 Are you under a stay-at-home order because of COVID-19 like I am? I'm actually not in the studio today because I'm making sure that I am not around potentially contagious people. And like many of you, you may be experiencing boredom, loneliness, or other psychological challenges because you're at home, so stay tuned to learn about owning your life during the COVID-19 pandemic, staying in control in an out-of-control world. Much more on medicine is an opportunity to learn about all aspects of health care. I talk with guests about medical and alternative care treatment, insurance, medication, surgery, rehabilitation, prevention, and much more. Today, I'm talking with Dr. Ron Kaiser. Dr. Kaiser is a positive health psychologist and director of psychology at the Jefferson Headache Center at Thomas Jefferson University. His interest in wellness promotion has led to the development of goal-achieving psychology and the Type P personality. He has a significant online presence devoted to helping people live in more healthy and positive ways through platforms such as his website, the mental health gym, and his podcast Rejuvenating with Dr. Ron Kaiser. His book, Rejuvenating, the art and science of growing older with enthusiasm has won awards and he is a keynote and TEDx speaker. Welcome, Dr. Kaiser. Nice to be with you, Captain. Well, I have a lot of questions for you today. Are you also under an order to stay at home? Yes, for a couple of reasons. Although I do work in a medical center, they have kind of restricted those of us who are in the upper age ranges told us to stay home, but the Philadelphia area generally is under about as much of a quarantine as there is in most places with supermarkets and pharmacies and gas stations open, but I don't know when I'm going to get another haircut or when I'm going to get my shirts out of the dry cleaners. Absolutely. Well, as an attorney, I am an exempt business. However, I'm not sure on that will be allowed, but this is a really unique situation. And from a psychological perspective, what makes it so unique? There are several things that really make it unique. First of all, in most cases, whenever we have a crisis, it tends to be a temporary thing, one that we prepare for the storm or the tornado or the inclement weather of some type and at some point it passes. Our history with other medical issues, such as the regular flu is you go about your business normally, you try and take care of yourself, get the flu shot, but basically things don't shut down with this. There's so much unknown about it and it has impacted on so many aspects of our lives. People have lost their jobs. People have lost money, at least on paper in the stock market. And also there's a lot of ambiguity about when is this thing going to end, when can we get out. So, in addition to the fact that we're just not used to being quarantined for an extended period of time, there's just so much uncertainty which allows the mind to do all kinds of strange things with our thinking. We're being bombarded with bad news and I have to admit that I am constantly watching the news and trying to find out more information about what might happen. But what, do you have any recommendation as to whether we should continue watching the news and paying attention to what's going on? I encourage people to watch the news the way that they're supposed to check emails. Unless it's an ongoing component of your job, it's always recommended that hey, maybe check it in the morning, check it sometime in the noon hour or thereabouts early afternoon and check it again later in the day. I think it's the same kind of thing here. It's a fast moving situation but it doesn't move from quarter hour to quarter hour and nothing particularly good yet is coming out of the news. So why punish ourselves? We can check in another three or four hours and see what's happening. So I think there's much more proactive things that you can do than passively except what you hear on the news and then spend time worrying about it. OK, that makes a whole lot of sense. And do you have an opinion or thought as to what our mindset should be at about this time? Yes, I like to think in terms of what I call the proactive and positive mindset. Proactive meaning to focus on what things we can do to control whatever we can control. There are lots of things that we can't control. And again, there's a lot of ambiguity. We don't know how, no matter how careful we are, whether we've been exposed. But we want to be proactive. There are things that we can do and also the positive mindset. The first book that I ever wrote was in 2011, the first popular book at any rate, called What Can Go Right? And I think that's something we've got at least some credence to. There's not a guarantee that everything's going to go right. And probably there are many things that will go wrong. But we have to at least allow ourselves the recognition that things will go right. Most prominently, the fact that this will end at some point and we want to be able, through our proactivity and through our mindset, to be able to prepare for that time. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. And I know that you're a proponent of positive psychology as you just indicated. Does this philosophy help you prepare and help us prepare for this situation? Yes, I think it's an important component of the situation. Again, positive psychology really looks at getting people to thrive. How can we flourish? What things can we do to move forward? As opposed to looking at disease and trying to get us out of the disease. But actually, what things can we do to flourish? I think that's a really important thing. I have, for my patients and followers, I've come up with kind of a concept that I call great SOS. It lists some of the things that people can keep in mind in order to be able to take charge of as much of their lives as they can. Again, we're not trying to be stupid about it. We're not trying to say that there aren't some real dangers. And some people will have a difficult time with this from a physical standpoint. But as long as we can be in charge of owning a big part of our life, let's try and implement some of those steps. Well, when I was recently in Minneapolis, I was watching the news. And at that point, they were under a stay at home order. And many people were at home working. And in a lot of situations, couples were at home working in closed quarters. And they recommended that as these couples or families have to work in those situations, that they create a fictitious coworker that they can blame things on. And I would look at that as a specific strategy. Can you recommend other strategies for people that are confined to their homes? Yes, I think I can recommend some better ones. First of all, I do have to say I hope you found Minneapolis to be a really nice place. That's where I grew up and spent the first 22 years of my life. So I have fond memories of it. But I do think that there are some things that, because of technology, that we're able to do now that we can or couldn't at some point. First of all, I encourage people, when I speak with company executives and others, to create staff meetings, whether you need it or not. I do it with my own staff and over Zoom or other kinds of ways of relating to just be able to be in touch with the others. I encourage people to email pictures of themselves if they're coworkers so that you do have coworkers around you. I also encourage people to kind of start thinking in terms of their pets or children as being coworkers. To build in specific times that they can look forward to being with them. I also do have to point out that if, I know this is untested ground for a lot of people, but if someone in their spouse is having a lot of trouble spending time together, I think that's indicative of perhaps another problem that they may want to discuss when this thing is over. You know, it's interesting that you talked about pets as coworkers. I posted on Facebook, what are your pet coworkers doing right now? And that was probably the most popular post. And it seems that so many people posted pictures of their cats and dogs and had something funny about what they were doing. And we call them our coworkers. And so lately I've just been calling my stymies cats my coworkers. Yes, you should be part of your job if you're home because she is an essence of coworkers. And I would definitely make sure that you're building in time, you know, snuggling time or whatever play time so on because this is a part of your life for the near term. And I did a webinar this morning and it was kind of interesting. I actually did it from home. And one of my cats actually got on the back of the chair that I was on and was in the screen. And there was like hundreds of people watching this. It was kind of amusing because I guess my coworker wants to be part of the show. Yeah, it's a little bit like there was a famous picture of a person, a professor I believe he was in the UK who was giving a real serious talk with us, Cote and Ty, on from his home. And pretty soon as kids started coming into the picture. So it looks like that was a very similar thing in your situation. Yeah, I actually think I saw that. But at this time we're going to take a short break. I'm Catherine Moore. This is much more on medicine on the Think Tech live streaming network series. We're talking with Dr. Ron Kaiser about owning your life during the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years. And we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines. And it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence and finding greatness. I feature a wide range of amazing guests who share valuable insights about how going beyond the lines leads to success in everything you do in life. I'm looking forward to you joining me every Monday at 11 a.m. Aloha. We're back. We're live. I'm Catherine Noran. This is much more on medicine on the Think Tech live streaming network series. And we're talking with Dr. Ron Kaiser about owning your life during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr, how important is interacting with others during this time? Oh, it's tremendously important. It's really a major part of the human condition to be social. We are learning more and more about this all the time. There's a good deal of research that enables us to really state this with a great deal of certainty. We know, for example, that loneliness is right up there as a killer, along with smoking, obesity, sedentary lifestyle when people get to be in their senior years. And if for many people, whether it was work, whether it was a particular restaurant they stopped at, the store, the neighborhood, for many people, that was a major part of their social life. So automatically, they've got feedback on a regular basis, got a certain amount of psychological support, also got a certain amount of maybe some negative references so they could know what kinds of changes to make and so on. Now suddenly, people in many cases are confined to their homes. They're not feeling good about the situation. They're not feeling up to call somebody, but it's a really necessary thing. For one thing, the more you avoid it, it's like any other muscle. If you don't use it, you lose it. It's, if you haven't called somebody for 10 days, it's a lot easier to not call in the 11th day. And then that multiplies, lessens the human interaction. The other thing is that other people need to hear from you. It's important for everybody's self-image to touch base with others, to have that feeling that we are a community even though we're experiencing this unusual kind of situation. And technology makes it so much easier now than ever before between phone, texting, FaceTime, Zoom, lots of different ways to be able to do this, that it's a very powerful and important thing that we can't really neglect. And the big problem in relation to it is there's, nobody's going to make you do it unless you take the initiative and do so. You know, you may have a particularly close friend or family member who's feeling more positive and reaches out to others on a regular basis, but you have to assume that that's part of your job. Right now, maintaining ownership of your life is your job. That makes sense. You know, in my own situation, I was most disappointed that I couldn't go to Zumba five nights a week like I normally do. And fortunately, I have two things that are working in my favor. My friends that I do Zumba with, we are all texting each other a lot during the day. And then they have a few instructors that are doing live streaming of work out in the evening and we're able to do it on our own. And then we kind of weigh in, we put comments on their site and we actually text each other about it to confirm that we did it and we have fun, that kind of thing in post pictures. So that's been a wonderful situation. Yes, there's lots of things like Zumba, yoga, meditation. Lots of available ways of healing in charge of normalizing your life that are available online nowadays. And also, I don't know how it is in your situation. We are permitted to go outside as long as we keep social distance. And I live across the street from one of the major parks in the city. And I do see on a regular basis, three or four people take their yoga mats, face them far, far enough apart and do practice that outside. And from a health standpoint, if you can go outside and maintain social distance, that's an important thing. But again, let's not forget all these opportunities that we have if you have a computer to be able to stay healthy while staying involved. In Hawaii, our parks are closed. However, we are allowed to go walking or running or, actually, the governor said that we can go surfing or swimming in the ocean. However, they've closed the parks. But I understand that we are able to walk through those closed areas to the ocean. However, I think it's complicated, but I think what they're trying to encourage us to keep fit and to walk outside and do things outside to make us healthy. However, they're trying to discourage us from congregating. Yes, it's somewhat similar here. I think you've got the advantage that you don't get as, at least at this time of the year, you don't get as many bad weather days. Today, we had a lot of rain in Philadelphia. And my best attempt at walking kind of got rained out. Absolutely. Now, I think a lot of people wonder about this one question. And I certainly do. I do use Facebook a lot. And I do appreciate that ability to communicate with people. However, as you probably know, social media has good and it's bad. And there are people that are very negative on social media. And that they judge people that post certain things. Do you have any philosophy on how to approach social media so that you can use it in a really positive way and avoid the negative? Two things. Number one, I always have preached that you don't have to be involved with toxic people. If you set goals or limits as to who you're going to be involved with and be able to say, I don't prefer to deal with negative people. I'm sure a crisis like this brings out some negative stuff in people who may not have shown that before. That's one thing. The other is I think we each have to be a role model. I think if you're a role model of positive proactive behavior, let people learn from you. And if it's not rewarding to them to be able to continue to express negative stuff because you aren't involved with them. And they're seeing your comments being liked. Hopefully that'll make the world a little bit better of place on one person at a time. But it is an issue as much as possible. I think you try and control again what you can control by avoiding certain people and by posting positive and uplifting things on your own. When I post, I try very hard to post funny things, cats and dogs. Anything that I think is funny and cute and fun. And I try hard not to post things that are kind of a downer. But on occasion, I might post something that's a little serious. But I think having kind of those standards, I think it's kind of helpful. Yeah, I think it's the same thing as friendships outside of social media. You don't want to avoid the fact that there's a real world out there. And sometimes you have to comment about it. But probably your strongest friendships are with people who make you feel good, not either tear you or other people down. Sure. And I know that a lot of people may experience depression and anxiety at this time. What do they do if they don't already have a therapist? The one thing, there are many restrictions. Most states have dropped restrictions with respect to doing teletherapy. So the fact that they don't have one doesn't necessarily mean they can't get one. It's not ideal, certainly, to not have met in person first. But there is a lot of teletherapy being done. But I think let's look at what depression and anxiety is. Anxiety, to me, is predicting that something is going to go wrong before it actually has. Kind of predicting failure before it's happened. And then acting as if that's what is going to happen. And that's why I think asking what can go right is an important thing. Be able to interrupt that negative thinking and ask what can go right. With respect to depression, the cognitive components really is the expectation that things will never get better, or that I'm this special kind of person that allows these things happen to me. And if you get your head into that kind of a cycle, that becomes very important in terms of maintaining that cycle. So the obvious thing is to break that cycle. To begin the question, how do I know? Am I a fortune teller? One of the questions I often have my patients ask themselves. Am I a fortune teller? What can go right? How is this helping me get to where I want to get to? And I encourage people to have four or five questions in advance that they can ask themselves the kind of guard against depression. But I do think you also have to take into account the fact that sometimes you may have to reach out professionally to a therapist or to someone who prescribes medication to deal with those things. But for most people, if this is a new and relatively, hopefully temporary situation, a lot can be done in terms of what you tell yourself. And we will have an end to this at some point. Do you have any thoughts about the aftermath? Yes, I think that there are things that we can learn. We wouldn't want to make this the way that we learn, but that we can learn that will enable us to be better people. For example, we can use some of the time in very productive ways to learn new skills, take a course over the computer or to read things of this nature, to organize our desk so that and our covers, drawers, so on to make sure that we've got a system in place that we can continue using. Maybe we can learn more self-management kinds of things, meditation, self-compassion, being as good to ourselves as we're often to other people. Even the basic thing is to notice that it's important to wash our hands and not touch our face if we've been exposed to dirty areas. So I think there are things that we should look at as not only what we're going through right now, but as building blocks for the future. Then I think the other element is to begin to see this as a way of building resilience. We're going through something, hopefully we're all going to make it. This is part of our history. We got through this, it was something that we didn't want, but we did the right things to get us to the other side. Fantastic, doctor. You've helped a lot of people today, but we're out of time and we'll have to wrap it up. I'm Catherine Norr, this is much more on medicine on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. We've been talking with Dr. Ron Kaiser about owning your life during the COVID-19 pandemic, staying in control and then out of control world. Thank you for joining us today. Next week, my guest will be attorney Natalie Pettit. We will be talking about COVID-19 legal issues. Thanks for our broadcast engineer and to Jay Fidel, our executive producer, please join us for future Think Tech productions.