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(soft music) - [Host] 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.

(soft music) Let's start with a little thing.

- I actually, I'm really a big fan of grounding.

I think grounding techniques are really helpful for almost any kind of...

I can't even think of a mental health disorder that I think isn't really helped by them.

- Grounding is really any technique that brings our attention back to where our feet are.

Like our feet are right here.

So things we might do are moving the body side to side, feeling our weight shift, maybe drawing attention to contrast, like how does this chair feel versus this paper here?

Again, pretty much any sensory information.

So what sounds do we hear in the room?

Or if we're using art as a grounding tool, what does it sound like as we're drawing?

Smells?

What are the colors that we can see?

So anything particularly that engages the senses, which is where we are in this present moment.

- You could do things like try to maybe, identify five different colors in the room that you're in.

And then it would be maybe things that you can feel.

The next thing would be how many sounds you could hear.

And there should all be different sounds.

So think about, just thinking about the space that you're in.

and then after that you could think about things that you smell.

And the last one maybe is something that you can taste.

I think those are kind of the big ones that really are kind of orienting yourself to your body in the space that it's in.

- 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.

(soft music) And that's something that I had to come to terms with and accept, "Hey, you were injured as a kid."

And food was part of it.

We... We didn't have dinner time at the table as a family.

We sure as hell tried, but there was a lot of domestic violence within the home.

Food was often used as an apology.

Anytime I would get in trouble for whatever, not cleaning my room, my mom would be physical with me.

And her way of apologizing would be... Is to hand me a tortilla with butter just wrapped up with a paper towel.

And I would sit there and eat it just sobbing.

But that was her apology, that was her way of showing me that she was sorry.

But those words actually never came out of her mouth.

- I was raised by an alcoholic parent.

And so of course, when I got to the legal drinking age... My whole life, I never wanted to drink.

And then I turned 21, and it seems like that's what all my friends were doing.

And I just kind of fell into it like many people had before.

And so, struggling with not knowing how to cope with those childhood traumas really took me into a dark place for a while.

- Forever, it was just something I didn't talk about, that I felt ashamed of or I felt like you needed to hide that or not know that, anything about me, which is common with children who grow up in homes with addiction - is this sense of having to cover for the adults in the home.

And you learn to shape shift and be what somebody needs you to be out of your own sort of safety.

- I am a survivor of sexual assault.

And so that's been, for better or for worse, pieces of my story.

And for me, personally, in working to heal from PTSD, it wasn't until I was introduced to more body-focused work like art and yoga that I kind of started to bridge some of those pieces for how to feel comfortable and safe in my own body.

Because what often happens with trauma is that we get stuck in our head because it's not safe to be here physically.

(soft music) - In 2016, I was 12 years old and I was sexually assaulted by a boy who was 15.

And I was very close to him, we were good friends.

And this occurred for about two months, I'd say.

And then it got out, and as a 12-year-old, I mean, you have no idea about any of that stuff.

It took me a long time to realize that it wasn't my fault.

- The trauma that I experienced as a child, not feeling worthy.

I did bring that into my adulthood thinking.

You know, I'd see a thin, lovely young lady, and I would look at her and I would say to myself inside, "I don't deserve to look like that."

- So I spent a lot of time being very guarded and very withholding and not finding it easy to connect to other people.

- So I'm a... As a queer person, I was thinking about this.

So I'm certainly at work, kind of going through my work day.

And that's sort of surrounded by these traumas from other people.

You're sort of a receptacle for these things in some way or another.

And then I go into my own life and I have, sort of, the never ending sort of baseline of my own trauma and also just existing in a space that is not accepting always of folks like me.

So then there's that.

And then that never gets turned down.

So it's always just here.

- I think it felt like a terror of being invisible.

I remember writing that a lot of feeling like I didn't exist.

I wrote a lot about wanting to do things that would get them to notice me, which you know, you could say, that's why I decided to become so achievement-focused in my life, was thinking, "Well, if I do this, then they'll notice me.

If I do this, then I'll be seen as worthy of their attention."

It's an overwhelming experience emotionally, and almost physically that you carry inside you your whole life.

And you sort of spend your adulthood learning to unwind all the trauma wrapped around that traumatized child.

(soft music) - So trauma's a very complicated topic, and you can't really just paint it with just one stroke of a brush.

We're talking about the pandemic as a collective trauma that we're all continuously living through right now.

And a lot of psychiatrists believe that we haven't necessarily seen all the mental health fallout of this yet.

It's building, it's still coming.

- A definition of trauma that I like is any event that is more overwhelming than the resources you have to cope.

Sometimes trauma is thought to be those big things.

You think of veterans who have combat PTSD, or accidents or natural disasters.

But we experience stress every day, and stress is very normal.

But when that stress overwhelms a system's ability to cope and it can't bounce back easily, that's when perhaps, something for one individual might feel traumatic, where the very same thing for another individual might...

They might be okay.

- So there's a lot of definitions for what trauma is or isn't depending on which institution or definition you're looking at.

And so the DSM, which we use a lot in psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is how we check off and decide if you meet a criteria for a disorder or not, says that you have to have exposure to something that's potentially life-threatening or is sexual violence.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health administration, they say that it's a devastating experience, basically.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be a threat to your life or sexual violence.

It encompasses more.

I feel everybody, everyone has trauma.

We don't always have the big "T" trauma that we kind of think of.

Not everyone, I don't know, got mugged or carjacked or whatever, but we certainly have a little "t" trauma.

- Ages five to seven are, if there's trauma in that area, it creates the most post-traumatic stress disorder, we might say, because if there is trauma, there is PTSD.

It's not just a military thing.

It's an everyday thing.

- And then the complicating step after that is who develops problems because of exposure to those traumas, because not everyone does.

And that comes back to kind of your core resiliency.

But the people who do go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder because of responses to trauma, we see that affect them in so many different arenas in life.

Of course, there are the emotional and cognitive pieces of that, feelings of shame and guilt and sadness, intrusive memories, reliving those experiences, nightmares, kind of change in belief structures.

Like if someone had experienced an assault out in public, someone they didn't know, and suddenly they feel that the whole world is dangerous.

That's a natural trauma response to what happened to them.

But we also see changes in our body.

Just staying in kind of a state of hypervigilance, always wanting to know who's behind you, who's around you?

And that you're a little bit more on edge than maybe you were otherwise.

So trauma affects us in so many ways, and it's not just us, it also affects our relationships and how we function in society and how we're able to do our roles.

- [Host] Symptoms of trauma include denial, confusion, and anger.

(soft music) - It wasn't until I was almost 23 when I woke up one day, I had gained almost a hundred pounds from drinking and I just felt terrible and didn't wanna feel that way anymore.

And so once I made that decision, I just, as hard as it was in the beginning, I kept showing up.

And I would make time to either spend 30 minutes practicing yoga or working out.

A yoga hike, it's a wonderful adventure.

Everyone should try it.

So we'll hike about a mile in.

And I go beforehand and pick a spot and a good trail that has enough flat ground for everyone.

(soft music) And so we'll hike in and then usually, takes 30 minutes to an hour to get to our destination.

And then we'll all put our mats down and I'll play some music and we'll go through a practice, usually 45 minutes to an hour.

And then we'll hike back.

So when these yogis are joining on these adventures, they're getting to be outside, which gurus and doctors all around the world will tell you that spending a little bit more time outside can elevate your mental health.

- [Host] Spending time in nature has been linked to a host of benefits, including improved attention, lower stress, better mood, reduced risk of psychiatric disorders and even upticks in empathy and cooperation.

- Nature deficit disorder, it's not an official medical term, but it's the concept that when so many of us are disconnected from the outdoors and from time in nature, things happen to our brains and bodies that they weren't designed to process.

So we don't see the sunrise, we don't see the sunset.

We don't have that sort of normal circadian rhythm helping us sleep at night.

We're not exercising as much as we should be.

We are not exposed to vitamin D from daylight, which is actually affecting the way children's eyes are developing, so that more kids are nearsighted now because of the lack of vitamin D from sunlight.

We see epidemics of diabetes and anxiety and depression.

These are kind of considered diseases of the indoors if you will.

And if we spend more time outside, some of those symptoms can really be helped.

I spent a lot of years being very fortunate to live in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, where I had a sort of hourly connection to the outdoors.

I had trails outside of my house.

I was on those mountain trails all the time.

And then my family picked up and moved to the heart of Washington, D.C. And I felt this almost like a stress bomb went off in my brain.

I wasn't used to being in such an urban area, the noise, the pollution, the sort of gray landscape, the asphalt, the traffic.

I was more anxious and I was kind of depressed and stressed out.

One of the first places I went when I was researching my book was Japan.

And that's because scientists there were monitoring people's nervous systems outside in nature.

So they were measuring their brainwaves and their stress hormones, their heart rate, their blood pressure.

And they were doing this while people were engaging in a Japanese practice called shinrin-yoku or forest bathing.

(soft music) And what it really involves is actively working to open up your senses.

So you would say to yourself or maybe a forest ranger would say to you, "What are you hearing?

What sounds are out there?

What do you feel in terms of the temperature of the air around you?

Can you smell something from the forest?"

These cues help wake up our sensory brains.

And when that happens, we can see from the science that our nervous systems actually calm down.

So we produce less stress hormones like cortisol.

Our blood pressure actually drops like several points, three to four points.

Our heart rate variability, which is another measure acts in a way that is less stressed out and more calm.

Trees give off aerosols, these small molecules filled with chemicals that smell really wonderful.

Or that wonderful smell of soil after a rain.

Apparently, there are microbes in the soil that have an antidepressant effect on mice in laboratory experiments and presumably, in humans as well.

We do know a lot of people who are very fond of that smell and of course, love to garden whenever they can.

And it turns out that when humans experience those smells, our immune systems actually amp up a little bit, too, in a good way.

So apparently, according to scientists in Japan, we produce more killer T cells, which are important for fighting viruses and cancer and other diseases.

And this happens actually, in the presence of some of these big trees when we're in the woods.

Texas is a beautiful state with a lot of natural beauty.

It may not be the big pine forest that I talk about in Japan.

But a lot of the neuroscience studies that I spent time trying to understand in my book actually take place in places like Utah.

So I worked with a neuroscientist there who has found that people who go for walks in parks or in canyons in the desert also experience a lot of these benefits where their creative brains are stronger after these walks outside.

They feel calmer, they feel happier.

We know that we can find a lot of beauty in different kinds of landscapes.

Noise pollution is actually, a very serious, invisible form of pollution.

A lot of us don't really think about it but our nervous systems are set up to be alert and to be responsive to especially, kind of deep sounds, deep motor sounds that could sound like a growling animal.

Even when we're asleep and an airplane flies overhead or a truck rumbles outside our windows, our body actually releases more stress hormone, starts to wake up a little bit, gets ready to alert us to a danger.

We may not consciously notice this because we think we're still asleep.

But if you actually put monitors on people's bodies to measure their blood pressure and things like that, there is a stress response that happens in the body.

And so people who actually live under the flight path of an airport or live on noisy streets do have more sort of micro stresses throughout the day and throughout the night that translate into more cardiovascular risk.

They're at greater risk for things like stroke and heart attack, as well as other diseases.

So many of us who live in cities do - and everywhere now - wear our headphones, we wear our AirPods, we're listening to our own personal soundscape, if you will.

Many people would rather listen to music than hearing the garbage trucks.

But it turns out that when we do this, we're actually diminishing our natural ability to hear sounds in nature.

We become less good at hearing bird song, for example.

And the same is true of our sense of smell.

Humans, since we moved into cities, we have lost a lot of our ability to smell subtle smells as we've spent more time in cities.

So it's kind of interesting in a way that moving indoors has in a way made us less human, less good at some of the things that our bodies used to be better at.

And so I think there's a challenge of how do we find nature in cities and how do we start to turn on those senses again?

Because that sensory experience is really linked to feelings of wellbeing and happiness.

(birds chirping) - When we spend more time outside, one of the first things it does is it puts us even subconsciously in a more comfortable frame of mind, where we can calm down a little bit.

And this is probably because our brains evolved outside of nature.

And so our brain systems like our neural optics, our neural nerves are used to processing information from nature.

And so we're not used to necessarily processing information from a traffic circle or from an intersection or a busy urban street or even being at our desks with our computers.

Our brains get into a little bit of a happy place when we see trees and we see greenery and we see grass and we see blue sky and we see sunlight.

Because our brains just know how to read those landscapes.

And so just subconsciously, we find ourselves taking a deeper breath, our sensory brains start to wake up.

We can hear the birds.

We can maybe smell the flowers.

We can hear the creek.

We process the breeze against our faces.

That actually relaxes us.

It helps to slow down the thinking parts of our brains, kind of shut that down a little bit while our sensory brain wakes up.

And our bodies love that.

It just makes us feel alive, gets us out of the soundtrack of our problems that sometimes recycle through our brains and makes us feel more relaxed.

- [Host] Next time on "The Little Things:" - We have an epidemic of loneliness because we have organized our society to be able to be with our devices, be productive.

And I think the pandemic showed us that, "Wow, we actually do want other people around."

So hopefully it showed us that we can reach out and make those connections, and we need to.

(soft music) - When folks say recovery, oftentimes we assume we're talking about substance abuse disorders.

Recovery is recovery from a mental health crisis, a diagnosis, a loss, grief, trauma.

Recovery is you getting your life back, to me, your life back, something you've lost.

What have you lost that you want to get back?

That's recovery.

(soft music) - What then did you begin to learn with counseling?

- I think I learned mainly to talk to people.

I would say that was one of the big things that helped me cope with everything.

(soft music) - And so I take myself a little walk and my goal, my purpose on my walk is to find one thing that's beautiful and take a picture of it with my phone.

And I have a ton of flowers and leaves and spiderwebs and just things that just struck me as beautiful that day.

(soft music)