“Connecting People to Crucial Mental Health and Addiction Information: A Conversation with Dr. Aaron Weiner”

[00:00:13] Jake White: Welcome, Dr. Aaron Weiner to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming in just sharing about who you are, what you do. And hopefully we can help some other people who are in our field. I guess just to start off, man, give your intro and the little bit of a spiel on what you do. 

[00:00:21] Dr. Aaron Weiner: Well, thank you for having me on, I appreciate it. So I’m a licensed clinical psychologist, I’m an addiction psychologist, and I’ve got one foot in the treatment side of things where I’ve got my own private practice. And then I’ve got another foot in the education side of things, where I do a lot of talks, both for professionals, for students, for schools, my passion, if I were going to sum it up, is about connecting people to the information they need to make the most informed choices about mental health, or about addiction. Because what I found is there’s a lot that’s published in Clinical journal articles and medical journals on the data side, that doesn’t quite make it into the hands of parents, into the hands of people who are struggling, or even into legislation where we’re deciding where to put really critical tax dollars, what’s the highest way to leverage, that was the best way to leverage that. So I tried to be that bridge and connect people to the information they need. 

[00:01:21] Jake White: That’s extremely important. And how, if you don’t mind me asking, like, how did you get into that passion in what you’re doing right now. 

[00:01:27] Dr. Aaron Weiner: So I started just thinking I would just stay very much in the treatment lane, I was training actually in VA hospitals for a number of years and thinking, I was going to end up as a VA psychologist, which is actually a great place to work as a psychologist, you’re very appreciated, you’re doing incredibly important work. But ended up not going that route, because when I finished my postdoctoral residency, there’s wasn’t really a fellowship, rather, there wasn’t a place in the VA system to go. And I ended up in a room that eventually brought me into hospital administration, over a psychiatric hospital in the Chicago area, which is where I’m based. And from that vantage point, I just started seeing that there were a lot of these gaps. And that if you look further upstream, well, where are these problems coming from? How in healthcare can we be more proactive, rather than just reactive, I’ve still always been very passionate about helping people who are struggling. But I also started to realize, wait a second, like, if we can stop someone from falling into the river, then we don’t have to fish them out. And so that’s really where a lot of my passion for policy, passion for education comes from, and how I got into the field. 

[00:02:43] Jake White: That’s really great and beneficial for people in our field to have someone like you who really understands the data. And the other side of it, where people are in long term recovery or treatment facilities, and then also being on the side of, let’s help people before they need to get here. They’re both so important. And you have experience in both, which is really, really cool. 

[00:03:07] Dr. Aaron Weiner: I remember back early in my training, I had this almost like training whiplash, where I actually spent the whole time in the alcohol and other drug office at the university, a University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, working with college kids who had some substance related consequence. But then I went to the VA hospital in Danville, Illinois, where I was working in intensive outpatient. And then also, I guess, actually, it was a residential treatment center, where you have these really tough on their luck folks, who are just very far advanced down the addiction spectrum. And I’m sitting there thinking like, “Wow, there’s a lot of these kids who I’m seeing at school who don’t realize, you don’t just end up 45 in this hole, there’s a progression, there’s a path you walk down, that gets you there.” And if they could see like, this is where this behavior is going to take me, maybe they’d have second thoughts. 

[00:04:03] Jake White: I think that’s really where we want to dive in, as you talked about that progression. And our podcast is mostly about prevention. And so my question for you is, what do you think that students are facing today? That’s challenging, or things that they’re going through, that you’re seeing on a daily basis, or you’re studying, talk to us about that? 

[00:04:29] Dr. Aaron Weiner: Well, so students right now are facing a really tough intersection have a really heavy weight of stress and mental health concerns, combined with industries that are there to prey on the fact that they’re feeling vulnerable and looking for outlets. And I think what a lot of people don’t recognize is that the stress system in the body is very similar to any other system where you’ve got inputs, but then you also have to have outputs. You can’t just keep stuffing and stuffing and stuffing things inside of yourself. And I think intuitively we understand that when it comes to say, like food, when it comes to liquid, but it also works that way in terms of stress and mental health burden. And so what’s happening is, as we’re seeing stress increase whether or not it has to do with academic stress and needing to go to college, or the AP classes, or expectations, or the stress of all the other things that are going on in life for kids right now, maybe for some of them more recently, things like school shootings, or things related to COVID in sickness or whatever it is, they’ve got all these pressures, how are they going to deal with it? That’s where we’re seeing companies come in, in terms of vaping, in terms of the marijuana and cannabis industry, even things like microtransactions in mobile games, where we see kids basically fall into gambling behaviors, through that social media, and the social comparison on Instagram, and what we see on SNAP, there’s so many places where kids can fall in, where we have these for profit enterprises trying to like swoop in and say, you’re stressed. So you have a need? Here’s the solution, but it’s not really a healthy solution. 

[00:06:09] Jake White: So just make sure I understand what you said is that since students are facing pressures, they have anxiety, and they’re coping with real challenges in life. And these companies see that as an opportunity to market their products as a solution. And so my next question is, for example, you mentioned social media and some of the gaming industry, gambling, these vaping, cannabis products, why is that not a good solution for them? 

[00:06:41] Dr. Aaron Weiner: Well, they’ve got downstream negative implications. And I think when we talk about maladaptive coping behaviors, which is what a lot of these things are, like, their ways of feeling better in the moment, but as time goes on, and you repeat it over and over and over again, there’s a lot of really negative implications. That’s, the pivot. The real question is, how do we equip kids with actual coping skills that work for them now, and don’t weigh them down later and turn into a chain around their neck later in life? 

[00:07:17] Jake White: That’s extremely relatable to me being a presenter in schools, is what you just explained, is the catchphrase or the theme of it, which is in life, you can develop skill sets, or you can take shortcuts. And so drugs or social media, or that escape is one of those shortcuts, and it doesn’t fix your problem. It just helps you escape from it. Versus what you’re talking about is how can we equip young people to develop the right skill set, so they can continue to cope throughout their life in healthy ways that doesn’t have negative consequences? So if students are using these shortcuts, they’re not developing the skills to cope with life’s challenges, but instead, they’re going to an escape. What does it doing to their brains? 

[00:08:02] Dr. Aaron Weiner: So the brain actually does become more sensitized to those shortcuts, the more you use them. So for example, in the case of nicotine and THC, in particular, we’ve seen that if you use those when you’re an adolescent, and your brain is still forming, and that’s actually a critical part to this, your brain isn’t really done growing in certain places, and pruning and others until you’re about 25 years old. And so anytime you’re putting a chemical in your brain that affects it before then you are potentially altering how it grows. But when we put those chemicals in there, in particular, we’ve seen that then when you later put it in front of the stimulus, like a different drug, like cocaine, or like opioids, or something like that, we find that the brain actually lights up differently, and you’re more susceptible to addiction to other drugs. It’s something that we call priming. But even outside of a biological side of things where you’ve got that priming effect, where you start to do is build this psychological pathway of thinking like, I can’t feel uncomfortable right now. It’s not okay for me to feel this way. It needs to stop as quickly as possible. This is not an okay state to be in. And you start to lose tolerance or not develop tolerance for discomfort, which is just a really important part of being able to make it through life without getting really frantic or frenzied, when you’re put under pressure. 

[00:09:31] Jake White: Wow. So you actually become less resilient to life’s challenges, because of the escape that you’re using or the drugs or anything that you would choose, because your body learns to take that escape every time. 

[00:09:50] Dr. Aaron Weiner: I would say that. I don’t think that’s going too far out on a limb to say that the more you practice something, or practice a response to something, the stronger ingrained that becomes which doesn’t mean that if you were say, to feel really stressed, and you use a shortcut, that all of a sudden, you’ve just like taped your resiliency, and now you’re in a hole or something like that, like so many things in life, it has to do with trends. But if your response, say to a situation that feels challenging, or threatening or where you think you might fail, and so that feels really threatening is to say, run away, or to shy away from it, or to self sabotage, so that you can be like, well, it wasn’t because I’m not smart enough that I didn’t do well on that test. It’s because I stayed up all night playing fortnight, or whatever, like that. You do that enough times. And that starts to become what feels comfortable. And the idea of being more courageous, or using a skill, or even just experiencing it and having like that pressure or discomfort be okay, that starts to atrophy. 

“Building Resilience and Coping Skills in Students: A Conversation on Hope and Strategies”

[00:10:53] Jake White: Okay, so what do you think that students, and I know that you do work with students and parents and professionals, speaking engagements, courses, trainings, even have a data package that people can basically get all the stuff that you nerd out about? Which is amazing. We need this. And you deliver it in a package to schools and different organizations who can use it? And so what are some of those things in there or even just one thing, just one thing that you think, hey, if we can help students realize this, then we can potentially help them?

[00:11:30] Dr. Aaron Weiner:  Well, It’s hard to pick one. I think the most important thing that you can sell students on though, is that these skills that you’re talking about, like skill sets, rather than shortcuts that the skill sets actually work. And I know one of the tactics that I like to use most when I work with people on coping skills, I like to start with deeper diaphragmatic breathing, where you breathe in through your nose, and it’s almost like inflating a balloon behind your belly button. Like true deep breathing. I think sometimes when people deep breathe, they don’t do it, right. And so they don’t really understand how it should feel. But if you do diaphragmatic, or deep breathing, particularly if you combine it with some mindfulness, but if you do that for even like three to five minutes, most people tend to find like, wow, I feel more relaxed in my body, like I actually do feel less tense now than I did just five minutes ago. And it’s almost like proof of concept, like, okay, like, I can understand how, this is not the same thing, obviously, is like someone getting drunk, but I can see how this could be useful. I can see how this could make life manageable. And I also can understand how doing these other things, has a lot of blowback, particularly again, if you’re a kid, and drinking, say, could get you in a lot of trouble, not to mention impact your brain or cause problems as life goes on. You start thinking okay, like I see, it’s not theoretical, I’m experiencing it. And so if I had to pick just one, it would be, how can we really try to create these deliverables where a young person says, I get it, I see it, I feel it right now? Because I think particularly for young people, it’s important to lead strong because their ability to see reward in the future and wait for it is actually less than an adult. That’s actually one of the last parts of our brain to develop is the part with executive functioning, which allows to reduce that reward discount issue where like something in the future doesn’t matter as much to you as something right now. 

[00:13:36] Jake White: Okay, that prefrontal cortex, is that the smart name for it? And you know why that makes so much sense to me is that, like, when you’re explaining just that simple exercise, is that you’re creating an experience for someone, like, it’s one thing to tell a student, hey, you can develop skills to cope with these challenges. And they think, Well, what do you know, you don’t know what I’m facing, you don’t know, like what coping skills I have, or I don’t have any skills, they might even think. And all these things might be going on through their minds. But if you can give them an experience, and it takes less than five minutes, and you can make them feel different than your words now are more trustworthy. They’ve experienced it themselves. They don’t have to go out on a limb to say, “Wow, Dr. Weiner actually knows what he’s talking about.” They’re like, he told me something. I tested it out. Kids love testing us. And now it’s proven it correctly. And now I can actually go on a limb and when he tells me that it’s brave to ask for help, I can go and develop these other coping skills with exercise or hobbies or being with friends, and it’s going to give me an outcome instead of using a drug or jumping onto social media or whatever it might be for them. That it gives your word more weight, because they’ve experienced it with you. So I think that’s fantastic. 

[00:15:06] Dr. Aaron Weiner: So I like to talk about the brain, particularly when it comes to stress. But I think even if we broaden out a little bit, I like to use the image of a dog driving a car. And I have a picture, I like to show actually during presentations. But if you can imagine, you’ve got the super advanced car like a Tesla or something. And then you’ve got this dog behind the wheel. That’s our brain. Because we have this really advanced prefrontal cortex, like you mentioned, that allows for this really intent like abstract thought planning, task switching, all is really interesting stuff. I would say really powerful stuff. But what’s even stronger is our emotion brain, our feeling brain. And that’s like the dog. I say dog because it doesn’t speak English. It doesn’t rationalize, it doesn’t logic, its way through things, it feels and that’s why if you’ve ever been like really angry about something, or you’ve been anxious about something, someone just like trying to reason you out of it, to talk you out of it, it usually doesn’t work. It’s like a pit in your stomach, or tension in your chest, or a feeling of heat. It’s not a rational thought. It’s a feeling. And the language of our primal brain, the language of our limbic system, that’s that dog behind the car side, the one that feels rather than thinks, it speaks and experiences just like dogs do. Like when you’re teaching a dog to learn to like to sit, it learns to sit not because you say sit, but because when you utter those phonemes and it sets, you give it a treat. And it’s like, okay, when I hear the word sit, I sit, I get a treat, I get rewarded, that’s what I’m supposed to do. That treat is an experience. And that’s the language that that part of our mind speaks. So if you can have someone experience relaxation, if you can have them experience a change, that cuts so much deeper on to that side of our reasoning than any amount of logic or any argument you could make everwell.

[00:17:11] Jake White: That’s fascinating. And even the fact that it’s becoming more memorable because it’s emotional, and hitting that part of the brain. 

[00:17:24] Dr. Aaron Weiner: So you and I are both professional speakers. And one of the first rules of effective speaking, is you have to evoke an emotion in your audience. Like, why are you memorable? Because you make someone feel something, the same thing goes for music, the same thing goes for movies because that cuts so deep into our memory. When you think about why do people like want to do something though? Like if say, someone’s in a position of stress? Are they going to want to take some deep breaths? Are they going to want to go for a run? Are they going to want to listen to music? Or are they going to want to get drunk? How they make that determination has a lot to do with their experiences around those different things. And that’s part of why when someone gets into a bad habit, why it sticks around? Because their brain thinks, Okay, what’s going to solve this problem the quickest? How can I get out of discomfort quickly? And if they’ve started to make this association of, you know what I’m going to do, I’m just going to go play Minecraft for four hours. That’s how I feel better. And anytime my mom or dad says, hey, it’s time to go do your homework, it’s going to feel so threatening that I’m going to yell at them until they leave the room and just don’t want to talk to me anymore. And then I’ll come down again, that feels really rewarding. Sometimes, even if you’re getting punishment from your parents. And that’s why you continue the behavior. So anyway, I could talk about this for a long time. But it’s all about speaking and experiences when you’re trying to get through to the emotion brain words or the logic brain. Both are important, but you got to speak the right language at the right time. 

[00:18:52] Jake White: That’s extremely helpful. So let’s jump to, any professionals listening here who the podcast is for, is might be a tough question too but what’s one thing that maybe they could know around this topic that can help them do their jobs better, to help students better? Take your pick, but something that they can implement, or just know, to be a little bit better equipped? 

[00:19:20] Dr. Aaron Weiner: Well, so I’m going to steal something then from Simon Sinek. And it say, ‘it’s important to know their why’, it’s important to know the kids why particularly, when it comes to mental health, and then also definitely when it comes to substance use. What I’ve found is that whenever you’re trying to get someone to walk away from one behavior and towards another, although you do have to give them that better offer. Like here’s where I want you to go not just don’t do this. It’s also really important to know why they’re doing it in the first place. Is it social acceptance? Is it stress? Is it depression? Is it because they’re dealing with abuse at home? Sometimes in their community, they living in dangerous neighborhood. There’s a lot of reasons why kids are looking for those quick fixes, those shortcuts, those escapes. And if you know why, then you can tailor the message, when particularly if you’re working with one on one with people as I do, it’s really important to understand their particular way. So that you can help really make the message work for them and get them to a different place. So know there why, I’d say that that’s the core of everything. 

[00:20:20] Jake White: Great. And then I want to end with this because I know that talking about prevention, and sometimes highlighting this can seem like we have an uphill battle, which makes sense, there’s a lot of money and time being poured into getting students into these things that aren’t great for them. So it’s going to take an equal amount of time and effort and money to keep them safe from it. So my question for you is like, what gives you hope doing this work? Because it can be heavy sometimes. So what keeps you hopeful in this arena that maybe things can change? 

[00:21:03] Dr. Aaron Weiner: Really good question. Well, there’s a couple that give me a lot of hope. The first is when you look at what happened with cigarettes in this country, and how, in the late 90s, smoking stopped being cool, and it didn’t happen by accident, there was a lot of work. The Surgeon General’s advisory about cancer came out in the 80s, so it took about 15 years. But actually it happened, where instead of smoking being like cool and edgy, and the thing that to do to be popular, it became gross. And it became something that the kids no longer wanted to do. That stop being idolized, to stop being depicted in the same sorts of ways and media. And we saw a shift in the smoking rate generally in the country has gone down every single year since then. Same thing for students, I think only in the past year or two, it’s leveled off, and we’ve got vaping the thing for that, unfortunately, but that’s something where I think about how does the future look in terms of some of those areas, where we are seeing these negative coping increases, like in vaping, like in marijuana and things like that, I’m hopeful that we can make that curve shorter this time. And that we have done it before, we can learn from our successes and do it again, what also gives me a lot of hope, is I see like right now, for example, the Surgeon General, the United States out there beating a super loud drum, about youth mental health, I see articles about youth mental health on national media, I hear people talking about the fact that this is a huge issue. And it really is, this is the sort of thing where if we pay attention to it now, it will help tremendously. And if we don’t, we are going to be feeling the weight of this, quite literally for decades to come. Because the people obviously, who are 8 through 18 now are going to be 28 through 38, are going to be 38 through 48, are going to be raising their own kids. And if these are issues that’s growing getting worse over time versus that we pay attention to now. There’s, a huge Delta in difference in how that’s going to go. So I’m seeing a lot of attention being given the right places, and I’ve seen us be successful in the past. So when I think about optimism, that’s where my mind goes. 

[00:23:17] Jake White: That gives me hope, too. And it’s, great to hear that we’ve done this before, with one platform. So we have a baseline to go off of, we saw some results, and that there’s people right now, like many of us, probably listening to this too, who are willing to put in the work and the time and effort to fight this and to make something good come from it. And hopefully some stronger stories. Kids growing up to be really great community members because of their experience. And I know with my intern program, I’ve seen students, they started vaping in school. And now they just don’t put up with it with their friends, because they had that powerful experience. And just the stuff that they’re brave enough to do, it gives me hope that, you said, like we’ve got people who are seeing it, the data is going to come out and catch up too, and we’ll be able to make a difference. So thank you for sharing that. As we wrap up, please share anything else that you think we didn’t get to talk about, that you want to touch on? And then I’d love for you to just share. What are you working on? Or what are ways people can stay in touch with you or even work with you? And end on that how we can stay in touch? 

[00:24:33] Dr. Aaron Weiner: Yes, absolutely. Well, in terms of wrapping things up and ending, I’d say if you’ve taken the time to listen to this podcast and get to this point, you are probably very solidly in the camp of someone who wants to make a difference in the lives of young people. And so I just want to thank your audience for everything that they’re doing. 

[00:24:54] Jake White: Dr. Weiner, this has been really really cool. I love that conversation. And thank you so much for being on the show.