Future of Mental Health with Kavya Rao

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Source: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/shake-up-the-world/episodes/Future-of-Mental-Health-Resillience—Kavya-Rao-efcjoc

Description

Today, for this episode of Shake Up The World Podcast, we have with us Kavya Rao who has taken up many hats in the past. She has worked as a consultant psychologist, teacher and also as a skill trainer for adolescents. Currently, Kavya works with Mamta Health Institute for Mother and Child, an organisation based in India where she develops awareness tools for maternal health and adolescent health.  As her interests primarily lie along the intersections of psychology and education, The topic of focus for this discussion would especially be surrounding the importance of mental health through awareness based education tools. 

We do a bit of a deep dive into her work through the organisation in terms of activity based learning approaches for pregnant mothers, adolescent teenagers and even parents. How can we help them become more efficient in handling challenges and remain resillient during times of stress? 

https://www.facebook.com/mamtaHIMC/ (Facebook Page)

http://mamta-himc.org/ (Website)

Shreyas: Hey folks, today for this episode of Shake Up the World podcast we have with us Kavya Rao. To give you a bit of background, Kavya has taken up many hats in the past. She has worked as a consultant psychologist, teacher, and also a skill trainer for adolescents. She has also worked on maternal health as an SBI Youth for India fellow. Currently she works with MAMTA Health Institute for Mother and Child, an organization based in India where she develops awareness tools for maternal health and adolescent health.

The topic of focus for this specific episode would be surrounding the importance of mental health and how we should develop resilience in this regard. So stay tuned as we join in with Kavya and let’s take it forward.

Kavya: Hi, I am Kavya and I’m a psychologist by profession. I have spent quite a bit of time in this field and I’m still in the phase of learning because this field is really vast. I’m working with an organization called MAMTA Health Institute for Mother and Child based out of India, spread across 22 states.

Three years back there was this project where mental health was introduced to our core aspects and we’ve seen our project grow from there. Ideally we used to target only antenatal care, postnatal care, nutrition - talking about how to be safe during delivery, what are the danger signs, and nutritional importance for adolescents and reproductive health components. But there was little focus on mental health.

Through this particular project, we are trying to focus on improving the overall mental health of women and adolescents. For women, we concentrate mainly on the antenatal and perinatal care wherein we concentrate on spousal interaction because when you look at the situation in rural India, the interaction in households is not similar to what you’d find in urban communities.

Shreyas: So you mean like before birth, during birth and after birth - during those three phases, providing information or awareness in terms of how they could cope with themselves during those situations. It’s a bit difficult for them to comprehend, is that what you mean?

Kavya: Through our awareness programs, we try and make them understand about the challenges which are to come during pregnancy, how to handle them and how family members can play an important role in making them adapt this entire procedure in a smooth manner.

Besides that, there are a couple of challenges when it comes to mental health after pregnancy, like postpartum depression and severe mood changes. Women are supposed to be aware of this along with the family members. Our awareness sessions focus on identifying warning signs because they can be really intense if not taken care of, and how they can reach out to health systems and healthcare providers.

Mainly we are trying to promote health-seeking behavior in terms of mental health. We are working intensively with these two age groups to build their self-esteem and improve their overall psychological well-being.

Shreyas: Let’s deep dive a bit into maternal health itself. When you were explaining about the awareness which you give during the three phases, how does it look like? We got a bit of idea about how it mostly comprises after the pregnancy in terms of postpartum depression and things like that. What usually happens or what kind of resources or knowledge do you provide to them during the prenatal phase?

Kavya: Our idea was to not advise the community. We do not do the work of advising the community, but we try to make them aware and help them understand through their own efforts. So in order to make this model successful, we took an approach called a peer-led approach.

An outsider going and telling them or trying to make them understand would not make them that receptive. If one of the community members is trying to provide the same sort of information, they would be more receptive.

The entire module works on training community members - let’s say peer leaders. In simple terminology, we take maybe 20 leaders, and then intensively train them on mental health awareness sessions and other reproductive health matters. These people conduct group sessions. Each group comprises of not more than 25 people because overcrowding leads to a lot of miscommunication.

Every peer leader has a couple of groups under them and they have to deliver these awareness sessions. We monitor them closely in the presence of program managers and outreach workers of the districts where the projects are going.

The content of the awareness sessions primarily includes what changes are likely to happen in a woman’s life during pregnancy, which includes baby blues. Initially, a lot of women are prone to nausea, not eating properly, sleeping very little or oversleeping, and aversion to some food that they used to enjoy before. Besides that, irritability in day-to-day life because the body is going through a lot of changes.

We make them aware that these changes happening within them are normal. We help them adapt behavior modification techniques on how they can monitor their thoughts and make themselves feel better. These modules are in the form of flip books, dialogue cards, or awareness charts with the help of videos, which are primarily developed by the government of India, NIMHANS, or the American Psychological Association.

To keep it more relatable to them, we try and use maximum resources which are based out of Indian communities because they can associate and learn from them better.

Shreyas: I think the peer-to-peer learning approach is quite relatable. In fact, that’s how we usually study in schools and colleges - doing group study and learning from each other and so on. I was also thinking about behavior modification, which you mentioned. How does it work? Isn’t that a bit of a difficult aspect to modify existing behavior?

Kavya: Yes, it is. It is very difficult. When you look at any project, the changes that you observe in a livelihood project are quite visible. But when you talk about changes in projects which aim at health and education, because it is purely based on behavior change, it takes quite a lot of time because people have to totally modify their way of thinking, their values in line with what is actually correct.

So it is pretty much challenging, but that’s where the catch lies. Because it is challenging, we intend to do the same though it takes more time, because in the long run this is something that can be beneficial for them.

Shreyas: So maybe a case study would be interesting because not all of us might be from this background. Maybe an example would help us imagine or understand this better.

Kavya: Let’s take an example of a woman who has recently conceived and the body is going through a massive amount of changes. She already has three children at home and has conceived for the fourth time since birth control is not very actively taken care of. It’s a joint family.

There are financial burdens because it’s a family based out of agriculture. They have very little income to support themselves. She’s conceived for the fourth time and there are massive changes happening. One, majorly because there’s financial crunch. Two, because there is no family support at all. Her body is not able to take the amount of pressure it is undergoing.

This woman was not feeling inclined towards the pregnancy. She could not attach herself to the child growing inside her body. So constantly she kept doing things which would either bring her some illness or spoil her mood regularly, or pick fights with neighbors to take out that frustration. There is a lot of emotional distress.

This is also a very sensitive topic which she might not be willing to confide in her husband or even a family member. The idea is to make them speak. What happens in our community is nobody wants to listen to what you want to say. Nobody is there to take advice, but they want to be heard. They want somebody who can listen to what they’re going through and probably just nod, acknowledge, or ensure that you empathize with them.

This woman needed support in terms of handling moods and changes. There was an immediate counselor who was present. Here we’re talking about lay counselors which includes ASHA, ANM, and Anganwadi workers, or any trusted person that she finds comfort in sharing all these details.

Upon sharing these things, the framing of sentences - I’ll tell you how it happens. If she’s telling that she’s not able to feel any love towards the child growing inside her, we try and tell her not to focus on loving the child right at the beginning, but probably she can start taking care of her health because if anything happens to her, she’s the first one to suffer, later comes the child.

So in order to take care of herself, she needs to eat healthy, communicate whatever distress she is going through to some trusted source, and reach out for help. Very simple method.

The idea is to simply reframe it saying when you need food to survive and you need nutrition to have some energy in your life, the only source of energy for a child is through you. If you do not eat, the child will fall sick. Then you have to rush to the hospital, which will again mean you’ll have to bear a lot of financial charges.

So associating their day-to-day lives with the complexities which lie outside helps them come towards a zone to bring in change.

Shreyas: So framing the sentence itself in a different way with a different point of view, and that in a way gets embedded in them and that changes the behavior itself.

Kavya: I would not say it changes the behavior, but here we are concentrating more on introspection. If I tell children not to consume a lot of sweet candies, do you think they’ll stop eating them? You just need to put across a lot of situations and give them time to reflect on what they should be doing and what they should not.

We try and do the same thing. We give them situations to understand what is beneficial for them, what can give them a healthy lifestyle. And if they adapt that healthy lifestyle, what are the benefits that they get out of it?

Shreyas: So in a sense, it mostly comprises awareness. We can give them material, we can tell them or guide them towards behaving or responding in certain ways, but then it’s up to them to actually modify their behavior.

Kavya: Yes, totally. But because you’re putting so much effort to bring in change, you can’t just leave them midway. So we constantly have follow-ups. What happens if you constantly keep listening to good things, if you try and give somebody a positive atmosphere constantly - out of 10 things, you at least adapt one or two.

So there is constant checking on them, feedback, review, and being there whenever they require, which ensures a safety, a level of confidence and trust. When they feel important, and because of that feeling, they try and adapt changes. Certain changes would be very minimal, but some little changes in order to stay healthy.

Most of the problems can be solved if someone listens to them, and most of the time, they don’t have that.

Shreyas: Though we are concentrating on maternal health right now, but I would just like to give you an instance of adolescents. Before beginning with the mental health awareness sessions for adolescents, I always used to ask my students - and I ask my population that I’m working with right now - what is the main thing that they want? When growing up, having challenging teen issues, what is that one thing that they wish would happen?

Most of the answers are: nobody is listening to us. Nobody wants to listen to us. We want to be heard. All they want is for someone to lend their ears and listen to them when they’re trying to talk and understand what their opinion is.

If you do not have that healthy atmosphere at home which is not giving you a chance to speak your mind out or express yourself when in distress, it ultimately puts you in the most miserable state. Even friends can’t help. But when you do not have your trusted members with you, when you don’t have those people who are supposed to be taking care of you, paying attention to your needs or trying to listen to you when you are in some sort of stress, that puts them in much more distress than anything else.

The current scenario of this entire lockdown is making them more distressed in terms of not being able to put across their thoughts, not finding that social space to move around. Staying in one particular place and not moving around might be a solution for people who are introverts, but not those people who like to walk around and explore. If you confine them to one place, they already feel restricted, which causes distress.

Adding to that, if you do not have any support system trying to understand or give you a chance to express yourself, we’re trying to bring everybody on one platform. We train not only the adolescents and inform them about what are the mental health challenges and coping mechanisms, but also whoever is trained in the mental health model - peer leaders, teachers, and medical officers associated with them.

All of them are trained together, not in one setting, but they’re trained on the same aspects. So that when an adolescent wants to reach out to somebody for help, they are aware about what they want to actually talk about and how they can probably help them with their problems.

Shreyas: Kavya, in the first phase, you mentioned that especially the adolescents are saying that nobody actually listens to them. But I was also wondering if there is a stigma associated with even sharing what you have, especially with adolescents. When it comes to mental health or sharing anything regarding your own emotional troubles, it’s considered to be somewhat of a stigma in society. Is there influence of that in your experiences with adolescents?

Kavya: What happens when you have persistent headaches and negativity coming across in your life on a day-to-day basis? They have no answer. Their response would be: where will we go? Who will listen to us? Who can we go and talk to about these topics?

The awareness about mental health is less and mental health is always considered to be a separate domain and not a part of overall health. When you talk about health, you have mental health also included in that. But we have stigmatized it so much that it has become physical health and mental health separately.

In that case, adolescents remain confused as to whom to approach. Can we approach or not? What happens if somebody gets to know? Will my family support me? Or is this a problem which I’m actually going through?

When you analyze all these things, the first thing is lack of awareness about these existing problems. A lot of times, what happens is - do we actually record our thoughts? Do we actually see if our thoughts are progressing in a positive manner or going in a negative manner?

Today, how many of us actually do that? I have to ask you this question. In 24 hours, how many times do you pay attention to what you’re actually thinking or what is going on in your mind when you’re doing something else? Are all the thoughts that are coming to your mind positive or not?

Shreyas: The answer would be… I’m not sure exactly, but it does go up and down for me sometimes.

Kavya: How many have actually observed: this is what I used to think before, this is how my thoughts used to be before, this is how I was as a person before, but because of this entire lockdown, I had a chance to introspect my behavior. I used to be so negative, but I have become a positive person. I am trying to see my own actions and thoughts.

I am particularly talking about reflection and improvising on your thoughts. It is a constant process of becoming a better person every day. We try and do a lot of things to make ourselves look really good physically. But are we doing the same thing for our mental health? Are we actually trying to reframe our thought process? Are we trying to tell ourselves, “No, I am thinking wrong. This is not what I’m supposed to be thinking.”

Most of the time before saying anything or before actually letting that thought in, it could be a challenge with an adolescent, a mother, or a woman.

Shreyas: It’s not just adolescents. Even us, we can practice and improve our mental health through reflection and so on. I guess it’s still a bit more abstract. If I say that I have to record my thoughts, what do you really mean by that?

Kavya: The intention of putting that across was - we don’t do that quite often because we have not given enough importance to our mental health because there is stigma in us. Because whenever you have to accept your mistake as a person, you have that apprehension. What if I am wrong? You have that fear. What if I say something and I am judged for that? So that fear sets you back.

Coming to the reflection part of it…

Shreyas: So you mean to say like journaling or writing a diary might be really good for mental health?

Kavya: That’s just one of the techniques. Works for me. What works for me may not work for somebody else. For some people, it can be probably expressing it out loud. They might just talk. For some people, it can be through performing arts. For some people, it is through painting, putting your inner thoughts out and looking at them and analyzing them.

It’s quite essential because unless you constantly introspect your behavior, you cannot bring in any positive change in it. You wouldn’t know because most of the time we have that fear - if I say this, I might become a wrong person or I might be judged. So that fear of being judged puts you aside.

If you do not want to be judged, if you don’t want to talk to somebody, these are certain basic things that you can do properly. Analyze your thoughts and see where you are going wrong.

I’m not going to restrict them to the mainstream learning methodology wherein they just come, learn, repeat, go, write in exams and forget. That’s the beauty of the subject psychology. You can help the person become better because it has helped you to become better.

I performed excellently well during my graduation and post-graduation because somewhere I was blessed to have some teachers who did give me that insight. There was a lot of discussion, there were activities. My professors were old, but there was so much discussion, such platforms to share your inner inhibitions and fears. We were given a non-judgmental platform to speak about anything and everything we wanted to.

So the idea was to give the same to my children as well. We hardly had classroom learning. It was more of wherever you are, just sit and start learning. It wouldn’t be through what is there in the textbooks. If we had to explain a theory, we would just go down deep digging into some random person’s story.

That person need not be an important person at all. It could be anybody. That person need not be a famous person. You can just pick any person because every life has experience and every experience is valuable. There is something to learn from there.

We started following that approach and I saw how receptive my students became. There were days when I wanted to do the mainstream teaching, but they would not permit me to do it because they wanted to learn in a fun manner. So it did make a lot of difference.

Shreyas: How do these activities look like? Is it a part of the NCERT existing curriculum which they already have or is it like an after-school session?

Kavya: There are a lot of activities. Curriculum is improving constantly and people are bringing about a lot of changes. But my time was like - oh my god, such black and white textbooks. I am such a colorful person. I cannot associate with it.

So the same thing was for my students. The 11th and 12th standard textbooks were so boring that a child would just go mad looking at them. So the idea was not to make them feel that way, but try and make that extremely boring thing fun-oriented.

It’s similar to your mother giving you chapati every day in the same manner. When you have it for two, three days, on the third day you will start demanding some colorful food. So what she does - the same chapati she puts in little sweet corn and capsicum and puts tomato ketchup and gives it to you and you feel like you’re having some exotic dish.

So you just have to do that. The way you project things, the way you make it easy for them to accept it and adapt it, they start finding interest in that. And then you don’t have to chase them behind marks because they will remember whatever stories that you have told in class, whatever examples which are real.

What happens - I think apart from Newton’s third law, I do not remember anything because I could not experience them myself practically. I’m sorry, maybe I was dumb. But actually, it is the case with a lot of people.

Shreyas: Even I still feel like I don’t know what happened to all the things I’ve learned. I have forgotten most of the dates and figures in history and geography. Did it really serve its purpose by giving us this information or not?

Kavya: I wouldn’t want to blame history here. Trust me, history was one of my savior subjects. Though the textbook was really boring, it totally depends on the teacher who’s teaching you.

I never had a great history teacher, but there was one teacher who taught me in grade nine and I remember whatever portion he had covered because the way he explained it - he came from Bihar, he had this very funny lingo while explaining any story. It looked like he was actually doing a Bollywood movie. He would bring so much masala, so much action in the story just to explain a very simple concept of how invasion happened in India, what all states were captured and how people fought. We could visually imagine everything.

But on the contrary, we had a mathematics teacher who could probably make that subject extremely interesting. But actually, it was so flat that I started failing in mathematics. The fear of mathematics which sunk in then still remains. The moment I see numbers, my entire confidence level goes down because the foundation has been so poor.

What I want to say is the kind of foundation that you set for anybody - a child, a woman, an adolescent - it is very important because that is the thing that they take further in their life. You always tend to go back in time and think and then proceed further.

So if you give them something which is really healthy and interesting, it will give them positivity. It will give them hope to overcome anything which lies ahead of them. But if you set a foundation which will just fall within a couple of minutes or eventually they’ll not have anything to learn from their past.

So it is very important to have something which generates excitement and curiosity while learning or attending any awareness sessions.

Shreyas: This really makes sense. In fact, approaching them at a very young age with such a topic of mental health itself would prove to be very valuable for them later on for years to come in their life experiences.

Kavya: Actually, there is a catch. If I go to 10 to 14 year olds - this is an age wherein you really need to stimulate them because the moral component is building at that time. They come from that “my mind, my pencil” to sharing habits. They are quite malleable. Based on their environment and their upbringing during that time, they could really change.

Children are beautiful to work with. I cannot directly go with the package of mental health awareness to a child which they will not be able to understand and I’ll be putting the child in a lot of distress. So rather than this, the approach is to first expose them to the beautiful side of psychology first and how it can probably harm their mental health or how it can probably make them a better person.

When the child starts identifying themselves and identifying those awareness factors, then you can gradually bring in the concept of illness.

Shreyas: When you are dealing with different groups - right from women giving birth during that phase and giving them awareness, and also dealing with children and adolescents - you have different approaches for different people in this way of spreading awareness. I see that there are different ways you adopt with respect to the people who are involved. With children, what you are saying is that it’s totally different and you want them to get appreciative of psychology itself, and then slowly get into the topic.

Kavya: Not just for children, for everybody. Mental health is a stigma like menstruation was a stigma once upon a time. Menstruation still continues to be a topic of stigma, but the intensity is a little lesser than before. People now speak about it openly because it took some good souls a couple of years to convince people that it is not something bad.

Same with mental health. So every group that we work with, the idea is to give them the positive side of mental health, the positive side of psychology - how it can make you a better person, how by adapting certain things, you can have a comfortable life and happy thoughts, or maybe constant interaction with your husband, with your family members, or have a good rapport with your parents.

When you’re exposed to the positive side first and then gradually bring it to their notice that if these things are not practiced, it can lead to these problems - not tell them that you are prone to these problems because the moment you tell somebody that they can also encounter such things, they get defensive. They get into that problem more. “I am also prone to all this. So what is the reason? What is the use of adapting good changes?”

So the way you tell them, the way you project anything, it is important.

Shreyas: It’s really interesting, Kavya. I’m just lost in a lot of thoughts now. I was also wondering - say there are these interventions in the school. For psychology, you mentioned that you help them to appreciate psychology through such examples and activities, and then they get interested and slowly you take them to the next level. Is there also a counseling front or a listening space for them where they could share things which they might not be possibly able to share in classrooms?

Kavya: It depends on the infrastructure. Not all government schools are equipped with counselors per se, but when you look at international schools, there is a separate counseling setup. You cannot expect everybody to be a part of international schools, so in order to bring in that system, we’re training the teachers.

In schools which have only one headmaster or maybe one teacher, it becomes challenging because you run out of options. So you also train the Anganwadi worker, ASHA worker, the nurse, so that a child has various options or anybody for that matter - not just children, but everybody who needs help has many options to reach out for help.

What you have mentioned - the referral systems or maybe a safe space to talk - is still in progress because a lot of counselors are still not on board when it comes to school education. But maybe that is a progressive field. Eventually, most of the schools will start having that and a child will have a safe space within the education setup.

I have come from a setup where there were three specialized people only for children to put across their thoughts and those three people did excellently well in their job. That was a safe space, but it is not available for all schools. But it is essential that a child has that space to go and vent out their emotions and put across their inhibitions and find some solutions to their problems while discussing it with somebody.

Shreyas: The question which I wanted to ask is how can we become more resilient individuals in terms of if there is a person who has had trauma? I can understand there is no general answer to this, but you could give an overview and at least it might be helpful to someone who is listening to this.

Kavya: I would not call myself an expert in trauma counseling, but with little experience that I have with my community, the strongest point which came in my observation was having a strong support system around them.

What happens if you feel you are the only person who is going through it - you tend to sink into that feeling very soon and give up very easily. But when you know that you have 10 people standing with you and they will not let you fall, you don’t give up on yourself that easily.

When I said we have all the sessions done in groups, each group is very closely related to each other. When you talk about a three-year project, it’s similar to a cohort setup in graduation - the way you have your cohesive groups, an intimate group wherein you both share everything.

So these groups of women and children are closely related to each other in terms of learning and sharing because they know all of them are here for a purpose - learning, sharing, helping each other in terms of needs.

For trauma, my biggest understanding came from providing them with support groups and immediate help where they can go in terms of any psychological help necessary or any physical help. You need to tell them where they can approach, who is the right person they should contact because a lot of times what happens when you run short of information.

When you know that there is a group which will help you sail through it, it reduces the intensity of the problem and ensures the factor of trust and confidence within a person to deal with that situation.

This has been my understanding of resilience because sadly from childhood if you look at ourselves, we were never trained to be resilient. We were trained to become great mathematicians, scientists, or anything, but nobody taught us the simple things of how to really face a problem and overcome challenges. What are all those methodologies that you need to overcome a problem?

Trust me, Shreyas, I learned the act of problem solving or what it takes to solve a problem in the right manner when I came to my first year of post-graduation, which was way too late. I was already 18 by then.

Shreyas: When you say problem solving, it means problems of your own?

Kavya: Problems of my own and any problems - personally and professionally. The way you can accept a problem, think about different solutions - the basic idea behind how you can detangle the entire web around you. That was something which was taught to me when I was in first year post-grad and I was thinking, what was I doing in my school? My teacher taught me how to find the value of x through so many pages of equations. Why didn’t they teach me this? This is an essential skill that we fail to realize.

Shreyas: I think problem solving is something which we apply externally to various situations which we as adults do. In general, what we are doing is ultimately problem solving, but most of the times we don’t really do it to ourselves or look at the problem which we see as a problem itself and come up with a solution for it.

Kavya: While I was introspecting, this happened quite recently. I was working on one of the parent awareness modules and like I said, nobody wants advice. But there was one thing that I came across - most of the time what happens when you are a child, the moment your parent sees you are in some problem, they come and solve that problem for you.

I’m not saying all parents do it, but a proportion of parents tend to do that. What happens when you’re not letting the child handle their own problems - they tend to develop dependency and that’s the end of their creativity and innovation to overcome challenges.

If the problem’s nature is not intense, it’s not severe, you have to let them solve it by their own capability. If they encounter any further problems, then you have to assist them, facilitate them to arrive at a conclusion, but not do it yourself.

Shreyas: And that allows them to become more resilient as well.

Kavya: Exactly. You are making them more responsible for their problems. You’re not doing anything extremely amazing, but you’re just doing a simple act of giving them space to solve their problems. They will come to you when they’re not able to handle it.

But I have observed a few instances, particularly in reference to the groups that I’m working with - even before they can arrive at a conclusion, even before they find a solution, the parent would have already done it for the child. What are you teaching the child about becoming independent? The child would always come back to you for solving problems.

There can be situations when the child is alone and has run out of ideas to do anything for overcoming that challenge. So building resilience - it is important to let individuals solve their issues independently. Not everything can be solved independently, but certain things which are very simple.

Having support groups and having a safe space to interact with somebody and having a professional around you becomes very important to handle complex issues. But the entire aspect is having a strong support system. It could be family, professional counseling, a best friend, a trusted neighbor, anybody for that matter. Pets - this is what my sister does. She is not very expressive.

Shreyas: That’s actually what I was also arriving at. In fact, most of them wouldn’t even want to share some of these aspects to their very close friends.

Kavya: Exactly. I can openly talk about it. My sister has been persistently suffering from depression for almost two years and she’s still under treatment. She’s doing extremely well in her professional life, but on her personal side, she has this problem and she’s not very open. I am on the contrary, I’m very open to people, but she’s not. She’s very closed and she chooses to maintain confidentiality.

She doesn’t share her emotions that well. She expresses everything what she’s going through through dance or through music. But her association with animals is totally different. I have seen her talking to them as if some human is listening to her and somehow when I ask her, “Does this bring any sort of peace to you?” She says, “Yes, it does. Because I think somebody is actually paying attention to me and that somebody is not judging. And the most important thing is I am trying to find answers on my own, which is making me more confident.”

Because we also have animals around, we cannot rule that option out. Some people who have this fear that somebody might judge them - animals are a safe option. They may not give you an answer, but you might get some sort of insight while putting across your thoughts out loud.

Shreyas: You also have a pet dog, or do you have a pet in Delhi?

Kavya: No, I don’t have a pet in Delhi. I have two of them back home, but here, below my building, there are about eight strays. I feed them every day. So they have become my source of interaction. I go, I talk. People might consider it weird, but that’s the way I want to be.

I just want to go say something. “You are a well-behaved child. Oh my God, you are on time.” Something, some sort of positivity. That’s the thing - if you are a magnet, you have the option of attracting negative and positive. I want to particularly choose positivity. So wherever it is coming from, it’s free of cost. I’m just trying to absorb all of it so that I have a healthy lifestyle.

There are millions of options available, Shreyas. Just that you need to find what suits you the best. A lot of times, paying attention to what is going on, what your body is accepting becomes very important.

Just to make this a little more clear, I’ll give you a very small example. There are millions of food options available across the globe. We know what suits us, what tastes we like, what is something that we want to have on a regular basis. So when you give importance to food so much, which is of course essential, why can’t you do that to your thoughts and behavior and personality?

Shreyas: What I’ve observed - it’s really funny that we are able to take care of others more than ourselves. Like even in terms of our parents, if they have to take some medicines, we are the ones pressing them to take this medicine and that, but they themselves don’t feel the same. When I reflect on myself, I feel the same as well. I can take care of my pet dog, but not as much as myself.

Kavya: That’s the tendency. Again, I would not generalize, but let’s say we have the tendency to preach but not put the preaching into practice. While talking to you, introspecting, there are a lot of things which I myself may not do. But I’m trying to do at least one percent of it so that whatever I’m trying to tell somebody is not going baseless for myself.

If I can adapt that maybe I’ll be able to do something better for people around. So it is important to take care of yourself also. You have to give yourself also that much of importance.

It’s quite silly that every textbook talks about love your environment, love your family, respect elders, respect animals. But I never see “love yourself.”

Shreyas: Exactly, because nobody has told you how important it is to take care of yourself, your thoughts, your processes, take care of your health. What is required? Eat nutrition, drink eight glasses of water every day. But did anybody tell you that don’t let negative thoughts enter your mind?

At least the curriculum now, which is updating, is quite better. But back in our times, this was not available. Only elders would give some sort of information and we would think, “What advice is this person trying to give us? No, we don’t want to listen to it. We already know a lot of things.” That was the attitude.

So it becomes important to put yourself also in focus and at times understand what your body is accepting. What is it rejecting? When you know certain thoughts are taking an emotional toll on you, try and keep them away from yourself and adapt something which is comfortable for you. So it helps you have a comfortable life, the way any comfort food does.

I tend to compare psychology a lot with food because the way I give importance to food, I have to give importance to my thoughts as well. Both of them are important for my survival. If I eat food, I need to think good also. The energy that you’re getting out of food has to be used for something good. I cannot be negative inside my head.

Kavya: You know, it’s very simple. You just have to give importance to the simplicity that you actually encounter on a day-to-day basis.

Shreyas: That’s a nice way to conclude this podcast as well. To look at the simple things around us and give importance to it.

Kavya: Definitely. Please, please, please try and focus on that. See that you are the best version of yourself every day and give yourself that time and ability to overcome or keep molding yourself to be better.

I’m trying to do that. There are times where I’ve criticized my behavior and I don’t know who to scold. There’s no one to scold me. So I would scold myself, writing it down on a piece of paper. When I look at it the next day, I would have been so embarrassed by my behavior that there is nothing to justify it.

So you need to constantly tell yourself the way you tell anybody, the way you try to control others. You have to try and do the same with yourself also. Then you can probably understand and see where your thoughts are going.

Shreyas: Definitely. Kavya, it’s been so amazing to listen to you and get to know your work in proper detail, which is what I wanted for a while - to talk to you in this regard. So thank you so much for your time and also patiently answering all the questions throughout the conversation and sharing your thoughts about it. I’m really happy about this and I hope the audience enjoys this too.

Kavya: Thank you, Shreyas. It’s been actually a great interaction, particularly while interacting with you. I don’t know how it’s going to benefit others, but I am going to listen to this and see what I have learned and what I need to improve upon.

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For more information about MAMTA Health Institute for Mother and Child or to connect with Kavya Rao, listeners can find contact details through the organization’s website and social media channels mentioned in the episode.