The Love Button Lecture Series hosted a presentation on Feb. 5 to help students deal with mental health issues.
“From Stress and Anxiety to Resilience and Success,” presented by Alane Daugherty, centered around eliminating the stigma against mental health and stress so that students could learn how to manage their anxiety and prevent it from taking over their lives.
Daugherty also teaches in the kinesiology department, so the lecture incorporated different sciences to support her lecture.
She explained that humans have two survival drives: a fear response system and a calm and connection system. Both are necessary to survive, but it is impossible to experience both at the same time.
According to Daugherty, each has a physiological imprint and is dominated by specific emotional states.
She said humans are good at adapting, so to increase our resilience to stress and anxiety, one must induce the calm and connection system by changing one’s experiences and the perception of those experiences.
“Every moment of every day you are transforming, and if you are struggling with mental health, it’s so important to be able to try to find a way to heal it, or you will just be going to be transforming to more of the same,” Daugherty said. “There’s ways to heal it. I’ve been there, I know.”
A second lecture was presented at night, featuring two more guest speakers: Dr. Sherry Sami and Dr. Habib Sadeghi, who are a married couple and co-founders of the Love Button Global Movement.
They added to Daugherty’s presentation by focusing on the goal of the Love Button Lecture Series. They brought science into the discussion regarding the importance of human connection and what it does for one’s health — both mental and physical alike.
“I had a 70 percent chance of dying and what really kept me going was love,” Sadeghi said. “I think part of what has occurred is we lost that connection. We lost that soul-gazing of being with each other as human beings.”
“Our tagline is ‘Pause and love’; we have to allow a neuro-connection to occur.”
The Love Button Lecture is working on expanding its outreach by teaching more people the importance of mental health, self-care and being nice to others.
“The Love Button Global Movement is a movement [that] is here to inspire people globally to stand for loving kindness,” Sami said. “It’s an act first towards loving yourself and from that space, bringing kindness in every opportunity you find towards others.”