53: Ankur Varma, LCPC - Brown Man Therapy: Sparking Dialogue on Mental Health Among Males in the South Asian Diaspora

0:01 As a South Asian seeking Mental Health Services, is it valuable or counterproductive to find a therapist who shares your cultural background, what is the Russell Peters? Somebody going to get hurt Trope of the angry, South Asian. Father. Tell us about patriarchy. In this culture. How can fighting dreaded traffic on Lakeshore Drive serve. As a metaphor for staying in your lane as a South Asian contending with the model minority myth. And what is brown man therapy? How did the founder untethered? Himself from negative perceptions of social media to launch incredibly valuable Instagram, resource for South Asian, males seeking help with mental health. Stay tuned. As we touch on these and many other topics on this week's episode of untether your life. Welcome to untether your life, a show that empowers you to own your own health and break free of templates for managing physical and mental wellness.

1:00 And looks at Key issues, impacting the South Asian diaspora. I am your host in a kilt or cigar and I'm passionate about the power of conversation to catalyze change. Theme of this podcast is looking past. Preconceived notions about mental health, notably in the South Asian diaspora. We've talked about mental health, from a broad, variety of perspectives, in the south Asian diaspora, but one area that we haven't delved into deeply is how it impacts the South Asian male and that's why I was very excited to talk to today's guest. Encore Varma ankur, Varma has his master's of counseling psychology with a specialization in Sport and Health Psychology from Adler University for over 10 years. Ankur has worked in various leadership positions, in Community, Mental Health and education to advocate for mental health, services around Chicagoland, ankur's, passionate about bringing a multicultural person-centered approach to Each people who have previously been marginalized or carry stigma about their own Wellness recently encores brownman therapy page on Instagram has been on a mission to engage more men and normalize conversations about mental health and South Asian cultures.

2:04 And with that let's get untethered. So anchor again, great to have you on. Is there anything else you wanted to add beyond what I just shared with listeners? Not really. I forgot how much was actually in there but you know, I'm happy to be here and overall this is really what lights My Fire. Is having conversations like this with like-minded people, with, with the intent of getting the word out there about topics that have previously, been difficult to talk about, or really just difficult to know how to talk about. I'm always fascinated to understand because as you and I were talking about the mental health Journey for South Asians has just become this huge movement in the last year. I would say. So tell me more about your journey to mental health. Encore how did you get interested in the field and was it a specific life?

2:50 Experiences. Yeah, so my foray into mental health, always started with an interest from the educational standpoint into psychology. I think for me personally it was fascinating to see how the people I grew up with and around, you know, how we kind of branched off even with having similar experiences. So I have a brother who's just about 15 to 18 months younger than me. So we're very close in age, but you might see us and meet us and talk to us and see two seemingly. Different people even though a lot of our clearances were very shared and so my interest in Psychology came from, seeing the people around me, my friends and then it slowly grew. As I also have my own experiences with both good and negative mental health, issues and struggle.

3:35 And those are the experiences that help us empathize with others who are going through struggle. And part of the work that we do is to understand, you know, the separation, the boundary between our own experiences and those of others will say on the personal side as well. You No, I was on this journey that is typical or familiar to most South Asian people. I went to college as a pre-med major and so I had this very interesting Dynamic Around Me growing up. I grew up in a part of Cincinnati where there were very few Indian people. Very few people of color in my classes on my sports teams. And so I grew up with people who did not look like me, who did not pray like me, who did not eat like But I did have people in that base. I have a big extended family that lives in Cincinnati. The Indian Community in Cincinnati was actually not too small when I grew up and we were relatively tied into it. So I did have those experiences, it just wasn't the next door neighbor or the person in my English class. And so that really offered me a diverse array of experiences in terms of understanding how my culture compared to others cultures and how that kind of identity process work. And, you know, even within that That the challenges of that, my grandfather, like to say, you're Indian at home and you're American at school or at work, I think the sentiment behind that was positive in that you have to recognize and remember where you're from, what your values are, who your family is, but really, what that also serves to

5:06 do, sometimes is create a little bit of a split and identity. You put on one task at school and one mask at home and sometimes it gets confusing, especially when you're younger as to, which mask am I supposed to wear, or am I allowed to not, And so, really, all of that kind of just paying attention that experience really came to a head. When I went to medical school after my undergrad and I really struggled, I hadn't taken the time to really think about my motivation behind going to this field. And at that time to, I started to recognize that I was struggling. So all I didn't realize. Oh, so you had actually gone to medical school prior to going into the your current profession that they'll tell me more about that. Yeah.

5:47 So I spent about a year year and a half a medical school. School. And there was a little bit of a culture shock for me. I went abroad for medical school and so I wasn't too prepared for that acculturation process being away from family and friends. And then also, just not being in the right head space to studying for 12 hours a day and, you know, have such a high pressure experience. I remember thinking I had a behavior Sciences class my second or by Third semester there and I remember thinking like this is what I want to do. This is why this is what like inquiry. Woke me up that behavior Sciences class, just like my psychology classes and undergrad, really like woke my brain up and I realized hey this is maybe something I need to pursue, it's just not through the medicine track and so that's where I ended up leaving medical school and then I worked some odd jobs actually including in car sales, which people are sometimes surprised by, but really bad experience to write. Sure me gathered.

6:47 There's a psychology biology that too, right? You feed in every every field in every realm. And so being able to talk to people about their finances, get them open understand them. That's something that you have to do in sales and that translated. Well when I decided to pursue my masters in counseling, psych-k you know, Psychiatry is a very different profession from what it was when we were younger. I mean, I mentioned to you before my father is a psychiatrist and it's a very different field right now, just because of the way Health Care is in general, it's not the consultative approach and this is something that I mean, I don't know what flash of Brilliance or lack thereof that decided to segment of pharmaceutical aspect with the actual cognitive behavioral therapy aspect because they're so tightly coupled.

7:32 And now Psychiatry is just more. A matter of it's like an assembly line right, where it's just basically like, ask a couple questions. I would almost call it like vending machine mental health where it's basically you put it, you put a quarter in, you get your diagnosis. Here's your medication any contraindications? No, but I think it's It sounds like you're happy with the decision, right? I mean, with going into this branch of mental health as opposed to maybe into Psychiatry then. Yeah, absolutely. I think being able to find something that actually came out of struggle, came out of my own, darkness of experience has really helped because, you know, sometimes you do have to struggle to get to what's good for you.

8:14 And sometimes we do things because we're supposed to or because tradition says, to do so, And that's okay to a limit. There is a limit to being able to do things because somebody or something else has has told us to do that. And really at the end of the day, we have to merge those things. Both, what is my culture? My tradition. And what is it? That is important to me and find the kind of the overlap, the middle part of that Venn diagram and are immigrants and, and allowed that to be our identity, rather than one or the other too much. Yeah. And I think I don't know if your parents Mentioned this, but they tended to say that things were a lot simpler back in India because it was like, you had three choices, which was the doctor engineer or failure and here it's sometimes the choices can be overwhelming because there are so many options, but you touched on one thing that I'd like to delve into a little bit more. I don't know if you use these exact words but you talked about sort of being Indian at home and then being American outside the home and the term model minority myth. Obviously, that term gets used quite a bit, but I wanted to get your take on it, in terms of what you are seeing with your clients, in terms of the struggles, they're facing with the model minority myth.

9:31 It's really like an over simplification. What did psychology and Psychiatry look like quote-unquote back in the day. And this is really what the world looked like. The world was a formula. We're supposed to go to school grade school, high school college, and then some sort of graduate degree that is going to get you stability. So you mentioned that That the Trope of doctor lawyer engineer for Indian. But if I go to India, I'm going to find, 1 billion, non doctors, lawyers and engineers at sure. And so we look at that, in terms of the Immigrant experience. And we see the ability, we see education as that pathway to survival and then Thrive it's, you know, my parents were born in India and moved here later on in their lives. And so, for those of us who are from these first second, and third generation kinds of families and Dynamics We might have that experience where we feel this pressure to be a certain someone and really at the end of the day, human beings act through survival.

10:28 So if we're not having our basic needs met, then those are that's where our focus is going to be our energy, both mental and physical is going to go towards that. And so for those immigrants that were able to come to the United States and have enough wherewithal privilege, well, whatever might be to pursue a degree like a medical degree. Or law degree or an engineering degree to have access to that meant freedom from poverty freedom from maybe not not actual freedom from, but a perceive freedom from trauma or struggle. I think about my dad's family a lot but my dad came over when he was 14. But he's the youngest of six said, bright, most of the siblings actually poor married with kids already when they came over here and they take a piece by piece.

11:15 They didn't come 15 people. At the same time they came every year or every couple of years as Had much. And as they had the ability to buy a plane ticket to come over. And so, I think when we to your question about model minorities, right? We think of you, no, Indian people or South Asian people. Sometimes it's being the model. Minority really? What this is is a racist true, right? And truth because it's a designation of Who You Are by a quote unquote Superior class, typically we think of that as white and well and that both of those, I think have to be kind of true at the at the start of it and that The foundation. So, hey, you are better than this race but you're still not as good as us.

11:56 And so we can tell these lower classes who might be black or Latino say hey why can't you be more like Asian racial class to stay in their Lane, they don't make waves. They just yeah they just like kind of do as they're told as we guide them along and I think that like you said laying that, you know, that's such a good analogy here. You're on one of those big wide highways. Okay, the right lane is the slowest Lane. Got traffic merge. And exiting so it slows down naturally and then you have the middle Lanes it gets a little bit faster, it opens up a little bit more that's maybe where the model minorities live but right but we don't have access to is that carpool lane where everybody's going 80. And so you know I think that's a really good way to kind of picture this and say hey well the middle veins are technically better on certain, you know, maybe on money or education or something like that, but you're still not as good enough to be in the carpool lane. And so, that's where I think the model minority myth. Is the important word here is really damaging because it really hits different ethnicities different races against each other.

12:57 So that one race. Or one set of classes wealth, socioeconomic status can continue to thrive and even pull itself further away from others. How are your clients managing with that? And I guess maybe, if I could step back a little bit because, you know, obviously your Instagram feed is brown, man, therapy. What is the makeup of your clientele? Is it pretty diverse? Because I think, United talk, I think you said you would work with a lot of Latino communities, talk to me a little bit about that about, you know, in terms of the communities that you see are they are they pretty diverse in terms of cultural makeup and, you know, I think we bonded over both being from Ohio and being familiar with Chicago and being in the Chicago area. And that's what I love about this city. There's a lot of faults to Chicago so those of you who are not from Chicago who are lifting your like wait I only hear bad things about yourself.

13:46 Right? Murder capital, right. We've got our violence, we've got our marginalization of communities, and there's a lot of work to do, but that's also what excites me and so in my career I've worked I was telling you towards the beginning of my career. I worked with a lot of Latino communities, a lot of lower resource communities. And I've really overall though, my clientele is diverse, it's really who I fit well with and so I don't necessarily Focus my attention to much on, okay? I'm only going to work with these types of clients, I think my Us as a clinician it's important to me to have a diverse caseload, so that I'm seeing different ages, different resource levels, different cultural and religious traditional backgrounds, so that I can kind of understand the human experience as holistically as possible.

14:38 So, if I can focus my attention on, only adult males, or only people from South Asian backgrounds, I feel like that would be limiting to me in terms of the work I can do in the understanding and empathy I can build My clients. So it's big. My clinical work has actually been reduced. I'm more in a managerial and supervisory role right now with my clients it's a pretty wide array and and to your question about or in my experience out of the model, minority myth layout, it's not anything that I've ever really talked about explicitly with many clients. I can think of one client where we talked about, you know, these kinds of topics specifically named the mount model, minority, myth, or patriarchy or toxic masculinity.

15:18 Those kinds of topics came out because That was something that he was really well read and very interested in terms of his own experience. So it's not necessarily something that we address directly, but it is something that we will talk about in a individualized way. What is your experience as this identity? And that identity includes your culture, your religion, your geography, your socio-economic makeup in the whole host of things. Sexuality, gender. So, all of these things have to intersect somewhere. And so for me and you, we might have Very similar backgrounds, in terms of where we were brought up, it could be religion, it could be our friends, it could be our geography, but we're going to have a completely different overall identity of the world. That's also why, you know, these kinds of terms are just a starting point for how we have these conversations but anytime you think of a term and you think, oh, this applies to everybody, it doesn't.

16:10 So this is why we start with model minority or we start with toxic masculinity and then we can break that down until we get to the community and to the individual. Absolutely. And no I think that's a good point. Bring up about trying to be an equal opportunity provider just because I personally think so there has been a lot of discussion. I know there are organizations out there. I think it's South Asian therapists, they have an Instagram feed, but I know there is a concerted effort to pair up Mental Health Providers on the certain background, like South Asian with clients who are salvation as well. And there's so many complexities to that because for one, And I think this might have come up in the article that you would work with zhoushan about why our South Asian male.

16:55 So angry there can be a little bit of insecurity or maybe self-consciousness about being so vulnerable and open with a member of the community, not necessarily someone you might have known, you know, at the temple or whatever. But because of that shared Heritage, there is that sense of well, you know, I still have to put on my game face. I still have to put on this facade, and then the other thing is, sometimes I would almost Argue that it can be kind of an echo chamber because there might be some things that there are commonalities that we tend to gloss over unconsciously, right? We tend to think this is just the way things are in our culture, but it is something that I have devoted more thought to recently. Because there are so many complexities in the South Asian experience that like, for instance, the collectivist society for South Asians, it's pretty unusual. I think to completely break free from their parents or because, you know, whereas Americans, I think our white people, whatever term you want to use, it tends to be more common. I think it's because of our Collective this background. The family unit is very I don't want to say strong, but it's very binding.

18:02 I guess would be the term. But yeah, I mean, so that's why I wanted to segue into the discussion about how this informed brown man therapy. If you could talk to me a little bit about that, was it informed by a certain deficiency that you saw in mental health as as it applies to South Asian males? The first thing I want to Days. You do not need a South Asian therapist to do the therapeutic work friend. I will tell you. I have never had a Salvation therapist. I have had three therapists that I've worked with in my life for myself. And none of them are South Asian. They've been three, great therapeutic relationships. So, you know, it's really dependent on you, and this is an individual process. It might be more important for you to have a somebody to certain gender, right?

18:45 I was just talking to a friend and helping him find a therapist and he was like, it's really important. That my therapist is apparent because he was struggling with things with his children. And so he needs to have somebody who he can connect with on that level. That's a very valid question to ask a potentially new therapist is how have you worked with somebody? Like me who has similar experiences to me and they don't necessarily have to have had those experiences to be able to empathize with you. And in fact, I think this is where sometimes not having somebody who is too similar to you cannot actually help my current therapist I've been working with for a long. Time eight years may be off and on, you know, is just kind of my person that I can go to when I when I need it. And that's a great place to deal with therapy in general, right? It doesn't have to be always like a weekly thing because she comes from a different, she's older. And she's not Indian, she's not South Asian. She asked me questions.

19:38 That make me actually. Think about, where did this come from? Is this like new thing? That's horrible to my family? Is this normal to me? Where did I learn this Behavior? Where did I learn this belief or value? And so sometimes you might have that overlooked if you have somebody who has a very similar cultural upbringing because they automatically assume things the echo chamber. That's what I was talking came to, like, like you said, right? It's like sometimes it's like you need somebody who's different enough from you to be able to challenge you to ask you the right questions. Doesn't mean that another South Asian therapist can't ask you those questions. But it's important that they're doing the work for themselves to process and maintain those boundaries between their own lived experience and yours and so the getting too brown man therapy.

20:19 That's really Wanted to have more of these conversations. I found that I wasn't having enough of these conversations, both in my personal life, with my family, with my closest friends, who are from South Asian background nor was I seen enough of those clients in my clinical work, you know, really I say it started as farc with me when I had a client. Actually a client that to me open my eyes because I'm like, wow, I personally have a lot of similar experiences to this person as another Indian fail. And I want to have these kinds of therapy sessions. As more. And, you know, I think it was an interesting eye-opening experience to me because I had to process for myself with my colleagues. Those overlapping value systems experiences that he had that. I maybe I didn't have the same exact experience, but I could easily empathize with his relationship, with his parents, with his relationship, with with work, and what were meant to hand, and finding the right field for himself. And so, that was the first client, it wasn't the first South Asian client, I'd worked with. But the first client, that was similar enough to me where I was.

21:20 Like, we really need to have these conversations more openly and I'm hanging out with my Indian, male friends, South Asian male friends. We are not talking about our mental health. We are not who might even talk about what we're eating our Nutrition a little bit, but once it starts to get into that feeling phase of things. It shuts down really quickly. So you know, I had this urge to get this conversation started some way eventually I got to Brown man therapy as a concept that I felt like, okay, I know Oh enough about Instagram and being able to most, let me just dive in. Let me see what happens. And the reception was way more than I could have ever expected and and led to conversations that I had craved for a long time. Yeah.

22:01 And you know, you touched on a couple topics. I wanted to delve a little bit further into in, this was also discussed in the article. You would you and Joe should worked on together in Psychology today. But patriarchy, I think is such a huge Topic in our culture and one of the things I loved about that article. I'm not a huge fan. That one Russell Peters, the Trope about the angry South Asian, father, you know, somebody's going to get hurt. I was just laughing about that because on the same token, there's some, you know, there's some pain there too, because there is that really stoic, take-no-prisoners mentality with that patriarchal element to South Asian culture. Talk to me a little bit more about that. I'd love to hear your perspective on patriarchy, as applied to the South Asian mental health experience. Patriarchy is a huge topic It's probably worthy of 20 episodes of a podcast.

22:52 So, I'll stick with the anger portion. The emotional aspect of things. Again, we think about patriarchy, it's such a scary term, right? It's something that we talk about and we throw around a lot, but again, it's one of those, you know, red flag terms. Where what does that actually mean in Context of me as the individual or my family, or my community, right? So, when we think about South Asian culture and Community, a lot of times we have this, like you mentioned this tro, the stereo typical day. Add, who is maybe more silent, but when he talks, it's generally going to be more angry or stern of in some way, right? And I think I've connected with people where like, yeah, you know, your dad could give you a look across the room and they're going to stop doing whatever you're doing. They don't have to say anything because you know exactly what they're feeling.

23:38 It's disappointment, it's frustration and anger and I think this goes back to why it's so important to have these conversations because when you think about a patriarchy you think, That the male is the head of the household is the head of the family, which you can have a different experience from that. I actually had this experience where we had a lot of powerful men in my family, but I really saw the females, the women, my mom, my grandmother, my aunts, as the powerhouses in our family. And so, patriarchy doesn't necessarily mean that females are weak, our don't have voices, right? But they haven't been given the proper platform and equity in terms of their role.

24:20 And so what we talked about that, Angry Dad, I think that comes from this idea that they're not allowed to share all of their emotional range. They're not allowed to express that and so that comes from the pressure of being the leader being the the term of Breadwinner for the family. So if dorkly the mother figure is the one that's going to stay at home with the children and do the nurturing and the child bearing, then the father is going to be responsible. For the income, the revenue. And that comes with its own pressure. In a lot of times as we get into the fighting mentality where it's like, well motherhood is work to. Absolutely completely agree but not having a balance is also important to understand here.

25:03 So both parents traditional Family. Household, if one is doing all of the outside work of income generation and one is doing all of the child rearing, there's an imbalance and that means that the father is not going to have the time or the energy to develop. The also being told I'm not supposed to do this, so, they're being told, I'm not supposed to hug my child or tell him I'm proud of him or say, hey, it's okay, you stumbled and you fell and you failed at this, but that's okay. I'm going to lift you back up. That is not an experience that a lot of people will tell you about. You know, that some of those things are going to be more what we deem as maternal roles. And so, it's important to recognize that, that anger, develop, because we're suppressing all these other emotional experiences.

25:47 The ability to cry, too, Feel sadness to feel like you're helpless at. You, you're overwhelmed. Those are not experiences as men that were supposed to share with other people and we're told that all those typical things that we were raised with, boys will be Boys, Boys. Don't Cry be strong. I remember clients. They early in my career, I remember talking to the parent of a client whose parent had passed away. So, the other parent and I were talking about it and the father had passed. And at the funeral, multiple family members had told this child. With eight or nine years old. You are the man of the house. Now Bonnie strong for your mother and your sister as an eight-year-old. Wow, that's a lot to learn in order to help protect that. And so, when we think about patriarchy and South Asian culture, we also have to think about the Immigrant experience. And so the last thing I'll talk about here is the Immigrant experience is a lot of times that we mature at ages sooner than we should.

26:40 Because we have you to translate for our parents or we were going through school and they haven't been to that kind of schooling or educational process. So they don't No. So we have to kind of figure it out ourselves to a lot of times resource finding, you know, learning the language learning the processes. You know, what do we do at the store? How do we go about opening up a bank account? Sometimes those are things that we're learning at the same time as our parents. And so when we don't have open lines of communication especially with Father's, then we also really lack in terms of openness in that when we grow up as men, those of us who are second and third generation and we had to, we had fathers, who had had this kind of Put this into The Stereotype to this Lane, you know, we're now relearning things for ourselves and so you know that's where we're being told.

27:28 Our history is telling us what we have to be. We have to be stoic. We have to be very flat or level. We can't ever be too excited or two down. We have to make all the money if my wife or partner makes more money than me. That. That's exactly right now. Yeah, I'm inferior. Now if I'm the one that stays on, with the kids, how am I possibly going to face my Friends and tell them, my wife is working. But I'm not that we're all of a sudden struggling because we're experiencing things that we didn't have any guidance on because our parents were not in that place to guide us through the world that we're in now. And so now we're having a unique Challenge and that's also part of why I wanted to have more of these conversations because our experience as second and third generation immigrants. Is truly the at this point in history. I think a lot of these issues of identity and a lot of the comparisons that we get into Of it is driven by social media. Now, you have a very interesting Journey with social media for brownman therapy.

28:26 Obviously, Instagram is at the heart of that because that's where primarily you're publishing your updates, you're doing and Instagram lives. But there's a flip side of that, which we talked about on the show, which is the Dark Side of social media, which is the tendency to get into this comparison trap or, you know fomo and also this tendency to curate your experience to be complete Distortion, you know, you. See, people, who are they have the best life on Instagram. And then the next day, you know, you don't hear from them or God forbid. They end up taking their life. I'd love to hear more about your journey with social media because it sounds like it's not something that you were wholeheartedly of fan of like, all your life and brown, man, therapy kind of segwayed into that. So, you know, I think more recently. That was my struggle around.

29:13 Starting, brownman therapy. Was my perception of social media especially as a clinician the my clients. It Equally their anxiety, their depression. Their struggle is not made better by more social media experience. And so, you know, I think I was a little disillusioned and jaded towards towards social media platforms because I was seeing it especially, you know, they're long stretches of my career. I've worked a lot with adolescents and young adults, who get a lot of social interaction and exposure through social media. And so I was seeing a lot of depressed, teens and young adults and anxious, socially anxious and otherwise individuals who were Were there symptoms were exacerbated by social media so you know I think that really that disillusionment really been followed me down in terms of.

29:57 Do I really want to go on social media to get the word out? But what I realized in the refrain for myself was this is a platform it is here to stay and if we don't kind of take the reins as much as possible and we filter it into something that is positive constructive and real. Then you know, social media will continue to be have that. - perception and have that negative impact on people. And so, for me, I was, I became an adult. I was a young adult when Facebook came out. I was a high schooler middle schooler when AOL and a I am was was getting out there and Friendster. I don't think I ever did that but you know, those times are old two of them, some people might have remaining cool or what we're talking about here, right? But I remembered the Facebook and I remember being, you know, that first year of Facebook being what, you know, one of those initial members and I loved it. Is great too, with my high-school friend tour in other places and just to get this, stay in touch with people and in a brand new way.

30:57 So for me, I was actually a frequenter of social media for the first several years that I was on Facebook. And then I burnt out, you know, obligations as politics, got more heated as more and more people joined. And as I started to work in this field more and more and see the impact of social media. I started to really pull myself away from it to the point where I actually for a full year did not go. Social media. And, you know, I almost had to completely unplugged before I was able to kind of replug and have a good digital detox. Basically. Absolutely. You know, the three things that come to mind for me here, our awareness awareness being, how am I using social media?

31:38 And when am I just scrolling? I just got off work, and I'm just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and exposing myself to dozens hundreds of people's experiences new store. Or he's videos pictures, going down the rabbit hole. Exactly. Going through the rabbit hole. Doom scrolling is another term that I've heard from my younger clientele and then what's the makeup of my social media exposure? Am I only looking at people who don't have Lifestyles like me and my looking at Celebrities, or actors, or entertainers of some sort who, you know, I'm going to compare myself to in the most unrealistic ways. And so I think that's where we have to, then lead ourselves to balance and modern And be more intentional and think about because it is scary. I equated to like a morphine drip where it's just basically something you're taking in and it seems so innocuous. And then over time, you know, you look at the clock and you've spent 10 minutes and sometimes it's not even the quantity, it's the quality of the information.

32:39 A lot of people say, they don't even read the news anymore because there's so much negativity and you're exposing your brain to all that information that's going to Ripple through and no wonder you're feeling sluggish. No, wonder you're not feeling up to going on the gym and the Trope, I uses. Its that bag of Funyuns, you know, that's basically it's like you're in this low State of Consciousness and you just grab that bag of Funyuns and it, you know, you just sort of Drown Your sorrows in it can really have Ripple effects. Oh yeah. I think you know, definitely being intentional is important. No, I think that you know, the intent is the key. I think the beauty of the time period that we're in right now is it's very easy to be cynical. It's very easy to be pessimistic. A stake right now and they truly because we have exposure. It's not that - things have not been happening at the rates that they're happening now.

33:27 It's because it's that we know that those things are happy. Yes, things are getting worse in some areas. So I'm not minimizing or dismissing certain things, but crime has always occurred. Suicide has always occurred violence towards others has always occurred suppression of people. Marginalization of people has always occurred now. We're just hyper aware of what's going on now. Now, we have a decision that we can make collectively and individually in terms of how we going to use social media, you talked about intent. So when you make a post or you intentional about why you're making that Pope, are you aware that you are putting out there? Positive facade, when things are not so great at home and then are you aware that? What that contribute?

34:11 Oh, everything is great with Uncle. You just posted a picture from the holidays, with his family. But really what's happening behind the scenes is x y z. So when I think it's just having that Awareness, and having having some intent behind that. What's been great. Is seeing more people post, real passions, real experiences that they're having. This was a really difficult month for me, or I got laid off or my wife and I have been struggling with having a baby. Those are stories that I'm hearing more and more about that. I know I know our parents Generations experience miscarriages, but you know what's unique is? I'm hearing more and more from my female friends when they do have a miscarriage or they go through IVF or something like that. And it's not like this. Carriages are new thing, but it's something that more and more people are talking about. So, in the same light for men, and our mental health, we have all experienced some sort of struggle in this area. It's just now we're talking about it. So it feels like there's more people for us to connect to and I think that's the beauty of social media. Nowadays is that we have those Avenues to have these conversations in such a widespread way rather than in a one-on-one setting which is also powerful. Also important, but we need it at the various levels. I think it's always really important to find a balance Tehran go, right?

35:23 Because it's just I love yes I 100% agree with you that I love the fact that there's more transparency and there's more dialogue because for me particular, like when I shared my story about, you know, struggling with bipolar disorder, you know that article that I was in Psychology today? I got a lot of people on LinkedIn saying, you know. Wow. You know, that took a lot of courage and either, you know, I myself have struggled with it or I have a family member, this is going to help. Oops, / some of that dialogue. Now what I really want to see happen is for there to be a solution oriented perspective with a lot of these activities because it is easy to Piper, pathologize, right? This is happening on Tick-Tock.

36:04 All the time, there was something about, like, Tourette's there were girls who were somehow all of a sudden. This diagnosis of Tourette's was exploding because a lot of these girls were seeing the symptoms and convincing themselves to that. So but I think what you're doing definitely is Of the, what I would say that the correct way to use social media, which is number one to create Community. Number two, you know, to Spur dialogue. Number three is, yeah, just to arrive at a solution because again, at the end of the day, if somebody says, you know what I've been sitting on this for too long, I've been suffering in silence, I need to go get help or a sibling, or a loved one. Then as the kids say, you win and social media today, one of the precepts of until your life is about.

36:49 Owning your health and Breaking Free of templates for managing our mental and physical health. Now, you know, with mental health, obviously cognitive therapy medication. Those are what I would call table Stakes. There's so much more that needs to be done. And we've had guests on here that are specialists in ayurveda or pranayama yoga. And what I would say is, you know, we literally wrote the book on this stuff. So it's good to see that. We're embracing it more. I wanted to hear more, maybe your views on a lot of He's Eastern approaches to mental Wellness in terms of breath work in meditation. If you could talk to me about that a little bit things are from a cultural standpoint. Things that have we are very familiar with.

37:30 I remember as a kid going to a meditation center with my parents on a Friday night, I know that my friends were not doing the same thing for me. That's a privilege South. Asian culture is it's interesting because you know, earlier we were talking about model minorities which means in a very irrational or false kind of way but Means that we have the ability collectively as a culture, to pull ourselves, woke to find success in some way. Sure. And we have these tools within our cultural history, that act in similar ways where we are able to. Now use mindfulness use meditation, use guided breathing, and other exercises to help our mental health and our overall Wellness. Something that happened for me personally, which is as a kid, if you're right, you're not only raised around your culture, your family.

38:18 You might tend to All the way from in your younger years or teenagers or 20 people tend to kind of pull away from what they were taught a little bit and go explore the world, right? A little bit. And then and then what we do as I think we talked about this before, right is as we're getting older, we noted perfect like pulling back into Boomerang effect. I would say Boomerang effect, you know, as we get older were like, oh, I kind of understand my parents now. A little bit more. We get to decide, you know, how much we want these different tools as part of our life, the same way that we get to decide which Value systems which belief systems we want to carry forward with us and which of those we don't need or don't have any interest in just because we are from this culture doesn't mean that we have to practice yoga practice pranayama, breathing.

39:02 These are tools that are at our disposal. I didn't create these tools, nobody in my family at least in my last several Generations created, these tools rather just have the benefit of being from a culture where these tools were created thousands of years ago. And so we have, you know, maybe an inside track. To these has a tools which are the tools that we use in therapy to practice, breathing is to practice the control to take the focus away from something that's outside of your control. The first thing that you can do is take control of your breathing breathing. Like I talked about with my clients is one of the most beautiful things known to Nature. It is one of the only functions in our body, if not the only function that is both in voluntary involuntary you.

39:45 And I have been breathing this whole time, but we had probably not been thinking about our breath, we go. Bring up the sound right and now we're thinking about our breath. So be able to do that. Is that powerful first step to taking back a little bit of control over your thinking over? You're feeling the tools that you mentioned are just a, some, some ways to get there. And so, if you have the access to these kinds of tools, if you have the familiarity with these tools, they're extremely powerful in terms of getting started on coping, with stressors managing difficult time. And and and getting to a place where you can allow your brain and allow yourself to process trauma and and break cycles that are unhealthy and dysfunctional.

40:29 You know, obviously this podcast it's called untether your life, you know, it's about going outside of templates, whether it be Health Care related, you know, about like surgery medication for managing our health or career-wise, you know, not necessarily Breaking Free of that. What I call the doctor engineer, failure menu of options. What does that term mean to you untethering? Your life. How have you? I guess. Untethered, your life. And what would you tell the listeners to help them untether their lives? Yeah, so I really love this title and the energy that it portrays right? Because I think we sometimes carry a lot of fear. Pulling ourselves away. From what we've known, what we've been taught, what we've believed our whole life.

41:12 But untethering yourself doesn't mean that you remain. Untethered. Really. It's a choice and you To be at the front of that to drive what that whatever that Journey looks like for you for me, you know, both personally and professionally. I've seen, you know, that Venn diagram has crossed quite a bit because I got into this field because of my own struggle, but also because from an educational standpoint and intellectual standpoint, it was super interesting. This topic and I was able to marry those two experiences and interests to create this career. And the same thing goes with brown man therapy I had Add to untether myself for my skewed belief system about social media because I was seeing it only as a - as a contributor to dysfunction.

41:59 So I had to kind of break away from that belief that social media is only bad to actually challenge it because we're not going to sit here and take Facebook down, or Instagram down or anything like that that you know, pranayama yoga, mindfulness meditation. These things are here to stay for. A reason, there is a benefit and that's the other thing. And I want to remind people of there is a benefit even to the negative things in our life. There is a benefits depression at that moment that you are depressed, it doesn't always look like it. But there is a reason that your brain went into depression that your body went into depression by untethering, by pulling yourself apart from things that you might believe or patterns communication Styles relationship habits.

42:43 All that means is that you don't remain untethered, but that you get to come back to which Styles which beliefs Which pattern you choose to keep because they are healthy because they're helpful and because they're effective for your lifestyle and your goals. And so why I love untether, your life is really, that's what we're doing at the beginning of therapy. Not all at once. That's the scary part about entering therapies, like, I'm going to question everything in my life, absolutely not. But we might pick and choose a couple areas that you question, you process, you explore the. Hey, you know, one of the most powerful questions that my This is ever asked me that I ask my clients now is, how did you come to learn this?

43:24 And really that is so applicable because we don't always think that way we just act out of having templates. Right. So about templates here and and so templates are important, templates are helpful to get us started yet. Not all to get us started and then sometimes we realize hey I got to rewrite this whole thing and that's okay because it's never it's never too late to make that change to untether yourself from something that is no longer working and And I think you and I have lived enough years to recognize that at different points, we would have untethered ourselves from different styles of living and we wouldn't have been wrong or right. It would have just been a matter of choice for us. And so I think that's the thing that I want to you know, kind of leave out there is untethering is is not a loss of control.

44:08 It's actually you getting more control just over different parts of life that you choose. And so it's really important to have that reframing that understanding I think when you're entering something like therapy that you are Actually doing this to gain more control over your life and your reactions to things that life throws at you. I love that. I love the way you frame that because the analogy I always use like corporations, you know, when you go on these retreats to have those trust fall exercises, right, where you fall back and you know, you're supposed to and that's really what therapy is. It is it is a matter of letting go of that tether that mindset, you know, that may be destructive. So I think you definitely you nailed it. I think you have a good understanding of In your life. So it's that that's one of the reasons I was really glad to have you on the show.

44:54 So on court has been a great discussion. Where can people find you? Yeah, so you can find me on Instagram at brownman therapy and hopefully very soon. You'll find me on YouTube, as well. Under brown man therapy, I'm happy to send me a message on Instagram. I'm happy to give you any insight. I can into your journey with mental health care specific questions, or you're not sure where to start in terms of finding a professional and happy to point you. In the right direction. Sounds great. Well, thanks so much ankur. This was a great discussion, really happy to have you on, and hope to hope to keep the dialogue going and keep this momentum of this movement going. So thanks again. Thanks. Thank you, thanks so much for listening and I hope you enjoyed that episode four, more of these types of conversations. Please visit us at untether, your life that Co you can also find us on Instagram at untether your life, as well as on Apple Spotify, and other platforms by searching for untether your life.

45:49 And if you did enjoy this episode, please leave us a review or share it with someone who might also benefit. Thanks. And until the next time we meet stay untethered. And if you did enjoy this episode, please leave us a review or share it with someone who might also benefit. Thanks. And until the next time we meet stay untethered.