August 31st, 2020 Transcript – Mental Health Moment 

Transcript by Google Voice Typing – Please excuse errors

Topic – Reckless Thinking.  What parents can do to model healthy thinking patterns for their children.

Welcome, Welcome to the Mental health Moment. It is Monday and time to take a moment for your mental health.  I’m your host Joe Newman from Life Launch Centers, and on this show we talk about all things for your mental health.  We teach healthy coping mechanisms, discuss current situations that affect our mental health, and really try to leave you with some tips, ideas and resources that you can implement right now. You know it’s all about resilience here and you know I often say that resilience is kind of a popular word these days and it’s it’s not something that you just like automatically have because you want if you were trying to build your physique you know you you don’t avoid the gym, right. You have to go in and actually spend some time you know developing them the muscle. Emotional muscles really it’s the kind of thing that you have to put the work in and and learn the tools the exercises to build that resilient so that’s really what we do at life launch centers in our group counseling programs it’s there really amazing the kids that, they’re usually have anxiety or depression and general in the ages of around 11 to 26 years old and they have age-appropriate groups that they come and learn about emotional tools they need to successfully launched into life group is really amazing because that’s that’s really the place where people make the most growth cuz they don’t even really have to really say much they they hear other people talking about how anxiety and depression and all these difficult emotions are affecting them and pretty quickly their barriers come down they realize you know they’re there be no worse off Sommer they’re better off than others and they kind of get an idea that they’re not alone in this struggle and there are actual exercises tools they can learn to help them become more resilient so you know today I thought we talked a little bit about what parents can do some of these tools that I mentioned and what parents can personally do to help their children’s mental health and I got with me on the show today Kaden Foremaster producer a canyon media on commentary of these ideas off of because this is a real issue you know it just last week I was up in Cedar City talking to a group of high school students who fits this new program called launch high school and you know it is kind of a coincidence our names in a life on centers in Los high school work closely connected with no affiliation but they brought us in as a mental health specialist to talk about the growing problem of anxiety and and depression among students and we had this opportunity to talk about with those students identify what it looks like in their lives help night they went through the process of thinking about what they could do to help and then come up with Solutions either products or services that they could offer and you know it was it was really a parent to hear from the students from the youth what some of the sources that they are identifying as causing this growth and anxiety and depression social media at least right now it definitely say with the pandemic going on and being you know definitely the social distancing thing it’s it’s it’s hard I specially at that age where you’re trying to learn and you have to say that such a difficult age to be distancing is awkward into know that self and then you add the awkwardness of adolescence on top of it of course they’re going through some anxiety right I mean today’s communication has been deteriorated by a variety of things first of all Society second of all technology you know we’ve taken away the the traditional modes of communication like face-to-face discussion and replaced it with lower accountability methods of communication texting for example you know like front of their face because you’re going to have to deal with him either punching you in the face or them like starting to cry and you have to you know that your response on the spot like I’m trying to like each student for recognizing is that it’s hard for them to do that because you have for most of their literate life they had a cell phone and an ability to text on a level that they are comfortable with which is a much slower Pace much more deliberate and let much less accountability rest so that’s that’s kind of some interesting things about how that what happened and in fact we talked a lot about communication with parents particularly how all these kids really feel like their parents really don’t believe that there that did their parents understand them lice really is different you know like I think of generations past there’s always been this struggle between parent and child in the new generation the old generation you we don’t understand each other there’s a generation gap I think that generation gap is probably larger now than ever before I would agree with that actually I think so I think it’s just that’s what technology is done to us and it’s really everything the process is just sped up really fat landscape for kids in and that’s one of the first things I think parents can do to really help their kids with their mental health is to validate to try to understand to look at it from from New Perspective rather than the perspective of their own experience social media child I like every high school student encounter they really believe that their life is on display and is a spectacle in reality it is used to think you know people who are always worried about what other people thought of him and and in reality is I come on with people are really aren’t thinking about you that much but today because we voluntarily put our kids lives on display through social media and through technology they just they grow up with that understanding that I have to look and be perfect because I’m constantly being judged online and through social media from from the way I portray myself for the way my parents portray our family and so they grow up in this bike hyper scrutiny environment it is stressful it is so stressful because the results you know in their mind are very very large you know like we’re used to being able to take him embarassment you know you grow this resilience where you can take embarrassment you can look dumb you can you know I have something not perfect about your life but you grow up in a in a environment where where everything about you is expected to be perfect inside out right now I know right side on is no big deal but now it’s like something little like that happens in and everybody looks for the viral opportunity how am I going to take this guy this yeah because I made fun of somebody but it’s real parents to to really help validate the second is numbing with our phones like as parents we really got a model healthy mental health practices and just the other day I realize I was I have to constantly restrict this for myself or my immediate thought process is to go to my phone to look at some news to check Facebook to look at some classified ads or something I would consider productive on my phone but what am I kids say is here on your phone to your on your phone constantly and so of course that’s what they’re going to do to kids are great models of behavior and so we as parents have to really discipline ourselves to model good mental health practices and we’re actually going to talk in the second I’ve got to go to a break but I’ve got a list of ways of Reckless thinking that are very commonly portrayed among young people as well as they come to realize that they really just learned from their parents so parents we’re going to we’re going to take a personal look at ourselves and try to see where do we employ this Reckless thinking and what can we do to model better behavior for kids. This is the mental health of Moment and I’ll be back in just one minute. 

Welcome back to the mental health moment I’m your host Joe Newman from Life launch centers today were talking about how to help our kids with anxiety and depression by modeling good behavior in and I’ve got with me Kayden foremaster producer Canyon media with me today thanks again Kaden Foremaster commentarying with us today have course I don’t think that’s a real word, that’s all good and he knows we’re talking about how you know parents really look for ways to help their kids and and sometimes you know they are there answer is medication sometimes it’s counseling and sometimes I think they want to bring him in for some but but honestly what we find over and over and over the ways that parents help their kids the most is by modeling healthy mental health practices for themselves and teaching their kids to example right so I mean that that sounds so simple but when we start to look at what we actually do its it can be kind of trying to be kind of difficult so today I wanted to look at kind of have an introspective time for all of us to look at some of the Reckless thinking out there that contributes to anxiety and depression and I want you to think about in personal terms not in terms of how your kids do this but in terms of how you do this because as we recognize that behavior in our own lives and we have a choice to be able to act more healthy and model good behavior so so one of the most common ways of Reckless thinking that adds to anxiety is called the filtering units is when you magnify negative details while filtering out all of the positive aspects of a situation so and the whole event becomes colored by that one detail and when you single out just the negative you miss out on all the positive experiences around you. I think that’s really easy recognize another people be in Dallas like I’ll come on you can see the you know the Silver Lining on the clouds or whatever but but how often do we do that all the time all the time I like to think I’m good at not doing that have to wait an extra you know maybe somebody got sat before you that came in after you and you start to complain you start to have a negative experience and then your kids see this and all we’re doing is complaining and focusing on the negative what is it what is that teach them all the negative exactly so as we learn how to filter deposit it look at the positive in life you know hey this is at least we’re able to go out to dinner I’ve had that feeling a lot lately with restrictions and it’s like focusing on the positive filtering the positive that’s that’s a really important one reading this is when you think you know what others are feeling and what they feel about you and why they act the way they do so so that you don’t watch or listen carefully enough to notice any data to show otherwise so if your mind reading you’re jumping to conclusions and you presume that they are true without checking or whether whether they’re true or not right this one is like a pet peeve of mine either when I see you to myself or see it another people practice one of the steps in our in our resilience curriculum we teach about the story in my head where we really believe that we can read the minds of other people and we can see that without even checking if it true that ain’t got for the real dangerous you may be able to to do this what somebody is thinking but without giving them the opportunity to either confirm or dispel that thought you really don’t know and it can be very can be very difficult very Reckless so you know getting them the benefit of the doubt you know when when they’re doing something that you seem to know exactly what they’re thinking check it with him say hey can I check the story my head with you it seems like when you came home late from curfew that you don’t care about that you know by the by you or you know this is a real life example actually that from our family to ask my son I was like it looks like your body language in the way you’re talking to me show me that you really don’t care about what you know keeping curfew is that true you know I didn’t hear you know any way that opening up a discussion is so healthy so how about this disaster okay you notice or hear about a problem and start to get stuck on the what-ifs oh man what if this happens to me or what if this tragedy strikes this happens all the time you I see this in little kid you know where I recognized at most for myself what’s up is when my kids aren’t home when they said they were going to be I go into the catastrophizing whatever it would have been my wife and I have to literally stop and go okay let’s just that should take a moment you know the other day I was sitting at home and I didn’t it was a Saturday and I don’t work on Saturdays but my wife rarely has to work on Saturday she happen to work on this Saturday and normally has been like an hour do you like sorry I just forgot something you know I go to worst case scenario you know like we live in this world where we expect instant communication has just magnified that problem for sure you know there but I can definitely remember before the time to sell phones that you can get in touch with somebody that’s okay it might be a day might be two days before they get back to you you leave a message and then you just kind of expect that I’ll get back to you when they can but that’s all changed today and especially kids who are I would never experienced that different kind of Lifestyle they they’ve been raised in this in this generation so it is definitely different for him so so stay away from the catastrophizing model hooks the good behavior for your kids up. How about overgeneralizing wow this is a big one so this is when you come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence if something bad has happened to you once you expected over and over again so overgeneralizing can lead to a restricted life as you try to avoid disappointment risk in judgment so I often think of this like like if your child took a bite into an apple and this is like the first Apple they’ve ever bit into and there was a war minute overgeneralizing would make them think that every apple has a worm in it and that’s unpleasant and they never want to eat any Apple ever again yeah you know that sounds so simple I think we do it all over the place I went to this one company and I was treated this way so that’s the way they must treat everybody and I’ll always get that kind of service from the right I see that all the time especially on social media site paid don’t go to this place because I have one bad experience there right and we can we just focus on that you know overgeneralize the rest of their employees or service or you know products or whatever based on on that one experience and I think a lot of that comes to when it’s a let’s say you were meeting people especially country or somewhere and maybe you don’t get along with that neighbors here like okay everybody from that country everyone from Back East is a horrible person yeah I know that’s a real thing and I think we need our kids see us behave that way then they get more stressed about having to be perfect all the time right because man if one little indiscretion or one little slip up there going to be over generalized right for the rest of their lot right though very Reckless thinking so you know anybody he’s turning in right now we’re talking about Reckless thinking in different ways that we can model good behavior for our kids and trying to really take an introspective look at what we can do to to improve our own Harem thinking model good behavior self here’s another one is called black and white thinking this is a very interesting interesting wonder where things are black and white good or bad you feel you have to have you know you have to be perfect or else you’re a failure you do things all the way or not at all you tend to perceive things at extremes with room for possibilities in the gray area in between you often use words like always never every time everyone or no one why talk about this with my wife all the time because when we all the time all the time right there it is damaging a very detrimental because like it says it’s either do all the way or not at all yeah we see this in kids all the time and all the time they try it out and it doesn’t work and so they’re all okay doesn’t work all the way that I’m going to go all the way with this I’m either going to be a professional soccer player or I’m not going to play it all right I do see this a lot and sorry to throw under the bus but I see there’s sometimes of my wife where she’ll try to Ferg’s ample like with cooking right I love cooking until I actually do a lot of the cooking at our house but when I try to cook something if it goes bad one time she just assumes that she doesn’t know how to make that dish so she’ll never tried again try it again right I love seeing people over, where they didn’t get it the first time but then they they leave room for improvement really that’s what strong mental health is all about that is all about it’s about leaving room for progression and becoming better Improvement so I mean there’s so many here that we haven’t had a chance to talk about blaming fairness fallacy talking about should Global labeling home and I’m going to post these on our website along with this radio show afterwards so if you want to have more information about some of these Reckless thinking and how do I identify in yourself and how you can better model it for your kids jump on our website a life launch centers.com and I will be right under the latest radio show or the radio archives show and you can access to that but it’s crazy how fast time goes you know I’m just so thankful that we’re able to talk about some of this today please don’t wait to get help all too often we hear parents say that they may know their kids got some prominent but it’s just not convenient for him to get help and you know we’ve we’ve had too many tragedies in the area with suicide with with you people not getting the help they need for their mental health so please don’t wait give us a call at life on centers it’s 833-803-3883 we do a free 15-minute phone consultation trying to give you the best course of action to take when I with your loved one so this is been your mental health moment join us again next time right here on St George launch centers until next time keep those kids safe and keep your sanity.