On today's show, we're going to be talking about a hard topic, so you might want to screen this one first, beware of any little ears that might be in the room. We're going to be talking with the young woman who calls in dealing with the aftermath of an abortion. She thinks she did the right thing and she's really struggling with grief. And so we're going to weigh deep into the waters. And I want you to join us on this hard but beautiful call.

We're also going to be talking about seasonal affective disorder when we talk about what it is, what it's not, and what you can do with dealing with the gray winter months. Stay tuned.

Hey, what up, what up? I'm John, and this is the Dr. John Delonas show where we are taking your calls about your life, your dilemmas, your next wobbly crooked steps. Want to help you rethink, reexamine and reimagine your life, paint a new picture and then go get it and then go get it. We're going to talk about how to talk about yourself, how to talk about your kids, how to talk with your kids, school teachers, how to talk to your friends who have cat families or dog families.

We're going to talk about love and loss in family issues. We can talk about infidelity, finding love again. And we may talk about your friend who continues nine months in to use the word unprecedented. We've got it, everybody. We've got it. It's unprecedented from here on out. Thank you for the heads up. So whatever is going on in your heart, your home, your head, I'm here to stand with you and walk with you. Give me a call at one eight four four six nine three three two nine one one eight four four six nine three thirty to ninety one.

Leave a message. Leave your name and number at the tone. Tell us what's going on. Kelly will reach out and set up a time for us to talk. Or if you're old school like me and you just want to write a letter, email me and ask John at Ramsey Solutions dot com. That's super. Not old school. That's if you're old school. In a new era, you've been shoved into the 21st century and you have to write letters with keyboards in the emails and the Internets.

Email me it, ask John at Ramsey Solutions dot com and let me know what's going on. Leave your name, your number and we will get in touch with you. People are email and calling from all over the world. It's exciting. It's heartbreaking, it's uplifting. And I'm just so thankful that everybody's joining us for this. Right. Ladies, let's go straight to the phones here. Let's go to Alex in San Antonio. Good morning, Alex.

How are we doing?

Good morning, John. I'm doing awesome. How about yourself? Same. Same. So how can I help this morning? OK, so in late April of this year, I found out I was pregnant. I was about three to five weeks. So it was really early on and I made the best decision for me and I went through with an abortion. OK, it's October and I'm still finding myself falling into these moments of just utter guilt, anger and sometimes a lot of shame.

And my question is, how can I move forward and hopefully forgive myself and, you know, maybe turn this into a better experience than I'm experiencing now?

Number one, thanks for calling. Thanks for your trust and for giving me a shout. So before I answer you, I want to pause here for everybody across the world who's listening and. Immediately, Alex, when you said this, the the listener divided into one of two camps, which is I can't believe this is even a big deal or I can't believe this happened. Right. And you know this. Yeah. And so what I'm not going to do for you or particularly for listeners who this is a third rail topic, right.

For everybody is I'm not going to beat you up and I'm not going to give you my insights and thoughts. What I'm going to do is sit with you in this moment and we're going to talk through this together.

And so for those who are listening, who are hoping I'm going to start banging a gong on either side of this conversation, I'm not going to I'm going to sit with my new friend Alex here and we're going to wade into the messiness and the heartbreak in that reality and then try to come up with a path moving forward. And so, Alex, thanks for let me have a little side there. So walk me through, will you find out you're pregnant?

Do you tell me who's dad? What role did he play in this? How did that conversation go?

So I have been with my boyfriend at that point for a little under a year. I'm still with him. He's a wonderful person for me. He was very scared, worried. And at the time, he didn't have a job. He had actually been unemployed for a little bit, for quite some time, for a few months, actually. And he was supportive of whatever decision we wanted to do. But I definitely felt he didn't want to go through with it, which was understandable with his circumstance and his situation.

He didn't want to go through with having the baby. Yeah, I mean, again, he was supportive of whatever I wanted to do, but it was he was definitely more adamant that we should consider going through with abortion.

OK, so you have this you have this procedure. Walk me up the week leading up to it. What's in your heart and mind? And then walk me through what's in your heart and mind the week after. Going towards that day, it felt easier. And then the night before I just break down for hours, I don't even want to sleep because I don't want the day to come. I don't want that moment to come. Since it was COVA time, I couldn't bring anybody with me to support me.

My mom drove me there, but, you know, she couldn't be there to hold my hand or anything like that. And then afterwards, I don't know, I didn't cry afterwards like I thought I was or had I did the night before. I just was really sad and empty. That's what it felt like. I didn't want to cry. I don't want to do anything. My birthday was that same week and I didn't want to celebrate it.

I don't want to do anything. It was hard to be happy for that week and gradually it started to get easier. But that week before then, it got hard. The date in the night of and then just felt kind of empty the day after and the week after. Really?

Well, thank you for sharing that. So when you talk about your. This was the right thing for you to do. When you when someone makes a statement like that that generally is them verbalizing outwardly a a leaning up against an internal value, that may be a little bit different.

Right. So I'm thinking of a situation that's totally unrelated here.

So if this is a bad analogy, it's off the top of my head. So I'm just kind of kind of speaking off out of my heart here and off the cuff. But if I'm a guy who believes in being kind to everybody and then I see somebody at a grocery store and they mouth off to the they say something just insanely, obscenely ugly to the woman who is taking our money, who's working the cash register. And I just blast that dude.

I hit him as hard as I can and he falls down. My first thought is going to be. Or my first statement might be in that situation. I just had to do it right, it was it was the right thing to do in that moment. I'm normally this way, but in that moment I just write. And so I begin this cycle of justification. I begin talking to myself in a way that's going to make what I just did OK.

But at the end of the day, it violated an internal value. And so what I'm getting we're trying to get it with you is did this violate your internal value or is this have you always been pro-choice? Have you always been it's situational or is it something you never thought of? Or have you been staunchly pro-life your whole life? And then all of a sudden you found yourself pregnant and you found yourself in a situation that you felt like this was the best move for you.

Give me a sense of your values before this. Sure. I think I've always been a pro-choice person when it comes to in general, every single woman in the world definitely has her own choice. It's her body. I just always kind of assumed that my position that if I ever came to that decision, I wasn't going to go. I was I was going to go ahead. And I guess I was kind of pro-life for myself.

For you. Yeah, totally.

And we all have theories and we all have generalizations, but then we all have to look in the mirror. So that's different for everybody. So you're several months removed now.

You feel good that you did the you you did the right thing. That was for you. It did violate your internal code or maybe not internal code, but it violated this. It's different than you thought you were going to be. Right. And you'd always thought, man, if that ever happened to me, I wouldn't do that. I would do X. And you ended up making the decision Y, and now you find yourself several months later.

We're in on top of this. And I just want to contextualize it. The world literally on fire. Right? It's an absolute mess. And so you have trauma on top of trauma, on top of stress and on top of an election on top of on top of right. So you are sitting on a pile of trauma, collective trauma, and then you are wrestling with us. Walk me through what's in your heart right now. In my heart right now, it just.

There's just moments in time that trigger me. It's not a definitely every day that I think about it or I try not to at least, but there's just moments that, you know, I see post on social media and it's people with little little babies who, you know, they they're young like me. And, you know, I kind of just think that maybe that wasn't a planned situation, but look how happy they are. And it just kind of triggers me or I just hear, like, success stories or I hear, like stories of other people going through a miscarriage or even an abortion.

And it just it just makes me feel like I lost something. And I try to tell myself I didn't as much as I I guess I try to I don't know. I just I try not to tell myself it was it was not too much at the time. You were so early. And I don't know. I mean, sometimes I'm happy, you know, and I know that I, I try not to say I made the right decision.

I try to say I made the best decision with the whole with everything that was going on with covid, my student loans financially and my emotional my emotional situation at the time. But it's just really little moments throughout the week that just hits me really hard. I cry for 15 minutes and then just try to move on.

Are you and your boyfriend talk about it? All talk about it after we do. I don't bring it up for him for every single time that I get upset about it. And recently he said he's been thinking about it a lot more than usual and he's been kind of sad about it, too. So we do share that pain and we do talk a little bit. But I don't tell him about every single time because sometimes it's just on the ride home from a friend's house or it's going to the grocery store and it's just little moments.

So what you're describing is a you just painted a beautiful picture of grief. And that's when intrusive thoughts is the nerd term for him, but which when thoughts and pictures pop into your head of what could have been what wasn't, and then you begin to backfill that either your body responds with sadness or your body responds with arguments or your body responds with this is done. It's got appeared at the end of the sentence and now we've got to move on. Right.

And then all of a sudden, other voices. Right. To talk about social media and your friends and your boyfriend, sadness, those things start to speak into this as well. And one last thing before we can kind of talk about what what healing will look like. Do you have people in your life you've talked to about this? You say your mom actually took you and dropped you off. She in support of this. Do you have people around you that know what happened?

That no, you you took this step and that are continuing to love you and walk alongside you?

I have three of the most four of the most beautiful best friends who I did talk to. I mean, I definitely try to make me feel better about what I did, you know, and just kind of support my decision. My mom was actually the one person who is super excited. And I think that a little bit if I didn't want her, I wanted her to support me, but I didn't think she was going to be happy about it.

And she was. But she was supportive when I told her why.

And, you know, she she was she was she was happy about being a grandma. She was happy about your decision to have an abortion.

She was happy about the thought of being a grandma. Gotcha. Gotcha. So what do you think heeling looks like for you? I hope that I would eventually get the courage to go see somebody to talk about it, because I know that this one phone call or talking to my boyfriend every once in a while, our friends, is not always going to make things better. I just kind of hope that one day I can look back on this and realize that making decisions is hard and having to do what's best for yourself and for others is it's hard.

But I can take this experience. And hopefully when I when I look back on it, I just I feel comfortable. I feel at ease with it. And then hopefully when I do decide to move on and have a child someday, I don't I get worried. I might feel guilt with it, too.

Sure. Yeah, and I don't want to feel that. Yeah, absolutely. So here's here's me being a straight talk with you as I possibly can, and I'm going to walk through the woods with you on this, and I'm going to end up making everybody around us uncomfortable. I'm going to make everyone around us mad at me, OK? And at this point, I'm going to do what a good coach does, what a good person in somebody's corner does, which is walk alongside you and have truthful, hard conversations.

OK, so the the there's there's myths that abound on both sides in terms of the literature and the science. And here's what's going to happen. He's not going to happen at the end of the day.

You've got to deal with what's in your heart, right, and you are going to both be at it, I don't say it is, but you're going to be you're going have a period in the sentence. What has happened is what has happened. Right. And you're also the grief you're feeling is situational. Every person feels it differently. The data tells us there is a wide swath of women who go through with an abortion procedure and they have other kids.

They've got a good partner with them and they don't feel guilt or remorse or they don't regret the decision later on. That's just what the data tells us.

There is also data that says A a small number of folks really, really struggle with this. And then there's anecdotal evidence these are just folks, students and adults that I've talked with over the years that are in your situation, which feel this as they see a picture of a baby in their stomach just drops or you will hit a a date that would be the first birthday or you will hold your first kid and it will flood you with, oh, this is what this would have been.

Right. And everybody does that differently and everybody feels that grief or doesn't feel that grief differently. So a couple of things that are real important for you, and that is to own your grief however you feel is OK. And if you don't feel bombarded with grief, there's going to be a group of people who tell you you're evil and wrong. I might even believe that about you, Alex, but I'm not going to say it out loud, OK?

And then there's going to be other folks that if you wake up and you can't get out of bed because you're doubled over in grief, you're asking yourself, what did I do or to do? What did I do? There's going to be a group of people saying, are you kidding me? Get over it. It was just a procedure. And I might think that way, Alex, and I'm not going to tell you the way you feel about this is yours to own.

OK, as you move through this, you said something that I want you to remember. There's going to be moments of discomfort. There's going to be moments of grief. There's going to be moments of flashbacks of memory. And they're just going to be uncomfortable. And that's going to be part of the decision that you made. OK, and fighting that, trying to avoid discomfort, trying to avoid sadness, trying to avoid grieving is a fool's errand and it's going to push you down avenues that are going to be escapist and a fancy word for escapist is addiction.

OK, you're going to try to do things that avoid the discomfort. And when I want to suggest to you, as you take those four friends of yours, you take that mom who loves you. You take that boyfriend who is grieving with you, and you'll sit in the grief and you own it. And you don't try to run from it, you don't let it overtake you, and that's why you have friends with you, but you don't run from it.

At the end of the day, what's done is done. What has happened has happened. And the first person you're going to have to forgive is yourself. The first person you're going to have to make peace with is yourself. And then over time, you're going to make meaning with this. And so people make meaning out of these sort of situations in all different ways. And what I'm going to say now is going to sound like a political statement, please, for God Almighty, whose people are listening to this.

Don't go there because I'm not. I'm trying to do the best I can to avoid the politics of this. We had a caller who called in the other day and said that they were in California. Their house burned down in the fires and they lost everything and they would move to another house, into another house. And those kept catching fire and they were moving to safe places and they were just stressed and freaked out. And they were dealing with tragedy, with grief and with loss.

And what I recommended they do is that they have a funeral for their house and the things they lost.

I often am telling people, have a funeral for your old marriage, have a funeral for your old relationship. And so I would recommend having some sort of grief ceremony, some sort of this happened. This is done. And there's a period at the end of this we want to acknowledge that it hurts. We it may have been the best the best thing you felt. It was the best thing for you at the time, but it still hurts and it's still popping up.

And what a ceremony does forces it gives us a touchstone for how to move forward, OK?

And not everybody needs to do a big ceremony or a small one, but having some sort of touchstone. You got to have other people when you do this, Alex, but it's going to put a period at the end of that sentence for you and then you're going to have to go about healing, forgiving yourself, being in the community, doing the things that, you know, keep you well and really not being afraid of conversations with your boyfriend to hiding grief.

Comparing grief with each other is a is a surefire way to destroy a relationship from the inside out.

And he may grieve harder than you or less than you. And you may have seasons where this is overwhelming and not a big deal at all. And it will just roll like a roller coaster. And you guys have to provide space for one another to be open. And then, as you mentioned, if you continue to have this weigh on you in ways that make you feel uncomfortable and I've sat with folks who tell me that this comes back and grabs them by the throat, they feel like it is months behind them, years behind him, and all of a sudden it comes back and is paralyzing the guilt.

And the frustration is overwhelming. You got to see somebody, OK? And I want to applaud your step, your courageous step for calling me. But you're going to have to get a professional to walk with you, especially if this morphs from grief into high guilt and shame and trauma. Then you've got to have somebody that walks alongside you.

And again, I've talked to other folks who have been relatively dismissive yet happen. I kind of wish I hadn't done that, but it did. And so I'm moving all my life. Everybody deals with this differently. And at the end of the day, you've got to have people around you and you've got to forgive yourself and you got to go make tomorrow the best it can be. I really appreciate you saying that I. It's just taken that first step, I think has been the scariest part, this is the first time I've ever spoken to an out, I guess, a party outside of my life.

And it feels better when I want to thank you for your trust, Alex. And.

If you if you hear anything, if you hear nothing else, you got to have people around you, even people who hold you accountable, even people who look you in the eye and say, I think what you did was dumb. I think that was a mistake. But we're here now. Right? And there's a difference between judgmental friends and friends who hold you accountable. And then there's friends you're just going to walk alongside and say you're allowed to sit down and just say, this sucks.

We're going to cry with you real hard and then we're going to make sure you eat. We're going to make sure you're sleeping. And I'm going to make sure you're going to work. And we're going to walk alongside you as you heal from grief. And again, the second thing is you've got to own your feelings, OK? And they're going to come in waves and there's going to be moments when you feel overwhelmed is going to be moments. And I'm just basing this off what you've told me.

Right. And there's going to be moments when you're heads held high and you were just walking through life. And if this pops up in three years and five years, if all of a sudden you're at a first grade graduation and you just get overcome, let that come and have a group of people that you can call and be with.

Grief is as a as a weird way of just showing up in different places and then make sure you don't compare grief with your boyfriend. Don't let social media tell you the right, quote unquote. Right. What you're supposed to respond to this on any side of this this debate. And again, thanks for the call. I want to again, I want to back up and and remind everybody there are political issues and abortion is one of those things. That is a third rail topic.

People feel deep, deep in their bones, deep in their bones.

And I want to honor everybody who's got their opinions, everybody who feels deeply powerful about the right thing to do in these situations and the wrong thing to do in these situations. I honor you.

Good for you have hard core convictions. We live in a world that has gotten soft with convictions and everyone's gotten mushy. Good for you. Sitting with somebody in the pain, the aftermath of a decision that you disagree with is not the time. To beat people over the head with your beliefs, it is not the time to drown somebody and what they did wrong. It's time to put your thoughts and your opinions and your beliefs in on the ground. And you sit with them at the well and you offer them a cup of water.

And you say, I see you and I love you and this sucks and I'm sorry. And then you take him by the hand and then you all start walking together. That's how you help people who are hurting. That's how you walk alongside someone who's struggling and these things that are there are theories and issues, they involve real people with real pain and real regret and real vulnerability and real drama and real wasn't that big of a deal. It's all of it.

And so when you love and people who are hurting love first judge later, OK, thank you so much for the call. That call helped a bunch of people. It's going to get everybody in trouble, but I'm gracious for your bravery there. So let's go to a quick e-mail real quick. We'll just do a palate cleanser here. Patrick writes, What are your thoughts on paying for therapy and counseling while still in debt? So most of you know, my boss is Dave Ramsey with the Dave Ramsey organization.

He is the get out of debt king who gives people a tools to become free financially. And as he's found over the last twenty five, 30 years, that taking baby steps together relationally helps heal marriages, helps heal communities. But at the end of the day, it's about not being in debt. It's not being slave to an owners. When you owe money to somebody, you have to keep doing what they want you to do, which is paying them.

And you often end up in jobs you don't like. You end up in situations you don't like because you are in debt. The borrowers slave to the lender. And Patrick asks, What are my thoughts on paying for therapy or counseling while you're still in debt?

This is a a broad question and here's why. Or it's a telling question. We still think of therapy. We still think of counseling like we do back massage, just like it's nice if you can afford it. It's a cool thing to do to feel better. And I want to reframe therapy on a reframe counseling as not a thing that, you know, it's nice to do do it once a month. If you need counseling. It is a medical condition.

Think of it that way. Think of it as would you if you were really sick with covid, you're really sick with the flu, would you say, well, I'm in baby step two for you, Dave Ramsey. Folks, I still have some money. I still owe some student loans, so I'm not going to go to the doctor this month. I broke my foot. I'm not going to go get a cast because I still.

Oh, no, you're going to budget for it. You're going to make it a priority and you're going to go see somebody and get the help you need. If you are still in debt and you need to go to counseling, figure out a way to go to counseling, there are community outreach programs. I did my practicum part of my practicum. I did at a family counseling service, which was is a sliding scale for for marginalized community members who have no money.

They've got very little money. They've got low income. And it was a group of interns and professionals who worked with this group for very little to know the cost.

It's important for folks going to counseling to have some skin in the game. And so paying something is important. But it wasn't this two hundred fifty dollars an hour like some some care is. I also had students that went to community counseling centers. I also have a lot of colleagues and friends who did practicum as graduate students. If you live in a community that has a college or university with graduate students there, they will often do their practicum, an internship for free or for very low wages.

And that's a great place to go see somebody. And if they're not good, you don't like that they think they were a good counselor. Go see somebody else. But I'll just say there are options and it comes down to budgeting for it, budget for it. That may mean you can't go out to eat twice and you've got to cancel Netflix. Good, good. If you don't have that stuff, you'll eat a little healthier and you'll go for walks and you'll go kick the soccer ball with your neighbor, with your kid, instead of just veg out in front of the TV, cut the things out of your life that you need to cut, cut the extraneous stuff and figure out how to pay for counseling.

But should you pay for counseling while you're still in debt? Absolutely. Budget for it and make it happen. So. Excellent question. Patrick, stop thinking of counseling everybody as a back massage or a mani pedi and start thinking that as a cornerstone of your physical, spiritual, emotional and psychological health. If you need to go to counseling, if you need to do it, OK. And I don't think you should be in counseling forever, by the way.

You should not go and go and go. Had the same counselor for 14 years. That's a whole other issue. That's a whole other show. All right. So let's go to the phones. Let's go to Jay in Dayton, Ohio. Jay, what's up, brother? How are we doing?

What's up, brother? Thank you so much for all you're doing. I love the show, man.

I am grateful for you. Number one, thanks for let me know that sometimes I just talk to folks on the radio and then James and Kelly put this on the Internet and I really don't understand how that works. And so I appreciate hearing from real people things, man. So how can I help you this morning?

All right, man. So here's the deal. I'm sad or what? I'm calling about a seasonal affective disorder. I come up against this every year.

Yeah, it kind of my question to you is a two part question. First of all, why is it happening? Is there something I need to kind of fix or review? And then further, what can I do about some of the effects of seasonal affective disorder? So I'm calling for myself, obviously, and also extended family and friends that I know suffer with this. So just kind of looking to get your insight into any help would be appreciated to kind of outline a scenario calling from the Northeast Great Lakes region.

It's October right now. The leaves are beautiful, but seasons come, seasons go, and we're about to enter winter. That's all right. Now we're losing. We're losing light. It's getting cool. It's getting depressing. Winters right around the corner and it seems like year in and year out, this is a four to five month cycle. So just kind of reaching out. Want to get a jump on this and get your insight.

All right, brother. I love it. And Kelly tipped me off that we were going to have a discussion about seasonal affective disorder. And so No. One, I'm grateful for your call. Number two, I've got a personal experience here. So as as I run my mouth too much and I've tried to back off on this, I got all of your cards and letters from everybody listening that I talk too much about Texas. I'm trying not to mention it so much, but when I moved here from Texas, I was about thirty or forty five minutes from the New Mexico border.

And which is another time zone, right? It's the other time zone. And then I moved to Nashville, which is about thirty or forty five minutes from I think it's the Eastern Time Zone. And man, my first winter here, I was completely caught off guard. It was getting dark. At four thirty. I found myself winding up for bed six 45 in the evening. It was pitch black outside. I was things were funny any more.

My food tasted. It was it caught me off guard. And I called somebody who had moved from the south, from the from Texas, from Arizona, and who had moved east, who'd moved north.

And they were all like, oh, brother, that's what that is. And I'd heard about it. I'd read about it. I'd never experienced it. But it was like somebody laid a blanket over me. Right. And it occurred to me about February or March that that was the longest I'd ever gone in my life without sunlight. And that was like since I was a little so that was born I'd always lived in a place with lots of sun.

And it was a it made a major impact on me. So I dug into it a little bit. And I will walk through with you some of the nerd things I do. The super nerds call them hacks. I don't like using that word, but some things that I do is some of it may be psychosomatic, meaning I made my brain maybe playing tricks on me, saying it helps and it really doesn't. But it's working for me. And as I'm gearing up for that season, I know Ohio is similar to Nashville, just feels like they lay this gray blanket of clouds over us.

Right. And it just lazy and gets lower and lower. The weather's beautiful. The scenery is beautiful. This morning, on the way to work, there were deer and turkey out, just eaten. It looked all beautiful, but man, there's just got that blank. It over us, right? So it is super real seasonal affective seasonal affective disorder affects millions of people every year. Some folks have mild form. Some have major depressive responses. The further we live for from the equator, the more it leans on us.

Right. So they say more sad. Right. And then you're going to throw in this year. I'm just prepping for it. This year we're going to have I don't know if you've heard I don't know if they've talked about this in Ohio, but we have an election coming up in a few days.

And you guys may have missed the coronavirus has been a thing for the last nine months. Right. So we're on tragedy. On top of tragedy. On top of tragedy. Right. And so it's going to I'm expecting it to be heavier this year. And so why do we feel it? Some say that it is the sunlight is that is the number one thing. We are vitamin D creatures. We've got to have vitamin D, we've got to have sunlight.

And it regulates our melatonin release. It regulates our wake and sleep cycles. When those things get compressed, our bodies just shut down. They just slow down. It's winter, right? The same as is the grass turns brown, the trees, the leaves fall off the trees. They're not dead, but they just go dormant for a while and our bodies do something very similar. And so sunlight helps stimulate melatonin. It helps stimulate vitamin D, a whole cascade of chemical systems.

Right. And without that stuff, vitamin D boosts serotonin. I want to be a super nerd here, but it all has chemical responses. And also we stop going out. We stop being around other people. We stop meeting, we just go to bed. It's early and it's dark. And let's just call it let's just watch a little more Netflix. Get under the covers a little further. Some have said we stopped being intimate with our with our partners.

We stop by. Right. So you back off sex. You start eating a little bit worse. You start sleeping a little bit more. And that's just signals to your body to depress stuff.

Right, to lay low. So here's a couple of things that I do personally. Actually, I'll walk to the big ones and then I'll tell you a couple of the nerd things that I do. Here's some highly intentional stuff we can do, number one.

And these aren't going to be shockers or anything, but go outside and enjoy nature even if it's freezing. Make yourself bundle up and go outside as often as you can I. I am a big believer and there's no bad weather, there's just wrong clothes, and so if it's freezing and it's snowing and it's raining, me and my kids are playing outside and we are running around being silly. And it may be so cold that we are chitter chattering, but we're going outside.

We're going to continue to be connected with one another and we're going to continue to go outside. Even if it's just 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes go outside. Right. The second thing is, is I is going to say this is me being vulnerable here with with the you and the 17 listeners of this podcast. I put a human connection on my calendar. I am a person who retreats by nature. And so I have to have intentional conversations.

I have to intentionally see people. It's going to be challenging in the winter this year because I've been able to the summer and this fall we have a lot of outdoor conversations. We have people over, but we eat out on the front porch in the backyard. I'm going to have to be hyper intentional in a season of covid and a season of winter. Being with other people. You got to see your friends. You got to see your friends.

You got to see your friends be hyper intentional, even if you have to schedule it, make sure that you are still being intimate. Make sure you are still holding hands. Make sure as you start every morning, if you've got a pet, you've got a, you know, a significant other in the bed next to you. Hold their hand, hug that dog. Right. Touch your bare feet to their bare feet. Make sure you're getting skin to skin contact and you're feeling somebody else's heartbeat.

Do everything you can in your power to eat well, sleep a lot and exercise not too much. Not too little. But, man, once once I get the sugar rush of of Halloween, usually I can hold on till Halloween and then I get on a gummy candy binge and I really don't recover until January till New Year's. I just lose it man. And then my wife stays inside and she starts baking and she's an extraordinary cook. Now my son's a chef now and he's baking everything.

My daughter and I just mainline sugar. It just goes down a rabbit hole. So it's making highly intentional choices about what I'm eating and then have things to look forward to. One of the things depression does to us, even seasonally, is it makes us our bodies feel like our minds feel like this is going to be this way forever. And so plan something for early March, plan something for when the when the when the like a vacation get out of town, even a small camping trip.

But put some things on the calendar that we can look forward to. Now, here's a couple of nerd things, and I've hinted at this a little bit. For the last decade I've lived up to my eyeballs in the research literature with the Outer Banks of what I would call woo woo stuff and with just basic just physiology and human anatomy. Here's a couple of things that I double down on now in the winter months starting now is a highly regimented no questions asked.

I cannot skip it. And this is a personal commitment. Cannot skip a morning routine that involves meditation, that involves silence, that involves my feet on bare ground. This is grounding that super woo. But I think I think the science supports it. But it's five or ten or fifteen minutes with my feet on background. It is feeling the seasons and it is an exercise program that no matter what's coming, I'm going to exercise. Even if I get halfway through my workout that morning, I'm going to do something.

I also am a big Imhoff guy, Wim Hof. We'll link to him in the show notes he is all about called thermogenesis, ice baths. And these are not ice baths like athletes take after a hard workout. This is ice baths as a way of regulating your body. And I won't get into the science here, but I take I have a tub that I bought from a a outdoor farm supply store, and it's a metal tub that I fill with water and sits outside in the winter and it usually has ice in it floating in it or it's frozen over.

And I get in there from three to six to ten minutes, sometimes every morning, every morning, sometimes in the evening. And it is unbearable and it is brutal and it is beautiful.

And so it is called cold thermogenesis. We Imhoff, he's awesome. The last thing here, I'll talk through this for the podcast, but I will show it for the YouTube.

I don't get paid for any of these things. Thawne and Keyon, those are the two supplement companies that I trust. I overdo it probably on vitamin D K2. I've got it here. This is what I take regularly. I take a lot of it. The research on vitamin D and covered the research on vitamin D and seasonal affective disorder and hormone regulation and all the different biomechanical mechanisms mechanism. Vitamin D regulates a lot and so does K2 and so of magnesium.

So I take a lot of that stuff and here's one of my nerd gadgets that I love. It's called The Human Charger by Valmiki. It's it's obnoxiously expensive, but you put it in your ears and it actually shines a bright light into your ears and led light. When I show friends and family, they roll their eyes and say that money would have been better if you'd set it on fire. I love this thing. I think it works. I use it every morning on the way to work.

It cycles through two or three. It's called a human charger. You can look it up on the Internet, Internets. We'll link to it in the show notes. I love that thing too, but it's about bright lights. And so when you wake up in the morning turning this bright lights on as you can, I've heard the investments in the sad bulbs, they call them are worth it. They're good. And so being intentional about making sure you're around a lot of bright light, the right kind of light, and letting your natural biorhythms work even when the sun is down.

Here's one final thing. You've heard me say this on the podcast often, and I'll continue to say it. We try as if people for the last 100 years to power through nature, we have tried to hit the gas and turbo charge in jet propulsion our way, as though nature didn't know what she was doing.

We tried to to I mean, I did not get into it here. We've tried to out farm Mother Nature by just beating the soil to death.

We've tried to out outgrow animals beyond Mother Nature.

We've just lost our minds. We thought we won. And Mother Nature's proving, as she always does, that she knows what she's doing, that she's in control. And there is an ebb and flow to the world. One of the things we can do in the winter months is just slow down. Just slow down, and that's hard for us, right, but we have to remember that up until about 60 years ago, you couldn't get apples in the grocery store in February because it was winter and apples weren't growing.

And we could not just get sunshine all the time. And there was a natural pulse and a natural rhythm to life. And so I want to encourage everybody to take care of yourself, do these things right. We've got to keep showing up for work. I've got to keep showing up to the podcast.

I've got to keep doing the things I've got to do to keep food on my table and also listen to the rhythms of nature, listen to the rhythms of your body. And it's OK to sleep a little bit more. It's OK to get a little more pensive. It's OK to write a little bit more in your journal or to add five or six things to your gratitude journal every morning. It's OK to read a little bit more. It's OK to slow down.

And so I don't want us to spend so much energy fighting the natural systems, but at the same time there are some cool things we can do to lift us up.

All right, let's see here. Want I want to shout out. I got a shout out here from Sabrina, Sabrina Seegars. She writes that she heard one of my shows from a few days ago, a few weeks ago, and she instantly thought of her husband. Now, what's awesome is she didn't leave his house. She didn't leave her husband's name. So, Sabrina Seegars, if you are out there, I got your note. He has been he has been by your side.

You all have been married for four years. You've been struggling with infertility for three of those four years. And you've had mental health challenges. You've been struggling and all that through that. Oh, there it is. There it is. Your husband, Josh, has been your rock. None of this was in the picture when y'all got married. And he continues to hold you. He continues to walk alongside you. His number one dream has been to be a dad, and he's surrounded by all of his friends getting that.

Yet he has turned our trial around. This is what she writes to be the best uncle to your family and friends. They love him and he continues to show up in their lives. He lives a quiet life and doesn't get enough credit. All men could learn from him how to live deeply in these hard seasons and how to care for their wife and their emotions, not trying to fix them, but just being with them. Our anniversary is October 30th and I would love for shout out for all he has done.

Josh Seegars, whose wife is Sabrina, she's calling you out. Brother, thank you for being a guy who just loves his wife and is doing the best he can to sit with their during hard seasons. What a stud, dude.

What a stud. All right, so as we wrap up today's show, man, I.

I'm just going to say it. Greatest song of all time by one of the greatest bands of all time off the greatest album of all time. This song is so good, I have no idea what it even means. I don't know what it means. I just know it's the greatest of all time. This is the best song, 100 percent about a calendar. It's the best about a calendar.

And the band has one word that's got two words, but one's in a definite article, didn't matter. It's got one word. The album was one word and the song's about a day of the week. The record dropped in nineteen ninety two. It was called Puf Wish it was by the band. The Cure in the song is Friday. I'm in Love. Robert Smith writes, I don't care if Monday's blue, Tuesday's gray, and Wednesday, too, Thursday, I don't care about you.

It's Friday. I'm in love. Monday you can fall apart. Tuesday, Wednesday break my heart. Thursday doesn't even start. It's Friday. I'm in love Saturday. Wait, Sun always comes too late, but Friday never hesitate. It's Friday I'm in love. And this is the Dr. John Delonas show.