May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so take a look back at some of the recent mental health discussions with The Daily Show's guests. Lil Red Howery and Michael Kosta talk the beauty of therapy. Singer Raye sits down with Desi Lydic and discusses singing about anxiety. Olivia Munn joins to talk postpartum anxiety. Author and social psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb joins Jon Stewart to break down productive vs. unproductive anxiety. Author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks the effects of social media on "The Anxious Generation." Actor Mark Duplass opens up about anxiety and depression. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: Why is therapy important?
You're listening to Comedy Central. You've been doing stand-up specials. And in this last special, well, you've talked openly about how vulnerable you've become in some of your stand-up. And you even spoke openly about some of the therapy you've tackled. Oh, yeah, I love therapy. Tell me about it. I love therapy. Give it up for therapy. Yeah.
You get therapy, and you get therapy, and you get therapy. Talk to me about the love of therapy, because it's nice to have two men openly talking about therapy. Yes, it is. There we go. And those are the women that are trying to bring us down. No.
You know, it's changed my life in so many ways. I think it's made me a funnier comic because it's not everything from a very dark place anymore. I'm able to, like, just pretty much talk about anything. But therapy has been so beautiful. Like, I'm at the happiest I've ever been because I've been able to unpack things over time. So, yeah.
You're... You're a busy guy. Are you doing, is it like phone therapy? Is it Zoom? Are you in a, you know, on set? Like, and this is the way it made me feel and, you know, that type of thing.
And then a PA knocking, hey, hey, time. But I do both, actually. It depends on what my scheduling is because I do like going in person. It's just in person is always so crazy because, like, especially if you've been crying a little bit, it's, like, awkward when you leave. Yeah. You can tell the therapist wants you to go because it's time. They keep doing this. Yeah. But you're like this.
And then... And so they're like, yeah, so, yeah.
One of the things that I appreciate so much about your music and that I think sets you apart from so many other artists is the way that you juxtapose these big sort of joyful, big band, jazzy music along with lyrics that are really raw and vulnerable and about very serious issues. You talk about body dysmorphia. You talk about mental health, sexual assault. How do you even begin...
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Chapter 2: How does music serve as therapy?
building music around those lyrics?
Well, you know, I do think music is medicine. I always say that. I think even sitting here and talking to you about these sort of heavier subjects, I get nervous. I don't really know how to address it or what to say. And I think music is a safe space. to kind of be raw and honest. And for me, that's my safe place. It's my therapy.
And yeah, you know, I think there's a lot, a lot of us have really broken and a lot of us are hurting and a lot of us are dealing with things we don't know exactly how to speak about or express, even with the people that we love. And I think music is a safe space to do that, to find healing or talk about it or just, I don't know, process it.
So that was really important to me as an independent artist. I just wanted to be honest about those things you're quiet about, you know?
You actually took quite a bit of time away from acting to spend the time with your family. You had Malcolm, and you were very open about experiencing postpartum depression.
Yeah, postpartum anxiety.
Anxiety.
Yeah, so I had been prepared for postpartum depression because we hear so much about it. But postpartum anxiety came on, and it was... I don't know if anyone here has gone through that or their partners have, but it is... It is one of the worst experiences of my life. It came on like a month or two after I had Malcolm and I woke up at 4 a.m. My eyes just pop open and I start going,
And I keep breathing like that all day long. And I keep waking up like that every day at 4 a.m. for a year.
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Chapter 3: What is postpartum anxiety?
For a full year. I just couldn't breathe. I just had so much anxiety. There was no actual thoughts. And thank God I didn't have any thoughts of self-harm or harming others. I have so much compassion and sympathy for mothers who are going through that. And I think that people don't understand it enough. And we're not compassionate enough about what it's like to be a mother and to...
birth a baby and everything that happens to your body and the hormones, but it was incredibly difficult, but I did make it through to the other side.
For social media to keep people engaged, for news organizations to keep people watching, they have to ramp up the urgency and the existential nature of the crisis. So you're sort of torn between these two impulses. One is to not participate, which would be abdicating civic responsibility. But the other would be to bathe yourself in this existential crisis. What choice do you have?
Well, we do have a choice because so look at anxiety. There's productive anxiety and unproductive anxiety. What? Well, think about it. If you didn't have anxiety, you wouldn't be able to be safe. That's why we have anxiety. It was like there's a bear. You better have anxiety. Unproductive anxiety is I'm just going to stand here. Productive anxiety is I'm going to do something about this.
See, that's so weird because my anxiety has never saved me from bears. But it often convinces me I'm not lovable. So how... How... I shared too much. How do you... How do you separate... I didn't want to watch the debates tonight, but I do work once a week now, so I have to. Because it's toxic to me. I know that. I have to participate.
But how does that anxiety of watching it, how is that a relic of something that's good for me?
It's good for you because then you can take action. By the way, I hope you're taking action on the unlovable thing. I hope you're getting some help with that.
Little thing called mushrooms, baby. Microdose away.
But it's helpful because you say, okay, there are two ways you can respond to this. You can say, I'm going to put my head in the sand and not engage, which is, I hope, not the option that people here are taking. And you can also say, oh, I'm just spinning in anxiety. I'm doom scrolling. I'm just, you know, getting all worked up. Yes. That's not helpful. That's unproductive anxiety.
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Chapter 4: How does social media affect mental health?
And then there's productive anxiety where you say, what can I do? Well, you can get involved in a campaign. You can volunteer. You can please vote. You can get the people around you to vote. There are things that you can do. The thing that you want to do is you want to say, what can I control here?
And that's where you take your anxiety and you say, it's going to motivate me to do something productive.
Something happened in the early 2010s. And my argument in the book is a tragedy in two acts. The first act is the loss of the play-based childhood. It's what anybody over 40 in this audience had. You were out with your friends after school. There was nobody supervising. You had to learn how to work out conflicts, how to face adversity.
So that's what kids have had for hundreds of thousands of years. It's part of being a mammal. You play, you develop skills. We began to crack down on that, to lock kids up in the 90s, to not let them out. So we're restricting what they most need, which is play, from the 90s through the 2000s. But mental health doesn't collapse then. It's actually pretty stable.
Then we get act two, which is the arrival of the phone-based childhood. And what that is, is in 2010, everybody had a flip phone. The iPhone had come out, but most teens had a flip phone, no front facing camera, no social media on the phone, no high speed data. And by 2020, 15, everyone's got all those other things.
Now suddenly everyone has a smartphone, front facing camera, high speed internet, social media, especially Instagram on the phone. And almost like someone turned a switch in 2013, girls in America and many other countries suddenly become very anxious, depressed, and self harming.
You mentioned that you've talked very openly about struggling with anxiety and depression. How did that feel to share that? Were you surprised by the reaction that you got?
100% surprised. And here's the thing. It didn't feel weird to share because I live in Los Angeles amongst a group of artists where this is just dinner table conversation. Totally. We're all anxious and depressed, and we're always talking about it all the time. We're trading therapists.
Oh, yeah. My therapist is right under the set right now.
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