Are you worried about your child's mental health?

Hello, this is Shellee Howard with College Ready. I am the CEO, and I have the honor of speaking with Patricia. Please, Patricia, introduce yourself to our families.

Thank you so much for having me, Shellee. It's such a pleasure to be here. My name is Patricia George. I'm a professor at USC, and I teach all kinds of different classes from introductory level up to the 400-level courses. Um, I went to USC for my graduate school, and I was the first person to be concurrently enrolled in two doctoral programs. So I have a doctorate, a doctorate in brain and cognitive sciences and in clinical psychology as well.

Outstanding. I feel so fortunate. Our students, you know, every one of them listening to this, and the parents will have such great perspective. We're going to talk about happiness. What a great topic. Can you tell us how you decided where you want to go to school, college, how you decided to become a professor, what it's like to teach college students before we get into the, the meat part of happiness and how that all happens?

Absolutely.

My path was probably— it's probably a pretty unique path, actually. I went to college at Scripps College, one of the Claremont Colleges. And I went there because that's where my parents told me I was going. So I didn't have a lot of say in where I went to college. And coming out of undergrad, I ended up putting myself through undergrad. And so I graduated a semester early. I graduated in 3 and a half years. And yeah, applied for graduate schools. And I was dating a cute boy who later became my husband. So he was at USC Law School, and I applied to a whole bunch of different universities in Southern California and was accepted to a lab in, um, at USC. So I was working in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program, specifically studying the differences between the two hemispheres of the brain. So what, what the right hemisphere specializes in versus the left hemisphere. And as I further pursued that, I, I understood that my my interests were not in normal college students, but really I was interested in clinical populations. And so in order to be able to work with clinical populations like stroke patients or people who have Alzheimer's disease, something like that, you really needed to have a clinical license. And so I then applied for another doctoral program for the clinical psychology program. So I was a third year in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program and a first year in the clinical psych—

Wow.

Outstanding.

Thank you.

I went on, I had 3 kids before I graduated in 8 years, and USC was incredibly supportive. They, they really do a lot to encourage you to be a whole well-rounded person and not just, you know, a professor, a publisher parish. They really want you to, to be a whole person, and I see that still as a professor there, actually, that they really care about each individual student. I really love the university. I stayed home with my kids for 11 years. I was a stay-at-home mom, which was the greatest honor of my life. And every year one of my doctoral advisors wrote to me and said, I have a job for you when you're ready. So about 3 years ago, I wrote to her and I said, I'm ready. And she said, I have a job for you. So I went back and started teaching at USC, and I'm, I'm just I'm so pleased to be there. I love the university. I love the students. It is, it is really a pleasure and an honor to be there with, with such smart kids. They're really smart kids.

Outstanding. For those of you who don't know what you want to do, I speak to a lot of, you know, teenagers. This is a great example of how somebody pivoted based on where they started and where they ended, but ultimately Such a great story. So thank you for sharing.

Now, go ahead.

Sure.

I just really want to share about that is something that I tell my college students all the time because I think we put so much pressure on our youth to know what they want to be when they grow up. From the time they're 5, we're asking them and they don't even know what the options are. And, you know, the average person has 3 careers in their life. And it's just, I think that that's a really important fact to put in the back of your head that You know, you can major in engineering and it doesn't mean you have to be an engineer. It doesn't mean you're going to work at Northrop Grumman for your whole life. You can do different things. Yeah, absolutely.

So today we're going to talk about the state of affairs and what's going on. And, you know, it can go kind of sad, but let's talk about happiness. Let's talk about turning lemons into lemonade and how we can help our students the best version of them while supporting them where they're at. So, um, what are you seeing amongst your students right now?

You know, it's a great question. So I'm a mom of 4. I have a 2nd grader, a 4th grader, a 6th grader, and an 8th grader. So it kind of runs the gamut from elementary to middle. And then of course I have all my college students who, you know, to me I treat them like they're my babies. You know, I always say my kids are going to go to college one day and You know, I want to treat them the way that I want someone else to treat my kids when they're in college, right? And so I really try to have and maintain an open environment where they can come and talk to me when they're feeling overwhelmed or stressed. And, you know, the truth of the matter is that, that the students are looking at all of the expectations that I think of as, as little bricks that go on our back. You know, you need to go to class and you need to do your, you know, do your tests and you have to write your papers and you have to go to your labs and, and then you're supposed to be social and you're supposed to be making friends and all the stressors that normally go with college. And then in addition to that, you're wearing masks and you're getting, you know, COVID tests at least once a week and you have to maintain this certain app on your phone in order to even get onto campus at USC. So if you fail the app, You miss class and that adds another stress, and then you don't have the club support and the, you know, and the parties that you're expecting to go to college. And so you just see, I just see these, these bricks that are building that each of these students can handle each one of these things individually, but when you put them all on the backs of these kids, these, these students who we're expecting to act like adults, even though their brains aren't even all the way developed, you know, I see, I see a lot of stress. In them. And, you know, I worry about them as— and it's funny that I worry so much about them, and then on December 7th of this year, the Surgeon General released a warning saying, you know, our youth, our adolescents up to 22 years old are on the precipice of a mental health crisis. And that came from the Surgeon General, which I was like, I know, I've been yelling about it. We need to support these kids, you know, and I know that For the kids who are in high school and applying to college, you know, it's just one more fear that they have about, am I going to get in? Am I doing enough? How do I overcome, you know, not being able to participate in my sports or whatever because of the COVID guidelines and restrictions, right? And so in seeing all this stress, I talk very openly with my students. And I was mentioning that when I was in graduate school, I TA'd a class called The Science of Happiness. And a couple of students approached me after class and said, USC doesn't offer that class anymore, but I would really like to take it. And so I approached the chair of my department, who's just wonderful, and I said, you know, my students are asking for this and I think it's a reasonable ask at this point. And the chair said, well, would, would you like to teach it? And I was like, I would love to teach it, yes please. So it, it had to go through, you know, nothing goes easily when you're adding a new class. You have to create the syllabus and you have to, you know, get it approved by a whole bunch of different groups on campus. So I'll start teaching that on campus in fall of 2022. But in the meantime, I've had all kinds of different groups reach out to me and just say, Trish, can you, can you come talk to my group? Can you come talk to my, you know, women's group? Or can you come talk to my club on campus? Can you Can you share a little bit about how we can become more, more happy? And what does that even mean?

Right? Mm-hmm. Which comes to my very next question. How do you define happiness? That seems so ambiguous. It's like a concept that's hard to wrap a teenager's mind around. They're just like pushing through right now. I feel like in my practice of helping students get into college and graduate debt-free, there is so much stress because there's pressure and there's anxiety, and then there's the unknown, and then there's COVID. We used to plan for Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C. Now it's Plan A, Plan B, and the COVID plan. So we truly have to pivot and help these students. And I, I feel like College Ready has really stepped up, and that's why I wanted to honor and have you meet our families because we want our students to understand it doesn't have to be stressful. It doesn't have to be overwhelming. We are there to support them and to mentor them. And so how do we, as a parent— I have 4 kids as well— how do we define happiness in our teenagers?

Yeah, I mean, it's such an abstract concept, and if you look online, there are all kinds of happiness scales, right? What are we doing to make ourselves happier, right? And what does it even mean to be happy? Is happy joy? Is happy a momentary mood, a flicker, you know, the way that you wake up in the morning, you feel happy? Is it life satisfaction? Is it how satisfied we are with the state of our being and what we're doing? Or is it an assessment of specific life domains, right? Is it how we're doing in our work, in our relationships, and our finances, and our health, all of these different domains, right? And they all feed into our baseline level of happiness. And one thing that I think is really interesting that has been discovered through a lot of twin studies is that we're actually born with a certain level of happiness, right? And so about 50% of our level of happiness or our general satisfaction with our life comes down to the genetics that are given to us, right? And so I was just reading this study that was a world study, and it said, you know, if we use the term of psychological well-being, how mentally healthy are people, Paraguay and Uruguay are the top-rated countries for psychological well-being, but If we define happiness based on life satisfaction, it's Finland and Denmark. So it varies depending on how we are even talking about and defining this very abstract, intangible concept of happiness, right?

For sure. So as, you know, as a parent or as a college consultant, when we are asking these students to think of a major, think of a career, think think beyond what they possibly have the knowledge to do. And yet we balance— we want them to be happy, but we have reality of it's competitive. And how do I help them stand out? And how much is, is the right, you know, amount of support? And I have parents hire me just so they don't have to nag at their kid to complete applications on time, because I do it joyfully and I do it love and kindness and getting them what they want. So I believe these teenagers are looking for some support to feel less pressure, and that leads into happiness. Am I on track? Is that what you're seeing?

Yeah, I mean, we are seeing, uh, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, suicidality, and suicidal ideations are at an all-time high. That's where the Surgeon General's warning comes from, and It's specifically for kids aged 10 to 22 or 24, depending on what studies you, you read. And, you know, I know a year ago what we were seeing in ERs was that in the local ER to where, near where I live, I was talking to some of the doctors and they said they're seeing adolescents come in at a 3 to 1 ratio of mental health issues compared to COVID. And, you know, I think that the number one thing that we need to do, which is is maybe related to happiness and maybe just related to an understanding of where our country is, which is that we prioritize physical health over mental health in every aspect. We don't even talk about it. And we don't make it okay to say, "I'm too anxious," or, "I'm too stressed." We say, "No, take the AP class because if you don't take that 5th AP class this semester, then you're not gonna get into a good college." Okay, well, is, is going to that good college, is going to Stanford over USC, is that going to change your life trajectory? Is it going to change your level of happiness? Is it, is, is anything more important than that level of happiness? Is, is a certain job? No, we've established in the literature that a certain job is not going to make you more happy. Is a certain income level? No, we've established in the literature that making $10 million a year versus what a blue-collar worker makes who's able to pay their bills and get by, those people are marginally, marginally more happy. So, you know, the things that we— and the Dalai Lama has a great quote about this, about how, you know, the things that we value in our society are based on external materialistic circumstances, right? And really, happiness comes from inside. So our ability to achieve, our ability to meet our goals, right? And our satisfaction with the way we're going about our day. So happiness is not— it's not a goal point. It's not an end point. We don't reach happiness and we're done. Yay, we did it! There's no, there's no end to that. We're always striving to achieve our goals, but to be satisfied comes from, from inside. So the pressures that are coming from outside are causing this anxiety that isn't allowing the child or adult, because let's face it, we're all there at certain times, it isn't allowing us to, to feel fulfilled right, which isn't allowing us to achieve this level of happiness that, that we are striving for. And then the other part of it is, there's, there's a theory out there that's been shown multiple times, which shows that there's something called the hegemonic treadmill. And what that means is that we all have this baseline level of happiness. And no matter what happens in our life, we could have, you know, the death of a loved one, or we could inherit $400 million. It doesn't really matter because we have this base level of happiness that comes from inside, and it's always going to be where we return. So people can, can suffer a huge trauma, or people can have a great boon, and at the end of the day, their baseline level of happiness is always going to almost return to the same set point. We have a set point level of happiness, just like our bodies have a baseline set point level of our weight, right? You can change it over time by changing habits and using different strategies and techniques, but generally, like, Eeyore is never going to be Tigger. He is just not going to be.

He is probably not.

There are things he could do to be a little more like Tigger, but Eeyore is not going to be Tigger.

Great, great. So, you know, in our world, we do one-to-one mentoring with our, our high school, middle school students, even our transfer college students. And we're always striving to simplify life and not make it overwhelming. And so we, we focus on 3 things: academic fit, social fit, and financial fit. In a perfect world, we have them all. In the world of happiness, how would one get to or improve their level of happiness? Is there anything we can do as parents, as students, to achieve happiness?

Yeah, great question. So it's important to know that just because you're a happy person doesn't mean you never feel other emotions, right? So I'm a generally happy person. I'm outgoing and I'm silly and, you know, I'm affable. But You know, I still feel anxious sometimes and I still feel sad sometimes. So it is normal to not always be happy. In fact, you know, just like that, that quote, you know, you, you can't have a rainbow without the rain. We have to have a whole range of emotions in order to achieve happiness because you can't be happy if you've never known sad or anxious or stressed. Simplification is a great way to help bolster happiness, right? You know, there are strategies and techniques that we can use to make ourselves more happy, but I think if you're, if you're a parent who's trying to help a child, the number one thing we can do is listen to what they're saying and even what they're not saying. If your child used to be super social and loved to be out and all of a sudden they'd rather be in their room, you know, curled up with a book, there's nothing wrong with that occasionally. But if you're seeing changes in your child, or your child is using those words, I'm anxious, I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed, that's a huge red flag that it's time for us as parents, as educators, as, as, you know, helpers to, to intervene and to say, okay, no, what, like, what is it? Like I just said to my son the other day, my 6th grader, I said to him, what can I take off your plate? Is it soccer? Is soccer too much? You know, and he said, Mommy, soccer is the only thing that makes me smile right now. And I said, well, unfortunately, I can't remove your homework, which is probably what you're, what you're going for right now. But yeah, you know, being aware and allowing the expression of those negative emotions actually encourages happiness, right? Like when I was a kid, my parents said to me like, oh, shake it off, or, you know, no one wants to be around you when you're you know, Debbie Downer or something like that, you know, cheer up, you know, like, no, it's okay to feel those sad and anxious and frustrated feelings and to express them and then to understand where they come from. Because if they are coming from that 6th AP class, then that tells you something, you know, that tells you something. We put pressure on our kids in our school system from the time they're 5 years old We're asking them to do things that are not biologically— they shouldn't be, like, they shouldn't be reading at 5 years old. Now, some kids do, but most kids, their brains are not developed enough to be reading. And now when you go into kindergarten, at least in the area where I live, if you're not reading, you're behind. So we're taking 5-year-olds and we're stressing them from the time that they're 5. By the time they get to college, they're all taking anxiety medication. So lowering that stress and allowing them to understand, you know, it might be like one of my kids, she started reading when she was 4.

Okay, great.

She's a great reader.

It's normal for her to be reading at the age of 4.

But you know, I have a 7-year-old who's still struggling with it. And I'm like, you know what, but you're a rock star on the back of a horse. So acknowledging those strengths and weaknesses that everyone has and acknowledging like, You are going to have these strengths in your life and you're going to have these difficulties in your life, and, and it doesn't make you better or worse than a sibling or a friend or the valedictorian of the class. It doesn't. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and that's okay to know what they are and to know how to navigate ourselves to, to be the best version of us that we are. Right?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, that reminds me of a great story. I was sitting at my son's graduation, his high school graduation. And of course, I'm a proud parent. I'm like, he's graduating high school. My job is done, I thought. And I was sitting in the front row and he went up to give a salutatorian speech and I was beaming with pride. And a young man next to me says, dude, I didn't even know that kid was smart. And it's because he was just so normal. He He was a normal, happy— he didn't have the perfect GPA. He didn't even have the perfect test score. He had a really great strategy. And yes, getting into 7 top-tier schools was huge, and going to Harvard for free was game-changing. But ultimately, he's choosing to be a doctor because he wants to help people. So his core value is what it was when he was 3 years old. It hasn't changed that he was picking up and helping people as a child. And I remember nurturing that, thinking, that is so sweet, that, that is your gift, is bringing people along. And so I would encourage people listening to what you're saying to really focus on their core values and think of, how do I help this child be the best version of them? Yes, because that's what we do in College Ready. Our program is, yes, being college ready, but it's more being life ready. We're helping them not only get into college but to graduate and be able to have a job they're gonna love, not a life sentence. So focusing first on their core values and really their strengths and helping them just you know, master the things that they're really good at gives them that sense of, I am okay, I, I am living my purpose. And sometimes we can see they start like this, and by the end, their little shoulders are coming on down and they're smiling again. And so I encourage families to, to seek you out. And if they're struggling with, how do I know if it's a teenage thing or if it's truly a happiness thing, how might they find you? How, how can they get more information?

Great. Yeah, I speak at all, in all different venues. Um, there are a few, a few high schools where I'm speaking and I'm going to an in-service for the teachers, and then I'm teaching or talking to the parents that evening, and then I'm talking to the students the next day. I talk to clubs, I talk to athletic clubs about mental resilience and happiness and how to come back once you've had You know, when she don't get— one of my friends just called and her daughter didn't get into Northwestern, and she was, you know, the tears, not just her daughter but her, like tears. And I'm like, okay, well, how do we come back from this? Like, let's teach how, how do we come back? You know, just like on the sports field, how do you come back when you're, when your scoreboard goes upside down and you're losing and you're like, oh, I want to give up now? How do you come back? So I talk to all different groups. I speak to corporations because we know that Happy employees are productive employees. Happy doctors make faster diagnoses. We, we know, we've done the research. We know that happiness, the mental state of someone, is so important. So I speak to all different kinds of groups and all different kinds of venues. The best way to get in touch with me is email. My email is trish.george@gmail.com. Very easy, traditional name, trish.george@gmail.com. I also have an Instagram. It's private, so you have to request me, but it's trish.george, very easy, trish.george. So those are probably the two best ways to get in touch with me, and I'm very open to speaking on Zoom or in person. I'm very passionate about this topic, and I am, I am really worried about our youth, and so I do think that providing strategies and techniques for improving our levels of happiness is only a positive thing. Now, I have one last question for you. Yes.

What do you think is the number one thing that has been shown in the literature to increase happiness?

The number one thing. I immediately went to me. Literature, I'm like, I've read books. Harvard has a great study that I've read. But in general, I would say feeling loved.

Oh, that's a good one. That's a good one. We do need to feel loved and we do need to feel like we belong. That is actually one of the top things. But the very, very top thing that brings people happiness is doing something for someone else. Yeah. And every time I say it, people go, of course that's what it is. But no one ever comes up with it. So, you know, if you're having a bad day, if you're feeling really down and unhappy, try doing something for someone else because, you know, you know that feeling of how it feels to give of yourself. And yeah, that always, it always brings more happiness to people.

I love that.

So in our program, we do what's called Passion with a Purpose. And it's our standout strategy in the College Ready Plan. Not only does it teach students what their gifts and talents are, but it helps them to verbalize, this is what is important to me, what I truly value and love, this is what I want to see changed in the world, and I am going to lead others to create change. So we are doing exactly the number one thing, which makes me so proud, because Passion with a Purpose has got our students into all of the top universities without having the perfect GPA and without having the perfect test score and without having a million APs. And I think it's also making them a better adult. Just imagine what life would be like if every 17-year-old did 200 service hours before they graduated high school. What kind of world would we live in? A happy one.

A happy one.

Absolutely. So if anybody who's listening would like a free discovery call with myself please go to podcast.collegereadyplan.com or event.collegereadyplan.com or just our website collegereadyplan.com. We want to support you and thank you, thank you so much for coming and sharing your brilliance with us. We are truly grateful.

Thank you, thank you for having me.

You're welcome.