10 Lessons from 10 Top Emerging Mental Health Leaders
By: Jordan Gross
Tags: Life Lessons, Leadership, Inspiration, Psychology, Mental Health

1. A Superpowered Life Comes from Turning Anxiety into Courage

Shefali Tsabary PhD works primarily with parents and children in an effort to build emotional resilience. She helps parents alleviate their own anxiety when it comes to parenting and the associated challenges. In her new book Superpowered she urges kids to take their insecurities, like not doing well in school, and turn them into strengths by figuring out how they can excel in different ways that will serve them best.

2. Put the Right Nutrients into Your Body to Minimize Anxiety

Drew Ramsey, MD works at the intersection of mental health and nutrition. He’s a board-certified nutritional psychologist, and his work helps us understand how to better nourish our bodies to reduce emotional imbalances. Most notably, he is known for highlighting the benefits of leafy greens, especially kale. These should be regularly implemented into your diet for reduced stress.

3. Don’t be Intimidated to Use Your Voice

Kevin Love is a fierce competitor in the National Basketball Association. It’s not often that a man with such physical prowess — he stands almost 7 feet tall and weighs near 250 pounds — would be expected to speak about mental health, but Love is the exception. He helps athletes and individuals become more confident and open as they go about their mental health journeys.

4. Marginalized People Must Break the Stigmas of Mental Health

Wilma Mae Basta is working to give away 10,000 hours of free mental health services to anybody who identifies as a woman of color in the United States. She works to fight against misconceptions related to mental health. For instance, she stated in an interview, “The Black community has survived slavery. Our story is of perseverance and resilience, and because of that, there’s an expectation to also survive depression and anxiety. But mental health should not be a symbol of weakness, and finding healing from it should not, either.”

5. “Even if you’ve been mentally healthy your whole life, the stacked stresses of the pandemic, financial strain, and isolation may have pushed you into unknown territory.”

Dr. Daniel Amen is a world-renowned therapist who has written 10 New York Times best-selling books. His work now focuses on pandemic related mental health issues. One of his most notable recommendations is rewiring your brain’s negativity bias about self-isolating, quarantining, and social distancing. Instead of dreading the times we’re facing, try asking yourself questions like:

What do you enjoy about being at home?

What’s better about your life now that you don’t have to commute to work?

What has this time at home freed you up to do more of?

6. Friendship is as Important for Your Health as Diet and Exercise

Lydia Denworth is a science journalist and author of the book Friendship, where she explains the emotional, psychological, and evolutionary foundations of why we make friendships. According to her research, “With friends our attention becomes focused, distractions lessen, awareness of time disappears: We emerge into a world in which the intimacy and joy shared with others is the fundamental reality, and for a time the world becomes a different place.”

7. Accept and Embrace an Appropriate Amount of Grief

David Kessler is one of the world’s foremost experts on grief and loss. Unfortunately, society is undergoing more loss than it’s ever seen right now, whether that be loss of family, friends, money, occupation, or hope. Ramsey in his book, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief, explains how recognizing grief but then using it to find some sort of meaningful activity to do is critical right now.

8. Your Inner Biases do Not Control You

Light Watkins is a meditation teacher who focuses on bringing simplicity to the meditation practice. He recently discussed the importance of meditation in reconfiguring the mind to avoid implicit biases. By activating the mind through meditation, we are better able to understand where our biases come from and how we can get rid of them.

9. Everybody Panics

Perpetua Neo blends concepts from neuroscience, psychology and ancient wisdom. She recently published an article about panic attacks based on her own personal experience. In it she describes how truthfully, none of us are in control, and based on external factors anybody can experience a panic attack. But, once you understand this, you can begin the internal work to realize that they can be easily overcome with certain tangible steps and the appropriate mindset.

10. Emotional Agility Serves as a Roadmap for Real Behavioral Change

Susan David is the mother of emotional agility. In her Wall Street Journal #1 best-selling book about the subject, she emphasizes that emotionally agile people are not immune to the daily stress we all encounter in our everyday lives. The key difference though is that they know how to gain critical insight about situations and interactions from their feelings, and they use this knowledge to adapt, align their values and actions, and make changes that move them forward in the best way possible.