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John Delony Makes the Case for Choosing Reality

John Delony believes that anxiety is a normal reaction to something that has gone wrong. The key is knowing how to tackle it in a positive way. (Courtesy of John Delony)

Over the years, John Delony has found his calling in “sitting with people,” whether that’s counseling distraught students, comforting grieving parents, or advising brokenhearted husbands or wives.

“I want people’s days to be a little more peaceful after they’ve interacted with me than before,” he said.

On “The Dr. John Delony Show,” which reaches 200,000 weekly listeners, he offers advice to callers in difficult situations: the man who has secretly cheated on his wife for years; the middle-aged woman who’s never had a real friend. Mr. Delony listens deeply. But he also interrupts people and dishes out, as needed, tough love or encouragement. The advice is usually simple. Putting it into action is usually hard—but then again, so is taking no action at all.

“I’m probably the most hopeful person you’re going to find,” Mr. Delony said. He has counseled parents who have lost their children in tragic circumstances—and witnessed their resilience and growth as they later helped bereaved parents in similar situations.

“We spent so many years talking about post-traumatic stress that we have completely not talked about the other side of that teeter-totter, which is post-traumatic growth—the extraordinary things people do on the back end of tragic moments and seasons. And so I believe in our collective ability to do really hard things.”

On his show, Mr. Delony takes calls from listeners and gives them the advice they need. (Courtesy of John Delony)

Anxiety Is a Smoke Alarm

In his new book, “Building a Non-Anxious Life,” Mr. Delony tackles the subject of anxiety and outlines its main triggers: loneliness and disconnection from family, friends, or community; sensing you’re unsafe; an unhealthy, sleep-deprived, or overstimulated body; dealing with trauma or other concerns; and a lack of autonomy or freedom in your life.

Polls and studies indicate increasing levels of anxiety. An annual poll conducted by the American Psychiatric Association from May 2023 assessing people’s feelings about current events found that 70 percent of adult respondents said they felt anxious or extremely anxious about keeping themselves or their families safe—an increase of 6 percent over 2020. That same month, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory calling “our epidemic of loneliness and isolation … an underappreciated public health crisis.”

Parting ways with the more conventional viewpoint that “everybody’s increasingly more and more broken,” Mr. Delony redefines anxiety as a normal function that alerts us to something gone wrong.

“We have innate safety mechanisms,” he explained. “Our bodies know when we’re not safe. Our bodies know when we’re lonely.” When your marriage, relationship with your kids, or financial life is on the rocks, your body knows it.

He compares anxiety to a smoke alarm that alerts you when a fire’s burning. And the first step to putting it out is to acknowledge the fire.

An Old Roadmap

When you picture anxiety, you might think of someone drowning his or her sorrows in a few pints of beer at the bar. But people can resort to coping through different unhealthy mechanisms: the unrelenting pursuit of status and money (which can look like success on the surface); out-of-control shopping sprees; getting into fights; doomscrolling on social media; and endless worrying, among many other behaviors.

But there are positive ways to go from a reality check to a peaceful life. Those entail cultivating a life filled with connection with others, autonomy (including being debt-free), mindfulness, good health, and a belief in something higher than ourselves. It seems like common sense, but as Mr. Delony points out, in an age of self-actualization where “people chase the best feeling possible,” these principles are not always popular.

(Courtesy of John Delony)

Mr. Delony’s book is partly dedicated to his grandparents, David and Addell Delony, who were married for 73 years and raised four children in their 900-square-foot house. During their long marriage, they were firmly anchored in a faith community. Their home was peaceful and devoid of anxiety—though they certainly faced difficulties, such as living through the Great Depression.

“They had a tiny house and they didn’t have new clothes. But when he died, it turned out he had a whole bunch of money he left my grandmother so that she could get the care that she needed in her final days,” Mr. Delony said.

“It wasn’t about getting a bunch of money, the newest technology, or flashy things. It was about getting up and doing the same thing over and over every day, and loving those closest to you and being a member of a community and neighborhood,” Mr. Delony said. “And it’s a pretty remarkable road map.”

His Own Journey

Mr. Delony is no stranger to anxiety, and he has been transparent about his own struggles and how he’s worked to heal himself. He grew up poor and, for many years, earned many academic degrees—markers of status and security—and accumulated massive debt. In certain seasons of his life, work came first, while he fell into old patterns of neglecting his family, friends, and his own health.

For example, there was a time when his young daughter refused to hug him. At first, the way she ducked away was cute, but her persistent behavior became cause for concern. He didn’t yell at home, and he wasn’t threatening, so he was puzzled. But he came to realize, thanks to his wife’s gentle counsel, that the “nuclear reactor in his chest” was affecting his daughter. Kids can, in effect, absorb our feelings—hidden though they may be.

Mr. Delony often talks about the importance of parents and mentors as models, and he knew that he had to do the inner work and get some counseling.

(Courtesy of John Delony)

“​​If you are surrounded by loving, caring parents and grandparents, extended family, and a community that you can feel has your best interest at heart, that is the soil from which inner wisdom is born,” he said.

Mr. Delony and his daughter now enjoy a close relationship, but he has become more conscious about his priorities and what he needs to do to recharge, including spending time with family, getting outdoors with guy friends, and going to a spiritual counselor.

We live in a time and age where there is no shortage of anxiety, or “smoke alarms” going off, whether in real life or online. Contemplating the state of our world through our screens can be especially paralyzing. When Mr. Delony looks at the divisive barbs that fly on social media, he said, “I don’t see a path forward for us unless we can re-engage the ability to sit down with people and laugh and carry on and have very different beliefs about certain things.”

But when it comes to our influence over our relationships and our community, the old road map his grandparents passed down held true then and holds true now. It provides a time-tested path “to make our neighborhoods better, to make our families better,” Mr. Delony said. “We’re gonna start there.” On the road of life, what better place to start, indeed?

From May Issue, Volume IV

Categories
Features Lifestyle

Hemingway’s Granddaughter Finds Peace Through Family, Faith

(Illustration by Biba Kayewich)

Mariel Hemingway was born four months after her famous grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, committed suicide with a shotgun. Growing up in a family blessed with creative passion and shadowed by mental health crises was a balancing act if ever there was one.

“There have been seven suicides in my family. While it is amazing to be Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter, there were moments when I thought, ‘Oh no. Does this mean I’m next?’” Hemingway said.

As a child and young adult, she watched the members of her family struggle with their passions and their pain, and she felt her own lack of balance threatening to derail her. The so-called “Hemingway curse” weighed down on her. Until she decided to fight back.

“Sometimes we put meaning to something that happened in the past and think it’s a curse. We have the ability, though, to change how we think,” Hemingway said. “The way to create a world where you’re not a victim of where you came from is to define your story. Awareness is everything. Once you become aware of the story, you don’t have to be its victim.”

Now, the actress—who began acting at age 14—is also a writer, public speaker, and outspoken mental health advocate. She’s passionate about encouraging others along their own mental health journeys, and sharing how her holistic lifestyle is central to her happiness and well-being.

American Essence spoke with Hemingway from her home in Venice, California, about her childhood, a life-changing experience with the Dalai Lama, and her routines and rituals for wellness and balance.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

American Essence: What were the steps of your own mental health journey, from the time you were a child until you started to find your own balance?

Mariel Hemingway: I grew up in this amazing, creative family. However, my father suffered because his father, a great man, was probably not a great father. My father drank a lot. My mother also drank. She had lost her first husband, the love of her life, in World War II. They’d only been married for nine months, and he was shot out of the sky. There was a tremendous amount of tension between my father and my mother.

I spent a lot of time as a child trying to make myself invisible, at the same time wanting to be noticed. I used to go outside and hope that somebody would notice I was gone. I’d come back after hours had passed and nobody had realized I wasn’t there.

When I was about 10, I decided I was going to fix them all. I was going to pick up the wine glasses and broken bottles after they’d had a fight. I really believed it was my role. I feel for my parents because my two older sisters both had mental illness. And me, I was the good girl, doing everything right and helping Mom and cleaning the house, thinking that I could be the savior.

At the back of my mind was always the fear that I might end up like my mom or dad or my sisters. I started to think the way to control myself was to control what I ate, my exercise—I overdid everything in order to try to find balance.

Over time, and trying to follow gurus and diets and exercise routines, I realized that my solution was within me. I spent countless years giving my power to everybody else and thinking that somebody had an answer for me until I realized it was me.

AE: How did you come to realize that you already held the answers?

Ms. Hemingway: I had an experience in India with his holiness the Dalai Lama. It was in a small group of people and he was listening. I sat next to him. He kept looking at me—he has this wonderful smile. The other people were asking important questions and I was just sitting there. But as I stood up to go, he put his hand on my hand and he looked me in the eye and he said, “You’re OK.” And he took my breath away.

Over the next couple of years, day by day, I understood it more: “Oh, I am OK!” Now that’s my message to others: You’re already OK. Let’s find the tools that work for you to chip away at habits of mind or body that interfere with you being OK. I want to help people break free of belief systems that tell them they’re not OK, they’re broken. I don’t believe anybody’s broken.

Mental health is an ongoing journey. Every day I’m finding my balance. You need to find peace within the choices that you make, or you will be chaotic. We need to find our balance every single day.

AE: What are your tools for finding your balance every day?

Ms. Hemingway: My tools are my lifestyle, which is simple and ritualistic. My lifestyle is the only reason that I am feeling happy, healthy, and better about my life than I ever have.

Morning is a very important time for me. How you start your day is how the day will unfold. I start my mornings with a prayer, by being grateful, and by paying attention to my breath.

One of my tools is belief in something greater than myself: I believe in God and that belief is strong in my character, and it is a connection to earth and all that is beautiful. Nature was always the thing that literally grounded me when I was a child. I didn’t know that the fact that I loved being barefoot was actually helping me.

Being intentional is an important tool. Making deliberate choices about food, being aware of my breath, my thoughts, aware that I drink water. We take these things for granted, but if we start to pay attention to them, we start to live in the present.

To be present is to know where you are in the moment. Multitasking is really just an inability to stay here. If we aren’t present, we can get wrapped up in what has happened or what’s going to happen and we forget about the importance of this moment, right now.

AE: What advice do you have for someone who is struggling?

Ms. Hemingway: Talk to somebody right away. Don’t let it fester inside and become bigger than it needs to be.

Then, try to look at your lifestyle and habits and see where you could make some shifts. Lifestyle is powerful. Food is really significant: If you’re eating too much sugar or processed food, it all has an effect. Stick with simple, real foods.

Try to form habits of being outside and getting connected with the earth. A while ago, I had a friend who was really struggling. I phoned him and recommended that he go outside. I said, “I want you to look up at the sun. Take your shoes off, even if you’re in the city. Sit there, stand there, walk, whatever. Take at least 20 minutes and then call me back.” He called me in about an hour and a half and said he couldn’t believe how different he felt. When you change your energy by going outside, it’s going to shift things.

Laugh, play. I remember when my kids were young, I would watch them play and feel jealous. I grew up in a family where I became an adult too fast, and I didn’t know how to play. But if you think about it, play is instinctive to children. Why shouldn’t we adults also have fun and play?

AE: What can people do to help when someone they love is struggling?

Ms. Hemingway: Listen. Don’t say anything. Anybody who is struggling needs to be heard. Learn to be a good listener. Most people don’t know how to listen because they’re thinking about what they want to say. If somebody’s in pain, they probably feel isolated, lonely, unheard, and unseen. For you to witness them in their pain is the most powerful thing you can do to help.

At a Glance

Lives in: Sun Valley, Ida. and Venice, Calif.

Notable Films: “Lipstick” (1976); “Manhattan” (1979); “Running From Crazy” (2013), a television documentary about her family; “God’s Country Song” (2023)

Notable Books: “Finding My Balance: A Memoir” (2001), “Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family” (2015)

From Sept. Issue, Volume 3

Categories
A Love of Learning The Great Outdoors

Outside Changes Everything

(Ben White/Unslpash)

My friend Ann, a veteran mother of four, has one piece of parenting advice she passes out consistently to frazzled new parents, particularly if they happen to have a fussy baby: “Get out of the house. Put that baby in a stroller and get outside. Outside changes everything.” She’s right.

Outside really does change everything, especially in today’s world when, by some calculations, up to 90 percent of our lives now happen inside. And each year we spend more than 1,000 hours in front of a screen. It’s an insidious change from the way people traditionally lived their lives, and it’s not for the better. Happily, some folks are beginning to notice.

In his 2005 international bestseller “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” Richard Louv discusses the importance of being outside and interacting with our natural world. “Now more than ever, we need nature as a balancing agent,” he says. Turns out the benefits are myriad, but here’s my top five.

Improve Mental Health

With so much anger, anxiety, and stress happening indoors, simply stepping outside can be an easy antidote. While it isn’t guaranteed to cure all your problems, breathing fresh air and observing nature has definite mental health benefits.

Follow the science: Sunshine is a natural mood-lifter because it boosts the body’s serotonin levels. Serotonin helps stabilize moods and keeps people calm and focused. Outdoor time also decreases hyperactivity in children. As Louv said, “The woods were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.”

Follow the logic: Outdoors, children can run and yell, jump and climb; it’s an easy, healthy, all-natural way to burn off excess energy, so much so that children diagnosed with ADHD who spend more time outdoors tend to have milder symptoms.

(Annie Spratt/Unsplash)

Improve Physical Health

It’s important to prioritize the time we spend outdoors. “Time in nature is not leisure time; it’s an essential investment in our children’s health (and also, by the way, in our own)” Louv says. Perhaps that’s because there’s just something about being outside that naturally encourages people to be active.

My plan to relax on the front porch turned into an evening weeding the flower bed—working up a sweat and pulling a sizeable pile of weeds. Turns out being physically tired helped me fall asleep more quickly and sleep better throughout the night.

But the health benefits of being outside don’t stop there.

Sunshine (again!) helps rev up the vitamin D levels, which are critical for a healthy functioning immune system. Plus, those same vitamin D levels also build strong bones and muscles. Outdoor exercise—particularly weight-bearing exercise such as biking, walking, hiking, or climbing—increases strength and endurance even more. Dealing with the changing terrain of the natural landscape improves balance.

There are other, more unexpected health benefits of being outdoors. Optometrists know our eyes aren’t made for screens, and excess time staring at tablets, phones, and computers leads to dry eye and eye strain. Nature provides ample opportunities to exercise our farsighted muscles and build depth perception as we look at things 20 feet or 200 feet or even 2,000 feet away.

Build Confidence

Beyond the mental and physical benefit of being outside, a life spent with nature changes us in many positive ways, perhaps because the things we accomplish outdoors are real—not virtual—and so are the rewards.

Encountering a bear or a mountain lion on the trail and living to tell the tale is about as real and confidence-building as it gets. As Louv says, “The pleasure of being alive is brought into sharper focus when you need to pay attention to stay alive.”

(Will Stewart/Unsplash)

But wild adventures don’t have to be life and death to be meaningful. Walking the length of a log without falling off is its own triumph. Put that log 2, 3, or 5 feet off the ground and bump up the thrill of achievement. Try jumping across a narrow spot on a stream. Fail and you walk home with squishy wet socks and pruny toes; succeed and you walk home with dry feet and a smile on your face.

Hunting and fishing or gathering nuts, berries, or mushrooms in the woods bring their own brand of confidence. Want to grow your confidence? Grow a garden. Invest yourself in a very real way in keeping yourself (and your family) alive by planting, tending, and then gathering up your own food.

Make Social Connections

It’s not immediately obvious, but being outdoors offers social connections. Opportunities to work together on an outdoor project cultivate a spirit of cooperation. Fallen logs are too heavy to be moved on their own. One person catches the fish while another builds the fire to cook over, but both jobs are necessary.

Visit a farmer’s market and you’ll soon strike up conversations with vendors. Do this for several weeks in a row and soon you have new friends you’ll look forward to seeing … and it’s all brought to you by the great outdoors.

Promote Learning

Take it from a veteran homeschool mom—being outdoors is the ultimate educational experience. In fact, many of our best learning moments took place outside. A life outdoors promotes curiosity and the learning of new words and concepts. Being outside nurtures creativity and imagination; it encourages risk-taking and independence.

Why is the sky blue? Why are rainbow colors always lined up the same way? Why don’t earthworms have eyes? Why do hummingbirds hum? What does pileated mean? Why is the sand at the bottom of the sandbox cooler than the sand at the top? Why do flowers smell different? With so many curious, interesting things around them, kids learn without even being aware they’re learning.

(Leo Rivas/Unsplash)

Creativity and imagination take flight as leaves become boats carrying cargoes of dandelion flowers. Trees become houses with leafy roofs. A fallen log becomes a mighty train headed down the rails to adventure. Outdoors, people learn about the interconnectedness of the natural world and its inherent complexities. Fisherfolk protect the rivers, lakes, and streams that serve as homes for trout, bass, crappie, and catfish. Hunters conserve the homes where the deer, elk, bison, and antelope roam.

Working to achieve that indoors-outdoors balance, Ginny Yurich, founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and her family decided to make a conscious effort to spend more time outdoors … like 1,000 hours each year. Yurich ended up starting a movement (www.1000HoursOutside.com), promoting the benefits of spending large quantities of time outdoors. Whether you’re a city dweller or country through and through, whether you spend 1,000 hours outdoors or something less, time spent outdoors is good for the soul. Because being outside really does change everything.

Gina Prosch is a writer, home educator, life coach, and parent located in mid-Missouri. She is the author of “This Day’s Joy” and “Finding This Day’s Joy,” both of which are available at Amazon. Find her online at GinaProsch.com or TheHomeschoolWay.com. She also co-hosts The OnlySchoolers Podcast (OnlySchoolers.com).