us what roles or what a psychologist does sure sure that will thank you for having me by the way of so excited to be here so a clinical psychologist is someone who has a doctorate in clinical psychology and they provide mental health services so it can be anything like psychotherapy which is basically counseling or it can be psychological testing like educational testing or i q testing they can also be professors so there are variety things love working with young adults i've had a variety of experiences working at like hospitals and clinics and counseling centers but i've had a lot of experience working with college students so i was at the college in new jersey i was at rutgers and i was a post doctoral fellow at princeton university so i really just enjoy working with young adults they have so many interesting issues that they're working on a lot of life goals whether it's academic or trying to find a job or trying to work on anxiety stress depression and relationship issues so they have a lot of interesting issues so that's what sort of drew me in and then i also see a lot of teenagers i also have a special interest in the gifted or profoundly gifted so i often see teenagers through various organisations who are you know struggling with various issues so earl mentioned psychotherapy so could you explain to us what that is what entails schurz sure so psychotherapy is when you basically go to counselling for typically like once a week for about fifteen minutes and you can talk about anything so it's really great because it's collaborative so you can kind of use the time the way that you would like to use it so it's really nice to have that space where you talk about your life you know things that are stressing you out what you're feeling about things and it's just nice to have a trained professional who is outside of your friend circle outside of your family circle to get their perspective and to get their support also to work on skills so it's just it's a great space where you can use that anxiety according to a two thousand and sixteen national survey sixty two percent of undergraduate students report experiencing overwhelming anxiety so that's a huge number right and over the last five ten years we've seen a huge increase in people teenagers and young adults in college seeking services which is great that they're seeking services but that also says you know there's just been a huge increase and we could talk about why in a minute there are a lot of cultural reasons why that's happening but there's been such a huge increase in anxiety one of the biggest things that i tend to see is fear of failure that's how the anxiety tends to manifest itself and so that's one of the best ways to address that fear of failure that i typically work with my clients on is self compassion so compassion is basically being kind to yourself and a lot of my kind say you know if i become kind of myself i'm going to lose my competitive as or maybe i'll become lazy or unmotivated and actually the research shows that the opposite is true and here's why it's so let's say you're going to take a really hard math test or you going to try something new or you're going to  do some sort of athletic competition if you know that at the end of that event or competition if you don't do as well as you hoped they would be yourself up you're going to be a lot more anxious and you're going to be a lot more likely to avoid it maybe gets you know get sick or try to get out of doing it so often self criticism works against us whereas if you know that you are going to be kind to yourself regardless of how it goes you've made a decision they're go go into it and at the end of it you're going to be nice to yourself you're going to say oh you know yeah that didn't go as well as you hoped but that's ok everything's still ok and you just go speak softly and kindly to yourself the other thing you do is you c your hand on your heart when you speak you know kindly to yourself because what that does is it releases oxytocin which is the neuro hormone of love and oxytocin is the fastest way to calm the stress response so if you're speaking softly and kindly to yourself you put your hand on your heart you would be a lot less likely to be anxious about that situation and so that really reduces the fear of failure so i work with a lot of my clients on  that and that is typically pretty helpful and sometimes you could even make that intention before you do the activity you can say ok regardless of how this thing goes i'm going to be nice to yours to myself and then you're free you can kind of you can do whatever because you know you're going to be nice to yourself at the end of it you know and really commit to that so that's something that is typically helpful for fear of failure which is a huge issue right now so with the rising report of teens and adults having anxiety what do you think are some potential factors behind this for is it just that people are more willing to admit it these days yes so luckily the stigma has gone down which is very good because i think that's helped a lot of people seek services and people are more willing to talk about it publicly and things like that so i think that's really really helpful and there are some good national role models even i'm thinking like demi lovato you know she openly talks about her mental health issues which i think is great which gives other people that feel makes them feel like they can share as well so people are definitely coming in because they feel less than the ties but some of the other reasons are that anxiety and depression you know have gone up ever since you know the last ten years that's definitely the case but since two thousand and twelve when smartphones kind of came into the picture of unfortunately we've seen a huge spikes in anxiety depression self harm suicidality with teens and young adults so we do know that there is an impact that having a lot of access to smartphones unfortunately in social media it's stressful you know i mean there are there are a lot of reasons it's stressful on others generations haven't had to deal with  stress or so and you know with with cellphones one of the things that comes up is cyberbullying you know obviously that's a huge issue and and it's hard to deal with that when you're younger because you're not always prepared to deal with that and you in the past when you've been bullied at school for instance you could leave it at school not to say that it was a good thing but you can leave it at school whereas now it follows you home and so you don't really have that break from it and so the best thing for parents to do is to really talk about those kind of things and to address them and if they see any signs of cyberbullying for instance which is a risk factor for anxiety they can and some of the signs for instance might be something like they're on the phone a lot more often or they're on the phone a lot less often or they break the phone because maybe they want to take a break from the phone or you know accidentally they they drop it or something or there's just a huge changes and behaviors like sleep or eating things like that so those are some things you can watch and you know parents can watch out for obviously they can mean different things but those are some signs that they can kind of look for and maybe just use that as a discussion and talk about it i always considered like an aspect of social media contributing to depression or anxiety was that like you know it's kind to highlight someone's life like nobody ever post a picture of them like oh you know depressed today or whatever it's like me with my friends with me on vacation do you think this is so contributor to like the teen mental health issue with social media yeah definitely i mean we do see like you know the facebook depression things like that as a phenomenon and it's just too easy to compare and to think that everyone has this perfect life where they're all successful they're all happy they're all thin they all have luxurious things and so it's so easy to get caught up in that and to compare and one of the best things sometimes you can do is to get some distance from it and some perspective and if you feel like you are feeling worse when you look at that you know you're looking at somebody and says instagram posts and then you feel worse then to maybe think you know maybe i should take a break or unfollowed this person you know really hard and you know as you get older it becomes not just about academics but it comes about like hustling so hustling is like a big thing later on so there is a lot of social pressure whether it's in high school with grades and not getting sleep and making sure that you're putting a lot of pressure on yourself and then when you get older there is a lot of you know feeling like you have to work hard and hustle push yourself and press yourself and we know that just increases stress and leads to a lot of like adrenal fatigue so it makes people feel actually physically more in some ways it increases the risk factors for anxiety and depression so if that is the case that you're experiencing a lot of pressure you know that would be something that it would be worth looking at you know what is the culture in your high school  maybe talking about changing that culture a little bit like you know you can get good grades and still get some sleep you know using that as a segue what are some positive and healthy versus some negative unhealthy ways to cope with being stressed yes so that is a great question so let's start with healthy you so i'm going to read healthy things that you can do i would say the first is what i call long exhale breathing and when you say like deep breathing everyone says kind of you know you could the eye roll like we know that deep breathing is helpful but long x help breathing the reason why that's important is because when you have a longer exhale then in hale what it does is it engages the parasympathetic nervous system which is the part of you that tells your body it's time to calm down it's time to rest it's time to digest which is the complete opposite of the stress response which is fight or flight so what you want to do when you're doing a long x help breathing is breathe in for a count of four and then breathe out for a count of six so that exhale has to be longer and you can do that like three times a couple times a day so that way when you are stressed out it will be very helpful so maybe you can even try that now if you want to give it a try see how it feels and so and when you're breathing and what you want to do is you want to you want your stomach to sort of go forward rise because it's di that feel good yeah you can do that just making sure that the x hills longer couple of times a day and that will just give your body that calm response so the second thing that you can do to relieve stress and anxiety is just labeling your emotions so there's an expression you have to name them to tame them and when you name your emotions what that does is it calms your brain so you might say to yourself you know ok what am i feeling right now i'm experiencing some anxiety or i'm feeling sadness and as you're doing that also being careful to not say like i am sad or i am anxious because you want to create a little bit of a distance from it you don't want to miss is the sara lee identify with it because  emotions are like waves so they kind of start off slow and then they crest and then they fall and what most people do is when the emotions is that it's peak they panic oh no i'm feeling stressed out of feeling anxious this is to horrible you know i is stop rather than saying ok i'm anxious right i'm experiencing some anxiety right now and that's ok it's normal to have a lot of different emotions that's called even adversity that's normal and then kind of watching it fall away because that's the normal progression of emotions so throughout the day you can say what i'm experiencing right now what is my feeling right now so that's the second thing you can do and then the third thing is mindfulness of course everybody's heard of mindfulness is the big thing right now and there's a good reason for that it really does help to create a little bit of distance from your emotions so that you can observe them and you're in your thoughts as well and it's a lot easier to manage them that way so mindful basically non judgemental awareness of your thoughts feelings and sensations in the present moment and there are all variety of ways you can you can try mindfulness you can try an app you can try  to popular ones are headspace and calm and some universities actually provide free access to those if they do have a membership fee which is really really great and so those are two ways that you can start getting involved with  unhealthy ways to cope with stress yes so unhealthy ways you know there's obviously the you know over eating under eating drinking you know drugs things like that it's what i hear often becoming consistent as a way to procrastinate like you're saying or just avoid feelings then it becomes unhealthy or avoiding your work so you know those are a couple of the big ones but definitely like you were saying before smartphones have become a way to sort of disengage and avoid feelings of discomfort whether it's boredom or whether it's loneliness or anxiety cell phones have definitely become something that is used in an unhealthy way but the good news about cell phones i do want to say smart phones is that there's a tipping point so in about two hours per day if you're a teenager or young adult it's still pretty healthy so if you're on the phone looking at things you know for an hour two hours a day it's still pretty healthy the tipping point is about two hours so if you go past two hours it can become unhealthy at that point actually a recent study this past december two thousand and seventeen looked as smart phones and teenagers and what they found is that teenagers who use smartphones for more than five hours a day which is a lot right but there are plenty of people who do that actually increases their risk of having one risk factor for suicide by seventy one percent so that's a huge huge number so obviously that's something to be concerned about so you want to stay within that range of two hours because here's what here's the reason why that's that's happening so if you're on the phone five hours a day what you're not doing is you're probably not getting enough sleep you're probably not getting enough exercise you're probably not having a lot of face time with people like this which is really important you're probably not doing a lot of activities so those are all of the things that can protect you from anxiety and depression and now you've introduced something that stressful like the stress of you know you text someone and then you're waiting for them to text you back and then you see the dot dot dot and it disappears and you're like what's happening and so you're stressed out about the interaction or you're stressed out because you posted something on instagram or some other social media site and you're waiting for like you know so that can be really stressful so we've taken away something that might protect you from anxiety or depression which is like exercise and we've added stressors so if you're spending five hours a day that would  i would say that providing information i think to parents would be important something that comes up a lot is when should i get my child to start a smartphone yet that's a popular diets a huge part you know the topic of debate right and the average age is ten so the average ten year old in america has a smartphone and if they don't they're probably bugging their parents to get one right yes and so that's a huge issue because the actual recommendation is ninth grade so that's a huge huge distance right disparity and so you know a ten year old eleven year old isn't really ready to deal with really really tough questions that might come up like whether  saying something you know really uncomfortable i can you text me a nude picture or something like that would they know what to do in that situation and have they had that conversation with their parents about what do you do if someone does this so i would say that one thing that schools can do is they can open up that discussion with parents to say you know when do you want to get the smart phone and if they already have it don't panic you know just monitor and supervise what they're doing and how much time they're spending on it  but definitely have a lot of open conversations about like what would you do if this happened what would you do if somebody online said you're ugly you should kill yourself right because these are things that happen and if you feel like you should keep that secret then that becomes a huge issue right that feels like a burden and a shame that that and if you know that your parents are willing to talk to you about these things and they are safe places where you can openly talk about these things you can be a lot more protected in those situations so in our last few minutes of the interview i'd love to hear about why you decided to become a psychologist how long you've known you want to do this and what your favorite parts about the occupation have so i've known for a long time that i want to be a psychologist when i was about thirteen years old i discovered psychology books spirituality books and meditation and so i read every day everything from like freud to self help books and it was just so exciting i was so passionate about it and i would also do these like silly experiments on myself because i was so intrigued by the idea that things could affect your mood especially so i would do these things such as like making like mix tapes which at the time this is the early ninety's so it was literally cassettes that you put into the radio and they would be from you know from really sad songs to increase in the upbeat songs and then i would mark down how was my mood affected by this which seems really silly you know at the time it seemed like a really weird quirk but now this would be like life hacking you know and then i would do the opposite like really upbeat songs to really slow songs and sad songs how would this affect my mood and how would exercise affect my mood and how would meditation effect like my homework or met it or relationships and and meditation had a huge effect so i've stuck with it since then so that's been a really long time so i was just very curious i was always experimenting trying new things and just very passionate since i was really really so and my favorite part i would say about being a psychologist is that you realize that there is space for all feelings and that all emotions are ok i think we live in a culture where happiness is so overvalued there's a lot of pressure to be happy where i was in psychotherapy a kind of one of you know emo diversity that's the term for a range of feelings and studies show that you know diversity having that range of feelings is actually healthier so what psychotherapy has taught me is is that it's ok to have lots of feelings and that that's actually a good thing and so i really passionate about sharing that kind of information  blog recently which is really exciting about using your emotions to work on goals and so they can find me at d r and i cress dot com so those are some ways that they could find me and get some more  information well i've certainly learned a lot i'm sure you've certainly learned a lot it was a really fascinating interview and i can't believe how quickly food by it's certainly a very relevant topic these days you know increased social media increase of you know and basically what happened was we we were traveling to italy for the summer and we had to take a connecting flight from up new york to munich and so we took the flight live tons of and we e mailed them in advance telling them i have severe food allergies can he board the plane earlier so i can wipe down the seats and they said that's fine that's fine you can board the plane and then when we went to the airport we told him again like o they got they had the pilot got really scared and says the pilots responsible for all the passengers on the plane they didn't he didn't want to take the risk of carrying me on the plane so he kicked us all off the plane without giving us tickets t refunding our tickets so to what extent well you're obviously very severely allergic but how much of the allergy and would have to be your surroundings or what kind of contact would give you an allergic contact like if it comes to my skin i could start hiding out and if i if that stuff it ends up in my mouth that i can end up having a severe food or food allergy reaction and what would happen during a severe food allergy reaction i would basically it ranges for some people but for me it's my eyes get really watery and then everything the first starts itching on my face and then afterwards after like two or three minutes my throat surfaces fell up and close