The importance of Mental Health Awareness Month, The crucial role of mothers in maintaining family well-being. The tendency of mothers to prioritize everyone else over themselves and stresses the need for them to focus on their own mental and physical health. The concept of journaling as a tool for reducing anxiety and gaining perspective on life's challenges. He encourages viewers to adopt regular journaling practices to better manage stress and improve their overall mental health.

Highlights of the Podcast

01:09 - When we think of a mom

02:57 -How they should deal with their health

05:09 - One of the more important parts of that journaling

05:52 - If you're going to be on a health journey

07:42 - Why the viewpoint that matters

09:45 - When you pray, how you pray matters

10:28 - The mental health strengthening thing where we try to help

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:03] So this week. This month is Mental Health Awareness Month, which is a great month for guys who have charities dedicated to mental health, specifically helping PTSD, addiction, depression, and veterans and first responders. So, which is why we're doing this whole thing. So switching over to, Tree of Life Dot health, check that out and we'll be good. So I thought that the best way to do this week, especially because Mother's Day was yesterday, was to start off with my mom lecture. And if you're if your house is like mine was yesterday, you're going to you're gonna get this one pretty well. So my mom lecture is I give this to all the moms we start talking about, you know, what's going on because they're usually a mom will come in and she's all beat up and she's exhausted. And you can tell she's just been put through the wringer. And she's like, we need to work on my kids and my husband and my friend Susie and this other person I just met, and I was like her and go.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:00:57] Let me tell you something. So this is my mom lecture. So women typically start off better than men as far as being compassionate and loving and kind and nurturing and all the things that we think of when we think of a mom, which is great and that makes you better servants and better people, and just all around role models for how we should treat each other. However, that gets kind of put on steroids. It gets made substantially stronger whenever they become moms. So they'll take care of their kids, their kids friends. Their friends. Kids. Stray animals, stray people. Random everybody. And then at the end of the day, if there's any time left, they might might think about taking care of themselves, which again, phenomenal. That's how you do as a servant. That's how you do it as a great, compassionate human being. You put yourself last and that's that's great. The problem is, is that I don't think mothers are putting the the emphasis on how important they are on themselves. They're the glue, the linchpin that holds the families together. If they go down, the family goes down. You know, if I get sick for a couple of days, my worry about my my family can deal with it.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:02:05] You know, the kids get their other food, they get all their clothes down, they get taken to school, the homework, kids check the, you know, all the politics of the school of, you know, well, this person said this to this person and you know well all that all that jazz still here. If mom goes down, I have no idea what little Susie's big problem is. I can't I can't continue that conversation with the kids. You know, I don't know, you know, this teacher's mean, and this one's not. I don't I don't know those things because that's what moms are great at. So what I always tell these women is that you need to understand that your mental health, your physical health needs to be up there ahead of everybody else's. Because if you go down the family, go south and the president you sat with your health teaches the children how they should deal with their health, what importance they should put on it. So just like when I tell the guys you're the example physically for your boys and for your girls, so you need to work out. You need to take care of your body. You need to, you know, work hard. You show them what being a responsible, healthy adult looks like. Same thing with mom. So that's one of those things. So get your massages. Take the time out in the middle of the day to read a book or take a shower, get your nails done, or just sit Sarah Wall and decompress and calm down and relax.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:03:26] I know that's just a way to calm down, but you need to calm down. You take a second and relax because that's critical for your neurological, psychological and mental health. So one of the things, that I always like to toss out and it's odd because. So I joined a church not too long ago. We were going to this November, but, Saint Andrews and the, Pastor Arthur is, fantastic. It was funny because he made a comment about, journaling. And the research on journaling. And journaling is actually one of the things I was going to talk about this week. So what people notice is that the journal long for long periods of time and then write down the problems are having and possible solutions to them and that type of thing. Then you go back six months, a year or 2 or 3 years later, and you look at those the problems and possible solutions, you know, especially write down how you feel about them, how scared, how you know, you know, the impending doom, the anxiety, all those sort of things. And then you go back to them a month, you know, a couple months, a year later, you realize this, this was an issue and it was a problem to be dealt with. It was, you know, an obstacle in my path, but it wasn't in any way, you know, as earth shattering. It's all going to die. Everything's be horrible as it was now. Obviously from time to time you can write down.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:04:48] This person has cancer and it is going to be life changing. But a lot of the things that we put so much stress and so much worry, so much worry for the future, which is the definition of anxiety into we realize. Didn't come to pass. You know, the terrible thing we were worried about didn't happen. And that, I think, is one of the more important parts of that journaling is you add it all up and you're like, okay, over the past five years, I've had, you know, all these worries and all these things that were going to come. It was just going to be horrible and terrible. The world was going to end. And, you know, I was going to lose my job and I wasn't be able to do this or that and, you know, whatever. And you look at me, you go, 75% of those didn't happen at all. So it's one of those things where that in itself helps you when you write today's list of worry. But you go. Maybe I shouldn't worry as much. Maybe I should so plan and, you know, obviously do the things we have to do, but maybe we shouldn't worry as much.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:05:50] The other thing is, is that if you're going to be on a health journey and we don't do a ton of mental health wellness, we don't do I don't do a whole lot of, you know, I don't talk a lot about the the goal setting, the planning, the spiritual or the psychological work we do. Because of the hierarchy of needs, we have to get the health body fixed first before we start working on the essential stuff. But it's a big, big, big deal. If you start to work on crafting who you want to be mentally, psychologically, and spiritually. Journaling is one of the most important things you can do because you write down how you think about a problem today, what the problem is, your viewpoint on it, and then months later, you look back on it and you go. This should have been looked at differently. And the more you do that, the more you start looking at today's problems and you go. The last time I saw this, I looked back on it and I decided I should have looked at it from a different angle. So you start looking at problems from different angles and you see things differently. Perspective changes everything. So this is where I mentioned church earlier.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:06:56] Let me give you a kind of an example of the way that you look at things and how the way you perspective of things matters. So let's say you miss church couple times and you feel bad about it. And so you take all the all the collections you were going to give. You put them in an envelope, the city of $1,000 in cash. And this envelope and plate comes around and driving the plate, and it kind of keeps going. And you look over it and you see something. You take that envelope out of your pocket and plate goes up. So my question is, as we're going through that, did that make you mad? The idea that you took $1,000, put it in the offering plate and somebody took it out of there, you know, before the plate was collected. Does that make you mad? Depending on your viewpoint. Sure. So if you're like, I don't know, depending on your viewpoint, it should make you in that. Now the question is the viewpoint why the viewpoint that matters is did you give that money to the church, or did you give that money to God because he gave the money to the church? You should be mad because somebody intercepted it before the church was able to get it. If you gave it to God, then when in some happenings as soon as you let go. But it's got to do with his chooses. If he if once he gets that guy, he takes it.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:02] Now that guy can buy food for his family, or he can pay for a surgery he needs. Or maybe he just uses it on, you know, luxury items and toys. But then he gets worried about it. He feels guilty. So it's going back to church and ends up becoming a Christian and paying that money back 100 fold over the time, and brings his whole family to the church and hold. It also depends on how you look at things, depends on how you should feel about them. So as you start journaling and you start looking at a problem in today's eyes, and you look at it and you're worried about it and you have anxiety and you build that stuff up, and then you go through that time period and you go back and you look at six months or a year later and you go. Now having hindsight and understanding how all the things we're working on, we played into this. I now understand this from a different perspective, and I realize why it shouldn't have been hysteria at the time. Well, that's fantastic for that case.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:08:55] If you can then learn to take that idea and apply it to today's problems. You've now found a way to greatly reduce your anxiety, greatly reduce your stress from your own personal experience. You now have to argue with yourself about your past, about why you should be worried and argumentative about a thing that is you now perceive is going to happen in the future. When you have all this evidence for the things you were horribly terrible at, terrified about in the old past never happened. So that's one of the things about journaling that really kind of helps out. It also helps you kind of streamline what you're thinking, what's going on? So journaling is a fantastic way to actually help today's problems with yesterday's information so that you can't journal for a week and be like, it didn't help me. You kind of have to journal for a while, which is also one of the issues with prayer. When you pray, how you pray matters. And so when you when you go through it, when you do it, if you're just flippantly doing it, it's not gonna it's not going to help you. It's like, that's not what I'm supposed to do.

Dr. Matt Chalmers [00:09:57] So if you will start journaling on a regular basis and writing down the things that are bothersome to you, the way you feel about them, the way you think about, you know, hey, I have this problem here, and I'm worried about it for these reasons. And here's my options of what I'm trying to trying to do. Once you kind of get through that, it'll kind of help reset it. What kind of help reset all that stuff. So, that's one of the things if you if you have anxiety, if you have a set of things and you're not journaling, it's a great option to try. Like there's lots of little things that we do when we go through the mental health strengthening thing where we try to help. We're really trying to help kind of get things moving in the right direction. It's like goal setting, that type of thing. So, if you guys have any questions or questions at Chalmers Swanscombe, or you can stop in the comments and we'll get going on that. So thanks for your time. We'll, talk to you guys later.

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Dr. Matt Chalmers

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