Subscribe to Lemonada Premium for Bonus Content

Description

Psychologist Ben Miller wants us to think about mental health differently. And he has lots of ideas of how to make that happen. Imagine a world where the people we encounter in our everyday lives — baristas, grocery store clerks, nail techs — were trained to recognize and help someone dealing with a mental health issue. This episode’s practice is about engaging with the people in our community, and feeling more connected to ourselves because of it.

Resources from the show

• Check out Well Being Trust for mental health resources and community.

Do you have a question about grief or other ways you can take care of your mental health? Send Claire a question to be featured on an upcoming episode www.bit.ly/newdayask

Want to connect? Join the New Day Facebook Group!  https://www.facebook.com/groups/newdaypod

Click this link for a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this show and all Lemonada shows go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors.

Did you try one of these weekly practices? We want to hear about it! Call 833-4-LEMONADA (833-453-6662) or email us newday@lemonadamedia.com.

To follow along with a transcript and/or take notes for friends and family, go to lemonadamedia.com/show/newday/ shortly after the air date.

Follow Claire on IG and FB @clairebidwellsmith or Twitter @clairebidwell and visit her website: www.clairebidwellsmith.com.

Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.

Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our show and get bonus content. Subscribe today at bit.ly/lemonadapremium.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Ben Miller, Claire

Claire  00:09

Hi, I’m Claire Bidwell Smith. Welcome to NEW DAY. Do you know the difference between mental health and mental illness? It’s okay if you don’t, because that’s what we’re going to be talking about on today’s episode. There’s no denying the impact the pandemic has had on mental health in the last few years, we are in crisis. There are so many people continuing to struggle, and so many reasons to be struggling. The worst part is that it’s hard to know what to do or how to help. And as someone who works in this field, it’s something I’m constantly thinking about. So as my guest today, Ben Miller, Ben is the president of the wellbeing trust, a National Foundation committed to advancing the mental, social and spiritual health of the nation. And he’s just lovely and positive and makes me feel better, even when I’m feeling overwhelmed about how to make change. Today, he brings some really new and novel ways we can think about taking care of our mental health. And I can’t wait to share a conversation with you.

Claire  

Hi, Ben, I’m so happy to see you today.

Ben Miller

Yeah, good to see you, Claire. I’m glad to be chatting with you.

Claire 

Me, too. I’m really excited to talk to you. I feel like you’re so full of good energy all the time. And I want to know more.

Ben Miller 

Yeah, well, I’m gonna give you the insider scoop of where that good energy comes from. Hopefully, I’m still making me cry today, Claire. That’s the only goal.

Claire 

Let’s see. My husband likes to say that that’s one of my superpowers.

Ben Miller 

Nan, I wouldn’t know that origin story, then let’s go.

Claire 

So I start every episode of this podcast, asking my guests how they’re doing. But how are you really doing?

Ben Miller 

Thank you, Claire, for asking that I encourage people to do the same. And I’m actually feeling really energized today. And let me tell you why. This has been a hard last couple of months, just with so much work stuff and all the things that are happening in life. But tomorrow, my oldest daughter turns 14. And I know. And so it’s this energy that comes from the unknown because she’s my oldest. And I’ve never been at this level of teenager before since I was a 14-year-old. And I am just really excited about this. The future that’s ahead of her. So I’m feeling that today.

Claire  02:25

That’s awesome. I have an almost 13-year-old so I’m, with you in the excitement and that trepidation. I’m feeling trepidation. So who are you Ben? Like, how do you if you’re at a dinner party and you meet a new person? And they ask what you do? What’s your answer? How would you describe yourself.

Ben Miller

I dodge it as quickly as I can. Because I actually, I think that anytime somebody finds out that you’re in the mental health field, no matter if you’re a policy wonk, or clinician, it automatically goes to these really awkward conversations about are you analyzing me right now. So what I usually lead with are the things that I actually would like to be doing for a living, which is like, I’m a musician. You know, I like to bake. I’m a father, you know, I’m a husband, I mean, I lead with the characteristics that I think better define who I am. And actually, if you get to know me, you know that those things actually make me better at my job. And it’s funny, because last night, we were having dinner with friends. And I was just, you know, we’ve known them for a couple years, but I really don’t know what they do. And I kind of see that’s a very refreshing place to be when you are friends with someone. And the defining way that your friends is not based on their job, or something as simple as that.

Claire 

I love that so much. I think that that’s such a cool thing to think about my ex-husband, who were friends, but, he used to always ask people rather than what do you do, he’d say, what keeps you busy? And I thought that was kind of a good way to kind of give people an opportunity to have a different answer.

Ben Miller 

I love that. What keeps you busy? I mean, I think anybody that’s got kids, what keeps us busy is our kids, right? But then, you know, there’s so many better ways to describe who you are than just, oh, I’m a president of a foundation, which I am. And I love that, and it is a part of my identity, but it’s not really how, if I’m meeting you for the first time, I’m probably not going to lead with that.

Claire  04:10

And that foundation is the wellbeing trust, correct?

Ben Miller 

That’s correct.

Claire 

Tell us what the well-being trust is?

Ben Miller 

Well, we are a national foundation that’s focused on advancing the mental, social and spiritual health of the nation. We’ve been around about five years now. And as a foundation really focused exclusively on mental health. We’re really trying to break the mold of what good looks like for mental health in this country, and trying to really shake I think the foundations and the structures that have led people to a place that access to care is difficult, or even just how we think about mental health is so medicalized, like there’s just so many new and novel ways that I think as an organization, we’re trying to get people to see that there’s a better way to begin to talk about mental health.

Claire 

I’m really excited to find out more about your novel ways, but let’s start with what it is that needs to be changing. Because, you know, for the last two years, I think we’ve really been able to see what is wrong in mental health and mental health care right now just in during COVID, how many people have been really struggling with their mental health, and not being able to find enough support for it. And as a therapist, you know, I was talking to my therapist two days ago, and she was saying that she doesn’t even know where to send people for therapy, because everybody that we know, every single therapist is booked out. And you know, we’re private pay therapists, like, I mean, that’s, you know, I just can’t even think about the basic level of just mental health care in this country.

Ben Miller

Well, we know from the data that half the folks that are identified with the mental illness don’t get care. And then less than 10% of individuals identified with a substance use disorder don’t get care. So I mean, just starting off, those are the people that we know of Claire, I mean, these are the people that have had some signs and symptoms and are identified, there’s a whole bunch of folks out there that don’t know they have a problem, that aren’t seeking care. So I actually think that this is probably one of the most foundational flaws in how we’ve approached health in this nation is that we’ve, we’ve reconciled mental health to be this thing that happens over here, in the distance on the sideline. It’s not something that’s like foundational to our core.

Claire  06:18

We couldn’t, it couldn’t be on the side anymore.

Ben Miller 

How many times have you and I sit in front of cameras like this and looked into the eyes of somebody who’s going through world of hurt, they’re experiencing pain or suffering, or the uncertainty of not knowing if their kids are okay at school today. These are real problems that we’re facing. And so I agree with you, I think that mental health has now been placed at the forefront of almost everyone’s agenda, though they may not name it as that. It’s there.

Claire 

Yeah, it is. What you said that people may not know that they need mental health care. Tell me more about that.

Ben Miller 

Well, you know, sometimes it says, And I’ll get a little clinical here for a second and geek out on this. But I mean, in our world, you and I, I mean, we sometimes use language that people don’t use. So we talked about things like depression or anxiety when reality when people are on the street and they’re hurting, not just on the street, but people are in their homes at their work. You know, they say I’m sad, I’m lonely, I’m scared. Yeah, I’m angry. You know, they describe other emotions that I think are probably more accurate to what they’re experiencing. They may not label that as oh, I have a mental illness. Okay, because add these things up in his depression. No, they’re just thinking about, listen, something’s not right in my life, and I need help with it. And I think that’s where we have an opportunity as a society. Like, one of the things that we’re working on that I think is fundamentally almost a rethinking of how we approach mental health is what happens when you equip everyone in a community with the skills necessary to intervene with someone who’s experiencing any issue around mental health or addiction. I mean, think about it, the people that you and I have relationships with, they’re people that you know, that cut our hair, service coffee, you know, they’re doing services, we have relationships with these people, but rarely are they equipped to know how to respond to us, if we’re in a crisis, or if something’s going wrong, I think that’s where we need to go as a country is to equip these people with those skills to help the person that’s right in front of them. So now imagine taking that to scale. So it’s all the nail techs, it’s the hair salons, it’s the pastors and the e-moms and you know, the rabbi’s. It’s the people that you already have relationships with in communities that are now being taught that mental health is a part of their function. It’s not a new job, it’s already what they do. It just becomes something that is naturally a next step for them and their engagement with you.

Claire  08:36

So I’m just super curious, like how this works. So if you educated someone like a hairdresser on mental health, and what is what are the kinds of things they could be doing or saying to a client who comes in and is talking about feeling sad, or having gone through grief or feeling anxious?

Ben Miller 

Well, it could be something as simple as you know what those thoughts that you’re having, they might need to be addressed. Because it sounds like you’re being really hard on yourself. So taking the problem, reflecting on it, and then beginning to help them equip them with something that they could do to change their own thoughts, their own behavior. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is been around a long time, and we all love it, right? But there’s nothing really complex about CBT. And I hate to say this, because I feel like I’m telling a little bit of a, you know, something that’s not supposed to be said, I’m telling you how to do the magic trick. But Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is very basic and what it tries to get people to do, why can’t everyone learn how to help someone else with something like cognitive behavioral therapy, changing your thoughts, changing those patterns, changing your behaviors, changing how you feel about certain things? I mean, all of that stuff is it’s what we try and do with our kids. But why wouldn’t we do it with the person that’s right in front of us that you’re spending all that time with its working on your hair?

Claire  10:13

I get so frustrated when I think about how we are really having to kind of backtrack and begin to teach social emotional skills. You know, I just I feel frustrated with this, how did this happen? How did we get this far into a culture? A species, you know, and then we’re having to backtrack and just help people learn how to address their own emotional needs and talk about, you know, I had Mark Brackett on as one of my early guests and talking about his social emotional programs in schools, and it’s brilliant, but like, why did it take this long?

Ben Miller 

You know, we’ve established new social contracts with one another. And these social contracts, especially, you know, post-COVID. I mean, even that’s probably the best example actually, for folks listening, is that if you want to see what a new social contract is, look at how you interact with people now that we’ve had it been living under a pandemic for two years. So I think over time, we’ve created these new social contracts, they’ve taken us away from things like empathy, to know what it really means, to feel something for, you know, to feel like what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes, I think we’ve learned to stop paying attention to our own emotion, because we’ve got the internet, or we’ve got cable news or television to tell us how we should feel or what we should think. So we don’t do the hard work anymore. And it’s a shame because like, emotions are so foundational to who we are. And we need to embrace them for what they are. But we need to figure that out on our own. It can’t be something that you can go and Google search your way into finding. Sure you can learn what emotions are. But so I think our society has been somewhat hamstrung by people spoon feeding us how we should feel and what we should think. And let me give you a better example of this. When was the last time you just got in the car and tried to navigate your way around to go somewhere?

Claire  12:02

I am very aware of this. It’s I’m so disappointed. My father was this amazing, like map lover and navigator and, and I miss just looking at a paper map or just not knowing where the hell I’m going and having to figure it out. Because I don’t even try anymore.

Ben Miller

Yeah, I mean, cartography is a word that our kids probably will never know. And it’s just, it’s something that I feel like is another parallel of how we began to evolve, and not in the best ways, because of technology. Now, I’m not trying to downplay the important role that technology has had in our lives. It’s been good. And there’s a lot of silver lining attached to that. But for the things that you and I are talking about right now, and that departure from really embracing some of those core elements of emotion and connection, I do worry that these wonderful devices are connecting you and I 2000 miles away, have heard us just a bit.

Claire 

Yeah, no, I agree. I like to advise people to not look at their phone for like an hour after they wake up, you know, we’re looking at our phones before we are out of bed. And it’s completely changing our day, you know, you’re anxious before you’re out of bed, because you know what your best friend had for dinner last night and it makes you feel inadequate, or you know, read something that a politician said and it made you feel scared, or you got an alert about a meeting and you’re feeling anxious about that. We’re not getting up in the morning and just being a human in the world, you know, having our own independent thoughts and feelings. It’s all being fed to us all the time.

Ben Miller 

And how do you not grieve that loss of control? When your day is being started on someone else’s agenda, that that email is now dictating the course of your emotional flow that That morning, I think it’s a horrible thing that we’ve done to ourselves. There was an article that was published two years ago. And it was in the New York Times, it was an op-ed, and it was talking about the Blackberry. And they, you know, it was joking about the Crackberry how we become addicted to our devices. And it was a very tongue in cheek article about how our meaning it this time, it was the blackberries, I don’t know if you remember this, we used to have this little light, they would change colors, if you had like a notification, email, text, whatever. And they were describing how our life has become waiting on that light to turn. And that’s not presence. That’s not mindfulness. That’s not, you know, showing up or being your best self-that’s waiting on someone else to set that schedule for you. And I just find that to be the culture that you and I probably fight against every day. Yeah. Because it’s so expected that we’re always on call. We’re always available on someone else’s time.

Claire  14:26

Totally. Well, I think that we’re that generation where I remember life without a phone, you know, and my kids don’t have any idea about that. And you know, even like 20, 30 something don’t know what that what that was like. And so I see the difference. I remember what it used to be like, and I was experiencing the full progression of getting to where we are now. But you know, I also want to say I think the reason it’s so confusing and addictive is because there are a lot of benefits to like you said Here we are 2000 miles away. I am providing, you know, counseling to people all around the world. And I think that there’s so much benefit to that. I think that there’s been so many things that have come from it yet. I believe what’s missing is kind of this balance counterbalancing what we’re bringing in and how we’re being impacted by it.

Ben Miller 

Yeah, I mean that erosion of social capital and community has been happening for decades. And I just worry that sometimes technology might be the nail in the coffin for just how we get to know our neighbors. I mean, simple stuff. But this pandemic, I think, is forced people to either rely more on technology or to actually, you know, rely less on it. And there’s a variety of stories. I’m sure we could each tell on that. I mean, I did something that probably you shouldn’t do, which is I moved during the pandemic, you and I talked about this? And so, you know, I don’t know how smart that is. And there’s a chapter in a book somewhere that I’ll write about moving across the country. But you know, what that taught me is that when you enter into a new community, into a new neighborhood, into a new culture, people you do not know, you can’t rely on the technology to help you find a new home. I mean, sure, house, yes, but not at home, not a community.

Claire  16:10

I’m right there with you. It’s hard.

Ben Miller 

I mean, have you been able to break that mold and find kind of a social network.

Claire 

It’s been really hard. We’ve been in our new town for seven months. And I’ve got three kids here. And my New Year’s resolution, my biggest theme this year is like I’ve community, I really want to build a community around me. I had one in my previous home, and it’s really missing in my life. But it’s very difficult right now, in this time, people are hunkered down, people are very insular, they’re very family oriented, which is amazing on some levels, all those things, but not for if you’re trying to build a community for yourself, and you’re feeling lonely and needing support around you.

Ben Miller

And what a horrible time to not have. When we’re all going through so much. And we lose the thing that helps us process, helps us manage help us cope. I mean, we had an amazing block we used to every Thursday, we would take our kids and the families and we would walk about eight blocks to a local brewery, we were just hanging out, we would call it Fairfax Friday. And it was just our way to kind of process the week and let the kids hang out and just do the things. But when you lose that, especially you know, you don’t have to move to lose that you can have COVID, to lose that. It does force you to at least acknowledge the things that maybe you weren’t good at processing without others, and where you need other people in your life and what hole they might fill in you. And I was years ago, probably three or four years ago, I was in an event in Denver. And I remember there was this guru that came in from India, and he was talking about, you know, all the problems to plague the world. And he said, What are the problems in the United States? And what do you want to talk about? And I asked him a simple question. I said, listen, we’re losing more people in the United States to preventable causes than ever before. drug, alcohol, suicide, everything is on the rise. Our youth are showing up in emergency departments for issues that never they’ve shown up before. Like, what do we do about that? Because I’m just curious, like, what does an outsider perspective think about this? Let alone he’s this, you know, world famous guru, and he said, you give them something to do together. That’s the solution. And I’ve been thinking about that constantly, Claire since then, because there’s such power in what happens when we join together towards a common goal. And when we can’t join together, or we don’t have a common goal, which is very much I feel like what’s happening United States right now, we’re so divided. Like, we have to go back to the basics if we’re going to begin to heal.

Claire  19:04

Do you ever feel helpless? Do you ever get down from this work?

Ben Miller

You know, as clinicians, we’re often trained to compartmentalize, you know, leave it at work, don’t bring it home, keep the motions in check, you know, process it, walk around your car, do whatever you need to do, come into the house, and it’s just gone. Well, I work from home, and I don’t see patients anymore. And what I’ve learned this last year is that I am beginning to take the faults, the failures of our system, and how it is enabled to help the people that have the most profound need. I am taking it personally. You know, this is not just a job for me. And yes, I get paid. yes, I have a wonderful staff and all that stuff. But I take it personally I like I get a little pissed off on Sundays. Because I cannot fathom why we as a nation cannot see what’s right in front of our face. And I’ll give you an example. So you know data that the CDC put out just a couple months ago show that we lost over 100,000 lives to drug overdose in 2021, 100,000 people. Wow, that’s the most ever. And, you know, I talked to reporters left and right about this stuff. And one of the things I kept going back to is I kept saying, You know what, I am tired of saying the most ever. I’m tired of saying that. Why don’t we do something here? And this is where I take it personally. And that whole, you know, am I doing okay here? Because it is starting to feel like it’s overwhelming. This is on my watch, like my kids one day when they’re, you know, older and doing whatever they’re going to do. Like, I don’t want them to say, Dad, why didn’t you do more? And I feel that deeply Claire. So it’s an interesting time for the question, but because I am, I’m at a place now where I want this revolution. And I don’t have to lead it. But I sure second company sit on the sidelines while it happens.

Claire  20:53

Yeah, you don’t sound hopeless at all. But you sound frustrated, like, that’s just, I get it. What do we do? Like, what do we do?

Ben Miller 

Well, let’s go back to the beginning of something we started talking about, about how we introduce ourselves, you know, so I say, you know, I’m a musician. And early on in my academic life, I used to describe myself as like a punk rocker of health policy. And I liked it, because, you know, the punk rockers, they were, you know, anti-establishment, they were trying to get people to recognize that you don’t have to conform a certain way. You don’t have to accept how it is just because that’s how it is. So I used to joke, you know, I want to like catch us on fire and throw them out the hotel room, I want to get people’s attention, that we can have radically restructured systems that help people. So for me, what I think we could do, and this is a challenge to everyone who’s listening here is I actually think that policy, as unsexy as it may be, as a term is all of our responsibilities. And we failed at our attempts to organize properly to advance policy for mental health. So if just imagine right now, like everybody that’s listening to this show decided that there was two issues for mental health they wanted to advocate for it was increased access and make it more affordable. Okay, let’s keep it simple. Well, what happens if all of us at the same time went to the same place, held hands and stood around a building and said, We’re not leaving until you change that policy? Don’t you think more things would happen? Yeah. But we don’t do that for mental health. We do it for all kinds of esoteric things. But we don’t do it for mental health, which is part of the reason why I think that is one of the solutions that we’ve got embraced, it doesn’t solve the erosion of community, it doesn’t solve some of those deeper cultural issues that you and I are talking about. But my goodness, it would make immediate impact for our kids. To have policies that are more supportive of their emotional health, it make an impact for the folks in our communities, it would just benefit a lot of folks.

Claire  22:51

Yeah, it’s that question of how bad does this need to get?

Ben Miller 

I mean, how bad does it need to get Claire? I mean, you and I both see the pain. How much worse could it get?

Claire 

Ben, is the difference between mental illness and mental health?

Ben Miller 

It’s a great question. I decouple these things all the time. Because I feel like folks have confused the terms. And so what I would describe to my mom, if I were saying, hey, Mom, here’s the difference between mental health and mental illness, which is, you know, it’s the thing I do a lot is I think about what would I say to my mom about this is, you know, mental health is a part of you, it is naturally about how you process emotion about how you feel what you think, you know, it’s very much just core to you who you are. Whereas mental illness would be like, well, what happens if I don’t take care of how I think or what happens if I don’t take care of my emotions, and it starts to go in a different way where I don’t feel so good, or it gets out of control with how I’m able to control those emotions, then it becomes an illness. It’s like physical health, you know, physical illness. You know, we all have these bodies that we’ve been given here. And so if I don’t take care of this body, there are parts of it that will break down and could become an illness, I think of it the same way. And so I just describe it as that when I talk about mental health, I am literally talking about the entire continuum. Because I think when we focus on illness, it sends the wrong signal that this is only about, well, you should take care of it when it’s bad, or when you get sick. But mental health is something that you should foster and develop and really just took care of throughout your entire life. How would you describe I would love to hear your response to that same question.

Claire  24:36

You know, it’s tricky to kind of think about and to piece out like that I hadn’t actually done it before. Thinking about it as the difference between physical illness and physical health helps me do it. But then the minute I did that, I thought, God, why? Why did I have to do it like that? Why couldn’t I have thought about it for mental health in the first place? And that goes back to our culture and our society and how we value and what we put our priorities on and how we look at mental health, I really am optimistic that it’s changing a bit right now, I think that we’ve seen a big shift in the last couple of years in terms of like, hey, we really need to be paying attention to this. And we really need to be doing things about it. I think it was unavoidable. The last two years of the pandemic, we couldn’t not face this, what has happened to so many people around the world going through isolation and loneliness and anxiety and not having support and the things in place that they usually have. I mean, we haven’t been able to not look at the effects of that.

Ben Miller 

Yeah, I agree. I describe it as a propitious moment. It’s a moment that I don’t know will ever come back around in our lifetimes, where mental health is so much front and center, because we’ve had to acknowledge how this has affected how we feel. I mean, you just you unless you’re a robot, you’ve experienced an emotion during COVID. Okay, well, that is mental health guys, that is mental health. So let’s embrace that. Let’s talk about it. Yeah,

Claire 

no, I agree. What would a mental health day look like, like my daughter keeps telling me, my almost 13-year-old daughter’s like, I need a mental health day. And for her that’s like, sitting in our bed and looking at TikTok, that is not my idea of a mental health day, what is yours?

Ben Miller  26:10

I think it really is highly subjective on the individual. But here’s what it’s not, it’s not pretending that you’re not working. But then showing up and working a little bit over here, it’s not doing an activity that you need to do just because you have to do it like laundry. Might be, but for most people, it’s going to be something that fulfills gives them some sense of fulfillment, that allows them to have joy, to just take a moment and be present with whatever they want to be present with. That to me, is a mental holiday. It could be fishing, it could be sitting there and watching a show. It could be reading a book or playing the guitar, it could be anything. So it’s really subjective. But you know, the healing part about a mental health day is it’s about you. And you prioritizing what you need to just which is something we don’t ever do. We never take that moment.

Claire 

I just want to sit outside and read a book in the sunshine. Like that’s all that sounds like heavenly to me. And really hard one these days. Okay, so if you can leave our listeners with one thing that they can be doing, either for themselves or for their community, or on a policy level. Maybe that’s three things, but give us some things leave us with some good things, Ben.

Ben Miller 

Yeah. So I think the most important thing that you could do right now to help advance mental health in this country, as simple as it sounds, is to talk about it, make it an issue that is not hidden in the shadows, make it an issue that is front and center. Because it is, it already is there, you just may not talk about it. That means at the dinner table with your kids with your family, talk about it discuss what mental health is. That means when you’re out for dinner with your colleagues bring it up I my dinner last night was around climate change in mental health. It inspired me so much. I wrote about it this morning. You know, so bring it up, because it is a natural kind of line through everything in our lives. So that’s number one is I feel like if we could all discuss it a bit more, it would normalize it at a level that could be culturally changing. Number two, which I’ve said and if I can give two things, yeah, is that I really feel like, okay, I really feel like we all have to have a bigger role to play in advancing policy. And it could be something as simple as showing up at the school board meetings and talking about the importance of having our kids in schools. Okay, it could be something as simple as going to your local, you know, YMCA and talking about how they could be housing more folks who are unhoused. Okay, these things are all policy, policy is not just going to the hill and talking to elected leaders, policies all throughout our lives.

Claire  28:41

I love that. Thank you so much, Ben, thank you for the work you’re doing. Thank you for your optimism. Thank you for all of your wise words and advice today. I really appreciate you.

Ben Miller 

Oh, thank you Claire. I appreciate you. And thanks for your ongoing leadership on this show. And beyond the show, you’re doing amazing things.

Claire

I am so glad that we have people like Ben in this world, knowing he’s out there making change and thinking about ways we can all be making change seriously helps me sleep at night. This week’s practice is about community. We talked so much about self-care, but it’s important to feel like you’re part of something. Here are some tips. How are you feeling about your community? Is that something you want to put more effort into? Ben and I talked about moving to a new community and how that’s had its challenges. But I think everyone’s feeling a need to reengage after these last two years. Are there ways you can be strengthening or renewing your sense of community? It sounds trite to say but I really think we’re stronger together. We’ve been making Valentines at my house for the elderly. Jules keeps writing these terrible secret messages on them, like help me. But it’s the thought that matters, right? Do you have a place of worship or community center you can engage with? See if there’s an event calendar to see what’s going on? I’ve been inviting all the moms of my new neighborhood over for wine. Who are the people in your own community who you can spend time with? Give some thought to anyone around you that you think might be struggling with their mental health and check in with them. Ask them how they’re really doing. And if they answer that they’re struggling or they’re anxious or depressed, tell them about some of the resources you’ve heard about on this show. There are so many books and practices that can make a difference. Sometimes people just need to feel like someone else cares in order to make that first step. As always, thanks for listening. And if you get a chance, send me a question through my new online question forum at bit.ly/newdayask, it’s totally anonymous. You can literally ask me anything and you can find the link in the show notes. Or if you just want to tell me about one of your weekly practices. Call me and leave me a voicemail at 8334-LEMONADA. That’s 833-453-6662. Or email me at newday@lemonadamedia.com

CREDITS

NEW DAY is a Lemonada Media Original. The show is produced by Jackie Danziger, Liliana Maria Percy Ruiz and Erianna Jiles. Kat Yore is our engineer. Music is by Hannis Brown. Executive producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer, Lily Cornell Silver and Claire Bidwell Smith. NEW DAY is produced in partnership with the Well Being Trust, The Jed Foundation and Education Development Center. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Follow us at @LemonadaMedia across all social platforms, or find me at clairebidwellsmith.com. Join our Facebook group to connect with me and fellow NEW DAY listeners at facebook.com/groups/newdaypod. You can also get bonus content and behind the scenes material by subscribing to Lemonada Premium. You can subscribe right now on the Apple podcast app by clicking on our podcast logo and then the subscribe button. Thanks for listening. See you next week.