#355: How Mind Hygiene Changed Everything

In this episode, we explore profound loss, transformation, trauma recovery, and self-love techniques with Dr. Druva, a family medicine physician with over 27 years of experience. Discover practical tools like CBT, EMDR, and the power of creative expression to transform your mental well-being.

"Okay, that person did it, I can do it."

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Mind Hygiene and Self-Awareness
02:21 Dr. Druva's Personal Journey Through Addiction and Trauma
04:26 The Role of Evidence-Based Therapies in Healing
07:20 Understanding CBT, EMDR, and DBT Techniques
10:20 The Power of Creativity in Mental Health
12:29 Rebuilding Self-Belief and Forgiveness
15:14 Practical Practice for Immediate Mental Health Support
17:22 Resources and How to Connect with Dr. Druva

"Whatever the drinking, the smoking, the drugging, had nothing to do with the present."

 More Key Takeaways
*Practical steps for emotional healing
*Acceptance of past trauma is crucial for healing.
*Writing down and processing emotions reduces neurochemical stress.
*Practicing empathy and understanding others' perspectives fosters forgiveness.
*Engage in consistent mental health practices, even for a few minutes daily.

"Understanding others' perspectives helps alchemize resentments."

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

In all of this mind hygiene, you write it down, you accept your awareness, you're taking time to be compassionate to yourself because you're saying, look, I'm not dumb, stupid. I'm trying to understand it, which is another EMDR technique. So what you're doing here is essentially all three of these, which they flow so well, is you just accept it. You say, okay, that person did it, I can do it. Let me alchemize these resentments, meaning, let me turn it into purpose right now. Let's try to do that. And then let's reprocess it. Let me take a moment and show you what it took to self-love. I had to take five years and admit to myself who I was. Low self-esteem and no confidence was my genetic makeup. I had to accept it in order for me to wake up. Got ingrained so much because he was saying abusing me all the time. My mom making me hit my mom. She was schizophrenic. My brother, he died from alcohol and drug use. There's all kinds of stuff that had happened that I didn't accept and I was trying to fix.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me on your show. I'm looking forward to it. And everyone, this is a mental health break. So remember to take a deep breath, relax, and enjoy the show because as I mentioned, we're bringing on someone, a board-certified family medicine physician with over 27 years of clinical experience, and that work sits at the intersection as I tease with neuroscience, trauma-informed growth, and spiritual freedom. So we have so much to learn today, excuse me. And we're going to learn how after navigating profound personal loss, he immersed himself in evidence-based therapeutic modalities, including CBT, DBT, and EMDR. We've heard a lot of these things, but we may not know what they are. So sit tight, buckle up, and remember to share this episode with someone who will find value once you hear it, because we are bringing the heat today. And you had this life-changing situation, right? You had this moment where everything changed and it led you into this field. From wherever you feel comfortable, please share that story.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Yeah, thanks for asking and what you do. And I've seen your story and how you inspire others. And to be honest with you, when I look at your story, if I can track some of my thoughts and place myself back in that time, if Vincent can do it, why can't I? So those were the biggest driving factors in my growth. I just knew it wouldn't be overnight. I'm walking in from the primary care area to the urgent care area. They're quite separate. The lights are bright, fuzzy. I got sober July 31st of 2018, and I'm 47. I'm gonna be 47 now. So whatever that minus is, I just don't remember the exact. Sometimes people are like, Well, were you 38 or were you 39? I was around then. And I walk into the medical director's office, and he's sitting across from me, showing me a lot of compassion over the months that I was decompensating. And as he sits across from me, he says, Look, we're worried about you. Well, this time I was in full-blown self-hatred. I was in a cocaine-induced manic episode. I was seeing 37 stars an hour, drinking 37 drinks a day, trying to do cocaine as often as I could, and it just was not with it. I mean, the speech patterns were quick, the stories were all over the place, and I was gonna die, lose my career. I was in $300,000 gambling debt. I was a goner. And what happens is that I had all these angels looking over me. I mean, this whole thing happened at the place that I worked at. All the doctors, medical staff are the ones that helped me get into rehab. I went to the Washington Physician Health Program, and I knew whatever I was doing wasn't working anymore. All of the emotional turmoil, the neurochemical prisoner of resentment, judgment towards myself just deflected on everybody else. That's when I started writing, rapping more, going to CBT, EMDR, cognitive behavioral, dialectical behavioral, and just started writing more. Only probably after five years, well, a few people started asking me to speak in my maybe my third or fourth year of sobriety, but I was still terribly embarrassed about it. I was like, I'm the stupid doctor. I actually wrote a book called The Dumb Doctor, because I thought I was so stupid. And that really tracks back to I realized that whatever the drinking, the smoking, the drugging, the hating, the blaming, the narcissistic traits, the external validation needs, and then the drugs, alcohol, the cocaine-induced manic episode was had nothing to do with the present day. If my dad would have said maybe one time or two times that I was stupid, I might have believed it a little bit more. But I think it just got ingrained so much because he was saying, abusing me all the time, my mom, making me hit my mom. She was schizophrenic, my brother, he died from alcohol and drug use. There's all kinds of stuff that had happened that I didn't accept and I was trying to fix. And that's pretty much what led me to this concept mind hygiene, where you just accept your awareness. I just started writing, writing, and accepting my awareness. And that's how I really came to where I am. People will say, Well, how did you do it? What did you do? I said, I saw people like Vincent, I saw people like David Goggins, Dan Martell. We'd been through something similar in some way. And I said, What did you guys do? And I just followed that whole pattern. And then I got to where I am now. And I would say, lastly, that anybody can do what I'm doing. You don't need me, you don't need mind hygiene. I mean, if you can quit everything and not blame, not look for external validation, not eat inflammatory food, drink, drug, whatever, you can also be in neurospiritual sovereignty or be in emotional freedom.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Congratulations on how far you've come and everyone out there, what we're going through is a glimpse in time. We can either react positively or negatively. And he made a great point there too. Seeing other data points, right? Seeing how other people do things and applying it to your own journey, which I think is awesome. And you did beat me to it when we're going to talk about the mind hygiene, right? This incredible practice that you're running. But I do want to back up a second. We talked about things like CBT, DBT, EMDR. These are like buzzwords in mental health right now. But not many people may know what they are or who they're for. So if you don't mind, we can give people some good information. Because I say it all the time. We're in this digital age, there's millions of information out there, and not a lot of it's good. Not a lot of it's correct. So with experts like you, I want to use your ability to help people on this show. So if you can give just to scratch the surface, what are some of these things and who can they help?

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Yeah, no, thanks for asking that. Yeah, let's take that time where I'm in. Lights are bright, fuzzy. I can hear little voices in my head telling me that I'm dumb and stupid, and my hands are fidgeting, talking fast, and I'm in my medical director's office. Let's take some cognitive behavioral, dialectical behavioral, and eye movement desensitization techniques into that. Cognitive behavioral therapy would say, okay, this is what's happening. A lot of the time, people are like, well, let's just get on my phone. Nah, man, let's call my brother. I gotta call my friends, let's go have a drink. You're cognitively forgetting it. You're trying to block it out. Cognitive behavioral therapy in my mind is very simple. You're just accepting things, you're aware, and you're creating some mindful techniques, which dialectical behavioral therapy will do as well. Dialectical behavioral therapy is where you take this instance and you say, Okay, wait a second. I'm drinking, I'm drugging, but my medical director's helping me. Oh, I hate myself, but Vincent figured out a way to love himself. So that's a dialect. In my mind, and I don't mind the words positive and negative. It's just for me, certain things don't work and are good or bad. We won't view this as good or bad. This situation is just an experience. An EMDR is eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapy where you take whatever you're doing. For example, if I am the EMDR therapist, which I'm not, my EMDR therapist was great, God bless her. And you take this instance, you're in the medical director's office, you're drinking drugging, everybody knows it. You just think about that. You just keep on processing it. I like that word better than reprocessing initially. You process it over and over again, and one day it'll vanish. Or what I like to call in all of this mind hygiene, you write it down, you accept your awareness, you're taking time to be compassionate to yourself because you're saying, look, I'm not dumb, stupid, I'm trying to understand it, which is another EMDR technique. So what you're doing here is essentially all three of these, which they flow so well, is you just accept it, you say, okay, that person did it, I can do it. Let me alchemize these resentments, meaning let me turn it into purpose right now. Let's try to do that. And then let's reprocess it, which could take several years. I know it doesn't sound exciting, but at least when you start it, you have the confidence that you can continue to do it. So that's my personal take on it. Although a therapist might give you a better, more specific.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Oh, I like how you said there, hey, this isn't what I do, but this is the information I have experienced firsthand. And something else I love you do is tap into your creative juices. I have written in my book, Mr. Lance, he talks about mental health, the power of creativity, and that looks different for everyone. But in addition to him doing incredible keynotes, speaking, sharing his story, he's found music to play a role in his life. And I love to talk about that and the positive mental health benefits associated in your experience, of course, right? Speaking from your life, that is done for you, right? Because I know for me, when I tap into my creative juices, I'm writing, we're podcasting like right now, life is great.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Yeah. I mean, I have been rapping my whole life, and if it wasn't for rap, I would have never been here. And with rappers, you're writing a lot. You see, some of the things that they say, they're so profound. It's because they've written it over and over. There's one bar. Let me take a moment and show you what it took to self-love. I had to take five years and admit to myself who I was. Low self-esteem and no confidence was my genetic makeup. I had to accept it in order for me to wake up. I'm telling, why am I saying low self-esteem? Why do I hate myself? Wait a second. Am I judging myself? Great. CBT, DBT, EMDR, all in one. We just did it right now. And I'm just, let's keep on doing. I feel his hand on my brain when I write rhymes. I go blind and let the Lord do his thing. That's Tupac. So that stuck with me. The okay, fine. So somebody else could be speaking to me, higher power, God. And now that's figured, not transformed into now I practice identity transfiguration like a daily prescription, turning all my past confusion into sovereign intuition. My oxytocin rises from self-connection while my cortisol drops with introspection. Now it's completely shifted to another whole degree where I'm able to just use these techniques almost to install a neurospiritual operating system where I'm just like, okay, I hated myself. I love myself. Let me inspire somebody. Let's transfigure the identity. So all of these things, including what you're doing and you're writing, you don't have to use my process. You can just write it, but it has to be a written-down hand to paper. That's the only one thing I'll definitely inspire people from. If that's the one thing they take, it has to be written down. No typing, talking, dictating. I feel that those are very advanced techniques.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

So that's just my personal take. You moved from that self-hate right to self-acceptance. And some of that was through the power of music. And I love to ask, because I know that you've got such great insight. You're so open with being vulnerable and honest. I know that's when guests come on, how the listeners really get something out of this episode. For listeners who feel trapped by their past, what would you want them to understand about healing and rebuilding self-belief in the ways maybe we haven't dove into yet?

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Yeah. When you are able to take whatever it is that happened to you, as an example, there was one instance where my dad had taken me away from my mom. She was institutionalized, in and out of mental institutions for 27 years. There's one time that she was sitting down across from me and my dad said, hit her. And then what happens is that she starts bleeding a little bit, and she's still smiling though. So as I take all of these things into consideration, we're talking about my dad hitting me, hitting my mom, and that's one thing. But then saying we're stupid, we're dumb. But let's take all of this and forget about what. See, you can see how I'm trying to view it as an experience. We take why did my dad do what he did? Now we're not trying to say he did something good or bad. We're not trying to forgive him. That's not the idea. It's to try to understand what he was experiencing was that he had come from India to the United States with I came to America with five dollars in a bit of chapul. This is his story, right? He came here from the hood, from the ghetto in Tunkur in India, and then he files for bankruptcy twice. He's gay, he doesn't accept it. He loses all of these deals, he's on welfare, and that's his life story at that moment. If you were to take something like that and write it down from his perspective, you'll be able to understand what he's thinking. That doesn't mean we need to call him and kick it with him right now. We don't need to have dinner with him and say, I forgive you. But we can understand, and when you repeat that process over and over again, you'll have consecrated those and alchemized those resentments to a point where you're not neurochemically dependent on the past and you're not blaming the past because those are narcissistic traits, right? Complaining, blaming, condescending, talking bad about others. People get confused about what narcissism is. And I'm only speaking from perspective because I was like that for most of my life. I thought that was normal. So that's what I would say is that if you write it down from their perspective, you'll be able to understand them more. And then empathy will just come naturally, then you'll forgive, it's forgiveness in motion. So that's one thing that I would consider, you know, when it comes to certain things. And a lot of the times, as an adult, we tend to fix and control our emotions, and then it leads to these types of problems.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

I mean, just absolutely unbelievable episode. I appreciate you giving it all your heart. Everyone, as I said in the beginning, be sure to get ready to share this with someone who could use the value, stick around just a little longer. We'll find out how to get in touch with him, how to find his book, his practice, all those things. But before I let you go, we've touched on a lot of different tools today. If there's someone listening on who feels anxious, ashamed, maybe disconnected from others, what is one practice that you would recommend them beginning today?

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Now, this might not sound nice, but it's to take fine, we'll take a few scenarios and take the medium one in that. Whatever happened, somebody said something, did something to you, and you just write it down and you try to aces it, accept your awareness, communicate your compassion because you're doing something you don't want to. E is embrace your empathy and s is soften the process, which is essentially what we talked about, CBT, DBT, EMDR. And you just keep on doing it over and over again, one to 90 seconds every 90 minutes. You're like, I don't have time to do that. Well, it's like doing push-ups. I'm a personal trainer. I'm asking you to do push-ups. You do it enough times for six weeks, you'll start seeing the benefits of it and reduce all of those, that stimulation, the neuropinephrine, the cortisol, all of that. It'll reduce. And if you can keep on doing that, I mean, if you can experience a reduction of 30 to 40%, you're an all-star. If you're batting 300, you're an all-star. But people don't really think about I don't ever see that 100% day. You can ask my 38-year-old self, 100% day is a day on cocaine. Otherwise, you're going to be feeling good maybe 60, 70%. So that's a very high level. If you can maintain feeling good 60% of the day, that is such a high level, I think. So that's what my inspirational message is.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

I often share that too when you put in baseball batting averages for the Major League Hall of Fame, like just the baseline. There's other variables, but a 300, 300 is 30%. 30% of 100 is failing 70% of the time. Yeah. You failing 70% of the time and considered being the best at your profession. So keep that in mind. Don't be too hard on yourself. Life gets harder and harder, but all we can do is try to improve. I always say 1% each day, treat people kind, right? When you see something that happens in your life, learn from it from whether it's you doing or someone in your circle. We can make this day better. And I gotta thank you so much. We'll give a big shout out to Kay for putting this interview together. Some hiccups along the way, but we always make it. Now, where can we find you online? Everyone, again, be sure to check out all the great work he does. Be sure to share his episode and his content online. He has a lot of value to share. Where can we find you?

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Yeah, you can log on to DruvaMD.com. And if you want to join the believe in yourself to believe in yourself email list, you can join that. And I just dropped a book called Emotional Freedom, where it's how to heal childhood trauma and believe in yourself. And it's just stories from when I was younger, and 30% of that will be donated for mothers who were abused and children who were abused to try to help accept and understand. So I appreciate you, Vincent, for sharing that.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

And absolutely. Keep up the good work. Every day is an improvement. He is an example of that. Our yesterday does not define our future, does not define our today. We can go out there and make the most of it if we consume the right information. We surround ourselves with good people that help bring us and make us better opposed to setting us back. And it sounds like you did the stat, you did a life audit, right? You found yourself somewhere and you said, I don't want to be here anymore. And look how much you've accomplished. So, everyone, again, my name is Vincent A. Lancy. Please remember to subscribe to Stay Current and be sure to share this episode with someone who can use the value you heard today. He brought a lot of it. And again, check out all of his great resources online. He is here to help. And with that, we are signing off today from Florida all the way to Denver. That's right, a little colder there, but it's summertime, so we're happy. Thanks so much again. Okay, thanks, Vincent.