Dr Tom: Wake up and be grateful for three things

One of Dr Tom Mulholland's KPIs is how many oceans he's visited.

So the leader of healthy thinking had a great couple of days last week when he spent time on the Coromandel Peninsula's Pacific Ocean towns promoting the message that you can turn life's lemons into lemonade.

The author and mental health advocate spent more than 30 years in hospital emergency department roles before deciding too many Kiwis were becoming ill from preventable diseases.

He set out to become the ambulance at the top of the cliff - turning a retro Chevy ambulance into a pop-up medical clinic and travelling around New Zealand.

He spoke at Opoutere School on Monday last week to an audience that included emergency services volunteers, local Police and staff, farmers and townsfolk from the Coromandel Peninsula.

Dr Tom was brought to the area by PGG Wrightson through rep Mike Dyball after a chat with Onemana Rural Fire Chief Jo Adams.

Jo says there's a need for mental health support for volunteers and farmers especially.

Supper was provided by Port Rd Bakery and the cup of tea afterwards allowed everyone a chance to connect with each other.

At the start of Tom's talk, the audience was asked to think about what age they want to reach, and what might stop them reaching it.

This was easy with a simple question: Do you know your numbers?

The numbers include your blood pressure, cholesterol level, whether you snore and if so, if you have been tested for sleep apnoea, how many alcoholic drinks you consume in a week and how many minutes' weekly exercise you get.

Dr Tom has developed an app called KYND which stands for Know Your Numbers Dashboard.

He says people are often more honest with their phone than answering questions, and it is used to measure physical, mental and social health that give a picture of a user's level of stress.

The Doc knows about stress.

A keen surfer, he was in Java when a tsunami struck in 1995, detailing the horror in his book 'Healthy Thinking: How to turn life's lemons into lemonade'.

"Then 10 years later when another large tsunami struck I went to help. I got divorced, was stabbed in a home invasion and nearly bled to death," he goes on.

He also had a venture capital company and was known as 'Dr Global', featuring on TV show '60 minutes'.

When it failed, the totality of his life's stresses left him experiencing increasingly unhealthy and destructive thoughts.

"When you start to think your friends and family are better off without you, that's a major warning sign that your brain isn't working properly."

Meeting a 17-year-old who'd lost his father to suicide gave Dr Tom perspective.

"He said 'when dad took his life, he didn't take his pain away, he just gave it to us'."

The Doc says rest, sunshine, good nutrition and meditation are key to getting back on track with healthy thinking.

Dr Mulholland authored two books, 'Healthy Thinking: How to turn life's lemons into lemonade', and 'The Power of Healthy Thinking to change your attitude and your life'.

He told the audience that healthy thinking can treat the feelings of despair triggered by unhealthy thinking.

Continuous exposure to unhealthy thoughts may lower serotonin and other mood chemicals leading to deeper depression, he explained.

"Wake up and be grateful for three things. When you change your thinking, you change the shape of your brain."