Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Introducing Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

Armed with a Phd in Neuroscience and plenty of personal experience, Mayim Bialik connects with special guests and breaks down the things that make us break down. Episodes include insightful interviews, personal stories, practical advice, and signs to watch out for. See www.bialikbreakdown.com to 'Ask Mayim Anything' and have a chance to get your question answered on air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Mayam Bialik and welcome to my breakdown. There's a lot of misinformation and myths out there about mental health and the goal is for me to break things down so that you don't have to. I studied neuroscience for 12 years. I have experienced most of the mental health challenges that we will be discussing. The gentleman to my right is my second favorite Cohen from Canada. That's right. He's not Leonard Cohen. He's Jonathan Cohen. He's Jonathan Cohen. Hi, Ma'am. There's a tremendous amount of stigma surrounding mental health, and the point of joining me for my breakdown

is to learn together how to heal and how to start understanding how all of these things are our mind and our body and our mental health. I'm choosing to be vulnerable here. I'm going to do it, just going to do it. If I don't have an experience, if I don't have a story about what we're talking about, I'm going to find someone who does,

and we're going to talk about what works for that person. We don't drink and might be. Baptist or complete teetotalist. But I had a friend that was an Episcopalian. Oh, yeah, those Episcopalians. The Whiskeypalians. And so you figure out, wow, it's a little easier being gay, you know, when I'm loaded. And thus began this self-medicating.

People always ask me about the confidence thing. There's such a reward now for being a strong woman. And every woman's like a kick-ass rock star mama bitch. My mother is like, I just, I was going to work. It was never a conversation, like a badge on your sleeve, like she just did. I actually was doing MDMA one day, and my mother called, and I actually did talk to her one day when I was on MDMA. So what that means is you can carry on a rational conversation. You can be listening to people.

You know who you are. Okay, it increases activity in the prefrontal cortex where you think more logically. Correct. And it increases connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus. Conversations are not communication. is what I've also learned as an adult. It feels like when I communicate, I'm throwing a grenade and I'm, like, walking away,

hoping that, like, it doesn't cause permanent damage. I hide under furniture, Grace. I physically hide under furniture. One of the things that we used to do on Big Bang Theory was Sheldon never got when people were being sarcastic to him. And it was always a surprise because he was a very sarcastic person, and that's part of my own journey.

You know, I'm a teenager in the 70s, and no one says, in Euroa typical, they say, let's beat him up. It was a different approach to that. It's my and the Alex breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She knows a thing or not. We're going to break down the terms, the concepts, and the miseducation that most of us have received regarding mental health and emotional well-being. The more we know, the better we can know ourselves. And I promise this will be fun.

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