{"id":123278,"date":"2019-05-10T17:41:34","date_gmt":"2019-05-10T21:41:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wanderlust.com\/?p=123278\/"},"modified":"2019-05-10T17:41:34","modified_gmt":"2019-05-10T21:41:34","slug":"may-is-mental-health-awareness-month-mindfulness-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wanderlust.com\/pt-pt\/journal\/may-is-mental-health-awareness-month-mindfulness-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Mindfulness Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

May is mental health awareness month and therefore a very meaningful month for me. My current role as the founder of WellBe<\/a>, a board certified patient advocate and a speaker on the topic of wellness and a holistic approach to health, all stemmed from losing my mom to suicide in 2010 following her battle with Schizoaffective Disorder during the last few years of her life.<\/p>\n

Though her case was complicated, one of the main things I remember about the last few months of her life was how incredibly lonely she was. Her brother, my uncle, became her legal guardian and was living in Boston for work, so she moved up there from New York City where she lived for most of her adult life. She didn\u2019t know many people and lived alone in an apartment across from my uncle\u2019s church. He is a priest so my mom could not live there with him.<\/p>\n

Because of the many psychiatric drugs she was on, she felt terrible and wasn\u2019t up for socializing often, and certainly not with new people or those who weren\u2019t aware of her situation. She spent a lot of time alone in Boston, though my uncle did his best to spend as much time with her as he could. My brothers and I went to visit her, but all of us were in college or just entering the working world in Baltimore and New York so it wasn\u2019t as frequent as we wish we\u2019d visited. She began to lose hope, to give up, and assumed she would be on the debilitating drugs forever and didn\u2019t want to live that way.<\/p>\n

The Issues of Isolation<\/h3>\n

The former United States surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote<\/a> in 2017 that loneliness and social isolation are \u201cassociated with a reduction in life span similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with obesity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In January 2018, the New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> that Britain appointed its first \u201cminister for loneliness,\u201d charged with tackling what Prime Minister Theresa May called the \u201csad reality of modern life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thinking back to my mom\u2019s experience, I can understand how the loss of connection brings a loss of hope, a questioning of purpose and too much time for the negative voices in our heads (which every one of us has!) to get too much air time, and without any other positive perspectives or people to quiet them. And it\u2019s not just those suffering from mental illness: a 2015 study found<\/a> that loneliness can alter immune system cells in a way that increases susceptibility to illness. The risk of all kinds of chronic illness increases when someone feels lonely\u2014and it\u2019s across all age groups. Medical News Today also reported<\/a> that younger adults aged 45-49 reported higher rates of loneliness than adults aged 70 and older in a 2010 survey of more than 3000 American adults.<\/p>\n

Because I do a lot of writing, editing and recording for my work today, I work from home at least half the week. I can tell a huge difference in how I feel when I spend too many days in a row working from home. Sometimes it\u2019s subtle, but I now look out for it and recognize that if I\u2019m feeling a bit blue after a few days of working from home, it\u2019s not me or my brain, but rather the situation I\u2019ve put myself in.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite things to cite in my work are the five Blue Zones of longevity<\/a>. One of the main commonalities of why these disparate communities around the world live so long without disease is that they all live in close knit communities. Many generations of families live together in the same house and in Okinawa, one of the five Blue Zones, people have \u201cmoais\u201d which are social, financial, spiritual and health support groups that meet regularly.<\/p>\n

So at this point you might be thinking: great, I live alone, I\u2019m in a city for work where I don\u2019t know that many people, does this mean I\u2019m going to die of a chronic disease? No, there is much you can do to find connection. It just takes a little effort.<\/p>\n

A Quick Exercise to Identify Ways to Connect<\/h3>\n

Grab a notepad and think about the different things that interest you and that you believe in.<\/p>\n