This episode discusses being able to highly perform at work, but not being able to function outside of work due to depression!

No one is immune to mental health issues. Mark Twain, who lived with a bipolar diagnosis, said:
“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

Bonny Llyn was besieged by a depression so great that it threatened not only to destroy her career, but it also put her life in danger.

Hour by hour Bonny fought to stay afloat during these years of the onslaught. There was no readily helpful information and it was a taboo subject in the world of business. While going to work in San Francisco Skypscrapers and for Silicone Valley Fortune 1000 companies, with the odds stacked against her, she filtered through countless types of healing modalities and tried every Bonny’s own experience with High Functioning Depression – at the height of career success but dealing with a silent, debilitating (outside of work hours) depression motivated her to speak on mental health, in particular for workplace suggested approach to combat this silent destroyer called high functioning depression.

An expert in neurodiversity and the gifted brain, Bonny ‘s how-to’s for individualized mental well-being practices/tools for success have helped many people and are well worth a listen in!

Podcast by the numbers further down the page & FULL transcript at the very bottom, let me know if this was useful to you…

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Podcast by the Numbers:

2 MINS – Just ONE tip to feel better!

4 MINS – A high functioning individual with depression
Hyper productive and hyper sensitive brains

6 MINS – Life stopped when not working and then thoughts of ending life

8 MINS – What did you do to get out of your depression?

10 MINS – Are you busy and blind to your own depression?

14 MINS – Managing Stress at work and working at home in 2020

16 MINS – The workplace stigma around mental health

18 MINS – To be human is to have emotional ups and downs

20 MINS – Warning signs of depression

ALPHA ROUND @ 24 MINS

QUOTES:

“Ultimately whats most important is to have the courage to follow your heart”
Steve Jobs

BOOKS:

The Success Principles – Jack Canfield
The Mosaic Mind – Regina Goulding and Richard Schwartz

CONTACT:

MentalHealthKeynote.com


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FULL PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Adam:

This week we’re going to be talking about mental health, and specifically high functioning depression in the workplace. We’ve got Bonny Llyn on the line, she’s a mental health speaker. Through her own trials and hardships, Bonny has found and developed a variety of ways to overcome many of life’s challenges. Having suffered from debilitating depression that left her under the covers for weeks and months, Bonny was desperate to find ways to come alive and be successful. So, I’m sure some of us can appreciate and relate to that, I know I can, I’ve had depression in my history as well. So, I’m really excited to dive into this one and I know there’s a lot of high functioning people out there who maybe feel a little bit down in the current circumstances. So Bonny, are you ready to awaken your alpha today?

Bonny:

Absolutely. Hi, Adam.

Adam:

Good to speak to you. So, that was quite a brief introduction by me. Is there anything you’d like to add or highlight? What are you all about at the moment?

Bonny:

What I’m all about is to have one little conversation with someone, a client, or with five hundred of audience, virtual meeting, to share even just one grain of salt, even just one tip to feel better.

Adam:

Well hopefully we get many tips in there today. So, can you tell us a little bit about your origins? Where are you originally from? Where are you speaking to us from today?

Bonny:

Yes. Well, I was born and raised in the island country of Taiwan. And I came out here, meaning California, to get my Master’s in Interpretation and Translation. So, of course, I worked as an interpreter for many years. But in between, because of my entrepreneurial spirit, I also did holistic healing. And I was certified as a wine educator, and I wrote a book about wine. So, after all these experiences, at one point I realized, oh, clients are flying me across the Pacific Ocean, and life was good. But that’s only on the surface, because I actually was feeling terrible inside. And that lasted for at least a few months before it dawned on me that, oh boy, I have depression. I have severe depression.

Adam:

1 Why do you, why do you, I mean this is always a tricky one to find out why. Why do you think that happened, because we’ve been talking about high functioning depression, and like you said, your clients are flying you all over the world. From the outside looking in, you know, it looks really good and, you know, you’re doing really well. Do you know now, looking back, why you became depressed?

Bonny:

Sure. So clinical depression has so many causes it’s quite complex to manage. So, I think one thing is certain brains are considered neurodivergent. Meaning, our brain is in the spectrum, like our sexual orientation. And on the two ends of the spectrum, these are neurodivergent brains. So, they are gifted brains, or neurodivergent brains, that are just hypersensitive. But these are also hyper-productive and creative brains. So, the sensitivity makes it more susceptible to environmental toxins and chemicals and these potentially heavy metals accumulate over a lifetime and, eventually, what it does is weird juju to our behaviors and emotions. But in addition to that, there’s also the traits of those like superdriven and ambitious traits that, this sort of brain, the flip side of it, could be seen as the anxiety symptoms or the bipolar, or OCD symptoms.

Adam:

So, for you personally, I mean how long were you kind of functioning to a high level with it, and what happened ultimately?

Bonny:

I was kind of always functioning in a high level, so to speak. But what ultimately happened was on the off workdays I couldn’t run errands. I had a hard time even getting up in the morning. If I wasn’t working, everything stopped. So then when I showed up to work, I was a different animal. And it was alarming because on the off workdays, there was thought of ending my life. And there was a part of me that was alert enough that I knew, I’ve got to do something about it.

Adam:

What did you do? I mean, how long would you? You were depressed and how did you get out of that?

Bonny:

Oh, it lasted quite a while. I think between six months to nine months. Depends on, like, the small actions I took, and people I reached out. I knew that my former therapist could no longer help me, because we explored talk therapy. And I, at that point, I was not considering seeing a psychiatrist or taking antidepressants. I was…somehow have that

2 misconception and fear, a huge fear, that I would become addicted to drugs. As I had seen other people experience. And so, therapy was out and anti-depressant was out. I had many late night or early morning sessions with my life coach, who is also my spiritual teacher, and so I did more soul-searching sessions and work. So, it started… I think what helped ultimately were, again, so many different things, it’s always a puzzle piece. A lot of it’s a complete puzzle that we have to put in the right pieces at a corner and complete the rest of it. And the pieces I put into a corner were to work on my diet. For me personally, I couldn’t have sugar; I couldn’t have gluten. And two, the continuous healing sessions. Whether it was a session with my spiritual teacher for the heart and energetic healing work, or going to a meditation retreat. So that’s another corner of the puzzle to go in really, really deep to see what was missing. What was my soul craving, what was my heart craving, but I wasn’t giving myself? And another piece of the puzzle was to have different conversations with people, and that, in a way, is a mental shift, like, rather than feeling so alone, starting to feel or to have a confidence that I could actually build a connection or relationship with people and it could be just having interesting conversation with strangers. So, working on my social life was another piece of the puzzle.

Adam:

You mentioned that you changed some of your diet, and I saw in some of your information, you know, ‘Foods to avoid if you have depression.’ I thought that was an interesting one, and you obviously mentioned modifying your diet. I mean, what are your thoughts? Obviously, you can’t be specific to all the listeners, but foods to avoid if you have depression. What are your thoughts around that?

Bonny:

The elimination of added sugar. For some extreme cases, that extreme moment, like back then, when I was at the depth of my severe depression, I had to not have sugar at all, meaning the more sugary fruit, or dry fruit. I eliminated that. So, it was quite extreme, but I had to sort of cleanse my body.

Adam:

Yeah. If someone’s, you know, feeling depressed and listens to this, and they think they’re in depression, or close to depression, and they’re trying all sorts of things. Sugar, that’s a healthy thing to do anyway, but that could be something if you really, you know, you want to cover all your bases and you really want to start to look to get out of depression, that can be something that at least helps the process.

Bonny:

Yes, absolutely. Sugar does weird things to our brain, for our behaviors.

3 Adam:

Did your work ever suffer from your depression? Because it sounds like you just switched into a different person when you were at work and then it, kind of, all the depression came out after it. Did it ever cross over into the workplace.?

Bonny:

No, that’s the thing. That’s why I was sort of blind to my own depression for a long time. While I was, like, multitasking, passing the wine exam, wine tasting, and working on my interpreting career. And also, I actually had a few other business ideas, fire burning on the back burners. It just didn’t cross my mind I was suffering, in a way, because I had extreme late nights. And I was also starting to be sort of socially seclusive.

Adam:

Yeah, I know what it’s like when you kind of don’t want to talk to people, and it’s a slippery slope like that. For you, what was the rock bottom?

Bonny:

It was the thought of taking my life. And it was New Year’s Day, and of course it was supposed to be festive, and yet there was nothing to celebrate, I thought, in my own life, besides the pinnacle of career success, right, and besides having a beautiful and lovely condo in San Francisco, and having a sweet cat, for whom I was being a delinquent mother to. So, lying there in bed, I didn’t have the strength or physical, as well as mental strength, to get up and, and the thought of just…this is it. This is my life and… and that’s all I had. Should I go? Can I actually continue? And… and what happens? What might it look like if I continued? Are there people out there like me? So, all of these thoughts are going through my mind. And… and the thought of, like, leaving my family, and my then really, really young nephew, and having an unimaginable impact on my family and my close friends kind of was a loud enough alarm to sort of shook me to action in a way. But it was several things. It was that and it was feeling that I have something to do in the world. This can’t be it! What if there are people like me? What if I could get to the other side? Maybe I can help!

Adam:

I know. Obviously, it sounds like the work was this, what was getting you up and out of bed and out of the house. But, obviously, since the pandemic in 2020, a lot of people aren’t working so much, and then even people who are working, they’re working from home so that, you know, they don’t have maybe the routines to get out the house. And so I wonder your thoughts about managing stress at work, and even now, managing stress at working from home? Which is not just the entrepreneur now, it seems to be a lot, well the world, a

4 lot of the world is having to juggle working from home with, a lot of cases, the family in and around where they’re working. What are your thoughts around that?

Bonny:

Yeah, two things. One is, it’s kind of always about self-care. So mental health is total health. There’s no separation of our physical from our mental and emotional and, yeah, and our psychological health. And so self-care could be about carving out five minutes at the top of the hour to do a deep breathing exercise. And I’m talking about really just three or five minutes of continuous deep breathing. And you can see it as a form of meditation, but it’s not the sit-down sort of quiet your mind of meditation. It’s actually working our body, working our breathing. And it actually can eliminate toxins. And so that’s one thing. So at the top of the hour, whatever you do, stop and give yourself that wellness spa time. And for the next hour, it could be about giving your eyes a rest. And every time when I do that myself, and just open my eyes up for the next 55 minutes or two hours of work, I really always feel better. So, that’s one thing – self-care. And then, two, self-compassion. Of course, as our demands from our life, work and the demands from a family – they don’t end. And so at some point we have to put a stop to the disruption, and to the chaos, and say to ourselves, “I can do it.” One. And two, what do I need at this moment? Rather than, we’ve been all about taking care of others, it’s about taking care of ourselves, like, I am okay and I can breathe. And I can take a break, and I’m doing great. I’m doing well. I’m doing okay, and I’m good.

Adam:

What are your thoughts around this, the workplace stigmas on mental health, mental health conditions?

Bonny:

So, there’s several things. One is to recognize the brain diversity of it, right? No two fingerprints are the same, and no two brains are the same. So it takes all kinds to create the success of a company, and productivity can look differently for different brains with different personalities, and your very highly functional workers, or high productive star, may actually require a different kind of workstation setup, and they may need to work at a more quiet environment, potentially. So recognizing the brain diversity. And two, it has to be a conversation about normalizing the mental health. Meaning we could genuinely reach out to coworkers on virtual meeting, or on the phone, or in person and ask the caring question of “how are you”?

Yes, everyone asks that, and everyone just answers it mindlessly, but it’s about asking for the second time, to show that you really care. Like, ‘I mean, how are you?’ To help people open up. And managers can do that, the supervisors can do that, to set an example of it’s

5 okay to talk about mental health. It’s okay to talk, talk about what we’re experiencing emotionally, to normalize that conversation because no one is 100% mentally healthy. That’s a myth and makes us not human. To be human is to have emotions, emotional ups and downs.

Adam:

Yeah, I see. I saw on your website to make people feel, I don’t know, that they’re not alone, it’s saying since the pandemic, I know stats can come from all sorts of places, but between 41 to 79% of US adults working or not are experiencing symptoms of mental health through this period in 2020. And exactly like we say, you know it’s… There’s always, everyone on the surface, you know, might look all good and well, but, you know, there’s always something going on behind the scenes, and everyone has challenges and struggles.

Bonny:

Absolutely. And the suicide rate sadly also went up. At least, 10% more, and that was just within the first two months of the pandemic. We don’t have the latest number yet. Even before the pandemic, we lost one American every 11 minutes to suicide.

Adam:

If someone thinks they’re depressed, they very likely are, but what about the early warning signs that you can maybe personally spot yourself? If you’re the difference between, you know, just having an off day, or feeling slightly sad and heading in the direction of depression, what early warning signs can you see personally, and also what things can you try and do before you become, you know, fully depressed.?

Bonny:

That’s such a great question, Adam. One early sign is when you’ve been feeling blue for a while, and a while could be more than three, five days. In addition, recognizing different emotional profiles of depression symptoms. Feeling blue, feeling sad is only one symptom. You could be feeling very irritated, or easily irritable. That’s another symptom of depression. And then there are physical symptoms of losing weight, gaining weight for no reason. And either you sleep too much or you can’t sleep. Having special cravings for food like overeating, or no appetite at all. These are all warning signs.

Adam:

So, if you start to notice, you know some of these symptoms we’ve talked about here, is there anything else in terms of to prepare yourself or make yourself more resilient to becoming fully depressed?

Bonny:

6 Yes, absolutely. The first step should always be reaching out to the professionals. Reaching out to a talk therapist, a licensed psychologist, or a non-licensed therapist who’s very experienced, and very skilled and who is the right personality and professional profile or style fit for you. And that take some interview and take some time to find the best therapist for you, but it’s worth the effort. So, seeking out professional help – psychologist, therapist, and it needs to, psychologists who are the kind of psychologists who are willing to sit down and have a meaningful conversation. Who’s not just ready to give you the first antidepressants to try within five minutes you’re actually in the office.

Adam:

Yeah, I was curious. Do you still do the translations, or was that something you had to change to make some significant changes for your own mental health.

Bonny:

So, the interpreting work wasn’t the source of my depression. And it wasn’t that lifestyle because this was healthy and I set my own schedule. But it’s very much about where I was in terms of what I was looking for from life, and the, again, the accumulated toxins in my brain, and locked in my cells that I wasn’t able to detox or cleanse out. So I had to do a lot of functional medicine type of diet and supplements help.

Adam:

And how long ago was it when all this happened?

Bonny:

The depth of my depression was about six, seven years ago.

Adam:

And have you ever had a period since then where you thought actually that was either, you know, very close to depression, or that was another challenging period but then, obviously, from what you’ve learned since you kind of identified it and did your best to get away from that, as it were.

Bonny:

Yes, what I’m sharing with people is it’s not about not having depression or changing our brain. Of course, I think there are energetic healing that we could actually change our brain. However, it is about knowing the solution, having all the puzzle pieces for our selfcare to manage our depression. Know what kind of support we need – physical support and the support network – like, know the professional medical support as well as knowing ourselves, and set up that network for us. And having, again, the different tools, like taking your wellness break every hour or a few times a day, or when you need to, take a nap in the middle of the day, if you could afford that, since we’re working from home. And I also learned that a lot of people aren’t taking the PTO’s, paid time off. This is a good time to take the PTO, even if you stay at home, but just lounging around and give yourself a break.

Adam:

Moving to The Alpha round. I like to start that off with – is there a particular quote that really is either a favorite or really sums up your approach to life? Any springs to mind?

Bonny:

I do like this quote from Steve Jobs. And it wasn’t your typical Silicon Valley quote. And he said, “Ultimately, what’s most important is to have the courage to follow your heart”. We’re all pretty brainiac. We’re very intelligent and intellectual but that sometimes can, our emotions are what we really need, and our depression symptoms could actually hide behind that intelligence or intellectuality. And so, if we, when we can, remind ourselves to have the courage to follow our heart and listen to our intuition, it makes a difference. It helps us recognize the signs of depression and anxiety, and other mental health symptoms and challenges. And to start doing something about it.

Adam:

Yeah. And when it comes to books has there been an impactful book for you? Or, it doesn’t have to do with depression or in this sort of realm of the brain, but it may do, just an impactful read for you at the time?

Bonny:

Overall, I really like these two books. One, The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. And the other book is titled The Mosaic Mind.

Adam:

I’ve never heard of that one.

Bonny:

By Regina Goulding, and Richard Schwartz.

Adam:

Okay. What, what’s the general kind of premise behind The Mosaic Mind?

Bonny:

8 Yes, the mosaic mind talks about using internal family systems, i. f. s., as a way of therapy self-therapy as well as professional therapy, to unearth the traumas and start dealing with our traumas. Traumas could be our hidden skeleton behind the depression.

Adam:

Good recommendations. And what’s the best, what’s the best way people can connect with you if they want to continue the conversation?

Bonny:

Yes, they can sign up to get a free gift on my website and it is

Adam:

mentalhealthkeynote.com

What are some key things that you feel like we haven’t covered when it comes to, you know, depression? The subject, dealing with it, identifying it. Is there anything else that you really feel like hasn’t been said yet, you really want to drive home that point?

Bonny:

Yes. So, it has to do with what I’ve learned, personally experienced, and from conversation with people. The unspoken traumas or the unhealed traumas, again, could be one of the causes for depression. And even anxiety, as well. So at some point, when people are ready to start that journey of looking in, and looking to the past, and heal the trauma, and deal with the grief. And certainly, once certain work has been done in that department, it’s also very much about looking forward and be ready to transform your life, transform your mind, transform your inner conversation for the future. Supposed to keep digging into the past. And it becomes a never-ending journey of dealing with traumas. It’s good to unearth some, and then start dealing with that, and having that recognition, but it’s also very much about future looking.

Adam:

Definitely. Well, Bonny, it’s been an absolute pleasure today. Thank you so much for the time.

 

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