Optimizing Our Pain, Why This Is The Answer

Before jumping in, I will be in?DC?and?Boston?doing local premieres of?Screenagers Under The Influence: Addressing Vaping, Drugs, and Alcohol in the Digital Age, so if you or people you know are in those areas, please come!

It’s Mental health month, and I am jazzed because this topic is so important to me.?Talking with our kids about mental health topics?is a gift we can give them this month.?Each of my writings in May will address mental health.

Since I was a teen,?I have been uncommonly drawn to wanting to understand the emotional pain points of being human. In all sorts of casual situations, I gently direct conversations away from chit-chat into discussions about the hard things happening in our lives. ( I titled a monthly gathering I have with women at my place called our?“NeST” group = No (extra) Small Talk.

In most of my conversations with my friends,?I share at least one struggle happening in my life.?There may be a situational challenge happening right then, or it could be sharing what new negative or anxious self-talk my mind has been dishing up.?My own battles to navigate my painful self-talk in healthy ways is a big motivator in my having gone into primary care,?in which lots of the work is mental health care.?

Why my devotion to having conversations about hard emotions??It’s all in service of one thing: to uncover the thousands of ways we can maneuver in the face of pain to get through it in positive ways.?

While there are writers and podcasters who are all about optimizing life (which can be helpful but also paradoxically unhelpful when it makes us feel less-than),?my work is something I call “Optimizing Pain.”?

In today’s blog,?learn more about “Optimizing Pain.”