Episode 20 Transcript: Tatertots Taught Me 3 No Nonsense Mental Health Tips to Protect My Time & Energy
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In this cozy episode, I’m going to tell you the story of how potatoes, tater tots specifically were foundational in teaching me 3 practical, no nonsense ways to protect my time, energy, and mental health. (Smile in voice/lighthearted tone) So, if you can learn from knuckleheaded mistakes, come relax with me and keep listening!
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Good morning y buenos dias! Welcome to The Noggin Podcast, a cozy mental health advocacy podcast, with me, Kyarra Keele. It genuinely means so much to me that you’re here, so thank you.
On this podcast we cultivate a gentle space advocating for diverse mental health dialogue in the community for people of color, educating about marginalized mental illnesses, sharing empowering resources for recovery, & providing the occasional sprinkling of zest through sarcasm & shenanigans. So, if that's what you’re looking for, welcome home!
Hey, it's Kyarra. Welcome & bienvenidos to season 3. So, I want to tell you this one short story about how potatoes tatertots were foundational in teaching me 3 no nonsense ways to protect my time, energy & mental health. So, let me take you back to when I was about 6 or 7 years old; I have this vivid memory of little ol' me sitting at the dinner table munching on nice crispy tater tots out of the oven which were the classic OG snack in my household at the time. I was probably doing that content hum, tapping my toe under the table (you know the thing you do when your snack is so good you can’t sit still?) Well, this moment of bliss was abruptly ended because my dad came by and swooped a tater tot off my plate popped it in his mouth and declared “Dad tax!” & confidently kept walking. Now, at the time, I thought that was just kind of funny quirky and rude all at the same time but then I realized even at that young age that well, it makes sense, my parents do pay the rent to keep a roof over my head so dad tax on my tatertots seems fair. Also... I grew up in a black household with a black mama & a black dad so like... there was no talking back or discussion about these dad taxes & I learned to laugh and embrace. Well, from that point on growing up, I remember that if I was ever eating something riquisima, something delicious, my dad declared Dad tax and playfully helped himself a little bite of whatever we were eating. Okay, what does this have to do with mental health? Well, now as an adult, I’m 21, reflecting back I’m grateful that my dad imposed this tater tot tax, shout out to him, because he was teaching me a valuable lesson as a child, whether he meant to or not, that absolutely nothing in this world is free even your tater tots when you're 6 years old are taxed by the government and apparently by your dad. But here’s the thing: it took me, years after learning this lesson as a child about nothing being free, to apply this knowledge to other practical areas of my life.
But when I finally connected the parallels, here’s what it all boils down to: My time is not be free, my energy is not free and the reason they can't be given away for free (listen closely because closely need to hear this) The reason time & energy should not and cannot be given away for free (& I’m not talking about volunteering for your local food bank, okay? That’s different) is because when you give those things away without thinking critically to establish boundaries, you are giving away your precious mental health for free. And since mental health is the foundation of happiness and thriving in life, you are giving away your life, to other people around you who probably don’t care about reciprocity and therefore don't deserve the investment of your energy in the first place. Let me tell you something, we can't have that nonsense. Not ever, absolutely not in 2021. We’re ending those shenanigans. The same way a sweet precious plantita (a little plant) needs sunshine and water to thrive instead of shrivel up, guess what, you are a precious plantita, I'm a plantita, & protecting how we invest our time & energy determines how our mental health thrives. I really want you to thrive with me, so keep listening to learn from knuckleheaded mistakes while I share these 3 honest, no nonsense ways to protect your time, energy, & mental health.
Also side note: The Noggin Podcast now has a twitter as of this morning. Which is a big deal because anyone who knows me knows that I try to stay off of social media as much as possible which obviously... not the easiest is you’re a podcaster. But now that I have a Twitter and a Youtube Channel, I really love it, if you’re listening to my voice right now, if you could just pop over to either one, especially Twitter, and just say hey, drop a little comment to say you came from this episode, and maybe tell me what your number one takeaway is from this episode when you finish? I would really love to hear from you.
Okay, #1, If you don’t listen to any of the other equally valuable 2 tips which I highly recommend you do because all 3 combined are most effective but if you don’t, this is the most essential tip. #1 is learning how to match other people’s energy. I’m not going to take credit for this idea, this concept was best articulated to me by the lovely MJ Harris. He’s a highly successful black entrepreneur & CEO in finance but I was blessed to find him through his zesty, no nonsense Youtube advice. If you need some tough love and you’re not sensitive to swearing, he’s exceptional at being that person to tell you exactly how it is, not mince his words, roast you, inspire you, and make you laugh all at the same time. The reality is that he probably didn’t create the concept either but that doesn’t matter because I believe everyone just needs the right person to articulate the same message in the right way that is memorable for them and maybe I can be the one to help pass along and share this message in a relatable way for you.
Matching others’ energy simply means being mindful of maintaining balance between the time, energy and effort that you invest in someone else and the time, energy and effort that you receive in return. Note that the time you invest in someone includes all of the thinking about them, planning for future, daydreaming, etc that may happen when you're not even physically with them or talking to them. That’s still a sneaky and unconscious form of investing in them that may compound to hours of your life that you’re giving away for free so consider that the next time you hang up the phone and spend an hour daydreaming or overanalyzing a text for 30 minutes. And here’s the key: matching energy applies to everyone in your life: romantic interests, casual or long term friends, and family. If you have to ask yourself if someone cares and wants to be in your life...etc, if you are questioning that, it is likely a sign that you need to reflect on if you’re matching their energy and become more selective about who you share your life with. Someone who genuinely cares about you, and wants to be in your life, will make it so beautifully clear that you will not have to doubt or question it. You will feel it, see it, and know deep within. They’re not always going to tell you that vocally right away, they’re going to show you with their actions. (If they're a real one) I don’t listen to words much anymore when it comes to deciding who I want to be in my life to protect my mental health, because anyone can learn to speak the right persuasive words that you want to hear that will allow them to continue their toxic nonsense in your life so they can keep taking advantage of your kindness.
Those who don’t actually care about you will quickly show this through all types of disrespectful behaviors: cancelling last minute on plans, always having excuses, always late, always texting specifically for favors or when they’re bored, always venting but never listening, never initiating text or calls but quick to answer if you text or call them, never asking how you are, never inquisitive about your life and goals, sending you lazy 2 word texts no matter how hard you try to be an interesting conversationalist, or taking days or weeks to respond to simple questions. No. If someone wants to act like they don’t know how to hold a conversation, let them act silly and send those dry, ashy 2 word texts to someone else and you can delete their number (little laugh) and go about having yourself a lovely day.You don’t have time for that. On a similar note, as Nedra Tawwab said in a post, a lovely black therapist and relationship expert that I shared in my last episode about mental health resources and empowering creatives for people of color, she protects her energy by not answering the phone when she doesn’t want to talk and replying to texts and her convenience, not anyone else’s.
If someone’s actions are expressing this energy that they don’t care at all, or they do care but just not nearly as much as you care, don’t entertain that. I personally disengage completely, just stop reaching out to them. Stop replying. There’s nothing to negotiate and there’s nothing you can do except respect your time, energy and mental health enough to not give out the privilege of being in your life to individuals who are clearly not earning it. Remember the tater tot tax story? Nothing is free. There’s no way to make someone care, want you or love you, if they don’t want to, even family, even long term friends, childhood friends, even a partner you’ve dated or married for a decade. If your intuition is telling you that someone in your life is not healthy for you, or as MJ Harris says, if they’re not bringing you happiness or money, please listen to that intuitive feeling.
Even if you manage to convince them to stay, you’re going to eventually wish that you had just let them go because they won’t value you anymore then they did before, in fact not only will they continue the same hurtful behaviors but now they’ll start getting bold and disrespecting you enough more because they can see that you don’t respect your own time and energy.
If you are like how I used to be for so many years and you tend to overgive and then end up depleted and hurt, then energy matching is the most powerful tip for you, it will change your life because you can finally focus on yourself. All of the people who don’t belong in your space, who are gobbling up all of your sunshine and precious water, so you can’t thrive as a plantita, the minute you match their energy by disengaging completely which means, stop calling, texting, delete their number, block them or if it’s a family member that you can’t avoid completely, just reduce the amount of time you invest into interacting or even thinking about them, often times, those people will just drift away on their own, you don’t even have to say anything.
To those of you who always text your friends first and you’re starting to wonder who is actually a friend, stop texting and calling them. If they don’t reach out until 3, 6, 12 months later to say “Where have you been, I’ve been thinking about you!” then you know they probably don’t need to be in your life. Anyone who actually cares about you, when they think of you, they will take 2 seconds to pick up the phone and say “Hey, I’m busy this week but I’m thinking of you, I hope you’re doing well let’s talk next on the phone or meet up for lunch or something next Friday if you’re free?” or if they’re like me, they’ll send you a cheeky meme to make you laugh and say, “Hey, a lot going on with xyz, but just wanted to tell you I’m sending you good vibes, let’s catch up next weekend” Done. 2 seconds. No one is too busy to at least communicate that they’re busy and when they’ll have time later. The same way it takes you a few seconds to say and do all of these little sweet check ins that you probably do for others, good mornings, and how did your interview go last week and all of that, mmm mmm, stop doing all of it for people who are not earning it and consistently matching that same energy and effort in their own way. We have to balance kindness and boundaries. They are not mutually exclusive. You can have both.
Before I move to Tip #2, let me be clear about 1 very important distinction. It’s okay to have friendships where you’ve mutually established that your friendship is not based on how often you talk and that you want to be in each other's lives even if you don’t talk frequently. I have several long distance friends that we go weeks or months without talking on the phone, but every single time we do talk, it feels like home. It feels natural, we pick right up where we left off, learn about each other's life changes and growth, & we roast each other into oblivion and have a good soul laugh, because we both understand that even in our silence the love remains and I never question that. Even though we don’t talk every week, we both understand that’s just the style of our friendship that best aligns with our busy lifestyles, so no one’s feelings are hurt. Hopefully you can understand that distinction?
Matching energy is liberating and from experience, I can promise you, that it is truly better to be alone and work on your goals, your happiness, getting your money, than to invest in someone who makes you feel alone.
#2 If you are someone who is already struggling with your own mental health or you’re on your healing journey, the second tip to be intentional and selective about surrounding yourself with individuals who are already on their healing journey, have done their emotional work, and are actively continuing that “work” every day. I’m going to keep this one fairly brief, it boils down to 2 situations: Firstly, if you have someone in your life who always has something negative occuring and always wants to discuss it with you but never wants to actually take steps to address the problem, that is going to drain your soul. Run. That person will always have a complaint, and they will never address the root of the problem. They are basically using you as their therapist and you’re not even getting paid for you or trained for it.
The potential second situation that can be uncomfortable and emotional to navigate but is important to address is: if you have someone in your life who is struggling profoundly with their mental health but they’re unwilling to do their own work which means seeking professional mental health support to address their insecurities, traumas, self loathing in therapy or support groups or if that’s accessible right away due to financial barriers, doing their personal research to learn healthier coping through free online resources. What I want you to always remember in that situation is this: If someone doesn’t want to invest in themselves, you can’t do it for them and probably cannot convince them through pressure either. I’m speaking from experience when I say that trying to force someone to get help just irritates them and stresses you out and no one wins. That is the hardest truth to accept when you love someone and you care, you just want to help and fix the situation, and take away their pain. But if that person is another adult, that is their life journey, and their choice whether or not to work on cultivating their happiness. From a young age, I had to learn from my painful mistakes, that love by itself does not heal someone else’s mental illnesses and love is not always enough to motivate someone to seek help. Now, you can recommend thoughtful resources and do your best to connect them with professional help if they want it. (But only say that if you genuinely are willing to help find the resources and you have the emotional capacity to give in that way) You can always remind that you care and you want to see them get better but at the same time, you still have to protect your energy by allowing yourself to have alone time or space for self care, setting boundaries about when they can vent or call late or night, and referring them to resources if they’re in crisis instead of trying to handle the situation all on your own.
The more severe of a mental health struggle, the more important it is for you to remind yourself that you cannot fix them but you can gently support them (with boundaries in place) to receive what they actually need which is professional support of some kind. It’s really hard (soft laugh & sigh) That's an understatement...it's really difficult. But destroying your mental health for someone else because you want something for them more than they want it for themselves, is even more devastating. Sometimes protecting your mental health means taking space from toxic friends, family or romantic partners until they choose to get help and sometimes they won’t choose to get help. That’s the honest part that we don’t talk about. Sometimes the people we love don’t heal for a long time. Please remember that’s not your fault. That’s not your choice. Please try to surround yourself with others who are taking care of themselves physically and mentally, who practice gentleness instead of self deprecation even in jokes, and who are actively working towards their own goals and passions because you deserve to share and exist in the company of happiness.
The 3rd and final tip is absolutely an underrated way I leveled up to protect my mental health and that is: frequent virtual decluttering and social media cleansing. I’ve mentioned this before in Ep 7 about feeling better on bad mental health days. I basically Marie Kondo my online life every few months, which means, if I’m following or subscribing to someone who does not bring me joy or teach me something practical of value anymore, I unsubscribe. If I see their post in my feed, and I don’t feel that positive intuitive feeling anymore, I unfollow. I am constantly filtering through my contacts, my social media feeds, my apps, and opting out of email lists. In the past, I subscribed to over 200 channels on Youtube, now I follow only about 48 or 49 the last time I checked a few days ago in preparation for this episode. Every one of those 48 channels, I genuinely enjoy their content and feel excited when they post. It feels lovely, it feels liberating to declutter and cleanse. When we’re not choosy about the content creators we support on social media, what email lists we allow to overflow our inboxes, and what messages we consume for hours every day, it’s incredibly easy to unconsciously give your life away for free through all your clicks, comments, views, and scrolling on profiles of content creators you may not even be subbed to but they keep popping up in your feed.
I unsubscribed from quite a few channels over the weekend actually, some of them, I had been following since I was a whippersnapper. I realized, our values no longer align so the kind gift I can give to myself is to simply let go by unfollowing to make space for exploring and learning from new creatives. I'm not subscribed to channels that are based on clothing hauls, makeup hauls or materialistic, flex culture. Why? Because I value sustainability for beautiful planet earth so I try to avoid supporting fast fashion & I value financial empowerment & minimalism, so I don’t want the algorithm to promote to our youth that instead of starting their savings account you should buy 500 worth of Zara. As another example, I don't like supporting food waste so I'm not subscribed to channels that have mukbangs where 1 person is eating enough food for a family of 4 that is struggling to feed their kids because for me that seems painfully out of touch because I come from a low-income family where food was not always in tremendous abundance and my parents had to work extremely hard to keep a roof over our heads and keep food on the table. So, glorifying food waste in not something I want to support. The final example I'll give of content that I actively choose not to support for my mental health would be true crime videos or insensitive pranks that use violence & serious issues like cheating, abuse, injuries, going missing for a day, losing your memory, etc as entertainment. These things are not funny to me at all, they’re just toxic, so I’m mindful to filter this out and also not support it in any way that the algorithm would detect.
I think we forget that an influencer can only be an influencer if we give them a platform by viewing their content. When you give a creator watch time or likes or comments, it tells any social media algorithm that you think their content is valuable which means other people might think it’s valuable too, and the content will be recommended more. When we stop clicking on problematic and toxic content that is damaging for collective mental health and we stop watching it, the social media algorithm especially Youtube will stop recommending the content to you and other people like you. It’s like another form of voting in a sense. By supporting positive and zesty creators that are good for our mental health by subscribing to them, watching their videos, liking their posts...etc we are also helping those creators share their positivity with other people who haven’t found their channel yet. So in a way, we can look out for each other by telling the algorithms the positive content creators or influencers that we value.
I challenge you to go check: how many people you subscribe to on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram TikTok, or Facebook? If you don’t use social media, how many spam or irrelevant emails do you get per day? What apps are distracting you from your goals?
In fact, in honor of the tradition of the Noggin Nurturing segment here on this podcast where we take a little pause to do one thing to invest in ourselves because I believe that must like plants we need nurturing and nourishment to thrive, I challenge you today to invest 5 or 10 minutes to cleanse your social media feeds, email, apps, contacts, photos, or old texts. Whichever category feels most important to you, that’s the one I encourage you to choose. You don’t have to do it all today. You can set aside time once a month or a few times a year to declutter your phone or laptop and see for yourself what a difference it makes. It’s honestly refreshing.
I challenge you to be more active about supporting creators who better align with your values. There’s no need to support problematic content creators who choose to sustain their careers off of drama, negativity, and toxic messages because there are way too many wholesome, profoundly creative, empowering, and hilarious creatives who chose to build their community and their careers on the foundations of kindness and respect.
(Smiling) Okay, I just want to say whether you’ve been here with me from the beginning season 1 or 2 and now you’re here with me in the new season 3, thank you so much. I’m honestly proud of how far the podcast has come, I have so many exciting episode ideas and an upcoming series for you, and our home has grown so much just in the last few weeks so if you’re new here, I’m also so happy you’re here. If you enjoyed and valued this cozy episode and would love to support me in creating more empowering mental health content, please share this episode link to someone you care about, and you can also become one of my lovely supporters at patreon.com/thenogginpodcast or anchor.fm/thenogginpodcast/support. I deeply appreciate you, thank you so much. Next week’s cozy episode is going to be a lot of fun so I would encourage you to subscribe to The Noggin Podcast youtube channel or follow me on my new brand spanking Twitter so you know when the next episode is on Monday morning.
The very last thing: If you already know me you can skip these 40 seconds and just head to the end of this episode, but if you are new here and you’ve never stumbled across me before, pleasure to meet you. Again, my name is Kyarra Keele. Aside from being the host of this podcast, I'm a four-time published author, soon to publish my fifth in a few months, I was a healthy lifestyle blogger for six years and I am an aspiring polyglot currently learning four languages. I was a mental health ambassador working as a liaison between the community and local health center to educate and support and progress the mental health dialogue and I've been navigating the mental health system for about a decade.
I'm deeply passionate about mental health service and advocacy because I believe that no one deserves to be hurting or feeling alone in this universe. I hope that my zest & compassionate podcast will cheer you along on your good days and offer a cozy and supportive haven for you on your more difficult days.
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The Noggin Podcast is brought to you today by Anchor. A practical app I actually use. The anchor app is the easiest way to record a high-quality podcast, and distribute it everywhere (including Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple, & more) all in one place with one click when you release a new episode. No fancy equipment or experience necessary, and even better than all of that, it’s 100% free! I’ve tried a few other editing apps that make it a headache to import and export your audio files but Anchor’s intuitive platform makes it nice and easy.
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If you made it here to the conclusion of this episode, I just want to say thank you so much. Muchisimas gracias. If you’re interested in learning more information you can explore The Noggin Podcast official website, and you can show your love and support for compassionate mental health advocacy on our Patreon as well as following us on Twitter, Pinterest & The Noggin Podcast Youtube channel to be a part of our cozy home with new episode releases every Monday morning. (Smiling in voice) See you in the next episode! Nos vemos en el próximo episodio.
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