Mental Wellness Mastery: Dr Carl Nassar On Everyday Life Hacks For Optimal Mental Wellness
An Interview With Eden Gold
Our compassion soothes our challenging emotions, and it opens the doorway to understanding our feelings. Most people, myself included, find that the simple act of making time to understand our feelings naturally moves us in the direction of genuine change, guiding us toward our best lives.
In our modern, fast-paced society, mental wellness is a crucial aspect of leading a fulfilling life. However, for many people, achieving and maintaining good mental health can be a challenging task, with obstacles such as stress, anxiety, depression, and more. That’s why it’s essential to have practical and accessible strategies for mental wellness that can help build resilience, emotional intelligence, and overall well-being. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Carl Nassar.
Dr. Carl Nassar is a twenty-five-year veteran in the fields of psychology and clinical counseling, a Certified International Integrative Psychotherapy Trainer and Supervisor (CIIPTS), a Certified Integrative Psychotherapist (CIP), and a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC). His work with individuals, couples & families frees them from the constraints of traumas, limiting mindsets, and societal worldviews that hinder their mental and emotional well-being and restrict their understanding of themselves and the world around them.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about Mental Wellness Life Hacks, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
I’m delighted to share the colorful journey that got me here. I was born to parents who’d immigrated to Canada on the day I turned three years old. My parents wanted me to have a safe and secure future, and that meant giving me two choices for my future career: I could become a doctor or I could choose to be an engineer. Because I problem solved better than I memorized, I entered the field of engineering, where I earned all three of my degrees — my Bachelors, my Masters, and my Doctorate — from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. I accepted a tenure track faculty position at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, and taught and researched there for seven years, earning tenure as an engineering professor. And then, I changed everything…
I realized what I loved most about my work was people, not programming, and I wanted a career where the work was the people. So, I earned new graduate degrees in clinical psychology, and, to quote my mother at the time, “gave up the certainty of tenure for the few pennies my clients would pay me.”
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
There are so many juicy stories to choose from. I could tell you about how I tired of working alone as a counselor and decided to hire a few people to work alongside me in a group practice, and how that group practice exploded in size until it included 300 therapists across the state of Colorado. But that’s likely my most surprising story, not my most interesting one. For a more interesting story, let’s you and I turn to my clinical career…
When I was a handful of years into my young career as a counselor, I was in training to become certified by an organization known as the International Integrative Psychotherapy Association. They’re a group made up mostly of Europeans, but they also have a small international footprint. They were holding their first-ever oral examinations, set to take place the day before their bi-annual conference in Lake Bled, Slovenia. Passing the oral exam meant becoming a Certified Integrative Psychotherapist.
Now, as you’ll remember, I was once a doctorate-level engineer, so I was quite familiar with the rigor of oral exams. I studied hard, putting together a clinically and theoretically strong presentation and preparing for the Q&A session that would follow. But I’d misunderstood the whole goal of the presentation, which was to balance my knowledge of the theory with my relational style so that the evaluators could see both my understanding of the material and my relational presence.
My misunderstanding led to a catastrophic outcome. The evaluators failed me. It was the first test I ever recall failing. I was crushed. Then, I did something brave, something that surprised me. I asked the leaders of the organization to reconsider, explaining my failure was based on miscommunication.
What happened next amazed me. The senior members of the organization, twenty people in total, none of whom knew me well at the time, spent two long evenings debating what to do with me. They understood that I’d misinterpreted the intention of the exam, and they thoughtfully asked themselves: Was that on me for failing to understand, or on them for failing to make it clear?
On the third day, they came to me with a proposal. They said they’d allow me to retake my oral exam the following morning if I wanted to a do-over. I did. And this time I passed, knowing now the presentation needed to be as relational as it was rigorous.
There were important life lessons here for me, lessons I carry to this day:
One is that there are so many good people in this world, more people who really care and are willing to go above and beyond than I’d ever imagined. These aren’t people who make it into nightly news stories, but they’re all out there nonetheless.
Second, I’m reminded to never let the theory of counseling become more important than the relationships at the heart of counseling. And I’m reminded never to let telling people what I think become more important than allowing people to know what’s in my heart.
You are a successful individual. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I’ll start with being generous with offering care toward myself and others.
Living in today’s consumer culture, I sometimes get caught up in defining myself by how much I do, telling myself that making the most of my short time on this planet means accomplishing all that I can. Sometimes, while living what can then become a busy, hurried life, I forget the importance of slowing down and taking time to care for myself and the people around me, each day, in small ways. But, over the years, I’ve made more and more time for myself and others, and I continue finding that my moments of connection not only create meaning but propel me forward.
I’ll add in being adaptable when life throws curveballs my way.
I’ve never accomplished anything I set out to do. By that, I don’t mean I’ve never achieved a goal of mine, but I do mean I’ve never achieved my goals in the way I’d set out to do them. My life, filled with unexpected events, always seems to get in the way of my best laid plans. Rather than try to plow through with my original plan when things go sideways, I find I’m far better off pausing when life throws me a curveball. It helps when I take the time to sit with how I feel and ask myself, “What does moving forward look like now?” and “What path is true to my heart?”. Sitting with these questions for a short time, I find myself charting a new way forward in my new reality, instead of clinging to my original plans.
Finally, I’d add going through the traumas and losses of life in a gentle, compassionate manner.
No one gets through this life unscathed. I’ve suffered my own unique sets of traumas and losses, and all too often in my youth, I felt isolated… no one arrived to hold me in many of these moments. I was alone dealing with the aftermath of what had happened to me. At those times, I sometimes turned against myself, telling myself there must be something wrong with me, or perhaps that I deserved what happened to me.
But today, far more often than not, when traumas and losses tumble into my life, I invite myself to slow down, feel the ache, find the friends and family who can care for me, call in the professionals when needed, and hold on to hope. I remind myself that what I’m feeling in my darker moments is just that, what I’m feeling in my darker moments, nothing more and nothing less. When I make room for it, it passes through me in its own time, and I find my way forward again.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview about mental wellness mastery. What is one often-overlooked daily habit that can significantly improve one’s mental wellness?
We live in a culture, a consumer culture, hurrying us. It hurries us to get out there and make something of ourselves each day, and it hurries us to go out there and find things that stimulate us each day.
But hurrying comes with unintended consequences. When we move quickly, we rush past our own feelings, losing contact with ourselves and with what matters most to us. We also end up rushing past each other, managing our relationships instead of making time to truly listen, understand and connect to one another.
One daily habit to help us all, most of all, is the simple act of slowing down. Each of us can learn how to slow down and stay in touch with our feelings and stay connected with each other.
What we’ll discover first when we slow down is nothing short of our own hearts: We’ll reclaim our capacity to bring compassion and empathy to all that we’re going through and to all that others are going through. And we’ll start acting from this caring place.
Slowing down is a big ask, and a hard task, in a world that’s always demanding something of you: to go to work, to come home and cook and clean, to constantly take care of the kids, to spend time on the weekends shopping, and to do all this and much more mostly on your own. Slowing down is a big ask in a world that offers a constant stream of stimulus: the apps on your phone, the promise of social media, the endless email notifications on your laptop, and the streaming opportunities on your television sets.
To slow down, you’ll first need to remind yourself that its time to interrupt your busy life. That’s the hardest part, remembering in the midst of business to break free from it all. From here, it can be as simple as taking few deep breaths, coming back to your heart and everything you’re feeling, and sitting for a time with all of it. After you’ve begun this practice, you’ll find it’s an art form well worth continuing.
How do you recommend individuals recalibrate their mental wellness after experiencing a significant setback or failure?
We live in a world teaching us “you are what you do” and “you are what you have”, which feels wonderful when we’re thriving in the outside world, but terrible when we encounter significant setbacks in it. It’s very easy to over-identify with the setbacks and say to ourselves, “I’m a failure”, instead of realizing “what happened was a failure”.
This takes us down a dark road, a path to believing there’s something wrong with us. But this is a misguided conclusion.
Whenever we find ourselves over-identifying with setbacks and letting them define us, let’s do this. First, we’ll stay with our feelings. We’re likely to discover feelings of grief, grief over the failure, grief bringing with it anger, fear, and sadness. We’ll take the time to feel all of these. (If we don’t, we’re likely to act out our feelings, perhaps with our anger turning toward the people we care most about, and with our sadness creating a loss of energy and vitality in our own lives.)
After we’ve made time for what we feel, then we can ask ourselves these important questions. “Where does my heart want to go from here?” “What does living in a manner congruent with my best life look like now?” And we’ll take small steps forward.
In your experience, what is a common misconception about mental health that hinders people from seeking help or improving their wellness?
We grow up in a world valuing forward motion instead of making room for stillness. It’s a world that values “pushing through” when we’re having a hard time instead of slowing down.
We’ve all been told messages, beginning in our early childhoods, that include “Don’t cry over spilled milk” and “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”. But these sayings are nothing more than misconceptions. They encourage us to get through this life pushing down our difficult feelings and pushing through our challenging experiences. They don’t allow us to take the time we need to experience our feelings or to tend to the traumas and the losses sure to fall into our all-too-human lives.
When we attempt to push through instead of taking the time to sit with, we only end up with repressed feelings, feelings that build inside of us until we find ourselves too unwell — too depressed, too anxious, too overwhelmed — to keep going.
Instead of attempting to push through our feelings and our struggles, we can choose to find caring people willing to sit with us and support us in going through them. That is what’s at the heart of mental health counseling.
Can you share a transformative moment or client story that highlights the power of a specific mental wellness strategy?
The remarkable moments in therapy take place when therapists create nonjudgemental spaces and clients lean in to these spaces and courageously share their tender, insecure, and unshielded parts, the parts of themselves they’d typically protect from others in a world telling them to be “strong” and never “weak”.
When clients receive loving, empathic responses to their brave acts of sharing their struggles (sharing with hearts open wide and emotions on their sleeves), this changes everything. The way clients feel about the painful experiences literally changes. Even the way clients remember these painful experiences changes. Everything softens and is now seen through the tender lens of compassion. I’ll share one example to illustrate.
A client of mine, a young woman in her 30s, had been through a lifetime of sexual trauma. She knew her father had sexually abused her when she was only four or five years old. She knew when she and her mother moved away and she began spending time playing with her new neighbors that they too abused her. And, making matters worse, she knew when her mother remarried, her older step-brother sexually abused her. But, each time she recounted the story, or parts of her story, to me, she told it factually, as if she were a reporter reading the daily news from a teleprompter. If you just listened to the tone and not the content, you might think she was telling me what she ate for breakfast earlier that morning.
She and I slowed everything down, built a caring, genuine relationship, and a handful of sessions later she told her story again, but this time with her heart cracking open, recalling the events the way she’d felt them long ago, revealing to me the anger and the sadness and the terror she felt but had always hidden away. No one had been there to listen to her. I was here now. And I listened to every word and witnessed every tear. While my heart broke alongside hers, I remained a safe container, able to hold all that she needed to let go of.
She wasn’t magically transformed, but something very important shifted that day. Something had happened inside of her that had never been possible before. The frozen trauma that had lived within, the pieces of her that lived inside as broken off fragments of a larger whole, had now come home to her heart. She experienced a stronger sense of self after that session, a more solid, grounded self than she’d ever known previously.
This speaks so well to the power of slowing down and reconnecting to ourselves and our feelings.
Based on your experience and research, can you please share “5 Everyday Life Hacks For Optimal Mental Wellness?”
Hack #1: Is this really what you want?
I’ll start with something I haven’t mentioned before. Prioritize. If I were to ask just about anyone if they’d like optimal mental wellness, they’d almost certainly respond with a confident, enthusiastic, “Yes please!”. But what happens if I then tell them getting there will require, say, an hour in therapy each and every week? What happens when I add in that getting there means spending a half hour each day performing a loving kindness meditation? And what happens when I also say they’ll need to slowly break free of their addictions to drinking, or to smoking, or to working too much, or to video games, or to busyness in general? With each new request telling them what it will take to get to optimal mental wellness, I’ll lose some people along the way.
And that’s quite understandable. Our culture teaches us to assess ourselves not with the measuring stick of overall mental well-being, but instead on the basis of what we do for work, how much money we make, and what our net worth is. The measures that count most in today’s consumer culture are economic in nature. They’re not about who we are and how well we are doing emotionally, but about what we do and what income we earn doing it.
Measuring ourselves on these economic terms doesn’t work for us. It leaves most of us overwhelmed, exhausted, and isolated, and it is the root cause behind today’s loneliness epidemic. But it is nevertheless the life we’ve been told to live. And it’s hard to let go of the life we have today for the promise of a life with better mental health tomorrow, because who knows if that promise will materialize.
There’s an old quote therapists use in couples counseling: Do you want to be right or do you want your relationship? And in individual counseling, therapists ask: Do you want the life you have or are you ready to move forward into the life you really want?
Most people say they want a new, better life, but they never-the-less cling to their life as-is, until the boulders of trauma and of loss fall upon them. It’s only then they decide the life they have is no longer working, and only then they recognize its time to build a better one. But why wait for tragedy to make the changes you long for?
If you want optimal mental wellness, then the first hack is to prioritize it. How? By prioritizing to the next four hacks.
Hack # 2: Let’s not do this alone.
Nothing motivates us as much as our relationships with each other.
But you and I live in a culture telling us that strong, capable people make it on their own, warning us that it’s dangerous to depend on other people because this might make us weak. These statements are nothing more than cultural myths. In truth, for most of humanity’s 200,000 year history on this planet, we were born into and grew up in villages, where security was found in each other’s arms. Our brains and our bodies evolved in these village settings. That’s why, from the time you and I were born, we’ve longed for a connection with one another, and this longing for connection motivates us more than anything else.
For this reason, it’s important we begin our journey to optimal mental wellness by surrounding ourselves with people supporting us and encouraging us on our path. We’ll add these people slowly but steadily, a little each week or each month, finding everyone from a wise and nurturing therapist, to a meaningful therapy group, to a loving kindness meditation and yoga class, and to spending time with trusted friends and family who we know will be supportive of us.
Hack #3. Slow down and connect to the people around you.
With hack # 2, we begin slowly surrounding ourselves with people who’ll support us. Now, you and I will need to slow down and make time for all of them as well as for everyone else around us.
If you’re anything like me, you sometimes get caught up in the business of everyday life, busying yourself with everything from work to chores to smartphones to social media accounts. I can get so busy in this life that I sometimes fear slowing down, as if slowing down means all the emotions I’ve been too busy to feel will catch up to me all at once and overwhelm me.
But deciding to slow down to connect with others turns out to have many unexpected benefits…
The research shows that when we hurry with the people around us, focused on getting things done quickly, we disrupt the richness found in relationships, whereas slowing down promotes it. Slowing down to make time to authentically catch up, to joke around and play together, to communicate affectionately, and to engage in simple shared activities, all strengthen the bonds connecting us to one another. And slowing down and making the time to talk in-depth, with a willingness to be genuine and vulnerable, leads to lasting connections.
But this isn’t easy work, especially when you and I have been taught that each act of slowing down is an interruption to our important, busy lives. Each act of deceleration is a rude interruption from the felt need to rush back to all we have to do, to the familiar fast pace of our everyday lives.
Being willing to slow down and have our lives interrupted by time spent with others is one of the most important things you and I can do… because it gradually returns us to the life we were born for, the life that best supports our mental health, a life lived together in a rich relationship.
Hack #4. Slow down and make time for your emotional self.
You and I have been taught to hurry, to move at a fast pace, to stimulate ourselves with everything from streaming services to dating apps to climbing the corporate ladder. This makes it easy to lose contact with ourselves, losing contact with our relational need for each other and also losing contact with our need to honor our feelings.
When we slow down, we can meet our relational needs by connecting with the people around us, and we can also meet our emotional needs by tuning into the feelings within us. Slowing down, we can compassionately listen to all our feelings, bringing empathy to our sadness, bringing understanding to our anger, and bringing reassurance to our fear and anxiety. In this way we care for ourselves as emotional beings instead of rushing past ourselves.
There are many different paths to slowing down and making room for our emotional selves. Here are two of the many: First, attend therapy, where a therapist slows us down, makes room for our feelings, and offers us an attuned response to whatever feel comes up. Over time, we’ll internalize this process and do it for ourselves. Alternatively, practice a loving kindness meditation where you close our eyes and open your heart to all of your feelings, holding them in a loving embrace, and then asking yourself what actions honor the feelings you’re embracing.
Hack # 5. I’ve saved the best for last…
In the first four hacks, we prioritized our mental well-being, we decided we’re not going to do this alone, and we slowed down to meaningfully connect with others and our emotional selves. But, all of this can lose its meaning if not for this fifth hack: Every step of the way, let’s you and I embrace compassion. What do I mean by this?
Living in our consumer culture, I sometimes find myself hurriedly jumping from one form of busyness to the next. All of this leads me to feeling a great deal of stress and, when I’m stressed, I’m likely to become critical of myself and of those around me. That’s because my stress tells me to get relief, now, at all costs… even at the cost of my emotional self and my care for others.
When you and I slow down, we create a new opportunity for ourselves, and we can make the most of it. We create the opportunity to truly listen to and hear ourselves, instead of rushing past ourselves. Now, to best listen to what we’re feeling, let’s find a still, soft part inside ourselves filled with compassion, the part of ourselves ready to hold us tenderly.
You can summon this part of yourself by imagining a younger you, perhaps at the age of four or five, feeling what you’re currently feeling. Imagine putting this younger you on your lap. Now, offer this young part the compassion and tenderness you longed for but seldom received.
Our compassion soothes our challenging emotions, and it opens the doorway to understanding our feelings. Most people, myself included, find that the simple act of making time to understand our feelings naturally moves us in the direction of genuine change, guiding us toward our best lives.
What role does technology play in mental wellness today, and how can individuals leverage it positively without exacerbating mental health issues?
We’re born for a rich relational web of connection, both within ourselves and with each other. Whenever technology supports our ability to genuinely engage and relate to our inner world or to each other, it can be a great help.
The dilemma we experience with technology is that so much of it comes with the promise of connecting us to each other, but all it ends up doing is connecting us to our smartphones or tablets. For example, social media promises to connect us, but all too often we only end up endlessly doom scrolling.
So, how can we use technology to help us connect, without going down a rabbit hole that instead has us feeling disconnected?
The key is to find the things online we believe are connecting and do just a little of each of them at a time. Examples of these would be finding an online community where you feel safe sharing yourself, finding educational content to guide you in what to do with your current feelings of depression or anxiety, or finding a mindfulness resource that offers you five minute meditations guiding you to compassion.
What’s important to remember is that these are tools, best viewed as short bursty tools used for a few minutes at a time and then stepped away from. After you’ve received what you came for, put down that phone or that iPad. Otherwise, if you’re like me, you’ll quickly find yourself trapped in the black hole of distraction that these devices all too often offer up.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
What a deliciously rich question.
For most of humanity’s 200,000 year history on this planet, we lived our lives in villages, intimate communities where safety and genuine security were found in each other’s arms. When our ancestors arrived in their village worlds, forty pairs of eyes greeted them, and as they grew up there, forty pairs of hands guided them. There, they seldom felt a need to prove their worth, because it was steadily reflected back to them in the loving eyes of their fellow villagers. When the necessary traumas and losses of life fell upon our ancestors, their fellow villagers stopped all that they were doing, interrupting their lives, so they could serve as a caring container and a guiding light through the darker moments of life.
The deepest longing we, as humans, hold is the longing to return home, home to that place where we’re seen and known and welcomed in all of who we are. We long to return to the village.
If I could start a grand movement, I would create village subcultures within the larger consumer culture.
My village subcultures begin by getting groups of twenty to forty people together, typically ten households or so. I’d spend time with each group to guide their way to a camaraderie and a connection that frees them from the social isolation of our current consumer culture. I’d work with them to create a framework of building a life together, rather than each household surviving all on their own, granting them relief from the exhaustion of our current culture. Together, we’d begin letting go of a life spent working to live and invest in a new life of living meaningfully together.
In each village subculture, I’d work with them to help economic security gradually, almost invisibly, become replaced by a genuine form of social security. The safety each group once felt building their own individual piles of wealth would slowly give way to the safety offered by the village subculture itself. Money would succumb to mutuality as village members supported one another from a place of genuine relational care.
You might say I’m a dreamer, but all this is already happening, it’s just on such a small scale that you and I don’t see it. It’s estimated that there are well over 100,000 people in the US living in intentional communities, another term for my village subcultures.
In each village subculture, we would be actively creating the world we most want to live in, a world rich in social connectivity and mutual care, a world where we would come home at last.
How can our readers further follow you online?
It would be a joy to meet any of your many readers online. They’ll find me on my webpage at www.carlnassar.com where they can reach out to me directly, read more of what I’ve written, watch me on video, listen to me on audio, and learn about my upcoming book Born for a Better World. They’re also very welcome to receive my monthly newsletter which they can sign up for on Substack at https://carlnassar.substack.com.
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About The Interviewer: Eden Gold, is a youth speaker, keynote speaker, founder of the online program Life After High School, and host of the Real Life Adulting Podcast. Being America’s rising force for positive change, Eden is a catalyst for change in shaping the future of education. With a lifelong mission of impacting the lives of 1 billion young adults, Eden serves as a practical guide, aiding young adults in honing their self-confidence, challenging societal conventions, and crafting a strategic roadmap towards the fulfilling lives they envision.
Do you need a dynamic speaker, or want to learn more about Eden’s programs? Click here: https://bit.ly/EdenGold
