“Protecting Young Minds: A Journey from Addiction to Neuro-Based Prevention”

[00:00:04] Jake White: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Party Talk where we get to empower leaders in youth drug prevention. Today, I’m chatting with Dr. Crystal. And listen, this is so cool. I met her in Denver, Colorado, we were actually at the Johnny Ambassador’s Conference. And if you know Laura Stack and Johnny’s Ambassadors, that’s fantastic. If you don’t look her up, she’s incredible. But you were a featured speaker there and you blew my mind, like your book, your presentation, your style, I was like, “You’re my best friend.”

[00:00:38] Dr. Crystal Collier: Thank you. I’m blown away by you and everything that you’ve done. And so I want you to know that it’s mutual crushes perfection and impressions on each other.

[00:00:50] Jake White: Yes, prevention crushes. It’s real. So tell us a little bit more. So this is the audience first time meeting you let’s assume, can you describe your work and why you love it?

[00:01:02] Dr. Crystal Collier: Sure. Well, the why I love it, I think comes first because I am a person in long term recovery. I started drinking it 12, my parents got divorced. And I’ve moved and moved and moved, got involved with the wrong crowds to seek attention and validation and what I wasn’t getting in other places. So I also didn’t know that I had a lot of genetics, working against me. So by the time I was 16, I was really addicted to a lot of stuff and started using intravenous drugs. And the whole time I was doing really well in school, I was making a smart kid. But I was really heading downhill fast, graduated early from high school went straight into college. And then of course, when I got there, it was graduating into bigger and better risky behavior, it was just all so available. And there didn’t seem like anything else to do except party, do drugs all that stuff. And so I went downhill pretty quick from there and had a pretty bad overdose when I was 18. And by the grace of God survived it, called my mom asked for help. Got into rehab. And then when I got into recovery, and got back to school, I took a gap year, not to go to Europe, but to go to rehab and to a recovery house in a different state, which saved my life, and also introduced me to the world of being able to entertain yourself, survive and cope without drugs and alcohol, or any other high risk behavior. And so that’s what I ended up doing. And when I went back to school, I remember feeling so much shame and guilt, I just kept thinking, “Why did I do this?” I am a good kid, I am smart. I am cute. Like, what and why? And why did I make all these dumb decisions. So I started studying that question in school, taking every psychology class that I could, and all these really amazing brain studies were being published because functional MRI technology was less expensive, and they were using it. So I get to see these real pictures instead of your fried egg as the metaphor for drugs, your brain on drugs. I got to see real pictures of what people look like in a functional MRI when they were high or using or engaging in risky behavior. And I just thought, “This is so cool.” I show this to other people. But then it’s something else. So interesting. I kept noticing that in all of these studies, it was a very particular part of the brain that would shut off the frontal lobe. And I’m thinking, this is why I made such bad decisions. Because when you’re high when you’re using your frontal lobe is shut off. And that is the part of your brain that does all of your basic thinking, feeling and doing skills. We call them executive functioning skills. And it scared me because then I realized if that part of the brain is off, it doesn’t get to grow. We have to tell everybody about this. Anybody who takes care of a kid any kid to protect their brain, so that just grew and grew and grew into a psychology practice. I’ve been a therapist now for 25 years, I wrote the book, “The Neuro Whereabouts Guide” which graphically describes how risky behavior especially 18 risky behavior affect the brain. And then it’s really a guide for parents of how to protect the brain what your scientific justification is, brain based parenting techniques, but also I’m really excited because right now I have a group of high school interns and college interns that are helping rewrite a youth version. So that I’ve had so many kids read their parents book and say, “Oh, I really want one of this that was written for me.” And I thought that’s perfect, because I really could have used something like that when I was growing up. And so that’s really the why I do what I do. And the result of it is just teaching people the neuroscience of high risk behavior and how to keep their brain on.

“The Power of Positive Peer Influence and Sober Socializing”

[00:05:31] Jake White: Wow, there’s so much to unpack there. That’s cool. Though, we’re gonna get to your, because when I was reading your book, I was thinking the same thing. This so digestible, this is so accessible. And the information is so good that you would understand why you’re making certain decisions, or why certain decisions and actions are influencing your outcomes, because it’s all related back to your brain. So I want to back up all the way till when you shared your personal story, is you highlighted that you’re getting great grades in school, but that you turn to substances, I think you said for attention and validation. What did that mean for you? And do you see students today doing that, too?

[00:06:21] Dr. Crystal Collier: So much. So I probably primarily work with kids and their parents, I work with a lot of adults in recovery too, but especially more so today, because kids are having experienced deficits. I call them experience deficits. Because you’re on your screen all day long, you don’t need to go out and do anything. But for me, when my parents got a divorce, it was right in the middle of puberty. And when we moved, we moved to this place where there was a neighborhood pool, and there were older people there who paid me a lot of attention. And I wasn’t really getting that attention from what was going on at home because my parents were really bury it  upset about what was going on with them and struggling with that. And then when they got a divorce, my mother was worried about feeding us and making sure that she went to school and bettered herself. But I was kind of that kid that my parents trusted, that I would make the right decision and take care of myself, because I did those things and was good at that. But what I also didn’t know is that my genetics were kicking in at that time. And my body actually makes a little bit less dopamine than the general population, which is really what the genetics are predisposition are about, your genes tell your body to make the  amounts of different neurotransmitters, hormones and peptides. But if you have genes that predispose you to addiction, your genes may not make the right amount of those. And so because I don’t make the correct amount of dopamine, which is the chemical that makes you feel calm and happy when you do stuff for your survival, I was always a little uncomfortable in my own skin. So when someone else paid attention to me, it increased my natural dopamine levels a lot and that was really rewarding. When I drank alcohol or took drugs that really increased dopamine levels. And for me being kind of a dopamine deficit kid, who was really in the midst of a lot of family stress. It was the perfect combination. So older boy attention and drugs and alcohol, it was the Band-Aid that took care of my emotional stress distress.

[00:08:57] Jake White: That’s so enlightening. And it’s coming back to me some of the things that you presented on is, so when you were a student, a kid, the validation was coming from this group of friends. And you look to them, to tell you that you were good, that you were okay, and that you were enough. And because of that, if they were getting into drinking or drugs, I’m right there. I’ll do what it takes to be a part of this validation. And I remember you talking about how you had this strategy. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was brain based something. And it’s the way that you talk with your kids to build them up. And it’s congratulating them for brain based things and not for maybe like superficial things or accomplishments. Can you tell me a little bit about that? We hope parents now with that same thing.

[00:09:52] Dr. Crystal Collier: I call it brain based parenting. But anybody do it brain based counseling, brain based whatever it is. And I think that so the first step is to memorize your brain’s executive functioning skills. And that’s easy, because there’s just a short list in each neuro stage of development. And these are things like self-monitoring, organization, flexible thinking, emotion regulation, frustration, tolerance, task initiation, impulse control. So once you memorize them, and this is her kids and adults, know what your brain does. And then as a parent or counselor at anybody, any adult who works with kids, you can really validate their skills and be able to say, “You took out the trash and I didn’t even have to ask you, thank you”. Like that’s reinforcing task initiation. You can say things like, “I love how you organize that, tell me how you did it. What you really showed some impulse control today, I’m so impressed, I would have been and the way that you regulated your motion today, you really calm down. Two weeks ago, you would have popped off the handle, be able to watch kids and see that they are using those skills and reinforcing them increases the use of those skills.” But what we see a lot of parents do is that reinforcement decreases as kid’s age. When they’re young, and they were potty training them. You use the restroom for the first time, it’s already. But when they ace a chemistry test, then that’s it. So what we can do is be able to say, “How did you do that?” That’s amazing to be able to really reinforce somebody. And it’s interesting, I keep thinking in the back of my head, I have this one person that I’m working with 14, 15 year old boy, and he’s just really struggling, he hears more from his parent about what he’s not doing the ratio of positive to negative communication is really skewed to the negative. So he feels terrible about himself. And then he goes online, and he finds all these websites that validate how terrible he is, because there’s so many forums and chat rooms out there today of kids and adults who are really suffering in silence, experience deficits. They don’t go out and get validation from the world. And so they feel very victimized and helpless. And I remember yesterday that I was saying, “Do you feel better when you go on to those sites?” And he’s like, “No, but at least I’m not alone.”

[00:12:46] Jake White: That is a statement. So he’s not even seeking validation. His lowest form of dopamine would just be not being alone.

[00:13:00] Dr. Crystal Collier: What he’s going through really normal adolescent changes. But his dad doesn’t really understand neuroscience, puberty, adolescence, and is very authoritarian. So we’re like, “How can we create a forum for him that says, let’s validate you for being awesome. And just going through life and getting through instead of reinforcing helplessness or hopelessness.” And that’s really what I did when I got into recovery, I had a really great doctor in rehab that said, “You should not go back to your old apartment, you should go on to a recovery, sober living facility back then they call them halfway houses.” So I was convinced to get on a plane to Omaha, Nebraska. And when in the late 80s, early 90s, there were no recovery houses down south where I’m from. So everybody was there and it was so cool. I remember going to this sober, dad’s. If I walked in, and there’s 500 young people at this dance with DJ. And I remember thinking, “No way, all these people are sober.” So I elbowed this dude, who was standing next to me and said, “Are all these people sober?” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s a recovery dance.” And it made me feel so safe and silly. So I could dance without alcohol, because everybody else was acting like an idiot, and that was okay for me to do too. So it’s interesting too. I fell in love with that record. It was once a month there. And there was one year where we were snowed in and it didn’t happen and that was all for us, because I was so looking forward to that. But then later on, I became a DJ and so for a couple of years, I did that very dance myself.

[00:15:03] Jake White: No way, that’s so cool. That reminds me, I used to tell the story, when I would speak for first year orientation at colleges, about how it’s gonna tie back to what you said about people really like dancing sober, and you’re just needed to that. If one other person is doing it, it’s okay to do it. I remember my literally first day of college, I walked into this giant biology class 250 students in stadium style seating. So teachers into the fronts cascading chairs all the way to the top, and teacher starts. And it’s the first day and he’s like, we’re gonna quiz what you know so then at the end of the semester, we’ll quiz the same thing and see how much you’ve grown. It’s an easy “A”, just complete this test, you could fail it and you still get an “A”. And so he’s like, grab your like a pencil from your backpack. If you don’t have a pencil, I’ve got a box up here at the front. He starts passing them out. And then the time starts. I’m sitting there filling out my test. And the guy next to me, isn’t doing a thing. And I turned to we were talking before the class, and he’s a super outgoing guy, really popular. Everybody knows him. And he’s not doing his tests. And I’m like, “What’s going on?” Maybe I was being too nosy. But I was like, “What’s up? You’re not doing your test.” And he’s like, “No, I don’t have a pencil.” And I was like, “Didn’t she see?” He’s got a box of them up there. He’s like, No, that’s okay. I’m big in myself, this guy’s gonna miss the easiest a in the semester, because he doesn’t want to go to the front of the class and get a pencil. So I gave him my pencil, I got up, and I started walking to the front of the class. And no kidding. When I got down to the box, picked up the pen and turned around, there was 25 people getting out of their seats following down to the classroom, they were all terrified of being the first one. Isn’t that insane? And that really taught me when I started my movement of throwing sober house parties, I was like, “People will follow.” And what you saw is people will have fun without drugs and alcohol, they just need someone to show them how to do it or that it’s possible.

[00:17:26] Dr. Crystal Collier: Absolutely. It’s really simply either negative peer influence, positive peer influence, and you can engage in either one with the same effort. So why not do it in the positive way, keep your frontal lobe on and growing so that you and you get those experiences and grow those neuronal networks so that you’re not afraid to go get a pencil.

“Empowering Youth and Educators in Substance Abuse Prevention”

[00:17:55] Jake White: That is so good. It takes the same effort, why not build the positive habit?

[00:18:00] Dr. Crystal Collier: It makes me think about how that might affect his life for the rest of his life of like, what is he going to miss out on because of that. So I remember, a couple of years back, I did an assessment with a new young adult client, who was really failing out of college, and he had to kind of boomerang back home for a while. And I was going through my normal assessment questions, “What do you do for fun? Do you have a partner? Do you engage in sexual activity?” And he was like, “No, I’ve got pornography, and I’ve got DoorDash, I’m good.” And I thought, Oh, my God, you’re just gonna stay inside with your, and have a relationship with your laptop and have food delivered to you for the rest of your life and you’re miserable. He was miserable. He was depressed. And he felt so bad about himself. But he wasn’t willing to go out and have new experiences because of the anxiety that it provokes. So I think what’s happening in our culture is that this experience deficit, everything’s so easy, we don’t have to go make effort. But when you have to make an effort to go do something new or different, or social, that there is a level of anxiety that comes along with it, but it’s normal and it’s healthy. Anxiety is just low grade fear. That’s all it is. Fear of something new, fear of change, fear of being rejected, fear of all these things, and we get when we engage in that experience, and we do it, then we grow neuronal networks that say, “Dude, you’re okay, this is awesome. Look what you did, you can have an effect on the world and then your self-esteem goes up when your self-efficacy goes up.” So, if you can be the person then to go have that party and go dance like an idiot and let everybody come and join you. You’re like, what’s happening in the brain is new network wiring that will build for you for the rest of your life.

[00:20:14] Jake White: Wow. So that story is scary and terrifying. But what’s worse is it’s not an isolated thing I’ve hear I’m hearing all across the country is like, we just can’t get our students to do something they in default to whatever is easiest. So their escape is vaping, THC, alcohol, all the like other substances, or its video games, or social media. So like they’re having a hard time engaging young people. And in your opinion, is there or maybe even research on this. I don’t know that you’ve heard about what’s one of the answers to pull them out of this? If this is a generational poll to say, “I’m so anxious, or I’m letting my anxiety drive my decisions. I’m just not going to go out and do that I’m going to stay home and where it’s easy and do this.” What do you do to kind of help that?

[00:21:09] Dr. Crystal Collier: Well, that’s a great tough question. I’ll tell you what, I told a parent yesterday, who was telling me about how her son won’t get a job. And I said, “Who pays his rent?” And she says, “I do.” And I said, “Stop paying his rent. Because when you’re hungry, you will figure out how to get your butt up out of the house and go eat.” And if you’re, you can’t pay rent. So necessity, is really the driver. But we don’t have the necessity anymore. Because why should I drive down the street and go get my meal when I can just have DoorDash deliver it? There’s like the necessity of that. How do we create that need? And I think that it’s going to be different for everybody but for schools for universe. So I think what you did with that guy’s pencil is awesome. So please hear that.

[00:22:14] Jake White: Enabled him.

[00:22:16] Dr. Crystal Collier: So then what might happen if that scenario happens over and over again, with other people doing for him? He’s not growing neuronal networks for getting through that anxiety and doing it anyway. He’s growing neuronal networks for dependency on other people to do for him. So part of it is okay. So I wouldn’t have had to do that any different. Because there’s 25 other people got through their fear and got their butts up to get a pencil. So I there,

[00:22:47] Jake White: I stole the, the neural networks, as he said, I got them. He didn’t get them.

[00:22:54] Dr. Crystal Collier: And hopefully he learned, and I gotta get up. Hopefully, he saw that that was okay, because it created this new thing. And I think it takes young people like you to get up and say, “No, that’s not okay. It’s not okay what you see in TV, all the alcohol use all the substance use it, they make it look so normalized, it’s not normal, it changes your brain forevermore.” And then you’re always chasing that, that easier, softer way. And it’s so interesting, because if you just work through the harder ways, the more anxious, anxiety provoking ways, they get easier with experience, and then it raises your self-efficacy, which raises your self-esteem, and then your whole entire life is better. If you keep doing the easier, softer way and avoiding everything, you get more and more depressed hopelessness and feel like life is meaningless. So that’s a great question, how do we get them up off their seat to go out and do and so I think part of it is doing less for them.

[00:24:02] Jake White: That’s good. And I like what you said to the parent too, because you’re like, in a way just as I enabled, this others friend is new friend, is their enabling their child to stay in the same situation? Because there’s no pain to overcome, there’s no obstacles, just like my life is perfect as it is, why would I get a job? But by saying, I’m not going to pay your rent, so you have to choose the pain of being anxious? Is that greater than the pain of getting a job. So what either are not being fed and not having a place to live? Well, that’s a huge pain. I actually have to deal with that. So I’m willing to go through the steps of getting that job, because I need to eat. That just really basic. It’s really fundamental. It’s simple, but I’m sure as a parent, it’s very difficult to do but it’s in the best interest of your child’s future.

[00:25:03] Dr. Crystal Collier: It really is. And what we see globally is that when a country starts to move from third world status into a much more economically rich country, and they have more expendable income, drug and alcohol rates start to skyrocket, which is interesting. So when we get lazy, we drink more, we use more when we don’t need to hustle so much just to live, we sit and relax, get bored, don’t know what to do drink and use that. And then it becomes normalized, because we get addicted. And we don’t want to keep doing it in whatever way. So on a little micro scale at home, the idea is to teach your kids how to do when they can. So if your kid could do it, they should do it. So if your kid is old enough to do their laundry, they need to do their laundry. But a lot of times what parents go through is we want to give to our kids, maybe what we didn’t have, which is such a mistake. Unless it’s an enrichment, if we didn’t have a lot of enriching things, we can enrich their lives with more, but taking away responsibilities debilitates kids in not just that skill way, but also socially that way. So when we give our kids smartphones so young, and they get addicted to screens, and they don’t go out and develop their communication and relational skills, they don’t get to learn them. A lot of times people make fun of middle schoolers and high schoolers for having such dramatic relationships. But that drama is critical skill building to learn healthy relational techniques that then sustain long term relationships. So I’m seeing young people who don’t have those basic communication skills. They’re either not getting in relationships, or they’re failing to understand how to sustain a relationship.

[00:27:10] Jake White: Wow, this is really fun talking to you. We’re getting close to the 30 minute mark, I could talk for like hours. Let’s do this. You have so much knowledge. Could you give us a few tips, since people in the prevention field are going to hear this? Can you give us maybe three tips that we can take from what you do and share with people in our network, about maybe your expertise about the brain about working with students how to help them, it might be hard to pick just three, but that’s my challenge. And then I want to hear how people can stay in touch with you. And even higher, you’re incredible. So you to go to them in their community. I definitely want to end on that. So they can have you there.

[00:28:05] Dr. Crystal Collier: You got it. And we’ll have to pick back up with some other topics later on and keep talking.

[00:28:12] Jake White: That’s great. If you’re up for it, I’ll take you up on that.

[00:28:15] Dr. Crystal Collier: I think you got it. If you work in prevention, I think the most important thing to say is be consistent and here’s why. If you do a really awesome, if you will hire Jake White to come to your school and do an amazing presentation with students, you’re gonna get a 30 to 90 day effect. That means students are going to change their behavior, they’re going to change their attitudes and beliefs. But if they don’t continue to hear that message, if it doesn’t get reinforced within their environment, that effect will fade and compete with all the other messages in the world that says drugs and alcohol and risky behavior are normal. So you’ve got to be consistent in that message. I think the second most important thing is teach kids the real neuroscience of high risk behavior, not a fried egg on a frying pan, but literally show pictures of that of how kids can keep their brain on and growing and protect it from risky behavior. And then third, if you’re a prevention specialist, make sure you work with your whole system, meaning the students, the students, caregivers, and families, the staff that work for them. I cannot tell you how often I’ve gone into a school and done a prevention program and then I hear the theater director be, it’s not that bad. You have to make sure that everybody in that system is on board with the message that you’re trying to reinforce within that system, because there are going to be a lot of parents out there who engage in risky behavior themselves, normalize it are passive with their kids and permissive. And so working on creating a message that everybody can jump in to and adopt is really critical. So if you’re interested in in my work, as, especially as a prevention specialist, I really want you to go to my new website, www.knowyourneuro.org. So the book has a website to the “Neuro Whereabouts Guide”. If you want to order that in English, Spanish, audible or eBook, you can go to the neurowhereaboutguide.com. But I also have just spent the past couple of years making tons of videos for K through 12 that are developmentally appropriate, that teaches the neuroscience of risky behavior to students at different ages and increases those executive functioning skills. And each one of those videos comes with a one page activity handout you can do at home or in class. So I would love to come to your school, your community and talk about this. But knowyourneuro.org is a free resource for the world to be able to use translatable into other languages. So that prevention specialists everywhere have a new tool to teach kids.

[00:31:30] Jake White: That is incredible. I love it. Listen, I know Dr. Crystal is insanely busy, so if you’re thinking about it, just sent her an e-mail right away. Don’t sit on that. Because the openings in her calendar are closing up. And ever since we sat, I mean, I sat down with you, Dr. Crystal, at Panera Bread after the conference, and then we went to work together. And even just hearing how you are working with parents to help coach and how they can better influence their students in that decision. Like you have your own practice, so your time is super valuable. So I just appreciate that you’re in this field with us that you’ve decided that you’re going to pour into young people and just yeah, just really, really humbled to be in the same space as you. So thank you for being on my show too.

[00:32:20] Dr. Crystal Collier: You got it. Thank you. I am such a big fan of yours as well. I really appreciate the opportunity.

[00:32:26] Jake White: Awesome. Well, for everyone listening, that’s was an episode of Party Talk where we get to empower leaders and youth drug prevention with Dr. Crystal Collier. And I hope that you enjoyed it. I know that you learned something from it. So we’ll see you next Monday morning on your way to work. You can listen in again on whatever your favorite place to listen to podcast is to, so don’t forget to follow or subscribe and please share this episode with a friend.