Kristen Lee

Kristen Lee, EdD, LICSW, is an award-winning Behavioral Science and Leadership professor, clinician, researcher, activist, comedian, author of Reset and Mentalligence, and host of Crackin’ Up. She has over two decades of clinical experience in mental health, and twelve years of teaching and leadership roles in higher education, focusing on underserved populations. She leads the Behavior Science program at Northeastern University. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts. For more, visit kristenlee.com.

Author photo © Priyantha Herath

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Be What You Want to Receive: Three Ways to Experiment ...

At a time when we’re marinating in trauma and dealing with the test of a lifetime, we all wish things were different. When what we want from life is a million mile march from what it actually is, it can seem like we need a massive intervention to keep facing what’s at hand. 

But research shows that small things can make a big difference. Just like stress is cumulative, so are the daily steps we take to grow and give.

Microdoses of bravery add up. To start, consider moving from asking what will the world offer me, to what will I offer the world? Tiny bits of strategic courage are sources of nourishment that can help you become what you want to receive. 

Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable is a tall order, but worth doing. Microdosing bravery can help us build the strength and stamina that helps us heal, create, and liberate from fear, despair, and isolation. 

Here are three ways you can experiment with microdosing bravery including journal prompts for reflection.

Worth the Risk - Be What You Want to Receive

 

BE LOVE. 

Loneliness is being called “the new smoking,” a modern health risk. For some, the global pandemic has strengthened relationships, allowing for bonding and teamwork like never before. For others, it’s wreaked havoc: leading to feeling smothered and stuck. For those living alone, distancing has been brutal, making love feel far from reach. Loss, whether through death, divorce, breakups, or other factors, singes our hearts. We can become avoidant and skeptical of our future potential to love and be loved. 

When we strive to embody love, it’s essential to keep an open mind and heart. Loving connections are protective factors to our well-being. Consider these microdoses of bravery to strengthen your relationships, your sense of belonging, and the co-creation of new love paradigms in your life:

  • Get real. Go through your friends on social media and make a list of all the real people in your life with whom you can be yourself. Make a conscious effort to spend time outside of social media. Thank them for being so real to you and vow you’ll do the same.
  • Spark connection. Initiate a conversation with a partner or friend to see if you can build greater intimacy or camaraderie. To improve your connection, ask them what would mean a lot to them, and offer your own thoughts too.
  • Seek affinity relationships. Write a short poem or essay about yourself to clarify your various identities and then seek an affinity connection. Invite that person for coffee. Don’t shy away from sharing yourself and nudging them to do the same.
  • Be innovative. Create your own bravery microdose to help you be love.

Take note:

Write down what you chose to do and reflect on how it cultivated love in your life. Consider sharing this with someone you trust to help you maximize your efforts.

BE HEALING. 

The level of trauma at hand has ravaged our lives, making healing feel elusive on a good day, impossible on a bad. Given the magnitude of suffering at hand, healing should not be trivialized as a three-step process. Healing requires enormous courage. Microdosing bravery can help us reach out and tap in to the many forms of restoration available to us.  

Understanding how resilience works is a helpful way to begin healing. Gone are the days when it was viewed as a character trait—something you’re born with or not. There’s a lot of hype about being gritty and never letting anyone see you sweat that gets in the way of us finding the right support. Here are some ways to microdose bravery to foster healing and build resilience:

  • Recognize you’re not alone. The biggest lie our difficulties tell us is that we’re the only ones dealing with such intense suffering. All of us are living in a global mental health crisis, with exorbitant pressures and crushing circumstances. Suffering is part of our shared humanity. Finding solidarity and safe community can serve as a catalyst to healing. As we get traction in our own healing process, our acts of courage can be nourishing and healing to those around us.
  • Self-advocate. Healing requires intentional change in our communication. Many of us are comfortable and willing to give help, but few are asking for it. Identify one trusted person in your life that you know has the emotional maturity and skills to listen and support you. Tell them what you’re going through and work with them to identify potential roads toward healing, such as therapy, strategic behavioral change, and targeted self-care.
  • Set boundaries. Untreated trauma and unresolved issues can haunt us and impair the quality of our lives. By paying attention to what we say yes and no to, we can ensure we are leaving space for growth after we’ve gone through significant stressors. Find language to courageously share what you can commit to, and what you cannot. Enlist support to help you firmly protect your time so that you can devote attention to healing and restoration.
  • Identify resources. Take some time to scan your direct environment for things that nurture and sustain you. Select one or two things that can be microdosed to build your bravery.

Take note:

Write down things that help you experience healing. How can you continue to build off this?

BE A LIBERATOR. 

Society can project a lot onto us, caging us into patterns of conformity that can become harmful. Freedom to live as our truest selves isn’t something that comes with safety or ease. The work of unhooking from social prescriptions and ills can be fraught and exhausting. Still, when we find the courage to call out injustice and fight for a more humane world, we can experience exuberance and help change paradigms.

When we strive to liberate, we realize that we must dismantle oppression. That we must advocate for inclusivity and human reverence, particularly for social identities that are marginalized and harmed. Constrained living hinders human progress, individually and collectively. Consider these microdoses of bravery to liberate from social constructs that are harmful:

  • Let go. Take inventory of so-called social “norms” and become less apt to cower in the face of social impositions that are dismissive and destructive toward “difference.” Embrace your own multidimensionality, and that of humanity.
  • Speak up. We all have opportunities to be active contributors rather than passive bystanders in the world. Practicing accountability means that we call out injustice and work to eradicate forms of human suffering and imprisonment—whether based on race, gender, orientation, age, place of origin, or other social identity categories.
  • Practice human reverence. Move from me to we. See the glory and wonder across the human spectrum. Honor varied identities and perspectives. Work to find and engage in diverse relationships, rather than staying insular or spending time with those that look like, love like, and think like you. Become a liberator by standing fervently with those who’ve been marginalized, oppressed, or discriminated against. Seek ways to forge change, bit by bit.
  • Break Free. Create your own bravery microdose to help you liberate.

Take note:

What do you need to be liberated from? Do you know someone who is struggling in a similar way? How might you join forces and work together to become freer?

Author Kristen LeeKristen Lee, EdD, LICSW, is an award-winning Behavioral Science and Leadership professor, clinician, researcher, activist, comedian, author of Worth the Risk: How to Microdose Bravery to Grow Resilience, Connect More, and Offer Yourself to the World, and host of Crackin’ Up. She has over two decades of clinical experience in mental health, and twelve years of teaching and leadership roles in higher education, focusing on underserved populations. She leads the Behavior Science program at Northeastern University. For more, visit kristenlee.com.

 

 

 

 

Book - Worth the Risk

 

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Microdosing Bravery

Kristen Lee, EdD, LICSW, is an award-winning behavioral science and leadership professor, clinician, researcher, activist, comedian, and the author of Reset, Mentalligence, and with Sounds True, her newest book, Worth the Risk. The host of Crackin’ Up, she has over two decades of clinical experience in mental health and twelve years of teaching and leadership roles in higher education, focusing on underserved populations. She leads the Behavior Science program at Northeastern University. 

In this podcast, Kristen Lee joins Sounds True founder Tami Simon to talk about how strategically “microdosing” risk can cultivate courage and resilience in the face of challenge and adversity. Kristen and Tami discuss: embodying a sense of gumption and spirit; bringing mental health out of the shadows; measuring our risks against our values; how risk can nurture resilience; the importance of safe relationships; finding the right balance between being on the edge and being safe; anxiety as a “frenemy,” and how self-acceptance and compassion support healing and change; microdosing bravery in our creative pursuits; freeing ourselves from the need for external validation; moving from being a spectator to an active changemaker in the world and looking for ways we can begin our own process of active contribution; confronting your biases and prejudices; the illusion of perfection; the cult of overachievement; the new psychological safety; and more.

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How Reframing Conflicts Can Actually Help Your Relatio...

In the Internal Family Systems model, the practice of speaking for, rather than from, parts when they are triggered is an important aspect of Self-leadership. When people receive a message from you, it has two components: the content (the actual words) and the energy behind the words. When your protective parts are upset and speak directly to another person, invariably they will trigger parts in the other. When, on the other hand, you listen to your protectors and then speak for them, from your Self, the message is received in a very different way, even if you use the same words that your parts are saying. Your words lose their judgmental sting or their off-putting desperation and coerciveness. Instead, your respect and compassion for the other person will be heard in addition to the courage of your convictions.

Self energy has a soothing effect on any parts it touches, whether they are in you or in another person. When your parts trust that you will speak for them, they feel less driven to take over and explode at people. What they really want is to have a voice—to be listened to by you and to have their position represented to others.

Practice: SELF-LEADERSHIP AS A WAY OF INTERACTING IN A CONFLICT

These practices—remaining the “I” in the storm or the empty vessel, and speaking for rather than from your parts—can be combined into a general way of relating as a couple when you have conflict. When you begin to fight, each of you can try the following:

  1. Pause
  2. Focus inside and find the parts that are triggered
  3. Ask those parts to relax and let you speak for them
  4. Tell your partner about what you found inside (speak for your parts), and
  5. Listen to your partner from your open-hearted Self

When a couple is embattled and each focuses inside, as in step 2, usually they only hear from their protectors. If it feels safe enough, moving an extra step toward vulnerability can reap big rewards. That step involves staying inside long enough to learn about the exiles that your protectors are guarding, and then telling your partner about these vulnerable parts. In most cases, when one partner has the courage to reveal the vulnerability that drives their protectiveness, the atmosphere immediately softens and the couple shifts toward Self-to-Self communication.

This is an excerpt from You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships by Richard C. Schwartz, PhD.

Forest Bath Right Down This Path

Dear Readers, I’m excited that my new picture book  Forest Bath Right Down this Path is part of the Sounds True Kids collection. It’s a book of my heart as it portrays a fog forest—Barred Island Preserve—that my family and I hike every year on our summer vacation in Maine. I’m thrilled that you can enjoy this forest through the window of Khoa Le’s gorgeous illustrations.

As we wander the forest’s moss-lined paths, we smell pines and firs, touch bark and berries, and listen to birds and chipmunks. The hike ends at a rocky beach where we swim and explore tidepools. When we leave, we feel peaceful and calm. The name for this kind of soothing experience is forest bathing.

There’s evidence that smelling chemicals from trees called phytoncides and microbes from soil called mycobacterium vaccae may reduce stress and boost immune function.

I work as a child psychiatrist to help children, teens, and adults, and I’m always looking for ways to help people manage stress and anxiety. Some of the recommendations I make for doing this include exercise, taking time away from screens, meditating, and connecting with family and friends. I try to do these things myself, too! Every morning I take a half hour walk through the woods near my home.

I’m also a parent of two children (now young adults), and I’ve been concerned about the ways phones and screens are interfering with paying attention to the natural world as well as one another. It’s known that spending a lot of time on social media is contributing to the worsening of teens’ mental health. Adults need to take time away from their phones, too. That’s why the main character of my book, Kayla, encourages her father to put away his phone and fully engage in their walk through their forest. Children want their parents’ undivided attention; often they’re the ones encouraging adults to turn off their phones and be present.

I hope this book inspires you to spend time with your loved ones outdoors and soak in all its beauty and mental health benefits. Happy forest bathing!

Wishing you fresh air and sunshine,

Lisa Robinson

P.S. I invite you to download the free story time kit with five activities for children to learn more about forest bathing—from heading out on a sensory expedition to exploring their senses to making art in nature.


Lisa Robinson is a therapist, picture book writer, and nature enthusiast. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts. Every summer her family travels to coastal Maine for two weeks. The highlight of the trip is a walk through Barred Island Preserve on Deer Isle. The animals and plants mentioned in her new children’s book, Forest Bath Right Down This Path, are all found there. Learn more about Lisa and her work at author-lisa-robinson.com.

Give Yourself Permission to Take Up Space

Dearest Friend,

We live in a world full of deadlines. Alarms. Screaming kids. Nagging bosses. More on our to-do lists than we could accomplish in three lifetimes. It’s easy for your needs to get buried underneath the rubble of daily life, and figuring out how to reconnect with your authentic self can feel touch and go… at best.

I wrote Needy: How to Advocate for Your Needs and Claim Your Sovereignty to lovingly provide the space for you to better understand your needs, experiment with new habits that help you meet those needs each day, and build a resilient connection with yourself that you can rely upon for good.

You have needs—your needs matter. And yet, you’ve been taught that pushing your needs to the back burner is the only way to get things done, that your needs are an overwhelming burden, or that self-care is a luxury you can’t afford. But the presence of your needs is a fact and not a flaw. You can reclaim your energy and give yourself permission to take up space in the center of your own life.

In Needy, I share my unique approach to identifying, honoring, and advocating for the most tender and true parts of yourself that yearn to be acknowledged. It is an invitation to embody self-acceptance, which leads to meaningful growth in self-responsibility, self-care, self-trust, and self-love.

This book will be a delicious companion for your journey, but you actually can begin caring for yourself with greater tenderness and open communication right now.

I invite you to take the next three minutes to check in with yourself.

Put down your phone, close your computer, and put your hand on your heart.

Breath deeply into your belly and ask yourself:

How do I feel?

What do I need?

What does my body need from me?

What is ONE, doable need that I am ready, able, and willing to meet?

Real self-care is responsive, not prescriptive. The care you are aching for right now will be found in asking yourself those four questions. Give yourself permission to start with one, tangible action.

And repeat as necessary.

Need more? I will see you between the pages of Needy. I am so grateful to be able to share this book with you, and I hope you will share it with the humans in your life who struggle to take up space in this way.

xx Mara

Mara Glatzel, MSW, (she/her) is an intuitive coach, writer, and podcast host. She is a needy human who helps other needy humans stop abandoning themselves and start reclaiming their humanity through embracing their needs and honoring their natural energy cycles. Her superpower is saying what you need to hear when you need to hear it, and she is here to help you believe in yourself as much as she believes in you. Find out more at maraglatzel.com.

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