Every person on earth has challenges in life but the good news is that there ARE ways to carry all these pieces and find balance. I love this saying, “Sometimes we cannot control the wind, but we can direct the sail.” However, when we are stressed, what we need at the moment may be just to keep our boat steady!

Here are some ways I have found help me deal with day-to-day stress. Feel free to pick one or two of your favorites to help your boat get back to steady!

• No one in the world is perfect. So accept your strengths and weaknesses as they are and appreciate yourself.
• FORGIVE yourself and LEARN from your mistakes.
• STOP comparing yourself with other people. You are unique.
• Always believe there is something GOOD in everyone as well as in YOU.
• Celebrate your achievements, small or big!  The sense of success becomes real when you do what you enjoy (watch a nice movie, dance, or hang out with a friend) 
• Do not spend time thinking about what other people think of you.  Value yourself.
• When possible, surround yourself with POSITIVE people and LIMIT TIME with negative people.
• Find the POSITIVE side in any life event. Even if something horrible happens, we can always learn and grow through it. 
• Find positive ways to EXPRESS your emotion (writing, singing, or watching a movie).
• Balance your day by keeping a TO DO list. Set time limits for work tasks. Include flexibility in your day along with time for loved ones.
• Schedule a routine BREAK to refuel (exercise, play with your kids or pets, go for a walk, practice deep breathing, or take a day nap). 
• BE MINDFUL, just focus on the moment and press pause on the stresses of life.
• SMILE! There is great power in smiling! It actually increases energy and eliminates stress.
• FORGIVE others. I know it is not an easy task. However, the power of forgiveness can bring joy, harmony, and peace to you and your family.

Haun, V. C., Nübold, A., & Bauer, A. G. (2018). Being mindful at work and at home: Buffering effects in the stressor–detachment model. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 91(2), 385-410.

Kraft, T. L., & Pressman, S. D. (2012). Grin and bear it: The influence of manipulated facial expression on the stress response. Psychological science, 23(11), 1372-1378.

Rasmussen, K. R., Stackhouse, M., Boon, S. D., Comstock, K., & Ross, R. (2019). Meta-analytic connections between forgiveness and health: the moderating effects of forgiveness-related distinctions. Psychology & health, 34(5), 515-534.

Chloe: Welcome to the BH WELL video blog. I'm Chloe Robertson, your host. BH WELL stands for Behavioral Health Wellness Environments for Living and Learning. Today on the blog we have with us Marc Woods who is the assistant chief nurse executive for behavioral health at UK Healthcare. Hi Marc, thank you for joining us today. 

Our first question for you is, why is it important to address suicide prevention? 

Marc: Chloe we're in the midst of a national mental health crisis with regards to suicide. We know that suicide is the 10th leading cause of death for all adults. But for college students, that increases to the second leading cause of death. We know that a lot of this is because students typically in that age group don't take care of themselves the way that they could or should. They are also entering a stage of their life where they may be experiencing some drug experimentation, also first time in their lives they've been away from their family. So there are a lot of new social interactions that are put upon them, so they have a lot of stressors that we're not so sure that they're always prepared to be able to handle. 

Chloe: Why is there so much stigma around suicide and prevention discussion? 

Marc: So mental illness and behavioral health, for the most part, has quite a bit of stigma attached to it, It has always has. And suicide is no different. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't make efforts to try to combat that stigma but it's just one of those things that's attached to behavioral health and people aren't always sure how to handle someone they think may be suicidal. It's one thing to know that a person's behaviors have changed, or they may be experiencing sadness, or they may even voice certain things that kind of let you know that they're not doing so well. The average person may not feel comfortable with talking about suicide and asking about suicide. 

Chloe: What are some risk factors for suicide and people with behavioral health challenges?

Marc: There's lots of different risk factors: previous suicide attempts, or having a history of behavioral health certainly puts someone at a higher risk for suicidal ideations or suicidal thoughts. We also know that certain groups of people experience suicidal ideation at much higher rates. We know that our LGBTQ community and our young males are actually at higher risk for higher rates of suicide. 

Chloe: Could you talk a little bit about the Columbia Lighthouse Project and why UK Healthcare adopted this approach? 

Marc: Absolutely. So one of the things that the literature tells us is that persons who actually commit suicide or have a successful suicide they, oftentimes about 50% of the time, have seen a health care provider within the last one to three months. Unfortunately that health care provider hasn't always been a behavioral health care provider. And so the concept is that those persons are oftentimes coming into contact with health care clinicians and so if we were to screen for suicide we may be able to treat someone. Maybe they didn't come there for suicidal ideations, maybe something else, but if we're screening for it we can kind of identify it and then connect that person to services. We chose the Columbia Suicide Severity Screen for a number of reasons; the main reason was that anybody can use it. It's widely accepted, lots of institutions use it and it's three to six very simple questions and after that it allows us to kind of triage the level of risk that patient is in from low to moderate to high and then give the appropriate level of interventions for the level of risk.

Chloe: That's a very important project. Can you talk some about how simply asking someone if they're contemplating suicide can make a difference?

Marc: It’s the most important part. So what we have to get comfortable with is saying the word suicide. Asking have you ever thought of killing yourself? If a person is interested in learning more about that and they're not a health care clinician they can go and look at the Columbia and literally just ask those three to six questions. We don't ask them simply because we might feel like the person is going to be at higher risk for committing suicide or maybe they weren't thinking about it before but now they are. That’s one of the fallacies that's just simply not true. Lots of studies have shown that we don't increase a persons’ suicidal ideations simply by having that conversation. It's the single most important thing that we can do for a loved one is to be able to have that comfort and that communication line where we can ask, “are you suicidal?,” “have you had thoughts of hurting herself?” 

Chloe: Well thank you so much for sharing this important information with us today and thank you also for your time.

Marc: Absolutely. 

If you're interested in learning more about BH WELL and the Behavioral Health Wellness Environments for Living and Learning, check out our website at https://www.uky.edu/bhwell/. Thanks for tuning into the BH WELL blog where behavioral health is our priority. See you next time.

Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK

www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org

Silas: Yeah. I think I've always been interested in music, I think it resonates with us on a deeper level than we even know how to communicate. But my first memorable experience with music was when I was six years old I found my dad's Van Halen album in the car and thought that was the coolest thing I've ever heard when I heard him play guitar. And so I asked my parents for a guitar when I was six and they gave me a cheap little $100 thing, they didn't think I'd play. And you know the rest is history. I have continued playing from then on out. I think what makes music so cool in my personal experience is the ability for music to take chaos and turn it into order. I think it's kind of built on that Dallas dichotomy of, you know, where there are infinite possibilities of things that can happen. Music can take that and transfer it into something that we can all relate to at a fundamental level. I think that's why it resonates with us. At least that’s why I think it resonates with me. 

Silas: Well personally, I'm not a very emotional person on the outside. But I think what's cool is the emotion that comes out when playing is something that you don't even think about consciously. For example, when you're playing a guitar solo, the notes just play themselves. Once you get to a certain level of playing, and I think most people who play a good amount of time would tell you this, you really can get the emotion to come out when you're not thinking about what the emotion is that you're putting into it. So once you step back and let it take over, it comes out in ways that you're not even consciously aware of.

Silas: Yeah, of course. I also brought a loop pedal so it's going to just loop some chords I'm going to play. I'll just go on top and I guess we'll find out what emotion I'm feeling. *Plays music*

Silas: To me I kind of felt a sense of calm. I'm not really stressed out, just happy being here. Also kind of a little reflective, you know. That’s at least what I got, what did you get out of it? 

Chloe: Yeah it wasn't like sad, but it was more of like a happy calm. But not like an extremely happy. 

Silas: Yeah, I think that's what's so cool about music; Because it's subjective, you might feel something totally different than I might feel. It's not that it’s wrong, there's no wrong answer. That's what's so cool about it.

Silas: Yeah definitely. When I was at school all the time, I would get super stressed out and would just revert back to music. I would throw it on a loop and start playing guitar. It brings out those kinds of emotions that I didn't really know were there sometimes. It made me feel better at the end, for lack of a better term I guess. I don't know how to describe it. I would revert to it sometimes when I would get stressed or sad about a breakup or something and the emotion that would come out would be really interesting and I wouldn't even know I'm thinking it.

Silas: I think it kind of goes back to what I said earlier about the dichotomy between chaos and order. Whereas there are infinite places where I can play on this guitar, but out of that, it creates some kind of structure. The human emotion aspect of it kind of relates to everybody, that it's expressing something that we all feel on the inside but don't really know that we're feeling it. Regardless of whether you know what you're thinking, it relates to us at a fundamental level. 

Silas: Definitely that you should learn how to play an instrument! But I know that's not easy for everybody. It takes a lot of time and a lot of work to really master something. Listening to new music, listening to instrumental music, and trying to figure out the conversation that's happening there on a deeper level than just what the popular music conveys. 

Chloe: Thank you Silas for sharing with us your love of music and your passion. 

Silas: Thanks for having me.