31: Eric Kussin
Max, Nick (the indoor griller), and Eric at a UK game (way way) back in the day
“And all of a sudden, my brain goes dark and something made me introduce the team president and walk off the stage. I don’t know what happened in the suite the rest of the night.”
About Eric
Eric Kussin is the founder and CEO of The SameHere Global Mental Health Movement, a nonprofit organization focused on mental health.
Eric didn’t start his career in the mental health space. No, he was going in a very different direction. After graduating with honors from Cornell, he spent many years as a professional sports executive, starting his career with a long stint at the NBA League Office, and then transitioning to management positions with such teams as the Chicago Sky, Phoenix Suns, New Jersey Devils, and Florida Panthers. Eric was in the midst of this ascending career when a debilitating mental health crisis stopped his life in its tracks.
Due to unresolved personal life traumas he failed to appropriately address at a younger age – life experiences he was unaware were affecting his mental health – Eric developed a severe bout of PTSD, along with symptoms of anxiety and depression.
It was like being sacked by a monster right before making the throw of your football career.
Sidelined, Eric spent two and a half years almost permanently in bed with severe cognitive impairments. This was a strange and disorienting turn of events for someone who was used to going hard, being the guy, and always having more in the tank.
He underwent many failed treatments, including trying over 50 combinations of prescription medications, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), IV Ketamine, as well as Electro-Convulsive Therapy. Eventually, he was told that he was "treatment-resistant."
But he never gave up, and after being introduced to integrative and holistic approaches to treat his mind, body and central nervous system, slowly, he began to climb out of the abyss.
On his path to mental wellbeing, Eric became determined to share his story of challenges and triumphs, and in an effort to help others he launched the #SameHere Global Mental Health Movement. The nonprofit is comprised of athletes, celebrities, expert practitioners, advocates, and everyday heroes who’ve come together to normalize society’s perception of mental health and make it part of our everyday conversation.
Eric and the SameHere movement are determined to spread his message: that EVERYONE in the world is affected by life’s inevitable traumas and stresses. We can’t escape them, as they are part of the human experience, but they impact everyone differently.
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Max Chopovsky:
This is Moral of the Story, interesting people telling their favorite short stories and then breaking them down to understand what makes them so good. I'm your host, Max Chopovsky. Today's guest is Eric Kussin, the founder and CEO of the same here global mental health movement, a nonprofit organization focused on mental health. Eric didn't start his career in the mental health space. No, he was going in a very different direction. After graduating with honors from Cornell, he spent many years as a professional sports executive, starting his career with a long stint at the NBA league office, and then transitioning to management positions with such teams as the Chicago Sky, Phoenix Suns, New Jersey Devils, and Florida Panthers. Eric was in the midst of this ascending career when a debilitating mental health crisis stopped his life in its tracks. Due to unresolved personal life traumas, he failed to appropriately address at a younger age. life experiences he was unaware were affecting his mental health, Eric developed a severe bout of PTSD along with symptoms of anxiety and depression. It was like being sacked by a monster right before making a throw of your football career. Sidelined Eric spent two and a half years almost permanently in bed with severe cognitive impairments. This was a strange and disorienting turn of events for someone who was used to going hard, being the guy and always having more in the tank. He underwent many failed treatments, including trying over 50 combinations of prescription medications, transcranial magnetic stimulation, IV ketamine, as well as electroconvulsive therapy. Eventually, he was told he was treatment resistant, but he never gave up. And after being introduced to integrative and holistic approaches to treat his mind, body, and central nervous system, slowly he began to climb out of the abyss. On his path to mental wellbeing, Eric became determined to share his story of challenges and triumphs, and in an effort to help others, he launched the Same Here Global Health Movement. The nonprofit is comprised of athletes, celebrities, expert practitioners,
Eric Kussin:
Woof!
Max Chopovsky:
advocates, and everyday heroes who've come together to normalize society's perception of mental health and make it a part of our everyday conversation. Eric and the Same Here Movement are determined to spread his message, that everyone in the world is affected by life's inevitable traumas and stresses. We can't escape them as they are part of the human experience, but they impact everyone differently. And, having personally known this savage for over 15 years, I'm excited for the impact coming to the mental health space because when this guy gets after something, he goes all in. Welcome to the show, my brother.
Eric Kussin:
So man, it's funny when you said two things, you said favorite and then short stories. I was like, I don't know at the time if this was my favorite story, especially
Max Chopovsky:
Ha ha.
Eric Kussin:
as I was going through it, certainly looking back on it now, there's a favorite element to it because of what it allowed me to then do with my life and the way I'm able to help people. And then short, it's interesting because you gave the introduction, which is I guess the bio way that you introduce people and it doesn't sound so short, right? So it's certainly a long path of going somewhere and then having to get somewhere from there and then trying to build something from it. But I'll do my best to entertain the audience and story tell and keep everyone engaged.
Max Chopovsky:
I don't think you have to try very hard. Short stories are tough, but they're good. So before you get into the story, set the stage. Is there anything we should know before you start the story?
Eric Kussin:
Well, your host is Max Chopovsky, who was my friend going all the way back to Chicago, was the second stop along my career where Max mentioned I started at the NBA league office and then friends were ripping me apart saying, what are you doing? You're leaving a job where you're presenting to the likes of LeBron James and, you know, Amari Stoudemire and Steve Nash and Kobe Bryant. On what was called the business of basketball the way in which teams generate revenues so that players understood what their role is with the interaction between fans and corporate partners to help start up a WNBA team and So if there's any lesson from that and Max are our mutual friend is a guy named Nick Myers Who was in our building who I hired out of selling telephone books, right? That's what he was selling when we met him is I don't do things in a traditional way, right? I a different perspective and I think that getting to know you and the time that we all knew each other, there was the example of that through the sports world and through the hiring of people that I thought would be a good fit that hadn't worked in this space before. And then that, I guess, view of this world and how do we flip things on its head and look at it differently has served me well in terms of my own life experiences, what I went through, the story I'll share, and then what's been able to come out of it.
Max Chopovsky:
Alright man, well let's giddy up, tell me a story.
Eric Kussin:
I'll tell you a story. Well, so, you know, you mentioned, spend most of my career in professional sports. So mental health was not on my radar screen, which is rare for someone who works in the mental health space now. Most people are psychologists, psychiatrists, had a family member that they lost to suicide. That was not my case at all. I was plugging away, working a number of different sports outlets. So it started with the NBA league office, Chicago Sky, we already mentioned, Phoenix Suns after that, New Jersey Devils after that, and Florida Panthers after that. And in the corporate world, it's just like any other play sports. You go from assistant to manager, manager to director, director to VP, VP to C level. And so I found myself in a C level spot with the Florida Panthers. New ownership group had just come in and purchased the team and end of 2013, beginning of 2014, it's the same team, same ownership group that owns the team now. I saw the direction that they were going. I was excited that it was a new group coming in because Florida was not known as a great place to go and lead a business unit. But this owner came in, military grad, West Point background, and I said, okay, sign me up, I'm ready to go. It's the next step in my career. It was difficult because I was leaving New York where I, how many people get to work in sports, move around the country to all those places, then find themselves back. When I was with the Devils, we go to a Stanley Cup final. I'm living in New York City, traveling to New Jersey. That was ideal. but this next opportunity seemed like the next step for me. I get this C level spot. I'm one step away from being a team president, which is what my ultimate dream job would have been. And so imagine being a single dude in his low thirties, just gets this high paying job, doesn't have to pay state income tax, living on South Beach, playing in sports leagues that I'm loving and... uh, you know building a staff from scratch and and seeing the writing on the wall that there's a path towards what my next position will be You can't ask for a better situation Until
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
I start to notice That i'm losing interest in things outside of the office. So this I I joined the team in end of august of 2014 So about two months into that, uh October right because I remember having the pictures from halloween So my work interest was still there. I could come in the office every day and focus and get things done. But all the things outside of the office that I was mentioning before, hanging out with friends, going out on South Beach, you know, caring what car I have, right? Like the things that like maybe don't seem like that big a deal and they really aren't. But then things like watching my teams on TV from New York, right? Like getting the league pass, playing in my own
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
league games. Those things I started losing interest in. And I think a lot of people go through that where I'm getting older This is the world's way of telling me I need to focus on work even more I need to put more and more time into xyz And so that's the way that I justified it and so you know that I'm a hard worker So I would go into the office at 630 in the morning instead of 7 and I'd leave at midnight instead of 1130 at night right, and so Because work was still clicking for me. I didn't pay attention as much to those other things almost evaporating, I'll use the analogy for those folks who are old enough to remember the movie Back to the Future, where Marty's looking at the picture and he sees his sister and she's disappearing in that picture until he goes back, I think it was 1955, and you know brings his parents back together and the sister starts reappearing in the picture. That visual of the sister disappearing was like what was going on with the things outside of the office for me. And so... I don't know what to do at this point other than grin and bear and I wake up one morning and this is now December of 2015 excuse me of 2014 and it's like I'm pushing myself out of quicksand to get out of bed I go to walk to my closet, it's like I have cinder blocks on my feet. I open up my closet door, it looks like a bomb has gone off, even though, you know, I'm not the neatest person in the world as evidence of what's behind me, but I'm usually structured enough where my shirts are in one place, my pants are in another place, my belts are in another place, and it looked like that bomb had gone off and I couldn't make out should I wear a sweatshirt like this, a button down, a t-shirt, should I wear blue jeans, slacks. And when your brain starts to malfunction like that... Here's one of the first key learnings, though I didn't know it at the time. Here's what we do as human beings, we test ourselves. So I'm like, okay, my brain's not working, how can I prove to myself that it actually is working better than what I'm failing to be able to do right now? So I went over to a picture on my counter of my nieces, the two most important little people in the world to me, Rebecca and Kaylee are their names. I speak to them on FaceTime every other day, and I pick up the picture and I was like, okay, Rebecca and Kaylee, what are their middle names? And I can't remember their middle names. And when that recall is gone and something that is so cemented in your mind, testing is one of the worst things you can do because your nervous system is already on high alert and now you test yourself and something that should come to you so naturally is not, it freaks you the eff out. So still being that stubborn SOB, right? Grit my teeth. I put something on to wear into the office. I don't even remember what it was. I just know that we had a game day. So I remember bringing a tie with me. I definitely did not shower. I get into the office, they call it white knuckling it when you clench your fists, right? And you just try to get in somehow. I don't remember driving to the office that day. I sit in my office and my office has a wall window that I look out through and I can remember to this day where everyone was sitting because we were all on one floor. It's about 70, 80 people that were part of our group. So the season ticket sales department was over there, the group sales department was over here, the marketing department was over here, the corporate sponsorship over here. the service department over there. I mean, these are the different departments that you oversee when you oversee the revenues for a professional sports team. I'm telling it to you right now in a very clean way. It felt to me like I was looking at Grand Central Station when I was looking out of my office. Like everyone was moving a million miles a minute. You know, you see those on documentaries, right? Where they have the stock footage and you see people
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
just going by each other fast. And I'm someone who loves conversation, as you know. Like we've been up till all hours of the night having talks. People were coming in my office on that day and I was making excuses like picking up the phone. Hey, I'm on the other line, I can't talk right now. Because I knew my cognitive faculties were so blunted that if someone came in and tried to have a linear, logical conversation with me, it would have not gone well. Now still, more of the stubbornness, that night I had a presentation I had to give for. folks who are coming in who are prospects. So I would challenge our reps, Nick Myers being one of them, not
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
at the time but throughout my career, to they had to bring two prospects to the game. So 25 different reps, each bringing two, that would bring 50 people into the suite that we would try to sell on season tickets, on packages, on corporate partnerships, et cetera. And your
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
job as Chief Revenue Officer is to be the chief cheerleader, essentially. So I remember pacing in that suite, right? during the first period because the speech was supposed to be between the first and second. I hadn't spoken to anyone the whole day. The email, which is everyone's email is either Gmail or Lotus Notes or Outlook or whatever they have, is usually nice clean lines and only certain people who are old enough to remember this reference will get it. But it looked like light brights to me. So the computer was like flashing lights instead of seeing these even lines. But still stubbornness would be I'm going to get in there and something's going to click when these 50 people are in front of me and I'm going to be able to give my talk. My owners in the suite, our team presidents in the suite, they're all filing in, and I just go, hi, my name is Eric Hewson, I'm the chief revenue officer with the Florida Panthers. And then all of a sudden my brain goes blank and dark, like someone turned the light off. And I don't think I've ever quit anything before in my life and I still don't think I quit, but something made me go, this is Matt, our team president, and he's gonna take it from here. And I just walked out of the suite and walked back to my office. And like, I don't even know how I got to my office. That's how messed up my brain was. And I don't know what happened in the suite the rest of the night. I just sat at my desk staring at my computer, had no interest in what was going on at the game, thinking like, I guess I gotta wait for the game to be over to go home, but I don't know what else to do beyond that. And Vinny, the owner of the team, his name is Vinny Viola, again, West Point grad, so military background. He comes in the office afterwards. I don't know what to expect. Now it's January of 2015. and he looks me in the eyes, very supportive. He says, we never leave a soldier out in the battlefield. I can tell something's up. I want you to take as much time as you need, one month, two months, three months, you're gonna come back, hit the ground running. And so when I hear three months, right, that's the longest of the time periods that he gave, even though it was probably totally just arbitrary he was doing out there, my mind immediately went to, okay, something's wrong with my brain. I don't know what it is, but if he's giving me up to three months, Who's not gonna get better in three months? I've watched these commercials on TV. The sad face becomes the smiley face 15 seconds into a 30 second commercial when someone introduces a pill. Now, I didn't think it was gonna be that easy, but for everyone out there who's listening to the concept of mental health, I want you to consider something. We all get sick when we're younger, streptarope, bronchitis, pneumonia, and we take this delicious tasting liquid before we're able to swallow a pill called penicillin that tastes like bubblegum. And then when we get older, it comes in a pill form. And our parents say, curl up in a blanket, drink tea, eat chicken noodle soup, and you're gonna feel better. And guess what? Two days, you feel better. So why wouldn't you think that when your brain doesn't feel right, and you feel lethargic, run down, melancholic, all these things, that your path towards getting better is not also taking a pill, right? So I just didn't know what other options are out there. So I went back to New York. left all my stuff in Florida thinking, I'll pay my rent for three months because I'm fortunate enough to have parents that are supportive, that will let me stay in the twin bed at my size that I grew up in when I was a little kid, and rehab, go to the doctors I need to to get better, and then go take my job back. That was my plan, except for the fact that the reason in the bio that you read anxiety and depression is not because I believe in those labels. You'll hear as we go through the Q&A, I'm not a label person at all. The reason you're hearing some of the sirens in the background, that is New York City. But the reason that you, you know, the labels are in there and the labels are part of it is because the first doctor that I went to, I filled out a form, he was called a psychopharmacologist, which means he mixes many, many medications together. And he just looked at me and looked at the chart I filled out and he said, Eric, you have a shitload of anxiety on top of a shitload of depression and you need heavy artillery. to get this knocked out of you. And what was his definition of heavy artillery? Many drugs. I left that appointment with five prescriptions. An
Max Chopovsky:
Holy shit.
Eric Kussin:
SSRI, a booster to the SSRI, a benzodiazepine, an off-label drug called Namenda that works on dementia patients, but they think could work well on those who have mental health complications. It's an absolute mess, but a cocktail of five after- having tried maybe one some point earlier in my life, like Alexa Pro, now I'm all of a sudden have five. And what stemmed then from there was two and a half years of absolute dysfunction, laying in a bed, staring at the ceiling, not watching TV, not listening to podcasts. I usually say radio, cause I'm more of a radio guy, but some people are like, who still listens to radio? And I was essentially, when you see people being catatonic, I wasn't that bad to where I couldn't respond to commands. But my parents had to remind me to eat because I had no interest in eating. And I would literally try to sleep 16 hours a day because the only escape was sleeping. And in your mind, you're thinking medication and more rest is what's gonna get me better, medication and more rest. So I thought it was better that I was sleeping more. Well, two and a half years in, a doctor finally says, you've tried so many things, let's try something different. And then they tell me to do TMS therapy. TMS stands for transcranial magnetic stimulation where they put a helmet on your head. and they shoot electromagnetic waves into your brain. It's kind of like the waves that are in an MRI machine, but they're targeted at specific areas. It hits this thing called the motor threshold, your thumb jumps, and that's why they believe they know they're hitting the right place when your thumb jumps. And now they mark that on a cap that they put on your head and they keep hitting that area. And I do 23 sessions of that, 23 days in a row. It's not covered by insurance, at least at the time. So this is in 2017. and $350 a session. So, you know, your savings starts to get whittled away really quickly. And the morning of the 24th, four in the morning, I wake up and this thought is playing over and over again in my mind, swallow that bottle of pills, swallow that bottle of pills, swallow that bottle of pills.
Max Chopovsky:
Fuck
Eric Kussin:
And
Max Chopovsky:
that.
Eric Kussin:
I'm very open to everyone about this because I don't think there's any shame in the concept of suicidal ideations. 15 million people last year in the US reported suicidal ideations. We put shame on suicidal ideations because we think there's a choice because that's how the media portrays it. I could tell you right now there was no freaking choice going on in my head. There was no voice I was hearing, there was no hallucination. This was an impulse error message that I didn't know where it was coming from, where I had looked at a bottle of pills before and always thought, oh, you take one of those a day and it makes you feel better. And now my brain is seeing it as a weapon that can be used to end my life. How did my brain switch to that place? And I have this prefrontal cortex front of my brain saying to the back of my brain, my amygdala, you don't want that, why are you thinking that way? Why is your brain telling you to do that? And so you're in your own brain fighting between those two thoughts. And I was fortunate enough, and I was 35 at the time, nine-year-old kids, their prefrontal cortex is not developed enough to be able to fight that amygdala that's going do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, over and over and over again, like a record playing. And so. I said to my family, you got to take me somewhere inpatient because I can't stop that thought. And if you leave me alone, I'm not doing it because I want to do it. And it's going to be graphic to people who hear this, but why do we lose people by trains? Why do we lose people by bridges? You lose control over your own body. That sounds out of worldly to people who've never felt the ideations before. I can tell you as someone who's sitting here and has now lived through it for six years afterwards. your brain gets taken over. It's not an alien, it's error messages. We can go into the reasoning why later I think that those error message happen and what they feel like the magnetic pull, but nonetheless that lands me in the hospital. And so I go to, I don't share it publicly because I don't want them coming after me in some lawsuit, but I go to what's considered the top treatment facility center in the Northeast. I get transferred to what's considered their best campus location. There's 30 of us on the psych ward floor. I meet with the attending psychiatrist the first day and she looks at my chart and she's a Harvard trained doctor With top doctor plaques all over wall So why wouldn't you believe what she's saying and she says Eric looking at your chart the meds the TMS? You've tried everything there is your last resort is to do ECT electric-compulsive therapy or shock therapy and You don't have friends to call up go max Nick when you guys were offered shock therapy. Did you
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
take it? Right, like that's not part of our normal everyday conversation And even if you did have that, not many people have gotten it before. So you wouldn't be able to be like, what was your
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
experience with it? And I was the only one on my psych ward floor who was getting it. So my definition in my head is, I'm the most effed up of the effed up people that I'm the only one who needs this treatment. For those who don't know what shock therapy is, you get wheeled into what's the size of a dentist office, at least this was my experience, laid on a bed that's almost like a dentist chair. You get a blood pressure cuff on your ankle, they... put propofol, anesthetic that Michael Jackson died from, from the overdose of. They put that in so you go under general anesthesia. There's an oxygen mask on your face. They put electrodes on your skull and they shock your brain into seizure, hoping that it's like a hard restart of your computer, that your neurons are gonna start firing again the way they weren't before. So I do 12 sessions of that over five weeks inpatient at the psych ward. An absolutely awful experience at the psych ward. And I come out of it and I'm like, oh my God, I just did this for all this time. And give me one second. Can we pause it for one second
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah, yeah,
Eric Kussin:
Is that okay? I just got a
Max Chopovsky:
yeah.
Eric Kussin:
text from someone I haven't gotten from in a while. Okay, all right, we're good. I wanna make sure it wasn't someone who there was an issue. I haven't heard from this person in like three years. Okay. So I leave the hospital feeling no better than I had the two and a half years prior, essentially thinking my life is over because this doctor told me last resort. And so I retreat back to that bed that I've been in for two and a half years. And it was like serendipity. My parents are both former educators, father is a principal, mother is a language teacher. So they go to these continuing education courses all the time. and
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Kussin:
they go to this course called integrative breathing practices, which doesn't resonate with me at all. I don't know what the term integrative means, and I've never done a breathing practice before in my life. So, okay, mom and dad, go ahead. And my mother runs back from the course that night. It was like nine o'clock at night. I'll never forget seeing the digital clock in my room. We met this Dr. Donna. She's a psychologist. She treats differently than all these other psychopharmacologists you've been to. I can't explain it. It's too complicated, but the way that she explained it, It's just so clear. It makes such a difference. Please go see her. Please go see her. And at that point, when you've been told last resort, you're like, all right, if someone's got a different way, sure, I'll try it.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
So I go to her office three days later, I sit on her couch, and I'm expecting the appointment to go the way that every other appointment I've been to. And anyone who's been to a mental health appointment can relate to this. Three segments of your appointment. Hi, Nick, nice to meet you. What are your symptoms? You list them. Okay, Nick, based on your symptoms, here's your diagnosis. And I was diagnosed with everything, melancholic depression, anadonic depression, PTSD, OCD, ADD, ADHD, right? Agoraphobia. And then the third segment is, based on your diagnosis, here's where we're gonna treat you, and that's where the meds come in, and that's why I was trying to over 50 different ones, because I was a perfect target, a guy who had discretionary income to be able to spend on the meds, and I said, fix me, I wanna get better. So, expecting that. She sits me on the couch, she's like, nice to meet you, Eric. The couch is your stage. I'm your one person audience. I have no questions for you for the next hour other than this one. What's the story of your life, right? It's kind of like your podcast. And I think to myself like, wow, this is so different than anything I've been to. Like usually even if we do like psychoanalysis or like there's some kind of Freudian talk therapy, it's like, let's start at the beginning. Tell me the relationship with your mother, right? Like. There was
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
none of that. There was no leading me towards anything.
Max Chopovsky:
Uh huh.
Eric Kussin:
So I just started Disney and all those memories when you were a little kid. And then all of a sudden, this is what came out of me, which is gonna take me two minutes to share with you, but took me 50 minutes to share with her. I was eight years old. My older brother was 12 and he broke his femur bone in an accident, sport accident, and was put into a body cast for a year and homeschooled. Healed from that and a month later, got diagnosed with ALL, a children's form of leukemia. So five years of chemo and radiation. Miracle, late 80s, early 90s, he goes into remission, no longer found in his body. Month later, he's in a Jeep Wrangler with his friends, open top, no seatbelt in the back, car loses control, he flies out of the back, lands on his head on the Meadowbrook Parkway, cracks his head open, loses partial vision in his eyes, and ICU for a month. Heals from that, goes to college, is feeling a pain in his knee, they do all this testing, blood tests come back that cancer from childhood's returned. And now that it's returned the second time, they have to give him a stronger dose of the chemo, which does a great job on lowering the white blood cell counts, which is what cancer in an ALL form is, but it's also beating the shit out of all his healthy cells, which is why we see people lose their hair. And so you're seeing his joints break down, he's hunched over. I'm up at college at this point, he just graduated. He's going to law school while he's getting these chemo treatments. I get a call from my father, I gotta drive back down to where they're at. because my brother's got 105 fever, body goes into septic shock from the chemo treatments, the neurologist come to us at the hospital and say, look, he's fallen into a coma from the septic shock, you can have the tubes continue to breathe for him, but we don't know if he's gonna wake when he does wake and if he does wake, if he's gonna have any cognitive faculties about him. So that goes on for three months. We're just holding on hope. I'm driving back and forth from college. My parents are staying by the hospital at the Ronald McDonald House. And eventually he wakes from the coma. Miracle, full cognitive faculties about him. But his kidneys fail from the rigor of the septic shock. So he needs to go on dialysis. We all get tested to see who's the closest match. My father is, donates a kidney to him. That all ends, I get that first job at the NBA league office, bringing it back to center. Blank slate, real world, get the start over from scratch. And three of my close friends pass away back to back to back of either misdiagnosed or undiagnosed heart conditions. One guy running on a treadmill collapses. His wife was six weeks pregnant at the time. One guy carrying boxes up a flight of stairs in a walk up collapses in the walk up. One guy aneurysm, right? Coming, stemming from. So the woman stops me at this point, the doctor, and she's like, Eric, what else happened to you as a child and a young adult that impacted your mental health that I need to know about? I know I told you I wouldn't ask any questions, but we only got 10 minutes left in the session. And I kind of got angry, not in like an actual piss type of way, but like, what do you talk about type of way. I said, I'm 35 years old, I'm sitting in your office with a chemical imbalance that I've been trying to balance out for the last two and a half years with medication. You asked me to tell you about my life, all I did was tell you about my life. And now I stopped at 22 or 23 years old, that was 12 or 13 years ago. What does one thing have to do with the other? And you as someone who knew me at 26 years old, you didn't know any of those things, right? Cause that wasn't a big part of my life. I didn't think, I'm Eric the sports executive. That's it. And I like to go out and have fun and meet friends and work hard. I didn't think about those things. And so she gives me this analogy, which I think is really poignant for the fact that you knew me during that time. She said, Eric, if you had a front row seat for an NBA basketball game when you were an executive and these players are running up and down the court and they're seven feet tall and they're sweating. as they're running by you and the sweat flies off and hits your suit. Or a ball goes out of bounds and they die for a loose ball and they land in your lap. Your suit's gonna get all sweaty and you're gonna take that suit back to the dry cleaner. After three hours of being at the game, you're gonna take a shower, put on a nice press suit the next day and go on to work looking like you were never sweated on before. You had a front row seat, but your front row seat was not for an NBA basketball game, it was for the game of life. And the game of life was represented by your brother in a muddy wrestling ring. and your friends in a muddy wrestling ring next to him. And every move they made to wrestle the game of life to stay alive, the mud was splattering and hitting you and splattering and hitting you and splattering and hitting you. Your focus, even though you knew the game was in front of you, the wrestling match, it's not like you didn't know it wasn't happening, but you were looking at the Jumbotron. You were looking at the LED lights. You were looking at the music in the arena. You were looking at the fans dancing, which is representative of, I was being a sports executive. I was being a guy who was making friends. I was being a guy who was dating different people, I was going out and having fun. Those were the things I was focused on, but I wasn't paying attention to the mud that was caking up and building on me as an ancillary piece of sitting in that front row seat. And the biggest difference between the NBA game and the game of life is, you didn't just sit there for three hours, you didn't sit there for three days, three weeks, three months, three years, 30 years. For 35 years, you've been sitting in the same freaking seat and eventually that mud got so heavy, you literally fell off your chair. Because you didn't do anything about it. And it's not your fault that you didn't do anything about it, you just didn't know about it. So, my immediate reaction to that was, if that's what mental health is, and all we need to do is have a front row seat to watch things happen to other people, and it doesn't need to be us flying through a windshield, it doesn't need to be us laying in the bed in the coma, then take me out of the equation at 35, take your average 15 year old. All you need to do is watch other things happen to other people in your life, okay. watching your parents have fights and go through a divorce, watching your parents lose their job and potentially lose the house, watching your two best friends, friendship break up and dissolve and them not talk to each other ever again. And that being weird between the two of them. Watching your friend being bullied on the schoolyard or verbally abused, or your friend confiding in you that they're being sexually abused, or your friend dealing with the sickness of a loved one or loss of a loved one or being the isolated kid that no one talks to or the overweight kid that everyone makes fun of or all these things that we all see. All we need is a front row seat of that and that impacts our mental health. I said, if that's what mental health is, everyone's mental health is impacted and that's not the narrative that's out there. So help me connect the dots here. And you could tell, like, I get passionate about it. She's like, Eric, you're right. Like everyone's mental health is impacted and no, that's not the narrative. Now keep in mind, this is 2017. So this is before COVID
Max Chopovsky:
Thank you.
Eric Kussin:
and people opening up even more so, which we're still not even close to where we need to be. She's like, listen, you know, couch that thought for a second. let's send you to a weekend breathing program. Like breathing, I'm like, okay. She's like, promise you it's gonna help you. So I show up to this course at a karate studio that they rented out, this nonprofit organization called The Art of Living, and I'm the only male, only 140, and only one born in this country. So it's me and eight Indian women and nine yoga mats,
Max Chopovsky:
amazing.
Eric Kussin:
and I'm a complete fish out of water, right? And I'm sitting there looking at these women and the practice that we're learning is all part of what they learned growing up in. the country that they grew up in. And I just start peppering everyone with questions. I'm like, I breathe every single day already. Why is breathing gonna make me better when all these other things happen? And I start learning about the vagus nerve and I start learning about cellular inflammation. I start learning about the amygdala. And one simple explanation I can give to people is if something bad happens in your life, a car accident happens outside or you get bad news or what happened with just me just now where you got a text message you don't know it's from. Your breath goes like this. Well, guess what? There's a nerve that's connected from your neck and your brainstem all the way down to your stomach, two branches called the vagus nerve. That's how messages get sent between your brain and your body. So if you're breathing normally, and then you all of a sudden go, your vagus nerve is tightening up. Go back to my story. Brother sick, brother sick, brother sick, brother sick, friends pass away. You're going, not just with the events, but also the fear of the what if of the events. That's just one example of one piece of the physiology in your body that changes over time. That if you just continuously breathe the way that you quote normally breathe, your body's gonna go, you're always on high alert for the worst case scenario happening, sorry we can't concentrate on anything else, you're F'd, focus only on this. And that's
Max Chopovsky:
and the
Eric Kussin:
what
Max Chopovsky:
cortisol.
Eric Kussin:
essentially was that cortisol, which is known as the sympathetic response of the nervous system. Okay, so... We live, I'll go add a storytelling mode since you brought that up, we live as human beings in the state of balance between what's called parasympathetic and sympathetic response of our nervous system. So think of it as P and S. Our autonomic nervous system has two branches, parasympathetic and sympathetic, that it can go into these two phases. The balance between those two is because as human beings, we'd love to be in the parasympathetic P. Think of pro. productive, positive. We love to be in that all the time. I'm in a moment talking to my friend Max. I haven't spoken to him in a while. It's great to be here. I'm concentrating on what he's saying. Sympathetic response is, wait a second, I just heard a crash outside. What happens if someone got injured? I gotta go help that person. That's the sympathetic response. Think of it as stress. We have to live in that state because from the earliest days of man and woman, we sat around a fire, we talked to one another, we were enjoying each other, and then... a wooly mammoth or a tiger came by and we were like, we gotta go kill that thing, everyone mobilize. We killed the thing or chased it away and then we got back to the fire pit and we told stories again. So we're supposed to live in balance between those two things. What happens is when we live through the threat too many times, or those of us who have active, creative brains and the threat happens even once, or it doesn't even happen to us, we see it on TV. Wow, 9-11? plane got crashed into a building, I can't go on planes anymore. And then our brain goes, I got a trip coming up, I got a trip coming up, I got a trip coming up. You're taking that balance between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system, you're throwing it completely out of whack where the sympathetic response is becoming the dominant response now. And if you're living in that dominant response, now going back to your point about cortisol, cortisol gets released because the amygdala in the brain is going threat, threat, threat, threat, threat. Now I got to mobilize, mobilize, mobilize. And what does that cortisol do throughout the body? It creates cellular inflammation. It makes the gut porous, right? It actually, one of the more recent things I learned, the avioli in our lungs, it collapses them. So there's less surface area for us to be able to breathe in oxygen. Like
Max Chopovsky:
And
Eric Kussin:
all
Max Chopovsky:
it's,
Eric Kussin:
these
Max Chopovsky:
and it,
Eric Kussin:
things,
Max Chopovsky:
and it slows
Eric Kussin:
yeah.
Max Chopovsky:
down your digestion because,
Eric Kussin:
Yes.
Max Chopovsky:
from an evolutionary perspective, you really don't need to worry about digesting food when you might become food.
Eric Kussin:
Yes.
Max Chopovsky:
And so the thing is that our bodies are fine with that as a short-term situation, but when cortisol floods our bodies constantly, that's what creates the inflammation. And we just weren't made for that. We just weren't
Eric Kussin:
We weren't
Max Chopovsky:
made for
Eric Kussin:
made
Max Chopovsky:
that.
Eric Kussin:
for that. And now take what you just said, we weren't made for that. Look at like the phone that I'm holding up. Well, guess
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
what? The sympathetic responses, text message, push notification, alert, direct message, right? People don't realize that that is if you want to break that down in the simplest way. When we had flip phones before we had smartphones and they eventually put caller ID on the flip phone. So none of the other noise was there. No social media, nothing else. But you got a call from your. parents and your immediate reaction was, oh shit, did something happen to someone at home? Now multiply that times the number of messages the average person gets in a day between the push notifications, all those, is 217. Okay, like emails, push notifications, text messages. So your brain is going message, message, message, message. So maybe it's deadline at work, maybe it's a work project fell through, maybe it's there's something wrong with my child, maybe it's my parents are calling because one of them is sick. the what ifs that we think through because we're getting, and compare that to 1997 when we were all in high school where it was AOL dial up, it's like, doot, doot, doot, you've got mail, and you only had three messages and you thought you were popular because you had three emails from the day before, our brains didn't evolve fast enough to catch up with how quickly the technology has caught up.
Max Chopovsky:
Dude, it's so funny. So Andie's been watching Laguna Beach, remember that show?
Eric Kussin:
Of course.
Max Chopovsky:
And she's like, you know what the kids would do? So this was, Laguna Beach was like early 2000s. She was like, I was watching them all in this episode. They were hanging out by a bonfire on the beach and nobody had their phones out. Like they were talking to each other. And they did have flip phones, but she goes, it's so crazy how when when they would call each other, the conversation was a five second conversation. Hey, what are you doing? You wanna come over? Cool, like let's go. And that's where we came from, assuming the baseline is after we have phones. The, where we got is, you know, to your point about the notifications. So I was in this program, Goldman Sachs 10,000 small business program for like growing small businesses. And we had this class taught by a Harvard educated, Harvard professor who teaches classes on negotiation. And she goes, now keep in mind, this is like 30 founders, CEOs of small businesses. She goes, before we start the session, I need you to put your phones away. So everybody's like, okay. So they take their phones off their desk because they're in front of all of us and put them in their pocket. She goes, not in your pocket. They have to go in your backpack and you have to turn them off. And everybody's like, what the hell is she doing? So they begrudgingly put their phones in airplane mode, put them in their backpacks. She goes, I see those Apple watches. Don't think that I don't know what's going on. Put those away too. Everybody's like, finally somebody raises their hand. They're like, what are you doing? We have businesses to run. She goes, every time that you get a ding from your phone, or even if it's a vibration. it takes you out of the moment because you immediately in your head, subconsciously without thinking about it, go through a series of thoughts. Who is that? Is it personal or is it professional? Is it important? How urgent is it? Do I need to handle it now? It's probably not that urgent. She goes, that might take you a few seconds, but to reset your attention, to get to where you were before, takes a lot longer than that. She goes, so if your phone goes off 10 times over the course of the session, you're gonna lose maybe 20, 30 minutes because it takes so long for you to come back to focus. But if you, but it won't go off 10 times, it'll probably go off a multiple of that. She goes, so why are we wasting our time when we know that by doing, that by having these phones around us, it's gonna be so counterproductive? So what I'm curious about is as you go through all of this, as you talk about this story that you've gone through, this sort of, this journey, this incredible character arc. When you think back to it, what is the moral of that story for you?
Eric Kussin:
Well, there's a bunch, right? The first is I was going along and not thinking that life impacts me because what was explained to us as what mental health is when we were in health classes growing up was the things that you read in the bio, depression, anxiety, PTSD. And we were told depression means sadness, anxiety means nervousness, and PTSD happens to service people. I wasn't sad, I wasn't nervous. And I wasn't in the military. So I didn't think any of those things applied to me. I was numb and dysfunctional Those were never part of the description. So the first moral of the story was There's so much that we don't know we're not taught about and I think purposefully kept in the dark about I could go into a whole Other podcast about why I think the messages are the way that they are So that was the first piece of it. The second moral was maybe I went through this because I looked back and I was like I worked in sports and I got as high as I did and as close as I did to that dream job at such a young age, why did that happen to me to then be able to go into this space? Well, what did I learn in terms of managing a business? in terms of growing revenues, in terms of being able to be subsistent, in terms of being able to understand how a balance sheet works. Okay, I could have learned that in any industry. Bam, to make relationships and have the credibility with athletes and entertainers that I could use my story to recruit them to be a part of what we were building. Bam, to be connected to influencers like a Darren Revelle who's got two million followers on Twitter, to be able to take the stories of the people that I connect with and put it on a much larger platform to be able to change the perception storytelling to show the common threads that exist. So I look back on it and it kind of is a joke and in a funny way to what you were talking about about our favorite stories is at the two and a half year mark it was not my favorite story, it was probably my least favorite story. And then as one of the doctors who's on our board tells me all the time, that two and a half years he goes, how beautiful that your nervous system did exactly what it was supposed to do to protect you. And I wanted to beat the guy up. I was like, what are you talking about? That was the worst two and a half years of my life. He said, Eric. You your nervous system if it didn't shut down the way that it did I want everyone to think of a computer that has too many windows open If your computer has too many windows open it blue screens and it shuts down that's protective for your computer It makes the motherboard not get burnt out and your computer never work again When your phone's in the sun for too long the phone goes time to shut down We can't be on anymore. You got to take this out of the sun. It's protective So I think I went through the most miserable thing that I could imagine. I don't compare it to other people. You can't measure, uh, compare measures of emotional pain one person to the next, but it was worse than anything I could have drawn up. When I draw up what I think hell looks like, I can tell you there were moments, not the entire two and a half years, but moments during that two and a half years where it felt like someone was taking my brain and dragging it through hot coals beyond something I could describe now in a logical way to people that would make sense. I could give enough adjectives. It still wouldn't do it justice. that why would I go through such misery? And I think I did because I tried so many different things. I tried the traditional things that were told. I was the person who did exactly what was told of me because of the only messages that are out there in a big way, and I failed all of them. To be able to couple that with the people that I have all these relationships with and have at least a decent enough science mind to be like. I can connect with the Dr. Plieners and Dr. Roses of the world that get this bigger picture of how these things all fit together. I think I was meant to go through that awful experience to have the credibility through my story and the connections to be able to bring this to the masses in a way that helps change people's lives.
Max Chopovsky:
I mean, I just remember, you remember Nick's wedding when you were kind of TBD on whether or not you were gonna go. And I just remember seeing you there at the table with your parents. And I just remember thinking, hey, man, that took balls to show up, like real, real willpower to show up because you wanted to be there for a close friend. But you were, if sitting in your office made the screen look like a jumble and looking at... your departments right outside of your office made it feel like Grand Central, then you're basically in this unshielded environment where you're at a table surrounded by 200 people and it's loud and it's crazy. And I just remember seeing you there and being like, that's awesome that you were able to attend. The question that I have for you is, have you talked to your parents about... what it was like for them during that time between everything that happened to your brother, which is just, which is devastating, but then also on top of that, having this effectively ongoing crisis. I mean, their bodies had to be flooded with cortisol. Like, have you talked to them about their experiences of those years?
Eric Kussin:
It's interesting because they've never been to therapy up until the last couple of months when I've made them come with me, right? And so my parents have a very baby boomer mentality, which a lot of people will be able to relate to, which is life gets handed to you. And they're not, my parents aren't like these military people, they're not like, you gotta be too, you're not tough enough for that. That's not how they are. They're just, their mentality on things is some things suck and it sucks and you have to get through it, right? And so, Like they would be willing to get me help in any way I needed. And what you're talking about with Nick's wedding, so everyone knows the reference. I was so dysfunctional in that bed, but when Nick invited me and I was invited to be in the wedding party, as much as I couldn't move, I'm like, I got to figure out a way to get there. And Nick knew the situation. He's like, do you want your dad to come with you? And like... Help you maybe that'll help you come and people are like you're an adult. You're in your upper 30s Like how do you need a father to help you? It wouldn't matter if it was my dad though. That was comforting or it was a nurse or whatever For people to understand like walking around was difficult like seeing your brain can't remember a direction like turn left versus turn right Get off the plane and go do this when your brain is that dysfunctional you need to be almost handheld Fortunately, the visual would have been weird. I didn't have to hold my dad's hand, but I had to like follow the direction of where he was walking after coming off the plane. But my parents still even in therapy, they would hate me for saying this, but I'm gonna say it anyway. Like I have a very good therapist who was not my personal therapist because I didn't want that to be part of it and us going together. for them to learn about what I've been through and what they need to learn. My parents have heard me talk so many times, they've heard me tell this story. And it doesn't matter how many times I tell my story, they can't fathom it in their own brain that it impacts them. They're like, oh, that makes sense that Eric's been impacted that way. But they, the, the, the one plus one equals two, that the calculation that you just did in your mind that's like, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Kussin, do you ever realize how what you went through with both of your sons, not to mention your own shit that you probably went with, with your parents fighting and all the things that they lived through. And then, you know, your, your father's both passed away at a young age in their early seventies and missing them. Like, Hey, that's your mental health. And my dad in one of our last sessions goes to the therapist and little literally goes. Yeah, my attitude on life is like things happen and then you have to find the positive way around it and that's the way through. And so the therapist goes, Steve, his name is Steve, he goes, do you realize you've been carrying things around your whole life and not dealing with them? And like some of the stuff that Eric gets frustrated with you on, like you're up till one, two in the morning in your seventies doing taxes at weird times of the year that you don't need to do and checking credit card bills. You're just doing it to busy yourself because you don't want to be in your own body and deal with those things. And he's like, no, I don't believe that. I don't think it's built up and impacted me. And he doesn't get it.
Max Chopovsky:
But it's the same thing that's happened to you as your parent.
Eric Kussin:
Yeah.
Max Chopovsky:
It's like literally parallel, because you were like, oh, there's nothing wrong. I'm just, I'm gonna tough it out, whatever it is, it's fine. And your dad, it's the exact same thing. And it's like father, like son. Let me ask
Eric Kussin:
Because
Max Chopovsky:
you this.
Eric Kussin:
the thing is our coping mechanisms, people look like we all know that drugs and alcohol can be addictive substances. And so then they get put in this category of that person has to go to AA, that person has to go to rehab. And what we don't realize is work was my addiction. And I'm staring my dad at the face when I say this, when I talk about. his habits of what my dad was a school principal who never stopped working was up until two in the morning getting master schedules ready for the next day when you are doing something that takes you away from Feeling in your body and what the emotions are of what you've just been through and allowing your body to process What you just experienced all it does is cake up and cake up and cake up Now some people might say yeah, but eric your dad didn't fall apart the way that you did So he's managing it properly and my answer to them would be like Do you know how much more my dad could possibly enjoy the time with his granddaughters when he picks them up? As much as he loves it now, his 8 on a scale could be a 10. Because there's those things build and cake up. You know when my dad falls asleep when he goes to try and watch a movie? Imagine he was actually able to sit through the whole movie instead of his brain just shutting down on him. These are the things we don't think of as mental health. But they're all mental health. Our productivity as human beings and our ability to feel and emote and enjoy is based on what we clear out of our system from what happened so there's more room for other new things to happen. And when we don't do that, we just busy ourselves.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah, yeah, you're so right. It's like you don't know what you don't know, but how much better things could be, how much more you could actually enjoy what happens to you on a daily basis. Let me ask you this, if we sort of step back and think about storytelling for a minute, if you think of some of the best stories that you've heard, so if you think of some of the best stories that you've heard, what makes for a good story in your mind?
Eric Kussin:
What makes her a good story is there being a protagonist who faces immense challenge, who in overcoming that challenge learns something that changes their perspective on how they used to view the world as part of what overcoming that challenge entailed. So Giannis Attena-Cumpo. the guy who plays for the Milwaukee Bucks, they call him the Greek Freak, won a championship in 2001. And a reporter yesterday asked him, they lost in the first round to the Miami Heat, and they were not favored the Heat at all. So Milwaukee was supposed to beat him. And the reporter asked the same question two years in a row, Giannis was this year a failure. And he looked at the guy and he said, you asked me that question last year. And he takes a deep breath and he collects himself and he goes, The Milwaukee Bucks didn't win a championship from 1971 until 2021. Were those 50 years all failures or were they learning points building up to that point? Michael Jordan played 15 years, he won six championships. Were his other nine years failures? And then he throws it on the other guy, the guy who asked him the question. He said, you don't get promoted every year. Is that a failure when you're not promoted? You don't make more money every year. Is that a failure? He's like, I assume what you do with your job. You work in order to be able to provide for your family. You work in order to be able to give money to your parents if they needed to have help. You work in order to be able to live in a nice house and in a comfortable setting. Are those failures when you don't make more money and get promoted that year? He's like, no, these are all learning experiences towards when we fail, we get better. So to me, a great story, and he told a great story, but it was from his perspective of what he's learned throughout his life and what a genius way for him to put it You have to go through challenge and in going through that challenge, what would be considered, oh, well they lost in the first round, but they were one of the favorites. That has to be a failure. No, it's a change in perspective of the way that we see the norms of this world and it allows us to live in a better and more productive way.
Max Chopovsky:
Totally, totally. It's so interesting when you kind of flip the common convention of there has to be something achieved for it to be a success, because really, that achievement would not be possible without building on the year that came before that and the year. that came before that. For Jordan to call that guy out with something that made sense to him was brilliant.
Eric Kussin:
Well, think about sort of sport of hockey, which is being played right now, right? Like I posted that on LinkedIn because I wanted people in offices to see that. And obviously a lot of the connections that I have are in the sports world. And what I brought up was the Tampa Bay Lightning were the most dominant team in hockey, I think it was five years ago. They make it to the first round of the playoffs, win what's called the President's Trophy, which is for the best record overall in the league. And they lose in the first round to like a team that no one has respect for, the Columbus Blue Jackets. And then by the way, they go on to a bunch of championship wins after that year. Did the hunger that came from losing that first year in the first round after they were expected to win, propel them to work that much harder and now win multiple championships instead of one championship? I would tell you yes, right? But people
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Kussin:
don't often see it that way. They don't realize that there's a marathon to be run and not just an individual race.
Max Chopovsky:
When you think about stories, does every story have to have a moral? And if it doesn't, is it still a good story?
Eric Kussin:
Um, I think there's stories that are there for entertaining purposes that don't necessarily have to have a moral, right? Like there are stories that are just hilarious. Like, you know, we could go back and tell a story of our friend, Nick, that he likes to grill inside, um, with his, with his Webster grill, right. And that he almost would burn apartments down. I don't know
Max Chopovsky:
Yes.
Eric Kussin:
that we learned anything from that about, you know, Kentucky ends coming up to Chicago thinking that they can grill indoors. Um, So every story, good stories, right? You think about what comedians do on stage. They oftentimes
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Kussin:
point out our flaws in our logic, right? So a moral doesn't necessarily have to be, but the stories that move us to a better place as a society, I
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Kussin:
think, necessitate having morals because we learn from them. And then stories are really, they're teaching agents is what they are. Right? Like
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
I can talk about parasympathetic, sympathetic all you want, and I'll bore the shit out of some people and I'll tune some other people out. But when I say you're at a concert and you're enjoying yourself and you're in the moment, all of a sudden you hear shots and fire go off from a gun and you have to get into the mode of crouching down, you understand the difference between parasympathetic and sympathetic response. Stories help teach. And that's why oftentimes we need story as a tool.
Max Chopovsky:
So you have in the last, call it five years, become a much better storyteller than you were before. And you were a good storyteller before, but your analogy game is on point. It's definitely on another level. So what advice would you give to those that wanna learn the craft of storytelling?
Eric Kussin:
So the hard thing about it, and it's like my brain rewired when it shut down. So in a way, I think I picked up some things that I didn't have beforehand. So I'm going to answer that question through a mental health lens, not to keep it boring in that way, but to build off of what I shared. I remember before I got sick, one of the things that prevented me from telling the story is, especially in cases where it was high pressure situations. I'm 23, 24 years old having to present to LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and RC Buford who's the GM of the Spurs. You get in your own way because that sympathetic response as you're telling the story, we all have this voice in our head that as we're telling it goes, is it going well? Are people reacting to it? What are they thinking, right? And when you start to allow yourself to go, I'm gonna tell my truth coming from my heart. regardless of how they react to it, what that does is it lowers that sympathetic response and it allows you to get into your truth. There were so many times before, when I was, before this stuff happened, where I would be telling a story and then I'd be like, oh my God, I'm about to lose my train of thought. And then I'd lose my train of thought and they'd be like, what was I gonna talk to you about on this? And
Max Chopovsky:
That's the worst.
Eric Kussin:
you still kind of lose my train of thought at times, but because I'm speaking just from the heart and I'm not worried about whether or not that happens, the. next point on my outline in my head just comes right back to me, right? So that outline doesn't go away when we don't freak out of the what if might happen, right? And I get that that's a skill that you have to build over time, but it's like stand in front of a mirror, start telling your story to yourself, and in telling that story to yourself go, okay, like I'm going to stare at myself like I'm my audience and I'm going to
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Kussin:
freak myself out to see if in freaking myself out I can And the way that you maintain it is by that, what they call that third eye in the brain, the picturing of the story in your head. Tell
Max Chopovsky:
Uh huh.
Eric Kussin:
the story from what you're picturing. Don't try to tell it from something that you memorized or some big, when you're just, when it's flowing out of you, it just one thing builds after another and then you're reminded of things and then your mind doesn't stop. And by the way, for everyone that I'm saying this to, because some people who are going to listen to this are people who are dealing with mental health challenges right now. When I was in the depths of what I was dealing with, I would watch people talk on TV, and I would go, how the hell are they saying so much? How much is so much, how is it possible that so much is coming out of their head when I'm sitting here and I go, I can't even form one sentence. I can't put like a string of 10 words together. Like they must be, my brain must be so much damaged and they must be so much smarter than me. And the reality is, it's the access to what parts of our brain we can get because we're moving the clutter out. Everyone's brain has that capability of stringing together multiple thoughts and even if we sit in solitude and we go Okay, challenge myself to think of one memory from the past and we've all had this moment and we're like man I am in such a weird bad place right now I can't even remember a single memory about myself, right? Like like it's a weird freaky place to be but like Okay, like try to think of a time period of my life and like what happened during that time period think of like a person that I did something with like Okay, I just need to pull something out of my head to prove to myself that my brain isn't completely after right now. How is that possible that that happens? And then yet, you get into a room and you're talking with someone and 400 stories can flow out of your head,
Max Chopovsky:
Totally.
Eric Kussin:
right? It all lives in there. It's all not that it all of a sudden becomes inaccessible and you're never gonna get it back again. It's that things get clouded over it. It actually is a good place to bring back the suicidal ideation. What I think what happens with suicidal ideation is when the stress trauma level builds to a certain place, let's say we typically have 17 voices that we're hearing in our head, not voices as in hallucinations, but like, I need to go pick up the groceries, right? My wife is putting the groceries away, like, what am I gonna do with my kids later? I am on this podcast right now. I'm really hungry, what am I eating for dinner? You've got these 17 things that are going on. We have this thing called neuroception, which is we're always looking out for the threat. We're wondering what is out there that may be an issue. When we're in suicidal ideation mode, the other 15 thoughts that typically are productive thoughts, what am I in the mood to eat? What do I want for dinner? Where am I gonna put the groceries away? They just become quiet and we don't have access to them. And the two voices that are saying, hurt yourself, hurt yourself, hurt yourself, are on much larger volume. And if you could hear that and understand that in the moment when you're feeling an ideation, when it feels like that magnetic pull, you can reason with yourself and go, wow, it is telling my body to lunge towards that thing. But that's only momentary because there's 15 other voices that when this calms down are gonna come back. This tunnel vision of the darkness of that tunnel for just those two voices telling me that will not be how I'm gonna be for the rest of my life. wait for those two of the voices, five of the voices, seven of the voices as I calm down. That's the reason why I do, I call it first person suicide prevention training in schools and in offices, because I need to tell people what I've been through so that if they experience it, they don't have to go through what I went through, which is, oh my God, I'm an alien. I'm the only person who's ever felt these weird thoughts before. No one else has ever been through this where my brain has broken, which guess what? makes the sympathetic nervous system go even higher, which guess what? Make the ideations even stronger.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah,
Eric Kussin:
So
Max Chopovsky:
I mean.
Eric Kussin:
if I can normalize that these are things that we all feel, that when someone then rec, oh my God, that's what that guy Eric who was in my school was telling me. Oh, but I'm not that much of a freak. Okay, he told me to follow these steps. I can't even remember these steps that he told me to follow, but the good thing is, I'm not the only freak who feels like this, like other people have felt this before. Mom, I need help, I need help. That gives you that little bit of momentary time to fight that thought off. but we're not openly talking about it because it's shame because we're saying someone chose it.
Max Chopovsky:
I mean, it's just terrifying to me to imagine, like we all have noise in our head about, you know, what we have to do, right? And it's just terrifying to me to all of a sudden have that everything go to absolute zero and then having it be completely silent. And then all of a sudden you hear, do it. Just jump.
Eric Kussin:
Okay, so you
Max Chopovsky:
That's
Eric Kussin:
want the best,
Max Chopovsky:
fucked
Eric Kussin:
so for
Max Chopovsky:
up.
Eric Kussin:
people who've not felt them before, so you know what your loved ones have felt or you might feel so that you don't freak out about it, I think every single person on this planet has been on a four-story building or higher and been on the porch or towards the ledge of that building. For some of us, we've been all the way in the high, as high as the World Trade Center when it was up back in the day or the Empire State Building. or Sears Tower, right? We went to Sears Tower back in the day, and you're enclosed, but you're still looking up going, oh my God, I'm all the way up here. But if you've been on a building where you're near the edge and there's that slight 1 16th of a second where your brain goes, what's it like
Max Chopovsky:
Mm-hmm.
Eric Kussin:
over that? And you freak out and you're like, you walk back and you go three feet back. Imagine feeling caught in that 1 16th of a second for minutes and hours at a time.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah.
Eric Kussin:
That's what it feels like to have a suicidal ideation. So hopefully people can now relate to that feeling and go, oh, when that happens, I'm not a freak, I'm not a damaged person, that is part of what is encoded in our DNA to have that reaction when the stress trauma level builds. This is my own personal opinion slash hypothesis and until someone who's called a suicidologist proves me wrong, which, can't happen because I'd like to see someone prove how a thought develops in the brain, right? No matter how many debates I have with suicide ologists, I'd rather hear from people with lived experience who've been through it is that I think we are wired for survival, food, shelter, water, clothing. We wake up every morning and we get a dopamine hit for go get the groceries, go do the work, go make the money so that I can provide for the family or provide for myself so I can live. So I can reproduce, I can keep this thing going, right? For some people, reproduction's not an important thing, but you get where I'm going with, okay, it's alive, alive, alive, alive. I think what happens, what's coded in our DNA is when the stress trauma level builds to a certain point and there's too many windows open on the computer and the sympathetic response has gone through the roof, the system goes, it's too much pain right now, abort mission, abort mission, abort mission. Where it's saying that motherboard is gonna get uh, uh, burned if you don't do something about it. Now that's an error message Because yes getting out of that pain is the only thing you could do to get out of that pain in that moment But if you're able to reason with yourself of that pain in the moment and go the pain is only temporary How do I fight that urge in some way so that when that pain goes away? I can live a fulfilling long life from here That's what we have to start talking about openly. But how many times have you heard people talk about this exact conversation openly? It never fucking happens.
Max Chopovsky:
Never. I mean, it's interesting, you know, the, the motherboard analogy and actually to an extent, your brother being in that coma for, you know, three months, that is the brain shutting itself down to protect itself. And so as your doctor said, wow, your nervous system worked beautifully. It worked exactly as it was supposed to. That is, that's exactly right. And without it, you know, we would without those mechanisms in our heads protecting us, we'd be in trouble. Now, let me ask you this. You've obviously been through a lot in the last five years, in the last 10 years, because even earlier in that 10 year period, you were on your way down, right? So the last question I have for you is, if you could say one thing to your 20 year old self, one thing, what would that one thing be?
Eric Kussin:
I think the one thing would be what you're going through is what millions of people go through and it's completely normal. You're dealing with a more extreme level of it maybe and you can't even compare those levels. So the only reason why you haven't heard it to this degree is because it's not been talked about openly in this way. But I think the reason why I continued to spiral the way that I did is because I felt like my d***. my system was damaged in such a way that has never happened before, right? Like, so which just makes you feel more and more in the whole, more and more in the whole. So the reason I share my story, I heard someone say the other day, I'm gonna write about this, they said, if I don't show my scars, no one else knows that there's the opportunity to heal their cuts. Think about how profound that is, right? Like, so that's why I tell my story, so that here are my scars. And guess what? You can get through it too. But I didn't have that on my end because it happened in 2017 instead of 2022, let's say. And so there was no one out there for my parents to be like, look at this story, this person went through it and they healed from it because that wasn't open information. So my, to my younger self, for, you know, 20 years back and be like, this is so common. It's it, you know, and if, and if you get through this, the amount of people you're going to be able to help is, is, you know, immeasurable. I mean, other than the number of people that are on this planet, keep doing what you're doing and eventually you're going to get to a better place.
Max Chopovsky:
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's. the validation when you're that early in your journey of like, hey, it's okay. And now that you're on the other end, I mean, that's the silver lining in it is if it happened to somebody like you, now there's so many other people that are benefiting from that. That does it, my brother. Eric Kussin, founder and CEO of Same Here Global, check them out at samehairglobal.org. You guys are doing amazing things. I am... so happy that this is the outlet after everything that you've been through because it really is making an impact, man, so I appreciate you.
Eric Kussin:
Thank you brother, thank you for allowing me to have the conversation and to talk about our friend, Nicky Myers.
Max Chopovsky:
Never fails, never fails, I love that guy. For show notes and more, head over to mosspod.org. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, wherever you get your podcast on. This was Moral of the Story. I'm Max Chopovsky, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time. Peace.?