The Psychology of Youth Mental Health | Ross Szabo

20:36It's a real fear.

20:38Dr. Michael Gervais:What about their own mental health? What does the data suggest for people missing days of work because of their internal conditions? That is typically the biggest cause of missed work days, is adults' own mental health. And then one of the leading causes after that is taking care of their kids' mental health. So it's a universal crisis. It's not just, it's just the kids. How do we normalize? What are you coming to understand? How do we normalize conversations around mental health without it feeling nerdy, clinical, uncool? How are you entering the conversation? How do we make this thing more normal, more exciting, less taboo?

21:16First, you need an actual clear definition on what mental health is. Whatever what you call mental wellness, mental health, behavioral health, whatever you call it, people need to know what it is. In L.A., when I tell people that I teach about mental health, people will say like, oh, you work with homeless people. And I'm like, no, I don't. Or other people will be like, yeah, I teach about mental health. They'll be like, yeah, I go to the spa and I get facials and massages. And so if we are in a world where the words mental health either mean luxury or homelessness, we don't have a definition for it.

21:45We just don't. Put it in plain language. The way that I define mental health is it's not about having a problem. It's how you address different challenges in your life. It's not about being perfect. It's like when you hurt your leg, you know you need to go to someone, get it assessed, and figure out your road back to using your leg. If you wake up in the morning and you're like, I have a cold, you know you have to grab some cough drops and some tissues and go to work. When people wake up with different mental health experiences, not only can they not name them, sometimes they can't identify them.

22:15they don't have the skills of what they actually need to do. They don't know that, oh, I'm just stressed out, so let me go hit the gym or let me go for a run or let me manage the stress versus, wow, I actually am having a panic attack right now and I can't breathe, so what are the steps I would need to take there? And that's what the definition really is. If you think again about physical health, you think, what am I doing and what do I need to do about it? None of us have our physical health perfect either. Those days where you eat too many donuts or drink too much or do something else. The next day you're like, all right, I shouldn't have done that.

22:48But you know how to come back from it. With mental health, we're not at that place. Yeah.

22:52Dr. Michael Gervais:There's still a taboo and a shame and a foggy cloud of like, what do I do? And I'm not sure I can talk about it. So it's getting better. It's getting better in my lifetime. It's better than it's ever been, which I think is better than most civilizations have done it, but I'm not exactly tuned to that. But I think we're getting better. And I'm going to say this to the community. If you're one of the cool kids, if you're a leader in your organization, if you're a high performer, if you're getting it done, raise both arms, even if you don't need it yourself, but raise both arms and say, hey, listen, it's really important for me.

23:29Dr. Michael Gervais:It's really important for my family. This is a really important thing. We're going to figure this thing out together, bring you into the organization, whatever it might be to help educate and get a definition. One other piece is that this gets a little complicated to imagine, but mental health is not the absence. It's not the absence of a disorder, right? So that's a little bit of gymnastics you need to do with your imagery, but mental health is like thriving. And we still got a taboo. It's like mental health disorder. This is like, what are we talking about? So, okay. Mental health is also just managing.

24:03It doesn't have to be thriving. It can be, look, there are many things that have happened in a life where even on your best understanding of mental health, you're not going to thrive. When I lost my dad, it was the hardest thing I've ever gone through. You know, you can take the bipolar disorder, the suicide attempts, the five years of substance use, the drowning, everything. When my dad died, I was in grief for at least four to five months. And it didn't matter if I went to therapy. It didn't matter if I did my coping mechanisms. It didn't matter if I did all those other things. I wasn't able to actually balance my mental health.

24:37And that's okay because that loss that you feel that you grieve is equitable to what's going on. It doesn't mean I couldn't function. I still went to work. I still had other things happening. But I also think that like mental health isn't just thriving. It's also there's going to be times in life where you're just managing. Great.

24:57Dr. Michael Gervais:So let's get into the weeds of what we can do. Okay. So that's the what. You've dedicated your life to it. providing a clear understanding of what it is, what it's not, a working definition. You're investing in a school system to give it to kids that are young so that they're better. By return of investment, the parents are better too. But let's get into the how. How do we invest in our mental health? The most important things people can do to really take care of their mental health is first, know your journey. So many people are reacting to things that are happening now without thinking about their past.

25:30They are kind of still in their past repeating the same behaviors over and over and over again without seeing how they got here. And so even with my students, when we do a healthy relationships class, I ask them to think about their self-defining memories that got them here. And self-defining memories are just the core memories you have from your childhood all the way up till now. And so making a roadmap for that is actually a really beautiful thing because you get to see that, yes, you went through things, but you also did other things. You had good memories, too. It wasn't just this problem.

26:04Dr. Michael Gervais:Can you give us the visual? I've done this a handful of times with some folks. It's really great. I was exposed to it early in my kind of training. But can you give a visual how you do it? So there's a timeline on the bottom. And there's – how did we do it? There's like above the line, below the line, if you will. there's things that were like important memories that weren't so great kind of below the line there's this imaginary line if you will and then there's things above it and you can be slightly above it and or you can be like mountaintops above it definitely how do you do it do you put above the line below the line yeah in a timeline yeah i do a similar thing i ask them to think about and they're younger right so it's a little easier but uh i asked them to think about trips they took you know people that were important in their life moments that were great like maybe they won an award or something like one of my students is on every Girl Scout box in the world.

26:49And the picture was taken of her when she was like, seven, you know, it's just there's like little things like that. And then I also think about their first experience of loss, or change, or rejection or hard times. The most important thing, though, is I model it. So they see my timeline from my life, and get to see like, oh, so I can share, it is safe to share something harder than just making this like, you know, picture perfect timeline. Up until the right. What about you guys? So yeah, it's an exercise that I think adults need to do. And I think it's really important if you're in a relationship, because not everyone shares everything from their life and doing a timeline not only helps you as an individual, but it also helps you understand who you're in a relationship with.

27:37And that's the first step is you have to know your past to better understand your future. If you don't understand your past, you will keep repeating the same mistakes, the same habits, the same things. And that's true of relationships. That's why you can see people in, you know, multiple marriages, but they're doing the same thing. They're just finding someone who's more tolerable of it. They're like, oh yeah, but that person was bad because they didn't get that. And then they didn't change. They just found someone who was like more tolerable. This is a thing now.

28:06Dr. Michael Gervais:I was in therapy with my wife. We were married 30 some years, right? And so I'm in therapy and we're going through a phase and I'm Italian. She's Latina. We're in there and it's, it's got some fiery kind of nature to it. And the psychologist stops us and says, okay, this is about as bad as it gets. And she, she was a wise woman, classically trained, clinically trained, wise woman. And she says, Mike, do you know that you need to work on yourself? I said, yeah. She looked at my wife and she says, Lisa, do you know you need to work on yourself? And my wife says, yeah, yeah, yeah. And she says, okay, really simple.

28:45Dr. Michael Gervais:You guys want to do the work together? Or Mike, do you want to do it with another partner? Lisa, do you want to do it with another partner? And I was like, oh my God, that's the heaviest question. That's the question. And my heart sank in those handfuls of seconds that felt like an eternity. It was the most honest question that she could ask. Even thinking about now, I'm like, whew, like the vulnerability required because I knew what I wanted to say. And I wanted her to have all the space for her to know what she wanted to say. And I looked over and she said, I don't want to do this shit with anyone else.

29:28Dr. Michael Gervais:I was like, thank God. Like, okay, we have a chance. We've got a chance. And so I said, I'll do the work. I'll do it. I'll do all the work. Yeah. But I do want to highlight something there too, because you said vulnerability. And in today's world, I think sometimes people think vulnerability would be doing that timeline and then just trauma dumping on their partner or their spouse or their, you know, whoever. Trauma dumping. Is this a thing? It is. What is that? So there's a difference between vulnerability being like, here's my timeline. This is how messed up my family was. This is what happened to me.

29:57This is the abuse I went through. This is what other relationships have been like. And it was horrible. Versus this is everything I went through and I am open to growing. And I need support in these ways. And I need help. Because in our society right now, vulnerability has been turned into just share things. You can't just share things and have growth. You have to share things under the guise of this is where I need support. Otherwise, it's not vulnerability at all. So that's the first step is this self-awareness, self-defining memory roadmap, whatever you want to call it. You're understanding your past.

30:33You're understanding what you bring in to your current life with your mental health. The next step is really thinking about how do you cope? Coping mechanisms are the building blocks of mental health. So when we want to get strong physically, we exercise, we eat right, we train hard. and some of your clients or the people you work with are the most exceptional people in the world at that. They have trained so hard physically that they have excelled in ways that you can't imagine. There are ways to do that with your mental health and those coping mechanisms aren't the same for everyone. Some people do like to talk.

31:07Some people like to write. Some people like to exercise and get it out. Some people like to do other things but after you know yourself, you have to think about how you cope. If you're in a relationship, just because we brought it up sooner, you do need to communicate. It can't be like, okay, I'm really stressed out. I'm just going to go in my silo and fix it and come back because that other person has all kinds of emotional reactions while you're doing that. But the next piece is how do we cope? What do we do? The piece after that is thinking about the relationships in your life and what their current state is.

31:39So you go map it out.

31:40Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. So let's kind of let's create this map of above the line, below the line in my language. Then you're investing in some vulnerability to share and talk about it and be open to like, not just trauma dumping, but actually saying, this is my tender spots, if you will. Okay. And then you say, okay, I need to build some coping skills. Let's pause there for just a moment. What are the coping skills that you're most interested in teaching? So we teach the neuroscience of coping versus emotion-based coping. I learned very early on, even with kids, that if you go to this place of like, oh, how do you have feelings and how do you change your feelings?

32:15It was not as effective as teaching them that the longer you do something, the better you get at it. So for me, when I started drinking at 12 and then binge drinking at 16, every emotional trigger I had truly until I was 22 and hit rock bottom because I couldn't continue those coping mechanisms, the deeper I got into drinking, the deeper the neural pathways got in my brain and the better I got at it. Similar thing for athletics. The longer you practice a sport, the better you get at it so that when you're in a big moment, you're not going to choke. You're going to be relaxed and do the sport because you've practiced it enough.

32:49I think that social emotional learning and teaching emotion-based things in elementary school works really well. But in adolescence, I found that if you enter through neuroscience and show the pattern behavior, it opens on the feeling, oh, that is real. And then you can dive into the emotional piece, right? So I have them understand how the brain works and that the longer you do something, the better you get at it. Then what I'll do a lot of times too is ask them to think about something they're good at and the steps it took to get them good at that, whether it's video games, cooking, whatever it is.

33:21And they'll often list that like, you know, it took time. It took trust. It took someone typically teaching them. And then it took practice. And then I'll say, yeah, to change coping, you have to do the same thing. It takes time. It takes practice. It typically involves someone else. And then it takes a while for you to rewire your brain to actually use that coping mechanism. But the flip side of that, the emotional piece of it is all research shows that the more words people have for their feelings, the better their mental health is.

33:50Dr. Michael Gervais:Full stop. It's worth repeating because that is so foundational, something that you and I understand, but almost evaporates into the world of daily living for people who haven't spent their life studying this. It's worth saying again. So the more words you have to describe your feelings, the better your mental health is. But we live in a society that is not promoting multiple words. We live in a society that is literally funneling you into anxiety and depression. I'm good. Or I'm good. Yeah. Yeah. Or anxiety and depression. Right. And there's shades of it. 100%. Which is how you open this conversation saying there's a difference between, I think you said anxiety and nervousness.

34:32Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. Yeah. And there's a difference between anxiousness and clinical anxiety, right? So can you open up just a little bit on how to practice putting words to these states? The best thing you can do is use apps. There is an app called How We Feel. It was started by one of my friends. And every day it gives you 70 emotions that you could choose from. And the more specific you get with your emotion, the more relief you're going to feel. because a lot of times people think if they don't share their emotions, they're going to feel better. But naming emotions, even if it is grief, loss, tormented, whatever it is, it activates your cortexes and it gets you out of that kind of fight or flight response.

35:14So it lets you at least clarify it. So I always recommend using whatever you can to help identify those emotions. And then you figure out kind of what you need to do to come back or address the emotion. You know,

35:27Dr. Michael Gervais:So the research is actually quite clear that when you put a name to the state that you're experiencing, the emotional state, it actually dissipates the intensity of that emotion. It's a little bit like if you're holding a dandelion and you blow on the dandelion, it changes and it becomes different. It's lighter now. There's less tentacles that come off of it. And just naming the emotion actually does something like that. I'm being poetic with this imagery. But that is so counterintuitive because what I was taught and you and probably many of our community is if you name the emotion, now you bring it to the light.

36:06Dr. Michael Gervais:Now you're in trouble because if you don't name it and don't bring that friend with you to the whatever experience, then maybe you can hide it. Maybe you can ignore it and maybe it'll just go away. It doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that. And then once you name it, you go back to like, all right, how do I typically cope with this? Now, coping is not a linear line for anyone. So I'll talk first about like my own experiences with that. I grew up in a home where no one used emotional words. And so I didn't have that. And then I started drinking. And then when I wanted to come out of it, it was a series of different coping mechanisms for me.

36:40It wasn't just like, oh, this is what I'll do. The first thing I had to do was put myself in a very strict structure just to understand what was a disorder and what was my actual life. And that meant waking up at the same time every day, going to bed at the same time every night, eating foods and boundaries. Because I would say that let's go back to that parenting question from the beginning. When people come home from this busy life, everything else, the first thing that goes is boundaries. You want your kid to just be placated. And so if that means they get a device or they get to play video games, they do something else and you don't have to fight them, then you let go of your boundaries, right?

37:14For me as an individual, I needed those boundaries of how do I take care of myself? How do I make sure that I'm doing everything I can to be prepared to monitor my mental health? And I know that's like a reach back to parenting. But families without boundaries are also going to struggle with coping mechanisms because there's not a model. There's not discipline. There's not a way to keep that in place.

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40:06Dr. Michael Gervais:And again, it's a little too right angled here. Okay. But what are some foundational activities that you do every day for you? And you could extrapolate that to like, what are foundational things like as concrete as you can, that you would hope every or any person that really wants to thrive in life, these would be worthwhile investments as a baseline. So structured things for me, when I wake up in the morning, I do take a phone break first and just connect to how I actually feel and what I see and what I want for the day. How long? For me, it's 30 minutes of just like centered, focused attention, things like that.

40:42I will either lay or walk or, you know, sit and just think about the day, what I'm going to be facing, what's going to be happening, and just kind of taking a moment first to prepare.

40:53Dr. Michael Gervais:Is there any research that you point to of this practice or is this something that's been useful for you? I mean, there's a lot of research on starting your day tech free. That's correct. Reaching for your phone right away. Yeah. And then the meditation quality is like, I don't meditate every day, but you know, starting your day with your own voice versus all of the other voices. There is a lot of research philosophically. That's yeah. That's really nice. And there's good data to suggest the data on mindfulness is ridiculous. It is the research I should say. Yeah. And then I'm a meal prep guy.

41:21I don't know about other people, but I'll make overnight oats for the week. And then I wake up and have, you know, once I have cleared my mind, I have my, my overnight oats. I can control the amount of protein in it. I can control the ingredients. I can do a lot and you can actually pack a lot in there. You can pack chia seeds and almonds and protein powder and blueberries, bananas, like, you know, you can make sure your breakfast is hitting your goals without having to make it every day. So I try to make sure that before I go to work or before I do anything, that I take that time to get ready also device free so that I am not distracted.

41:54And that, When I talk to my wife, when I do other things, it's like, all right, we have this kind of whole wake-up routine. Everyone needs their own wake-up routine. Work is whatever. You can take breaks. You can do other things like that. I'm not going to structure everybody's work life. I do think it's important to have moments that are tech-free at work too. We know, especially at a school, that tech has just destroyed an entire generation of kids. Big statement. That the rates of anxiety, depression, neurodivergence, suicide, they wouldn't be as high as they are without tech and someone else.

42:25media. Yeah. Yeah. That's all very real. And now you see school districts removing tech from elementary and middle schools, which I am in favor of.

42:32Dr. Michael Gervais:The data is scary heading into colleges. A hundred percent. Yes. Yeah. This is not getting better once they get out of. And it's plateaued, but it's plateaued so high that you're like any improvements are like great, but it's already so high. General numbers. What are we looking at for? So the suicide rate since social media has gone up around 60%. It's increased. It doesn't mean 60 % of kids are suicidal. It means that it's the absolute number. Yeah. The number in the U.S. is 41 ,000 people a year, somewhere in that range, almost 42 ,000 people a year commit suicide. Yes. School me up here. I think I got a lot of backlash on using the phrase committed suicide.

43:13Dr. Michael Gervais:What's the language? The language around committing suicide induces guilt upon the person who died by suicide. So the language that a lot of mental health advocates use is died by suicide, took their own life. There are people who will say like, you know, the depression was so crippling that they succumbed to depression or they succumbed to something else. The committed suicide language came from, there was laws in the books that committing suicide was illegal. And so committing came from that. I see. Like committing a crime. Yes. But it's, okay, so it's a hangover. So that's why it's still there.

43:44But dying by suicide took their own life is, you know, the more.

43:48Dr. Michael Gervais:Thank you. Yeah. Gender differences. What are you finding? Young women are four times more likely to attempt suicide and young men die by suicide four times more likely. And that is because they use more violent means when they attempt. Like we can't say like, oh, certain genders have it more difficult. The mental health crisis is equally difficult in everyone, but it comes out differently in different genders. Let's go back to the group that you're spending most of the time with, sixth grade to 12th grade. What are you finding gender there? Is there a difference between boys and girls? For young women, they are more likely to internalize their emotions and their mental health in the ways that they treat themselves.

44:28So you've spent time with women. They factor so many different things, think about so many different things, and consider so much more than I ever will. If I ask my wife, like as a check-in, like, hey, what are you thinking about right now? It is at least eight things that I have not considered at all. And so remember that that doesn't just turn on when they're adults. That starts at a young age. And so they do have higher rates of depression and anxiety that they're diagnosed with, partly because of the way that they are addressing their emotions. And so young women need an approach to mental health that is naming things, identifying what they're going through, building coping mechanisms, but understanding that they are likely to take those emotions on themselves.

45:11Young men tend to externalize. So when they do have emotions, it tends to come out in anger, frustration, things like that. But there's a bigger stigma for young men to share their feelings or to talk about it. And so while young women may be more open to doing that, young men aren't. And so the approach with them has to be modeling it. What we've seen with young men's mental health crisis is one of the biggest fix is having other adult men in their life that are modeling the behaviors that they need. Some boys don't have a single male teacher from pre-K through sixth grade. They get their first male teacher in middle school.

45:48That's a problem. So having more men involved in education and healthcare and things like that to model those behaviors is helpful. It is no mistake that me being a male teacher talking about mental health and healthy relationships has an impact because most young boys aren't getting that conversation or that information anywhere else in their lives.

46:08Dr. Michael Gervais:Very cool. And then if you have that vacuum, you're going to fill it with the manosphere and all these other things that aren't supporting them but are speaking to the vacuum of their mental health, their emotions, their feelings. And so they gravitate to it because the reality is kids do want to have these conversations. We're not filling the vacuum with meaningful things that can support them. Can you talk about looks maxing and the manosphere? And can you just open those up a little bit, what they are and your take on them? To me, this whole experience of looks maxing, manosphere, the masculinity crisis, all of it is truly just filling this vacuum of young men who feel lonely and isolated and don't know where to go with it.

46:49And then they're taking those emotions and they're getting projected into whatever outlet is speaking to them at the time. Even for me with the young men that I work with who have fallen down that rabbit hole, it's not because they don't care. It's not because – But they look like it. Sure.

47:05Dr. Michael Gervais:I mean, I watch that and I'm like embarrassed for a whole population. Embarrassed is too strong. It has nothing to do with me. But I'm like, I don't want anything to do with that. But it's hitting a lot of boys. Wait, are these new heroes happening? There's always going to be someone filling that vacuum. Right now it is clavicular and his looks maxing of like hitting his jaw with a hammer and doing all these other things. I don't know any kids who have done that, but they're fascinated by it. And so they'll check in on it. And eventually that seeps in. I'll tell you one thing that I do at the end of every 10th grade class at the end of the year is I ask everyone to write about who they want to be in a future relationship using some of the skills we discussed from the year.

47:49So attachment theory, conflict resolution, codependency, communication, the effects of media, you know, porn, all of it. And every year there are young men who write the most powerful reflections you could ever imagine. And they talk about who they are and where it came from and that they haven't had a language to ever use before to describe it. And so a lot of our focus is going to go on all of the problems with young men. I like to stay focused on some of the solutions and the way to actually help them. And this activity teaches me more about that generation than I could ever imagine. What are some general themes that are emerging for you?

48:30So over the past years, you have these kids who present to the school as like, you know, problematic, disassociated, maybe super quiet, not necessarily fitting in, not knowing where they're going. And then they'll write these reflections of why. They grew up in homes that they weren't supported in. They started internalizing being a man at a young age and felt like they had to show up and step up for whoever they're dating, for whatever's happening in the family, whatever else. And so then their affect at school is, well, I'm just going to keep doing that because no one cares about me. And then even though my class is not therapeutic because I don't believe schools can be therapy centers, I do believe schools can teach mental health like you teach physical health.

49:11But I don't believe they can be therapy centers or therapeutic interventions. These kids learn these skills where then they will go home and try to implement it with their parents or try to make a big difference in their lives. And they get it at a time period where they can actually implement it. age 15 to 16.

49:28Dr. Michael Gervais:List off a handful more of skills that you're interested in for this generation of kids building. So I do think it comes down to healthy relationships. I do think obviously mental health is important and we've addressed that. We've talked about it in this interview at length. But I do think kids need to know that the way that they were shown and the way that they gave and received love as a kid will affect them into adulthood. And that's attachment styles. I do think they need to know that there are different conflict resolution styles, that competing, problem-solving, compromising, avoiding, accommodating are real things.

50:02And that if you can understand that at a young age, it helps you navigate what someone's trying to do to you. And if you know you're an avoider and accommodator in adolescence, that's going to follow you into adulthood. And that's going to affect everything. And then we do talk about the difference between independent, interdependent, codependent relationships because most relationships are codependent.

50:23Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. And they're problematic. Just to define it. Here's a simple version that I like is that my happiness depends on your happiness. So that's not the clinical, but that's kind of the way it shows up locally. How are you defining codependency? codependency. Codependency is an over-reliance on someone addressing all of your emotional needs. Yeah, that's right. And that's not great. Yeah. And this is why an addict and a codependent work so well together. It's because one can do the job. It's this symbiotic relationship between the two. One is messy, let's say, and the other one cleans it up. Yeah.

51:00Dr. Michael Gervais:Definitely. We're depending on each other to be a mess and to be the cleaner. But what that comes down to, too, is we don't teach kids self-advocacy and we don't teach them how to ask for what they want in any relationship. So we are doing that. We're doing lessons on, hey, here's self-advocacy. Here's how to think about how you want to be treated and what you need and what you like so that you can state that from the beginning of a relationship or a friendship and not just be constantly responding to when you're not getting it. We do talk about love languages. I don't love the five love languages.

51:31They've turned them into seven. What I do appreciate about that is it helps people think about how they feel seen and heard. And so if they can state that, they can clear up a lot of different dynamics in families, friendships, and romantic relationships. It doesn't just have to be. I think sometimes when I say healthy relationships, people immediately think I'm teaching kids how to date. I'm not. I'm teaching them how to manage family, friendships, and romantic relationships. And what we've seen from this, again, because I don't think it can be stated enough, is like these kids go home and they teach their families these skills and it does help heal generations

52:07Dr. Michael Gervais:of mistreatment so a parent says what you learned today in school and a kid says oh we learned emotional regulation skills you know and and then what are you talking about yeah and then they go and teach at the dinner table yeah yeah or the parent will be like you know chastising them for something and they will say that's not how you're supposed to talk about that and you know there is the dynamic there that like there are many students that I have taught that I love teaching that I would never want to parent. I would be like, please God. And I'll see their parents and just be like, God, you got a handful.

52:42You're doing so much. But I know that those kids are also, one, using those words to fight back and push back against their parents just to push back. But two, they are conceptualizing it in that moment. It's not just the, you know, being a rebel. It's also like, OK, this is what I need. Yeah.

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55:19Dr. Michael Gervais:That's lisa, L-E-E-S-A.com, promo code mastery For the 25 % off, select mattresses, plus the extra$50 off when you use the code mastery. What do you think most adults have missed? The emotional expression that they needed. When you look at attachment theory, like secure attachment, which is that most of your emotional needs were met, is still around 50 % of people, but it's only 50%. The second highest is disorganized, which means your emotional needs were met with threats or actual abuse. How does that show up? What is a threat? Oh, I'll give you something to cry about. Or, you know, a kid's expressing emotions and you tell them to shut up or stop or, you know, things like that.

56:02And I still think that's a pretty common parenting style. I don't think that's. And how does the parenting style promote avoidance and avoidant attachment? So for me, I grew up avoidant attachment. It was just my emotional needs were never met. Until I was much older and my dad was like, I mean, this kid's going to die. So I need to stop and I need to actually like listen.

56:21Dr. Michael Gervais:You chose to avoid? No, I was raised – my mom had a mental health disorder and was not able to respond to my emotional needs. And I'm not blaming her. Like that's just the reality. So I disassociated from a young age, hid everything inside, thought I was super independent, and then thought I was okay, and then was a nightmare in relationships. because there's nothing worse than someone who, when you ask if they're okay, defaults to everything being okay when, in fact, nothing is okay, but they don't have the self-advocacy or vulnerability to address what's going on. They're going to constantly say everything's fine, and it's not, and you can't access them in that relationship.

56:58That's a problem. An anxious attachment? An anxious is your parents were just uneven. So sometimes they responded caring, loving, and other times they were overly intrusive and like, you know, trying to fix everything. And so a kid grows up thinking like, I don't know which parent I'm going to get. And so they become clingy. And then as an adult, they tend to be really clingy. And as you probably know, in adult world, for whatever reason, people who are anxious tend to attract people who are avoidant and they stay in that anxious avoidant cycle for until, you know, they break up or just, you know, infuriating.

57:34Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, there's an interesting position is that most of the major issues that you have with your partner do not get resolved fully. They're kind of just are there. They become better managed. Sometimes you can extinguish them or fully heal from them. But to do that requires a lot of intentional work. So there's like, you know, I mean, if you're okay with the issues that you have, you don't need to go to work. But if you're like, oh man, there's some stuff that I need to sort out and I can see a better version of our relationship, then it likely needs somebody that's an expert in that field to be able to navigate it for you and with you.

58:14And to that point, like what I learned quickly in creating this school was a lot of the best ideas came from these kids. And so when I created the school, I didn't have a year healthy relationships class. But by year two of the school, I saw that relationships were the biggest thing impacting their mental health. And if they didn't have these skills to use, they weren't going to be able to manage their mental health. Just like, you know, you see like tech influences them, other things influence them. But we are in a society that doesn't have the strongest relationship skills. And you do need to start learning it from a young age to be able to make a change.

58:51Dr. Michael Gervais:Let's go a little older right now. You know, the college years. Sure. 18, 19, 22, 23, in that kind of range. And we've already mentioned that the data there is alarming of people that are struggling, if not radically suffering, more than they ever have in our lifetime. What do you hope that parents can do to support and challenge their kids to be healthy, to be their very best? Speak to the parents to college. The thing that I do to prepare my students for college is in their senior year, because we can do this once a week, I put them in every scenario they're going to be in and ask them what they're going to do.

59:28So we spend weeks on roommate conflict and understanding different conflict resolution styles. We spend weeks on drugs and alcohol. The amount of my graduates who have come back to me and said like, hey, you weren't lying. I got offered cocaine in my first days on campus. Like these drugs are more prevalent than I think people realize. And there are less of Gen Z using substances, but it doesn't mean they're not available to them. So to answer your question in a short way, think about the threats and the experiences your kids are going to have in college and start those honest conversations with them before they go so that when they do go, they're going to open up and ask for support or talk about what's going on as opposed to just shouldering it on their own, taking it on their own.

1:00:10UCLA currently has 55 counselors at the counseling center. And obviously there's a wait list and there's always people who need to get in. But the percentage of students who need support for anxiety disorders or depression is not nearly as high as the amount of students who can't handle a roommate conflict, don't know how to ask somebody on a date, don't know how to navigate just basic life skills. And I think where a lot of parents make a mistake is they focus so heavily on is their kid academically prepared for college that they forget that they may not have the actual skills they need to navigate the different challenges they're going to experience interpersonally versus academically.

1:00:47Dr. Michael Gervais:Where are you on the narrative for – by the way, that's epic. I loved every word that you chose there. Where are you on fraternities, sororities as a protective factor versus a risk factor? The data shows that students who are in fraternities and sororities have better mental health than college students who aren't. In this world of loneliness and in this place where we don't have belonging, the fraternity and sorority chapter can provide that. I say can because that's not always going to be the case. And in cases of hazing and other things that have been detrimental, then you're going to have a sharper turn that is not going to be helpful.

1:01:24But the data for belonging has shown that college students who are in fraternity and sorority life have better mental health. Hazing is a real thing, though. Yes, it is. Do you get through fraternity, sorority experience without hazing? There are a lot of colleges that you can. That's definitely possible. And then there are a lot of colleges that you won't. And remember that hazing isn't just the men. Like what some of my college students who have graduated from my school share about hazing for women is equally disgusting. Can you give some examples? There was a hazing ritual that a graduate shared with me.

1:01:58I can be graphic. It was basically – That's okay. It was basically you have two options. You either do a line of – it's called blow or blow. So you either do a line of cocaine or you give somebody you don't know a blow job. And there are certain people who do both. And this particular student was like, I'm not going to do either. And they were like, okay, you can't be in this sorority. And she was like, OK, then just give me my money back. And they were like shocked. But she was like, why would I do that? And so there is that side, that hazing side that can be horribly detrimental or traumatic.

1:02:36One of my friends is a mental health speaker and he talks about a hazing incident that brought up all of the memories of his dad taking his own life when he was home. And that was part of the hazing ritual. Like, as you can imagine, there was like some really dangerous things involved. So yes, yes, hazing can occur and it can be detrimental. So is the juice worth the squeeze?

1:03:02Dr. Michael Gervais:Let's make up a number. 80 % are going to have a hazing experience. And the data is that we could say 50, I don't know. And the data is pretty clear that social network is really important. If you get through this potentially humiliating or whatever type of scary, intense, traumatic experience, then you'll have a social group to be okay with. It's going to depend on a lot of factors. One, the hazing we just named is the most extreme things that I've heard of. And most of it is not. It is just group belonging. It is just kind of like, hey, you fit into this thing. And so there are kids who wouldn't make it through that.

1:03:40And that would be weeded out pretty quickly. for the kids who it's not traumatic and it is more team building. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because there are team building things that are like, hey, you just do this thing, you know, that's minor. Like you carry someone's like, you know, backpack or you clean up after a party or something like that. Then, you know, I think it's okay. Obviously, if it's traumatic, you can't endorse that.

1:04:04Dr. Michael Gervais:Okay, cool. Data is mixed on athletics and protective factor versus risk factor. It's mixed. It's not clear that because you've got better psychological, emotional management tools because they're required for high-pressure situations, if that is actually – if the pressure outdoes it, if the social factors of having close relationships is protective versus the risk. Like it's – sport is unclear right now. And so I err on the side of like, yeah, it's probably a good thing now. But the data does not completely – But this is in your wheelhouse. I think it more comes down to the person's identity.

1:04:37If their only identity is that they're a student athlete and that they are thriving off of being that student athlete, their transition out of student athleticism is going to be really hard. And if there's no balance to the team and there's no other aspect of it, I think you're going to see that detrimental mental health piece. I do think that it's interesting. There are a lot more organizations supporting student athlete mental health and making it more normalized. Hidden opponent is a great one. and there's so many others. But I think that there's still a huge amount of students who are like, I don't want to disclose what I'm going through because I'm going to lose my scholarship and I'm going to lose my starting position.

1:05:18And if I just lost my starting position, I'm going to lose my identity of who I am and my mental health is going to spiral. We still see high suicide rates in student athletes and high suicide rates in people who were student athletes. And I don't know that joining a team is your biggest sense of belonging, as is that identity work is. If we knew what you knew, how would we parent better? The first thing that would happen is modeling the type of mental health that you want to see in your family and not just telling kids they have to do it. So those boundaries around we take family walks. We have family dinners that are tech free.

1:05:54We do these things. We show up. It's got to be the most important part. What typically happens is parents come to me after they haven't done it and now their kid is in a mental health crisis and they're like, what can I do? It's never too late to start. It's never too late to model the things you want to have. Even if you don't have the most time, you set up the boundaries and the rituals of this is what we're going to do.

1:06:15Dr. Michael Gervais:If we knew what you knew, how would we lead an organization better or a team better, knowing that we've got real pressure to meet deadlines, to make Wall Street happy, whatever it might be? How would we lead better? Treating mental health the same way you treat physical health means that there has to be a language for it. I spoke at the Pentagon a few years ago and the secretary of the Navy brought me in and he was like, you know, what do you think we can do? And I was like, well, look, your military is successful because everyone speaks the same language. Everyone's on the same page and they can complete operations that no one else can.

1:06:48In the business world, you have a language for whatever your field is. If you're a lawyer, if you're in tech, if you're a financial advisor, whatever it is. And it's typically a language that other people have to get a degree or experience to speak. Like if you do not have that same level of language for mental health, your business will not be as successful as it could be.

1:07:06Dr. Michael Gervais:You just shared what I think is one of the great, most impactful advantages that high-performing teams, whether it's in sport or other levels, have is shared language, shared practices. So the shared practices is the piece I put on that as well with shared language. So once you get that dialed in on the psychological pieces, like it is different. The other thing I will say, though, is a lot of businesses treat mental health as a third rail and they're afraid to touch it because they think if they have a language for mental health, it has to be therapeutic, and it doesn't. What's happening in a lot of businesses now is people have figured out the language that they can use to get out of work.

1:07:42And so they'll go to their supervisor and they'll explain like, hey, this is happening and this is happening, and so I just can't do this thing. And then the supervisor typically takes on the work of that person to help support them, which isn't sustainable for either person. So when we say there's a shared language for mental health, it's not that it's a language of not having accountability. It's a language of identification of what somebody might need and normalizing mental health so that somebody can either get the support they need or just letting a supervisor know like, hey, this is what I'm going through.

1:08:13So if I'm not 100 percent, this is why. As opposed to the scapegoating, which is, hey, I have mental health, so you figure it out.

1:08:21Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, right. Right. So where's the imaginary line between, I got something I'm working through. It could be like something that I can't see, like an ulcer, let's say, right? And it's like really problematic and depression, something I can't see, but both might have behavioral performance consequences. So let's just go in this world of mental health for a minute. You go to your supervisor or boss and you say, I got something I'm working on. It's tough. I'm going to navigate it. I just want to let you know. And then the supervisor is like, yeah, no problem. It's good. We're talking about this because your performance has been problematic.

1:08:54Dr. Michael Gervais:Matter of fact, like we really need to do something because you're in a dangerous zone for keeping your job, let's say, or making a move, something along those lines. Where's that imaginary line between your promise to the shared mission is to do these responsibilities well, and you've got a thing going on. As a supervisor or leader, how do you navigate that? Person's not performing well, and they're going through something that is tricky. And remember, there's going to be different individuals here too, right? So there's always going to be outliers from what I'm about to say. There's going to be the people who are disclosing this because they do want to actually work through it and they're trying.

1:09:32There's going to be people who disclose this because their severity of their depression is so much that they probably can't work right now. And that, depending on the size of the company, is a different experience. If there's HR and there's support for people with disabilities, things like that, maybe they get the support. If you're a small company and you don't have that. You don't have HR. You don't have all those things. That's a different conversation too. I think the line you really want to understand is how severe is it? Would time off be more beneficial than them trying to plug through?

1:10:02Remember, we're also working at a time right now where cost of living is so high that a lot of people do try to push through even when they can't because they're worried that if they lose their job, they're not going to be able to survive. So it's not as simple as like you're just not producing or you are anymore because you may not be getting the honest responses from people. I think the line that I always try to walk, whether it's parenting or even because I supervise people, I'm an administrator at my school, is the difference between empowering and enabling. Enabling could be like, okay, so this is this person's level of capacity and they're never going to be able to reach it, whether they have depression or not.

1:10:38And I have a choice here of like, do we just keep this dance or do they need to find a different career because this isn't going to work out for them versus empowering, which is if we build trust on this team and I set a benchmark and they're able to hit it, even though it's not where it needs to be, this experience that they're having is real. And when they work through it, they'll be able to come back up. That's a different conversation. So I can't give you a like quippy answer here. There is no easy path to navigate here. And most managers do care about their employees and they don't want to be the dick who just fires people because they have a mental health concern, but they also do have to answer to their bottom line and be productive.

1:11:22And so unfortunately I stick to the like empowering versus enabling line, but that's also going to be, yeah, it's a good different. It's a good hinge.

1:11:30Dr. Michael Gervais:I want to take a second here to tell you about a morning routine that I've been using for years. For me, it's a great way to switch on my mind, to ready myself to take on the day. So before I check my phone, my emails, market updates, or text threads, I choose how to start my morning. That's always in my control. That's always in your control too. This is the same morning mindset routine that some of the world's top performers across sport, business, and the arts are using. The best part? It only takes about 90 seconds to do. So just head over to findingmastery.com slash morning to download the audio guide for free.

1:12:05Dr. Michael Gervais:Again, head to findingmastery.com slash morning to get your morning mindset routine. Finding Mastery is brought to you by AG1. Summer is here, at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. You can just feel it though. Days are longer, pace picks up, and there's this sense of momentum that comes with the season. For me, that also means more travel. It's more early mornings, more late nights, and it's just really a schedule that isn't consistent as I'd like it to be. That's exactly when having a simple, reliable, daily foundation, it matters. AG1 has been that foundation for me for over a decade now.

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1:13:20Dr. Michael Gervais:Visit drinkag1.com slash finding mastery to get an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 free in your welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription. It's a$72 value. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash finding mastery. Okay, one word answers, right? Little fire around here. It all comes down to. Resilience. The good life is marked by. Connection. Success is. Peace. Relationships are. Responsive. My vision is. Health. My purpose is? Self-advocacy. My dream is? Mental health being everywhere. Very cool. I was trying to get to one word and I was like, I can't do it. I can't do it. Yeah.

1:14:11If you were to name a boat, what would you name the boat? There's so many quippy names because I paddleboard through the marina a lot. Marina del Rey. And the water means so much to me. The water is where I go to seek mental health peace. I'll just go sit on the beach. So I think I would have to name it something like My Utopia, something like that.

1:14:30Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, there you go. And then last question. If you were to sit with a true master, somebody that were in that position, who would it be and where would you want to sit with them? I would love to go back to some of the early educational people like Vygotsky. You know, Vygotsky's whole thing was scaffolding. And he was really one of the first people to understand that, like, not everyone is just at different stages. but you can meet someone somewhere and scaffold them to a different place. And he died at like 30. He died young. But his work is so prevalent. And it's something I always think about is how do we scaffold people and what happens for them and what are the bridges to get them from an educational psychology perspective.

1:15:16So he's the first person who came to mind was like Vygotsky. I really, really loved his whole concept. And Vygotsky was also the first person to realize that people have an internal voice. And one thing we didn't get to address a lot here is the way you talk to yourself is the loudest voice you have. And we talk to ourselves more than we talk to any other person. So when Vygotsky, when I found out that Vygotsky was the person who figured out internal voice, I was like, oh, man, I have so many questions for that guy.

1:15:45Dr. Michael Gervais:Very cool, man. Ross, thank you for your commitment to mental health, the clarity that you're able to share the ideas with. the openness to share your story and how you've navigated and the dream that you have for people to live a better way. Thank you for the commitment. It really is important to me that my family, my community, my ecosystem that I get to navigate with and the global community figures this thing out because there's so much human potential laying dormant because we have not invested properly in the way that we navigate our internal experience, our psychology, our thoughts, and our emotions.

1:16:23Dr. Michael Gervais:So just want to say thank you. Appreciate you. Thank you so much. This was really, I love this conversation. So thank you so much. And your work is just so awesome. I love it. Thank you. Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by Matt Abrahams, lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter. Why do we so often lose access to what we know the moment all eyes turn toward us. Matt shares practical tools for navigating high stakes conversations, overcoming the fear of being put on the spot and why the goal isn't to sound perfect, but to create genuine connection.

1:16:57Dr. Michael Gervais:So join us Wednesday, July 29th at 9am Pacific, only on Finding Mastery. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday.

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1:18:11Dr. Michael Gervais:So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your health care providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.