and at the start of the pandemic I wanted more of the news, I wanted to protect myself or business, family, friends and through that I was like, you know what? I need the news even faster. So I ended up finding myself on Twitter and of course the news is published even faster in 140 characters and then around the middle of summer when the riots hit LA and I was on, the local news was on the TV, I'm on Twitter and I'm seeing on Twitter that our favorite Italian restaurant is burning to the ground with an arsonist and I turned to Amy and I'm like, I can't believe this, the world is literally on fire that we know here in LA and she's like, can you please just turn off this local news just take a step away from Twitter for a minute. I don't like what I'm seeing from you, you are in a doom loop and the next day come to find out that was not accurate information. So not only did I get myself worked up about our favorite Italian restaurant burning to the ground it wasn't even real, it wasn't even true and that's when I realized, okay I need to step away from Twitter, there's really nothing that I'm gaining from getting the news that quickly and we had friends a few years ago tell us that they don't interact with the news at all and they're content and we kind of shrug their shoulders at that like, wow that's a pretty strong take and I'll tell you now that I've unplugged all the important news still gets to me. I still know about Afghanistan but I'm not going and refreshing websites and chasing down this information because everyone else around me is chasing down this information. So I'm gonna get the news whether I'm avoiding it or not just through casual conversation interacting with my friends, family members. So that for me is a much healthier way to consume what's going on versus where I was a little over a year ago when things in LA were dire, the pandemic, the lockdown, everything was going on and it's just consistently hearing about the new awful things going on in the world and yeah, exactly that a frozen state of afraid of my own shadow, I don't wanna go out, I don't know that I can trust anyone and that is not helpful for our mental health. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. The other thing about it is because of the way it is set up and everyone's engagement you will find whatever it is that you're looking for and once you realize that that whatever it's right there that then you're like, well, wait a minute well, how is it news? I'm, how is this important? I can whatever angle lens I wanna see it from that's what I get and not only a couple sources as many as I want to bolster whatever I wanna take away from it so how does that offer you any value when you're just making it up and finding everything that you need to back up those assumptions? I mean, that's once you realize that you're like, oh, I gotta put a better filter on and I need to take some time off this thing. Well, it's like we were saying before about you can find anybody out there who aligns with you and who likes you, right? Like people are doing this filtering themselves all the time and then you find that the same four people that have the same opinion as you and just read that stuff again and again and then you're isolated and some people break from reality entirely. So yeah, I think we need to be more careful than ever with this stuff with the media that we consume and I would put social media in that bucket as well cause that's a whole other thing you're just looking at a bunch of curated filtered stories about your friends and their perfect lives, right? The quote unquote, perfect lives and it can have a similarly distorting and disempowering impact on us as well. All very well intended but when you're miserable at your desk and you see your friend on vacation in Tahiti or something, it's like that can have a disheartening effect on you and there's all sorts of, yeah, their emotional impact, I guess, that can be unintended. Well, think of it this way. 40 years ago, you didn't know all this stuff that you know about your friends now because people are just posting their inner thoughts and their pictures and you didn't know any of this stuff. You only knew when you asked. So now, not only do you know all this stuff, you're being judging about it and you're comparing and contrasting things that you would never know previously with your life now and so you're literally driving yourself insane. Yeah, I was never insecure about my kitchen but then I saw this kitchen today from someone I went to middle school with or something like, why would you ever know that? Yeah. And I think for many of us, we don't realize that we have control. We can turn this off and we work with clients who find themselves gravitating towards the news or social media or video games as a distraction and they think they're doing themselves a service by, okay, this is just me unplugging. I just need this to unwind but actuality is getting them even more wound up. It's robbing them of the social connection which you talked about earlier which is far more important than what's streaming on Netflix. Being in touch with people you love, actually fostering, developing those relationships has been proven scientifically to add years to your life, to help you mentally and physically sustain everything that life has to offer. But unfortunately, the news, the media, social media makes it so easy for us to feel connected artificially and not actually invest in those real connections that we need as humans. Yeah, I see that happening and I wonder how much of this has to do with social anxiety to, you know, if you're in a place where you're physically connected to other people and every day, you know, let's say it's back in the day, every day you gotta leave your house because you gotta go get food and you gotta go be around people and run into people and have conversations. Seems like there's not as much space for social anxiety to get purchase, to get a hold of you when you're forced into all of those interactions with people all the time and now if you can just as easily, you know, have these pseudo interactions online and then it can almost be weird. I remember especially during pandemic like clients talking about how weird it was to actually see people in person and it's like awkward and how do you shake hands or do you nod and everything. So I think it's reinforcing that. Yeah, I mean, these are learned practice skills and we talked about it on a previous episode. Even I had a bit of social anxiety coming out of this simply because I wasn't in the room with people for a very long time, we all weren't. And I laugh especially because up in the Bay Area, I know here in LA too, I've seen it. You know, I used to crack the joke, well, at least we get to socialize with our DoorDash delivery guy or our Instacart delivery and now they have robots delivering our food. So we are literally removing all social interaction. We can go on an app, we can order whatever we want, our dry cleaning gets picked up, they don't look us in the eye, they're wearing a mask, we're wearing a mask. And all of a sudden you've gone weeks on end without any real human interaction, that anxiety, that stress is gonna be through the roof. Totally, yeah. And it also, I mean, it gives you this control in a way of your life that in some ways is very comforting, but it also erases a lot of that spontaneity. Like yesterday actually I was out eating someplace and I ran into someone that I hadn't seen in like four years, just randomly on the street. And it was really cool. It was like, oh yeah, that can happen. People can just show up in your life uninvited, like in a good way and it's cool. That hadn't happened in the longest time because of all this. I'm excited for that to start happening more. Yeah. We're herd animals and we get value from the herd. We get value from being, from attention, approval and acceptance. And if you're not getting that, if you're not having those social interactions and you're just having pseudo interactions and you're like, oh, I guess somebody liked my post. I mean, your needs are not being met. And because your needs are not being met, that is going to manifest itself in behaviors that you're going to find unappealing and that other people are going to find unappealing. And it may even put you in a position to be supplicative or combative to get the attention, approval and acceptance that you're not regularly getting anymore. And again, this goes to putting another red flag of when you're seeing these behaviors come out and you're seeing yourself do things that in the past you wouldn't have done. This, that is another red flag. Totally, it's, we're bringing this back to stress. It's like we normally help each other through stress. We kind of soothe one another socially and you see this in your workplace. If you have a really difficult interaction or a meeting or something and you go in there with one of your coworkers, you're like, oh my God, what was that about? I know that was crazy. You are soothing each other and you're bringing down your stress levels and you can see that physiologically, right? There are changes hormonally that occur in interactions like that. So we've set up this social structure, especially lately that just doesn't support those kinds of real interactions. We get them somewhat, you know, like we are having that somewhat right now, right? And we're all virtual, but I think there's just much less opportunity to do that. You don't have those hallway moments. You don't have those running into people. So we have to work extra hard right now to set up lives where we have the social inputs, where we have those interactions where we're really, really taking care of our stress. And we've got to do all this in the face of a cultural conditioning that says, no, just grind harder, grind harder, just suck it up and do it. So it's a lot to remember.