TEDx Talks: Ken Falke on Ideas Worth Sharing – Struggle Well

For the last 20 years, I’ve been helping these two communities learn how to struggle well and thrive in the aftermath of trauma. Why? Because the mental health system in our country is broken. And it’s not just me saying this. It’s the thousands of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers that I’ve spoken to. It’s hundreds of articles from the most prestigious of medical journals. And the gentleman who ran the National Institutes of Mental Health for 13 years—who now, by the way, is on the outside of the bureaucracy trying to change things because the tens of billions of dollars that he spent in those 13 years—the tens of billions of dollars he spent in those 13 years—did not move the needle in regards to suicide reduction.

Another problem with traditional mental health care is that it’s a system that has no incentive for you to get better. It’s a system that is run by associations, by insurance companies, by pharmaceutical companies. It’s a system that’s designed to make you feel less bad—not to feel good.

The third problem is, is that the mental health system—when I say system, I mean the people in it—have convinced Americans that if you’re grieving, struggling, or stressed, you have a mental health issue. And it’s not true. These are normal responses to human activities when it comes to grief and struggle and stress.

And you may ask, what do I know about stress? Well, I spent 21 years, as Tracy said, in the bomb disposal community in the Navy. Some people call it the most dangerous job in the world. I led men and women on thousands of high-risk operations around the world—parachuting, diving, and rendering safe exploded, unexploded ordnance on the battlefield. That included landmines, booby traps, and terrorist bombs. So yep, I know a little bit about stress.

And that stress—and that response to stress—we did a study on bomb disposal personnel and found while they were diffusing bombs that their heart rates actually went down, not up. And if we know that our bodies have the right chemicals in them if we’re well, if we know that, we can do something about struggling well.

Now, the first thing you have to understand, I think, when it comes to self-care is that no matter who we are in life, you’re going to live a life of ups and downs. I call it the sine wave. What you don’t want to do is live a life that looks like this, because that’s a roller coaster ride that none of us will survive. But how do you live in what I call the livable band of this sine wave—the ups and downs?

And if you think about your life—you think about—I think about my life—you can almost map out what happens in these ups and downs. Grief. The struggle. The stress. But to live in this life—because no matter how poor, rich, or whatever rank you are in the military, you’re going to have this life. This is our life. This is life.

But to live this life in this livable band, you have to get two things right. They’re kind of represented on this graph—graphic—by the red lines. Think of it as a bowling alley. Think of it as those red lines as the bumper you can put up in the gutters of a bowling lane so that your ball doesn’t go down the gutter.

The first thing you got to get right is what I call your “three to five.” This is your support network. These are the people that, when times are tough, you can turn to. So you don’t have to rent a friend at the local therapist’s office. You can, in fact, turn to your friends and get the support that you need—and the shared experiences that you need. But these need to be healthy people. These need to be people that you admire, people that you inspire to be like. They can’t be toxic. They can’t be social. They can’t be virtual. They have to be real friends that, when times are tough, you can turn to.

Why three to five people? Well, science tells us that humans become the average of the three to five people they spend the most time with. It’s important to get this right.

Think of the other bumper in the bowling lane here, and that’s what I call wellness practices. And that’s our body’s ability to really self-regulate. And I’ve got a saying that if you can’t self-regulate, you often tend to self-medicate. And that’s a big problem. There’s been plenty of TED Talks on self-medication. I won’t go into the bad part of that, but it leads you down a really bad road. And it affects those good chemicals that are in our body that allow us to self-regulate.

And what do wellness practices look like? Well, I put them up in what I call the Wellness Triangle. Now, triangle normally has three sides—which this one does—but we have four areas of wellness in our Wellness Triangle: our mind, our body, our financial wellness—because as Americans, we have to make money; this is a country that requires that—and in the center is our spirituality.

And I define this—and for today I’ll define it in a non-religious sense. You think of spirituality in a three-part definition. The first part of the definition is your character. Are you a good person? Are you living a life of morality and integrity?

The second part of spirituality is your “three to five.” Do you have three to five really good people in your life? And the other part of that is, are you healthy enough to be in somebody else’s “three to five?” Super important—and from a wellness perspective.

And the third part of the definition is service to others. What are you doing to help others—especially those that are less fortunate than you? I live in Loudoun County, Virginia. It’s the richest county in the United States. We have every problem in that county that every other county in the United States has. There is always something that you can do to help. And it doesn’t have to be big. You don’t have to start a nonprofit. You don’t have to work at a nonprofit. But you have to do something to help others. The local homeless shelter, soup kitchens—lots of places where you can be of assistance and service.

That service increases your emotional intelligence. It increases your empathy. It makes you a better “three to five” in somebody else’s network.

Now take a journey with me for a second and close your eyes. And for those that have their legs crossed, uncross them and put your feet flat on the ground. And on a super simple scale of one to five, I want you to measure yourself in these four areas of wellness.

Let’s start with your mind. Now remember, there’s one, two, three, four, and five. You can give yourself one of those scores. A one—maybe at the lower end of this spectrum—we just feel like we’re living this proverbial life of the tail wagging the dog. The black cloud over our heads. That no matter what we do, we don’t feel like we have control over our life.

On the other end of the spectrum—the higher end of the spectrum—you feel like you’re in control. You’re doing something to increase your wisdom, something to be a better person. You feel like you can—you’ve got enough goals in your life that you’re working on them, and you feel like you’re in control of your destiny to the effect that you can…can be.

Give yourself a score—one to five.

On your body—maybe you’re at the lower end of the spectrum if you’re recovering from an injury, you’re recovering from a surgery, a hip replacement, a knee replacement. Maybe you just can’t walk up and down the stairs without getting winded. You’re out of tha out of shape. Now when I talk about your body, I don’t talk about just exercise—but the nutrition, what you put in your body. Super important because putting bad things in our bodies not only affects the chemicals that are in our bodies and our ability to self-regulate, but it also tends to have us put on a lot of weight, which leads to lots of problems down the road. So on a scale of one to five—again, the lower end, you’re struggling; the higher end, you’re doing something to increase your fitness.

Now I’ll tell you what my doctor told me—and that is: at 80 years old, who cares how much you can bench press? What you want to be able to do is bend over and tie your own shoes. You want to be able to get up if you fall. And if you fall, you want to be able to fall gracefully and have the strength to do that. And that means you got to go to the gym. You got to do something aerobically and…and lifting weights to keep yourself in this condition.

Financially speaking—my dad always said financial wellness was easy: don’t spend more than you make. But I think it’s a little more complicated than that. Because what you don’t spend that you make has got to be saved. Saved not only for the rainy day issues of life—the home repairs, the car repairs that are unplanned—but for your retirement. Because as your hair starts to get a little gray, and you start to see this idea that you may not be working in the future and you have to rely on your 401k and your IRAs and all that—it might be a big challenge if you haven’t saved for this retirement day.

So on a scale of one to five—one, I always think of somebody who might be homeless, who doesn’t have the…the resources to even make any ends meet. And on the other end—you don’t have to be a multi-millionaire—but you’ve got to have a plan. You’ve got to have savings. You’ve got to have a retirement plan.

Give yourself a score.

And finally, in the center of the circle—and think of that circle, even with your eyes closed. Remember that it’s touching all three sides of the triangle. Because if you think about this triangle, the outside of it is really our egos. How smart are we? How fit are we? How good-looking are we? How much money do we have or want people to think we have?

And if that ego—the points of that triangle—start to flatten because our scores are low, and there’s nothing in the center—what’s going to happen? It’s going to collapse. The triangle, geometrically, is a super strong shape. But if those points start to…to falter, that triangle is going to collapse.

So in the center—if you think of that circle touching it—you need to inflate. I call it inflating the ball. The spirituality ball.

Measure yourselves on a scale of one to five. One—maybe you’re completely disconnected from other people. You…you’re isolating. You’re not talking. The only friends you have are on Facebook, social media.

Or on the other end of the spectrum—remember the definition of spirituality is three parts: your character, your “three to five,” and your service to others. If those are inflated and they’re…and they’re good, then you’re going to be okay.

So now, go ahead and open your eyes. And think about those scores in those four areas. And then ask: what’s next?

The most obvious question to me is: what do I do with this information?

We talk about increasing your emotional intelligence. Part of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. Now I start to feel self-aware—that I understand where I am in this wellness—and that gives me the first step to getting better.

What do you do to get better? You set goals. And every day of your life, you get up and you work on a goal in each of these four areas of wellness. And if you do that—you’ll be well.

Now, you may ask: what does wellness have to do with suicide prevention?

My belief, after—after now being in this business for 20 years—and by the way, in the last 20 years, we’ve lost more military and veteran personnel to suicide than we did during the Vietnam War—in combat.

This is a problem. It’s an epidemic in our country. And it’s not just military and veteran personnel now. And the reason I’m here today is because what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years—and the hundred of thousands of people we’ve helped—I believe we can take that to the world. And that the only way we’re going to change this bureaucracy is if we all help each other.

Because the system will never have enough mental health providers, enough pharmaceutical solutions to fix this problem. We have to lift each other up. Because the true opposite of suicide is living a great life. And if you’re well, you can live a great, great life.

And for that—that’s the recipe for how to struggle well.

So thank you very much, and have a great day.