5 Things I Wish I Knew About Mental Health 20 Years Ago

Introduction

Five things about mental health that I wish I knew 20 years ago. There’s just been some amazing scientific and personal developments over the last 20 or 30 years. So stay tuned for the end, because number five is one that brings all five together, and it comes with a personal story from me.

Breathing

Number one, I would say 100%, is breathing — the importance of breathing biologically, what’s happening inside our bodies when we’re really engaged in deep breathing exercises, and the power of breathing to regulate us. The science makes sense, and it’s working within our own body system to calm ourselves down. It’s really, really cool. There are other videos in this series about breathing, and we would love for you to take a look at those. It goes deeper into that topic.

The Outdoors

The next one is the power of the outdoors for the healing of trauma. Oh my goodness. There is just something that we know innately when we step outside, especially if we’re in a green space like a park or on a trail somewhere — our bodies just know this is good. But now, in the last 5 to 10 years, there’s been a lot of science that actually proves that. It starts with the aromas and the aerosols in the air. It goes through the fractals that we see as we’re in green spaces and natural spaces. There is just a growing body of research about how the outdoors really can impact our mental health in a positive way. Wish I knew that many years ago, but now we do. More information on that in other videos.

Sleep

The next one is sleep. Oh my goodness, sleep. I would say in the last 15 to 20 years, I have had a rocky relationship with sleep. It’s not awesome when you’re not getting adequate sleep or enough sleep. But I have been on a quest, and the great thing is that I’m not the only one wanting information on this. There are now sleep labs and sleep studies and great bodies of research and work out there about how sleep impacts our mental health — the how or the why — but then what do we do about it? The application: if we want to improve the quality of our sleep, the amount of our sleep, what do we look into? There are concepts like QQQRT. As an organization, we provide workshops on sleep, sleep quality, how to enhance your sleep, how to enhance your mental health. All of these topics are readily available through James Trail, and it’s just something that I’ve been really excited about. It really has improved my mental health personally as I’ve deployed some of these techniques. So I’m a huge fan and a huge advocate of understanding our sleep.

Epigenetics

Okay, so the next thing is epigenetics. Oh my goodness, if you don’t know what this is, please feel free to Google it. But what epigenetics does in relation to mental health — it actually gets me really excited — because I think sometimes we feel doomed to repeat the mistakes of previous generations, especially when we see stuff appear, or even worse, when someone says you’re just like your mother or you’re just like your dad, and they don’t mean it in a nice way. That can be really tough. But as we are understanding more in epigenetics, what it points to is that the very hard, intentional, deliberate, excruciating work that we do in mental health spaces — with therapy, with group therapy, enhancing our community, strengthening our faith, all of those things — actually can activate or deactivate, turn on or turn off, our genes in very specific ways that can help prevent these generational challenges from being passed on to the next generation. For me, this is massive. This gives me a lot of hope. So, check it out — epigenetics. Again, another topic that we workshop on, and very exciting.

Faith and the Body

And then the last thing that I would share, as far as things I wish I knew 20, 30 years ago, would definitely include an element of my faith. And this is where the personal story comes in. I don’t really know how to put this in words, but it’s my understanding — my newer understanding — that the God who created the universe also created me, and that He wants me to heal, and He wants me to understand my body so that I can work with this creation that He gave me, and that He wants me to understand the science. He created us with innate abilities within our own bodies to heal. And when I can fully appreciate that and fully understand that, then in moments when I feel alone, or I even might get mad at God and say, “Where are you, you’ve left me,” and all that kind of stuff, I can pause and remember that He gave me this body, and that in many ways there are things I can do within this creation that He gave me — things that He built in that can help me heal. And that includes understanding sleep, and understanding what our brains are doing during sleep. That includes understanding how my body interacts with the outdoors, just breathing, all of it.

And so for me, that has made such a difference in my life, and frankly has so much to do with how we started James Trail. It’s these kinds of concepts that we just want to share with the world. And again, we are on the trail — and what we mean by that is that we don’t have all of this figured out. I don’t know everything there is to know about trauma and mental health and all that kind of stuff. But our hope and our goal is to bring resources to you that can be meaningful to you, while still being on the trail ourselves, trying to understand mental health and trying to grow in my own mental health journey.

So, please check out the link that we’re going to provide here. We would love for you to follow through our website. We have a resources page with information on the outdoors, sleep, and other trauma-informed resources. We would love for you to check that out, and we’re just glad you’re here. So, check out some of our other videos, and hope that they’re helpful to you. And remember that on this journey, trauma does not get the last word.