After mental health struggles, drummer now teaches about emotional wellness

By VALERIE SCHREMP HAHN

Mike Veny was an angry kid. He’d get into trouble, hit his little brother, yell and fight at school.

“I just thought I was a bad kid,” said Veny, a keynote speaker at CHA’s 2023 Catholic Health Assembly. “I was told to stop being bad. I didn’t know why I was angry and upset all the time, but I just was.”

Veny became a professional drummer, and now he’s a corporate wellness specialist. He’s written several books, including Transforming Stigma: How to Become a Mental Wellness Superhero, and co-hosts a podcast called Bettermental

Veny further described his time growing up on Long Island in New York. He had supportive, wonderful parents, he said, but his mental health and behavior issues got him expelled from schools and placed into mental hospitals. At age 10, he tried to overdose on his medications.

Drumming at his desk led to drumming lessons, which led to enrollment in a performing arts high school. He felt happiest at the drums. Starting at age 18, he toured the country as a professional drummer. He still drums, gives drumming and wellness workshops, and also gives people tools to help their own wellness and mental health.

Focus on self-care

He asks people to focus on self-care: for daily living (things like teeth brushing and laundry), for coping (such as preparing for a busy time at work) and for healing (bringing in professionals if needed to deal with trauma).

Moral injury

From page 1 of Healthcare, a nonprofit that addresses the crisis of clinician distress. Dean and cofounder Simon Talbot, a plastic surgeon, wrote If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It’s So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First, published in April.

Finding the right language

She and Talbot talked to numerous colleagues, including a nurse practitioner who retired early because she couldn’t stand to keep turning away from her patients to enter data; a doctor who quit two jobs in five years when her hospital told her where she could and could not refer her sick patients with cancer; and a physician who said business imperatives were undermining his medical judgment and “inflicting financial toxicity” on his patients.

“What they all said was, ‘I’m struggling, I’m distressed, but burnout doesn’t quite fit. It’s not quite the right language,’” Dean said.

She and Talbot wrote an article in 2018 for the online publication STAT called “Physicians aren’t ‘burning out.’ They’re suffering from moral injury.”

Dean learned it was one of the site’s most read articles. “And that isn’t because we’re so clever,” she said. “What that said to us was that clinicians were hungry for a new way to describe their distress.”

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the next three years, Dean said, “I fielded variations of this same theme with clinicians saying to me, ‘It’s not that I can’t handle my job. I can’t handle being unable

Speaker urges self-care for those who care for others

By VALERIE SCHREMP HAHN

People who care deeply about their work and who have a strong sense of purpose and mission — like many health care workers — are at the highest risk of suffering from burnout, according to Nataly Kogan. And she wants to help.

As Veny spoke, he leaned into his camera, pretending to see his virtual audience. “You’re multitasking,” he said. “You’ve got another window open on your computer. You’re on your phone. That’s OK. I’m multitasking in my head, too.”

But if people have open loops in their head and don’t deal with them, those loops become stress, he said. Veny recommended a “brain dump” — writing down everything on your mind. “It won’t take away your problems, but it’s going to make them more manageable,” he said.

Veny also challenged his listeners to ask themselves three questions daily: What am I feeling? Where is it located in my body? What do I need right now?

The three outs

In Veny’s case, he asked himself these questions before his talk: he felt nervous about the presentation, and the feeling sat at the top of his stomach. “Just that awareness alone grounded me,” he said. He also meditated, drank some water, and told himself not to worry.

Veny also talked about castles, which have moats and drawbridges designed to keep them safe from enemies. Like someone who lives in a castle, he said people should be intentional about their boundaries and who and what they let inside. That means keeping boundaries around things like smartphones, social media and the news.

How to tell if someone else is struggling?

Veny discussed the three outs: out of character, out of nowhere, and out of the group. Examples of each would be someone who is uncharacteristically late for meetings, someone who spontaneously starts crying, and someone who isolates from friends and family.

‘Help me understand’

Don’t give advice to the struggling person, Veny said.

“One good thing you can say is ‘Help me understand.’ Another good thing you can say is ‘How can I support you?’” he suggested.

Veny said his time as a mental health patient helped him realize that when health care workers show their humanity, vulnerability and weaknesses it’s a sign of strength. Working through anger, grief and fear can help leaders become successful, he said. “Learn to chase it, and work with it, and be an example for others,” he added. vhahn@chausa.org

Kogan, a keynote speaker at CHA’s 2023 Catholic Health Assembly, is a motivational speaker who focuses on emotional fitness and well-being, the founder of Happier Inc. and the author of Happier Now, Gratitude Daily and The Awesome Human Project

She immigrated to the United States at age 13 as a refugee from the former Soviet Union and became a founder and executive at five startups and tech companies. Then, she burned out.

Now, she said she helps people become “awesome humans,” giving them the tools they need to care for themselves so they can care for others.

Lesson of burnout

Kogan said burning out taught her a powerful lesson: you can’t give what you don’t have.

“If you want to give the care that you all give, if you want to serve the mission that you all have for a long time in a sustainable way, it means you have to put your self-care and your emotional fitness at the top of your list,” she said.

Kogan defined emotional fitness as “creating a supportive relationship with yourself, your thoughts and your emotions.”

She said research shows that among workers if colleagues have better relationships with themselves, those on their team have a better chance of improving as well. The opposite is also true, she said. If someone is depleted and stressed, that stress affects others.

Check in, fuel up

Kogan shared two specific ways to practice emotional fitness: the self check-in and the mini fuel-up.

Like one would check in with a colleague, patient, friend or family member, she said people should ask themselves how they are feeling. “Especially when you acknowledge your difficult feelings or uncomfortable feelings, you’re able to experience them for a shorter amount of time and with less intensity,” Kogan said. “And at the very foundation of this practice is this idea of creating a more supportive relationship with yourself.” to do my job. I know what my patients need, and I can’t provide that for them.’”

To explain the mini fuel-up, Kogan compared humans to cars. “Your car needs fuel to do its job of being a car, right? You need energy to do your job of being a human,” she said.

Rebuilding trust

It’s important to address moral injury because when clinicians feel distressed, patients are less likely to feel satisfied with their interactions with them, and they’re less likely to follow directions and have good outcomes, she said.

Moral injury is also “wildly expensive,” Dean said. She cited a Mayo Clinic article published in February 2022 that estimated that $260 million in excess health care costs come from burnout-related turnover among primary care physicians and $4.6 billion in lost productivity and costs to replace physicians.

To move forward, Dean said hospital leadership and federal agencies need to rebuild trust with health care workers who felt betrayed during the pandemic.

‘A unifying purpose’

Dean suggested that clinicians and health care workers “flip the script” and ask administrators what they are doing to help clinicians so they can focus on patient care. She also urged clinicians and administrators to break down imaginary barriers between them and ask how they can help one another.

“In health care, we need to come together as a community to emerge from this pandemic with new language and new ways of thinking about where to go from here,” she said. “We won’t agree on everything all the time, but we have a unifying purpose.” vhahn@chausa.org

The simple practice means taking a 10- to 20-minute break for a walk outside, having a chat with a colleague, inhaling some deep breaths or pausing for prayer. Kogan urged going outside and stepping away from all screens to disconnect and refuel.

Kogan encouraged Assembly participants to make well-being and self-care a daily priority. “I want you to pause and remember that we’re all connected, that your self-care gives you the ability to give care to others,” she said. “Because if everyone makes this commitment to our emotional fitness and our well-being, think of what is possible. Think of the meaningful impact and meaningful connections we can then create with others.” vhahn@chausa.org