Good Life Project - From Bipolar And Suicidal to Living a Good Life: Ross Szabo

Episode Date: March 4, 2015

"Someone who is stressed out needs mental health as much as someone who has bipolar disorder."There are few subjects as delicate as mental disorders and the best way to treat them.I'm guessing most of us tend to avoid the topic in general, we're pretty ignorant about what is involved.Until it affects us or someone we're close to it.That's why I was so interested in learning from today's guest.Ross Szabo is living proof that living with a mental disorder, in his case bipolar, does not have to define or isolate you.Through extreme mood swings, substance-abuse, denial, secrecy and erratic, sometimes harmful behavior and thoughts (as well as see his brother go through the same), Ross eventually found his way back to a dynamic peace with bipolar, and devoted his life to becoming a national advocate for better mental health education.His story is powerful and raw and he shares an honest look into what it's like to "feel the tentacles" of your disorder creeping up on you.We discuss his process of working through self-hatred as an adult after years of coping through alcohol abuse. He shares his viewpoint on the terminology we use around mental illness and we talk about the alarming trend in schools to cut programs like physical education and art (which are key in supporting mental health for kids).Fundamentally, Ross is about hope and education, building and sharing his curriculum with thousands of schools through his Human Power Project and speaking on the topic globally.Some questions I ask:Do you remember your first manic episode?What's the connection between anxiety and bipolar disorder?How did you get into the Peace Corps since you were exposing yourself to change, loss, and lack of sleep?What is it like to feel the tentacles of the disorder coming at you?How do you publicize a brand about mental disorders?Links we mention:The Human Power ProjectJoseph CampbellBehind Happy FacesScott HarrisonFollow Ross:Website | Twitter"I was a functional mess-up."Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I started developing these symptoms of psychosis, I just started hiding everything. I didn't want to talk about any of it. I just wanted it to go away. And so I started having thoughts of death and suicide, and I didn't even tell the psychologist I was seeing every two weeks because I was really embarrassed and I was really ashamed. And I really just felt like one day I could wake up and it would all go away. But it doesn't work that way.

So can you imagine what it would be like to stay awake for three to four days in a row? Not because you were trying to, but because you literally were so massively filled with energy in a deeply manic state that you could not shut your eyes. And then swinging from there into a violent crash into a deep, deep depression. Well, this is one of the things that was experienced on a pretty regular basis by today's guest, Ross Szabo, who was diagnosed at a pretty young age with bipolar disorder. And today's conversation gets into not just his dance, his struggle, and the way that he's moved into his diagnosis and then his life, but also the general conversation around mental disorder, around all sorts of stress, around the way that

our brains work and the way that society and those closest to us often either move into us and help us or completely abandon us and how to live in the world when you're different. So powerful episode, powerful and very real conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations.

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So we're hanging out as always in TLPHQ, aka my living room on the Upper West Side. And you're just cruising in. We were just talking about

for the triathlon and some other stuff. We came together through a mutual friend and somebody who's actually been on GLP in a past life, Aaron Weed, aka Weed, which people take in various different ways. But you're, you currently, I mean, you hang out in LA, that's your full time.

Yeah, I live in LA. Right. What do you actually do there? It doesn't sound like you're actually there a whole lot. No, I'm not. I'm the CEO of the Human Power Project. Right. And my company creates mental health curriculum for people of all ages. So my first wave of curriculum rolls out this fall to 25,000 high school and college students. And when I'm not creating curriculum, I'm speaking at high schools and colleges and corporations around the country. So sitting across from you, you appear to be a fairly young guy.

And this is a fairly heavy, intense topic. So there's history here. This is not just, hey, I majored in psych and this seems like a cool thing. This is like deep and personal. So take me back a little bit and tell me where this all comes from for you. Sure, yeah. I always joke, you don't become a well-known mental health advocate because you're at like the best life, right? You had to have gone through something at some point. Mental illness runs in my family pretty heavily on both sides. And I actually visited my oldest

brother in a psychiatric ward when I was 11. He had an episode of bipolar disorder when he was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. But luckily, they caught his early and he accepted treatment and accepted his diagnosis and was able to, you know, take some time off from school, but eventually go back and graduate and move on with his life. Right. Tell me, break it down a little bit. I think I understand what bipolar is, but I'm sure I don't actually really get it. So, I mean, because how do you know if somebody's going through, like what actually manifests? Sure. Well, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder around 16. And what was happening to me was I would have these massive mood swings that were uncontrollable.

You know, sometimes people are like, oh, I'm so bipolar because they like woke up early or like, you know, they had a mood swing one day. That's not bipolar. Bipolar is this uncontrollable mood swing where it goes between two poles, a manic high and a depressive low. So, when I was 16, I started not being able to sleep for three or four days in a row, but not ever being tired. You know, I'd lay down to go to sleep at night and it was like, my mind was just constantly racing eight to nine thoughts a minute. And I'd reach these feelings of euphoria, like nothing could stop me, nothing to bring me down. And then my moods would

change, you know, after either a few days or a few weeks of being manic, it would switch to the depression, which is, you know, the polar opposite. You can't get out of bed. You have no energy. You don't do the things you enjoy anymore. You have a lot of anger. diametrically opposite um phases or just states of mind are you aware of the fact that you're in this sort of like one really strong representation of some sort of of i don't know whether it's a disease a disorder a condition how do you actually call it a disorder right it's like a behavioral disorder right so from the inside looking out are you actually aware not in those first episodes

right you know when they first hit you it's much like anything else you're trying to figure out what's happening and you need a break you need a time period of uh almost normalcy after those episodes to really see like oh my gosh what what was happening you know it's like a bad breakup you know after that breakup you're like just trying to get through your day you're not yourself you're struggling and then after that period you look back and you're like who was i after that breakup it's similar to mental illness in the sense that when you get a period of normalcy and look back you're like what was i doing like that was really really extreme so it's a fact you mentioned that your little brother.

My oldest brother. Or your oldest brother. I'm the youngest of three boys. Was diagnosed when he was 11, you think? No, I was 11. Oh, you were 11. He was 18. Okay. So when you're 11 and you see what's going on, I mean, what's the experience for you

at that point, just seeing what's happening with your older brother? And did you actually understand it? Was there a family conversation about it? I think kids have more of like an innocent view of the stuff like that. Like the way my dad told me was really traumatic. He was like, your brother's in the hospital. And you know, all I could understand, all I could really think was, did he break his arm? Did he break his leg? Like the regular kids. Right. And my dad was like, no. And then they, he explained that he was in the psychiatric ward and I just didn't know what it meant.

Right. When I first saw my brother in the psychiatric ward, I was relieved because he didn't have an oxygen mask or an IV. There wasn't like an outward thing, so they were broken somehow. Right, but he didn't know. When I first saw him, he didn't know who we were. Oh, no kidding. He didn't really know who was in the hospital. It was.

And on the way out of the hospital that day, everyone in my family was crying and I wasn't. My mom was like, you know, it's okay to cry. And I was like, well, if out of the hospital that day, everyone in my family was crying. And I wasn't. And my mom was like, you know, it's okay to cry. And I was like, well, if he's not going to die, this must be something he can get through. Right. This must be something he can build up. What do you take to just fix it? Right.

Yeah. And luckily, his path to finding what worked best for him was much quicker than mine. So it gave me hope. Like I saw, okay, you could have this really really extreme disorder but you could still go back and function um my disorder you know they all manifest differently they all have different tentacles they all have different extremes inside those extremes and and it hits each person differently you mentioned that this actually runs in your family so was this in your parents generation it was and in um it was in my grandparents uh but it was mainly anxiety

depression and substance uh alcoholism on both sides and uh uncles grandparents things like that so that it's it's not so much the the manifestation the particular condition, but it's something – I'm trying to sort of like understand. It's not so much that bipolar runs in your family, but there's some wiring. There's some genetic wiring in the brain that leads to manifestation, which I guess unfolds differently in each person, each generation. But whatever that origin point is seems to be heritable. Right. Yeah. Or we say it's a biological predisposition.

You have a biological predisposition to developing cancer or heart problems. You can find people who think they're the healthiest people in the world running a marathon, but they have a biological predisposition to a heart disease. And then there's environmental factors. So for me, I had the biological predisposition. Then it's also possible the coping mechanisms because of those disorders were also passed down through my parents to me. My dad did not grow up in a home where anyone talked about emotions. My mom grew up in a home where women weren't supposed to cry. They were supposed to be strong and be there for the family. So there wasn't a level of emotional expression in my,

my family at all. And that kind of compounds a mental disorder because now you have this severe thing and you don't, you've never even started an outlet of expressing your emotions to cope with it. But which is so interesting though, because like you said, when you, you guys all left the hospital after your brother was diagnosed and everybody else is crying, but you in a family that generally never cries. And that didn't trigger you to say something's really wrong. You were still kind of like, oh, well, it's fixable. I can't see anything on the outside. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, I think they cried in big moments. And they were in a rough spot. When my brother was in the psychiatric ward, my dad's dad was in the hospital. My mom's mom was really dying. she only had a couple months to live so they were literally going hospital to hospital to hospital just everything yeah yeah it was a really hard time do you remember the first um time that you experienced um some sort of manic or depressive state that you can where you're like you know and and then you came full circle to that place where you're sort of baseline again and you're like what just happened

i can remember the end of my junior year of of high school um you know it was the it was kind of the this time period where i really did just feel invincible. Like I remember walking down a hallway and feeling like if I ran through a wall, nothing could stop me. And remember, I still remember that feeling like what is happening right now? Like, why do I feel so high? But once it escalates, you lose that sense that it's going that route. And even today, because once you're diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it never leaves you. Today, I can start to feel the tentacles of those manic episodes. And then I have to really take care of myself and make sure I don't go into the extremes of it. But

I still remember that first time. And then what happened was I just started binge drinking. And so then I was drinking, you know, a case of beer a night or a bottle of vodka or a bottle of rum to just stop the thoughts, to stop the mood swings, to stop the emotions. I started doing that when I was 16. And so it got, you know, it got really to a place where that became the coping mechanism. And so even after I was diagnosed and even after I was placed on medications and all these other things, I would always turn back to alcohol in my most desperate times because that was kind of the first way I learned to cope with it.

My brother never drank. He never did drugs. He never did any of those things before he was diagnosed. For me, the coping mechanisms I was creating were much more destructive. Did your brother do any of those things after he was diagnosed? So he had a different path. He just had a different path. And because of the pathways in our brain, because of the neural pathways and the connections we make in terms of coping with all emotions, those first

pathways you laid down in terms of understanding your mental health disorder are really critical because they're the ones you're going to turn to kind of the most initially. Because, you know, the longer you use a neural pathway, the more automatic it becomes, right? It myelinates and now it's your behavior. Was the drinking about, was it in response to both the euphoria and the depression? It could be, yeah. Because with the euphoria, you're not sleeping and you're up all the time and no one else is, you know, even in high school, even in the summer, you know, that's when most high school students are binge sleeping. They're just like, I want to sleep the whole summer.

You are aware that no one else is awake. Or you're at a party and you feel that invincibility. And you're at a party where alcohol is being used and you're like, watch how much I can drink. I can drink so much more than you. I can go so much more extreme than you, which is really frightening in a way. Right. So were your friends aware of what was going on? We've had this conversation. I'm still close friends with a lot of my friends from high school. And when like, you know, when I started the path to advocacy and when I was speaking

around the country and especially when my book came out, they were, you know, they're all in the book. They said that, you know, they could tell something was wrong, but there's 16 year old boys. What are we going to do? Sit down and talk about it. Are we going to like sit down as 16 year old dudes and say like, Hey man, you know, you're out of control your emotions are really strong i just they were concerned but they really didn't know what to do and they didn't really know what to say um and i think that they thought if they just stayed close to me that was something

like at least it was better than me being alone or them not knowing right where i was what i was doing so when you actually um you said you started treatment, I guess, when you're. Yeah, I was diagnosed when I was 16. Right. So what's, how do you, how do you treat it? Well, you know, there's a couple of ways to treat all mental health disorders. And the first one is usually medication. The tricky thing with medication is finding the right dosage and the right medications that a

person responds to then other treatments are therapy the most effective treatment is cognitive behavioral therapy cognitive behavioral therapy is really kind of what i was describing already you become more aware of the behaviors you're using and you try to replace them with more effective things so i had a psychiatrist who was putting me on meds and a psychologist who was saying, we're putting you on this medication to lessen your anxiety. What causes you anxiety? How do you react when you have anxiety? How can we change those reactions to anxiety so that you're not reaching the extremes of it, that's the most effective treatment is some level of medication with some level of therapy.

So what's the connection between anxiety and bipolar? So anxiety is, for me at least, kind of the main trigger for my anger, for my depression, for my – I went through severe anger – sorry, I didn't mention that. I went through severe anger uh i'm sorry i didn't mention that i went through severe anger control problems um and uh i also had my diagnosis eventually changed to bipolar disorder with anger control problems and psychotic features and i had severe hallucinations and delusions and well um that was all in high school so at 17 my diagnosis changed to this other place. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Where's the first onset of the hallucinations and the psychotic things? Now that I remember. So I got diagnosed when I was 16. And then by 17, I was still taking meds, but I was drinking much more than I was taking meds. And if you drink on psychiatric meds, it's terrible. It makes the meds ineffective. It's really dangerous, especially now we see so many people die with prescription drugs and alcohol abuse. and so in the summer before my senior year of high school it started off with me just having kind of I'd be asleep I'd wake up and I'd see someone in my room and then you know that you can brush off as like okay well maybe I was asleep maybe I wasn't and then I would start hearing my name being called like you know I'd be outside and I'd just hear this Ross

Ross and you know nothing was there and then and I'd just hear this Ross, Ross, and you know, nothing was there. And then it just kept building and it would build to, um, people running by me and yelling my name or, you know, eventually I started hearing voices telling me to kill myself and to kill my friends and to kill my family and, uh, having hallucinations of people chasing me or popping up in the rear view mirror. And then I did stop drinking at that point where I was like, this is, this is too much because it's crippling because it's the most, I think, vulnerable thing where you're alone and you start hearing these voices and, uh, it really just shuts you down. You know, you don't want to believe them. You don't want to hear them,

but it, it but it keeps happening. And so then they'll, then they started changing my medications and changing everything else. But shortly after that, I went into a horrible state of depression. Was that sort of a rebound of this or shift in the medication or is that just what happened? So at 17, when I started developing these symptoms of psychosis, I just started hiding everything. I didn't want to talk about any of it. I just wanted it to go away. And so I started having thoughts of death and suicide. And I didn't even tell the psychologist I was seeing every two weeks because I was really embarrassed.

And I was really ashamed. And I really just felt like one day I could wake up and it would all go away. But it doesn't work that way. And so in my senior year of high school, I was hospitalized for attempting to take my own life in January, my senior year. And at the time, you know, I was class president and varsity basketball player and, you know, in every student activity and had a high GPA and was volunteering everywhere. So on the outside, it looked like everything was fine, but I was really a mess. So when that happens, does what you're going through become more public at that point? So when I was hospitalized, I was in there for a while.

And when I came out, everything changed. When I came out, I went from being the guy everyone liked everyone knew to all of a sudden i was just that loony wacko quack psycho the crazy kid um i had a lot of rumors about me i grew up in a very small town in pennsylvania and uh it's hard it's hard because you already feel so ashamed of what you're going through. And then when those things happen, you, it's really hard to stomach it. Yeah. I mean, so how do you, how do you move through that? And what was your approach or? So two months after I got out of the hospital, one of my teachers brought a psychologist into a classroom to talk about patients he was treating. And as a psychologist talked about the patients he was treating every student in that classroom started laughing and I was really kind of shocked you know um I was really angry and so

I grabbed my teacher and I took him into the hallway and I said this isn't funny to me and he looked down at me in a really rural Pennsylvania way and he said well what are you going to do about it and I said let me speak if they're going to laugh at this if they're you going to do about it? And I said, let me speak. If they're going to laugh at this, if they're not going to understand this, then let me at least say what I've been through. And he said, I could speak. And so two weeks later, I stood up in that classroom and I spoke for the first time. How was that? It was really, it was really one of the worst experiences that I'd gone through. not because of what happened but i'm a fighter obviously and i'm very stubborn so i was like oh let me speak but then when i had to

speak it's like whoa i mean you're an average person just like speaking on reading an essay in front of a class at any age let alone you know like late teens it's terrifying it's one of the biggest fears for anybody but for you actually being that level of vulnerable, it must have been. Well, I sweated through my clothes and I held on to that podium, white knuckled, and I shook. But when I finished, nobody laughed. And I think it helps people understand. And it actually opened a lot of doors in that classroom for people to share about family members or other things. And I saw that as an opportunity to really educate people because this wasn't a time period where

people were talking about mental illness in a big way. And from the very beginning, when I first started speaking, I never wanted it to be about mental illness. I wanted it to be about mental health. Because what I saw happening was these psychologists were coming in and all they're presenting is the most extreme model. You know, this is someone with schizophrenia and this is someone with bipolar disorder and this is someone with depression. But if you're an average high school student, you're not going through that. So you don't relate to it. You don't see't relate to it. You don't see the ties to it. So what I wanted to really do was explain mental health from a perspective that

affects all of us, not just because, you know, 20 to 25% of people have a mental health disorder, but because someone who's stressed out needs mental health as much as someone who has bipolar disorder, that I wasn't the outcast. I shouldn't have been the one who was, you know, um, just viewed so differently for what I was going through. We all needed mental health. There were kids binge drinking with me who didn't have bipolar disorder. There were kids, you know, racing their cars with me, driving drunk that didn't have a diagnosis. And so that was kind of easily the kind of PBS after-school special moment of like, this is how he started speaking. Right.

Well, it's kind of like, you know, like Joseph Campbell, The Abyss. It's like we all have one. It's different for everyone. There's the rabbit hole, and we've all got them. It's just, you know, they're all different for each individual. And so how do you stay on the right side of it? Well, and I wish I could say that that moment helped my mental health. The reality was what I went through after high school was much worse.

I went away to college and relapsed with bipolar disorder and had to go home. I had my stomach pumped from alcohol poisoning. I continued to abuse alcohol for the next four years until I got to a point where I realized I was either going to continue those behaviors and die, or I was going to have to change. And that's when I really started getting more control over bipolar disorder and really making the leap for my own mental health. But that doesn't just come from advocacy. Yeah.

Was there a moment that made you make that big change? There was. I passed out for 22 hours one night after drinking, you know, binge drinking vodka and other shots and things like that. And when I woke up, like I passed out one night at two in the morning, I woke up the next day and my clock said 12. And when I looked outside, it was dark and it was midnight of the next day. And it was just like, you know, what are you doing? You keep doing this to yourself. You just keep living in pretty much denial that I needed to treat bipolar disorder differently i was a functional

mess up i could get good grades i can work i could do all these other things and make everyone think everything was okay but inside i was just a nightmare just destroying myself and so that was the night where i was like you have to change this and um you have to accept that you have bipolar disorder and you have to accept that you have all these terrible ways of treating yourself. And the hardest thing for me to accept was that I really hated myself, that the years of uncontrollable emotions and events had led to this horrible place of self-hatred. And if you hate yourself, it doesn't matter what your treatment is it doesn't matter what people think about you you don't care enough about yourself to want to even try and get better what was your what was your brother like during this time like did you guys did you guys compare notes at all so it was tough was my brother decided he didn't want to

talk to our family anymore when i was 16 um And so he left the family when I was 16, and I think that would have happened right after I got, right before I got diagnosed. So I don't even think he knew at that point that I was even diagnosed. Then I searched him down and found him, and we were able to work as a family to bring him back after I was on the road to recovery. So we can compare notes now.

But in my worst years, I didn't have him to talk to. Actually, before we move on, you said something that I think is an interesting thing to explore. You said when the professionals, the psychiatrists, were coming, and they would talk about the extreme cases of somebody who has schizophrenia or somebody who has bipolar. It was interesting. A couple of years ago, I was working with somebody in a program, a training program we were running. And she shared a story about her mom who had schizophrenia. And apparently pretty severe.

At one point, i said you know like i use i phrase it as your mom is schizophrenic right and she's like no she's like do not she's like you don't do that in in this community she's like everybody does that you know it's like in by doing that you're making like it's like a noun like that defines her right no she's living with schizophrenia or she has schizophrenia. And I had this really mixed emotion in response to it because on the one hand, okay, I get that. But then when you look at all these other labels that we give people, like you're black, you're white, you're Jewish, you're Italian, we don't say you're living with blackness or you're living with like lighter skin or you're living, you know, as a Jew. And so it's really, it seemed that it's really just when there's a negative association with it, there's this real hesitancy to include that as sort of like the noun of you are, but almost anything else, it's okay.

And I was like, I was struggling with that to a certain extent. I think the difference with that example that you're giving is mental health disorders are a condition. They're not a stable trait. I guess maybe that's what it was about. Right. And so you always want to use people first language. Mental health disorders are covered under the American with Disabilities Act. You know, we don't say people are disabled anymore. We say they have a physical disability or something like that. And the reason I always say that I have bipolar

disorder is because it's not something that defines my life. Like I'm a person who has this disorder. I can manage it. I can work on it. And I can find a way to balance my life with it. You don't have to worry about that as much with your race or your gender. You're not trying to necessarily overcome your race or your gender as much as, you know, some. There will be people that argue pretty fiercely against that. Well, no, I understand that. But what I'm saying is what you're trying to overcome in those situations are racism. And what you're trying to overcome in those situations are discrimination for something that you can't control, something you were born with. And while you are born with and have these predispositions for mental illness, you know, it's something, something again that you can manage and balance it's

something that you can work on so yeah i agree with you overcoming um is a is a tough word to use when we're discussing race and ethnicity and it's also it was just it was the first time that i had really when i was corrected it was just the first time that i actually thought and i consider myself to be a pretty open pretty right non-judgmental mindful person yeah and it just made me start to think about like how i'm sort of like defining people and using labels um just all around um and whether you know like is this you know is this you know sarcastic new yorker university actually is that pc you know right and they're like no but like let me really think about what's going on here you know and um and what is appropriate and what's the language that i use on a day-to-day basis and

and um am i am i putting somebody in a box by using language that's really not a box that's you know appropriate to put them in yeah and and there are people in the community who want to own their bipolar disorder or anything and they will lead with they'll say i'm bipolar and you know that's everyone's choice um but for me i have found much better success in being who i am managing my bipolar disorder than letting it overwhelm and control me and i think what we're seeing now is we're getting to a place where you can find a healthy way to balance these things, where you can find a healthy way to really work on them. We're not stuck in the, let's cut out a part of somebody's brain as a way to treat mental illness, you know, and the treatments have really advanced and the future is bright for understanding mental illness.

So you had that 22-hour blackout incident and that becomes this inciting incident to say something must change. Where do you go from there? The first thing I had to do was learn to like myself. You know, if you, like I said earlier, if you hate yourself, it doesn't matter what your treatment is. It doesn't matter what people think about you. You don't care enough about yourself to want to even make that change.

So what I had to do was really find one thing that I liked about myself and, you know, use that in my darkest times. But does that come to you? I mean, does this come to you because you've been through years of therapy? Do you wake up and say, you know, like, I'm going back to a therapist and the therapist is like, no, this is where we need to start. I had a therapist who helped guide me on that. But you have to do the work outside of therapy. You wake up and say, you know, like I'm going back to a therapist and the therapist is like, no, this is where we need to start. I had a therapist who helped guide me on that. But you have to do the work outside of therapy. It's great to get those advice and those tips, but you still have to do that work. And so. So what was the one thing? It was that I did, I really did enjoy giving back to others. I'd volunteered for as long as I can remember in my life. But when I was doing that,

I used to always tell myself, well, that's just a show. That's not really who you are. You're, you know, you're a loser. You're a failure. You're a mess up. This isn't who you are. So I had to start embracing that I actually did enjoy giving back to others and feeling connected to something that was, you know, larger than myself. And so I continued to volunteer all through that time, but really take time to appreciate it and soak it in. And then once you find one thing you like about yourself, you can build it up and get out of that hole of self-hatred. But even after you do that, I still had to deal with bipolar disorder

with anger control problems and psychotic features. Right. And a horrible alcohol abuse problem. And so to do that, I put myself in a system where I woke up at the same time every day and went to bed at the same time every night so that at least I was getting enough sleep. And at least I was trying to take this thing that throws you in flux constantly and put some more controls on it. And so then I stopped drinking. I stopped smoking weed. I stopped smoking cigarettes. I started exercising. I started eating healthy. I stopped drinking caffeine. I stopped drinking soda. I changed my diet. And I also, what I really had to do was change my coping mechanisms. Instead of being

triggered and letting myself have that anxiety rise and going to mania or depression or psychosis or anger, I needed to find ways to really identify it earlier and change the way that I was coping with it. Whether that was writing or talking about it or exercising or just, you know, finding a way to find that balance, I had to start chipping away at it. And it takes a long time. It takes a long time before you get those controls where you can spot those warning signs before they control you. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the

difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. the difference between me and you is you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk are you on medication for life um some people are you know because i speak to so many people i get this question a lot of like what is your specific treatment my my goal in speaking right now is not to tell everyone to do what i did right yeah it's to find their own path and not be afraid of it so i'm still in treatment for sure but my treatment is much more weighted towards cognitive behavioral therapy and it's much more focused on changing my coping mechanisms and that's constant because bipolar disorder is not a diagnosis that just goes away

and you have to constantly be aware of it now i will say the more years you have to constantly be aware of it. Now, I will say the more years you have identifying triggers and the more years you have using effective coping mechanisms, the less you have to think about waking up. Like, you know, there were, you know, a few years there, right? I wake up every day and be like, I have bipolar disorder. What am I going to do to make sure that I take care of myself and I don't go into an episode and I don't do these things. I don't have to think about that as much. Now I've been doing that for, for over 10 years of. So you've got this one,

you just kind of built the structures and the awareness into your day to day. It's fairly automatic. Could you say that? It is fairly automatic. And you do have to be careful during certain times, change loss and lack of sleep are the three big things that can bring about any symptoms of a mental health disorder. But I've been tested. You know, I was in the Peace Corps from 2010 to 2012.

And the year I left the Peace Corps, I lived on three different continents in seven different homes and went through the end of a 10-year relationship. So everything changed. Everything. I had had no job i had no money i had no anything which is so fascinating because if you if you know that like the triggers are change loss and lack of sleep you know and then you go into these scenarios like the peace corps um how do you that's big i mean that's sort of like you know that you're opening up the door to the possibility of all three triggers happening all the time right but you you know at that point i felt like i built myself up enough i built myself up up enough where i could handle it and the peace corps made me write a 10-page essay on my coping mechanisms before i could join to see you know

if i was okay and i had to get clearance from every psychiatrist that ever saw me to get in. And I was shocked in the Peace Corps. I had two moments where I was like, you really have done the work here. The first moment was we were in training and I was in Botswana, which is in Southern Africa, just above South Africa. We were in training and training is like going to school every day, but you're adults for like eight hours a day, and you've no control of your schedule and everything else. And the first day that people got to be able to drink, I mean, it was like a party.

And every cell in my body was like, you are not drinking. You're not going to get drunk. You're not going to drunk you're not gonna zone out you're gonna pay attention to what is happening here you're in a massive change you're not gonna turn to this and i i didn't get drunk i didn't you know i might have had a beer or two but everything in my body was saying no um and then unfortunately uh about a year in um not even a year in i guess about eight months in i got a call from my dad that my mom had breast cancer and i was my village was 12 hours from a mat and a 12-hour bus ride from like a major airport like it wasn't something i could go home for and when i that news, my initial response was to drink.

You know, the second thought I had was to punch something. That's a whole other thing. And I didn't, you know, I sat down and I emailed all my friends and I Skyped and, you know, I had people call me and I talked it out and I worked through it. And those were really good signs to me that I wasn't going back into repeating the same patterns I had for so many years with a disorder. It was interesting. You used the word earlier in the conversation. You can start to feel the tentacles.

Deconstruct that a little bit for me. I think so. I guess the best way I could explain it is you your pathways in your brain for all your behaviors right and i had drank to cope with my emotions for so long that um those pathways are there while i'm not using them in my brain they're still there that thing was as wide as the mississippi river at some point that pathway was so commonly used. And so when these things happen, um, and it doesn't even have to have an event like, uh, as severe as I talked about, um, you could just wake up one day, like even training for this New York city triathlon, there was a day where I was running like 10 miles and just started to feel that runner's high. And that euphoria is similar to the start of mania.

It's not the same because mania goes beyond a runner's high and takes you to a different place. And so I can start to feel kind of those pathways taking hold where it's like you're going up more than you need to be. And that's when I really have to make sure that I sleep and that I, you know, figure out what's happening right now. Is it a change in life? Is it a lack of sleep issue? Is it anxiety? And the reality is anxiety has a pretty similar feeling in my body. That nervousness gets so much that it can, you know, really give you this place of, I guess, unknown,

some unknown territory. Luckily, I'm able to identify that and just kind of take a step back and be like, okay, let's not follow those pathways back into the mania. I mean, it's so interesting the way you describe that the runner's high through mimicking a certain amount of that sensation of mania, which is sort of like the early stages, you know? Which is, you know, people exercise very often just to feel that. They push themselves to a certain level of exertion just to feel that,

almost like you become addicted to that, you know, like the release of those chemicals. And you've got like you keep doing the behavior because you want to feel more and more of that whereas with you it's actually a warning sign you know like is this a runner's high or is it is it the the triggering of something that will become something which where i really don't want to go and i would say the flip side of that is that exercise also probably keeps me away from getting those uncontrollable highs. Because I am giving my body a release. I am getting those chemicals flowing through my brain. I am having a chance to experience something.

I'm not just sitting in a dark room and going through it. I'm giving my body an out and getting out there. And at the same time, I mean, exercise is, you know, is actually a phenomenally good form of therapy for anxiety and depression. Absolutely. Yes. You know, John Rady's book, Spark, I don't know if you've read it at all, but a tremendous book where Harvard-trained psychiatrists basically wrote an entire book, which was a huge bestseller.

The fundamental message was you know almost everything that we treat with pharmacology from uh you know a mental disorder or state um anxiety depression ocd all these things very often is as effectively treated with exercise and i don't want i i would never make a blanket thing saying don't take it right but everybody's it's fascinating to actually see. You know, like, he just laid out – he spent a whole book laying out the research showing how, like, boom, boom, boom, and how he started treating so many of his patients. Yeah. Not pharmacologically, but, you know, even agoraphobia and things like that. He would use physicality.

He would drive people to malls at night, and he would start at the far end of the parking lot and have them walk in the direction of the mall. So physically walking because it would actually help release some of the anxiety while they're doing it. And they're moving closer and closer to the place of massive anxiety provocation, the trigger. And then over a period of weeks or months, he would start to have them walk faster and then they literally you know end up sprinting to the front doors of the mall and you know he was astonished that this actually became a really effective form of therapy without having to put people on medication which basically wiped out um or substantially treated the anxiety around

right this phobia. But I guess one of the questions that comes up for me also is that because I've certainly – nobody's alive until midlife without either experiencing something themselves or knowing plenty of people who have some level of struggle. And one of the things that I've heard over time with people is well yeah like it helps me you know like not go to those dark places but at the same time i feel like i'm kind of flatlined like i don't have the low lows and i don't have the higher talking about meds or yeah what are you talking about medications with meds um you know like but but it keeps me from the extremes but at the same time it keeps me so far you know like that i but, but it keeps me from the extremes, but at the same time, it keeps me so far, you know, like that.

I don't feel like I'm really experiencing the full swing of what life is about. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's why therapy and meds can be such a good combination. Some, you know, I think the reality of the percentage of people who can find a good therapist and afford meds in this country is unfortunately low. And I mean, that's a big problem, too. The money side of it.

Yeah. In some ways, I was very privileged to be able to find cognitive behavioral therapy so young because then I could just start doing it without needing to check in or, you know, but if you're in this place of not understanding the diagnosis and your options are to feel flatlined or to be, you know, literally trying to kill yourself, you're going to take feeling flatlined. But, you know, neuroscience is showing we can move past that. We can help people feel more and do more. And, you know, I think that's going to be the future is getting more people to understand the pieces of their mental health disorders and what they can work

on so they can feel more alive and have those chances. Because what you're talking about, too, in the agoraphobia example, as that person's walking, they're also creating these pathways to be able to approach that mall exactly they're also they're one getting a physical therapy physicality and yeah i mean it works on so many different levels and when you think about in this youngest generation how many schools are cutting gym classes yeah and it kills me and how many people can't go outside right your kid can't play outside it's it's going to contribute to poor mental health it really i mean when i see what schools are doing i mean they're cutting art which is a great form of expression and they're

cutting um yeah phys ed yeah and music right which i mean so you've got three things which are such huge linchpins of mental and physical health and and there are also linchpins of academic performance i mean there's a bunch of data now that shows that, at least I know the data on art and – actually, it's art, music, and exercise. It all increases test scores. All of it, yeah. So the notion that a district needs to get the optimal scores for optimal funding, so they need more like STEM or STEAM. You know, well, STEAM is better, but, you know, all just STEM

and then we'll cut the music, the art and anything involving physicality. It's just so counterintuitive to me and contradictory to the goals that they're trying to achieve academically in the school and for the kids. You know, it's like you're taking away three of the most astonishingly constructive

coping mechanisms and and you know like skill building mechanisms and and channels and of outlet of creativity and expression and connection um i just yeah it's it's it's not a good scenario and it's not like i understand that the school districts are really strapped across the country right now, and they've got to allocate funds. I just wonder about the decisions about pulling funding from those things. We don't know what the long-term implications are going to be in terms of our kids' ability to flourish. It makes me really nervous. I agree. I definitely agree with that. So you, once you're shifting gears and you go to a place where actually you, I guess you dropped out of college.

I was in and out of college for four years. I didn't drop out of college once I made that decision to start, you know, working on the bipolar disorder. I was still in college and finishing it. And what were you majoring? In psychology. So I had this idea my last year of college that when I was in high school, there were full school assemblies on don't drink, don't do drugs, don't take your own life and don't have sex. But nobody was saying, come in and talk about how you feel. Nobody was saying, let's talk about mental health. Let's normalize mental health instead of isolate mental illness. And so I had this idea that it would be great to start doing full school assemblies based on mental health. And I researched what a lot of organizations were doing,

and I didn't really see anything I liked. So I started my own nonprofit organization when I was 22. And it was called the Youth Mental Health Awareness Movement. It just rolls off your tongue. And I ran it. It's an excellent branding. Yeah. And I ran it for a year and I went to American University and I had the PR department at American University promoting it. And so it got a lot of attention. You know, I got into Parade magazine and like all these things. And when I graduated college, and it's weird, my birthday's in May. So whenever I give these ages, people are like, I don't understand. Like, when I graduated, I'm like 24.

And the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign hired me to be their director of outreach. That campaign was started at the White House in 1999. And it was started to remove the stigma and stereotypes surrounding mental health issues. And they came to me at that time and said, what do you think we should do next? And I said, you should start doing actual assemblies, like in person, someone who's had a mental health disorder talking about mental health. And then I ran that organization for eight years. And I created the first youth mental health speakers were on the country that was focused on large scale assemblies to help people talk about it. And I, you know, I wrote a book called behind

happy faces in 2007. And I created some school programs. And then in 2010, I kind of burned out, I was traveling around 70 of the year i was speaking i was doing all these other things and uh and for you because you're constantly like you're constantly just aware of the right you've got to take care of yourself and i wasn't um and i needed a break and uh my my ex at the time really wanted to join the peace corps and so uh we did you know we went to peace corps for um for you know the two years and three months service yeah peace corps you don't know where you're going you're not they changed the laws they changed the rules last week oh really they're

gonna change that so you know now you yeah you just get a region of the world okay um and so yeah when i got back from botswana i thought like what do i want to do next and so, yeah, when I got back from Botswana, I thought like, what do I want to do next? And so I went to see one of the speakers I trained and he was great. He got a standing ovation. Everybody loved it. And I thought to myself, like, I was saying that in 2002, that's not the future. You know, that might be where people are now, but what's the future? And that's when I had this idea to start creating curriculum because it's one thing to have

a PSA. It's one thing to have an advertisement saying you should talk about how you feel. It's a whole other thing to get the tools you need to address your mental health in a classroom. It's a whole different experience if we can take a conversation about mental health and start allowing young people or even people of all ages. There's actually a couple of corporations interested in the curriculum as well because they're like, this is a huge problem at work. So how do we address it? And I think the best way to address it is to give people the opportunity to understand

that they do have the power. They have that human power to be able to change their lives. They don't have to be stuck in. So how do you brand or label the curriculum in a way where people don't feel like they're raising their hand and sort of like publicly stigmatizing themselves when they show up at a class they really want to go to? Right. Help them. Right. Well, I think what's interesting is in most schools, you know, obviously it's mandatory.

So it's not like, right. You don't have a, you know, I always joke with people too. My audiences are always mandatory. So you're covered. Right. I always joke with people, too. My audiences are always mandatory. There's very few people. And maybe this will change. And I've obviously seen a lot of students change this. But it's rare that on a Wednesday night, if there's a mental health presentation at your campus, that you're like hey guys you want to go right to the bar or do you want to check out this mental health speaker you know so yeah i don't have to worry

about that as much but in the corporate level you would you definitely do yeah it'll be an interesting sort of like uh challenge or experience trying to move into but that's why i named the company the human power project right as opposed to the mental health, mental healthily, mental stuff thing. Like, you know, you want it to empower people. You want it to be like, hey, I do have the capabilities to change that. And it's such an interesting lesson also, you know, sort of shifting gears a little bit and looking at now you're actually building a new organization and future and sort of changing, building a new direction. Not really a new direction, but you're kind of like trying to take things into the next iteration, the future of being a club kid and a club promoter, and he understood the need to actually create a brand that was really appealing to the community who really most needed it.

So he creates Charity Water. It's this gorgeous visual brand and calls it Charity Water rather than the project for re-watering towns in the you know in africa um and so like you're kind of i don't know whether it's delivered or not but you're kind of really doing the same thing with the the way that you're actually sort of like branding and naming and building what you're doing now or sort of like okay how can i actually create you know create a a way to interact with this brand um that feels really accessible and enticing to people and so that they potentially want to move into it of their own choice. And also even in school, you know, they're just completely cool embracing first the brand

because it's a cool name. And then the curriculum and the experience and the learning that goes along with it. Right. Like so much is about lowering barriers to participation. Well, and messaging matters. Yeah. You know, the messaging surrounding mental illness is constantly dominated by the news showing these mass murders or, you know, look, I've been turned down from some of the biggest

talk shows in this country because I'm doing well. You know, even when my book came out in 2007, it was, well, what kind of story do we have? You're doing well. And so I'd always lose the spot to the mom who killed or drowned her kids in a bipolar rage. Or the concept, I think, from the producers was, well, this is what mental illness is. If this guy's okay, we probably didn't have anything yeah and i just feel like uh if you show more people doing well it gives the person who's hiding and it gives the person who's really fearful the chance to actually want to come forward and want to talk

about it and not be stuck in this mentality of well i know what this mental health presentation is going to be about it's going to be about how terrible these things are as opposed to the biggest thing that makes the human species different is that we do have the ability to adapt. We do have the ability to rewire our brains and change these things. We have the ability to reflect. We have the ability to notice our state, which is really unique to us. And that's the precursor of being able to respond to your state.

And that is a game changer that most people actually ignore. Oh, yeah. They ignore it. Or look, this world is tough. You're either so distracted or, to be honest, sometimes having the ability to be aware of your state is a privilege in in some ways you know uh there's a lot happening in this world even right now where you're like in some parts of this world could you really sit there and say like this is my state like i can change it or are you just worried about getting food yeah are you just worried about getting water

absolutely yeah no i guess i'm really i'm thinking of sort of like you know western like basically right if you're somebody who has the ability to be listening to this conversation right right yeah you're that person yeah you know so it's almost like a call to action to say you know like yeah zoom the lens out every once in a while well and understand that the future is going to be based in understanding our brains a lot more. We've learned more about the human brain in the last five years than we did in the thousands before. And we learn more about the brain all the time. And another issue is even in learning about the brain, the messaging is off. You know, if I go in and just talk about, you know, all the parts of the brain and everything else, it's not as exciting as a human power. You have this power to really embrace what you're doing and make a difference in your

life. So when you think about the work that you're doing now, what is it about it that lights you up? I still think there's the 17-year-old in me that grabbed the teacher and took him out into the hallway and said, we're going to talk about this. And I still think that having that opportunity to shed light on on this issue, and now give other people the chance to talk about their own struggles to talk about their own ways and to create their own past. That's the that's the best feeling you can have to, to know that, to know that it came from a place of such turmoil and so many days where I didn't even think I would make it through to get to a place where you're able to reach so many other people with that message and know that they're, they're having a chance and an opportunity to get out there is really

something I'll never take for granted. Yeah. So the name of this project is Good Life Project. It's so fascinating having these conversations because I had these longstanding questions that I kind of explore, which is, you know, your average person who just kind of lives in that everyday life, you know, when they sort of think about what is a good life, you know, a set of stuff that they think about, but then when you have somebody who struggles with some sort of mental health disorder or some sort of physical disability or some sort of chronic

illness or pain you know i think it's so interesting when you explore the question well well can that person live a good life and how good and what does it take to do that and um you know so it's so interesting to have conversations like this so if i turn that question back to you, like to you, what does it mean to live a good life? I think for me, living a good life is not repeating the same negative patterns or the same ineffective patterns I've had. You know, we all have our own paths in life, for sure. And I think the best thing about the life that I consider that's good for me is that I've been able to change those things, is that I've really been able to grow

and that once you start doing that, there really doesn't have to be an end to it. We can all find ways to stop these ineffective negative patterns in our lives and develop really effective, fulfilling, amazing ones. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you, man. It was a great time.

Hey, guys, thank you so much for tuning into this week's conversation with Ross. I really learned a lot. It's so powerful to hear somebody sort of share their very raw story and how they've moved through it and give me new language and a new lens to really understand how to relate to people who may be going through things that I haven't viscerally experienced and try and understand how to best support them. So if you found this episode valuable, if you know anybody else who you think really might benefit from it, please feel free to share it, let other people know. And if you enjoyed it, I'd so appreciate it if you would just take a few seconds, jump over to iTunes, and share your support with an honest review. And as always, if you're curious about what's going on with Good Life Project, with the bigger things that are happening with us,

then just head on over to goodlifeproject.com and check out what we've been going on with Good Life Project, with the bigger things that are happening with us, then just head on over to goodlifeproject.com and check out what we've been going on. Wishing you a fabulous rest of the week. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. We'll be right back. If you're looking for flexible workouts, Peloton's got you covered. Summer runs or playoff season meditations, whatever your vibe, Peloton has thousands of classes built to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations.

What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has everything you need, whenever you need it. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.