Collage Your Mood

Feeling creative or like playing around with your mood? Collage it online with this mood collage tool from Tian Dayton Ph. D. and Senior Fellow at the Meadows.

Once you have the collage you like, take a screenshot of it and journal about these questions:

1.     Has my mood changed at all through collaging it and if so, in what ways?

2.     Does collaging my mood make it lighter or more conscious and if so what would you say about that?

3.     What parts of my collage pop out to me and why?

4.     What parts do I want to carry forward into my day?

5.     What parts do I want to change?

6.     What is the most positive light in which I can see my collage?

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The Whole Truth on Whole Grains

For the past few months, I’ve focused on eating real food, and getting plenty of color in the diet. Now that the month of May has arrived, let’s focus on getting the best grains possible! The US Dietary Guidelines recommends that whole grains should make up half of the grains you eat. My take – why just focus on half? The truth is, the vast benefits of whole grains should convince even the biggest white bread fan to make the switch. Here are some fun whole grain facts.

High fiber whole grains help to fight against cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and constipation.

Multiple studies show that more whole grains amount to less disease and obesity. This has a lot to do with both the inclusion of soluble and insoluble fiber, the impact that fiber has on gut health, and that fact that swapping refined grains for whole grains help to better control blood sugar and inflammation. A 2014 study in the British Medical Journal found that heart attack patients that consumed more cereal fiber lived longer. Another study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found dietary fiber helps to reduce the risk of death from all causes.

Whole grains can help keep you healthy as you age.

A 2016 study found that individuals who consumed more fiber-rich whole grains as they aged were less likely to develop age-related diseases. The authors of the study determined that consuming whole grains was tied to successful aging.  Who doesn’t want that?

There’s an abundance of gluten-free whole grain options to choose from.

Yes, you can still be gluten-free and fiber-rich! Gluten, the protein found in wheat, rye, and barley can be problematic for individuals with non-celiac gluten sensitivity and completely contraindicated in individuals with celiac disease. Whole grains that are void of gluten (and completely delicious) include brown rice, oats (look for certified gluten-free options), quinoa, amaranth, millet, and buckwheat. So, go ahead and stick with these grains and your gluten-free lifestyle!

You can still be low carb and eat grains at the same time; here’s how:

Many individuals choose to start or stay on diets that are lower in carbohydrates to help manage disease or weight. Often times, they feel they need to cut grains out completely. The key is not to cut but to upgrade to only intact options! Choosing more intact grains (which have more fiber and protein) is easy and involves omitting things like pasta and bread that are made with grains but then processed into a “product.” Instead go for the whole unprocessed version instead. Intact grains include brown and wild rice, steel cut oats, quinoa, buckwheat, and barley.

The Meadows Behavioral Healthcare family of programs realize that food choices affect the overall success of treatment. Many nutrients have connections with depression, anxiety, and addiction. Few treatment programs realize this connection and I am proud to be associated as a Senior Fellow of this organization.

Next month, I’ll be focusing on how your fuel can impact your mood! Spoiler alert – what you choose to eat, and not eat, may have a huge impact on your happiness.

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What I Wish I’d Known as a Teenager

What I Wish I’d Known as a Teenager:

Lessons Learned about Mental Health

I worried about grades as a teenager. I mean, I really worried.

Today, I know this was not typical anxiety about school. Looking back, I struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder and perfectionism. Among other things, I was obsessive-compulsive about never wasting time. Not. One. Second. Further, I was laser-focused on getting nothing but 100 percent of the answers right on everything.

I remember audio recording myself reading my textbooks aloud. Then, when doing “unproductive” things like walking to class or driving to the store, I could listen to my textbook recordings. OCD wouldn’t allow me to talk with friends on the way to class or to listen to music in my car, as these activities were deemed a waste of time.

My roommates in college were flabbergasted by this and my other behaviors. You’re studying, yet again, on a Saturday night?

I wish I had known that this level of anxiety, as well as isolation, was a problem.

Little did I know, in the end, my grades weren’t going to matter that much. If I could get all of that over-studying time back, I would put it toward what truly counts in life, like meaningful relationships. I’m not saying that learning isn’t important. Memorizing my textbooks word for word wasn’t necessary or productive. In fact, I barely retained anything that I learned from semester to semester. Part of the reason for this memory loss has to do with my next lesson learned.

I wish I had known that my relationship with food and my body wasn’t normal.

I should have been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa in college, but most people were too busy giving me compliments to notice that I was suffering from the mental illness with the highest mortality rate of any other. You look great. How do you stay so thin? However, my parents were worried, so I visited my college doctor who asked one so-called diagnostic question, “Do you eat?”

Yes, I ate, and the ironic thing about my eating disorder is that it wasn’t truly about food, shape, or weight. Instead, anorexia was, in part, about that painful, unrelenting perfectionism. Restricting and bingeing helped, in the short term, to turn down the knob on anxiety, not to mention, to mask my underlying depression.

I was malnourished. My brain wasn’t working. Back to my earlier point, this, in addition to the fact that OCD and perfectionism didn’t find sleep productive, is why I didn’t retain that information that I’d worked so hard to memorize.

I cannot fathom how I got by on so little sleep.

I won’t mention a specific number of hours here, because I don’t want to be triggering. When I speak at colleges, I have learned that today, there is an even more rampant race to see who can sleep the least. Yet, research tells us that getting enough sleep is required for optimal learning and health. I didn’t know that back then.

Something else that I wish my friends and I had understood is the prevalence of sexual violence on college campuses.

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Sexual violence can lead to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance use disorder, depression, and other trauma-related problems. What I know now: if you have to ask yourself whether sex was consensual, it wasn’t. By definition, the idea of consent means that you would know.

This is a message many of my friends and I desperately needed to hear. If I had, when I experienced sexual assault with a boyfriend in my late twenties, I might have known to call it what it was. I believe that we should take the “date” off “date rape” because it seems to minimize the assault. I’d later develop PTSD as a result.

I will be talking more about PTSD and all of these topics on this blog in the months to come, as I am honored and excited to be the newest Senior Fellow of Meadows Behavioral Healthcare! As it turns out, joining this incredible team had nothing to do with my near perfect college transcript and everything to do with how mental illness has knocked me down over and over again, and, importantly, with the support of professionals and loved ones, I have learned how to stand back up again, each time.

Gratefully, I no longer struggle with OCD, nor PTSD. I have tools to deal with anxiety, ones that don’t involve dieting, nor bingeing. Getting plenty of sleep helps. I have even learned to embrace this perfectly imperfect—and what I now see as a wonderful—life.

Most of all, what I know now that I wish I could go back and tell my teenage self is:

You are not alone. Mental illness is real. You didn’t choose it, but you can choose to get better. Help is available, and above all, healing happens.

 A Senior Fellow with The Meadows and advocate for its specialty eating disorders program, The Meadows Ranch, Jenni Schaefer is a bestselling author and sought-after speaker. For more information: www.JenniSchaefer.com

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Growing Up With An Addicted Parent

I remember as a twelve year old, sitting alone in our living room after one of our by then typical family meltdowns …….trying to make sense of the pain and general devastation of our once very happy family……trying to understand how kind, decent and loving people could cause each other such unrelenting pain, how we could say the things we were saying, hurl insults, act out in anger and rage……I recall saying to myself “wars do these things to people, separate loved ones, wound hearts, tear families apart. But somehow we’re doing this to ourselves.”

Just as in a war people are forced to witness the dark side of humanity...those of us who live with addiction come up against it as well. It was my beloved Father, the man who loved and nurtured me, who gave me café au lait from his spoon, held my hand when we walked and took such pleasure in sitting me up on the kitchen counter to watch while he squeezed fresh orange juice for me. My Darling Dad who worked hard to give me a life with so much more than had ever been given to him. It was exactly this father who would sit with a glass of scotch in his hand and slowly, glass by glass, descend into becoming a monster. Who would become cruel and terrifying, tearing down what he had worked so hard to build; devastating those he loved the most, making the house shake with his rage and doing to us with his own hand, those very things that he had spent his life protecting us from.

And eventually the gravity of his illness sucked us all in, we all at one point or another shared his private hell with him until all of us lost our grip on normal.

Living with the roller coaster ride of addiction, the unpredictability, and bending of reality, the broken promises, the dashed hopes…the disillusionment and disappointment, the secrets and lies...is a traumatizing experience. As the French say it “marks” us.

When I was young there was no such thing as family disease or family healing; we thought that if the addict sobered up the family would get better by itself. We didn’t realize how sick family members became through living with addiction.

My Father never found recovery.

I entered recovery not from addiction but the fallout of living with addiction. Because I watched the Father I adored drift slowly into a bottle of scotch that took him far away from himself, from us and from each other, I need healing.

Once I discovered them, just sitting in alonon meetings was for me deeply transformative. Saying what was in my heart and having no one jump up, accuse me of being out of line, slam doors or rage or simply quietly slip out of the room, changed me in profound ways. When people would come up to me after meetings and say they identified with me, I was dumbfounded. For so many years I had barely let myself know how different I felt. Now I wasn’t alone after all. There was a room full of us, at least.

I don’t know if this experience has made me a better person, but it’s made me deeper, funnier, wider…..and more importantly, it has taught me the value of life, it has taken me to the edge of inner experience where I had to make a choice to choose a lifestyle or a death style; because addiction is a slow suicide.

And I chose life.

I’d like to borrow a quote from Vaclav Havel, who helped to carry the Czech Republic to freedom and was also a prolific author and playwright…..

“Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. It is a dimension of the soul, and it is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or the willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things”.

Vaclav Havel

This kind of hope is a great gift of recovery. I have come to discover through both personal and professional experience that those of us who live with addiction have a disease that is chronic and progressive, a disease that has its tentacles wrapped around our personality development because we grew up with it; a disease that requires aggressive treatment. It is up to us to recognize this in ourselves and to get the help we need to become well again so that we don’t pass the effects of living with trauma onto the next generation.In finding my own strength and resilience, I have had to learn to stretch and deepen my mind and heart to include all sides of our humanity; to integrate love and hate, to learn to accept people and myself in our full range of both beauty and ugliness, to find understanding and forgiveness not just to be nice to another person, but to become whole again myself. Recovery reflects the kind of hope that Havel talks about. We enter it because it makes sense because it is better than the alternative. We embrace it because we have hope and that hope gives us, strength to live and try new things. That hope leads us to expand the dimensions of our own souls.

Recovery deepens us because it forces us to look at both sides of life, the good and the bad and somehow hold both. It makes us more aware of the dark side of life, but paradoxically better able to love the light.

Written by: Tian Dayton, PH.D. and Senior Fellow at the Meadows

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