Maintaining Good Mental Health And Conditioning Your Brain For Positivity With Kelli Hansen

We all feel different emotions depending on the circumstances we face every day. In this episode, Kelli Hansen shares her expertise on mental health. She founded the BCC Evolution, a mental health and suicide awareness nonprofit, in 2018 after losing her middle sister to a completed suicide in 2017. She wanted to break the stigma of associating mental health with negative and degrading things. We all need to focus on our mental health. How can we practice positive thinking in our daily lives? It all comes down to conditioning and practicing your mind for positivity. Stay tuned and find out more and maintain good mental health! --- Listen to the podcast here: Maintaining Good Mental Health And Conditioning Your Brain For Positivity With Kelli Hansen We're going to talk about mental health. I know I talk about mental health quite a bit but I think it's a topic that deserves a lot of discussion because it's integral to a lot of different aspects of our lives and a very important component of our life's outcome. It's an umbrella term that encompasses many different situations, fears, tragedies as well as states of mind. One of the things that are interesting is as we become more aware of mental health, its presence and its importance to our life's outcomes, more and more people are taking on mental health as their cause and idea of what they want to do with their lives. My guest Kelli Hansen is the Founder of a mental health organization called BCC Evolution. --- Kelli, welcome to the program. Thank you so much, Steven. I appreciate you having me here. I appreciate you coming on and taking the time to join us in the show. The first thing I want to do is get our audience oriented to BCC Evolution. What is your approach to mental health? What aspect of the mental health challenge because it's so broad that you are solving? What inspired you to get started on it? It’s absolutely my favorite subject. I founded BCC Evolution in 2018 after I lost my middle sister to a completed suicide in 2017. I knew that I didn't want to sit around and do nothing. At that time, I was working with another organization that focused on the adolescent aspect. I was hyper-focused on suicide prevention. Over the years, as I've gained more knowledge and had more collaborations, I've found that mental health is the root cause of what leads people to the complete act of suicide whether it be a moment or a lifetime of some mental health challenge is why people complete the act. If we can get to that root cause, start doing the education, bring more awareness, start having these hard conversations like you and I are having and breaking down that stigma, that's how we're going to start saving lives. BCC Evolution fits in the pre-crisis space, more of the education, learning how to identify signs, knowing the symptoms. How do we talk to somebody when they come to me and they're like, "I'm suicidal. I'm having this mental health challenge." Instead of locking up like a deer in headlights, you have some tangible ways that you can talk or communicate, ultimately and potentially save their lives. That's what BCC Evolution is all about. It’s the awareness, the conversation and the education. One thing I love about it is that suicide hotlines at the moment of crisis prevention have been around for a while. I know it was 2017 when the rapper, Logic, wrote that song with the title of the suicide prevention hotline number but with education and with tackling these underlying longer-term issues. Not only it seems like at least to me, do you have a chance to save the person's life but you also have a chance to make that person's life better because it's not that we kept you alive but we're also addressing this underlying root problem that's deeper within. It's okay to cry. It's okay to be happy. All of the emotions, it's okay to have all of them.Share on X The more that I've had to have a conversation with people and the more that I've had people come to me asking me questions about how they talk to other people, the more it even makes me a better person. It's not just being able to help them, which is the ultimate goal but also helping myself to understand how I communicate with people. The suicide hotlines and all those hotlines are around for a great reason but when you get into maybe real life or you're not in a crisis situation yet, how do we have that conversation with people? How do we communicate in general? In the mental health world, nobody wants to talk about it. I don't want to burden anybody. I don't want anybody to think bad about me. How do we start breaking down that stigma? It's okay to talk about whatever your feelings are. It's okay to cry and be happy. All of the emotions, it's okay to have all of them. Why not allow people to be people? We'd go to the doctor for a broken arm but we won't go to a doctor for our potential broken mindset. How do we start getting people to shift that thought process of just because you can't physically see it, it doesn't mean that it's not happening? One encouraging trend I often talk about is if a trend is encouraging, disturbing or disencouraging. One encouraging trend is when I talk about the difference between Baby Boomers and Millennials, amongst Millennials and Gen Z as well, going to a therapist is far more normalized. It's viewed less like a failure on the part of the person seeking therapy. It's more of a normal thing to do. Do you think that the component of it needs to go even further? Do you see that as an encouraging trend that has already given people at least access to therapy? There's more when it comes to talking about mental health beyond your once every two-week appointment that you pay for. When it comes to seeking therapy, say way before you become suicidal or even with nothing to do with suicide, how you're feeling about your life day-to-day, do you think that that is fully normalized yet? Do you think there are still a lot of stigmas around it in a lot of communities? I don't think it's normalized at all because I know that for most people that I talk with, it's the hardest for them to even ask for help. A lot of times, we don't know what's going on anyways. We have all these emotions, hormones, maybe all these different changes in our bodies and we're not exactly sure what's going on. I’m trying to figure out all of those things and being like, "I need to ask for help." Most people, what they do is instead of asking for help, they will sit in whatever is happening. It's still a challenge even in the groups that I'm in getting people to have conversations about their feelings or get into that deep conversation versus the surface level. I know in the mental health world that it is very inundated. In getting into a therapist or a counselor, there are waiting lists. That, for me is not okay because the space that we lose the most people to suicide is from when they go to maybe their general doctor and they're diagnosed to when they can get professional help. How do we fit that gap with everyday people to understand and have these tough conversations without having that stigma centered around it? Even more normalizing the conversations and that's what I'm trying to do with my nonprofit in general. You're trying to make it one of the things that I observed quite a bit that I feel like it exacerbates. I'm not saying that's right but what furthers the problem along is our culture has a way of amplifying the ups and downs in people's lives. When someone is doing well, everyone wants to be around them, to come out, to do that and if someone is not doing well, for one reason or another, they become a tougher person to be around. Mental Health: Mental health is the root cause of what leads people to complete the act of suicide. The more shallow fake friends, if you want to call it that, slip away, go by the wayside and then become lonelier, makes the problem worse because you don't have that person to talk to. You're going about finding a way when someone is slipping and say, "We're going to notice this person is slipping and before they go into the spiral where they have slipped a little bit and they're becoming a little bit runty. People are like, "I don't want to be around this person anymore because they're going to rant, wallow or however it manifests." That cycle continues to find that cycle and squash it before it happens amongst people. One of the things that I created is called Self-Care Safety Plan. It's a safety plan and a self-care plan altogether so when you're going into those moments that you already have this list of things. I designed it in threes. If you think about the structure of a triangle, it's the strongest structure in the world. If you think of things in threes, one, it's easier because then you don't have this whole list. Two, it's going to be a lot stronger. How do you create this list or the safety plan or the self-care plan when you're at a high? If you're going into that low, you can pull up this plan and be like, "This is a person I know I can call at any moment. These are the things that I'm grateful for. This is the people place, wherever that I can call or talk to if I'm in a crisis situation. Building in the skills for people to understand their own behaviors is important. What you were talking about at first is our brain naturally steers away from pain and it goes towards pleasure. Those people that are super energetic and always happy, people were like, "That's so pleasurable to me. I want to be with them." Those people that are, as we call them Debbie Downers or whatever you want to call them, are a pain for us. That's a pain for our brain. Our brain is naturally going to avoid the things that are painful for us and go towards pleasure. It's more understanding about how our brains work, which I think it's cool but I'm a total nerd that way....