 Today, I'm going to be giving you seven different keys for better mental health. There's one thing that we've realized over the past few years is that mental health is something that it's gone down a lot for a lot of people. The average amount of phone calls into the crisis hotline has literally gone up three times, 300% from what it was a few years ago. And so with better mental health, this is something that we all need to concentrate on because we are the ones that are in charge of our own mental health. There's nobody else's job, but our own to improve our own mental health. And so for today, I'm going to give you seven different keys to improve your mental health. So let's dive into it. Number one, if it still bothers you after 24 hours, speak up within 48 hours. Okay. Something happens to you. Maybe you're in a relationship with somebody and they do something. And what you typically would do is take those feelings and push them down. And what you want to say, you don't say. And you're just like, I'm just going to avoid it. I'm going to avoid this conversation because I know that it could turn into a blow up and she could blame me for it and I could blame her for it. And then it's just easier not to get into it. If something is still kind of lingering, if it's still bothering you after 48 hours, you need to speak up within the next 24 hours. I'm sorry. If it's still bothering you within 24 hours, you need to speak up in the next 24 hours. So if it bothers you after 24 hours, speak up within those 48 hours because what it's doing is it's showing you something. I don't know what that something is, but I do know something around that is ignoring something does not make it go away. Ignoring something just puts it in the dark, puts it under the rug and you just keep putting things under the rug and under the rug and under the rug. Eventually it's going to build up and you're going to trip over that rug. And so if there's something, anything somebody needs to, you need to say something to someone, you need to express something to somebody, whatever it is, if it still bothers you after 24 hours, speak up within 48 hours. That's number one. Number two, get better at expressing your feelings. Part of being a human is having a large range of emotion. We can have the highest of highs, we can have the lowest of lows. We all, myself included, everybody need to get better at expressing our feelings. So we need to express what's going on inside of us. If you have anger, let the anger out in a safe place. If you have sadness, let the sadness out in a safe place. If you have frustration, let it out in a safe place. Stop holding it all in. We're holding onto so much of it. Sometimes if you're just really pissed off, if you're really anger, if you're really frustrated, maybe what you need to do is go to a kickboxing class. Maybe you need to go to the gym. Maybe you need to go to kickboxing class, then go to the gym and then have that conversation like we were just talking about a minute ago. Stop holding it in so much. If your body is at ease when you're not holding it all in, then it is at dis-ease when you don't release it. So dis-ease inside of your body can turn into disease in your body. You might say, oh my gosh, that sounds so woo-wee and stuff. Well, there's an entire book on this called The Body Keep Score where a motion that is suppressed inside of you, a motion that you suppress, suppress, suppress, actually turns into a lot of dis-ease inside of the body, right? So don't apologize for expressing your feelings. Now are there right ways to express your feelings in the wrong ways? Of course. But don't apologize for expressing something that feels true to you and don't let somebody else invalidate your feelings simply because it doesn't line up with the way they feel about a situation. And so one of the things we can all do is just get better at expressing our feelings. Whenever something comes up, try to express it. Try to let it through. If it's sadness, there's so many people that you have so much grief that you are holding onto inside of you and you haven't let yourself feel it. Somebody died, somebody left, something happened the way that you didn't want it to happen. You were neglected, all kinds of things. And sometimes what we need to do is we need to actually just let it all out. So don't apologize for expressing feelings. Express your feelings in a safe place, in a safe way, and then also don't let people invalidate your feelings. So that's number two. Number three, get better at asking for help. We all need help at some point, right? And so many people that I see, so many people come to me and they're just like, I'm terrible at asking for help. I put everything on my back. I try to do everything for everyone else and I'm just so terrible at asking for other people to help me. Imagine that everything that you go through, everything that happens to you in your life, everything that you do has some weight to it. A fight that you have with somebody has weight to it. To-do list that's way too long has weight to it. Things that happen to your childhood have weight to it. And I'm just talking about physical weight. Just imagine that it weighs one pound. And you keep putting that one pound, each one of the things weigh one pound, you're putting into a backpack on your back, you're putting it into a backpack in your back, you're putting into a backpack on your back. And you keep putting on more and more and more and more weight. Put it in your backpack, you put it in your backpack, you put it in your backpack. You realize a year, two years, three years, five years down the road, it's like you're carrying a backpack that weighs 300 pounds. There are people in your life that are more than willing to help you take some of the weight, but you don't ask for help. That's why it feels so heavy. That's why we say it feels, oh my gosh, it just feels so heavy. You don't know why. At some point, you have to learn to drop the weight. At some point, you have to reach out to somebody and say, hey, I need help with this. I need help with the way that I'm feeling. At some point, you have to drop the weight and ask for some help, otherwise it's going to all come crashing down. I've been there before. So many people have been there before. You have to learn to ask for help. It's like the phrase, the mountains that you are meant to climb, the mountains that you are carrying, you are only meant to climb, right? The things that you're going through, you're only supposed to climb that mountain. You weren't supposed to take that mountain and put it onto your back and carry it with you all of the time. And so sometimes we just got to get better at asking for help. And so if you feel like you need some help, who is the person in your life that you feel you can reach out to that you trust more than anything else and just be like, hey, can I express? Can I get help? Can I vent to you? Can I talk? Whatever it is that you need to do, you need to learn at some point in time that we just got to get better at asking for weight. You can't do everything alone. A lot of us think that doing things alone is the only way that we can do it is because sometimes we were the only one that we could trust when we were children. There wasn't anybody else that was helping. Sometimes you're taking care of your parents when you're nine years old, ten years old, because they don't have it all together. We've got to get out of that programming that we've created on ourselves and just say, hey, I've got to ask for some help. So if you feel there's something you need to ask for help with, go and ask for help. So that's number three. Number four, this is a big one. Start treating yourself like someone that you're responsible for taking care of. Let me say that again because a lot of people are not going to, it's going to hit. Treat yourself like someone that you are responsible for taking care of. Stop taking care of everyone else and just forgetting about yourself. Don't say that you don't have enough time to take care of yourself. Make time. If something is important to you, if it's a priority, you will find time. You will find a way to get it done. The most important person in your life is you. Now I've already triggered some of you that are sitting out there that are like, hold on, but I've got kids. I've got a spouse. I've got family. I've got to take care of my mom. I've got to take care of all these other people. How could I possibly be the most important person in my life? Because you cannot pour from an empty cup. If you're just waking up and immediately going to helping your kids, and then when you're done with that, you're immediately helping other people and helping other people, and you're not helping yourself, eventually you're going to run out. Eventually you're going to run out of energy. There's going to be a breakdown. There's going to be something that's going to go wrong. So what does self-care look like to you? What is taking care of yourself look like to you? And when I say self-care, I don't mean like going and getting your hair done. Now that's fine. You could definitely do that if that makes you feel good. I don't just mean getting your hair done or a massage or nails done or facial or any of those things. All of those things are great. But like when I'm talking about really taking care of yourself, like real self-care, I'm talking about things like meditation, sitting down and taking some time to yourself, allowing yourself to feel, to think. I'm talking about sitting down and journaling your thoughts, journaling your emotion, journaling what's been going on throughout your day, throughout your life. I'm talking about working out. You know, there's so many studies, like a ridiculous amount of studies that talk about one of the key ways to hold off on depression, to push depression away or to get out of depression is to get your body moving, to get some form of workout or yoga or running or walking or movement in general. And so working out is a form of self-care. Eating healthy is a form of self-care. A lot of people when you're going through a lot of stuff, when you're carrying all of this weight, when you're not asking for help, when you're not expressing your emotions, you go to numbing. And numbing can mean that you eat food that's not necessarily the food that's helping you. So eating healthy is a really high form, high value form of self-care. So meditation, working out, eating healthy. What does it mean to you? For some of you, it might be going on a hike in the mountains depending on where you live. For some of you, it might be going for a swim and doing laps every single morning. So like, what does self-care mean to you? That's something that you need to journal through. You're serving no one when you're ignoring your self-care. So that's number four. Number five, stop trying to escape your pain. An attempt to escape pain ends in causing more pain. By pushing it away and acting like it's not there, it's only going to make it worse. The only way past your pain is to go through your pain, to learn from your pain. Acting like it's not there is not going to help you. Looking away. Oh my gosh. Oh no, it's not over there. Don't worry. Yeah, no, I've been through some shit, but it's okay. Like looking away, numbing, all of these things don't make your pain go away. The way I think of it is like the parable where it's like the guy's holding a bottle of water. And he's in front of a class and he says, hey, how much do you think this bottle of water weighs? And they're like, oh, it weighs 10 ounces. It weighs a pound. And he's like, okay, and he holds it there and he says, now, how much do you think it's going to weigh on me if I hold this for a few minutes? What if I hold this for a few hours? If I hold this out in front of me, this bottle of water that only weighs a few ounces, 10 ounces, whatever it is, and I hold it for 24 hours and I hold it for 48 hours in two hours. What's going to start to happen? My arms going to tire out. My body is going to start to fail from it. The weight of the bottle didn't change. The only thing that changed was how long I'm holding on to it. So this bottle that I'm talking about, the water that we're holding on to, it's only 10 ounces, but we hold it and hold it and hold it and hold it. It's all of our worry. It's all of our problems. It's all of our stress. It's all of our anxious thoughts. We have to learn to be able to let all of it go. What does it look like for you to let go, to stop trying to escape the pain, but to just work through it and let it go? Because acting like it's not there doesn't make it there. You're still holding on to it, even if you're like, I'm not holding this water. I'm not holding this water. I'm not holding this water. You're still holding the water. And over time, the weight only starts to hurt you more. Okay? That's number five. Number six is more silence. Just more silence, more of it. All too often, we're so busy moving and moving and moving and moving and moving and moving and moving and having to do this and having to do this and having to do this and this, this, this, this. How can we just build more silence into our life? In your life, can you figure out a way to build more silence? Now there's a part of you, if you're an overachiever like I am that's like, hold on. I'm so busy. Like I'm not where I want to be in life. I've got to be productive. I've got to succeed. I've got to work. I've got to get to where I need to go. More silence sounds like it's going to be holding me back from being more productive. You've got to find more time to just sit and do nothing. Yes. Now Rob, 10 years ago, it would have been like, all right, you woo woo wee creep. Just sit and do nothing. That's not going to do anything for my life. But as I've gotten older and I've started to work through things in my life and I've built a company and built relationships and built a team and all these things, I realized that silence, just nothing is actually one of the biggest things that you could do for you on mental health. For me, I never got it. I used to always get into my mom's car and she never had any music on. And I was like, this is driving me crazy. We need some music on. I was like, how do you do this? And she's like, because when I'm in silence, that's my time to think. And I was like, I can't do that. This is ridiculous. And then like the past six months I get into my car and I love music. I'm a musician. I've been obsessed with it since I was a kid. I just don't listen to music as much because I allow that time while I'm driving to just sit and think and process life and not feel like I always have to be going, going, going, stimuli, stimuli, stimuli. And so sometimes like this morning, this morning I woke up and I just sat on my couch this morning, drinking my coffee for a good 25 minutes. I wasn't reading. I wasn't listening to music. I wasn't doing anything. I was just allowing myself to simply exist. And I feel like that made me way more calm to be able to do that. So just try to put more silence into your life. Try to put more silence. Take five minutes after this podcast. I'm okay with you turning this podcast off and when we get done here and taking five minutes just to sit and think and exist and allow your brain just to simply calm down a little bit. So number six is more silence. Number seven, put your thoughts onto a piece of paper. And I don't know how many people have told me they'll send me emails, they'll talk to me, they'll send me a message on Instagram and say, I heard you talk about journaling for, you know, for six months for a year for two years, three years, they've been listening to podcasts and they just didn't journal, didn't journal, didn't journal. And they're like, you know what? One day I just decided to, I thought that it was dumb. I thought it didn't make any sense. One day I just decided to put all my thoughts down on paper and I started to figure myself out more and it started to make my life easier and it started to make my brain work better and I started to actually put a plan together of how I was going to improve my life. And so life is so complex, so ridiculously complex. You can't figure it out in your head sometimes. Sometimes you've got to put it on paper. You've got to see it. You've got to let your brain release it because your brain now knows it's on paper and then you've got to pick apart the pieces that you put on that piece of paper and say, all right, I need to, you know what? I need to fix this in my relationship. My relationship has caused me a lot of stress. Let me journal through what would make my relationship better. You know what? Shit, I've got to have a really tough conversation with her about X, Y, Z. This thing that happened that I don't feel good about the way that happened or maybe I'm seeing something that I did and I don't like the way that I reacted. I need to go to horror and I need to apologize. That would make me feel like our relationship. It was, we worked through it. So put all of your thoughts down on a piece of paper and just start to work through that piece of paper. I always give the example of like, if I give you a complex math problem and I said, figure it out. You can't use your phone. What are you going to ask? Can I have a pen and paper at least? Why? Because it's easier to make a complex math problem, to work through a complex math problem, when you can see it and it's on paper. Your life, your mind, all of your relationships, your business, your family, all of these things are way more complex than a math problem. So many variables exist in it. When you just put it on paper, it makes it so much easier to work through it. So those are the seven things that I want you to do, seven keys to better mental health. Number one, if it still bothers you after 24 hours, speak up within 48 hours. Number two, get better at expressing your feelings. Number three, get better at asking for help. Number four, treat yourself like someone that you're responsible for taking care of. Number five, stop trying to escape your pain. Number six, have more silence in your life. Number seven, put your thoughts down on paper. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in it, RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. Also, if you're not following me on Instagram, we've got a ton of stuff that we put on there. So if you use Instagram and you want me to kind of put your news feed and put some mindset tips, tricks, all that stuff, we put a lot of stuff on Instagram that we don't put in this podcast. So you want some extra tips and tricks, go ahead and follow me on there, RobDialJr, R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And I'm going to leave the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make someone else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.