← HerMoney with Jean Chatzky
HerMoney with Jean Chatzky
HerMoney Classic: Mental Health: You Are Not Alone
00:34:54
An antidote to your post-holiday blues.
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- [00:00]
Jean Chatzky
Welcome to Nadia Yada island, next on.
- [00:04]
Melissa Bernstein
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- [00:31]
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- [01:02]
Jean Chatzky
Hey everyone, I'm Jean Chatzky. Thanks so much for joining me today on HerMoney. Let me start this week's episode by asking you a question. How are you? I mean it. How are you really? For many of us, it has been a rocky few years. Yes, we have come out of the pandemic, but some of us have dealt with layoffs or we've been forced to return to the office when we really don't want to, or we've had to readjust our lives in other ways. And at the same time, we have done what women do. We just soldier on. We put on a brave face. We keep doing what needs to be done to support our bosses or our children or our spouses or our parents. Not today. Today I am going to ask that we just stop and take a minute to get real about how we can start spending more time on ourselves by taking a critical look at our mental health. A study from the CDC found that nearly 1 in 5 adults reported anxiety issues recently. That is up from 15% in 2019. During the same period, depression rates have also gone up 3 percentage points. What that means, I think, is that even if you are not struggling yourself right now, you know women who are. And there has been this growing chorus to increase the dialogue around mental health to destigmatize our troubles, which is exactly what we're going to do some of today. It's that phrase, you are not alone that today's guest wants us to hear. I'm thrilled to introduce or reintroduce all of you to Melissa Bernstein. Melissa is the Co founder of the wildly successful toy company Melissa and Doug. She is the creator of for 5000 Toys, a mom of six and she's been on a decades long journey to triumph over her own anxiety, depression and despair. In 2021, she published Lifelines, an inspirational journey from profound darkness to radiant light. Melissa, thank you so much for being here today.
- [03:17]
Melissa Bernstein
Oh my gosh, I'm so honored to be here.
- [03:19]
Jean Chatzky
Jean, I want to hear about your incredible career, but let's not start there first. Let's start with that message, you are not alone. Why did that resonate with you so much? And why do you think it resonates with other women?
- [03:35]
Melissa Bernstein
Gosh, when we put up a facade and as you said, soldier ahead and deny the truth of who we are, ultimately that leads to a deep abandonment of ourselves. And you know, for me personally, I literally felt like the only tree in the forest. You know, there was no grove in my life. It was like I felt utterly and completely alone. Even though there were people all around me. I just had this deep existential abandonment of myself.
- [04:10]
Jean Chatzky
And you've said in other interviews that nobody would have ever guessed that, that you had this incredibly successful career. You were a happily married mother, you had six kids. Nobody would have guessed that you were fighting this darkness, what was going on in your life.
- [04:28]
Melissa Bernstein
Yeah, to be honest, I didn't even guess it because from the time I was born, the despair was so deep that the only way I could survive and still be here today was to deny, resist and disassociate from all emotion, literally everything I felt. And I think some people can relate to this. My coping mechanism became perfectionism, performance, pleasing others and sort of how I behaved and looked, being socially acceptable. So because I couldn't deal with the overwhelming feelings and I was told by society that feeling, what I felt wasn't right and was wrong. For a child to be thinking such dark, despairing thoughts, I just anchored to the opposite. So I kind of went through life thinking that was the way I had to be and developed a lot of really damaging behaviors because of it. Eating disorders and perfectionism that was so great that it threatened to suffocate me with the level of performance I keep needed to attaining to make myself feel validated. So it wasn't healthy by any means. But I wasn't conscious of the fact that I was engaging in these behaviors till much later on.
- [05:50]
Jean Chatzky
I wonder. And I'm thinking of all the amazing puzzles and other toys that you and Melissa and Doug developed and that entertain my children for so many years. I'm wondering, do you think you gravitated to toys because toys were happy?
- [06:10]
Melissa Bernstein
It is the incredible irony of my life because I believed before Melissa and Doug, I believed I could only create dark, despairing things. And that is all I created. I created from the time I was like 2 years old. But it was like musical compositions in minor keys. And it was really deep, dark questions about the meaning of life and what happens if we're all going to die. And I kind of had the whole light side of myself turned off. And I thought I was only capable of channeling darkness. So toys really was just an incredible accident. I mean, Doug and I, we were just dating and we started jobs right after college that were both, I would say, not consistent with our true essence. And I especially was really struggling. I was finding it hard to get out of bed each day because I didn't feel like I was thriving. I felt like a flower without sunlight and water. And I grew more and more despairing, thinking, what is the purpose of what I'm doing? And we decided to go away for a weekend, hopefully decide that there's something more meaningful for us to do with our energy. And we honed it on kids because we love kids. And we felt like there weren't enough products that could be that spark to unleashing imagination. There weren't enough champions of open ended play. So I think it was somewhat an accident to go from only creating darkness to realizing that I actually had the capacity to channel this exact same despair into pure light through envisioning and creating these toys.
- [07:53]
Jean Chatzky
How did you find your way from the darkness and despair and into a place where you were able to manage it?
- [08:02]
Melissa Bernstein
It's an amazing question. I mean, ultimately it took three paths. It took traditional psychotherapy that allowed me to go into those negative mindsets that made me so angry and so believing that no one loved me, that no, I couldn't trust anyone. So it was a little bit of cbt, cognitive behavioral therapy. Then it was philosophy and moving from being what is called an existential nihilist who is someone, this is the darkest anyone can be who believes there's no meaning to existence. And like we as individuals have no ability to make meaning in a meaningless existence to becoming an existentialist who actually believes that we do as individuals have supreme power to make choices and derive meaning in our lives. So I really moved from feeling like I was a victim and had no ability to make change to the opposite, like literally 180 degree difference and taking control of my life and choosing to make Meaning and now becoming a champion to help others make meaning in their lives. And then spirituality as well. And sort of the idea of following these beautiful spiritual teachings that really show that suffering is actually a created phenomenon in our own mind. And we can very easily, again, a little bit of existentialism, we can take control of our suffering and choose not to suffer any longer.
- [09:36]
Jean Chatzky
Oh, it sounds like something that so many women need, especially now. You started lifelines in 2020. Was that because you saw what the pandemic was doing to women in terms of isolation and emotional burden, or was this something that was being planned?
- [09:52]
Melissa Bernstein
No, it was really just happened be the timing, I mean, for me, and I think for all of us, you know, there's a reason that we have these middle age crises, because for so many years we're putting on the show, we're like, the dam is repressing the water. And I think there comes a point for all of us when that authentic cry of our soul to be seen gets so loud that we can't deny it any longer. And for me, it was. The suffering became greater than my resistance to change. So I reached this point where, you know, I was denying that I needed to do anything differently. I was fighting it. I didn't want to admit that I was flawed in any way and that I needed help. And finally I became so exhausted by resisting who I was and that work I was going to need to do to accept myself as who I was. The dam broke and it started to leak. And I basically. It was like a moment of sort of the metaphor of falling to your knees and saying, like, I surrender. I'm done. I need help. I can't do this alone. And that's when I needed to enlist the help of a trained professional. I decided to come out to the world and say, the person that made all these bright, shiny toys, it's part of me. I mean, that inner child is the key to us living fulfilling and meaningful lives. But there's also another part of me that's really dark and channels that darkness into this positive creation that helps bring my life meaning.
- [11:28]
Jean Chatzky
I just want to say thank you for doing it, I mean, and thank you for speaking out, because I think it's important that we see people that we look at as role models and say, hey, they're in it too. They're struggling too. And we don't often get the opportunity to do that. I've had the chance to interview Michael Phelps a few times, and I just. I admire it so much because the more that you're in the public light, I think the harder it is to acknowledge that all of this is going on inside of you. So thank you for that.
- [12:04]
Melissa Bernstein
Oh, you're welcome. And so many people believe. I think I wanted to shatter so many myths. And we. We did a whole series in our workshops that was like Mythbusters. And one of them is that when you have all these material things, right, when you have, you know, a $600 million toy company and six children and the husband you've always dreamed of and, like, everything is good, you must be happy. And I wanted to show that if you don't feel whole in your soul and you have an emptiness and an unworthiness, nothing you get externally can fill that hole. So for me, I want to be an example of the fact that this pursuit of happiness is an utter sham. What we need to do is to take that inward journey and accept ourselves in totality so we can truly feel that love for ourselves that enables us to then share it with others.
- [13:07]
Jean Chatzky
You mentioned eating disorders, and I know. I understand, having had one in high school, how those things go hand in hand. I'm wondering if you ever had any sort of manifestation with money. We often hear about how people shop to try to fill themselves up.
- [13:25]
Melissa Bernstein
Oh, my gosh. So I don't even call it an eating disorder. What I had was a control disorder. I felt that my fate, mortality was so out of my control that, in essence. And I couldn't deal with that. I couldn't deal with the fact that I would one day die. And I believed that I could thwart that death. And because I started to realize I couldn't, I controlled everything. So money was one of the main things I controlled, in addition to my diet, my exercise, my performance, my looks. And it's manifested in sort of two ways. I would say early on, it was a frugality that was, like, crazy and a denial of pleasure. I would, like, pinch my pennies so tightly because I wanted to, like, save them. And I would. When I was really in my desperate times, I was a student in Japan. I was studying abroad, and I would go and just walk the aisles of food stores and department stores and look at all the things I could buy. And I would sort of hold my money but deny myself buying any of them. So it was like a form of denial, and it was like a punishment. Like, here, Melissa, you have it, but you're not allowed to spend it. I really punished myself for so many years and had what I also call pleasure anorexia. I believed I was so Unworthy that I needed to punish myself by denying myself any form of sustenance or pleasure. So I'm fortunate I'm still here to talk about it because I came very close to not being here because you know, you can't deny yourself sustenance for too long without actually not going forward. And then now I would say what started to happen because I had so many years of denial, I started to closet by beautiful things secretively to like be able to hold them. This was more like years later and feel that I could have beautiful things but not show them to anyone and just keep them like stashed away so that I could kind of look through them as like a secretive need to give myself that pleasure. So it came out in like a almost a shopaholic type thing where I was just buying these things to feel like that sense of giving myself pleasure that I disallowed for so long.
- [15:53]
Jean Chatzky
Have you found a balance?
- [15:55]
Melissa Bernstein
I would say I've learned to deal with the feeling. So what would happen is I'd buy these things, right, And I'd look forward to getting them. It was like all about the adrenaline boost in knowing they were coming and then the minute I had them in my grasp the pleasure would go and I'd need another. So I've learned now when I have that feeling and it's a feeling of need, right, of desire, of not being full, I now because of lots of therapy, I have to become mindful and I have to go and touch that void inside that still. I'm middle aged now and although I've done a ton of work and I recognize it, it's still not filled and I don't know if it'll ever be. I mean that's why it's a practice. But I have to go back to that void. I have to say, melissa, you're okay, give myself the metaphoric hug and then once the racing stops, I don't need to engage in the buying. So now I often have a lot of shopping carts that are full and I'm about to press buy and I go through the work and I'm so proud of myself when I don't buy it because it's trying to fill an inner void with external material goods. And you can't fill something that is on the inside with something on the outside.
- [17:15]
Jean Chatzky
Yeah, it's so true and yet it's so difficult, I think for many of us who find ourselves not in a struggle every day, just in a struggle in the moment and being able to leave that shopping cart on the sidelines, it can be really hard. But I'm proud of myself when I do it, too. I want to talk more about Lifelines and I want to talk about why you started it and what we can get from it, what you are aiming to do with the programs. But before we do that, we're going to take a quick break.
- [17:45]
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- [18:15]
Jean Chatzky
Tell me about Lifelines.
- [18:17]
Melissa Bernstein
Sure. So I think as so many things, it started with my own journey to really share my truth and feel that I was okay and that I could be okay being who I was. And by the way, when I did that, like, so much of the burden I was carrying around completely dissipated. How funny is that? That we're hiding what we think will make the world like us more. But it's only when we share who we truly are that we kind of find that acceptance that we've always been looking for. Had to take most of my life to do it, but I got there. But then I was doing it, of course, to feel communion with someone other than myself, because the truth was, I had really never had authentic bonds in my life because I had never gone out as my authentic self. Like, I didn't even know who I was.
- [19:08]
Jean Chatzky
You had walls up.
- [19:10]
Melissa Bernstein
Yeah, I had walls up. And I always wondered why, like, I never had good friends, why I didn't have these relationships for decades. And it was because friendships just meant nothing to me because I didn't show up as who I was. And they weren't give and take and there was nothing meaningful about them. So I think I wanted to, through that story and showing up as who I was, I wanted to show others that they're not alone, right? Because I truly, probably my number one mindset was, I am alone. There is no one who will ever truly care about me. But that was really because I was alone in my soul and I didn't care about myself. So I realized, like, it's first inner before we go outer. So I wanted to show others who may feel alone that they're not alone either. And Then secondly, probably most importantly, that we all have the capacity to channel our darkness into light and make meaning. That was so powerful because I took something that threatened to really end my life, this existential nihilism, and on my own I channeled it into something that was able to impact others and that was like life giving. And I knew that so many others had that capacity. We all are born with, I believe, this innate form of self expression that longs to like come out and touch others. But unfortunately, either because we don't have a childhood, or because society or our burdens and obligations or our circumstances block us from sparking those seeds of self expression, we don't know what they are. So I believe it's my duty to help others find what makes their heart sing. And then third is, unless we stop racing outside ourselves looking for the elusive rainbow, and go inward and really accept ourselves in totality and engage in a daily practice to bring our beautiful seeds of self expression to enable us to flourish, we will never truly be contented or realize our full potential. Lifelines. That is the genesis of where lifelines started.
- [21:26]
Jean Chatzky
I took a look at a study on well being that was done and it looked at the four elements that comprise well being. You look at physical, social, mental and financial. And financial was the point that women across the board said, I am struggling with most, except for the youngest women who pointed at mental. They were having challenges with mental health and mental well being. What do you think that women of all ages who are struggling with their mental health right now need to do to get ourselves back on track?
- [22:04]
Melissa Bernstein
It's an amazing question and unfortunately it's not an easy answer. You know, because the truth is most of us are living in autopilot, right? We're not really like feeling engaged in life and we're not in the present moment and we're not necessarily really flourishing. We're functioning. And for me, you know, because I am a highly emotional person and I vacillate between extreme highs and extreme lows every single day, maybe multiple times each day, because that's what my temperament to be a white space creative is. And I've had to develop this practice that I engage in every single day. And it involves our physical, our mental, our emotional and our spiritual well being and making sure that each one is tended to. And I think as women, if we neglect ourselves, if we neglect our physical health and we believe that self care is selfish, which was my mantra my whole life, like I'm going to shoulder it, right? I'm going to never show A chink in my armor because my only purpose is to serve others and make sure they're okay. Ultimately, I crumbled under that because you can only do that for so long, especially if your kids are struggling and you're shouldering their mental well being as well. We need to ground ourselves and kind of have practices. So when we start to get into the spiraling out of control, you know, like even when I have that need to shop, that we can come back to the present and learn to be okay in our center and then learn to respond from our intuitive heart, not react from our ego like that is. As a mother, that is essential. If you react, you're going to say things that are just going to create a whole new set of issues. I've been there, you know, connecting. Oh my gosh, I mean, the social piece of it, you know, first connecting to ourselves authentically. Because when we don't connect to ourselves authentically, then the truth is our relationships are all really superficial too, right? So many women have these superficial relationships and long to have real relationships, but they don't know how to.
- [24:17]
Jean Chatzky
Our listeners love tactics and strategies. And I'm wondering if that practice that you described is something that you'd be willing to share, like, what exactly do you do and how hard is it to make it a part of your life?
- [24:31]
Melissa Bernstein
It's not hard, it's just a matter of committing, you know. So I think practice means that you say, this is really important to me. And a practice. Behavior change is one of the hardest things to measure and one of the hardest things to get people to engage in. And the first aspect of it is that you want so badly to do it that you are willing to commit some time. So the aspects of it are super easy. It's just, are you willing to commit time? So, for example, our practice is broken into branches. It's the metaphor of a tree. And the first branch of it is vitalize, which is to basically take care of your tree. So it's all the things you do. And I've reframed them because they all were very punishing. I used to call it like healthy eating. And that meant that it was good and bad. And you know, when foods are good and bad, then it becomes a deprivation, right? It's a lack versus an abundance. So now I call it nourishing my body. And that is again, over time. I'm not there yet. But it's, can we become intuitive eaters? Can we actually think about, like how I'm eating each day and can we learn to nourish our bodies. And we're going to have all kinds of tools to do this, to look at exactly how you're eating, not look at it from a perspective of like caloric intake and any of that. But more, are the things I'm eating making me feel good or am I eating these things and thinking after, oh, I shouldn't have done that. And the more we can actually look at these things with objectivity, the better we can say, today I'm going to replace one of the things that I don't feel good about with just one little thing. So it's changing one thing in your diet for like two weeks to one other thing. That's it. Maybe instead of having chips, you're going to have an apple. And that little thing is empowering, right? It's all about and rest. That's another one that I have a really hard time with. I used to call it sleep, but I don't like sleep because it's a waste of my time and I can't get anything accomplished. So I tended to not sleep. But we now know that sleep is directly related to longevity, productivity, well, being your mentality. So now I basically, because I say my body needs ample rest, I force myself to sleep. I'm still not great. Seven hours a night. It's a practice. It's simple, but it's a practice. So we have a whole bunch of aspects and then movement as opposed to like rigid exercise. That's no fun. So I think our mindset is that if you don't enjoy it, you are never going to engage in it long term. So I've had to reframe all these things to make them more enjoyable. So we are creating a workbook now that will be very concrete, simple steps to engage in the four branches of our practice. But I can give a simple one if you want the simplest concrete tool.
- [27:26]
Jean Chatzky
Yes.
- [27:27]
Melissa Bernstein
So it was my bigger journey, which I call the journey to inner space. But it's the word space and the five letters, S, P, A, C, E of space are the tool you use whenever you become triggered. So a trigger is something you're going through your day and your child says something that completely knocks you. Like, I'm not going to school today. And immediately you go into hyper arousal and you say something like, what are you talking about? That can't be the case. And you're completely destabilized. Right? That's reacting from your ego. Adrenaline's going. So this is the way whenever something like that happens and you hopefully take that one Little pause and say, I'm being triggered. Now you basically stop and sense. Okay, so I'm going to stop and say, what is going on here? And you're like, wow, that just triggered me. This is before you react. And when I say sense too, I mean, maybe you ground in your senses. You just take a deep breath and you feel the breath and you're like, okay, I'm stopping. Then you perceive what's going on. Perceive and picture. So now you say, oh, gosh, my child said that I'm feeling anger. What am I feeling? I'm feeling anger. I'm feeling frustration. I'm incensed. And picture it. Where is it? Right here. It's like this ugly, dark mass. And right here I'm feeling so much stress. Okay, now you see it. A is accept and allow. So now what do I do? I'm going to accept. Wow, I became really unhinged. That was destabilizing. And I feel really irate right now. And I'm going to allow the fact that that was my reaction and this is my actual reaction to what happened then C is I'm going to comprehend and correct. So I'm going to try to comprehend why I felt that way. It's because it triggered something in me that I'm terrified if my kid doesn't go to school, they're not going to graduate, they're not going to get a good job, they're not going to be successful. And like, that triggers in me this performance pressure.
- [29:44]
Jean Chatzky
And there goes my whole day. Right. And my kid doesn't go to school. There goes my whole day.
- [29:48]
Melissa Bernstein
There goes my whole day. Yeah, you start to catastrophize. Right. But you realize it's connected. It's not necessarily that your kids said they didn't want to go to school. It's that I've got this deep sense of pressure in me that is leading me to have these mind stories. Then you try to correct it. You try to say, what is my mind story? It's that if my kid doesn't go to school, they're not going to be successful. How do you correct that? You say, you know, that's really not the case. A lot of kids don't go to school. And you start to think about how can you reframe that and really understand the situation, because maybe there's a valid compromise or something like that. So you try to correct the flawed mindset that led you there. And then E is empathize and engage. So empathize is to say, first of all, you're empathizing with yourself. You're saying, it's okay, Melissa, you're human, you are going to react. That's what humans do. And it's okay that you lashed out, you got angry, you're human and you're imperfect and that is what all humans are. And then engage is. It can be a number of things. It's engage your new mindset, right, Your corrected mindset. Engage with the situation. Don't run away from it. Really try to respond to it now that you've grounded yourself. And it's continue to engage in the flow of humanity so that you don't become angry and bitter and sort of isolate yourself. So I go through the space exercise every time I'm triggered. I literally stop, perceive, allow, comprehend, empathize.
- [31:29]
Jean Chatzky
I love it. And I think it's useful in so many situations. Right? I mean, we talk about stressful situations on this show that have to do with your relationships, with your career, with your feeling of being out of control when it comes to the economic forces of the world or just the world in general. There's so many things that can throw us off course. And having a way to get ourselves back on is really, really helpful. Melissa, if we're struggling, if we're thinking, lifelines could be really useful for me, what do we do? Where do we go? How do we engage and become part of this community?
- [32:09]
Melissa Bernstein
Yeah, it's a free community. Doug and I have been so fortunate with Melissa and Doug. We are doing it as sort of our giving back. And you can join. We do workshops every couple weeks that are really fun and really talk about aspects of the myths. I mean, we try to get very real and we have all our workshops recorded. So if you go on, you can listened to. Probably, I don't know, we didn't record them from the beginning, but about 25 of them are probably recorded. And we have a Facebook group that has become like a lifeline to so many people. That's at least a couple thousand people. And they really, it's beautiful. And they have done some reading groups and they've sort of formed a whole bunch of events that they engage in.
- [32:51]
Jean Chatzky
Amazing. Melissa, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for sharing with us. And we'll send everybody your way.
- [32:58]
Melissa Bernstein
Thank you so much for helping so many women to not feel so disempowered and gain ability to, I would say, control their lives and make meaning.
- [33:07]
Jean Chatzky
Thanks so much for joining me today on hermoney. If you love this episode, please give us a five star review on Apple Podcasts. We always value your feedback and if you want to keep the financial conversations going, join me for a deeper dive. HerMoney has two incredible programs, Finance Fix, which is an eight week program designed to give you the ultimate money makeover, and Investing Fix, which is our investing club for women that meets bi weekly on Zoom. With both programs, we are leveling the playing fields for women's financial confidence and power. I would love to see you there. We'd like to thank our sponsors, Edelman Financial Engines. Her Money is produced by Hayley Pascalides. Our music is provided by Video Helper and our show comes to you through Megaphone. This podcast is also part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. You can find us and other shows like us@airwavemedia.com thanks for joining us and we'll talk soon.