Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the show. Got a great show plan for you. And unfortunately,

fortunately and unfortunately difficult times. And so tonight's topic is going to be really how to

take care of ourselves in this dark time, seeing what's happening. And yeah, and I wish I had a

magic bullet. Three quick easy tricks, you know, easy tips and tools as a way to kind of work through all this.

But what's going on around us warrants a lot of the responses that we're having. Remember, mental health is not the absence of fear, anxiety, worry, depression, or stress. It's the management of that because at times, like now, it's a healthy response to have

some stress, some anxiety, some fear, some depression, some, you know, I want those things

to galvanize us.

I want them to be motivating.

I want them to force us to take action.

But mental health, again, is not, you know, hum in a tune and smiling

and having, you know, rainbows pop out of your butt during a difficult, dark time like what's

happening right now in our country. We should feel bad. That's an appropriate response. It's

mentally healthy to feel appropriate responses to the appropriate levels of

severity of what's happening and bad, bad things are happening. So, you know, am I going to

give you some toxic positivity tonight? Absolutely not. But we're going to have some real talk

about how to best manage our mental health while all this is happening.

Because again, mental health is not about denying or making bad appropriate feelings and responses.

We acknowledge what we're feeling.

But we also don't amplify, catastrophize, or dramatize.

We sit in the middle.

And we truly feel what we're feeling. We don't

amp it up. We don't crank it down if it's an appropriate response. And again, right now,

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