Note from Hannah: This the first in a series of guest posts with the goal of providing new perspectives to mental health, wellness, and being a human. This piece is written by Aaron Bilodeau, co-founder of Exist Anew.

My brain is broken, I thought to myself, as I sat in a plush, brown leather chair in my psychiatrist’s office; the perfect cliché- in an old brick building in downtown Portland, Maine. I stared, vacantly, through a large bay window, the sun’s rays cast upon my face, warming my skin through the white sheer curtains. Being a few stories up, I gazed at a slightly veiled view of  the modest skyline of the city I grew up in, amidst the backdrop of sparkling ocean and blue sky. The view made it easy to transport myself elsewhere, in avoidance of what I was being told: “You have a mental illness and you need stronger medication.”

This visit was the culmination of many other painstaking appointments, over years, with therapists and other doctors abound in which I was prescribed different anti-depressants and other drugs for a variety of health issues. From the time I was a teenager, chronic insomnia, panic attacks and mood disturbances led me to a multitude of diagnoses: Depression, Panic Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Cyclothymia… call it whatever; I just wanted to feel better, even “normal.” At the time, in my late twenties, I experienced an air of skepticism and frankly, hopelessness, that I would ever feel well.

So, there I found myself, contemplating treatment with more and stronger medications with potentially serious, frightening and lifelong side effects. My general detachment from this conversation quickly turned to fear, then anger, at this prospect. I felt deeply that this path was not for me and I became incensed with a renewed passion, even desperation, to move as far away from this path as I possibly could.

It was around this time that I encountered a truly unsuspecting catalyst for this journey; I found the novel, Ishmael, written by Daniel Quinn. It’s a story of fiction that incorporates factual events about how human life has changed since the Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000 years ago. I know what you’re saying, what the heck does this have to do with mental illness? Allow me to explain…

As homo sapiens, our species have been around for about 200,000 years (and other species recognizable as humans for much longer.) For the vast majority of that time, humans have been hunter-gatherers- living outside, eating wild foods. Around 10,000 years ago, some humans decided to make some big changes, namely, growing and raising their own food through agriculture. This change led to surpluses of food that became “locked up,” which then led to the creation of different means of work, in order to get money to buy that locked up food. This occurred along with tremendous and rapid rise in population and development of hierarchies within civilizations.

Thanks for the history lesson right…so why does this matter?

Well, it matters because over millions of years of evolution, nature has made some requirements for our health through food and lifestyle that literally affect us on a genetic level. They are nature’s non-negotiables, and human life, which changed dramatically following the agricultural revolution, has progressively neglected this.

Here is a very abbreviated way to look at it:

Food-Before agriculture, our food was wild, full of nutrition and medicinal properties and free from pesticides and pollution. Today, almost all of our food is genetically modified and low in nutrients and medicinal properties, high in calories and full of pesticides.

Work Stress- Before agriculture, humans worked modest hours to secure their survival needs, in nature, breathing in fresh air and absorbing sunlight. Today, most humans work stressful and seemingly endless hours inside buildings, under florescent lights.

Movement- Before agriculture, humans used to move and lift objects frequently as part of survival. Today, we are often docile because our lives require little movement. We move from seated position to seated position with little regular movement (with the exception of some gym workouts-if we can manage that- thrown in.)

Support and Nurturing- Before agriculture, humans enjoyed the safety of tribes, social connections and ways of upbringing that worked for them over eons. Today, many of us do not experience the necessary familial and social connections and support necessary to create healthy people.

The previous examples briefly highlight what most of us know we need to make us healthy:  Healthy food, lowered stress levels, movement, exposure to the outdoors and support and nurturing. But rather than have this be just some generic health advice, it’s crucial to remember that through millions of years of evolution, they all affect our health on a genetic level. Yet, they are all disappearing from human life at a rapid pace and we have poor health and a change in our genetic expression of disease to show for it.

We are now living completely out of context. Our very environment is becoming completely toxic and malnourishing, from the food we eat and water we drink to the relationships we experience to the way we live our lives-our basic needs are no longer being met.

Diseases of modern times, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and even mental illness, which have become an epidemic today, did not exist in any prominence, if at all, in our ancestors. Nor do they exist in modern wild human populations.

This realization changed everything for me, because I realized that the symptoms I had been suffering from were not indicative of an isolated or personal flaw. They were, at least to a significant extent, a sign of the times; a product of the modern human’s dilemma of illness from living out of context with our evolutionary requirements for health.

Now, I don’t want to simplify mental illness because having dealt with it personally and working professionally with people with mental illness, I realize its extreme complexity. It will require a lot of support from many areas to help most of us experience a consistent level of mental and physical health. But, shouldn’t we begin by understanding our evolutionary requirements for health as a new perspective upon which to look at mental illness, and disease in general? The level of illness we see today is not the natural state of humanity.

Think about it like this- what if you took a wild animal and placed it almost entirely indoors and made it reliant on others for food very different from what it had always eaten in the wild? Food that was full of sugar, low in nutrients and, in many cases, full of toxins. What if this wild animal spent the rest of its life, alienated from its natural environment, moving far less than it ever had because it was encaged in a small area. What if this animal was forced to do stressful tricks for eight hours a day or more , five days a week, for fear of losing its food and shelter (and often alongside other animals it didn’t like?) What would you expect this wild animal’s health to look like? Aren’t we kind of like this wild animal? If so, then it becomes no wonder so many of us are ill.

We certainly cannot create all of the same wild conditions that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in, nor am I suggesting we wish to go back in time. However, we should feel assured that we can make dramatic changes given what we know about how the human animal evolved to be healthy.

For me, the biggest changes occurred when I altered my diet. While this would require a much more in-depth conversation, my diet gradually became based in food much closer to what our ancestors ate, and modern wild humans eat. We can’t always eat truly wild foods but we can use them as a guideline:

• While a wild turkey might be best, an organic, free range chicken is a lot better than chicken mcnuggets.

• While harvesting your own wild grains might be best, store bought wild rice is a lot better than a loaf of white bread or pasta.

• While foraging wild plants might be best, organic salad mix is a lot better than iceberg lettuce.

• While catching your own wild fish might be best, choosing wild fish at the market is better than frozen fish sticks.

Gradually eliminating sugar and most modern, processed foods really made the biggest difference for me. However, other lifestyle changes were critical as well, and involved me changing the entire framework of my life. This included changing how and what I do for work, altering social relationships and reconnecting with movement and nature. All of these changes were made upon the foundational knowledge of what is required to become a healthy, human animal.

So have all of these changes “cured” me? Heck no. But it has been years since I have required any type of medication and virtually every marker of my health has improved. The fear, anger and sometimes hopelessness I felt at my previous prognosis has been replaced by the calm that comes with increased knowledge and steady changes. This was not an overnight, dramatic change, but rather a gradual process over years that I am still very much taking part in. I’m confident that anyone could take similar steps to enjoy the increased health and freedom that goes along with recognizing our deeply rooted requirements for health.

Aaron Bilodeau is the co-creator of www.existanew.com, a project that challenges conventional notions on how to foster health, live and be happy. If you have questions for Aaron please contact him at existanew@gmail.com.

Recently I heard a talk radio program where the host said (in reference to what, I cannot remember), “This is not like psychotherapy where they are trying to fix you…” I couldn’t hear the rest because I was in total shock. I knew this point of view existed, but I had never heard it said so succinctly: psychotherapists try to fix people. I could only think in little sound bites: Wait. Time out. FALSE.

It took me a couple of weeks to recover and process. So now let me say in response that I’m not interested in fixing anyone. I don’t believe anyone is broken. At the heart of it, I actually think most people fear they are broken, but are not. It’s this fear that creates a lot of problems.

As a therapist, I do not try to fix things or people. I try to normalize the human experience. I help in another way key way, too: unearthing options that have been previously undiscovered.

It’s a bit difficult to convince people that they haven’t thought of all the possible ways to deal with a thought, feeling, relationship, or situation. But you haven’t. I haven’t. It’s a big problem because people think, “What’s a therapist going to tell me that I don’t already know?” My response is actually, “Quite a bit.”

As a therapist, I’m really just a creative, collaborative generator of possible choices. I listen, reflect, try to make sure I get what’s being said. Then through dialogue and questions, I help find more options than previously considered. Some ideas I bring up, some come up from clients just by talking in a new way about their situation.

It’s not because I’m all awesomely creative that I come up with ideas. It’s really because I talk with a lot of people in a deep and meaningful way all day. I’ve started to hear about lots of ways of doing things. I also try to read and collect ideas from a broad range of sources. I’m excited everyday to learn something new and to figure out how I might apply it to my work.

Out of this desire to collect new viewpoints, I’m starting a guest post series on this blog. I’ve met some very talented people who have interesting things to say about the world of health, wellness, and being human from their own unique perspectives. I’ve asked them to share here on this blog.

Last week, I featured a beautifully-done piece by Portland, Maine writer and musician James Day Leavitt. In the weeks to come I have a great line up for you:

Aaron Bilodeau, co-creator of www.existanew.com, a project that challenges conventional notions on how to foster health, live, and be happy.

Dawn Clancy, creator of Growing Up Chaotic, a blog and radio program for those determined to SURVIVE and THRIVE despite growing up in toxicity – i.e. a childhood immersed in alcohol, drugs and physical, emotional or mental abuse. Her goal? Create a community hell bent on breaking, cracking and demolishing the cycle of dysfunction.

Lynn Shattuck, Portland, Maine writer and mother of two recently featured on Love for Lemons. She writes warm, touching, and often humorous pieces on topics such as perfectionism, parenting, and grief.

I hope you will read, share, and comment. The more we talk together, the more ideas are shared, the more options we see in our world, the easier it is to make choices that work for our own lives.

Being self-assured yields kindness and contentment. This is contrary to what most of us were taught, and yet I’m increasingly sure that it is true. This is why, in my recent post about being self-assured, I questioned the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary about words “related” to self-assured: vain, egotistical, pompous.

In my mind, being self-assured means being on one’s own team, with a commitment to working on the skills and internal resources that help us through new challenges. It means having trust in one’s own ability to show up and figure it out regardless of what life throws our way.

I think there is a real problem when we equate working on things like positive self-talk, emotional regulation, wellness, and self-care with being “vain” “egotistical” and “selfish.” I hear this quite frequently in my office. Many really nice people think it’s selfish to be in therapy or to take time to help themselves feel better. No, I say. Taking time to feel well and gain helpful skills is about the best community service you can do.

Let me explain with an example. Who would you rather spend time with: A.) a person who is generally pretty upbeat who has a fairly predictable range of emotions and reactions and generally understanding and helpful OR B.) a person who does the opposite, who bombards you with negativity, complaining, yelling, the silent treatment, or aggression for reasons that either you don’t understand or are out of proportion to the situation and whom you generously dub “difficult.”

I admit that most of us are probably somewhere in the middle of Person A and Person B. No one is calm and collected all the time, and that’s probably a good thing. But my point is, being more self-assured is something that is quite desirable. It’s the underlying trait that makes people truly kind, steady, and easy to be around.

If we have emotional “stuff” bugging us, as we all will at many points in our lives, it requires attention and work. Otherwise, emotions bubble up and come out in ways that invariably impact others. Always. I get the “I don’t want to be selfish” concern, but taking care of your emotional life is not selfish. Not one little bit. NOT taking care of your emotional life will keep you inching towards being Person B. Don’t be Person B. It’s miserable.

Being on the journey towards increasing self-assurance is kind to yourself and to the world. It is not selfish. Selfishness is the product of unmet emotional needs always coming to the surface. Selfishness is needing to drag down others with your oozing and overwhelming needs, that only you can really learn to fully address. Others are there for validation, encouragement, listening, and even cheerleading. They are not there to manage your feelings. If you are managing your feelings (not denying, pushing away, projecting onto others but really feeling, owning and working through them), you are contributing positively to the world.

I’m no mathematician, but I think more self-assured people=a better world.

What do you think?

Can being self-assured help us to go boldly into unknown life territory? This is a question I’ve been thinking about lately. But what does it mean to be self-assured? To me, it seems like a very desirable quality, something to cultivate in oneself and in our children. In my curiosity, I did some research. According to Merriam-Webster Online, the term means “sure of oneself: self-confident.” It says that related words include: vain, egotistical, pompous.

I partly agree, but I have some issues with this definition and with the “related” words. I guess this begs the questions: Who am I to take issue with the dictionary? Am I self-assured or really pompous after all?!

In my mind, being self-assured means having a sense that one can make it through what life throws our way. It means cultivating helpful self-talk and being on your own team. Life is hard, you don’t always know what to do. You may be scared or unsure. Being self-assured (in my unofficial dictionary), is having some acceptance of this and still trying our best. It means showing up physically and emotionally and being in the driver’s seat of our lives. Even the self-assured need to buckle up because it’s often a bumpy ride.

In my humble (and yet self-assured!) opinion, self-confidence is a little different. I think confidence is the belief that you can accomplish something. Usually we gain confidence through previous life experience. I am confident in my skills as a therapist from roughly 10 years of training and practice. Prior to becoming a parent (where you clearly cannot get the experience until becoming one), I did feel self-assured because I was committed to managing my emotions, accepting things I cannot control, and willing to get help and support whenever or wherever I hit an inevitable bump in the road. These two examples feel really different to me.

It seems to me that confidence is trust on one’s abilities and self-assurance is trust in one’s self. I need previous experience to be confident. I need a rich knowledge of my internal resources (emotional, physical, spiritual) to be self-assured.

Self-confidence is great for preparing in many aspects of life. It’s a positive thing, but I don’t think it goes far enough. I think we need to develop self-assurance for the many situations for which you cannot prepare.

What do you think? Is there a difference between self-confidence and being self-assured? How do you feel about the term?

Next post, I’m going to take on those “closely related” words. If you have thoughts on that, too, I’d be very interested.

Thanks for reading- if you are interested please subscribe to this blog, check out my Facebook where I post interesting links, and feel free to share with friends!

I believe that failure is an unhelpful concept. I’m not even convinced it’s a real thing. In my mind, it belongs in the category of make-believe creatures along with unicorns, dragons, and the Easter Bunny.

Recently, Seth Godin (marketing genius and writer whose lessons surprisingly generalize to many areas of life), made a very wise point in his post, Just the good parts. He feels that when you hit bumps in the road, like a bad break or rejection, “It means that you’re doing worthwhile, difficult work, not merely amusing yourself.” I would add to this and assert that you can’t have success without so-called failure.

In my assessment, there is no way to “fail.” Life is not graded. You can’t get an F. There is showing up and participating, making choices, being accountable, and doing our best. Or there is not participating, waiting for others to make choices for us, and claiming that we are helpless. And every shade of gray in between. Trying and having it not work out as we predict or would like is not the same as “failure.”

In my mind, every time you choose to participate and give the best you can in that given moment, you are being your very best self. You can’t really go wrong. Maybe your grade isn’t so great, or the guy you like turns you down, or you didn’t get the job you interviewed for. But that is never failure. And usually, in the end, it works out better than you imagined.

At the end of the day, if we’ve done our best, we have a better sense of self and accomplishment. We can better accept our inherent strengths and weaknesses. We can begin to cope with the many areas of life beyond our control. Participating fully in life as our real selves with all we’ve got is the bravest and most rewarding way to live. Just showing up and learning from all that life has to offer will always be a winning experience.

Fearing failure is devastatingly counter-productive. It keeps us from putting our best, most authentic selves out in the world. We all lose when others hide themselves and their talents. It keeps us withered and tight, unable to bloom and open.

What could be different in your life if you stopped fearing failure?

PS: I’m still working on my project of finding ways to make emotional health information exciting and accessible to a wide audience! Can you help me by taking a very brief survey by clicking here? Your feedback WILL make a big difference. Thank you! And, while I’m in the mood for asking for favors, if you like what I’m doing, please feel free to subscribe to this blog, share on social media and encourage your friends to follow along and to take my survey too. (I hope the adorable collage in this post will serve as appropriate compensation for your time!)

A couple of weeks ago, I posed the question: Does therapy need a makeover? Many people wrote back saying that while therapy is (or at least can be) great, people without first-hand experience tend to feel negatively towards it.

Since then, I have been working on ideas to achieve my stated mission: to convey to people everywhere that working on your emotional life is a positive and useful endeavor that yields good results.

I need help again. I’ve created a survey that is very short (only 2-4 minutes to complete) and anonymous, that will provide useful information for my project. Find the link here.

Thank you to everyone who chooses to participate in my project. Please share the link to the survey, if you are so inclined. I will keep you updated as it (hopefully!) goes forward, or morphs, or whatever happens. Please also feel free to give more ideas in the comment section or go ahead and contact me.

I’m on a mission to convey to people everywhere that working on your emotional life is a positive and useful endeavor that yields good results.

I may have my work cut out for me. I have a deep concern that most people have negative associations with words like therapy or mental health.

Essentially, I worry that people think they are healthy as long as they don’t “need” to go to therapy. Therapy is seen as evidence of illness, instead of a way to accomplish wellness.

I love what I do. My day tends to be uplifting, fun, interesting, inspiring and motivating. The fabulous clients I work with do come for depression, anxiety, trauma, anger, and other issues. I listen, empathize, and validate feelings.

The work, however, is focused on finding ways to make life feel better and more fulfilling.

Through conversation, education, reflection and connection, I help people find ways to look at their situations in a more helpful way and take actions that increase their life satisfaction. It’s a pretty great way to make a living.

Still, when I think about “mental health” as a topic or as a profession, it seems heavy and a bit yucky. Even I don’t like it’s reputation, and I’m happily in the field.

I want this to change. We can find ways to be happier, healthier, and wiser. We can work on ourselves not because we are sick, but because we want to be well.

I believe that my calling is to find some way to communicate on a large scale that we need to focus on our emotional well-being. I want emotional wellness to be a topic that we all talk about and teach our children.

I’m not sure what it will take. New words? A whole new system? New options? I need your help so that I can figure out how to fulfill my mission. Please share your thoughts:

What do you really think about therapy? Have you ever thought about ways to improve your emotional wellness? Am I right? Is there a PR issue here? What would make it more appealing? How do I convince people that investing in emotional well-being is truly a positive thing and not an admission of defect? 

There is a grocery item that I buy on a regular basis. It’s in a glass jar and it’s on the top shelf. Now if it were a box of cereal, I could easily give it a little poke and it would likely sway and bounce off the shelf and into my hands. I’m less than eager to try with a glass jar. My strategy instead is to wait for either a taller patron or staff person to come by. I ask politely for their help, thank them kindly, and go about my shopping.

Pop quiz: What does this choice mean about me? Am I a failure because I’ve only grown to be 5’1″? Am I dependent on others? Is my lack of height shameful? Or am a resourceful thinker using the attributes of another to help me solve a problem that is difficult to manage on my own?

My silly (although very real!) example is intended to show that asking for help often makes good sense. In this scenario it would be quite ridiculous for me to go buy a ladder or climb up the shelving just so I could do it on my own. The point is, sometimes it doesn’t make any sense to do it on our own.

What I think is really great about being a modern human is that there are so many of us able to do so many different things. I do think we need a sense of self-sufficiency in some aspects of life, but we are social creatures. We are meant to make it together. With so many others, shouldn’t we be REALLY MAKING IT?!

It is actually a skill to realize that something you want or need to accomplish or understand requires the skills, talents, insights and feedback of other humans. We have so many resources available to us yet, I often witness people believing that because they can’t see the solution, it must not exist. This is problematic. If you don’t think there is a solution, another perspective, or a different philosophy, you won’t seek others to help you find it.

It’s this kind of thinking that stunts our emotional development. We get so stuck in our own feelings, thoughts, and beliefs that we mistake them as the absolute truth – the only way things can be. Feelings, thoughts, and beliefs can be changed, shaped, and challenged over the course of our lives. That’s healthy. Stagnating is not.

I believe that my primary job as a therapist is to help people identify options for their lives around their feelings, thoughts, and actions that they didn’t previously recognize. I believe that the clients who seek me out are skilled at recognizing a need for fresh ways of looking at their situation when the old ways stop working. This is brave, not weak. It is effective and smart, not shameful and foolish.

Are there things in your life that require a new perspective? What things are better done on your own?

I’m always a little surprised when I’m asked, “Can people really change?” Yes, people can really change. And if you’ll excuse the double negative, I’d say people can’t not change.

While I’m not an expert on too many things, my humble observation is that everything changes. All the time. I don’t know about you, but I wake up older everyday. I know about homeostasis but I think it’s to keep us on some even keel as we experience change around us at every moment.

Change happens, whether you believe you are in charge of it or not. If you don’t believe you are driving your own life, then change happens, you just didn’t give it much intention or direction. That’s a waste, because I really think we know what’s best for our own lives.

So it bums me out when people believe that they can’t change. I believe that a lot of distress in the world comes from a fundamental belief that we are primarily victims with little to no ownership of our lives. Here are some problems that I think come from, at least in part, this worldview: hopelessness, feeling stuck, over-focusing on aspects of life that are beyond our control (death, what others choose to do, what might happen in the future), getting overwhelmed by these uncontrollable aspects of life, feeling insignificant, numbing out, and blaming and raging at others.

On the other hand, people who bring intention and awareness to how they want to live feel happier and cope better with what’s out of their control. When we realize what we can control, and make our decisions accordingly, then life feels a whole lot different. We absolutely have a lot of control over our words, our thoughts, our behaviors, our reactions, our emotions, our choices, our preferences, and our priorities. Using our time and resources to learn how to be a skilled operator of these aspects of our being is a worthy investment.

People who are empowered to change, who own their choices, are a happier lot. They don’t look for others to provide the answer, they consult with others in a quest for their own truth. They don’t wait for circumstances to be different, they look for a path to where they want to go no matter what the terrain. They don’t make excuses, they make opportunities.

Our lives will be different in 2013 than in 2012. The question is: Do you want to shape the direction of your life or not?

I hope so. I know it can be daunting, so I hope you’ll check back here for some support and encouragement. You can do this life thing, I know it.

I don’t have the answer. I really don’t think there is one answer to most complicated human questions. Often there are many steps that lead us towards better outcomes. This is true on the individual level and I think it must be true on the societal level as well. When people first come into therapy, I try to advocate for taking small steps that can’t hurt. Often these small steps make things a lot better. We tend to underestimate how helpful small steps can be.

When the problem is bigger and more complicated, like when people kill innocent victims, I wonder if some of the same ideas can apply. What if we all did something that doesn’t hurt? Even if it’s not the answer, I have to wonder, what would happen if….

• we chose to articulate each day the things we like and admire about others?
• we decided to listen first and respond only when the other person is done and feels that we were truly present for them?
• we told those we love that we love them, always, no matter what?
• our actions and our words communicated to the people we interact with that we see them as an equally important and valuable human being?
• we can accept the follies and flaws of ourselves as part of our humanity, even as we strive to make better choices and positive changes?
• we evaluated what’s really important in our lives and consistently devoted time to these priorities?
• we spend as much time noticing what’s right, what’s good, and what’s generous in the world as we do pointing out flaws and criticizing?
• we remain mindful that despite our differences, humans share most of the same genome, one home planet,  and an overwhelming majority want peace, safety, and love?

I don’t know… but I wonder. I do know that I wish all of you a peaceful holiday season and a hopeful and happy New Year.