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, where 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. 

Optimizing pain

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.” Optimizing pain means addressing it in a manner that provides a gain. For instance, if a person is struggling with pain associated with parenting, they can make a gain by opening up to another parent and, in doing so, create a deeper connection.

Optimizing pain is the opposite of responding to pain in a way that may feel good at the moment, but overtime is not truly helping. I think about Jo, a girl who shares her story in  Screenagers Under The Influence. When faced with depression, she turned to cannabis, hoping it would be the solution. It was not. Ultimately she got the support and skills she needed and was able to optimize her pain for gain.

Here are a few other examples of optimizing pain for gain:

•A student is feeling the pain of feeling ignored by friends. Gain happens by telling a trusted teacher. Bonus: the teacher gains the gift of feeling needed. 

•A person is feeling the pain of anxious feelings.  Gain happens when the practice skills such as exposure therapy.

•A person is feeling the pain of “compare and despair” on social media. Gain happens when they ask their older sibling for advice on what to do. (Again, that gain of connection like above.)

Why this is the answer

Optimizing pain is very different from saying we should all go seek out pain. The brain hates pain for a good reason. But being human means pain happens — from little struggles to massive tragedies.

The old “suck it up, keep it inside, and move on'' mentality has proven disastrous. Fortunately, we are making positive strides in society to get away from that. We are helping more youth know that talking about pain and having ways to respond to it productively is the surest path to the best outcomes. 

So letting kids know that pain is ubiquitous and that life is a journey of getting more skillful at responding to it — optimizing it for gain — is the answer.

Share a time you optimized your pain

As parents, we are often in the habit of asking our kids, “How was school?” “How was practice?”  “What is happening with Scott after you had that issue about the lunch money?”  But in doing this, we often forget to share stories of how we have handled our emotional pain, which can be immensely useful for our kids to know. 

I invite you to share a time you faced pain with your child or students and how you handled it. See if you can think of a story from when you were around their age. (How to know what’s appropriate to share with your child at their given age? If you have any hesitation about sharing the story, hold it in for now and choose a different one). 

Ideas to get the conversation started (and by all means, put these in your voice):

1. Parent or teacher: “I want to share with you this hard emotional time I had in school which was……and how I tried to handle it and what I learned.” 

2. Parent or teacher: “I want to share my annoying negative brain chatter about….. and one strategy I have developed that helps me with it.” 

3. Parent or teacher: “I want to share with you this particular time when I felt a lot of (pick one: loneliness, anger, sadness, rejection), and this is how I responded.  But this is what I would do now. 

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Here is a video from the Screenagers YouTube Channel that talks more about this subject