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As the month of December continues and this holiday season is proven to be like no other, I want to continue the conversation around mental health. So many of us look forward to this time of year because of spending time with family, friends, and loved ones. However, with the current climate as well as the difficulties military life can bring in general, that may not look so normal this year. Today, I have with me Megan Rice.
Megan, like myself, is passionate about normalizing mental health and aligning with other professionals to create a space where people like you can be transparent about your struggles and get what you need to be the best version of yourself. Dr. Megan is the founder of Better Lives Building Tribes and along with her private practice, she writes for several media outlets such as Talk Space. Today Megan and I are going to discuss how to navigate a socially distanced holiday and how to recognize mental health warning signs amidst the people in our community.
Megan, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to be here. I think now more than ever, we really need to jump in and address these major issues, especially as we're combining these different activities that are coming up.
Holidays, especially, are stressful in a trying time and are incorporated with a lot of grief and loss, unfortunately. We're compacting all of those different things with this idea that people are struggling because they're isolated. They're isolated. They're alone.
They're having to do a whole bunch of different activities that they weren't otherwise doing. They're combining lanes, if you will. It's really hard to mix and mingle work and family and couple structures and individual ways of being. So I think it feels chaotic.
I think it feels chaotic and there's so many different layers right now that we really just need to talk about and be transparent about in order to help those in need. Absolutely. Chaotic is definitely, I think, one of the words that I hear thrown around a lot recently. I would love for you to tell our listeners a little before we jump into that a little bit more about yourself and how better lives building tribes came to be.
Definitely. I've been in mental health now for about 10 years and over the course of that time I've been working with a wide array of different populations, community mental health centers and hospital settings and especially kind of moving towards this private practice route. I really saw a need for getting more than one person together. I think standardized mental health care looks like one person in a room with a therapist, with a mental health professional.
But I really saw this need for getting your partner involved with therapy or getting your family involved with your therapy or hearing from your boss or hearing from other professionals that are in your life. I noticed that we're not just individual people in so many ways. We're really complex and we have a huge network. The more people that we can get together on our same team, on our same page to say, yeah, I recognize that they struggle.
Here's a certain time in place that they struggle. I would like to know how to help them or similarly with our other family members and our friends and our coworkers and people that are close to us, how as the individual that's struggling with mental health, how can they best meet other people's needs while also meeting their own needs. It was at that point that I said, how can I get people in a larger group on the screen? How can I get a text message from individuals' partners?
How can I get some sort of little blurb or script from a professional in these individuals' lives to test to what we're really struggling with and what we really need to work towards to get to the better version of themselves. I created a practice, a product consulting firm, in order to get more people on the screen and more people involved in the therapeutic process. I loved every single moment of it. There's so many people involved with my way of caring for individuals that need some assistance in creating that best version of themselves.
That's how it came to be. I just got involved with social media and people who write about it. I hope to one day write a book. I just don't think there's enough awareness about this idea that the more collaborative the better with people in our lives.
I absolutely love this idea of collaborative and I think it's super fitting for what you talked about earlier with how the boundaries in our lives are blurred right now. So work and life are all within the same space for a lot of people. So even more so, having that collaborative effort towards mental health I think is imperative with what everybody's going through with the pandemic and feeling isolated. And I'm working in my home office right now.
My rest of my family is upstairs. I think you're doing the same. And then there's no transitions. There's no transitions from going from work to doing home life.
And so we can get caught up in the busy of everything that needs to get done. But I still feel isolated, even being around our family, even being around our neighbors. And still that feeling of isolation is very, very apparent. I know that is for me a lot of the times that I'm sure it is for a lot of people.
So what are some of the things that you have been seeing, you know, to kill back, you know, my audience is primarily military spouses and that's something, this feeling of isolation and living and breathing our work and life and everything together is something that we're accustomed to. It's something that we do often, that I think the pandemic just makes it that much more challenging. It adds layers to an already difficult situation. So what are some of the things that you've seen or that you want to address today in regards to that?
Yeah, I think the isolation is a really great topic to bring up, especially as it relates to military spouses, honestly. Being completely surrounded by people doesn't equal fulfillment, right? We can be in the same room with large groups of people. We can be in the same shared office as our spouse and still feel alone.
We can be in, you know, exercise situations or group fitness and still feel alone because I think a lot of times loneliness is driven by our internal view of what's going on in the outside world. I think a lot of people think that we feel lonely because, you know, there's either a shortage of people or the people that are around us are not getting asked what we need. So there's this external view that I think a lot of people attribute that loneliness to. But the internal view is kind of the sweet spot.
It's the internal view that says, is my life in abundance right now or is my life short? Yeah. And if we get stuck, I think too long on that, my life is short. Like I'm being shorted somehow by the people in my life or the things in my life or the places in my life.
If I'm being shorted somehow and I get focused too hard on that, I'm going to feel lonely and I'm going to feel depressed. I'm going to feel anxious and I'm going to feel angry, irritable, frustrated, right? I think those negative feelings are able to creep in when we get stuck on the somehow my life is not sufficient. I really like to encourage people, especially now, you know, especially now is we're combining all these different layers to take a step back and recognize and it's hard sometimes, you know, I'm not going to lie.
I miss COVID to pull out like things in your life that really rock your world that you think are spectacular, but it's a practice, you know, it's a practice to almost make perfection there. So we wake up every single day and we pull out one thing, you know, and I tell tell my clients and tell people that I'm meeting with like one thing, just pull up a scrap of a thing that you can hold onto that says, you know what, my life isn't so bad. It can be something as simple as, you know, I'm safe for my family's safe or I'm healthy, relatively healthy. My family's relatively healthy.
My partner's relatively healthy. I am in a situation right now where, you know, I can start to think about the holidays. Maybe it's not perfect. Maybe it's socially distanced.
Maybe it's different than any other year before, but I'm in a spot right now where I can like think about some guests. So I can think about like how I'm going to show the people in my life that I love them and care for them and what the best for them. So it's a little piece of gratitude that I think we can wake up with that kind of like jump starts our day. Isolation is huge though.
Isolation creeps in when we're not able to pull ourselves away and focus on like what we're thinking about, what we're thinking about determines how we feel, how we feel determines what we do, you know, or all connected. All connected. Yeah. You know, you talked about that internal loneliness is driven by our internal view and I love that because I actually see what from hearing you and talking to you that that is something that is within our control.
And so I'm not talking about, you know, the chemical imbalances that leads to depression and things like that. I'm talking about focusing on the things that you can control and in your internal view, you can drive the narrative that you're telling yourself is what I'm hearing you say is, you know, waking up with pulling out that one thing and having a moment of gratitude, reflection on what is good about your life right now, not just what is that. And it's hard. It's hard to shift our focus when it, when, you know, the word you used before, when it's chaotic, it's really hard in a time of chaos to shift your focus to that one positive thing.
But what you're saying is that shifting your focus to that one positive thing can actually have a huge impact on the rest of your day, the rest of your week. And so, and you know, your holiday season. So what are, you know, with that being said, coming up to the holiday season, besides, you know, pulling out one thing, gratitude, journaling, maybe, what are some other things that you suggest for people as, you know, things are looking so different right now and fighting through that isolation. Yeah, kind of like what we talked about before too, you know, those individual lanes, right?
You know, at one point in time, maybe we had a lane for ourselves. We had a lane for our relationship. We had a lane for, you know, our family structure. We had a lane for, you know, our physical fitness.
I like to bring that back to the best of our ability. Not perfect. It's not going to be a perfect science. It's not going to be in the same way that once before, but especially as we're going into the holiday season and navigating, you know, like I said with my private practice, I'm kind of trying to help people navigate that spot in which they intersect with others.
Holiday season is a huge time for intersection with others. And so if we can pull it back a little bit, not only have that reflection of gratitude with going well in our lives, but think about ways that we can invest in four categories. And I pulled these four categories from a wide array of different sources, different books that have decided that these four categories are the heavy hitters, right? These are the ones that we need to absolutely have an investment every single day after we make the investment in these four categories, then we can go into the mindless categories, you know, or the things that are not so productive or helpful in our lives, you know, even negative coping skills are fine and out of addition after we do these four categories.
And so those four categories are relationships, right? So we need to be able to have a lane that says, I'm going to invest in the caliber of my relationships. We are the average of the company we keep. And so it's important to recognize that, yeah, the people that love you and care for you and generate some sort of energy momentum, they need to be reinforced for that.
People don't like to do things without some sort of reinforcements that are efforts are valid, right? And of course, the folks that love and care for us, the flip side of that, especially during the holidays, is to navigate those people in our lives that are maybe considered a little bit more toxic for us, maybe not even toxic for the world, but toxic for us as people and becoming the best version of ourselves. So not being afraid of sub boundaries, not being afraid of great space. I think about and I wrote about this recently where, you know, we can we can visit relatives, you know, we can we can visit family members without having to like be absorbed in their world or their culture.
We can stay separate places, right? So if we want to do something casually socially distance, you know, park type setting, we can stay different places. We don't have to stay at our relatives home. There's no expectation there.
And that little ounce of space can create enough space to where we're pulling back on our emotional engagement, getting to a place where we're logical and reasonable and then being able to reapproach the scene. Or we don't have to do anything with anyone that contributes to toxicity in our lives, right? So we have that choice, just like we talked about with choice focusing on gratitude rather than negativity, we have this choice to focus on, you know, the people that love and care for us and kind of make distance and create space with the ones who are not so helpful. And I love, sorry, going back real quick when you talked about not being afraid to set boundaries and create space.
Because the holidays look really different, you know, we do want to spend time with loved ones, but I think from listening, like you can do this by thinking outside the box. It doesn't have to look traditional, but you know, like you said, meeting up but not having to stay under one roof and you create that space, but then you still have time together, whether it be socially distance outside or whatnot. And so it's it's reimagining what it looks like, but doing it in a way that is healthy as opposed to, are you doing this just because you have to and you really don't want to. And then there's already that you're coming to the table with negative negativity.
But instead doing it in a way that, okay, I really want to be around these people. How can I do it safely and, you know, without putting anybody in jeopardy and making it a positive environment? Yeah, yeah, I think showing up in a logical, rational form is way better, even if it's limited and then showing up, you know, in this emotional chaotic spot, like you said, right, I don't think we're going to accomplish anything great by already kind of being backwards in terms of like our emotional representation. Yeah, okay, sorry.
So number one, the first category is relationships. Yes, absolutely. The first category is relationships. So we spend, you know, a certain portion of our day investing in the people that are energizing us are creating a move.
The next category is our body. And so this seems kind of silly, you know, and clients are always like, like, what are you talking about my diet and, you know, my physical fitness for? It's because we're a whole beat, right? And so if we're not taking care of our physical body, we're probably not doing amazing mentally.
We're probably not thinking about things in a great way. We're probably not feeling great. It's all interconnected, right? So it's important that we just kind of like glance over what we're doing to work out, you know, exercise, go for a walk, go for a hike.
It doesn't have to be anything major, but it has to be like some sort of investment in our physical body. We can also like look at our diet, you know, RV, you know, just pop in candies left and right, you know, bonbons are we, you know, like focusing on the whole grains and the fruits and the veggies and the proteins, especially combined during the holiday season with a lot more junk type oriented food. Yeah, food is an amazing coping mechanism. In some way, you know, it releases serotonin in the brain and, you know, makes people feel less depressed and less anxious.
But using that as your only form of coping is going to have like some sort of detrimental impact on your physical body. It's a mindfulness thing. It's a mindfulness check in that says, hey, do I get my physical body any love or, you know, do I throw it to the wolves essentially? You know, I just want to touch on that real quick because from a personal standpoint, I can share a testimony about how important the body is to my mental health.
You know, I'm finishing up a master's degree right now. And the first thing to let you don't really let go in a moment of stress is exercise. And so, you know, I don't know why that's our habit pattern is humans is just to be like, well, I've got too much on my plate. I'll work out later.
I'm not speaking for everybody, but that's my normal, you know, my M.O. And I can't focus. If I don't get up and I don't get up and I don't get to do something physical in a day, like I get sad, I can't focus. I'm like, I'm heavy.
Everything about me is heavy. And I'm not just talking in the physical sense of like weights or, you know, but just mentally heavy. And my family have noticed the difference when I'm like, okay, I'm just going to go for a fast walk or 15 minutes, then I'm going to come back and I'm going to get my paper done or whatever it is. And they have, because we've spent so much time together recently in the last nine months, they noticed and I noticed the same about them is when we do something physical, each of us in our own way, we're much more pleasant to be around and more productive.
Yeah. Yeah. It's really kind of like one of those silly things that goes such a long way. If you don't do it.
Yeah. So yeah, something little something active, some sort of mindfulness or paying attention to the fact that your physical body has needs and if you don't address them, it's going to overlap into the mental health category. Exactly. Also, another category is the mind.
And so I think we've been talking a lot about the mind today as far as what we think about determines our behavior. So there's a direct correlation between our thoughts, our feelings and subsequently how we're going to act upon them. Obviously, if we're thinking about things in a negative way, right? Like, oh, what was me, you know, such a victim, you know, like, let's make everything about my negativity.
There's a pretty good chance that you're feeling negative and then other people are going to absorb your negativity. Maybe not only you acting in accordance with something silky or something mopey, but other people are going to take on that energy too and be silky mopey, which is not going to help your silky kind of mopey, right? Right. Just this dominoes effect of, you know, negativity, big gets more negativity.
Our thoughts are everything. So I really push that mind category and it can be something little, like I said, shifting our focus to gratitude or meditating is a great means of like just checking in with ourselves two minutes, five minutes, you know, in the start of the day or I have a couple of clients that like to do it like three times a day, right? So like when they first wake up for a few minutes, lunchtime ish for a few minutes and then we're wrapping up their day for a few minutes. It's just a, hey, how can I fill up my own cup?
So my cup is full when I go to distribute that wealth to other people. Also focusing on a breath, you know, when I think about being mindful and feeling grounded, I think about how hard it is to focus on negative stuff or chaos when we're focusing on a breath. Like our brain doesn't have enough power to do both at the same time. Whether yoga is in alignment for, you know, your health and your wellbeing mentally or maybe it's just like I said, a couple minutes of let's focus on accounting in hell or accounting Excel or pairing up our breath with, you know, some sort of muscle tension and relaxation, something, anything could be minor in the same way that I kind of advertise physical fitness.
It's just knowing that like our mind is kind of setting the stage for the rest of our wellbeing. Absolutely. And like you mentioned, others wellbeing, if you're, you know, in close proximity with others, I wrote down when you like, don't be nobody wants to be the silky mopie like catalyst for everybody's day. Like you don't want to set your day off that way.
You don't want to set everybody else's day off that way. And I know my husband and I have talked a lot recently about how if he's in a bad mood, like I instantly am an about or by first I like we play off of each other so much. We also rely on each other. I'm like, wait, no, I'm frustrated.
You can't be frustrated too. I need you to bring me up. And so we've actually had those playful, we just transitioned, we moved here about almost four months ago, which is going to create me fast for months, but we moved back to the States four months ago from Rome. And it hit my husband and I really hard for different reasons.
But we were both in this like negative state of mind and not even realizing it. And it was just creating this cycle of chaos between us. Until one of us realized, well, both of us, we have to sit down and have a conversation and we both realized, okay, we don't make here. Life is really not that bad.
I mean, we're in a beautiful place. We've got our family, we've got our health, let's reset and be mindful about what it is that we like about being here and not just stuck in the past or stuck in the moving mode. And so I loved it when you said what we think about determines our behavior and that power is interconnected. Our thoughts are interconnected with how we handle our relationships and how our body manifests either the toxic or the good.
So just to recap there, I just love it is it's so interconnected. Yeah, and silly again, I keep bringing up this idea of silly. It seems so little, it seems so nothingness specific, but it goes such a long way. Just that shift that you have with your husband was enough to reset and create more of this positive energy mode rather than getting stuck.
And sometimes honestly, I think we can get stuck to the point where we definitely need an impartial opinion or we need an impartial professional view to say like, oh, that's really stuck, right? And there's different levels of stuck, but that's really stuck. So let me pull you out of the tunnel in collaboration with you rather than just feeling like you need to pull yourself out of the tunnel, which is kind of complicated. Like I said, if you get to a certain point, last category is our dedication to something purposeful, right?
And it's usually economic specific. So I think about work in school as our primary heavy hitters for the last category. And so that's some sort of investment in your purpose or how you define your purpose and your kind of intersection with the world. This is how people feel valuable.
This is how people feel like they have a place in the community. This is how people feel like they're paying it forward or giving it back to the world. And so that looks very similar for a stay-at-home mom in comparison to a CEO of a company. There's so much purpose involved with both of those things.
It's not that you necessarily have to have a paying job or you necessarily have to have a specific track in school that you're focused on. It's just some sort of dedication to say like, I'm going to do better when I'm doing something that energizes me or creates momentum or is something uniquely mine that I can hold on to and talk about with the world that says, you know, I'm really proud of the fact that I'm fooling my kids right now, despite the world, you know, kind of like crashing and burning around me. You know, I'm really proud of the fact that I can, you know, put a nice hot meal on the table for my family every single day. I'm really proud of the fact that, you know, I can give out a little bit of extra money to, you know, people in need or volunteer for a certain setting because I have an abundance because I kind of fell in my top and I have this overflow.
So once again, something little, something minor goes a long way in the scheme of how we do ourselves, how we're viewing other people and ultimately how we view the world, which are the trifecta of how we can get caught up in negativity, the same way that we can get caught up in really positive things. You know, one thing, the dedication to something purposeful, I know a lot of my listeners are struggle with finding their purpose, you know, perhaps with military life, it's sometimes hard to put your purpose out there because you're consumed with the support role of, you know, supporting your service members, supporting your family, so on and so forth. But I like to encourage my clients to focus on what you do in a day, focus on what you have done, not what you should have could have or would have done. When you peel back, wow, you know, I did put a meal on a home cooking meal on the table for my family.
I did homeschool my kids and sat down and read with them for 30 minutes or whatever it may be, that is purposeful. And oftentimes I think we overlook what it is that we do and how valuable it is to the people around us, which leaves us feeling empty and like we're not fulfilling our purpose. And so, you know, the theme with these four categories that I hear from you is be intentional with these four things. You're intentional with relationships, body, mind and your purpose, then you're in harmony and more balanced as opposed to just another thing that you said that I absolutely loved was that just as much as you could focus on the negativity and create that habit, the same path is for the positive, you know, like we're so easy falling to the negative, but it's actually the same, you can take the same path to find positive and focus on the positive.
Harder. Much, much harder, much easier. And you know, especially I think about, you know, how easy it is to be influenced by the world around us, you know, social media is huge right now for negatively influencing our thought patterns. You know, like you said, you can get caught up in this negativity with your partner, you can get caught up in negativity with people around you.
But this idea of investing in these four categories first gives us a better shot at focusing our efforts towards the positive. We bring our best A game to the show, right? And with our best A game, I think it's easier to say like, not today, negative, Nancy, or not today, you know, that's not going to crash and burn my style. I'm going to set boundaries on things that are not within my purposeful realm.
I'm going to keep space in between people that are not contributing to this energy and the momentum that I need. I think it just creates like this, this armor that protects us as we kind of navigate, you know, individual environmental triggers along the way. So yeah. I love it.
So, I mean, really, we make it complicated. And I know it's complicated doesn't have to be, I mean, we make it complicated in our mind, but laying it out into these four things and being intentional doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't mean it's easy, but nothing worth having is really easy, in my opinion. You know, we, we, it takes work.
It takes work to be happy. It takes work to be joyous in our lives. But being intentional with these four categories can get you, get you there. And so I know we're short on time today.
So I'd like to wrap up, but just to reiterate, you know, relationships, body, mind, and dedicating your time to something that you find purposeful can make all the difference in this isolated season of life, whether it's because of the pandemic, because of being stationed far away from family or, or even just the season that you're going through. Um, Dr. Meghan, thank you so much for all your wisdom and this excellent conversation today. Before you go, though, I'd love for you to tell the listeners where they can find you.
Definitely. I have a website, but I think the easiest way to access me, and hopefully everyone has Instagram these days, but at Dr. Underscore Meghan on Instagram, obviously you can do www.betterlives buildingtribes.com as well. But, but I'm around contributing to different social media sources and writing blogs.
And like I said, hopefully one day writing a book to help out people and decrease the mental health stigma, because I think everybody could use an impartial view on what's going on in their lives, saying if there's tips, tricks, tools, resources that would help them dig out in a more efficient way. Absolutely. And the theme of this month really with wanting to highlight mental health is that it doesn't need to be an issue that's surrounded by a negative stigma. We all have struggles.
We all have wounds, things that we've carried it, you know, with us from our past, things that we're struggling with currently, things that we wish or, you know, want to do and change for the better in our lives. So you're not alone. And people like Dr. Meghan can help lead you to the right resources.
So thank you again for joining me. I really love it if I know we can talk about it all day. All day, don't worry. Yeah.
But thank you. Thank you again for being here. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to today's show.
If you'd like to come on the show and have an honest conversation about connecting, relating, and encouraging women, contact us at hello at honesttalkinternational.com. Also, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast so that you can be in tune with all the great happenings. Have a great day.