- [Announcer] If you or someone, you know is in crisis, help is available.

Call or text 988 to be connected to trained counselors from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Free and confidential support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week in the United States.

If it is an emergency, please call 911.

For more information, visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org (calming music) - [Narrator] More people around the globe Googled how to maintain mental health in 2021 than ever before.

Between the pandemic, politics, and personal matters, we're stressed out.

The whole planet is stressed out.

We asked local and national experts for their advice and the research behind it.

Breathing intentionally, being mindful, exercise, connection, creativity those aren't just buzzwords.

They're science-based strategies to help us build resilience.

Sometimes the little things can make a big impact.

Let's start with a little thing.

- I work a lot with a thing called the thought model and teach them how what they think about is going to set the road for them, and so we work a lot on thoughts that lead to feelings that lead to actions and then you get your results.

There's a worksheet that you can work through on this, but you always have a set of circumstances.

Circumstances are black and white.

They are what they are, so they're not good, and they're not bad until you have a thought about it, and then when you think about it then you're gonna say, "Well, this wonderful thing happened to me, or this horrible thing happened to me."

So if your thought is, "Well, I'm depressed, and this is horrible", what feelings are gonna come from that?

So your feelings create your actions or they have you not act.

You either do something or you don't and then that gets you your results.

So your results would be, "Well, I got out of that depression," or "I'm further depressed."

That could be your results.

And so I work with people a lot on the thought model and I teach them to go down that line of those things that I just mentioned, and then I have them do a revised version where they tell me what they want, and the result that they want, and then, "Well, what would I have to do to get this?

What actions would I have to take?

What feelings would I have to feel in order to take those actions?"

What would I have to think in order to get those actions going?

And then does that improve my circumstances?

(calming music) - We have this imagination engine that runs all the time all the time, all the time, runs and runs and runs and builds up all this pressure, and if we don't have ways to bleed off some of that pressure, it blows out in the form of anxiety, or for some people, anger - those are kind of the top two.

When your stuff comes out sideways, it's usually in the form of anger or anxiety.

- We can see anger with depression.

We can see anger with anxiety, certainly with bipolar disorders, you can see anger and irritability, so anger's kind of nonspecific, and again, normal.

Anger can be normal.

It's a normal human emotion and sometimes healthy and adaptive and appropriate, not all the time, but sometimes.

- One thing they did, there's a great experiment.

It's classic that they did.

I forget what they gave the person, but they gave it was a lot of caffeine, so the person was hyped up, and they told the one person that, "Someone's done something terrible to you," and they got angry, and then they told the other person, "Somebody's done something wonderful for you," and they got excited.

Being hyped up is a physiological thing.

How you think about being hyped up is what makes you mad or excited or fearful.

- And it's okay to acknowledge that.

It's okay to be angry sometimes, but when you're having trouble regulating that, when you just feel irritable all the time or you feel angry all the time, then that might be a sign, is there something else underlying there?

Is it a depression?

Is it an anxiety?

And especially with teenagers, irritability is a big sign that we might be looking at depression, and in men who may not have the classic, "Boo hoo, I feel sad" presentation, and we think that's because society has told them that that's not okay, and so the more socially acceptable manifestation of feeling poorly is anger.

- One of the things I teach every Wednesday at 12 is a anxiety group, which is always, well, very much related to anger, and it's talking a little bit about recognizing how you think and the way you perceive or evaluate your environment, the situation around you, people's motives.

The belief systems around an event oftentimes fuel somebody's behavior.

They fuel their emotions, and so when we can teach somebody to develop an awareness of their thoughts, oftentimes they can sort of derail that process of anger and put maybe a little buffer in to find other alternative explanations for maybe why they're so angry or why the person that maybe offended them, offended them, things like that.

- You've probably known people, they come home from work, and they're like, "Oh, everybody at work's an idiot."

Probably they need to check their stress level.

If your stress level is about a five on a scale from one to 10, if your stress is at a five, and somebody pulls out in front of you on I-40, you could be like, "Oh my gosh, I hope they're not on their way to the hospital with a sick baby."

You know, you can be very generous of your assumptions of others.

If somebody pulls out and if your stress is at a nine and the same scenario happens, somebody pulls out in front of you.

You're like, "Oh, I can't believe you did that to me," and you call 'em all kinds of names, and take it all very personal, and it's the same situation.

They may still be on their way to the hospital with a sick baby, but all of a sudden you're taking it personal, and so that's your stress level speaking, not their actions.

So it's all manageable from within us.

- And I think emotional dysregulation is something we see a lot in college students.

Young adults in general, there's a whole bunch of research where we talk about young adults moving into successful adulthood, and a lot of that involves the ability to deal with stress.

We have a lot of kids who are great at school, but they're not very good at tolerating distress.

- For me, resilience looks like the ability to overcome our own personal situations.

That can be as simple as we're having a bad day, so how do we bounce back from that?

Or it could be the ability to handle something much more stressful, like losing a friend, or a parent, or maybe even a teacher.

And so being able to kind of, like I said earlier self-regulate our emotions.

It starts with us, and if we're not taught at a young age, how to do that, then of course we're gonna grow up and feel overwhelmed and anxious.

We talk about these crucial stages of development in childhood and the difference that good bonding and good parenting and a supportive environment can make, and I think it's easier to see the consequences of it when we look at kiddos who haven't had that, and then the struggles that they have.

And we talked about difficulty regulating emotions earlier.

We learn that from our parents.

That's modeled behavior.

And so, if you have either a difficult home life where maybe your parents are fighting all the time in front of you, or your parents are absent, there's no one there to model those adaptive ways to cope with emotions, because again, anger's not always a bad feeling, depending on what we do with it.

- One of the things I think we start with is a vocabulary of emotions.

It's really amazing how none of us are really good at naming how we feel.

A dramatic experience I had with some students who were, they were a classroom of boys in summer school that had never passed any end of course test, so they came to my class, let's just say skeptical about what was gonna happen there, and I tried everything I knew, every trick I knew to try to get them, trick them into English, trick them into writing and reading, and they resisted all of it.

And out of sort of desperation, I said, "Let's think about the word mad and all the different ways we can talk about mad, because I see that you're all very mad, but let's find other words."

And they were fascinated with understanding that there are sort of 88 keys on the piano, so to speak.

Where they were just using mad, there was this whole range of emotions that they could name that they were feeling, and I would never have thought that those boys would've been interested in that, but they loved it.

And we jumped off of that to storyboard.

Tell me an experience, draw it out of when you felt this.

Now tell the story.

Now write the, oh, they loved it.

They absolutely loved that because it gave them this agency to say, "This is what's going on inside of me, that I never had a name for."

- Today, I worked with a five-year-old on a very similar thing and he wasn't having the best day, so we got up and we did a couple of yoga poses, and for every pose, I repeated something to him.

"I am kind, I brave, I am strong."

And I just told him that he has the power to be kind and that that kindness can spread everywhere, and we talked about the difference of how he feels when he does something nice for someone or is kind to them versus if he hit somebody else in class or yells at somebody.

And even at that young age, just getting him to be there in the moment with me, I think really made a difference.

- [Narrator] Strained, interpersonal relationships and sudden outbursts of anger can be signs of emotional dysregulation.

- The kids that I have that are three to six years old are a little bit more challenging because I can't just give them a worksheet and expect them to follow along and understand everything that I'm saying.

So a lot of times, I'll use a supplemental activity whether that's, a lot of times I use the game Candy Land, and each color represents a different feeling.

And so for example, if they land on red, I'll ask them to tell me something that makes them mad, and then we'll kind of talk about that.

And yellow is for happy, so when they land on happy, they get to tell me something that makes them happy, and just by incorporating kind of a different way to view our feelings and emotions from their perspective, because if you tell a three-year-old to tell you why they're mad, they're not gonna know why they're mad, so you have to kind of break it down in a way that helps them understand their actions and their thoughts and how they can influence others with those.

- [Narrator] Creativity is one prescription for emotional dysregulation.

Being creative can unlock inner resources for dealing with stress, solving problems, and enjoying life.

- Personally, I do a lot of writing.

I've always done a lot of writing.

I write a lot of - I think I started writing really angsty poetry in my teens as a way to help navigate my own struggles with my own mental health at the time, and it was a really helpful way to kind of express things in a way that I felt like I didn't have other ways to do that.

- I feel like writing down my emotions really helps, keeping track of what I'm feeling that day, so I can look at it through the month and being like, "Oh, I was more happy than I was sad this month."

That to me is an achievement.

- It brings relief to me to know that when I get super anxious, when I'm at my worst, that I know that I can take out my journal and I can write down words, and in writing down those words, I can feel my anxiety reducing - It's great to know that I am doing better and I'm not feeling sad or I'm not angry all the time, and I'm finding healthy ways to deal with that.

- And a lot of people have this idea that journaling is something you have to do every day, and you have to write pages of things that have happened during the day.

It can be just that you write down your feelings at that moment, or it can be that you draw a picture or that you cut a picture out of a magazine of something, positive or negative.

I work as a nurse navigator for independent senior living and we gave them all little notebooks to be able to use as journals, and that I think was really also very helpful for them.

- There's a lot of research from James Pennebaker, at the University of Texas, who says that we deal with trauma more effectively when we write about it, which was another thing that I wanted my students to be able to do is to take some really heavy things that some of them were dealing with and be able to validate that experience on paper at least, because the paper doesn't ever judge you, the paper never talks back to you or tells you that you're wrong for feeling any sort of way.

- I think again, the self-excavation, introspection - all that's really helpful for figuring out what are the issues that you might have.

I think the first step is always identifying what is going on and then kind of talking through it with yourself is really helpful, and then I think that really gets you into a position where you can talk about it to other people.

And then after that, the next step always, of course, is action.

That's how you would maybe get to the point where you'd be treating whatever is happening or seeking the help that you need.

- I know for me, the healing power of creativity came at a time where I felt like I didn't have words to adequately describe what was going on in my life, and I have always been a person that felt pretty good with words, and so when I connected to the idea that, you know, you could express thoughts, emotions, process through things without words, that you could use color, you could use lines, that opened a doorway for me to feel like I could put things I was experiencing out there somewhere.

- We have two creative groups.

There's a drawing and painting group, and then there's a crafts group.

I think the greatest thing about the art classes, what I've seen, is they can actually, everything that they're feeling inside, all that energy, they're able to let it spill onto the canvas, what they're feeling.

It gives them focus.

Another thing, kind of divert them away from their angst and anxieties, so I use art in my own personal recovery, too.

- I am a program affiliate with the Art of Yoga Project and they are based in California, and they started as an outreach to incarcerated and marginalized youth in the justice system, and to bring expressive arts, to bring movement, mindfulness, and yoga, to help them get to know themselves better, how to work through emotions, how to manage stress and in the hopes that they can take those skills with them after they go back to their home.

Basically, I bring in kind of the lesson plan and ideas, and so we'll usually have a theme for the class.

It could be on the power of the breath or meditation 101, how our mind can work for us instead of against us.

I find that taking that time to get out of your head and back into your body gets more connected with your experience in the moment, which is really what mindfulness is.

And then being able to integrate that by expressing it really locks it in.

(calming music) - My favorite thing to do is go to the thrift store and find stuff that's got chips or is broken, and it's not quite as pretty as it should be and use those things in my art, 'cause you know why?

I used to be broken, and God has made me back beautiful.

And so if I can use those broken things and make something beautiful out of them, that expresses what, what's going on in my head.

- My goal as a facilitator is set the stage for them to maybe experience something differently than what they were expecting.

It might be a lesson we learned in art, but we can hopefully take that out to our interactions with others, into our workplace.

- And I'm working on a piece now that is helping me process what's going on.

And I mean, that's the basis of everything that I do.

I have one that I used keys off of the keyboard, a broken keyboard.

So here's this cute piece, and in the middle of it in keyboard keys, it says help me.

And really, I did it because I was just feeling that that day.

- I often feel my sketchbook is a safe place cause it's there and I can close it, and I know I can come back and revisit it on my own terms, or I can talk to someone about it.

So that ability to express in a nonverbal way can be very powerful.

- We put meditation in a box.

We think it's just sitting, eyes closed and breathing and all of that, but what other forms are there?

- Well, there is what they call the somatic experience which is more physical, a physical type of meditation which is journaling, putting pen to paper, seeing it reflect back to you.

Meditating on one object.

Maybe there's a candle and you're meditating on that.

Just maybe there's a phrase you're saying, as you're looking at the candle.

Running, people who jog or swimming, it takes you into a totally different state.

You escape this world and you'll hear about the zone or getting into the flow.

That's that whole meditation part.

It's about getting into that flow state where you go, "Where was I?

", and you've been gone for 20 minutes.

You know?

(calming music) - Give me an example of a prompt you might use.

- So one that we did recently was drawing lines on the breath, and so we just put a marker on the paper and with our inhales, we drew a line, then we curved it around for the exhale.

And so they're really noticing their breath.

They're really noticing that the lines that they're creating, and then as the students connect to their breath, you'll find that the lines change.

The breath shapes how the drawing moves across the paper, and it's a tangible way to see how connecting to your breath can affect your body and affect your mind.

- [Narrator] Next time on "The Little Things:" - For a long time, I carried the negative stigma that goes along with, "Oh, I don't have trauma."

To me, it sounded like a disease or a disorder, and it's not that.

It's an injury.

(calming music) - People don't come out of the womb thinking, "This is too hard.

I can't do this.

The world's a bad place."

These habits of thought develop over time and they develop from experiences.

(calming music) - I've taken the words should and shouldn't out of my vocabulary when it comes to feelings.

That's one of the things that we do to ourselves is we say, "We shouldn't feel this way.

We shouldn't be sad.

We shouldn't be angry."

And when we do that, we make those feelings carry shame and carry guilt with them, and that they're wrong, when in actuality, they're not at all.

They're just how we feel.

(calming music) - For me, when I would get up in the middle of the night, it'd be anxiety getting me up, so I would journal, and sometimes that's all I need to do, 'cause I would journal out everything that I was thinking.

And sometimes I would have a problem, and I would find the solution myself through my writing.

(calming music) (calming music continues) (calming music continues)