What Instant Gratification Does To Your Mental Health

[0:00]  the American society is not really tailored to physical and mental health right and again it's that instant gratification of like oh you don't feel good take an antibiotic or oh you're struggling to pay attention here's a pill for ADHD it's not a I want you to get an hour of exercise every day let's look at your diet let's change what you're eating let's change some of your patterns of behavior it's that quick instant gratification which has become so normalized in our country and our society and if you take a broad look and you look at other countries that build in some of those natural things that we should be doing every day but in the US they're luxuries you know oh you have a gym membership you have an hour to work out every day like y oh gosh you must have a really flexible job or you can eat organically

[0:49]  like that's really expensive you know and then we look at what we're feeding ourselves and what we're feeding our kids and all the dyes and preservatives and and we wonder why our kids don't feel good or they have attention issues um you know if I give my kid a bag of Skittles and Cheetos well they've had enough red dye right there to literally over the edge all right guys welcome back to a brand new episode of the heart and hustle podcast now I'm incredibly excited because today's episode we are sitting down with an amazing leader and CEO Alyssa hings is joining us now this

[1:37]  conversation is going to be really important because we're going to be talking about talking or navigating the post-pandemic challenges of mental health we're going to talk about supporting her community with incredibly needed Services we're going to talk about what being a leader in a CEO is in a Mental Health Organization today and so much more Alyssa welcome to the show thank you thanks for having me so Alyssa as we kind of get into this who were you as a kid I want to know this because often when we choose to divide or to Devout Our Lives to something as important as serving others and something as important as mental health you might have had a little bit of like a servitude heart when you were younger who were you kind of like when we were younger um it's a funny that you mention that because I actually had this conversation with one of our fellow therapists today and um one of our bcbas yesterday A lot of times when people get

[2:25]  into this field um it is from something in childhood that they kind of feel called to help other people um often that is an experience that you have had of yourself um or that you've witnessed or you've experienced somebody close to you go through so as a child um I had some pretty unfortunate circumstances my dad passed away when I was little um and then we had a tornado shortly after which just kind of I grew up on a farm um and and kind of just leveled everything so there was several years there where it was just you know a lot of turmoil and a lot of chaos and I really found my place of like my job was to be the stable responsible don't create waves go to school do what you're supposed to do kid um and so I think

[3:13]  that that really served me as an adult in terms of providing stability not only for myself but for my family and for other people and so as a kid I learned at a really young age the importance of stability predictability and consistency for those individuals that that don't have it or didn't have it and went through you know School my original plan was to go into uh the medical field started um with you know our standard intro toy class that everybody has to take in college and really felt called to kind of switch gears and transition into mental health and the brain is just a fascinating organism with all of the complexities and the pieces and the things that can go right with the things that can go wrong um and yeah just really start started to dive into that

[4:02]  and led me down to getting licensed as a mental health counselor and then eventually I shouldn't say eventually I came to be at Life Connections pretty early on in my career um but then also facilitating and fostering a place where other Mental Health Providers can really you know find a home and feel feel comfortable and also get that connection and that support because again most counselors enter this field because they've had something them themselves and so really creating a place where people feel comfortable with that you know it's uh first of all I'm so far sorry about your father um that made my heart ache are you um do you have any siblings I do I have a younger brother and an older sister okay it's interesting um you know I have a I'm the

[4:52]  oldest sibling um and I had the experience where it was my responsibility when I was younger to be like the stable one right and that kind of like meant my made my light bulbs in my head go off of saying like I wonder if you're the oldest sibling because so much pressure is usually put on us right in those situations especially um but I always felt like I had the responsibility my girlfriend is actually the oldest sibling as well and she had a uh some in I would say some unfortunate circumstances happened when she was a child and she always feels like she also has to be the person who holds the entire family down is the connector the stability and I think that's a really heavy burden to actually carry honestly um if most people um meeting my family ass that I'm the oldest see there we go I totally get it very interesting and so the other question I had for you was and if you are totally if you're okay diving

[5:39]  into this if not a tornado so you guys are located in Iowa correct yep so I grew up in Wisconsin and Southwest Wisconsin um yeah and uh May 2001 it was Mother's Day actually um we had a tornado and I mean just Devastation for us a lot of the people around us us um family friends they dug a in our backyard essentially dug a football siiz football field size hole um to to bury like as much as you could uh basically because there's timelines and restrictions on all of that but wow yeah I uh when I was growing I grew up in uh Michigan from 97 until 2009 when I graduated high school like we talked

[6:25]  about in our previous call and when I moved from Seattle to Detroit I experienced thunderstorms and weather for the first time and I'll be very transparent it scared the absolute out of me my parents would call me the weatherman because I'd sit there and watch the Doppler radar and like be like guys look at the clouds and all that kind of stuff so it's like that is one of my biggest fears in life and I'm so sorry that you had to go through that experience as well that breaks my I don't love uh I don't love bad weather like to this day people are like oh you know the joke is like people from the Midwest like they go out and watch the weather I'm like nope no no we're not going to do that so fell in love with um Psychiatry helping others at a very young age so why was it that you g i I would say you poured so much of your energy into going into the space because you mentioned early in your career I want to say that your organization of Life Connections was founded in 2009 and

[7:14]  you joined in 2014 so what were those early days like and kind of actually getting real life experience working in the space supporting others how was that yeah so um I was probably a sophomore or a junior in college um when I really kind of got my first first job I would say in mental health and I was working with children that had um disabilities and they were living in a group home setting and there's just a huge gamut right um when we start talking about physical um mental health uh disabilities and ailments and things like that um and I really kind of started to it was a great job it was a great like kind of entrance but I was like this isn't really what I want to do um and then so once I got my bachelor's degree uh a couple of the people that I was working on my masters

[8:02]  with they started working at um what is now Life Connections as what's called a be his counselor or behavioral health counselor um working with kiddos that have a behavioral disorder of some sort most people hear behavior and they're likeo gosh the angry kids and it's not necessarily that it's it's you know kids that are angry yes and need anger management and coping skills but it's also those kiddos that are anxious or they're shutting down or they're regressing you know they're really taking that emotion and they're turning it inward um and so working with those Kos to overcome the the barriers that they're having in the homeschooler community environment um and that's when I fell in love with behavioral health because there's so much communication that comes in the form of behavior that most of the time adults just don't understand and we're we're not asking the right questions to understand that

[8:49]  all behavior is a form of communication we're just not speaking the same language um and then when I was progressing through my Master's Degree and you start to learn about brain development and the fact that your brain's not fully developed until you're 26 27 you're like and we expect 6-year-olds and seven-year-olds to to self-regulate and to be you know aware of their emotional state and it's like their brains literally can't do that um and then you know you throw couple Early Childhood um you know experiences their parents get divorced or you know were homeless or we've witnessed abuse just sends everything Haywire right and so then where you're talking about these expectations of kids and it's their brains literally hard white to do something completely different and that's when you know it really kind of clicked for me that this is so much more

[9:38]  than sitting down on a couch you know talking to somebody what most people think like traditional therapy is it's it's so much more than that I think it's really important for us to kind of talk about the brilliant point that you just kind of made so apparent which is Young brains do not know how to regulate themselves so what do we think about kind of like the big challenges I'm sure we'll kind of get into this but like the mental health challenges of the youth today in our communities the school the social media all of the different influences on the young brain don't you with all of your clinical expertise and all of your knowledge get really concerned about these future generations of people who are coming up absolutely um the social media exposure is really concerning um you know when we talk what do people post on their social media the

[10:26]  best what do they take pictures of they like the best you know right we've got our filters on and um like it it's essentially a highlight reel for people and so again when as an adult we know that we know that there's you know we don't take pictures of the bad moments and then post it be like hey my kids were absolute today nobody wanted to get dressed you know we post those perfect pictures of everybody's candid and every and our matching outfits and look at our happy family and what we're teaching these young kids is this is the norm that this level of Perfection is what is expected this is how everybody normal lives and so then when you your family isn't like that or you don't have that that Baseline we start to see that there's some severe mental health impacts we talk about

[11:13]  anxiety we talk about depression um you know we talk about kids having social media at 8 10 years old so much information is out there on the web so much of it is misinformation none of it is regulated and you have opened the door for these kiddos that don't have full brain development I mean we're still working on learning multiplication and division and now you're giving them all of this information that their brain literally doesn't have the capacity or the cognitive ability to process and it it's incredibly concerning to know that it's just becoming more and more and more frequent do you ever reminisce and I hate to sound like I'm I'm being like that old guy but it's like we were because we graduated in the same year um I believe

[12:02]  right we grew up in what I considered the Before Time yes right we could be kids 5 six seven dial up internet exactly a a landline with a long extension cord we had to call our friend's house to be able to ask if somebody could play or whatever that looked like and if they lived out of town your parents were getting charged for it so you had to be really careful how long you were on the phone for 100% but it's like you know when I think about the influence of the landscape that we live in today you and I grew up in like a localized Community right we had compar feelings of comparison but comparison was normally like the kid in the other sixth grade class or somebody who was popular in our high school but now these younger kids have so much exposure to a global community that they're naturally looking at someone's life in Florida or someone's life in California or New York or what these kids are doing and faking and their

[12:49]  highlight reel which is a really interesting Dynamic of comparison that these younger kids are going to have to deal with and you said when we hand social media to a 9 and 10-year-old right but when I was in church a couple weeks ago I saw an infant literally on an iPad naturally navigating the in the operating system with swipes and skipping ads on YouTube and things like that so it's so much earlier than that and I think the one of the big differences too is that we may have had some exposure like in school or things like that I grew up in a really small town um my grad class was mid 20s I think we had 20 27 kids in our graduating class um you know so we had pretty limited exposure in Southwest Wisconsin but we also went home and there was no access right and so we talk

[13:39]  about you know increased suicide rates and depression and all of that when kids leave school now they're still constantly connected to one another there is no true like leave or turn off and you know think about a kid that's getting picked on or a kid that's getting bullied that doesn't end at 3:15 on Friday when they go home it's around the clock it's constant you know and our our phones are programmed to really like create an addictive pattern of behavior and so like that Ding goes off and what do people do like I got to grab it I got to look um you know and we're and you hate to say that we're almost like predisposition kids for ADHD but we are like kids don't have the ability to maintain an attention span anymore and things like that and a lot of it is

[14:27]  social media and electronic and think of how long a Tik Tok can be or like how long an ad can be it's meant to be like quick stimulation to get the reward center of your brain you know working and I think it's important for us to recognize two things um number one when you give your child access to social media you're not giving them access to the world you're giving the world access to your kid I heard an incredible analogy on a podcast the other day which I thought was incredibly like enlightening but also incredibly terrifying they said okay Mom dad you guys have little kids right let's say you have a one-year-old daughter or a one-year-old son you put them to bed at night in their crib but you also insert a little window on their crib and anybody from the internet can come peer into that window show them any type of

[15:14]  image show them any type of uh movie or whatever that is without your control let's take it a step further you have a 12-year-old daughter or a 12-year-old son you take the initiative one day to put a hole a Magic Window on their window outside of their bedroom any body on the internet can come up look in through that window talk to them send an instant message do whatever you want to do isn't that a scary world well if we talk think about that window not in the form of something on your house but this little device it becomes a lot scarier which is terrifying to me I mean think about that 12 13y old girl looking at that window and every image or every person that comes across that is a fit blonde 56 you know image and you've got a little 13-year-old girl

[16:02]  with glasses dark hair and acne how does she start to feel about herself when she's being bombarded with this is what you should look like this is What Happy Looks like we're we're just we're inserting you know so many complexities for kids that again don't know and they can't distinguish that that is not the norm here's some really scary statistics um in 20 2012 right a couple years after he graduated high school there was a national study that was done they found out that 9% of girls had major depressive episodes 2012 was actually the birth year of when Instagram and everything else kind of blew up as well social media the the relevance of it as of the most recent data that they actually released in 2023 that number went from 9% of girls in 2012 to 2023

[16:50]  31% of girls have major depressive episodes the writing is on the wall so why do you think we're having such a tough time reacting to this new reality and these new threats to our society and especially the mental health of this next generation of people who are coming up who are going to be the Future Leaders and families of our communities I think that it's one mental health is always a hard conversation to have right people are uncomfortable to admit that things aren't going well or they're not doing okay because what is what does that mean for them does it mean that they're weak does it mean that you know they're not good enough that they're not on par do they do they have a safe person that they can disclose and explor that with um do they know that everyone has those challenges probably not why because we don't talk about them if you

[17:37]  are struggling in your relationship do you go tell everyone like hey this is what's going on probably not you try to say face because you want to you want to match what everyone else is doing right that's human nature that we all want to be accepted very few people want to stand out and be different a lot of times when people are willing to to stand out and be different it's because they've learned to acclimate um that is their coping skill right we always talk about like the funny fat friend youve that's a that's a learned behavior right it's not because I enjoy being the fat friend but that has become my identity and so I have two options I either embrace it or I let it consume me you know um and so I think that we are going to continue to see an increasing trend of mental

[18:26]  health because there's just that lack of actual reality um you know we are the most photographed generation of of any period of time think about you look back at your you know we I feel like we still got like that awkward middle school phase right we did of like frosted tips and you know Silver Eyes Shadow and where you were like what were we doing um I cut my hair short I was like that's not a good look on the funny fret friend right kids don't have that anym more because imagine a 13-year-old girl looking like that now posting a picture online she'd be wouldn't do it the commentary would be insane insane like you would almost be asking for you know suicidal concerns and people are just

[19:14]  readily putting them their themselves and their kids in that position by allowing them unlimited access to social media and don't get me wrong there's benefits there's benefits of technology and things like that but yeah if we don't start to reain it in and really get some control over it it's it's going to be detrimental to the Next Generation We Didn't Start experiencing instant gratification or the need to go look at our devices until we were in mid college and when I think about how much trouble I have engaging with the real world because of how distracted I am trying to always hop on this device I have to be very intentional about limiting what my mental health diet looks like we talked about that topic a little before but for last 3 months I would say I haven't had social media on my phone

[20:01]  haven't had Instagram haven't had Tik Tok haven't had all those things because I realized that so much of my life was being taken away from me and that might sound extreme but think about how much time you have to invest into the relationship with your children think about how much time you have to be able to build your business and invest into your team if you've got six hours a day being taken away from you in micro chunks that makes life a lot shorter and that's really scary well and I don't even think people realize how much time they spend on social media how much time really you know if you're like oh I was only on Tik Tok for 30 minutes but you were on Tik Tok for 30 minutes six times you know but it's like oh yep I scrolled through and then you know I had to do something else but what is more advantageous what else could you do with that 30 minutes one of the first things when I have clients that come in with

[20:50]  depression and anxiety one of the first things I have them do is I'm not saying you have to get rid of your Instagram I'm not saying you have to get rid of your Facebook take it off your phone just take it off your phone and how much less you access it when you have to get on your computer and do it because again this right it's so much more instantaneous than when you have to get on your computer and look at it um and even the the reward center is different when it's on your computer versus when it's on your phone it's really meant to be on your phone so that it's you know like you said with that little kid in church like it's that scrolling and all of the engineering behind it is really intended to make it addictive are you hoping that there's

[21:38]  going to be a Day of Reckoning if you will or accountability where these platforms are going to be held accountable for the type of distraction that they're implementing into our lives or do you think this is like a bigger issue I hope so um we're starting to see some of that with Tik Tock right with some of the things that they've got going on there um but I really think it has to start at home um my oldest daughter is 18 and she did not have a phone until she was 16 and let me tell you what that was a battle um I was GNA say that seemed easy there was lots of like oh my gosh you guys are so old you're archaic da d d da like you you aren't and even at 16 I was like oh gosh this feels gross um but like she doesn't have Snapchat she doesn't have Facebook or any of that stuff because again you are you kid for such a short amount of

[22:28]  time time and you really when you're in it it feels like eternity right um but it is truly the only time in your life that you get to be carefree and why would why would we want to take that away from our kids prematurely why would we so quickly want to take this innocent child and put him in a world I mean the world we live in now is scary it's crazy why would we want to take our kids and put them right right in the middle of that and give them all of that information and expl them to all of it but that's what we do every time that we just openly give our kids electronics and it's easier right I mean that's the that's the bigger problem passive parenting passive parenting it's like hey you know back in the day they my our parents right would have to carry

[23:15]  like a pacifier and maybe like a a book with crayons or like a game that we could play in a restaurant now it's much easier just to be like hey kid be quiet take this little thing you're going to be distracted um but there there's a sense of like accountability in our previous conversation I brought up you know our generation got a lot of flack for being like the eighth place trophy generation right I heard a lot of that but my question was participation trophy yeah who did how do we get that how do we get the participation trophy we didn't go by them but it was the parents so where's the accountability lie lay on the parents feet here rather than kind of just punting it down the road and saying oh it's a social media but there's an accountability element of having these tough conversations with your kids although they might not be easy right and you know we are we have been we've been so blessed with just amazing teachers and amazing schools in

[24:02]  our area and just you know Wonderful Wonderful faculty um and one of the Hot Topics in you know I would say the recent school year is cell phones in schools because for gosh the last five to eight years kids have been allowed to have their cell phones on their person all day at school and I remember I got a cell phone I was probably 16 at the time good old like craer flip phone you know you couldn't get on the Internet or anything wildest thing you could do was play Snake um but they had to stay in our cars or they had to stay in our locker we weren't allowed to have them on us like in class right and kids currently can or apple watches and everything and then you know you talk about grades and kids aren't paying

[24:48]  attent well no if I got an Apple Watch on and you're talking about physics which doesn't interest me anyway well of course I'm doing something else um so there's been a lot of schools in the area that have gone back to like no cell phones during the day and the amount of parents that have been resistant to that has been really surprising because they're like again that instant gratification well what if I need to get a hold of my child schools got call the front call the call the front office and have them do a PA announcement to have your kid call you right but you know how foreign that feels for this generation of parents who are used to being like in instant connectivity with their kids um um and so I think you know we have to change it from a family home parental perspective and we have to start small and we have

[25:34]  to start like okay we're not going to allow the cell phones in school we're not going to you know have we're not going to allow our kids to be on these social media platforms where we know they're signing up and they're lying about their age you know um I think we have to start small before we can go to this huge systemic problem that inadvertently has been created so talking about the systemic problem that we're kind of facing ing right now how are you thinking we're going to be able to meet the need of these upcoming generations and their mental health challenges not only with kids but with young adults adults seniors like how do you think we're going to be able to battle this challenge you know it's it's going to be difficult there is already a severe mental health shortage um especially you know post pandemic and there's a lot of people that have left

[26:21]  the field due to compassion fatigue and burnout and this is not an easy it's not an easy you know feel to get into it's not an easy job it's not an easy thing and it's not something that you leave you know Friday at 4:30 and you're like okay I'm clocked out secondary Trauma from patients is real and there's just so many other impl implications and factors that result in people not having you know incredible longevity in this field and so it's it's really concerning that we already are in a mental health you know crisis um or a mental health shortage and I don't see that getting better anytime soon because we don't have the volume of individuals wanting to come into the field yet the mental health rates are rising at you know statistically a higher rate than ever

[27:11]  before yeah I mean there's the mental health challenges but there's also kind of like the emergence and tremendous growth of diagnosis like autism and other disabilities right I want to say when I first started working in the mental Behavioral Health space I found a partner here in Las Vegas in 2017 a couple years after I started my business and back then it was 1 in 56 kids I want to say were being diagnosed with autism 1 in 36 kids as of this year so not only are we having mental health challenges we also have more children who are being diagnosed with disabilities so how are we supposed to be able to meet the needs in our communities because that's not just an individual diagnosis that's a family diagnosis that's an entire family experience as well so like what what are we going to do Alysa well and I think again you know we have to start one about appropriate psycho education when was the first time that you or I were

[28:00]  exposed to brain health and that brain health conversation um realistically probably when I was like 24 yeah like just our parents didn't talk about it you know and if our parents had struggles or or things of that nature you just you didn't talk about it right and it's because their parents didn't talk about it and so there's still a good chunk of Our Generation that isn't comfortable talking about it and so we have you know we have a good portion of the population that your kids start to have feelings or you start to have feelings and everyone's like no that makes us uncomfortable stop you are the problem um so first we have to get comfortable with the mental health conversation and we have to talk about how normal those experiences are at some point everyone will struggle with you know a bow of depression

[28:49]  whether it's situational or diagnosable um you know maybe it's situational you had a family member pass away or you had a you know a beloved animal pass away or you've lost you know your dream job inevitably at some point in time you are going to struggle with those feelings of great sadness it doesn't mean that you go into a depressive episode or you get diagnosed with depression but do you have the skills to manage that have you been taught those skills you know we people always joke like our generation is that everybody gets a participation trophy were we ever taught how to manage our emotions in a healthy manner not really right and so if you're not in this field and you were never taught that well guess what

[29:36]  you're not going to teach your kids that either because you don't know how to do it um so you know we have to make mental health and Behavioral Health a part of the normal conversation we also have to get back to a point where we let children be children and we don't expect five and six year olds to sit still in a desk for six to seven hours a day like oh he's you know this this kiddo is and I say this because you know statistically ADHD is much higher in boys than it is in girls um he doesn't sit still he's fidgeting you know he can't maintain his attention da da he's five that is age appropriate for a 5-year-old I would be more concerned if that 5-year-old could sit in a desk all day long make are a robot like a robot you know um so from a from a societal

[30:24]  perspective we have to get back to a point of Ages and stages of healthy development um again we've had great teachers great instructors all of that kindergarten is not what kindergarten was when we were kids I mean we went to kindergarten half days yep you know we colored maybe took a nap snack and then we went home Kindergarten now is you're learning to read and you're expected to be able to read by you know the end of the year and math facts and stuff that we probably didn't do till second or third grade are we expecting our kids to grow up too fast are we allowing them to be little for long enough so that they can learn to have some healthy conflict and get them out at recess and let them you know get in a disagreement let them argue let them learn how to work through

[31:11]  that are we giving our kids the opportunity to build that strong foundational mental health and Behavioral Health so they can have healthy relationships I mean naturally when I think about the perveance and diagnosis with ADHD and things like that are there any from your clinical perspective do you think that maybe there are some societal pressures like pharmaceutical companies are getting paid a lot of money to hand out rlin and Aderall prescriptions to little kids and stuff like that it's easier right it's easier if I can give my kiddo a pill and they stop and school stopped calling me right it's easier to give my kiddo something that makes them calm down instead of me teaching them how to regulate their excitement or their emotions it

[31:58]  and then it becomes the norm that kids are supposed to act like this um you know and then we also talk about the prevalence of ADHD and the the amount of people that are misdiagnosed with that um there's kind of hot diagnosis that you can kind of see patterns throughout history and it's definitely like the hot diagnosis right now and so there's a high probability that a lot of the individuals that are diagnosed with ADHD currently don't actually have true ADHD when I was in high school um I was so unexcited about school I had such a tough time focusing in the classroom I was more interested in daydreaming and thinking about the things that I could do in sports and XYZ right and I had this really amazing doctor named Dr Al

[32:45]  Foley who was my pediatrician and I was seeing him up until I was like 17 years old 18 years old and I went back to him and said hey Dr a Foley I would love to get on Aderall prescription because having a really tough time with school first thing he said to me was Keenan I've known you your basically entire life you do not have ADHD and that was the first time I ever had a provider who pushed back against the idea cuz all my other friends were getting diagnosis everybody was getting pills and things like that and so of course me being the kid who I was I was like well let me just grab a couple of these Aderall pills from my friend and take them they made no difference because yes I could focus more but I was still uninterested in school right which you just didn't like the content was yeah 100% And I was like I don't want to take these because I would come home and my mom be like you're so angry and irritated I'd be like yeah because I have a stimulant in my system right now and it didn't change my perspective on school so this isn't what I was hoping for XYZ I was having a

[33:33]  conversation but how many doctors would have said no that's the point very few very few of them and that's what's so interesting it's like there's so many it's like you change the incentives you change the outcome when the incentive is to get Kickbacks and to be able to push more medication the outcome is more prescriptions are actually drawn and that in itself is really scary I was going to make a point where I was talking to a a CEO named Ned Parsons yesterday um um from an organization called The Crossroads Youth Development now this is a summer camp basically where they take kids and they bring them to Old School fi or like six and 12we Camp experiences which sounds like a blast right and he said you know one of the interesting one of the interesting things that we find is a lot of our camp counselors are actually Public School teachers and what they will find is they will have children who will demonstrate Tendencies like having attention deficit

[34:22]  disorder and ADHD and all these other type of things right in the classroom but then when they go to some Camp they get outside and they spend time in nature and they don't demonstrate any of those behaviors why is that happening very interesting to think about because we're allowing what our bodies are naturally intended to do right to be done we are not naturally predispositioned to sit and listen and focus you know just like if you look at the statistics of homeschool kiddos versus you know public education or private education schools homeschool children spend less time in academic rigor than public school kiddos but we don't see a huge statistical difference

[35:12]  in intelligence there's more Hands-On real life learning and I also think we have to look at our education system and say this is how one coort learns this is how one group of neurotypical you know developing children learn and if your child is not a neurotypical developing child they're going to have a really hard time with this one systemic track yep but we're trying to push them in to this mold to say you have to learn this way and the fact of the matter is a lot of people don't learn that way you know it sounds like you didn't learn that way you were not ever going to be engaged in that teacher's class because your brain doesn't function that way and if we go back to brain development and we look at

[35:59]  all of those different pieces and all of those different factors it makes total sense why this way of Education doesn't work for a lot of kids um you know and we're also the American society is not really tailored to physical and mental health right and again it's that instant gratification of like oh you don't feel good taking antibiotic or oh you're struggling to pay attention here's a pill for ADHD it's not a I want you to get an hour of exercise every day let's look at your diet let's change what you're eating let's change some of your patterns of behavior it's that quick instant gratification which has become so normalized in our country and our society and if you take a broader look and you look at other countries that build in some of those

[36:48]  natural things that we should be doing every day but in the US they're luxuries you know oh you have a gym membership you have an hour to out every day like yeah oh gosh you must have a really flexible job or you can eat organically like that's really expensive you know and then we look at what we're feeding ourselves and what we're feeding our kids and all the dyes and preservatives and and we wonder why our kids don't feel good or they have attention issues um you know if I give my kid a bag of Skittles and Cheetos well they've had enough red dye right there to literally over the edge it's uh it's a big problem that we're going to have to continue to keep fighting but but Alyssa when I know that there are leaders out there who are continuing to have this conversation advocating for the people who truly need

[37:37]  help in communities who most need it like you are it makes me feel a little bit better I know the challenge is going to be a big one so here's my last question for you when it comes to recognizing the space that you are working in right you started in 2014 so we're 10 years in right now to your career we recognize that this is a big problem and everything else we've talked about today indicates that this is going to be a big problem continuously into the future how are you thinking about keeping a mindset for the longtime Horizon of this work in your career and not being frustrated by what seems like the lack of progress so we always talk about one how do we create a whole healthy individual and that starts with us ourselves and how do I manage my own mental health so that when I go into

[38:25]  work and I work with my the kids that I work with and I work with the families that I work with how do I give them 100% of my energy and my effort um you know a big thing for me with my providers is manageable case loads you can't help 50 people at one time no matter how bad you want to you're going to burn yourself out you can only focus on these 20 to 25 people a week um so creating manageable expectations for mental health providers but also then giving those Mental Health providers the opportunity to recognize nobody was given a handbook of like here's how your life is going to go here's how to deal with it and so there's going to be challenges and there's going to be changes and just establishing the normaly of that not only for ourselves but also for our

[39:13]  patients um and then giving giving our giving our clients the skills and the tools not only to help themselves but then take that out to share that with their families and their kiddos so that we really start to see that ripple effect um you know because we know when you know kids grow up in healthy stable environments they do better as adults and so if we can keep parents whole and healthy or we can really start to combat some of that you know generational poverty and some of those other pieces that we really have the opportunity that yes it feels small but once we get that ripple effect we really can have a big impact even as one individual person one of the Traditions here that we have Alyssa on the podcast is we have our previous guest ask you blind question okay so the question is what is the Legacy that you are leaving

[40:04]  o my kids um and by that I'm a big proponent of leave it better than you found it and so if I can teach my kids to be you know you don't have to be the smartest person you don't have to be you know the most successful you don't have to be the most most wealthy but I want you to be the kindest and if I can instill that in them and then they take that out and they instill it in their their children and their friends and their families as they grow that that's it and um yeah I think that's the biggest piece is just breaking that generational curse and this is why you're the definition of heart and hustle and why it's so important to have you on the show because you are articulating exactly what we need to be able to combat these macro issues that we're facing so Alyssa thank you from the

[40:51]  bottom of my heart for everybody who's tuning in listening and watching today it's been an absolute pleasure having this conversation with you thank you so much for coming on the show thank you for having me I appreciate it