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To commemorate Mental Health Awareness, we’ve invited three authors whose work grapples with the challenges of inner life.
Join Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone; Haemin Sunim, author of The Things You Can Only See When You Slow Down; and former surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy, author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, as they help us confront the spiritual challenges we face in these times.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:03
If you are paying total attention to someone,
00:07
you feel deeper connections. You feel love.
00:10
When we connect with other people,
00:13
that’s where we get our power.
00:15
That’s where we get our strength.
00:16
That’s how we can grow and transform.
00:18
This is a really hard moment. Everyone is struggling.
00:22
We’ve got to not only be compassionate towards others,
00:24
but we’ve gotta be gentle with ourselves.
00:28
( theme music playing )
00:57
Hi, BookTube. I’m Lori Gottlieb.
00:59
I am a psychotherapist
01:01
with a clinical practice in Los Angeles.
01:03
I also write the weekly
01:05
“Dear Therapist” column in “The Atlantic.”
01:07
This is my book,
01:09
“Maybe You Should Talk To Someone.”
01:10
The book follows four
01:12
very seemingly different patients.
01:14
And then there’s a fifth patient in the book,
01:16
and the fifth patient is me
01:18
as I go through my own struggle with my own therapist.
01:21
I’m Dr. Vivek Murthy.
01:23
I had the privilege of serving
01:25
as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States
01:27
during the Obama administration,
01:29
and I had the opportunity during that time
01:31
to go into people’s living rooms
01:34
and sit with people and hear about their stories.
01:37
But what I didn’t expect to hear
01:39
were the stories about loneliness.
01:40
My book is about the prevalence
01:43
and the incredible consequences
01:45
of loneliness to our health.
01:46
But it’s also a book about hope,
01:48
about the power of social connections to help us heal.
01:51
My name is Haemin Sunim.
01:53
I am originally from South Korea. I am a Buddhist monk.
01:58
I am the author of
02:00
“The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down”
02:02
and “Love For Imperfect Things.”
02:05
Both books are about how to find mindfulness
02:08
and how to find gratitude and balance in our lives.
02:13
Vivek and Haemin,
02:16
it is so nice to chat with you today.
02:18
– Thank you. – Vivek, how are you spending your days?
02:21
I start each day off just trying to get the kids,
02:24
you know, ready, brushing their teeth,
02:26
getting them fed, and then hoping that I haven’t
02:28
missed a conference call in the process.
02:30
A lot of my patients can’t find privacy
02:32
in their homes to have their sessions.
02:34
So often they’re having them either from a closet,
02:36
but more often from the toilet.
02:38
And often they will put on, like, a blouse or a top.
02:42
And they don’t realize that sometimes
02:44
they’re angling the camera a little far down
02:46
and they’re wearing, like, their pajama bottoms.
02:48
So there’s been a lot of laughter
02:50
over wardrobe during quarantine.
02:53
My quarantine wardrobe usually consists
02:56
of a button-down shirt, plus or minus a tie.
02:59
but I’m always wearing scrub bottoms.
03:01
That’s what’s comfortable for me.
03:05
When I wrote my book “Together,” people said,
03:07
“Wait, why is a Surgeon General talking about loneliness?
03:09
Shouldn’t you be talking about smoking and obesity?
03:12
And it’s ’cause I was finding that even before
03:14
I had the chance to serve in government,
03:16
when I was starting to practice medicine,
03:19
I remember how many patients would come in all alone
03:23
and having to deal with incredibly painful diagnoses.
03:27
And I would sometimes go up to them and say,
03:29
“Is there somebody that you’d would like me to call?”
03:31
And so often, the answer was,
03:34
“No, there’s nobody else to bring in,
03:37
so I’ll just figure it out myself.”
03:39
I was finding that even though
03:41
we had never talked about loneliness
03:43
in our medical school classes,
03:45
even though we never studied it for an exam,
03:47
that it seemed to be all around us.
03:49
Yeah. You know, one of the reasons why we cannot–
03:51
you know, we are too afraid to reach out for help
03:55
is because we are afraid to become vulnerable
03:58
and talk about how you really feel.
04:01
I’m so glad that you mentioned vulnerability
04:04
because so many times when we feel disconnected,
04:07
we try to fill ourselves up with food or wine
04:12
or too much time on the internet.
04:14
A colleague of mine said that the internet
04:16
was the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller out there.
04:20
– I love that. – So, you know, we find all these ways– right?
04:23
And we find all these ways to try to fill ourselves up,
04:27
and yet they don’t fill us up.
04:29
We can connect at any moment with anybody.
04:32
And, you know, we have to define what is connection?
04:35
And it’s not just texting somebody.
04:37
It’s not just a “How are you?” and a brief response.
04:39
It’s really, “I see you, I hear you, I understand you,”
04:43
– and the reciprocity of that. – Right.
04:45
Technology can bring us to feel closer,
04:49
but at the same time, it can alienate us.
04:53
Technology’s ultimately a tool.
04:55
We can use it to deepen our connections,
04:57
or we can use it to dilute and weaken our connections.
05:00
It depends how we’re using it.
05:04
In my research for the book, I came across
05:06
a really interesting term, “phubbing,”
05:09
and that’s when we snub other people
05:12
in favor of our phone.
05:14
It’s important for all of us to remember
05:17
there are some places that we should keep sacred,
05:19
some spaces that we should protect.
05:21
And those spaces in particular,
05:22
it should be those where we’re having
05:24
face-to-face interactions with friends
05:26
and we’re catching up with people over the phone.
05:28
Times where we need to give them our full attention.
05:31
Five or ten minutes of undistracted conversation
05:35
where you are listening deeply,
05:37
sharing openly,
05:39
and simply being with another person
05:41
can be more powerful than 30 minutes or a whole hour
05:45
of distracted conversation.
05:46
Absolutely. Your friend, you know,
05:48
listening to you, he or she will also open up,
05:52
and thereby you can have a much deeper relationship.
05:59
Kahlil Gibran is one of my favorite poets and writers.
06:04
While I was a teenager,
06:06
I was reading his books over and over again.
06:09
I was in love at the time.
06:12
I had this first experience of seeing the divine
06:16
through, you know, loving that person.
06:18
This particular passage really spoke to me.
06:29
If you had said months ago to any of us
06:32
you’re going to be socially distanced from people.
06:35
You’re going to be sheltering at home.
06:39
You’re going to have all of this trauma
06:42
going on all around you,
06:44
I think that a lot of us would have said, you know,
06:46
“I don’t know how I could cope with that.”
06:47
And we also need to have some normalcy
06:50
to sit alongside everything else that has been disrupted.
06:56
There are certain things that we need to do
06:58
to have some structure to our days.
07:01
Go to sleep at the same time that you normally go to sleep.
07:03
Wake up the same time that you normally wake up.
07:05
Make sure that you shower and put on actual clothes every day.
07:09
And those clothes can be sweat pants, but at least it’s not your pajamas.
07:12
And make your bed every day
07:14
because it just makes you feel human.
07:16
And that is enough.
07:17
I think you’re doing great if you’re doing that.
07:19
A lot of people feel like when we’re in the middle
07:22
of something like a crisis or something very tragic,
07:26
that we can’t also experience joy.
07:33
And it reminds me of a patient that I saw who had cancer.
07:36
And she was saying that people felt so worried
07:39
about laughing around her because they felt like
07:42
it would somehow minimize the pain of her experience.
07:45
And she said, “It’s not like I’m going to forget
07:46
that I have cancer.”
07:47
You know, it’s not like any of us is going to forget
07:49
that we’re going through this pandemic.
07:51
You know, given the circumstance,
07:54
I think we can carefully look at where my mind is.
07:57
If we are looking at the negatives,
08:00
then it feels like we are in a prison.
08:03
But if you actually look at the positive side,
08:05
this can be a great opportunity for you to learn.
08:09
Thanks to YouTube, you can learn to knit.
08:12
You can learn to cook.
08:14
It’s very calming, and it is also
08:17
a very nice way to serve, you know?
08:19
Because you are making it not just for me,
08:21
but for my friends as well.
08:22
If we are doing things for other people,
08:26
then not only you feel good about ourselves
08:29
and then have much deeper connections,
08:31
but also you begin to see that your life is meaningful.
08:35
Haemin, I love what you just said
08:38
’cause I think what you’re pointing to
08:40
is that as dark and as hard as this time is for so many people,
08:44
that we can actually draw a lot of meaning out of it.
08:48
And if we come out of all of this
08:50
with a greater focus on people,
08:53
with a greater commitment to relationships,
08:55
then I think that we will have responded to COVID-19
08:58
in a way that will ultimately leave us stronger.
09:01
One of the great things about humanity
09:03
is that we come together in moments of crisis.
09:05
On September 11th, 2001,
09:09
when the buildings were beginning to crumble,
09:11
people started fleeing.
09:14
But those who fled south
09:16
found themselves encountering the Hudson.
09:18
Now the Coast Guard recognized that this was happening,
09:21
so they issued an unprecedented call
09:24
to all civilian boats in the area.
09:26
Over 500,000 people were rescued
09:30
from the southern tip of Manhattan.
09:33
It was an extraordinary moment.
09:36
But if you think about what happened,
09:39
these men and women on these civilian boats
09:42
were running toward the fire, literally.
09:45
They didn’t know what was going to happen.
09:47
They didn’t know if they were putting themselves in harm’s way.
09:49
But what they recognized
09:52
is that in those moments there’s a human need,
09:55
a call to be together, to be there for each other,
09:58
that rises above everything else.
10:00
We are doing remarkably well,
10:03
even if we’re experiencing anxiety and sadness
10:06
and so much loss.
10:08
We are being creative. We’re being adaptable.
10:12
We’re being flexible.
10:13
And so I think that what is–
10:14
what I found most surprising
10:15
is how strong we all are
10:18
when it comes down to it.
10:19
So I was looking at, this morning, you know,
10:23
how to make a burrito breakfast.
10:25
Lori, it sounds like when this quarantine is all over,
10:28
that you and I need to visit Haemin
10:30
and have a meal with him,
10:31
I’m getting hungry just listening to him talk.
—
This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
