Cultivating Mental Resilience with Jen Thompson: Full Transcript

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[Music] welcome back to another edition of the heart-to - heart podcast and my guest today is the returning guest Jen Thompson so Jen is a social worker she's been amazing she's helped so many of my patients with various different mental health Disorder so Jen welcome to the show thanks for having me Mike well it's great to have back on uh you know we had a real good chat the first time I wanted

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it as a whole for us here living um working here living here so you probably don't have to do as many trips to the grocery store then hey Mike I think I went this summer I think I went maybe gosh did I go once I've been to the market maybe maybe once or twice wow yeah you literally are living off the lane so to speak yeah we we uh preserve all of our food so I mean last year we were eating our potatoes into the spring

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with the friend and um I feel incredible from it like it's definitely pushing us out of the comfort zone this is the next kind of level for us on uh upping the anti leveling up expanding ourself getting really out of our comfort zone because I hate the cold I had rhoids before and it's cured my rhoids um crazy it's incredible because you learn to tolerate more discomfort yeah I think like I think

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to play and like to challenge to climb a tree you know if they always said like oh no I won't try that or oh what if I fall or if that's kind of scary that's too high which is our daily mind chatter around everything but when that child climbs up to the top of the tree they feel like king of the world right like wow I can't believe I did that right I I um I persevered I challenged myself and I get the reward it's the

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accept the situation if you just fight it then it's just going to get worse and you know we've kind of talked about this I think I mentioned last time on the podcast there was a guy Barry McDon who's who has this thing um I forget the name of his book now but he explained that you know if you basically try to fight it then your amula just keeps firing firing and you're basically just

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teaching how to feel safe and discomfort yeah that's a good way to put it how to feel safe and discomfort that's that's a real good way to to uh to put that yeah and I went through a lot of uh flight responses and and fight like because you you do challenge a fight flight um responses and your body um like I would jump out of the tub right my body's in flight or I would um push my arms against the tub and and I'm

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be in the sauna for 20 or 30 minutes and then cold plunge for 1 minute to 3 minutes back in the sauna and then back in the cold plunge the goal is always to end on cold so your body goes into that thermogenesis like it so it heats up faster and so your body learns to um adapt quicker um but when you go back into the sauna your body's heating up like artificially from the environment you're using that to heat the body back

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those you know one of them in particular is this like abundance versus scarcity that you've talked about and I really believe in this a lot so what I mean by that is I mean that if you do have that abundance mindset you are going to be more likely to seek opportunities more people I think are going to you know understand and recognize your energy and also will what reach out and offer you more opportunities whereas if you have

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I got to pay this bill like if you're always feeding that negative fearful narrative you're only attracting the same thing to you and so shifting our mindset to abundance is recognizing that the world is very abundant there's so much abundance in in so many different ways in opportunities in relationships in love and kindness right there's so much uh and financial wealth right like there's so much ways that we can receive

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and um you're you're perpetuating Your Own Stuck State whenever you catch yourself speaking as the victim to your circumstances you are the only one holding yourself there and I mean jealousy is a great emotion because it teaches us where we're lacking in our own life it's showing us where you know if that person's doing all these wonderful things and I wish I could be doing that jealousy is trying

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a person like if I'm happier for my successes but then I'm also happier for your successes and Emily successes and whoever else is then it's like you know there's so many different reasons now I have more reasons to be happy you know so I think that if you do have that mindset you can make you know a big shift in your life and your mindset um that being said like someone who say someone like you know uh Andrew

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and if you can and and maybe you you can't because of confidentiality reasons but can you think of like an example where this may have come up when in your practice where someone did feel like they had like some feelings of insecurity and maybe you had to say to them listen like these are not bad feelings like these are feelings that show you that you need to do something about it like this is showing you that

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happen to certain people all the time yeah I think it it doesn't address the root cause right it do doesn't address the root cause and the reason again every emotion has a role even depression when we feel depressed it's because we're moving the furthest away from like our heart like what our heart's trying to show us our guide us in the right direction it's like a person that

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call something called like functional depression I don't know if you know I'm still sort of um teasing that out whether you know I really believe in it or not in some ways I mean I think in some ways you have to have functional depression because you have to be able to function even when you're not feeling at your best right I mean that's just I think being an adult in some ways and being responsible you know you have to

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at all but if you have a job to do you know you do have to have coping strategies and mechanisms so that you can you know deal with those feelings and still continue to do what you're doing if we said to everybody um you don't have to do anything hard because you're feeling big emotions right now we're just teaching people not to cope and not to adapt we are not doing any service it's like um saying to my

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starts yeah so do you ever find then that like you when people say because you know we can certainly talk with this with nutrition as well but like people will say that like you know I'm fearful or I'm depressed so that's why my kid is fearful and that's why they're depressed where it's like you know maybe you are passing along some genes I'm not saying genes don't have anything to do with you know your mental health your health

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like how you're living and let's look at like how you're coping yeah and just like you know with nutrition you know if someone's going to be eating a terrible diet and then you know their offspring is also eating a terrible diet then it's probably the diet that's causing the health issues not the genetics and I think the same can be said about depression and anxiety like if you're

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stuff and like you know but I have recognized too that like someone say like like Joo wilnick or or Ryan Hol like Andrew hoverman like all three of those guys they all listen to like metal now I hate metal like I don't like metal at all maybe a little bit of Metallica every now and then but like it's it's just not not my thing I never got into it but those three people like I think they're you know amazing people so

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meets you at your frequency so um I think also like MMA for men like that's very like primitive like that's also um like also like masculine way of healing your own body and like I wouldn't suggest you go and you know do yoga I would say yeah go hit MMA like go and do something very physical for especially for men men and women are super different and so your coping and adaptations are also very different

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feeling secure yeah and creation and being being in creation yeah yeah I could definitely see that too like you know going into the divine feminine and trying to create like whatever it is that they want to do like I know for example like in my house like Emily wanted to put up the Christmas decorations November like that's what she wants to do you know and I understand that you know some of my

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clients you see that they're trying to like hold on to their old life instead of just trying to create a new one and it comes down to that that uh saying I'm not sure who said it but you know depressed people live in the past anxious people live in the future and happy people live in the present and you know if you want to create new good memories you know new good you know old times then you have to be able to live

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see you as who you were back then because they can't tolerate the who you are now accepting change I think is very difficult to do in general you know it's for for whatever reason you probably know a little bit better than me uh people just tend to want to you know not change and hold on to to things and uh I guess it's because it's more comforting to do that but um in reality you know if you do that you are going to create more

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he break it down to the person okay what do you think this specific person is going to say like how is this going to like impact your life and then by the time you like get down to it it's like okay so you didn't do this because one person might do this small thing or might have this small comment to make because of it and it's like that's crazy like look how much fear is holding you back like you're not pursuing something

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don't want this to happen then that's your brain saying okay let's go in for the kill and smash it and then you have this you know terrible panic attack whereas if you say like bring on the fear I want it I want more anxiety and in that situation you can actually dissipate the fear because you're attacking back like in the physical fist fight when you've been hit you know what you want to do is you want

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growth hormones or something from her so she she didn't fully develop her reproductive organs funny thought though around this my wife brought this up and said um it's funny because a female cow without a cervix without her reproductive organs is still female and okay same with the male being pinched it's still a male anyways um side note so now

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want to be part of this community kind of thing like everything that's going on like I'm doing me and I'm good where I am I'm okay with you know how I'm being treated in in society but I'm not okay with you know I don't like it's almost like you're being forced that you have to have these other trains values or you have to believe that like you know people should be on puberty blockers and that kind of thing and I

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know I think that if we are going to um you know look at this as a whole then we need to look at it as you know separated like I think that you know LGB needs to be separated from everything else and I appreciate what you know you're saying today and I think that a lot of people in your community would appreciate what you're saying as well because it's like you guys are forcing us to take on these values that we never ever wanted to have

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flag should be up too that's then everybody's being treated equally like I don't yeah it's yeah know I totally get it's the same thing where it's like you know black lives matter it's all lives matter yeah anything that's divisional that gets us fighting against each other isn't good yeah I agree 100% And I really appreciate your your point on that especially you know given your