Mental Health is the New Physical Health

What no one taught you about how to optimize your mental health (6:46)

Jess’s Mental Optimization Journey:

Growing up we didn’t talk about mental wellness. 

Mental health issues in general were taboo and didn’t apply to my family – or so that was the perception.

What started out as “everyone’s doing it” in intermediate school turned into 26 yearlong love affair with the only coping mechanism I had ever known. Alcohol.

Add drugs and bulimia to the repertoire of coping mechanisms and I was off to the races.

Somehow all of it got normalized along the way. I now believe drinking, using and food purging was my way of self-medicating against the fear and anxiety of never feeling comfortable in my own skin. Introvert here.

Or maybe it was out of boredom.

And to some extent that might be true but I now also believe that I was self-medicating to balance neurotransmitter signaling imbalances.

A ha moment.

I also thought back then, that if something was wrong in my brain/head, that needed to be the focal point.

While at college at Carnegie Mellon my bulimia had reached a tipping point. My roommate found me in passed out in shower in bathtub of vomit.

That was the wake up call for me.  So I decided to seek help.

Within 5 minutes of meeting with a psychiatrist I was put Paxil. I spend the next 6 months walking around my collage campus in a daze. It did not alleviate my desire to purge.

That wasn’t the answer, nor was it the solution.

That was my first introduction to our broken mental health system.

Amy’s Mental Optimization Journey:

I was waiting to catch mental illness.

All I knew about it was that my biological mom was not well. That is was something that runs in the family. Its in my DNA.

That this disease that I was afraid to catch isn’t really solved by any medication.

So much of it is behaviors and looking at the root cause of where it comes from.

So I grew up begging for a diagnosis. In college I went to so many doctors and psychiatrists.

One to get Xanax.

And two, I wanted them to tell me what was wrong so I could fix it.

And now with the trauma work I do in world, I am committed to helping people discover the root cause of whats really going on.

In my own lineage I uncovered a lot of  trauma. 

What does the body do when root cause things like that happen?

It shuts down parts of the brain. And then we call it mental illness.

I call it a response to emotion and physical trauma. 

And if someone would have taught me that growing up … how different would life have been?

Then it would have made sense that I choose to cope with sugar. Distract myself with boys. Drink a lot of alcohol. And use drugs.

Thank goodness I was so curious. That curiosity is the resilience that saved my life.

Mental wellness is possible.