Life Enthusiast

Podcast 488: Mental Health Warrior

We are very excited to introduce Bruce Schutter to share his transformative journey through the depths of mental health challenges—bipolar disorder, anxiety, and alcoholism, which in turn led him to create the ‘Mental Health Warrior Program.’ This program focuses on mindset, emotional and lifestyle adjustments such as nutrition and exercise, advocating for emotional empowerment rather than reliance on medication. Bruce, alongside Martin Pytela, emphasizes the strong link between mental and physical health, offering listeners the ‘warrior tools’ they need to regain control of their well-being. We hope this podcast connects with those facing challenges or anyone who knows someone in need of support

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MARTIN: Greetings. This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast podcast. And with me today is Bruce Schutter. And we’re introducing Bruce because he is the mental health warrior and he is helping people get back on the track. Bruce, welcome to the show.

BRUCE: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: Oh, pleasure. As usual, it’s the story of the fallen hero who overcomes, right?

BRUCE: Yes, it is. Yes. And I certainly have the story of the fall. But then the mental warrior program or taking care of our mental health is the journey upwards.

MARTIN: Well, that’s the whole point, right?

BRUCE: Exactly.

MARTIN: My story is not that different. Mine was more about physical health, but take a pick. Right?

BRUCE: Yep. No, no, but I was going to second it. As your mental health deteriorates, your physical health, your choices on foods and exercise, of course, all fall off the map. And so my physical health was no better than my mental health.

MARTIN: Right. Well, and it’s tied. Right. Like, you would hear me talk about nutrition and how what you put into your body will truly control your physiology. And so, it’s sometimes hard to know where the chicken or the egg is or the horse and the cart. What was the primal mover here? Was it the nutrition or was it something, some dysregulation in the body itself?

BRUCE: Correct. Right. And then you have, as I found, you have your mental health challenges. But alongside of, like we said, the nutrition, poor eating, I’m starting to have physical health problems, which certainly didn’t help my body working well. So kind of, in my mind, made the mental health problems even worse as my blood pressure skyrocketed, cholesterol, all sorts of additional things the doctors are trying to help you with. And it’s just, like you said, one giant connection and a big ball of problems going down the hill fast.

MARTIN: Okay, well, maybe just to give the listener a bit of an overview, explain why you have the authority on what you’re teaching people now.

BRUCE: Sure. Yeah, we did kind of jump into it there. So it started out when I was in high school, and I knew there were some challenges. I knew some things were different. I only seemed to know the emotional ends of the spectrum. I was always really very motivated or that manic type side or a complete depression. I was filled with anxiety all the time, but over the top that it would stop me from doing things. Walking in a room with friends, even was anxiety filled, which nobody else seemed to have. And as I went along, I’m still doing things. But you’re trying to figure out there’s no information out there, what’s going wrong, what’s happening, and along the way I’m doing life things. So while I was in high school, I joined and became a rescue squad, a local tech, and then became an emergency medical technician. So I’m going out on calls. I like to say at this point, I’m jumping into life’s deep end into the pool, and I’m not even prepared to handle where I’m at in high school.

MARTIN: Yeah, this is, this is really interesting because you’re exposing yourself to essentially PTSD material.

BRUCE: Exactly.

MARTIN: While you’re totally not ready to handle that. Right?

BRUCE: Right. And the thing was, most people that I worked with, and it was a volunteer, and we had all sorts of accidents, calls, all the situations that were horrible that were trying to help people through or save their lives, literally, and nobody really knew what to do about it. It wasn’t even just tied to my age or just me. So that kind of added where people really didn’t know how to process emotions nobody talked about, because this was years ago. And so, like you said, it was kind of that perfect storm starting. And my challenges just kept growing, not even knowing I had them, not knowing I was diagnosed bipolar. And I turned to ways to use short term solutions, so I turned to alcohol as a way to tamp down the feelings or just not deal with them, I like to call it.

BRUCE: I was trying to do anything I could to avoid my emotions. And sometimes, I mean, I was doing a million things, because if you keep busy, you can also avoid emotions. So this went along.

MARTIN: These words are really interesting. Right? Like, you have people called alcoholics and workaholics and sexaholics and whatever “holics”. Which, of course, it’s just is a play on words, but, yeah, distraction, right?

BRUCE: Yes, exactly. And again, it’s all even the mental health challenges are centered on emotions, and when you don’t know how to handle them. I didn’t even know how to handle the anxiety or ways to do that. I’m looking for short term ways, basically just to get through the day, get through that situation, which is not managing it, not being able to enjoy life. And that went along. I went to college, whole challenge of things. Like you said, I’m learning from high school now to college, then out into the workforce. And along the way, it’s like I see a little line of my challenges creeping up as they’re taking over more and more of my life and more of my decisions. And by the time I got out in the workforce, it’s like I described it to a lot of people. The surface picture looked great. You go out, you graduate college, you go get a job. I’m meeting people, I got married, bought a house, things like that. But inside, I’m crumbling, and it’s like this huge downward slope while the other one’s going up. So I’m not enjoying anything, I’m not being able to handle things. I know I could do better at things if I wasn’t filled with that anxiety which, again, transfers with you into, like, work, meetings, travel. So all those life challenges along with these untreated mental health challenges, I am just crumbling to a point where at a certain point, after 20 years of this, I like to say it really controlled my life. And along the way, I’m starting to get a little bit of diagnosis, but no real action on it, no real information, even. And what happened was I got to a point, 20 years in, where I felt so powerless and had no forward way to even deal with these challenges, even the little bit I knew that I decided to try and end it all. I tried to end my life. That’s where it took me to. And I just want to say it because that was the bottom of feeling powerless and no way forward.

MARTIN: And so this is like your late thirties kind of thing?

BRUCE: This is at age 40. And I’d gone on long enough white knuckling and holding on to life, trying to get through things again. I’m still doing things. I’m not falling apart on the surface, but I’m falling apart every night. I’m struggling every day, every activity. And at that point, I got a second chance at life. And that’s what started this whole idea of, I got to find a solution. And after some internal looking, I realized the solution was the same thing that was causing all my problems. I said, wait, emotions, they have that much power to bring me down. They must have the power to show me life and bring me up. And if I could manage all of them, well, isn’t that at the core of mental health challenges, life challenges, like we’re saying? And so I started building for myself and then for others, this program, this Mental Health Warrior Program. And that came about because the first thing I wanted to do was, to myself even, was to tell people, mental health is not a weakness, and mental health challenges are not a weakness. And so I thought, a mental health warrior stands tall. A good warrior, ready for battle. We step up to the plate. And I thought that’d be a great way to introduce it and start to say, look at what we can do. The neat part is the whole idea was because I had gone through all sorts of traditional methods. And even at the point of when I finally got diagnosed with bipolar and that you’d get put on a lot of meds, it’s the first thing everybody reacts to.

MARTIN: So you did do that? You took pharmaceuticals?

BRUCE: Yeah, I did. I went to therapy. I went through every med in the book because of the side effects, the problems. It took years trying to even get stable. But then I realized everything I was trying kind of had a dead end to it. There was no, how am I going to graduate past this? How am I going to go live life when I’m either tied to all the side effects of meds or.

MARTIN: Yeah, well, the pharmaceuticals have no end. They are just treating the surface problem, not the cause of it.

BRUCE: Exactly. And I thought, there has to be a way we can get the power ourselves. And that was the whole idea of this Mental Health Warrior Program is a self help program. So a self help approach, meaning, what can we do in our life? And I started looking around my life, too, at the same time, and realizing lifestyle changes, mindset changes that I could make, that I could build on, that would strengthen me. And they became warrior tools. They became areas that helped me deal with bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and anxiety disorder. And as I started to build all of this program, I realized that it was so impactful to me and what I could do myself and actually what I do every day with this, through all of those self help approaches or all those tools, I wanted to bring it to everybody. So that’s kind of why we’re talking today.

BRUCE: Cause I wanted to show everybody. It’s amazing.

MARTIN: Yeah, you’re echoing my story.

MARTIN: I ended my career in business management and computer science and became a health coach because this was more interesting to me because I could help others in a more important way than just helping somebody make more money.

BRUCE: Right. And that’s so funny. I forgot we were both in the IT field. I was in there on all different levels for 17 years, working on projects, doing development, leading projects. Then the same thing. I felt this had a lot more impact. And I tried to weave in things as I tried to work on my sobriety in my new life. I got certified, like, as a health coach. I got certified as a personal trainer and then nutrition coach. And that opens some doors of more self help things we can do where I know we’re on the same page. And this allowed me to build this program where now I have nine different books. And each one, like the first book, is my story. And a little bit like some structure of how to be a warrior and some key components of where you start building your power, you know, how you take back that control. And then a lot of the other books, I view them as the warrior weapons. And we have things like mindset rules that I created, and there’s a library of 53 of them I have in this book that I used to remind myself to stay out of trouble and get out of trouble. They’re simple things like that we forget because we get so busy, technology and everything’s pinging and going on.

BRUCE: Mindset rule two is simply learn to respond, not react. And that was a big one for me, because, of course, I would react, go back to those old solutions, jump back to drinking, hide from my emotions. So those are some of the fun tools I created that we can use to build that mindset. And then I tried to build, and again, where we are on the same page here. Then I started seeing other things like foods and the nutrition angle and how much that affects your mental health, as well as that physical-mental health connection, because if we feed bodies better and we exercise and use better foods, we improve our physical health, which in turn helps our mental health. And again, all the different benefits I found through researching things, or food benefits for mental health, it’s just amazing to me.

MARTIN: Yeah, I could echo that. Of course, we understand how the combinations of the macronutrients will affect the internal pH, which in turn will affect the. Whether you’re drifting into acidity, which is associated with anxiety and nervousness and all that, or drifting toward alkalinity, which is associated with procrastination and despondence and depression. And you can be anywhere on that spectrum. Like, you can be swinging just by what you eat. You can bring yourself from one side to the other. And if you don’t know or don’t understand or don’t have the awareness of that, you’re just wondering, what happened? Why did it happen?

BRUCE: Right, right.

MARTIN: It’s in front of our eyes, but it’s not being offered in the mainstream because it doesn’t serve their purpose. They want to sell you a bottle of pills.

BRUCE: Right. And again, I feel like we. A lot of what I’m trying to bring to people’s awareness is all the things that are in front of us. Like, I feel a lot of times the answers, like my own answer of realizing my mental health was at the core of everything, and that was my problem slash solution. But then things like foods, where we’re eating those foods every day, our mindset that we go into things, you know, that. That pre-work we may do before we get in the car and get into traffic and get stuck and then get frustrated. Boy, we took 2 seconds to center ourselves, what an amazing outcome. Same with what you’re saying if we pick some better foods.

MARTIN: Yeah. And your statement about respond versus react, I mean, it’s a major, major thing, right? If you just take three breaths and count to something and just. Okay, well, what does this really mean?

BRUCE: Right. And it helps. One of the things I create as part of the program, so I have the books, is from other groups. I noticed they always have something you can carry with them, from the group to remind you. So I created a mental health warrior challenge coin because I had done some consulting with the military, and they had the challenge coin representing, we overcame this challenge, or I was here type of thing, and they could carry it around. So I thought it’d be great to have one of those. And I put on the back some warrior wisdom. I have different ones, but the first one I did was respond, not react. And I literally carry it around, and people say they also carry it, friends and family have used it and people have carried it, and they take it to a meeting or something. Again, it’s so important. If we just take that pause, get a better answer, a better outcome.

MARTIN: Fair enough. So you now have distilled all of this into a graduated program, or how do you deliver it?

BRUCE: Well, right now the program is basically in all the different books. I have a cornerstone book, which is “I triumphed over bipolar, alcoholism, and anxiety disorder by becoming a mental health warrior.” And then I lay out the different components. There’s four components to keep it straightforward but powerful, and then the additional books. And then what I’m trying to do is eventually, I would like to work with people directly, but right now I’m trying to bring awareness of it. So I’m doing my own podcast, writing articles and things like that to get people where what they can do. So I’m trying to get them to take action, and we’re trying to bring it out through the books as a way you can take in the information at your own pace, bring it to your life again, fit it in, whichever works. And part of what I’m doing, too, is with the variety of books, is they’re on different topics, so certain areas might appeal to you more. And there were certain things I found. One of them I called this one book, it’s the one bag life, and it’s about less stuff, more experiences, because I had. And we had gathered so many material goods and so many things, and I realized half of my anxiety came from needing more or taking care of the million things we never got to use or felt we needed. I thought that would be a great thing to bring to people’s attention and show how that positively affects your mental health.

MARTIN: Well, and one of the symptoms of mental illness is hoarding. And part of the hoarding problem is you could be hoarding all kinds of stuff. You could be hoarding material things or just a segment, like books or magazines or, I don’t know, software or games or whatever. Pick a thing. And this hoarding just is blocking you from having a life. And you’re saying it really well.

BRUCE: And again, it’s interesting what you brought up. You could even have so many activities or so many commitments that you get caught up into that constant being busy. And I felt like all I did was take care of things or go to things and never enjoy them. You know, I never got to what was important, like you’re saying. And so a big part of that book is, again, to step back as, one of the warrior components is to find your values, because if you go after everything and you’re not clear on your path, well, it makes it very difficult to have a solid emotional center, because you’re going after everything, and you need to figure out what’s important to you, and that will go a long way. Like, I had to myself that it wasn’t all these material goods. And the whole point of the book was, it’s really about experiences, you know, all the things you can do in life.

MARTIN: It’s really interesting. In reflecting on my life, I’m looking back, I’m thinking, I so wish I had a coach back when that would help me understand, first of all, the process of sorting through what’s important and why. I was never asked the important questions. I was never taught how to learn to. I was never taught how to think. I was never taught how. Like, I had to learn it the hard way. And you’re describing it when you’re talking about your teenage years and your growing up time. It was just like you were thrown at it and you were flailing at it, really, hoping somehow that it will sort itself out. And if you had your today’s version of yourself talking to you about what really matters, your life would have been so much better.

BRUCE: Yeah. And that’s one of the things I’m trying to do too, is I give talks to groups and things on these various topics because at all different age levels, it’s interesting. I’ll talk to a group and it can be at a business company talk, but they also really like the idea of less stuff, more experiences, because they see that’s part of that whole balance of what you want to do in life. And you’re right. I wish I had known all of that now, but I’m going to bring it out to everybody today.

MARTIN: Yeah, this is the good part. Whoever’s listening to this, you can see two guys who are past midlife who have done the hard work and can pass it on. So if you’re finding yourself wondering why things aren’t as good as they could be, this may be because you didn’t have a guide. And I promise you that having a coach is worth its money in gold because the coach will be able to see where your gaps are and help you overcome that.

BRUCE: Yep. It’s always, always that outside perspective and people need that too. And I completely agree, too, because I like to tell people it’s never too late and there’s never too many problems because I use that as an example too, because all that time as an EMT and that, that kept coming back to me. And the PTSD from that, from the experiences and literally having someone die in your hands, especially when you’re 18 years old, you really don’t know how to process that. And it took me years to figure that out, which caused so much of the problems too, along the way. So I just want to always tell people, just like you’re saying it’s never too late. And then you can turn the corner and it’s fantastic what you can do, especially with mental health and how you can. Embracing emotions, to me, has allowed me to finally, I call it, I get the full life experience.

BRUCE: Before I was staying on little narrow paths because I was trying to avoid all the emotions. And now I’ve done things and I’m doing things that I couldn’t even imagine I could have done. And you probably feel the same way. Some days you look and think, wow, like, I’m doing this today, but boy, ten years ago, no.

MARTIN: Yeah, all that.

BRUCE: Yeah.

MARTIN: Okay. So, Bruce, how do people access all these beautiful experiences that they can have with you? I understand. Well, let’s start from the website, right?

BRUCE: Yep. So the website’s Bruce Schutter and it’s schutter. BruceSchutter.com. Also, I tell people you can just type in “mental health warrior program” and it’ll bring you to the website. So I’ve created that as like the central hub that has links to my podcast. I have a free book to get people started, newsletter, things like that that I’m starting. So all that information is there. And then the books and things like that are up on Amazon, but it links from there. That’s like the best spot to go to. Or, the best part, too, as I’m sure you know, is any of the social media places. I have a presence on that with the mental health warrior program or Bruce Schutter, so you can go there.

I try to keep people updated on what’s going on, tell them about new podcasts or new articles, always trying to bring in some new action tips people can take. So that’s definitely the best way to start to take advantage of all that. And there’s also then just like any website, you can have a contact form and things like I do speaking engagements, and right now we’re not doing like one on one that may come down the road, but it’s just really the hub for all the resources to get you started. And I try to provide a variety of things to keep people interested.

BRUCE: And then I have my podcast with shorter episodes to get you interested in what you can do as a warrior or if you like to read better, I have a free book and you can get started with tools in there. So I want to make sure I cover all the bases.

MARTIN: Yeah, well, that’s good, because it’s the way you’re doing it. Makes it affordable.

BRUCE: Yes, and that’s something we had talked about and everything with everything before, with some of the things I went through with the therapy and the meds and all of that. I’m very aware, too, of the cost of healthcare and the cost these days, especially in the mental health areas. And one of the things I’m trying to do is offer with this idea of self-help, is you can go and buy a book. I like to say for the cost of going to lunch, you could buy a book and get started on taking care of your mental health and learn things you can do each day, which I find so amazing. And I think that’s what’s kind of needed, as I always describe it, as there’s the top level when you need professional help and you need, certain times you need that help at the very top level. But what do we do to get started? You know, where’s that bottom level where everybody personally can just get started on things. And I’m trying to reach out to that level and get people to accept things, to be able to say, hey, it’s okay to have problems. You know, all the things we’re talking about openly, a lot of people are still struggling with, and I want to help out with that too. To get them to say it’s okay. And then getting a book and reading things about what you can do, I believe will empower people and that will keep pushing them to learn more and do more.

MARTIN: Yeah, well, many of us can be our own therapists, really, the solution is, you already said it, but the solution is in taking the gap and realizing, oh, hold on, I’m not going to react from the whatever it is that’s driving my silly or bad decisions and I’m going to just switch over to the other side and you can see it, like, I don’t want to talk to the crazy part of me today, I want to talk to the together part of me today and see what that wood suggest for me to do.

BRUCE: Yes.

MARTIN: And again, you’re explaining it well.

BRUCE: People always ask, too. I always like to throw in this scenario of, great to have all that outside help, but what do you do when it’s two in the morning and you wake up and your mind’s racing or maybe that depression has crept in and you feel like, oh, my life is not worth living. And I’m like, that’s where that self empowerment, that piece like we’re talking about is so important because we need to have that power ourselves. We need to feel more in control. And throughout the days, just like you’re saying. I know we keep using the word, but it’s so empowering that if you start taking care of your personal life, then your interactions at work, your interactions with friends and family, they can grow on that. And the best part is, I found it’s kind of like once you open the door, it’s amazing because you can start talking to more and more people about it. And that’s a sharing that I know we need with mental health because we don’t want to talk about too much.

BRUCE: But the more we do it, I find myself in amazing conversations in places, in line at a supermarket, talking about mental health to somebody because I happen to wear it on my shirt. And that’s a great piece of empowerment to be able to have an open conversation just like we’re doing. But we set this up, those are the unplanned bonuses.

MARTIN: Well, I especially appreciate the fact that you are helping people to help themselves. It’s so easy to throw a $6,000 program on the wall and just let the really rich people come to you and just help them as a private coach. But that catches only a few. What you’re doing, I think is really important because it’s at the level of everyone. There’s not a soul on the planet that cannot afford to participate at your level, the way you’re bringing it in and because of your lived experience, the way you’re putting it, and the way of understanding and just how organized your mind is and that you’re able to actually structure it for a person is that there’s no doubt in my mind that you will help a lot of people. All they have to do is just allow you into their life.

BRUCE: Thank you. And I find it amazing because I keep learning more things myself and then putting them into additional books. I started out with this a little bit, but mindfulness. And that fed into mindfulness along with cooking as a way. We already talked about how important it is to choose the right foods. But even doing cooking and enjoying the smells and your creation of a nice meal, what a wonderful thing I never had before. And you benefit across the board.

MARTIN: It’s known as walking meditation. Well, in this walking meditation, you’re actually cooking in your kitchen. And the process itself. Right. Like, instead of considering it as a struggle and something that you hate doing, and instead run into some fast food restaurant to grab something on the way. If you can just devote 2 hours of your life to the shopping and the prep and the doing, and you will have a fantastic experience and you will be actually more healthy, mentally healthy, and physically healthy at the end of this.

BRUCE: Right, exactly. And that’s where I made the book I was talking about, the three food rules of the mental health warrior. They’re very straightforward because I believe sometimes we get too complicated and it’s a little hard to sustain it then. But it’s low carb, no sugar, and then less processed, minimally processed foods. And if you follow those guidelines, like you said, you could go to a supermarket, it’s fairly straightforward. I mean, there’s details obviously, behind all of them. You know, how many grams of carbs, things like that. But you get the idea that you can make some great choices and then that comes home. Then you could use the preparation to help you work through some of your mental health issues. Racing thoughts and things calms me down with cooking. Again, I’ve tried to put some of that in as tools that people can use, and then again, all of that builds up to where you are now taking action, like you said, every day. And it just keeps building, which is fantastic, because what I found it allows people to do, and the people I’ve talked to is that you start building on that, and then you take your life and say new directions that you thought, oh, I couldn’t go there. And funny enough, life throws you some more challenges because you’re taking on something new, but you’re prepared to handle it, and you kind of keep stepping up and building the blocks.

MARTIN: Yeah, it’s well put. Because if you know that you can learn cooking from nothing, then you can also learn airplane building, or you can learn, I mean, pick anything. You can learn to play a musical instrument. All you have to do is just say, okay, how is this done?

BRUCE: Right, right. Or even maybe you’re cooking. Funny enough, I found this is a funny one, but your cooking gets you to share with people, and next thing you know, you’re talking to more people, which helped my social anxiety a lot. And that was fantastic, because now I found I have a connection with people talking about foods and cooking and things like that.

MARTIN: Right. And then you decide, okay, I’m learning Thai food and Ukrainian food and whatever else.

BRUCE: Right, right, exactly.

MARTIN: And then. Then you have to go to, I don’t know, what cultural center for the Serbians and say, well, how do you do proper serbian food? And you meet Serbian people.

BRUCE: Yeah. But then you’ve gained a whole new interest, and at the same time, that boosts your mental health and your ability to handle your challenges. I mean, it certainly gives you a solid ground when my bipolar is still going to send me. I didn’t have a magic wand because I became a mental health warrior and say, well, no more bipolar or no more anxiety and no more PTSD, but I can manage wherever it sends me. So if it sends me into depression, I have my tools and ways for that. And if it goes to the other end, I can handle that and keep it under control. And I found it amazing because basically, I love to say we gain back the power, all that power I gave up over those years, I found I could have it back. And then, therefore, your challenges, they really don’t become as scary, and they lose all that control over your life, which is amazing.

MARTIN: Yeah. I think we may as well end it on this note, saying, okay, look, folks, this is a very well put together, affordable, well structured program that helps anyone grow up. So if you yourself have struggled, great. If you have someone in your circle of influence that you see struggling, just introduce them. This stuff is worth, well I don’t know how to put it, but experience is in gold, right?

BRUCE: And I.

MARTIN: Go ahead.

BRUCE: No, I was just going to say I always end up telling people, if you’re struggling yourself, use my story, like we said, never too late. You could have a lot of challenges like I do. I just happen to pick up a lot of them through genetic lottery, whatever. But you can triumph over them. You can keep moving forward and you can. You can triumph as a warrior over all those challenges.

MARTIN: Awesome. Okay, so www.BruceSchutter.com Go there. Bruce, Thank you. This is so much worth our time.

BRUCE: Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Had a lot of fun talking.

MARTIN: This is Martin Pytela, life-enthusiast.com. Thank you.

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