As Mental Health Awareness Month continues Dr. Kim Lannon invites a furry little guest to help discuss the role that animals can play in your mental health game plan. We also talk about the ways sugar can undermine your mental and physical health. Sugar has been normalized despite its often severe consequences.

Which came first? No, not the chicken and the egg. Which came first, your cardiovascular issues, or your anxieties, your weight issues, or your stressors? People usually don't pay attention to the relationship between the mind and the body, between the challenges to your peace, the food you eat and the way that you eat it, and the health conditions you are dealing with as a result. Often physical issues and mental health issues are a dual diagnosis, and often they are most effectively improved when treated together. As Mental Heath Awareness Month opens, Dr. Kim Lannon opens discussion of the mind and body connection.

Dr. Kim Lannon talks about her experience in the 2022 Boston Marathon and how the lessons a marathon teaches can help your daily game face!

Dr. Kim Lannon discusses and injury she's dealing with as she faces her 8th Boston Marathon, and balancing between self-diagnosis and advocating for yourself when dealing with the health professionals in your life. It's important to understand, and have a say in your diagnosis and treatment, but listening too much to "Dr. Google" often leads to anxiety and trouble. This episode talks about your role in your own physical health, what it should be, and what roles are counterproductive.

Dr. Kim Lannon walks down several paths in this episode, starting with the psychological underpinnings of curses and touching on the balance between focusing on the internal factors and external factors in your life, learning that what is said is not often exactly what is heard, and revisiting Will Smith and Chris Rock.

Dr. Kim Lannon works through the Oscars fiasco between Will Smith and Chris Rock as a way to describe what happens when you are dealing with emotional dysregulation. Then she applies some of the same principles to family situations and family emotional issues that lead to similar incidents that always seem to be part of many families' histories and lore.

Dr. Kim Lannon talks about Narcissism, how it presents and how to deal with it, and then the discussion turns to the similarities and differences between the narcissist and someone dealing with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Dr. Kim Lannon talks about not being able to say "no". We all have relationships where we experience problems saying no. Sometimes those are the only kind of relationships we have. Sometimes we have trouble at work saying no. Sometimes those are our most significant relationships. But those relationships are always problematic and always, it seems, the problem is rooted both with you and with the other person in the relationship. Dr. Lannon talks about the causes and the potential cures in situations and relationships where you can't say no!

Many of us struggle with trying to control things that are out of our control, like the way other people treat us and talk to us. We try to change them when their behaviors towards us have much more to do with their deep-rooted issues about themselves than anything to do with us. The real problem is the power that we hand them over the way we feel about ourselves, and it's a good thing that that is the problem because that is something we do indeed have control over. We just need to learn how to use it. 

Personality challenges, such as Borderline Personality Disorder and yes, Narcissism, have a clinical diagnosis of course but they aren't zero-sum conditions. It's not that you have them or you don't. You, and everyone you deal with, has some of these traits to some degree. Dealing with them in others and even within yourself takes a toll. How much of that damage accumulates, lingers, and affects your day-to-day mental health is usually determined by your awareness of these conditions and the strengths from which you respond. Dr. Kim Lannon spends this episode helping with your awareness of the roles these disorders play in your life.