Episode 35: Scarily Skinny

Kevin Nahai

About:

Kevin is a 28 year old motivational speaker in personal coach from Los Angeles CA. When he was 19 years old, he was suddenly diagnosed with a chronic disease of the stomach it caused him to be unable to eat . He fell into deep depression, became severely anorexic Ann nearly took his own life in 2011 . By the grace of God he survived and lived to tell the tale . He still spent most of his twenty suffering through crippling anxiety, toxic relationships and breakups and a complete lack of confidence and direction. After several years of deep introspection therapy and mediation he was able to transform his life and become a public speaker and personal coach. Every day he chooses to harness his experiences in order to help others overcome their biggest emotional challenges from anxiety and depression to dating and relationships and confidence and self esteem. His mission is to provide his clients and audiences with the proven, practical, actionable tools and solutions he uses everyday in order to create a life of love.

Social media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-nahai-1b1ba41a2

Facebook: Kevin Nahai | Facebook

Podcast Transcript:

Damaged Parents: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Relatively Damaged Podcast by Damaged Parents where malnourished, wasted, pained people come to learn. Maybe just, maybe we're all a little bit damaged.

Someone once told me it's safe to assume 50% of the people I meet are struggling and feel wounded in some way. I would venture to say it's closer to 100%. Every one of us is either currently struggling or has struggled with something that made us feel less than like we aren't good enough. We aren't capable. We are relatively damaged. And that's what we're here to talk about in my ongoing investigation of the damage itself. I want to better understand how others view their own challenges. Maybe it's not so much about the damage. Maybe it's about our perception and how we deal with it.

There is a deep commitment to becoming who we are meant to be. How do you do that? How do you find balance after a damaging experience? My hero is a damaged person. The one who faces seemingly insurmountable odds to come out on the other side hole. Those who stared directly into the face of adversity with unyielding persistence to discover their purpose.

These are the people who inspire me to be more fully me. Not in spite of my trials, but because of them. Let's hear from another hero.

Today's topic includes sensitive material, which may not be appropriate for children. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended as advice. The opinions expressed here were strictly those of the person who gave them.

Today, we're going to talk with Kevin. He has many roles in his life, son, friend, motivational speaker, sensitive man, personal coach, and more. We'll talk about his anxiety, stomach problems and anorexia and how he healed. Let's talk.  

 Welcome to Relatively Damaged by Damaged Parents. Kevin, we're so glad you're here today.

Kevin Nahai: [00:01:59] I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me on Angela.

Damaged Parents: [00:02:02] Oh, no problem. No problem. It sounds like you have a really interesting story and a really neat struggle. So, if you could start for us, wherever that starts for you. And then what we'll do is I'll ask some questions along the way to get better understanding and with the goal of getting all the way through to where you're at now and where you found help in courage.

Kevin Nahai: [00:02:23] Sure. Absolutely. First of all, I want to just repeat what I said to you offline, which is I love the name of the podcast and I. I believe that a hundred percent of the population is damaged in one way or another, but there is probably 20, 25% of the population that embraces that and owns it and works through it.

And , 75 or 80% of the population that just tries to pretend that it's not there. So I really appreciate your mission in bringing this to light and hopefully making it less taboo. My story of damage, begins when I was about 19. It was my first semester of college. I was diagnosed with an incurable disease of the stomach.

And I was unable to eat for several months and I started dropping weight like crazy. And, I was very emotionally traumatized from the experience of my body giving up on me. As a result of that emotional trauma, I developed severe anorexia, and then I started starving myself. I fell into a deep depression, all the while.

All at the same time, I started getting panic attacks for the first time in my life. So it was just this enormous confluence of really difficult factors all coming together, my first year of college. And. I ended up being suicidal. And one night in the winter of 2011, I came pretty close to taking my own life by the grace of God.

I'm here to tell the tale, thankfully,

Damaged Parents: [00:03:55] Thank goodness real quick. I would like to go back to you have this stomach problem. You're already losing weight. You have anxiety and depression, but you also did it. Did you get it healed a little bit and then the anorexia set in, or did it just set in, because maybe you were trying to avoid the pain of what was happening in your stomach.

What was going on right there?

Kevin Nahai: [00:04:17] What happened was that when I first got the stomach disease and I couldn't eat, I started to associate food with pain. I thought to myself, if I eat, I'm going to be in pain, therefore I just shouldn't eat. And after a couple of months of doing that, the only thing in my life that I could control was my food intake.

Because as I said, my body gave up on me. I was in a new environment. I didn't have any of my old friends. And now my family with me, this was my first semester of college. I was. Thrown into an ocean with no lifeline, which is what happens with freshmen in college. You know, you're just thrown there and supposed to figure it out.

And most people thrive and they do well, but not with anxiety and depression and, you know, a new diagnosis and all kinds of scary new, new territory. So. The only thing that I could control in my life was my food. And I thought that if I eat, I'm going to be in pain, so it's better not to eat. And, I started to see how much weight I was losing.

I was 112 pounds. And I'm five foot nine.

Damaged Parents: [00:05:24] You're five foot nine and that you were that skinny.

Kevin Nahai: [00:05:27] It was scarily skinny. Yeah. And the thing is that. When you look at yourself, when you have an eating disorder and you look at yourself in the mirror, you hate what you see. And when you hate what you see that self-hatred begets more self hatred. It's not as if you hate what you see and you say, Hmm, I'm motivated to turn this around.

Let me make this change because this clearly isn't good. It's you hate what you see and you say, well, I hate this. So let me punish it even more.

Damaged Parents: [00:05:54] Oh, ouch.

Kevin Nahai: [00:05:56] You know what I'm saying?

Damaged Parents: [00:05:57] Okay. I think so. I'm not sure. I totally understand, because I haven't been there.

Kevin Nahai: [00:06:03] Thank God. It's the same thing with, you know, with, let me use the example of drug addicts. So, a drug addict will always say that their, their journey with drugs is it was really good until it wasn't like they enjoy doing the drugs as an escape. For the first whatever, few weeks or few months, or few years even, and then they become addicted and then the drug takes over their life and it's all they ever think about.

And they get to a certain point where they hate being addicted to drugs and they hate themselves. But instead of feeling motivated to turn that around, they're comfortable in it. It's familiar for them. That's what they know. So they continue punishing themselves with more drug use, even though they know it's destructive.

Damaged Parents: [00:06:46] Right. So do you think there was some shame in what you saw in the mirror.

Kevin Nahai: [00:06:51] Yeah, of course it's a hundred percent shame driven,

Damaged Parents: [00:06:53] Okay.

Kevin Nahai: [00:06:54] a hundred percent. I mean, when you hate yourself, you want to punish yourself even more when you hate what you see and when you hate what you are, you. There, there is no, there's no reserve of love of self love brewing below the surface that you can pull from if all you know is self hatred and self destruction.

And self-deprecation, that becomes the vicious cycle that you get stuck in. And it takes people a really long time, myself included to get to the point where they're ready to turn that around,

Damaged Parents: [00:07:28] So you're anorexic where you also believe blaming? No. Okay.  but you recognize this, how long did it take you to recognize that. It was a problem because you were shaming yourself. You're punishing yourself, but when did it become, Ooh, maybe I want to do something about this.

Kevin Nahai: [00:07:44] After two years of going through this hell, I. Had a very close friend who told me that when he was a boy, when he was little, he had an eating disorder and he went to this really amazing nutrition therapist. And maybe I should try her. And I was pretty resistant at first, but at this point I had admitted to myself that there was a problem.

I hadn't admitted it to other people. You know, and we're talking about two years of like the pink elephant in the room, you know, everybody knows that there's a problem and yeah, you're in denial.

Damaged Parents: [00:08:18] Oh, wow. What was that like? Can you talk a little bit about like, what it was like when you were in that room?

Kevin Nahai: [00:08:24] yeah, absolutely. I'll just say. The happy ending to my eating disorder story is that I got in the office of this very famous, very reputable eating disorder therapist. And over a course of a couple of years, she really helped me get out of it. But it started, it had to start with the willingness, you know, it had to start with a desire to help myself.

You cannot help somebody. I, my whole business is helping people. That's, what I get paid to do is I get paid to help them turn their lives around and I cannot do it with anybody who's not willing or able or ready to help themselves. So, I was in that boat for a long time. My friends, my family, everybody was worried about me.

Everybody would say, why aren't you eating anything? People noticed I was depressed. They would say, you know, why don't you come out with us? Why do you, you know, you don't need to stay in bed all day. I was having these panic attacks and then my eyes would be bloodshot red the next day. And people would say, why don't you go to a psychiatrist?

Why don't you try to get some medication?

Damaged Parents: [00:09:24] So were you not sleeping? And what did the panic attacks feel like to you?

Kevin Nahai: [00:09:28] Oh, they're they're the worst, have you, do you have anxiety?

Damaged Parents: [00:09:31] I do I do I've and I've suffered panic attacks, but I was wondering what it felt like to you to have a panic attack.

Kevin Nahai: [00:09:39] You know, just heart palpitations, you're reeling for anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours, you can't focus, you have brain fog, you're getting anxious, just thinking about them. You know, you've got physical symptoms, you've got racing, thoughts, so to answer your question, took me a couple of years of being in those rooms and lying to everybody around me telling them that there wasn't a problem that I was fine.

It's just this it's just that, and I'm sure if you interview, other people who've had. Similar issues, whether that's addiction or eating disorder or depression or whatever, a hundred percent of them will tell you that there's a denial period, you know, there's for every damaged person, there's, there's a period of denying that there is a problem.

Like I said, at the beginning of the episode, you know, what makes the difference between people who fix their problems and become successful and people who stay stuck in their misery. Is that people who are stuck in their misery think that being broken makes them significant, makes them important. That becomes their identity.

That becomes their story

Damaged Parents: [00:10:45] Okay. So what you're saying is because they're broken and that's how they identify, they can stay stuck in that story or that storyline, and then they don't want to get out because that works.

Kevin Nahai: [00:11:00] Exactly. So when you have a problem, that is the center of your life, you know, like self-hatred or whatever it may be, you get used to it. It becomes familiar. And that's all, you know, and now it becomes your identity. Your identity is this messed up person who has all these problems and you convince yourself that you're never going to get out of it.

Damaged Parents: [00:11:21] It's almost sounds like it's safer to stay there because that's  what that person would know

Kevin Nahai: [00:11:27] Exactly.

It's the devil, you know, you know, even though it's really uncomfortable, That becomes comfortable because comfort is familiarity, right? It's easier to stay stuck in your sadness in your misery than it is to take the dive, to take the leap, to hire somebody, to help you to admit there's a problem.

Those things are incredibly hard. So you start to think that this identity you have of this broken person is who you are. And who you are makes you feel significant. That's your life story? That's. What makes you important in the world is your problems to you?

Damaged Parents: [00:12:03] Right. No, I'm just really thinking about what you're saying. Right. If just having a, I also have a disability, as you were talking about earlier and. And I'm trying to think through what I did in, in my journey. And if I went there and I think I, probably, I did. I'm not going to say probably, I think I did.

It did, in some ways become who I am or was

Kevin Nahai: [00:12:27] Exactly until you break it.

Damaged Parents: [00:12:29] Yeah. And then so, but breaking it, I don't know about you. It feels like I'm jumping off cliffs all the time when I'm breaking it. And that is also scary. So what happened for you?

Kevin Nahai: [00:12:41] It's incredibly scary. That's what I'm saying is, people who work through their issues and they figure it out and they overcome, they realized that the ability to jump off those clips and land safely is what makes you significant and important. That becomes the focal point of your life, improving, overcoming working through these issues, not staying stuck in your misery and in your victimhood as the focal point of your life,  So as, I'm saying, you know, it took me a long time.

And then, like, I had other problems too, like dating and relationships problems with women where, I realized that I was codependent. I realized that I had abandonment issues. And then it took me a couple of years of being stuck in that before I wanted to get help. And before I wanted to jump off a cliff and overcome that, so.

I wish I had a magic formula for speeding up the process of making somebody ready to work through their issues. And I don't, once somebody is ready, then I can speed up the process of helping them work through their issues. Once somebody is ready, then I can help them actually fix.

Whatever the issue is, but I can't speed up the process of getting them there. You know, they got to get there on their own.

Damaged Parents: [00:13:56] I think that's the hardest part for those watching and  that are just watching because you can't speed it up for that other person. And it sounds like, I mean, you said for you, it was two years. Of the pink elephant in the room. So it had just happened to be your friend that said something, and then you started going to the therapist to, to change.

So could you identify maybe what it was inside of you or was it just, you were ready?

Kevin Nahai: [00:14:26] Well,

It was two years with the anorexia, but with other issues in my life, like with, my problems with women that I had and stuff like that, that, that took longer. I had those problems since I was 18. I didn't fix them till I was 25. You know? So

sometimes it's two years, sometimes it's five years. Sometimes it's a couple of months until you're ready. It's different for every person and it's different for every issue. But I think for me that the turning point was I realized that a mistake you make once is an honest mistake. A mistake you make twice is a choice and a mistake you make three times or more is a pattern. So I realized that I had. A pattern of making the same mistakes over and over and over again and getting terrible results. And I thought that I'm going to be able to do what I'm doing and that the results in my life are magically going to change.

Damaged Parents: [00:15:23] Okay, so you thought you could still keep making the same choices, but somehow magically life would change.

Kevin Nahai: [00:15:29] Exactly. Like I was waiting for God to help me or waiting for Dino luck to help me or waiting for, magic theory to help me or whatever, but I had to, I finally got to the place where I was like, no one is going to help me. I, no one's going to do it for you. I had to do it. When that happens, why that happens?

I don't have an answer. I can't, I can't tell you that, on a Wednesday after two and a half years of suffering with the same issue, that's when you're going to be ready to change it. I don't know why. But. It was certainly the realization for me that I keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

And that I'm the only one who's going to change it. Nope, no one I'm already a grown man. Dad is not going to raise me out of this, you

Damaged Parents: [00:16:17] Right. Yeah. So you started going to this therapist and What was that like? I mean, was it a slow process? Was it a fast process because you were ready? What was, what happened?

Kevin Nahai: [00:16:29] Well, it was a slow process as all therapy is. And I worked with a nutrition therapist for about a year, specifically on the anorexia. And then I worked with a regular therapist named Lisa for about six years. And I worked with Lisa on all kinds of other issues. The trauma from the disease, trauma from my childhood issues with women, like I was saying before.

So it was about seven, maybe seven and a half years of therapy total. You know, before I really felt healed and. I, of those seven years, I didn't even get most of my healing from therapy. I got most of my healing from the stuff that I did outside of therapy, which was taking the principles I was learning and applying them to my life every day, putting myself through like my own coaching principles. That's how I healed the most because in therapy, you're there for one hour a week. The other six days and 23 hours you're on your own. So I had to take what I was learning in there and apply it to my own life and supplement it with all kinds of, you know, all kinds of extra self-help books and seminars and, you know, meeting with different mentors and so forth and so on.

So people often ask me, what's the difference between your coaching and. Traditional therapy. And the first difference is that again, I was in therapy for eight years. So this is not a knock on therapy at all, but it's slow. The progress that you make in therapy is slow, because it's, it's focused on all of the problems of your past, up until this point.

And there is a lot to unpack there. My coaching on the other hand is future focused. Yes, we have to talk about your past and we have to uncover and unpack the things that, brought you to this point. But my question is, okay, now we have a good understanding of what your issues are and how you got here.

How do we change it? How do we fix it? Right? How do we take this bundle of problems and overcome them? So that in your future, whether that's in three months, six months, a year, five years, or someday far off into the future, you can actually accomplish all of the goals that you want. I never had a therapist who taught me how to do that.

I didn't even have a coach who taught me how to do that. A lot of coaches don't want that responsibility of getting people, those tangible results. But I saw a need for that. I saw a void there. I, , and that was really the gap that I am trying to fill.

Damaged Parents: [00:19:07] Right, because it sounds like what I'm hearing you say is yes. Sure. It's certainly helpful to go with and learn what your patterns. Yeah. And, and all of that and to gain some tools from the therapist, it's also very helpful to go and work with a coach and to, if you take it a step further, it's very important to accomplish the goals you want to accomplish.

And there is a difference between looking forward, just looking forward and implementing.

Kevin Nahai: [00:19:36] Oh, there's a huge difference. I mean, you can look forward till you're blue in the face, the implementation, the consistent daily practice is what's going to get you there.

Damaged Parents: [00:19:48] Right.

Kevin Nahai: [00:19:49] You know, one thing I'd say my clients all the time is that the rent is due every day. You're not going to lose 10 pounds from going to the gym once a week.

You're going to lose 10 pounds from going to the gym and eating a particular diet seven days a week. And it's the same exact thing with getting anything in your life that you want. Whether you're seeking a promotion, more money working on yourself, you're trying to become a better person. You're seeking a relationship.

You want to get rid of character flaws. You want to become better physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. It's something that you have to work on seven days a week. And it doesn't take much, 15 minutes a day, an hour a day. You do a little bit of homework here, a little bit of homework there, it's just that your mind has to be focused on some sort of growth every day, seven days a week.

That is the way that those changes start to come about.

Damaged Parents: [00:20:48] Okay. What you're saying is actually reminded me of what I've learned about training dogs,

Kevin Nahai: [00:20:52] Oh,

Damaged Parents: [00:20:52] which is not a bad thing. It's actually a good

Kevin Nahai: [00:20:55] bad So I love dog analogies.

Damaged Parents: [00:20:57] Right. So, Oh, well, that's awesome. I love it. So I remember learning about training dogs and it was five minutes here. Five minutes there you cannot expect to train a dog and just spend an hour.

One hour in one spot, even each day, you're better off to split it up into little increments throughout the day. If you really want the dog to learn and progress significantly faster. So what you're saying, what I'm hearing you say is practice a little bit every day, maybe twice a day. Maybe not, maybe it just depends on who you are and then you will start to see those changes.

You're not going to see it immediately. Now I'm thinking you're also. Leaving room for a practice that these habits are simply practice every day.

Kevin Nahai: [00:21:44] Absolutely. And when I say that you, that the rent is due every day and you have to work on your issues every day. I don't mean you sit there and you read stuff on Instagram every day. Or you watch like a motivational YouTube video every day that does not count on working on yourself. That's good for your awareness and for building your mind and stuff like that.

Really what I'm talking about is identifying the issues that you have and how they are affecting your life. The specific issues that you have from your past that are an impediment to your future, right? You have to look at your specific situation and your specific issues and working on those every day, 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there an hour in the morning and hour in the evening, and how do you figure those things out?

You need the help of a therapist or a coach or a counselor or a mentor, somebody who's in your corner and can hold up a mirror to you and say, here are the things that we need to work through, and then it's all about application and daily practice. The analogy that I like to give is. Kobe Bryant identified that he wanted to be a world champion basketball player, and he wanted to win all of these championships with the Lakers.

And then he reverse engineered from that goal. And when you said was, is that if that's where I want to be in my future, then that's going to require me given my skillset and my mindset and who I am. That's going to require me. To go to the basketball court and shoot however many free throws and spend however many hours of practice that's what I have to do to get to that goal, but he set the plan for himself based on who he is.

Right. He didn't just sit around reading books about basketball all day.

Damaged Parents: [00:23:34] Right because then he wouldn't have gotten better at basketball. He would have had a lot of knowledge,

Kevin Nahai: [00:23:39] Exactly. He would have had a, not a lot of knowledge, but no knowledge of how to, how to apply it to his life practically.

Damaged Parents: [00:23:46] right.

Kevin Nahai: [00:23:47] So there's a huge distinction there.

Damaged Parents: [00:23:49] So in, in that we're talking about practice, just even going into life in general  and taking the tools that, that you're learning through coaching  or whichever as direction you're going, you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable. It sounds like you have to be willing to try that new thing.

So what do you recommend to people who are trying those new things?

Kevin Nahai: [00:24:11] The greatest skillset you can acquire aside from kindness and generosity and selflessness is the ability to tolerate discomfort.

We will do pretty much anything we can throughout our day to avoid being uncomfortable. And I'm a perfect example of this because for me, discomfort is anxiety and I hate having anxiety. And so I want to avoid that anxiety no matter what, but when I say that the greatest skillset we can develop is the ability to tolerate discomfort.

What I mean is that no, one's going to enjoy being uncomfortable. But if you have uncomfortable situations like working out or communicating with your partner and having a difficult talk or going to a therapist or working on yourself in some way, that is not particularly fun, it makes you look at your issues.

If you can tolerate that discomfort, if you can at least accept it, not enjoy it, but if you can accept it, And try to assuage how much anxiety it gives you. If you can embrace it and say, this is good for me, this is going to build my strength. This is going to put me on a superhuman level, and this is going to get me closer and closer to my goals.

Then there's nothing in life that you can't accomplish. Anything we want to accomplish in life is going to require a high level of discomfort. Throughout the process at one point or another, if every time you're met with discomfort and challenge, your inclination is to run the other way. Then you'll never attain those goals.

You'll never get to your highest peak and it doesn't matter what your peak is. Right. But we all have a peak. We all have somewhere that we want to go. We all have certain things that we want to accomplish. And the process of getting there requires a lot of challenge and a lot of looking at ourselves and a lot of discomfort.

And if we can tolerate that and embrace it and accept it and not enjoy it, but at least know that it's good for us. And even though we may not like it, we're going to do it anyway. I really think that makes us superhuman.

Damaged Parents: [00:26:27] It sounds like you're almost. Utilizing your anxiety as a superpower. And I'm wondering if you shifted the perspective of from anxiety as bad to maybe anxiety is good because it means I'm working through a challenge.

Kevin Nahai: [00:26:43] Well, sometimes anxiety is just bad. Meaning if there's no reason for it to be there, like if I'm anxious about something that has absolutely no bearing on my life and, you know, I'm just being crazy in my own head, then anxiety is bad, but if I'm anxious because I'm trying to accomplish something or I'm like applying for a really important job, or I'm working on myself or I'm doing something difficult then yeah.

I say, you know what? It's okay for me to feel this because I know that this is a stepping stone toward accomplishing something. So I am reframing and recharacterizing that anxiety. It took me a long time to be able to do that. So, I'm not suggesting that, if you've got clinical anxiety, you should go to a psychiatrist.

Don't just play a mind game with yourself, but a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of discomfort is okay. As long as you can tolerate it and embrace it.

Damaged Parents: [00:27:36] Okay. So let's say somebody's got that anxiety, right? And  they're struggling. Hopefully one of our listeners has it and they could use tools to, to assuage,  the discomfort, and they want to get better. What were some of the things you did that worked for you?

Kevin Nahai: [00:27:52] First of all meditation, everybody talks about meditation and I hate to sound like a broken record. But doing it 15 minutes a day, saved my life in terms of anxiety.

Damaged Parents: [00:28:05] Okay. Explain.

Kevin Nahai: [00:28:06] Okay. Choose a meditation, get a meditation teacher, download calm or Headspace or YouTube guided meditation or whatever you want to do. Do the same one 15 minutes a day, every day.

Indefinitely.

Damaged Parents: [00:28:19] So what is, what did it do inside of your mind to help with the anxiety? Or can you even pinpoint that I'm not certain.

Kevin Nahai: [00:28:28] Well, there's a lot of science and research studies and things that explain the correlation between increased meditation, and decreased anxiety. I don't know how it works in the brain. I know that in the brains of regular meditators, they have different brain tissue. Like their brain tissue literally grows stronger in some areas, specifically the corpus callosum and a few other connective tissues literally become stronger and send better signals between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.

So there's all kinds of science. That explains. How meditation decreases your anxiety. And I'm not an expert on this. I just know that it works. And for the longest time I used to tell myself, Oh no, I'm not into meditation. I can't quiet my mind. My thoughts are always racing. I can never get myself in a peaceful state until I learned that those are all misconceptions. Meditation is, you are not supposed to quiet your mind. Nobody can do that. You are not supposed to remove your thoughts. Nobody can do that. What you are supposed to do is whatever thoughts come into and out of your mind, you don't click onto them. You just let them pass. Yes.

Damaged Parents: [00:29:44] Kind of like watching a movie, if you will.

Kevin Nahai: [00:29:47] Yeah. Or like watching, uh, a tree branch flow down a stream. Right. You see it for a second and then you just let it flow. And then a few minutes later, a leaf flows down the stream and then a few minutes later, another tree branch flows down the stream. It's exactly how your thoughts should be while you are meditating, you allow them to come and then you allow them to leave.

This morning during my meditation, my dog was barking and I was thinking like, be quiet. And then I heard some birds chirping outside and then I heard the Gardener's lawnmower. And then I thought about this podcast that I have at 9:00 AM. And, you know, then I thought about the rest of my day. And then I felt my dog sit on my bed.

So it's like all of these thoughts just come and go. And it's literally the process of just sitting there and allowing all of those thoughts to come and go that decreases our anxiety tremendously. But you have to do it every day.

You know, we've got it.

Damaged Parents: [00:30:47] right, but it's what you're explaining is almost like. By doing meditation and learning to watch those thoughts flow by maybe that helps in your day to day life with the anxiety that as that maybe as that feeling comes up, that then you're able to go, Oh yeah, there's that feeling again?

And just let it go. What do you think.

Kevin Nahai: [00:31:11] A hundred percent because the reason we become anxious is that it originates with a thought, right. So tell me something you're anxious about in your life. Okay.

Damaged Parents: [00:31:20] This podcast.

Kevin Nahai: [00:31:22] you have a thought in the morning or before you record or whatever that is just for example, I hope the audio and video on today's podcast is successful. Then you think to yourself, well, I hope this podcast is successful. Then you start thinking about your ratings. Then you start thinking about how many listeners you have.

Then you start thinking, well, is the content even that good? Is that why I'm getting, not as many ratings or listeners as I like, then you start thinking, well, if the contents not that good. Should I even be doing this, then you start thinking about your entire life. Well, what should I be doing in my life?

Am I a good mother? am I, this am I that? Whatever. So the anxiety that you have is really not about the podcast itself. The anxiety that you have is a snowball that started with one little speck of snow, and then it collected all of these other thoughts on top of it and turned into this big snowball, right?

What I tell people is that if you can catch the first thought and just let it flow, like a stream, like a branch in the stream, then it's not collecting all of the snow and turning into a snowball. Right. So you're not responsible for your first thought, Angela, but you're responsible for your second thought and your third thought and your eighth, a thought.

Cause once you notice the first thought. If you choose to go down that rabbit hole and attach all of those other thoughts, you can become aware of that. And the process of, practicing those thoughts from coming and going during your meditation is an exact mirror of the way that we think throughout the day.

Right. Don't attach to those thoughts.

Damaged Parents: [00:33:04] Right because they're not even real yet. It's just an idea.

And

you're reminding me actually, by talking about those thoughts and how the brain works about a conversation I had with a friend of mine years and years and years ago, that said he was insistent that control did not exist. I'm like, what are you saying?

I have control. He's like, no, it really doesn't exist. And we had a huge argument about it. And at the end of the day, I believe, and this conversation has stayed with me and I really believe it's because my perception changed. He said, if you don't have control over the synopsis in your mind, then control doesn't exist.

So if control doesn't exist, but in some ways, it, if I catch that thought and I let it go, it's a choice. So. Maybe I can't control every thought that comes into my mind and I don't expect to, what I can do is make a new choice. Does that make sense?

Kevin Nahai: [00:33:58] Makes perfect sense. I mean, this is such an interesting debate. And it's a philosophical debate about fate and free will and God, and what we have control over in our lives. My belief for your friend, if he's listening, is that we have almost complete control over ourselves in. The sense of how we react and how we think again, you're not responsible for your first thought, but you are responsible for your second thought and for your first action, I believe that we have so much more control over the outcome of our own lives and our own personalities and our own desires and our own results than we give ourselves credit for where I think your friend is right.

Is that I don't believe we have any control over other people, places, things, timing, anything that exists outside of the self. And the paradigm shift that I had to adopt was that I used to spend 98% of my time trying to control other people and trying to control places and things and events. And 2% of my time exerting control over my own life. Now I have completely flipped out on Ted. I spend 98% of my time trying to control myself, my thoughts, my actions, the type of person that I am. And 2% of the time I'm still trying to control other people and places and things, just because. I've relinquished 98% of that desire, but I still have a little bit, you know, I think we all do

Damaged Parents: [00:35:35] Yeah, I think you're human.

Kevin Nahai: [00:35:37] yeah, exactly.

It's progress, but, and I'm sure that I'm sure that it's more like 70, 30, you know, if I'm being honest too, who knows, but you get the point. The point is that I used to be a control freak over other people and situations that had nothing to do with me. And that is just no way to live constantly anxious, constantly on edge, constantly trying to manipulate situations and outcomes so that they turn out in my favor.

You know, we all go through those  it takes everybody a long time before they're willing and ready to just surrender and say, let me focus on myself. What other people do, what other people think it has nothing to do with?

Damaged Parents: [00:36:15] Most of the time, right. They aren't even thinking about what I'm doing. They're thinking about, who knows, maybe they're thinking about what they ate yesterday and, and how they. They're telling me you felt today or that they ate carbs when they wanted to eat low carb, high, fat, and now they're beating themselves up.

I mean, it really had nothing to do with me.

Kevin Nahai: [00:36:35] Most of the time, it has nothing to do with you. And even if it does have to do with you, what other people think of you is none of your business. What other people think of you is as much of your business as what they ate for breakfast yesterday. If you're not concerned with what they ate for breakfast yesterday, then you know, you do not need to be concerned with what they think of you.

Now. We all want to be well-liked. We all want to have a good reputation. We all want to present ourselves in the best possible light. Those are good things. Right. I, I don't think that this idea of, I don't care what people think of me should be a license to just go out and not care about who you are or how you look or being a good person or anything like that.

But we spend so much of our time thinking about what other people think of us and how they perceive us, rather than thinking about what do I think of me? How do I perceive me? What is my opinion of me? Right. And how do I build that? How do I bolster that? How do I improve that? That is the real quest, because that's all you have control over. You don't have control over what other people think of you. Good, bad, or ugly, but you have control over what you think of you.

Damaged Parents: [00:37:50] which takes us full circle. Actually back to the beginning. One of the comments that you had said is if you see yourself as this, Well, as you're like for you with your stomach and the anorexia, and then you identify, let's say I identified as I'm disabled or whatever, then that's and that's all I see.

Or maybe with you, it was all you saw, even though you didn't like it, it was safe for you. So it just was that comment really, for me, brought it full circle. What do you think.

Kevin Nahai: [00:38:18] Yeah. Yeah, I agree. You, as I said, asking yourself the question, what do I think of me? Is, you may not like the answer and if you're still stuck in the phase of life where you hate that, you need to get some help. You got to get somebody in your corner, but for the average person who's not clinically depressed or anxious or, has anorexia or has addiction or whatever for the average person.

What they think of themselves is completely informed by what other people think of them.

Damaged Parents: [00:38:52] So their dip. So you're what you're saying is they're depending on what other people tell them about them too. To determine what their identity is. So it's, and I can never remember who, who said this it's that quote. I am who I think you think I am. You know, the one I'm talking about you're smiling. So how do, how do you shift from that?

I'm certain, you probably found yourself in situations, you know, I know I do where I'm still worried or I, I, you know, every once in a while, it's not as often as it used to be, but where I'm thinking, Oh, I really want that person to like me. What do you do when that happens?

Kevin Nahai: [00:39:29] I have tried to build myself and build my life. To get to a point where whatever other people believe about me, I let them, because I am finally after many, many years, very confident in who I am. And I can finally say, with full honesty and being completely genuine that I love who I am.

You know, my body, my personality, of course, I still have flaws, but, but I accept those.

Damaged Parents: [00:39:58] Almost like you've learned to love. That you have those flaws. Let me give you an example. Maybe this will make sense. So, I'm an over analyzer. I have backup plans to my backup plans. That's just who I am. And I received a phone call one day and somebody is like, yeah, don't worry about that.

I'm like, what are you talking about? You know, you know who you're talking to. Right. And they're like, Oh yeah, you have

Kevin Nahai: [00:40:22] They can tell you. Don't worry.

Damaged Parents: [00:40:24] Right. But you see my point, it's like, you learn to maybe it, it can be a flaw and maybe it's not always a flaw and you learn to love all of the complexity.

So I've learned to love the complexity. Of my backup plans and appreciate them. They're not always necessary. I know that. And yet I still have them and that's okay.

Kevin Nahai: [00:40:49] And I think that's so true. One thing that I had to learn was don't crush your own superpowers. Sometimes the things that we think are major flaws, like being an over analyzer or being meticulous or being sensitive, whatever the things are that we criticize ourselves about. Sometimes those are our superpowers as well.

Right. So. If you've got flaws, like a bad temper or an addiction problem, or all kinds of relationship problems, those are issues that require self help. You have certain personality traits that are never going to go away because they're part of who you are. Those require self acceptance. 50% of the time, the answer to our problems is self-help.

But 50% of the time, the answer to our problems is self acceptance. So you have to look at your personality and you have to say, what are my character defects that I want to fix, that I want to change. And then you have to look at your personality and you have to say, what is it within my character that I think is a defect, but that is never going to go away.

And I have to accept it. And in fact it may be one of my greatest strengths. You follow what I'm saying?

Damaged Parents: [00:42:06] I believe I do. In fact, I had a conversation with a narcoleptic and I believe it's the second episode that was released.

Kevin Nahai: [00:42:14] wow. That must've been, fascinating.

Damaged Parents: [00:42:16] It totally was fascinating. What I learned, what even she learned throughout that process, actually, because we, I really love investigating and asking questions and understanding things.

But one of the things that we were talking about is she rec she was talking about how she was in the grocery store. She feels the narcolepsy coming on. And what happens is her neck goes limp and, you know, she, she will start falling asleep or. Or what have you, I can't remember exactly what happens.

And so she has to learn to focus on something else. So instead when she's in this grocery store, this mom's upset, she sees these kids and she looks at what the child is doing and focuses on his interest in this toy or something. And I said to her, I said, I think that's a super power because you just, when your emotions get too far to one side or too far to another side, You have to stop.

I have to make myself stop or walk away from that situation. So, and she hadn't really seen that as a superpower before that. And in my mind, I'm thinking, man, it's so hard for me. And here you have this natural alarm that goes off,

Kevin Nahai: [00:43:22] yeah. Wow. What an amazing example. Nobody would ever think of narcolepsy as something that's a super power, but if that's part of her life and that's something she has to accept, and it's not something she can fix through self-help, then that's something you have to embrace and say, how is this my superpower?

Like, imagine the amount of work she can get done in those moments of focus, you know, I don't have the ability to focus like that. We all have those things, you know, Angela, I, I'm a very tender, sensitive, loving giving man. And, uh, For years. I tried to change that. Like for years I tried to be this guy who, you know, went out and slept with women and, didn't call them the next day and whatever, it's just, it's not who I am.

And all the guys around me in college were doing that. And that's what I thought you were supposed to do. And, just this stupid shit, excuse my language. But it took me a long time to realize that the fact that I'm sensitive and emotional and loving and caring is what allows me to connect to people on a very deep human level.

So I thought that that was a flaw. I thought it was a weakness because it wasn't what other guys around me were doing. It, it wasn't how they were. They're like, so I thought I needed to change it instead. I needed to accept it. And instead I needed to recharacterize it. And realize that this is actually a great strength now, of course, sometimes it gets you in trouble.

It's a double-edged sword, you know, like you said, your backup plan, having a backup plan. That's not always convenient. Sometimes it's annoying as hell, but that's part of who you are and it's never going to go away. So that's something that you have to learn to embrace.

Damaged Parents: [00:45:02] Most definitely. Okay. Three things that you want the audience to walk away with tips or tools, whatever you whatever's on your heart right now to let them know

Kevin Nahai: [00:45:11] Oh, wow. Well, three things from this episode that we've already covered.

Damaged Parents: [00:45:15] doesn't have to be, it could be anything.

Kevin Nahai: [00:45:17] Okay. The first thing is reach out to me. If you were drowning in the ocean and I throw you a life jacket, you wouldn't throw the life jacket behind your head and say, I'm going to do it on my own. Don't do on your own. I'm always here to help. I'm here to listen, maybe you're afraid to talk to a family member or a friend or whatever.

You don't want them to know your problems. You can talk to me. So that's the first thing. The second thing is look inside and figure out which of your issues need to be worked on through self-help and which of your issues need to be worked on through self-acceptance and don't conflate the two, make sure you don't mistake them.

We all have issues that really need to be fixed and changed, but then we also have character traits that aren't going away. And then you need to be accepted and loved and nurtured.

And the third thing that I will say is that we didn't get to talk about this on the podcast today, but I actually spend most of my time on pocket podcasts, talking about love and relationships and men and women. And one thing I want people to understand is that the quality of your life is the quality of your romantic relationships.

Or romantic relationship, if you are single, if you're struggling in that department, if you're going through a divorce, if you're going through a breakup, if you are in a relationship and you've, there are some issues there or whatever, it's impossible to have a good life with a bad relationship.

So we are always focusing on everything, but romance and our lives. We focus on our career. We focus on our hobbies. We focus on our friends or whatever, but, human beings are meant to be together and meant to bond and attach together. And there is no way around that. So if you've got problems in the love department, you've got to figure those out.

Damaged Parents: [00:47:04] most definitely. I'm so glad I got to have you on the show today, Kevin.

Kevin Nahai: [00:47:08] I'm so glad to be here. Thank you, Angela.

Damaged Parents: [00:47:11] Thank you for listening to this week's episode of relatively damaged by damaged parents. We have really enjoyed talking to Kevin about how he reminds us to reach out when someone throws you a flotation device. We especially liked when he explained how grows can be incredibly scary .

To unite with other damaged people, connect with us on Facebook. Look for damaged parents. We'll be here next week still relatively damaged See you then.