Join the conversation about men’s health with James Monte, a top pharmaceutical rep with IBSA. He specializes in thyroid function and endocrine optimization and is passionate about helping others. He’s a dedicated family man and husband, with three children ages 16, 7, and 4. He’s been a Type 1 Diabetic for more than 35 years. In his free time, he coaches his son’s baseball and is a “cheer dad” for his youngest. He has extensive knowledge of the mental health space as he was diagnosed with depression in 2011 and was on several depression medications throughout the years. In August of 2024, he “quit” his medications cold turkey and is thriving without the use of pharmaceuticals. We don’t suggest you quit your medications. Please seek help from your doctor. Listen to the conversation as we discuss the impact mental health has on men, how to navigate life and seek help.
James shares his journey with depression and other ways he found helpful to his healing, including his spiritual walk and the impact on his family.
Podcast Transcript Episode 48
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole-person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me, your host, Dr. Ana Lara, naturopathic doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body, we are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started. Welcome back to Physician, heal myself, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Alara, and we have James back with us. In this episode, we will talk about men’s mental health, depression and some strategies, some things that we can do to help more men get help. So welcome back, James.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, thank you. In the last episode, we talked a lot about men’s physical health, but I wanted to talk about mental health and work through some of the stigma that comes from it. And there’s a fine balance. There is a fine balance because I don’t agree that men should be weeping and being vulnerable and to everyone. There’s a time and place and I respect that, that men are strong and they want to keep that perception of themselves as being strong people, but getting help is not a sign of weakness.
It’s definitely not. I think quite the opposite and the mindset needs to shift because, as I had mentioned earlier, generationally we’ve been told, handle it on your own. Figure it out, suck it up.
Suck it up. Don’t cry, quit. Quit being a baby. Wait, girls cry.
I have to admit where I’m at fault, and I sometimes do find myself falling into that with my son and my daughter where I’m telling them, don’t cry, suck it up. Be a man. But that’s, it’s not fair. It’s not fair to do, and there does need to be a mental shift in that because seeking help is not a sign of weakness. I think quite the opposite. Seeking help is a sign that you recognize there’s a problem and you want to fix it. I think that’s strong. I think that’s brave. I don’t think that’s cowardice. I don’t think that’s taking the easy way out. I think that’s you really stepping up to the plate and understanding I’m not doing okay, and I want to be doing better and I don’t want to keep suffering, so what can I do differently?
There’s a reason in the Bible, in the book of Genesis, when God created a man, he said, it is not good for man to be alone. God created a helper for him. So in this, I essence, if men were to start understanding how they’re created, the purpose of their existence and that there will be times that all of us men or women, we will need help from someone else in this life, it is impossible to get things done completely on your own. This podcast, there’s a team of people, Bill, my producer, who helps me a lot, but I have my social media person who helps me. I have my marketing person, who helps me, and my assistant. There are other people who help me, and just in my business, and I did have the mindset of just I got it on my own and did it for myself for a long time, but it doesn’t work mentally and physically, to wear on you. Men have this, and some of it has been their upbringing, been the upbringing of both moms and the dads of how they have the experience that they’ve grown up in their home, tells ’em a lot about what’s okay, how to behave and what’s okay to interact. What has been, I know you’ve shared before, your experience with depression for a long time.
Yeah.
What was that pivotal point for you that you realized that you were experiencing depression, or did you even have the word depression in mind?
Without getting too deep, I was unhappy with myself. I was unhappy with the choices that I was making. I was sad. I didn’t feel like I was in the right place at the right time. I felt very selfish and I realized that my selfishness and my self-centeredness were causing me to be sad all the time, constantly, and I hated how I felt. Although I can’t pinpoint an exact time, I’m sure there were intrusive thoughts in there, intrusive thoughts of you’re not enough or good enough. You are a terrible person. And so I realized I don’t want to continue to feel this way. It’s affecting me, it’s affecting my relationship, and it’s affecting my daughter, who was very, very young. I don’t think that it affected her because I wasn’t such a clinically depressed case where I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. It was just very faint.
I sought help and got on a myriad of different drugs over the years. I think it was on Wellbutrin for probably the majority of it; they threw in some Zoloft in there. They threw in a couple of other ones I don’t even remember. And I was always scared to get off of it. I was always afraid, well, if I get off of it, I’m going to backslide. I’m going to feel worse. I always made it a point to ensure I took it, but probably in 2023, I started getting this sense that I don’t think I need to be on this anymore. As a guy in a guy headspace, it was okay. When this happens, that will be the event that will cause me to stop doing this, or this will be the event that makes me start doing this. I kept waiting for that event to happen, and it never happened. Then in 2024, I made a kind of mental decision that I was going to wean myself off of it.
We’re on a Disney cruise with my family, and one day I don’t take it intentionally and the next day I don’t take it. And the third day, I kind of forgot. I kind of forgot on the fourth day, and then a week went by and guess what? I was still alive, and I wasn’t depressed, and I didn’t want to jump off the boat. And one week led to a month. A month led to two, and now here we are, almost a year later, no antidepressants, completely cold Turkey. I think a large part of that is due to a couple of factors that we spoke about before. Eating right, exercising, supplementation, and finding a group of people that I could connect with. When you feel like you have a sense of purpose, when you feel like you are intentional about the actions that you’re doing, I think you’re less likely to backslide.
You’re more focused on how to keep pushing forward and not so concerned with how I will backslide? So I think a lot of it had to do with mental space and I think a lot of it, shout out to my company, they took a huge chance on me. I had no pharma experience at all, and I said, I can do this, guys, I can do this. I started doing what I now do, and really, I began to make an impact and I started to see my numbers grow and I started to see my providers come back to me and tell me, Hey, what you suggested was really good. This product that you have, which doesn’t need to shout it out.
We do, it’s great.
But I think doing something where I felt I was making a difference put me in a different mental space. I didn’t have time for the nonsense. I didn’t have time for those intrusive thoughts. I was too busy doing things and pushing forward. I didn’t allow myself to slide backwards. I think that’s really important for men and women to understand is to find a community, find a group, find one or two people you connect with, and have them be your support network. Once you have that, you can always rely on them to give you a boost. When I’m feeling down, I’ll reach out to the guys. My best friend will always send me something highly inappropriate, but always exactly what I need to hear. People on my team will send me things. Hey, you’re doing great. Keep up the good work or go get after it today. You’ve got this. Sometimes, just those simple words of affirmation can totally change your mindset, and I think it’s really important that guys have a consistent flow of that.
Yeah. You said something that I always think is very important in our life, and that’s purpose. Having a purpose, knowing what your purpose is. Everyone has a purpose in their life, so it’s really important for you to identify that and maybe you’re 30 and 40 years old and you haven’t identified what that purpose is, but there is one, I think it’s really important to maybe whether it’s anxiety or depression that a person’s experiencing. I always say, if it’s not your physical body that’s telling you something’s wrong, then it’s your soul that’s screaming at you. There’s something we need that you need to feed us spiritually. Many medical conditions can cause depression and anxiety, including thyroid and blood sugar dysregulation, hormone dysregulation, and that could be it. But if you fix that or you’re someone who you are eating healthy, you are exercising, you’re doing all the right things, and you’re still feeling that, then I tell people, then you’ve got to look further inward
Look at what my soul needs right now. Is it healing from the past? Because of depression, I always like to explain what depression is and what anxiety is, besides the feelings of it. Depression really is us being stuck looking at our past, looking at our past decisions, and yeah, the voices creep in, and you start thinking, you still hold shame and guilt for some of the things, and that will become depressing. It pushes us down. It makes us feel small and insignificant. We’re not good enough. We’re bad because we did those things. Forgiveness, which is an episode I’m going to do or talk on, is that the important thing is that we learn to forgive. Forgive ourselves the same way that we have to learn to forgive others. We also have to give ourselves grace and mercy and forgive ourselves for our mistakes when we were younger.
In this world, no one is perfect, and no one has figured it all out. Everyone makes a mistake, and I always tell people, if you were 20, 15 years old, whatever age, and you made a lot of mistakes, a lot of foolish mistakes, the point is that you learn from them. Now, what did you learn from it? Reflect. Reflect. But don’t get stuck there and forgive yourself and give yourself grace. That’s what depression is. You keep looking to the past without really a resolution, without bringing closure and not being able to move forward. You’re stuck there.
I feel like we could do an entire you and I episode on exactly what you just said on that because for years I carried such a heavy burden of guilt and regret and remorse and sadness and shame for how I lived my life, and it took a lot of grace from myself. It took a lot of grace from the people that I hurt and forgiveness from the people that I hurt. It still bothered me. I think for me, at least, and I know that this is true for you, faith has now played a major role in that. Because what I can’t control, what I don’t feel like I have a handle on, I just have to give it up to God. And I’ve really been relying heavily on my faith to keep me in the right mindset, to help me to make good decisions, to do the right thing, and to be a leader and not a follower. Help me to unburden myself from guilt, shame, regret, remorse, sadness, and less-than feelings that I carried around for so long. Remove that from me, and I will feel so much better. I pray with my kids every night. It’s the same prayers over and over, but they have come to really like them. Now my little one will say, Can we do the three?
She wants me to tell her a story. It’s a made-up story. I ate 15 pizzas. I got fat. I climbed on top of a house. I was a hot air balloon. Then she wants to hear, I love yous, which we do our I love you. Then, both my son and my daughter want to say prayers. Now, they’re usually sleeping by the time that we get to it, but we do our prayers and now they’re asking for it. So I know that faith is coming off of me and going on to them. Hopefully, they can have a close relationship with God where, if they do make mistakes, they don’t have to live with it for as long as I did, because unburdening yourself frees you so much. I still feel bad about the things that I’ve done, but I’ve made my amends and I know that the people that I’ve hurt have forgiven me and they’ve moved on and so have it never really goes away. It just gets diminished to the point where you don’t notice it anymore. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I made bad choices and I’ve done bad things, but God knows God.
He knows what I’ve done. He knows what I’m going to do, and I just have to put faith in the fact that I’m an imperfect person. I’ve made imperfect choices, but God still loves me and I’m thriving. So faith played a huge role in that. For me,
The best gift you can give your children is faith and teaching them his word, God’s word. That is the best gift that any man, any father can give to their child. It’s not just in words, but it’s in your actions, in the way you carry yourself. And you’re right, we’re not perfect. I want to read this scripture. I just happened to have it. Look at that. It was not part of this conversation. That’s how it works.
That’s how it works. I bet you that if I open up NLT right now, there’s a verse that both you and I know is Matthew 11:28, 38. Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For I am gentle and humble and heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. And those are the words of Jesus. Forgiveness is a process, and I’m going to pray for you. I’m going to pray that God delivers those cuts that are off of you because the past is the past and that’s not who you are. It’s like when a snake sheds their skin, it’s done. They’re not that skin anymore. They’re outside of that.
A thousand percent.
A snake is not like, oh my God, look what I left behind. They’re done. They move past it. But as humans, we have a conscience; we have a subconscious mind. We have a soul, we have a spirit. We’re a little bit more complex than a snake, a little bit more, a little bit more. The enemy will always use those past experiences, the mistakes we’ve made to throw it in our face, to get us to feel bad because God is not a God who does that. God, when you forgive and you move, he forgives you and he wants to see you live out your life. He knows that we’re going to make mistakes, but I know that your soul is not going to make the same mistake that you did 2010 years ago, however past it was. You’re just not. Your higher spirit won’t let you do that.
Completely different person, completely different.
You’re not that person anymore. You’re this new version of God working in you to help transform you. Not just transform your mind, but transform your spiritual heart, transform you from the inside out. We have this thing, not all nature paths believe it, but I do that healing comes from above, below, into our bodies and from the inside out. That makes sense. It makes sense. It makes sense for physical or mentally emotional stuff.
Agreed.
Go ahead.
So today he will listen to the prayers of the destitute. He will not reject their pleas.
We are heard, you’re burdened to be unburdened.
If your child, let’s say your 4-year-old, drops an expensive vase, he breaks it. You don’t stop loving him. You might be upset,
I might be mad.
You might be mad, but you don’t stop loving him.
It’s a vase. It’s replaceable.
It’s replaceable.
Oftentimes, and not to upset our parents or anyone in our ancestry, but sometimes people hurt the child because they made a mistake, like breaking something, and they don’t understand the ramifications of how we talk to and feel guilty. There are times when I’m not doing well, I’m tired or hungry, hangry, and my child does something, and I might yell at them and then I feel bad. But the good thing is I can go to my child and say, I’m sorry that I yelled at you. I’m sorry that I said that. I love you. I love you no matter what. They need to hear that too, because when our children hear us humble ourselves and apologize for our mistakes, our children are willing to forgive really quickly on the spot.
Really quick.
Isn’t that amazing?
Why is it that children can do that? Not us. We can still be thinking about it, I still feel bad about what I did 10 or 15 years ago.
That’s the beauty of childhood. It’s a beauty of children that they don’t hold onto those things. We get mad, we snap if we’re smart, if we’re good people, we recognize that snapped and we can immediately go and try and correct the situation. I’m very guilty of this because my father raised my sister and I under NYPD, strict Italian Catholic upbringing. There wasn’t a lot of nonsense that we could do and get away with. My father did everything that he could, and he’s an amazing human being and an amazing father, and I love him. There were things that he did that I hated, that I have found myself doing or almost doing, that I’ve had to backpedal and remind my kids, listen, I’m sorry I was in a bad mood. My sugar’s high, my sugar’s low. I was frustrated with mom, whatever the situation was, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you. I knew it was an accident. Look, you’re not in trouble. Dad made a mistake. I love you. No matter what, always, always and forever, can you forgive me? Usually you don’t even have to get to the do you forgive me part before my son has his arms around you and he’s cries. It’s okay, dad, you don’t have to cry. Don’t get upset. It’s okay.
There’s such purity in children. They’re innocent.
It’s incredible. It’s absolutely incredible.
I always say children are our greatest teachers if we’re willing to listen and learn. They are our greatest teachers. My daughters have definitely raised me up. So I heard someone many years ago, before I had kids, say that our parents raise us, but our children finish doing the job.
That makes sense.
And it does, because being a parent is just a whole different experience. You see all these people who want to grow and enlighten and grow spiritual maturity. I’m like, go have some kids. That’s the test.
It’ll definitely change it.
It’ll really test you. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I definitely agree with what you’re sharing. When it comes to men specifically for mental health, I’m glad that you brought in this spiritual aspect because I find that you see this in churches where women attend and the men are not, and men were called to be in leadership. How important has your relationship with God been in your journey of mental health?
If we’re going to be honest, not big as of recent, very big long-term. My strategy for mental health was to medicate.
Medicate, find what works.
I have some statistics here that I think are pretty powerful. Men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women, and it’s the eighth leading cause of death. Men are less likely to seek help and self-medicate with substances. Men are more likely to binge drink and are two times more likely to die from an opioid overdose. In terms of therapy and getting help, only one in four men with pronounced mental health issues actually seek help. So, where does faith come in? If you’re already faithful, that’s a journey that you have to walk. For me, my faith was not strong enough during, we’ll call it the height of my depression that I felt like I could lean on God. I thought I’ll just medicate with whatever it was, whether it was Wellbutrin or Zoloft or I can’t even think of the other ones. But those were the two main ones.
That’s why I can’t remember.
As of late, I’ve realized that without the use of pharmaceuticals, I need to get my relief differently. I like to go to the gym. So for me, that’s a huge mental relief. I go to the gym, I work out. I feel better, I look better. I see gains. I see changes. That’s really motivating. So I keep doing it, but now I’m seeing that same effect spiritually, where I’m reaching out to God every night, every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Sometimes it’s just to say thank you. Thank you for getting my daughter home from school today. As of recent, spiritual health has really taken the place of pharmaceutical help. For me. It’s huge and I really like it. I like it. One, because it’s easy. It costs me nothing to close my eyes and fold my hands, nothing.
It takes two seconds. I sit here right now, I’m praying right now. It doesn’t take much. But for me, the relief that it gives me is so much greater than what I got before because one, I’m not clouded by anything. I don’t have any antidepressants running through my body. I don’t have it systemically coursing through my veins. What I have is my health and my faith, and it’s gotten me to a really, really good place.
I always approach this cautiously. I really think it’s an individual thing. I always see people as an individual, it’s hard to just generalize everything for people and say the right thing because there’s so many different components and moving things for that men are experiencing specifically whether it’s a physical situation, if it’s mental health, is there something going on with your brain? Men who’ve, sports who’ve had concussions, histories of concussions that can still have a lingering effect on the brain. If you’ve been on substances, whether it’s drug use or alcohol use, all of that has an effect on the brain. Now, I’m a believer that the brain can heal, that any part of you can heal and repair itself, doing the right things, giving it the right things physically, whether it’s getting the mental help or the spiritual help. I get to see these two different worlds of the Christian viewpoint and any spiritual viewpoint, and then the medical side, and I’m trying to marry the two because we are all of it.
You can’t separate the human experience from the physical, mental, and spiritual. We are spiritual in body, period, whether you want to believe it or not, it’s there. There are different ways to approach people, and there’s no cookie-cutter approach to mental health. So men might be watching this, and if they grew up in a very toxic home environment where they didn’t have a male figure, a positive male figure, or maybe they did have a male figure, but they were just toxic anyways, or they did have a good mom or they didn’t have a mom, or sometimes they didn’t have either parent, whatever it is, all of that has an impact on you, whether you want to believe it or not. I’ve had many men in my office say, Yeah, but that happened long ago. They’re in their forties. It happened a long time ago.
I’m like, yeah, but that inner child in, you never received what it needed. This is going to be a whole different conversation in the future, but there are different forms of attachment styles that we form early on, from conception to two years old, but really into the eight years we really form. We have a certain attachment style. If it wasn’t a safe and loving attachment, which lemme be honest, the majority of people haven’t had a safe, loving attachment style. It’s either that they’re an anxious attachment or that they’re avoidant. I’ve learned that there are two types of avoidance. So there are these categories of what kind of attachment style you have that when you get older, it shows up in everything. How we communicate in our work with other people, with their children, with your spouse, with yourself, how you handle situations, do you run away from, do you avoid stressful situations? Men tend to be in a lot of avoidance. You just avoid the problem.
I think that’s why men tend to avoid the mental issues, the physical issues. They just keep avoiding it, thinking it’s going to go away and it doesn’t go away and the problem just gets bigger. I would love for men to at least start exploring options. There are so many resources online. I’ll probably put some notes on this episode or link it in there because there are so many references to assessments you can do online to see which attachment style you have or what kind of different areas of mental health do you need. Is it something that you need medication for? Because if you do need it and it’s going to keep you from committing suicide, then yes, then do that. But that should be just to give you time to get the rest in place. And so there are mental health experts out there who are working more holistically too. They’re not going straight to the medications. They’re saying, let’s do these other therapies, let’s do these other things and see if that works. They’re the experts, so they know when someone needs to be medicated if it’s severe. Because what happens ultimately when men do suppress emotionally or they don’t get the help, is that it starts to impact their marriage
It starts to impact the relationship they have with their children. They get to be older and they’re disconnected from their children. I hear this all the time. That’s what I’m telling you. I have women in their fifties and sixties. Kids are all out of the home. Even as having adult children, the mom will say, My husband’s upset because when the kids call, they call me, they don’t talk to dad. And dad is like, How come no one calls me? Then I’ve had men say in their fifties, I made a mistake. I worked all my life thinking that my only priority was to work, to pay the bills, to provide, and I missed out on having a relationship with my family, with my children. And now they’re grown and they don’t want anything to do with me. If younger men in their twenties, thirties and forties would understand that, yes, we appreciate you working. We appreciate you being the provider, the protector, but they also want you. Your family wants you, your children want you.
Everybody wants you to be present. And, again, we touched on this generationally speaking. I mean from the dawn of men, men have kind of fallen into this. We are the provider. We are supposed to do X, Y, and Z. We are not supposed to show emotion. We are supposed to be strong and stoic. We’re supposed to be the disciplinarians in the house. We’re supposed to be the breadwinner. All of these labels are put on. But I think that in those examples of the guys that look back and they say, well, I should have done this, you can do both. You can still be a strong dad and be a disciplinarian, but still show up for your kids’ soccer games. You can still be the breadwinner and still read to your children at night. It doesn’t have to be either or. I think that when we start looking at the decline in mental health, it’s guys feel burdened that they have to do everything. I have to do everything for everybody. That can be really cumbersome and it can be really tiring. I think that as a society, we need to appreciate dads a lot more.
One of the silly things that I noticed is the changing tables. Changing tables are primarily in women’s bathrooms. They’re not in men’s bathrooms, but there’s a really big push right now for dads only. Dads, right? Instead of OnlyFans, it’s only dads. There’s girl’s dad, cheer dad. There are all of these dads that I think are now starting to realize that I don’t have to be X, Y, and z. I don’t have to be a hard ass. I don’t have to be some super tough, macho guy. I can be a cheer dad. I can put on my pink shirt. I can wear my pink watch, and I can do these girly things. It doesn’t have to be an either or.
I think that getting caught up in that mental trap is where we start to really see that decline, where you’ll start to see men who want to medicate, self-medicate, and they drink themselves into oblivion. They don’t want to feel the burden that they’ve got to put food on the table. They fall into addiction, or they fall into these really detrimental vices, because they feel alone. They’re trying to unburden themselves from that feeling of having to do everything by slipping into these vices. And I think there needs to be a major monumental shift in that. And I think it really starts with words of affirmation. So if you know a dad out there that’s doing really good, who’s showing up for games, who’s putting the work in, who’s playing with his kids after he gets home, give that dad a shout out.
It’s really, really, really nice to hear when we’re doing well. Why didn’t you do this? How come you didn’t do that? Why did I have to do X, Y, and Z? A little bit of praise goes a long way, but then again, I’m a Leo, so I mean, stroke my ego. Tell me I’m pretty, you could still set me in the corner for another couple of years and then just take me out and stroke my ego and tell me I’m pretty and I’m good to go. But it’s really nice, generally speaking, to hear you’re doing good. I always try and praise my wife overly praise her because it’s tough. She is a boss at her job. She is an absolute alpha and dominant, and she’s a super mom. Sometimes we don’t get the praise that we maybe not even need me. I need it. My love language is words of affirmation. So I need to be told that I’m doing good, which is why I love my job, because every week I can see if I’m doing good or not. James,
You’re doing very well. Okay, you’re doing well. Then it’s important too to understand what your love language is. I’ve learned that there’s not just four, there’s a little bit more, and I’m like, yeah, the one that I really act of service. I’m an acts of service person. It’s like the little things that people do that just make me excited, but also being heard is a big act, big time acts of love for me. When someone is listening to me, I know we’re engaged. That to me is a sign of love and respect. Wow, you said so many great things, just overwhelmed. But no, you’re right. I think that more people need to speak positivity into each other’s life and acknowledge the good things that they’re doing, not just, I think it could get very routine in life, and you get caught up in the busyness of life, which is why I tell my patients, slow down.
Just slow down, including men. Women get crazy with doing things that are not important, and it takes away from time and energy from you, but it’s okay to slow down and just go through your life and prioritize, right? Prioritize what’s most important on your plate. So I’m going to tell you just because my dad passed away on Father’s Day last year, and I’m not bitter about it because my father gave me a gift of faith of God in such a beautiful way without it being forceful. He was a man whose actions showed his faith and his love in us. I always said, I knew my father loved me, not because he had to tell me, but because I could feel his love. He showed it through his patience, through his kindness. I still have yet to meet someone with that amount of patience that he has. That’s how I knew he loved me. If there was a miscommunication on my part, a misunderstanding on my part, he just would smile and laugh like, oh, it’s okay. To me, that was the greatest demonstration of what Jesus is like, that he’s a loving father.
Hey, you made a mistake.
It’s okay. It’s okay. My mom was a different story. But that’s the story for a different time. So I think that slow down, prioritize what’s important to you. God, you and your family and your health, your wellbeing is a priority because if you’re not feeling well, you can not perform in your job. You cannot be present with your family.
I think that it also ties into mental health to really bring it back to mental health, because if you’re not in a good mental place, I think you’re less likely to want to pursue something that is more of an unknown, right? Faith is a complete unknown. We don’t know. We think we do.
But we don’t know.
But we don’t. We don’t. Getting yourself into a good mental space is really important. I did a presentation at our national sales meeting on the power of positive thinking. Studies have shown, and I don’t have the data, but basically studies have shown that you live longer, you accomplish more, and you’re more successful if you’re in a good mental head space.
Absolutely.
So I think positioning yourself to be in a good mental head space opens up the doors for a closer relationship with whatever your higher power may be, whether that’s God, the universe, or any other religion out there. Getting yourself into that mindset, I think is really, really helpful, and it opens the door for even more. Being rooted in faith, I think definitely helps with recognizing where your head’s actually at. So when you’re spiraling, slow down, slow down, slow down, okay. A car is not going to crash through the living room and kill the family. That’s an insane thought.
We don’t even live near a road. Stop thinking that the plane is going to crash into the Alps. You’re not even on a plane right now. Let those thoughts go. Give those thoughts up to God. When I started doing that, not only did I mentally feel better, but I felt more complete. I feel whole. For the first time ever, all the boxes that I needed to check in my life are now checked. I think it’s the first time I realize that all those boxes are checked. My children are safe. My children are healthy. My wife is healthy, our relationship is healthy. My job is healthy spiritually. I’m healthy mentally. I mean, I’m still insane.
Work in progress.
It’s always going to be a work in progress. Like everything. It could use improvement, but just doing better altogether. And that is where mental health really needs to shine a light or that we as a society need to shine a light, if there are resources for you to be in. This space that I’m in doesn’t take money.
Quite the opposite. It doesn’t cost anything, which is another reason for you to do it. I’m sorry for all the sins that I’ve committed. God forgive me for what I did. When I close my eyes, let me wake up in the morning and I have a new start. Cool, done. Boom. Maybe it adds relief to you. Maybe it doesn’t, but it’s not going to hurt. I think that what we really need to be looking at is outside of substances. Yes, there is a place for pharmacological intervention. However, I think that we can circumvent that by getting people involved in the community, giving people a sense of purpose, and having them feel like whatever they’re doing is making a difference. That’s huge. And that really doesn’t take a lot. It really doesn’t.
Well, as we wrap this up, men, take away the thank you for sharing all that and being on this episode. Of course.
Thank you.
We’ll have to see what other future ones we can get you back on here.
I’ll clear my schedule anytime you
Need. Absolutely. Thank you. Well, for men watching this, or if you’re a woman with a man in your life, share this with them and just remember that in order to heal, sometimes you have to slow it down. Just slow it down so that you have time to reflect on what your priorities are, to find balance in your life, find purpose, and find a community. You don’t have to do this alone. That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to help each other out. I hope you’ve been blessed by the message in this episode. And until next time, be blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.