Kyle: You have this great checklist of the 10… I’m just gonna read it ’cause it’s the 10 steps. Complete these 10 steps daily to begin learning the art of living mentally well. And we could do a whole series just on these, but let’s go each of them. Just give a couple sentences of how they’ve benefited you.
The first one is therapy.
Kevin: Therapy. All right.
It took me eight to 10 years of denial. To finally be honest in therapy.
Kyle: So the big takeaway from therapy: be honest in therapy?
Kevin: Be honest in therapy. It’ll do you wonders. And today I call it the Art of Wellness. And we’re coming out with a book with the whole 10 steps, and we’re coming out with five other versions of other people’s 10 steps to their arts of wellness, all right?
And they’re called different things. But we’re gonna be able to combine all of these steps, and you’re gonna be able to go on an app and choose whose steps you wanna follow. You can mix and match plans to build your own personal tool. To better your brain health every day.
Kyle: I need that. Yeah. I already started implementing these.
Kevin: Nice. Number two is medication. That’s the only one that’s not a common sense tool because it doesn’t work for everybody. But it worked for me and it’s worked for me for 20 years. Minus the time I had tried to poison me but we worked around that.
We found a way to get back on medication that helps save my life. So I take medication with 100% accuracy. Every day without fail. At the same time every day. No matter the time zone. Because if I put it on a calendar and I make it routine, it makes it affect me more accurately and more appropriately to better my brain health every day then if I’m just sporadically taking it.
Taking it one day and not the next seven days and not for seven days, or I’m binge drinking or something else. So I take it the right way and it has the best effect.
Kyle: And even when you said you were taking it, you sometimes weren’t back in the day. And so parents listening to this, make sure your kid is actually taking it.
Number three, exercise. Every doctor I talk to, they go, yeah, and all these steps are good, but eat well and exercise too. It’s so obvious, but we don’t do it.
Kevin: There’s something to it. Look, I look at it like this. If we’re physically capable of exercise and we’re not exercising, we’re making a huge mistake in our life’s journey. Because 23 minutes of rigorous exercise with very little breaks equals 12 hours of better mood. Better brain health.
Guess what? If you do that twice a day. 24 hours. 24 hours is a better mood. I exercise and when I was sick and in the physical pain for so long with the skin disease, I exercised 16 times a day in 13 minute increments.
That’s three hours of exercise a day, but 13 minute increments are realistic, totally achievable during the part of your day when you’re not doing something. Yeah, I’m busy most days, most of the time of the day, but I take those 13 minutes and I get it. Anywhere I can. Any way I can. I’m infamous for my airport workouts.
People stare at me and take pictures. But that’s their problem.
Kyle: That is their problem. I love that. Ummm, sleep.
Kevin: The most important by far.
Kyle: This is your most important on the list?
Kevin: Most important by far. It’s all of our most importance. If we are not getting adequate sleep, we are physically and emotionally and mentally damaging our brains.
We’re losing brain cells. We’re damaging our sleep function. It goes right in hand with breathing techniques. 88% of Americans don’t breathe properly.
Kyle: How am I supposed to be breathing?
Kevin: Because when you’re upset and aggressive and pissed off, you breathe shallow, short breaths that deplete oxygen from your brain and affect brain function. If you focus 30 times a day, three sets a day of breathing in the nose for four seconds, out for eight with pursed lips, like a whistle but no sound.
And you do that every day for six months. You lower your blood pressure and heart rate. Your blood sugar gets lowered. Your panic can be quelled, your anxiety can be quelled. An adrenaline rush can be crushed back to calm.
If you have low blood pressure, it’s not for you. It’s dangerous.
Kyle: No excuses.
Kevin: No excuse. We can all do it.
Kyle: I just did it. We can all do it. So we can all do it.
Kevin: Four, eight every day, three times a day, three times. It’ll help change your life.
Kyle: Love it. You talked about food in the previous video, but that’s obviously on your list. Healthy diets, better low inflammation foods. Number six…it’s probably my favorite one, which is education.
This is our whole purpose at MedCircle. Education. Education. But what does it mean when it comes to our mental health education?
Kevin: My Uncle Kevin on my dad’s side, every day…he’d come to every psych ward without fail, until he died of pancreatic cancer. He missed the last psych ward stay. Every other psych ward stay, he was there without fail, nobody else was.
Uncle Kevin would bring me three things – a cup of soup, conversation and comic books, and then he would bring me a separate thing every other session, a book on bipolar disorder. How to fight it, defeat it, beat it one day at a time.
How to use every tool in the handbook to better brain health. He would read me every book on the subject, every magazine, every article. And I devoured it.
Kyle: Number seven, probably a little tough for me. Refrain from using alcohol…
Kevin: Refrain from using alcohol. The next step is refrain from using drugs.
My birth parents died of alcohol and drugs. So I will never touch it. I binge drank until blackout at least five times. And I can remember while on psychotropic medication, which could have really damaged me. And I’m lucky that it didn’t do more damage than it had.
And if you find a way through substance use to find recovery from it, live in it and stay in it. My recommendation is refrain from all drugs and alcohol because it can’t tempt you to go down that path again. And I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s not the hardest thing you’re ever gonna do when you are addicted, but you can get to a better place.
You don’t have to end up like my birth parents did.
Kyle: That’s right. And it goes right into number nine. Number eight was refrain from using recreational drugs. Number nine is coping. So many people don’t even know they use food, television, relationships, drugs, alcohol to cope. So explain what’s your big takeaway from coping?
Kevin: You can choose negative coping mechanisms that damage your brain, or positive coping mechanisms that heal it. It’s your choice. It’s a hard choice to make. That’s why I don’t eat Cheez-Itz every day. Because I used to and I was near diabetic. Here I am in the best shape of my life at 36 years old in the shape I was in when I was a high school wrestler.
Because I worked tirelessly for my brain, mind, behavioral, spiritual, and mental health every day. And I fight the suicidal thoughts every day. And I win every day. I win every day.
Because of all these 10 steps that I do without fail each day, and I don’t gripe about ’em. I don’t cry about ’em. I get it done for my health, and I preach about it because I want other people to do the same.
Kyle: Yeah, I get it. The last one was the one that I go, what? I didn’t think this would be on the list. The binder. What’s the binder?
Kevin: The binder was a binder. What’s a binder? Kids at home are like, what is the binder, sir?
I only know binders in my phone or folders in my phone.
Kyle: What app is that?
Kevin: There’s probably an app for that. But it was a physical binder that I made for certain family members to opt in to my brain health. I got the release form signed by my doctors, all of them. Every kind of doctor you can imagine, so that my family could be a part of my wellness.
So that my particular friends could be a part of my journey to hope and healing and recovery. And so that when I was unwell and I wasn’t self-aware, they could say, “Hey, that symptom’s in the binder. We better get Kevin on track.” And so every sign, symptom, trigger every time…the bad relationships I had, the friends that were negative in my life, their names were in the binder.
Every doctor’s name, information, phone number, email, and address was in the binder. And my doctors all had, I coordinated ’em all together because you can’t expect them to do it. No, there’s no healthcare coverage in the world that has them talking to each other.
So you gotta go to your dentist, your psychiatrist, your primary, your psychologist, your psycho pharmacologist, or whoever you’re working with.
Your Reiki coach, I don’t care. Whoever you believe in is helping you mentally go to them and say, “If I’m in a bad place mentally, here’s who you call.” And then you create personal protectors.
So that you don’t have to rely just on yourself, especially when you’re mentally unwell and you can’t even function, let alone ask for help. So when they see me falling, they grab me by personal protectors. They say, “We got you. Let’s go to the hospital, let’s go to the doctor. Let’s get a checkup. Let’s go to therapy. Let’s be honest.”
Kyle: Yeah. Let’s be honest. I love, love that.
All right, just some questions. Did you ever meet The Rock? He’s like a huge fan of the Rock so you haven’t met him yet?
Kevin: 20 years trying. 20 years to try to reach that guy and I’m sorry, I love what he does for the Make-A-Wish Foundation but I’m not terminally ill.
And I get it. And it’s a wonderful thing you’re doing for so many kids. But I’ve been trying to reach you for 20 years, man.
And you saved my life, when I was first suicidal and self-harming, I read that book – The Rock Says, a New York Times bestseller. Thank you very much. He did a great job on that one. And in the book, he was the first celebrity I ever read about that talked openly about their bouts with depression and how they would overcome it. And he had a similar situation. He broke his back in football.
I didn’t bring my back in football, but I broke my back and he recovered. He had a rough life as a kid in really severe poverty for some time. Parents evicted regularly, things like that. And he overcame all of that with faith and the human condition that he had the will to find a way to hope and wellbeing and to a bright future.
And that inspired the hell outta me because I would look at this man who they called the people’s champ, who is this rock. He was built, he was strong, he was tough, and nothing ever crushed him, and he always won. Because he wielded it to be. So even when he lost, he won.
And then he goes and he says, “I’m gonna go be an actor.” And CAA looked at him and they laughed him out the door. They laughed him out the door because they thought, sure, you’re a wrestler dude. Get outta here. But then William Morris Endeavor was like, oh, we see your vision. And we got you. And then he became the single most bankable actor in the world ever.
2017: $13.3 billion in the box office. All because will finds a way. Yeah, dude’s my hero. If I never get to meet him, he’ll always be my hero. If I get to meet him, it’ll be the best day of my life besides the day I married my wife and found that ceiling line at the bridge.
Kyle: It’s going to happen.
Kevin: Your life to God’s ear.
Kyle: And now The Rock is here…but that’s not happening. Or is it?
Okay, so you never met The Rock. That sucks.
Kevin: But I will someday…
Kyle: Do you believe in heaven? What do you think heaven looks like?
Kevin: I think heaven looks like each individual who gets there wants it to. So what does your heaven look like? My heaven is a man cave. Filled with Marvel Comics, regalia all over the walls. It’s got, it’s just one room. It’s got a big plasma screen TV that’s playing.
Healthy videos of some kind. And Jesus is in the left hand corner of the room sitting next to my great-grandmother and they’re having a chat about her strawberry rhubarb. And then when I get there, she hands me a plate of it and I’m home
Kyle: With ice cream?
Kevin: No. That’s dairy.
Only strawberry rhubarb?
Kevin: Just strawberry rhubarb.
Kyle: And The Rock
Kevin: And the refined sugar in heaven is not inflammatory.
Kyle: It’s totally fine there…not inflammatory. Because that’s heaven! Okay. I love it. The beach or the lake?
Kevin: Oh, the lake. Easy.
Kyle: Okay. Coke or Pepsi?
Kevin: Neither.
Kyle: Oh, that’s right…refined sugars. Do you believe that we all have a soul?
Kevin: I do believe we all have a soul. I know mine very well.
Kyle: What is the soul?
Kevin: The soul is a symbiotic connection to the heart and the soul is where hope comes from. And when you find the ability to reach other people’s souls, you can change lives.
Kyle: Perfect. No further questions.
Kevin: Yeah, buddy.
Kyle: Kevin Hines, the man. Thanks for being here. Kevin: Thanks brother. Thanks for having me.
