How to Regain Control of Your Mental Health

Goal achievers, welcome to the Achiever Goals podcast. This is your host, Hal Elrod, and it's our first solo episode in a while. I've been sick for 14 days, which actually has nothing to do with why it's our first solo episode, but I thought I'd let you know it's very abnormal. Normally if I'm sick, it's like, you know, I'm over it in a day, maybe two or three. It's fast. But I caught something that I don't know what it is. It's some sort of weird virus or bacterial infection, I don't know. But I finally broke down and took some antibiotics and I'm starting to feel better, which is important because I'm leaving today on a field trip with my son. And today is going to be a short episode because I'm leaving on a field trip with my son. I got to get this episode done. But I'm not going to skimp on quality for you, right? Quality over quantity. One of my coaches used to say, Jeff Sooey, his calls were like 30 minutes long. His coaching calls, and a lot of coaches were doing hour long calls. And the way he explained it, he goes, look, if you went to a mechanic with your broken car and they said, hey, I have two methods to fix your car. One takes an hour and one takes 30 minutes. But the result is the exact same. Your car will be fixed. Which would you prefer? And, you know, you go, well, I guess I'll do the 30 minute one. If it's the same result, it's faster. Why not? He said, exactly. That's how my coaching works. I'm going to get you the result you want in less time. And I was like, yeah, that's a pretty good way to put it. So let's take that same approach for today. Today we're talking about how to regain control of your mental health. And I know that for just about everybody listening, myself included, mental health is. It's a hot topic right now, probably. I mean, has been for a long time. But ever since the pandemic especially, right? It's like we were really put into conditions, separated from our loved ones, not allowed to see people that we love that might be sick or even dying in a hospital. I mean, I don't need to get it, you know what I'm talking about, and isolated and feeling very unsure, unsafe of the future, on and on and on. And so our mental health was really put to the test in ways that maybe it hadn't before. And ever since the pandemic in 2020. I have said repeatedly, and if you're listening to the show, you've heard me say this, that when we focus on that which is out of our control, we feel out of control. And feeling out of control causes to experience unhealthy and unnecessary, which is the important part. Unnecessary, we don't have to, but it causes us to experience unnecessary and unhealthy stress and anxiety, which compounded, can lead to depression. And a lot of folks have found themselves, you know, in 2020, I went through a really debilitating depression and found no way out of it. And that's why it's something that I. For those that are still struggling with their mental health, I want to share as much as I can around being able to gain control of your mental health and feel good and enjoy this one life that you've been blessed to live. You think about it. At the end of life, I think that we're going to look back and if we spent a good part of our life miserable, where we didn't allow ourselves to be happy, we didn't allow ourselves to find inner peace.

We blamed outside forces on our mental and emotional state. I believe we're going to look back at the end and go, man, why did I do that? I wasted so much of my life being miserable when I could have been happy. Doesn't mean life was perfect or it was even good all the time. In fact, it was. I struggled a lot, but I could have allowed myself to be at peace in the moments of struggle rather than all tense and tight and scared and afraid and right. Like we've been conditioned as a society to think that our outer world dictates our inner world. And it only does if you either are unaware that there is a. That you can take control or you allow it to. If you allow your outer world to dictate your inner world and you go, oh, bad things happen and I feel bad and I am not in control of that because these bad things are happening to me. And I'm a victim. I'm a victim of my circumstances. I'm a victim of my emotional state. I'm not in control. I'm at the mercy of, of other people and events and circumstances. If you allow yourself to live that way, that is your reality. But I'm here to, hopefully to encourage you, to reach my hand out, to invite you that there's a different way of living, of interpreting life, of responding to life that allows you to be completely at peace no matter what happens to you. And I believe that I was put through some pretty horrific experiences to teach this lesson, right? My car accident and being told I would never walk again. It's pretty difficult to deal with that kind of reality, to wake up from a coma and be told, dude, you have 11 broken bones, you're never going to walk again. And then I feel like I was gifted with.

I don't know, God's grace, wisdom, mentors that influence whatever it was I was gifted with, this ability to realize, oh, I don't have to allow these unimaginable, painful, horrible circumstances to determine how I feel. I can choose to be the happiest and most grateful I've ever been while I endure the most difficult time in my life. And then when I was diagnosed with cancer and told I was probably going to die that same day, I made the same decision that I'm going to be at peace and I'm going to be happy and I'm going to be grateful, even as I suffer and I endure the most. And here's what I realized, by the way, and we're going to talk about this today. If you remember nothing else from this episode, remember this. There's a lot more you'll want to remember, but remember this one. Gratitude liberates us from suffering. Write that one down if you got a pen nearby. If you're driving, don't try to write it down unless you can pull over. Gratitude liberates us from suffering. What does that mean? Well, if you're in the midst of a painful, difficult experience and you are suffering.

Then.

If you stop and you pause and you focus on what you have to be grateful for in your life.

You'Ll notice if you're watching this. I'm recording this on video right now, which will go on my YouTube channel, I would imagine. But as I started to think of something I was grateful for.

My face contorted in a positive way into a smile. Like, I just started smiling.

And gratitude is the doorway to happiness. It's the doorway to happiness, and you have to walk through it every day. What does that mean? Walking through it means spending time focusing on what you're grateful for every single day, hardwiring it into your nervous system, embedding it into your subconscious. Gratitude may be the single most important activity. Notice I didn't say feeling or emotional state. It's all of those things. But gratitude as an activity, which is what produces the feeling and what fosters the emotional state and what conditions the state of consciousness, that is gratitude. Now, let me make a distinction there for a moment. I Talk about. In the new Miracle Morning book, the updated and expanded edition, there's a chapter called the Miracle Life. And in that chapter I talk about gratitude. How to be grateful for literally every single moment of your life, even the painful ones, the difficult ones, the unbearable ones. And.

I talk about gratitude exists both as an emotional state, a feeling, and as a state of consciousness. Now, what is the difference? Well, gratitude and the way I. In the book I spell, I say gratitude, little G, like gratitude with a little G. It's a feeling when you focus on something that you're happy about, that you feel good about, that you're grateful for. Then you naturally feel grateful and you feel good, right? It feels good, but it's arguably temporary because it's only when you're focusing on that thing or that person or that event or that experience that you're grateful for that you get to feel grateful, Right? Gratitude of the little G is an emotional state. It is a feeling and it is temporary. It is potentially short lived because as soon as you're focused on something that you're not grateful for, something that upsets you, that feeling goes away. And now you're not experiencing gratitude with a little G anymore. And then there's gratitude with a big G. What's the difference? Gratitude with a big G, a capital G is a state of consciousness. And here's the distinction. Gratitude with a little G is something you experience when you're grateful for something. Gratitude with a big G is a state of consciousness. And I don't know if I said it, I might have accidentally said that the first time. Gratitude's an emotional state with a little G when you're grateful for something. Gratitude with a big G. It's a state of consciousness when you're grateful for everything, when it's your lens for how you view the world.

Now we'll come back to gratitude, but I want to go, I want to talk about psychological safety for a minute. I recently had a distinction around this that I think can be extremely valuable. It has been, for me, really useful. I was speaking at an event a couple weeks ago and somebody in the audience said that he listens to the podcast every week and he's heard me talk about that. I'm writing the new updated and expanded edition of the Miracle Morning, which I just sent off the final manuscript this morning, although I sent off the final manuscript like a month ago. And the editor came back and said you need to cut 10 to 15,000 words. It's too bloated, you wrote too much. And I'm like, okay, so I had written 35,000 new words. And he said that 20 to 25,000 was the sweet spot where we needed to be. That's new words in addition to the 55,000 original words. But anyway, so I was speaking at this event, it was a gobundance event, and he said he listened to the podcast and he heard me talk about how I've been writing the new book and that there are two new chapters in the new edition, the Miracle Evening and the Miracle Life. And he said, he specifically asked about the miracle evening. He said he's really struggles with falling asleep at night. He said he, you know, at night his mind is racing. He stresses out, he's feeling stressed. He's worrying about things, he's worrying about his life. He's worried about the. The future, the unknown state of the world. You know, I'd imagine unless you're hiding under a rock, you're. You're watching our society go in some kind of, you know, pretty concerning directions. And, you know, yeah, I won't go too into depth, but I would just, I would imagine that. I would imagine you have things in your life that you worry about, that you're stressed about, whether they're personal situations, whether they're societal, you know, concerns, relational conflicts. I'd imagine you got things, you know, I got. You got enough on your plate, things you can worry about. And so he said at night, right, his mind's racing and he can't relax his mind, he can't calm down, and he has trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. And so he asked me if I would share the miracle evening with him. And as I started to share, here's the distinction that I. That came up for me, and this has been really. In fact, I literally added this to the new edition of the book after I realized this, because I never thought of it this way. And what came up is I realized that when we worry about things that are out of our control, you know, normally I say we feel out of control, but here's what we really feel. Yeah, we feel out of control. But what is that? What's at the root of that? Or. Or what does feeling out of control, how does that make us feel? And here's the word. It's unsafe. We feel unsafe. And feeling safe is our most fundamental psychological need. When we don't feel safe, our nervous system is threatened and it engages our fight or flight response. Now, this is detrimental any time of day, right? But in the case of preparing yourself to fall asleep and relax at night, so you can close your mind off and quiet it and go to bed. It's nearly impossible to relax and fall asleep peacefully when we feel unsafe. So I want you to think about that for a second. If you're worried about your finances, you don't feel safe around your finances. If you're worried about your marriage and that it might not work, that your partner might leave you or that y' all might get divorced, or just that the fighting is just that you just can't do it anymore. What you're really feeling, you might not call it, you might not use this word, but I want you to really start thinking about this. Because if you can't name the root of the problem, you can't solve it, right? Superficially, it's the conflict with your spouse. Superficially, it's your financial issues, right? Those are the topical causes of you feeling stressed and afraid. But what they're really causing is they're causing you to feel unsafe. And as I just said, if you feel unsafe, you're going to experience stress and fear and depression and anxiety, and you're going to be in fight or flight all the time. You are hardwired. We are hardwired from our cavemen and women ancestry to live by fight or flight. But it was to keep us safe from reality dangers, right? It was the saber tooth tiger that a real thing or saber tooth tigers killing people, I don't know, but it was, it was like, you know, the real life or death situations. And in some cases that, you know, when I had cancer, I mean, I felt unsafe for sure. But here's the good news for me. The good news for you is that when it comes to creating psychological safety, you are in control. You get to do it. You have the power to create psychological safety for yourself every day, 24 hours a day, all the time. When you're falling asleep at night, when you wake up in the morning, when you find yourself stressed in the middle of the day, feeling unsafe, which again, you might not have named it that, but I'm encouraging you to really consider that that's what at the root of the stress that we feel, we don't feel safe. And I want you to think about the opposite. And this is especially crucial when falling asleep. In fact, it's one of the first parts of what I affirm as I lay down to go to sleep, to flip that switch.

That switch of, you know, if you've heard me talk about the miracle evening I talk about, it's based on this fundamental realization that at bedtime, right when it's time to turn the lights off and wind down and put our head on the pillow, we have one objective. And most of us are terrible at realizing this is our objective, and we're terrible at implementing this as our objective. Our only objective is to prepare our mind and our body to get into a state of calm and now safety.

And peace and bliss and gratitude.

It's just to get into a optimal state.

To fall asleep. That's it. When it's bedtime, that's your only objective. But most of us don't have. We're not aware of that. You know, I use. I wasn't aware of that for a long time, and I suffered. I suffered severe insomnia and chronic sleep deprivation for almost half of a year. Because until I realized that and I was like, oh. Huh? My only objective is to prepare my mind and body for blissful sleep, restful sleep, relaxed, safe, peaceful sleep.

So therefore, if that's my singular objective.

It only makes sense that I align every aspect of my being, my thoughts, my feelings, my focus.

My physical environment, everything.

Should be aligned with that singular objective, to fall asleep peacefully.

And you can relate a very similar objective to your daily life. I don't know about you, but my objective is to enjoy this one life that I've been blessed to live. It doesn't mean that I live in denial, that there are difficult times and difficult moments and circumstances and situations, and that in some moments I'm not going to enjoy it. But I do know that that's my objective. And so it is my North Star. It's where I return to. I'm always striving to align my thoughts, words and actions with my objective to enjoy every moment. I have a big, beautiful wooden, kind of like a canvas, but it's wood. It's not made of fabric. And it's got a picture of a dock that goes into the ocean with. Or a lake with mountains in the background. It's a really serene image. And it says in all capital letters, enjoy every moment. That's in the front room when you walk into our house. And that's my objective, to enjoy every moment of this one life we've been blessed to live.

And here's the thing.

That wasn't always my objective. I wasn't aware of it. I was in a reactive state. You could probably relate to that. I think that's. Most people are in a reactive state where, again, it's like, you've heard me say this before, but I think it is worth repeating. Most of us live in the paradigm that says when good things happen, I get to feel good, but when bad things happen, I have to feel bad, right? Good things happen, I feel good, bad things happen, I feel bad. In other words, I'm not in control of how I feel. The outer world is in control of how I feel. External forces are in control of how I feel. And again, if you allow that to be the case, then it is absolutely the truth. And if you don't allow that to be the case and you choose otherwise, I venture to say if you choose better, which is like, how about instead of when bad things happen, I feel bad, and good things happen, I feel good, right? The new paradigm that I'm offering, it's the miracle life paradigm, is that no matter what happens.

We get to choose how we feel. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to be. I don't want to live in fear and depression and anxiety and stress and. And misery. And it's one of the most empowering realizations to realize, oh, I don't have to anymore. And by the way, it's not as easy as snapping your fingers. This is a matter of conditioning. In the Miracle Life chapter in the book I Give Y' All A Miracle Life, I basically summarize the entire chapter. And it's like a 10,000 word chapter. It's huge. But anyway, I summarize the entire chapter. And in a Miracle Life affirmation, which it basically lays it all out, reminds you of everything you just read in one page. But the point is, I say read this every single day for 30 days, minimum. You've got to recondition your consciousness, elevate your consciousness. You've got to reprogram your subconscious mind. You've got to reinforce this new paradigm of I choose. No matter what happens, I choose how I feel. I get to choose how I experience every moment of my life, even the painful ones. I can be grateful for the growth I'm experiencing while enduring the pain. Cause haven't we all had that experience where you look back at some difficult moment in your life? It could have been the hardest moment you ever went through. Or not. Just a moment, a time in your life, a period. It might have been months or years. And you look back and you're like, man, I. It almost killed me. But I'm better because of it, right? I mean, it's, you know, it's almost cliche. It is cliche, that adage. If it doesn't kill me, it makes me stronger. But if you. If that is Your truth. It is the truth. If that, if you live by that paradigm doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger, right. Then you can choose to me, the greater the adversity, the greater the opportunity for us to evolve in the midst of that adversity, to grow, to become stronger. Just like working out, the greater the, you know, the stress you put your muscles through and you tear them down and you're sore for days. The more they grow and the stronger you become. And it's the same with your mental and emotional well being and it's the same with your consciousness and your states of consciousness, the more you endure. If you take it head on and you approach it with that mindset of this is here to serve me, right? Is it Tone? Oh, that's so funny. Siri. Just thought I talked to her, she said on it. I don't know what she's searching for. No, Siri, no. Thanks.

Anyway. Where was I going with that?

So in terms of creating, let's go back here to creating psychological safety. Unless we are in immediate danger, some sort of immediate danger, which is very rare, right? Like you think about when you're feeling stressed and like, and worried, it's nothing that's actually happening right now. It's something that is happening like in this moment, right? It's something that you're worried about in the future or it's something that's happening outside of the moment, right? Meaning like if you're having financial struggles, there's no threat in this moment, right? Nothing's hurting you in this moment. Trust me, I've been there before where I can't pay my bills. That sure feels like an immediate threat, but it's actually not.

Stop and take a breath.

And think about that for a second. It's not an immediate threat. You're not in immediate danger if your bank account balance is in the red.

That's a situation that needs to be dealt with. But in this moment, think about this. In this moment, you can either be in fear and anxiety and stress because your bank account balance is in the red or you can remind yourself, I'm safe in this moment. Yeah. I've got a bank account balance that's negative and that sucks, man. I got a. I'm going to figure that out and I'm going to figure it out and I'm working on it. But I don't have to be miserable in this moment. I don't have to live in fear and stress and anxiety and depression because of that. I'm safe, right? My negative bank Account balance isn't going to walk through the door, Right. It's not going to walk the door and stab you. It's not going to get right. You're not in immediate danger. But you think you are. We think we are. We go into fight or flight. When we think about the bank balance, when we think about our spouse and the argument we had with them or the next one that's on the horizon, right. We think about. We feel like we are in danger, but we're not. And so by simply acknowledging and affirming that we are indeed safe, in any moment.

We can let go of that unsafe feeling that causes us so much inner turmoil. And if we relate it back to going to bed at night, right. As you lay down to go to bed every night, your miracle evening, the basis of it, Two parts. Number one, remind yourself your only objective at bedtime is to set your mind and body up for optimal sleep. I like the word blissful sleep because I like to fall asleep feeling good and grateful.

It can be peaceful sleep, restful sleep, whatever word resonates with you. But by simply acknowledging and affirming that you are indeed safe as you lay down to bed, you can enter a state of psychological safety and you can do the same thing any time of day.

How are we doing on time? All right, let's keep going. I got a little bit more. All right, here we go.

I want to talk. I mentioned that we were going to circle back to gratitude. We opened up with gratitude and I said it may be the single most important determining factor in your mental and emotional well being. That gratitude is the doorway to. To happiness, but that you have to walk through it every day. I want to talk about gratitude in the context.

And regaining control of your mental health in the context of the things you're afraid of.

And I'm talking. Let's go to the extreme. I know that there are some people right now.

That are talking about the collapse of society. Okay. And very smart people, by the way. Ray Dalio, one of the arguably the smartest investors in the world. Ray Dalio has recorded videos on YouTube. What did he call it? I'm drawing a blank. The Changing New. The Changing World Order. I think that's the name of his video and I think it's his new book. Anyway, sorry, I'm not looking at it right now, but Ray Dalio, I've watched his interviews and he's talking about. He studied the collapse of all other societies throughout history from the Romans. And I'm not a good history buff, but he is. And he talks about all of the factors, all of the things that led to the collapse of other societies. We are on that trajectory. And I know that's a sobering truth, and it could be arguably terrifying, but I want to go here. I want to go here. Okay? It's important that we go here. Margaret Wheatley. Margaret Wheatley wrote a book called who Do we choose to Be? I think I've read a chapter out of that book. Margaret Wheatley coaches my good friend John Berghoff. And by the way, her book, who Do we choose to Be, probably one of my top 15 books of all time might be the top 10. And it basically, she studied the collapse of all societies and she realized we are headed that way. It's inevitable. Every great civilization, again, the Roman Empire, and I can't remember all the other ones, but there's a lot of them. They all. Every single one. None of them is still, you know, the great civilizations of the world, none of them are still at the top, right? And the United States, we've. We've passed our run, and it's always greed and corruption and lack of moral breakdown in the fabric of society. These are some of the factors that lead to societal collapses.

You know, I pray every day that for our country and for the world and that. That we all end up okay and that these potentially horrible things don't happen, Right? So I believe in maintaining unwavering faith and putting forth extraordinary effort in order to create miracles. So I do live that way, but I also consider other people's perspective. And Margaret Wheatley, by the way, I talked to John the other day. Again, John coaches with her. She is about to release an updated and expanded edition of her book, who Do we choose to Be? And again, the original book was about how society is eventually going to collapse. Who are we going to choose to be in the midst of the collapse? Because in the collapse of every other society, right, there are people that live in fear and cower and some that take their own life because they just can't handle it. And then there are others who are leaders. Not leaders by title, not they're a CEO or a president. No, they step up as leaders in their families and in their communities in the midst of chaos. And one of my takeaways from that book is, she says, they choose to be an island of sanity in a sea of chaos.

So no matter what happens in the future.

Personally, in our individual lives or in terms of a societal breakdown or anything in between, who are we going to choose to be? Who will we choose to be. And I don't know about you, but I'm going to choose to be a lighthouse for anyone that I can be. For those I love and those I lead. I will do everything in my power until my last breath to lead with love, to help others as much as I possibly can, in whatever ways I possibly can. And no matter what happens in the future, and this is where I want to speak to regaining our mental health, which is kind of the through line, the underlying theme of today's podcast episode. But no matter what happens in the future, and especially if things are going to be difficult or, you know.

Death, our fear of death, if death comes earlier than we'd like. Right. I'm using an extreme right. The ultimate finality in a person's life is death, of course. But no matter what's going to happen in the future, and I'm speaking to you right now, whatever your greatest fears are that keep you awake at night, that cause you mental and emotional turmoil.

No matter what's going to happen in the future, and especially if things are going to be extremely difficult, that's even more of a reason to live your life to the fullest every single day.

Let's not waste our lives worrying about the unknown future. Truly experience every day day as the best day of your life. Enjoy every moment, and I taught you how to do it in this podcast episode. You deserve nothing less. You've been blessed with one life. And last night, what inspired today's podcast is last night I was thinking about the future and all the fears that I have and concerns that I have. And I thought, you know, none of us know how much more time we have on the earth. You know, I could get hit by a bus today. Knock on wood. Pray that doesn't happen. But.

None of us know how much time we have left. We don't know what the future holds.

If you or I were told that, hey, you have one week to live, you have one week to live, right? And this is what I thought about last night. And this is, I want to kind of end us with this frame of reference. If we were told we had one week to live or one month to live, let's go one month. It gives us a little more time. One month to live, right? You were told you had one month to live in. For most of us, probably 99.99% of people listening right now have more than a month to live, right? I mean, almost everybody listening, we got more than a month. But let's just say we found out we had One month to live, and we knew with certainty we were going to die in one month. How would you live this last month?

Now, you could live it in fear. You could be depressed that life is going to end in a month.

Or.

You could enjoy every moment. You could experience every moment being fully present to the miracle of the moment that you are witnessing, that you are experiencing. You could be the most grateful you have ever been for every breath that you take, every step that you take, every conversation that you have looking into the eyes of a loved one. It could be the most meaningful moment. Every day, every moment.

And this month could be the best month of your life.

And that's how I'm encouraging you to live every day for however long that you have and that I have. Whether we've got a month or a year or a decade or anywhere in between or more, let's enjoy this one life we've been blessed to live because we only get to do it once. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to get to the end. Whether it's a month from now or, you know, in a hospital bed or up in heaven looking down, I don't want to get to that point and look back, go, wow, man. I spent so much of my life worried about things that whether they happened or not, I didn't have to wor. The worry didn't change them. It just made me miserable. What a waste of my life. And I don't know about you, but I am not willing to waste this one life I've been blessed to live. I want to enjoy every moment and I want you to do the same. And I love you. And as someone who loves you, I would imagine if you love your children, for example, or if you don't have children, think about someone you love. Don't you want them to be happy? Don't you want them to be grateful to enjoy this one life they've been blessed to live? Well, I want that for you. I want that for all of us. And here's the great part. It's up to us. It has nothing, not nothing, but close to nothing to do with what happens to us. Because as I've experienced, even in the worst of circumstances, we can choose to be happy, grateful, at peace with what we can't change. We can give ourselves the gift of psychological safety.

In every moment, and we can enjoy this one life we've been blessed to live. All right, goal achievers and members of the Miracle Morning community, I love you so much. Thanks for listening. I'M going camping today with my son. We're going to a dude ranch. We're doing horseback riding and hiking and cave exploring and all sorts of fun stuff. So I hope you have a great week, and I will talk to y' all next week. Take care.