Brain Health Vs. Mental Health Ed Mylett with Kevin Hines podcast

Some people call me a podcast Junkie.  My best friend Mike often tells me to unsubscribe to all the podcasts I have.  Too much input he says.  He’s always right.  But today I’m glad I’m a podcast over consumer.  On the Ed Mylett show I heard Kevin Hines talk about his suicide attempt.  You can watch or listen to is here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpfe0oeQQs8

As I’ve explored breathing, cold, heat, therapy and how that relates to our mental state,  I’ve always used the term mental health.  It’s what society uses as a whole. It’s what people understand.  Kevin said something that struck me.  He talked about the negative connotation that the word mental has.  Who wants to be mental, have mental problems, be known as a mental case.  Just because we add health to the end of it we think it’s now a term that’s not embarrassing.  I couldn’t have agreed more with him.  People are more okay with the term  because it’s said that way in the media but it’s still loaded with stigma.  

So not being someone who wants to bring a problem to the table without a solution I’m thankful Kevin had the solution.  He refers to it a brain health.  I love that term.  There is so much cutting edge research into the brain and how things like breathing, sleep, hydration affect out brain’s actual physical health.   It’s no longer just a problem that you have in that mysterious mass of grey matter in your noggin.  Just like we can do lots of things for our physical self like working out, eating right and getting enough sleep.  We can do the same types of things for a brain health and we’ll feel better  both physically and in our heads.  

When I think of someone who has mental health issues I feel sorry for them and it can be hard to bring up the subject.   I actually have the thought of, oh poor them and feel helpless for them.  Like it’s such a problem without any real unknown acute/immediate solutions.  It’s something that requires long term therapy or something like that.  Now lets flip the way we talk about it.  If I told you I had mental health problems, you probably would have no idea if I was sad, bi polar, depressed or had PTSD and you probably wouldn’t feel that comfortable asking me about it. At the end of the day most people just want to know they matter and someone cares about them.  Now, change the way we talk about it.  

“I’m working on my brain health”.  

That does a few things:

It takes it from I have a problem to I’m working on my problem.  

1. It focuses on a specific part of your physical body that you can work on strengthening 
2. It makes it less awkward for people to ask you about what it is and what you’re doing.  

Now I’m not going to be mad at anyone who uses any terms that they feel best describe something.  I love free speech and I think it’s super important to fight for it.  In the same breath I don’t think all speech is helpful.  Words matter, they really do.  Before anything is brought into the physical world it usually starts off as an idea, turned into speech and then turned into reality.  For me the term “Brain Health” is very helpful.  It makes me feel more in control of my brain and thus my metal state.  We live most of our lives in our heads by ourself so it’s important to be in control of that.  So, just like I know I can affect the scale by what I eat.  I now feel like I can affect my mental state to a greater magnitude by thinking of mental health as brain health and what input I need to get the desired output.  I have always know that inputs determine outputs but my thoughts and moods seemed so etherial that sometimes I can get into the lane of saying that’s just who I am.  The term brain health changes that for me.    

Thank you Kevin for changing the way I think about Mental Health, Brain Health, Brain disease and how we can help ourselves and each other.  

Seriously give the episode a listen.

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Darren