This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through AllCEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. I'd like to welcome you to today's presentation on pain, moods, and management. Throughout this presentation, we're going to go over the characteristics of pain. And if you're in a Jaco accredited program, you're probably familiar with asking about the characteristics of pain. But we're going to talk about what that looks like and the reasons that we ask those questions and how they might help us as clinicians help our clients as opposed since we're not medical people. We'll look at the effects of pain, not only on mood, but on social relationships on people's environments on people's work and just generally how they think and function. We'll help people understand their pain. We'll talk about exacerbating factors and mitigating factors and helping people figure out what is it that makes their pain worse and what can they do to make it better. And then we'll wrap up looking briefly at some medical interventions that people can consider, both oral medications as well as other things like nerve blocks. And then we'll also talk about some non-medical interventions and referrals that we might be able to make. So everybody has pain sometimes. It is not realistic to think that you should never have pain. If you never have pain, you're probably not breathing. So it's something that you need to expect and something you need to figure out a way to cope with. Now, everybody reacts differently to pain. What causes extreme pain for one person may not be a big deal to another. For example, I have a pretty high tolerance for pain when it comes to working out muscle soreness, those sorts of things. But when I got stitches as foot surgery and when they took the stitches out of my foot, I about punched the doctor. And I didn't mean to, but it was just kind of that knee jerk reaction. So my pain threshold there was really low. So depending on the person and depending on the nerve endings in that particular area, whatever it is, they may have more or less pain.   But there are some people it does. And there are a lot of things that affect our pain threshold, one of them being our serotonin levels. So we'll talk about that in a little while. Our bodies are incredibly resilient. So when we have little pains when you twist your ankle when you strain a muscle, you know, I'm getting older every once in a while I'll bend over to get something out of the fridge and I'll strain my back and I'm like, Oh, that that really wasn't cool. In a couple of days, it's all better. Our bodies naturally want to find that homeostasis and naturally want to heal itself. So knowing your pain can help your doctor or physical therapist understand a little bit more about what's going on. And it can also help us as clinicians to help people deal with it because dealing with acute pain, something that's new something that's not going to last terribly long. A broken arm, something like that is much different than dealing with chronic pain, you wake up every morning and it hurts, you go to bed every night, and it still hurts. And this goes on for weeks or months or even years. You can see how just even thinking about that kind of chronic pain can be sort of overwhelming and depressing. The characteristics of the pain such as whether it's stabbing, aching, throbbing or burning. And these are questions that sometimes doctors ask and sometimes they don't ask they may just say tell me about your pain. When the last agency I went worked for went through jaco accreditation, we actually modified our assessment to ask these questions to get a clear indication about what that pain really was. Constant or intermittent. Now you can have chronic pain that's intermittent migraines are a perfect example, where this is something that happens relatively frequently, but it's not 24 7365 intermittent pain at least gives people a little bit of relief. So as a mental health clinician, one of the things I will want them to focus on is what's different during the times that you're not in pain, and let's focus and and keep a log or a journal of how often are you having these things we want those periods without pain to go to be as we go through treatment it may not remit completely. But if you can go from having a migraine three times a week to four times a month. That's a pretty big improvement. We want to know if it's stationary or radiating that can also affect how people interact with other people how people do their jobs. If you've got a stationary pain, then you kind of know what you're going to do that's going to make it worse. If it's a radiating pain. Depending on your movement it may kind of radiate move to other parts of your body. That will also help the doctors identify if it's neurological and all that kind of stuff but again we're looking at it from a mental health perspective. And then any numbness numbness is interesting because some people look at it as a blessing and some people look at it as a curse. Numbness obviously it's not hurting right now so that's better than hurting but think about somebody who has carpal tunnel they start having numbness in these first three fingers. They can't type. It's hard to even hold a spoon. They can't do manual anything with manual dexterity writing typing. Cooking I crochet a lot and when that when my hand starts acting up I have a hard time crocheting so the numbness while it's not painful is somewhat debilitating and that can be very frustrating which can make depression worse when depression gets worse than we know we also probably have a drop in serotonin which will make our pain threshold a little bit worse. So the effects of pain depression you know and that's kind of that garbage term that we talk about that has a lot of different manifestations one of them being fatigue. If you're in pain a lot you're probably not sleeping very well and sleep disturbances is next. But when you're in pain you don't get as restful of sleep you may toss you may turn you may wake up. And that keeps you from getting into that deep sleep and we know how important deep sleep is for our brain to rest and rebalance. The fatigue is also can also be draining because a lot of times your body compensates when you have pain on one side of your back for example the other side might spasm to try to balance things out. And they're constantly fighting which means you've got your muscles constantly working uses energy it can be draining on your just your general physical level of energy if your body's trying to recover and we're trying to fight against or deal with the pain that you're experiencing. And I talked about sleep disturbances not being able to get to sleep is one of them. The other thing that we look at with sleep disturbances and pain is the effect of a lot of pain medications you'll find that a lot of your opiates make you really sleepy but they don't help you get good sleep. So helping people take a look at what things are impacting your sleep aside from just your pain.  A sense of hopelessness and helplessness. I have a friend who was in a car accident and she is in chronic pain constantly and it's pretty much unremitting unremitting. She broke her back and has a rod in her back and it's you know yeah she's had a really rough time through the recovery she couldn't walk for six months. So she's made it a long way she walks now she can you know do house chores she's not able to work full time. So when she wakes up instead of focusing on all the things that she can do now that she couldn't do two years ago. Most of the time she's just faced with all the things she can't do so it's a struggle to remember how far she's come and what she's able to do. But on top of that not only just not knowing you can't do certain things but she's dealing with pain on a daily constant basis. Now sometimes it's a two on a scale of one to five and other days it's a full out five plus. So helping her look at the days that it doesn't hurt as much and being grateful if there's such a way for the days that it doesn't hurt as much and figuring out how to improve her life on those days. Another impact of pain that goes with depression is negative thoughts.  It can cause stress and a that fight or flight reaction kicks in our body perceives pain as okay you're vulnerable to attack so we're going to send out the cortisol we're going to send out those stress hormones. When you're in pain you've got this sort of thing going on. Serotonin goes down and pain goes up. So we know that with cognitive behavioral therapy and a lot of other interventions that we've talked about.  This is unbearable. I can't do this or focusing on all of the negatives then the neuro neurochemicals responsible for reward and happiness just aren't going to be there. We need to look at some things people can do to increase their happiness and sometimes it's just a matter of distracting from the pain that they're not going to be giddy happy but something they can focus on besides the fact that their back is hurting or their knee is hurting. So interventions mindfulness encourage people to do a body scan focus on what hurts what feels good. On those areas that do hurt there are a lot of different interventions people can do at home and they can talk with their doctor about massage. Strengthening exercises physical therapy a lot of physical therapy you go to the PT but then you come home and you do those exercises all week. Yoga. There's a lot of different things that people can do once they are mindful of what hurts mindfulness also looks at the pain and says is this pain due to my injury or illness or is it due to my stress. When we're stressed think about when you're stressed does your belly get upset does your back start to hurt does your neck start to hurt you give yourself a headache. It may be one it may be all of the above it may be none but a lot of people somaticize their stress. If the pain is caused by stress or anxiety that is a whole lot more addressable if you will I don't think that's a word by us as clinicians and by the patient themselves then something some medical diagnosis. I've worked with soldiers who have been injured in combat and sometimes they are just not going to be pain free and there's nothing I can do about that there's nothing the docs can do about that. But I can help them with other types of pain and other things that are ripple reactions from the pain. Good sleep habits. If someone is taking opiates they may be sleepy a lot and they may want to sleep a lot especially if they're not able to get out and go to work because of the pain. Their circadian rhythms can get disrupted so making sure that you're not sleeping too much during the day so you're actually sleepy sleepy at night. Making sure that the medication is not making you too groggy or disrupting your. Your deep sleep. Those are the two big things with a lot of my patients who have chronic intractable pain. One of the things we do for circadian rhythm maintenance is get up about the same time in the morning and whether that's 6pm or not 6pm golly 6am or 9am whatever it is for that person about the same time every day. And get into a wake up routine we talked in the sleep presentation about a go to sleep routine. Well this is our wake up routine. Generally when it's time for you to wake up your body starts secreting cortisol anyway and for most adults it's about 8am. Not for everybody it kind of depends on your rhythms. But we want to make sure our body knows it's time to be awake so that means getting out of your jammies. It means getting up and getting some sort of sunlight and trying to do this yes every day including the weekends. If you get up at 6am during the week and you want to sleep till 8am on the weekends or 9am you know that's cool but do the same wake up routine when you get up so your body knows okay we're not just up going to the bathroom we're actually up for the duration now. This will help set that sleep eat wake cycle and get people on the right track. Have people identify things they can control that are good. Okay you can't control the pain and if you think back to us acceptance and commitment therapy we know the harder we try to control something or get rid of something that's not controllable. The worse we're going to feel so accepting the pain exists and identifying the things you can control and preferably that are good so you can control your stress you can control what you eat you can control your sleep habits and there's a lot of those things that people can control. When it comes to addressing the self esteem and self efficacy issues that a lot of people face when they have some sort of chronic pain again focusing on the the days that are good and maximizing those days and cutting themselves some slack on the bad days. None of us is equal we all have different strengths we all have good days we all have bad days and when there is a bad day you know not dwelling on it and going well this is going to really suck today. But getting up and saying okay this is not a good day. Let me be kind to myself and figure out what is it that I can do to improve the moment. And eat healthfully to support serotonin functioning. Let's make sure we're getting that myriad of vitamins minerals and amino acids in there that you get from eating colorfully anxiety people with chronic pain or even acute pain can have a lot of anxiety. I had another friend bless his heart about my age and he decided to go out motocross and he took a jump a little bit too high landed a little bit wrong and broke both of his legs compound fractures of both legs. So for six months he didn't walk and he was in a long term care facility until you know things started to get better. And he could have gotten very anxious and very depressed over the fact that he couldn't walk and he couldn't motocross which is something that he had done all of his life he had competed and all that kind of stuff. But instead he focused on the positive and what he could do, which helped keep things moving in a positive direction. On the bad days, you know I said sometimes there's good days and sometimes there's bad days, even if it's chronic pain. Sometimes there are going to be days that it's a two or three and other days it's going to be a five plus. On the days that it's a five plus sometimes people will start to fret and worry that things are getting worse. If you've known anybody who's had surgery or whatever. There are some days that you know they're on the healing path and all of a sudden they have a not good day and they start getting really worried that they've got an infection or that they've broken a suture or this or that or the other and your mind can kind of go off into a myriad of places, helping people bring back their focus to what is probable. What is probably going on right now that made my pain worse today than it was yesterday did I do a little bit more activity yesterday. So if so then it might be a very natural consequence that I'm a little more sore today. And other anxiety can center around the consequences of pain, such as lost jobs. If you can't work because of your pain, or you can't do certain types of work, or hobbies, whatever you is important to you because of your pain. That can cause anxiety when it comes to a job. You might be wondering how am I going to feed my family if I can't work anymore, because disability is not going to pay enough. You know I don't even know if I'm going to get disability and people have a lot of anxiety when it comes to especially debilitating pain. It can have negative impacts on relationships to it doesn't have to, but it can. When people are in pain, think again about some time that you've been in a lot of pain. And did you want to interact with people. Were you as kind, compassionate, patient tolerant of other people when you were in a lot of pain. Probably not. You know I think to when I had my kids and my husband and the obstetrician were sitting there talking about flying. And I'm sitting there going excuse me I'm having a contraction this has got to stop. No, it's about me right now, which is not real good for relationships. But if you are constantly bringing the focus, not only back to you but back to your pain. It can have a negative effect on relationships. Helping people understand and be cognizant of how their pain is in affecting how they interact with other people and whether interactions with other people always center back around their pain. You know that's not helpful in either situation we want to have them have beneficial productive supportive relationships that center around hobbies and fun things not their pain as much. And they may worry if they were into working out before they may worry about their fitness level if they're going to be on bed rest for six months or if they can't walk for six months. It may concern them quite a bit. If you've got someone who has an eating disorder or who has a focus, it may be it doesn't quite meet the level of eating disorder, but they have a focus on being in shape and being thin. Then anxiety can creep up about what's going to happen to my body if I can't work out for six months or a year. So interventions for anxiety. Some of the easiest ones avoid caffeine and nicotine. These are stimulants that are going to make it more likely make you more vulnerable to use a dbt term to having anxiety and to getting worried and to being kind of revved up. Educate yourself about the disorder and the probability that things will get worse. You know how likely is it that if you have your wisdom teeth out, you're going to get dry socket as long as you're following the doctor's directions. How likely is it that the worst case scenario is going to happen and doctors can tell you that if you're working with a patient who just had heart surgery. That's huge. There's going to be some pain. There's going to be some recuperation time and there's going to be a lot of fear because if a heart doesn't work, that's a big issue. So we want to help them educate themselves about the probability and what to look for and when to call the doctor. And most doctors will go through that with them, but encouraging them not to bite the bullet if they're really concerned. If they do, then they might not get the reassurance that they need and they might sit at home and stew and wonder and get themselves all revved up and make their pain worse. As I said earlier, keeping a log of the good and bad days. Focusing on how many good days are we having and how can we improve the bad days. Practicing distress tolerance skills. There are a lot of different techniques that we'll talk about for dealing with pain, but dealing with the anxiety and the frustration that you can't do this right now, or it hurts too much to do this right now. And it can be maybe you can't go to your kid's recital because it hurts too much to get out of bed. There's a commercial on for some some pain thing right now. I can't even tell you what it's for.   But this is how people who are in chronic pain who can't fulfill their prior obligations their prior roles can feel so understanding and empathizing with how hard it must be to feel like you're letting people down to feel guilty to feel anxious to feel depressed and use the challenging questions worksheet to and to address anxiety provoking thoughts. If you Google challenging questions worksheet it's part of the cognitive processing therapy protocol. Basically it says what is your thought or concern. How likely is your thought or concern going to happen. What is the evidence actual evidence for it. What is the actual evidence against it. And are you using emotional reasoning or emotional reasoning or logic and there's it's a whole worksheet. It helps people take a very objective look at what's going on and figure out is this something I should really be worried about right now or am I getting worried over something that probably won't happen guilt self anger when you can't do something.  You may feel guilty you may be angry at yourself for not being able to fulfill that role function which can cause some people to lash out at others and push them away.  This obviously has a negative effect on relationships that we want to take a look at. Think about how you would want your child or best friend to feel if they were in your position. So obviously you can't have this discussion with the dog. You know the dog doesn't understand but if your child was in a lot of pain. Would you want them feeling guilty because they couldn't attend your birthday party. Probably not you know I would be more concerned about the fact that hey my child's in pain and I want them to feel better. So take that approach when you're if you're feeling guilty that your spouse is having to do more around the house. Switch roles and say if my spouse was in this much pain. Would I be angry at him or her because he or she wasn't getting up to do the normal chores. Get rid of the shoulds I should be able to make dinner I should be able to go to work I should know but you can't. Right now you are not the person you were before the accident or the injury so what can you do right now.  Some of us are really good at getting guilt and nurturing it. But is it a good use of energy.  Generally no so and I'm sure you have a lot of tips tools and tricks up your sleeve that you use to help clients deal with guilt. Those can come in really handy with people who have suffered some sort of an injury or have chronic pain. Grief.  If you've lost part of your independence. If you've lost part of your functioning maybe you used to be this you know a number one motocross star you know that wasn't his full occupation and he has other roles that he goes through. But it was something that he had done and competed in all his life. So my guess is he had to go through a grief process coming to the acceptance of the fact that he wasn't going to be able to do that anymore. The interventions are to work through the stages of grief for each of the losses because of the pain and there can be a lot of them. And there can be a lot of them. I'll have my clients write down what has changed since the injury or what has changed since you started experiencing this pain all the time. And then we start looking at which ones are losses which ones are things that they can't do anymore that they're holding on to that they're still trying to wrap their head around. And then we start going through each one of them and figuring out how to resolve that loss or figuring out whether it's a temporary loss you know something you can't do for a year. All right well at the end of the year maybe you'll be able to do it again self esteem. Obviously the difference between who you want to be and who you are right now. So maybe you want to be that person you were six months ago but right now you're not because you just had surgery or you're in pain. So make a list of the positive things about you right now. It's not going to be the same thing as that person. However I tried to help clients reframe pain and surviving whatever brought the pain on and surviving the pain itself in terms of a survivor story. How strong are they that they can get up despite the pain and doing these things identify one or two goals they can work toward it may not be pain related actually hopefully it's not what can you work toward. Maybe developing your stamina so you can get a part time job or even a part time volunteering position. Developing the ability to bathe yourself again or working toward finding a new hobby. My grandfather once his Parkinson's kicked in he used to make miniatures and he wasn't in pain but same kind of loss we're talking about here. He shook too much in order to make the miniatures and to paint them and he had to grieve that loss. But he identified a goal that he could work toward of a new hobby. Celebrate the small things the good things that you do the good things about yourself your successes and it can be getting up in the morning having a good day being kind to somebody else. And help people work on silencing the inner clinic it goes back to those shoulds that we talked about on the last slide. Should just add extra stress what can you do and that's what you're going to do. The other stuff we just need to figure out how to accept circadian rhythm disruption can come from not getting out of bed people are either in pain and they can't get out of bed or they're on bed rest. And you can get really sleepy just laying around all the time.  And you find that you really don't ever seem to wake up. So at night you're probably not sleeping quite as well because you're not getting out all that energy in your brains like is it time to sleep you kind of haven't done anything all day. So this can start causing circadian rhythm disruption. Encourage people if they're if they physically can to get out of bed if they can't and this kind of goes along with staying inside in the dark. Make sure to open the blinds sitting in your house not moving with the blinds closed makes just about anybody depressed. Not only do they need the sunlight for vitamin D and all that stuff but it helps set circadian rhythms and it'll help them feel better. Again we know vitamin D is also involved in depression mitigation. Lots of positive things about the sun. And sleeping too much. If you're taking medications or even if you're just depressed and you don't feel like getting out of bed and you're sleeping all the time. Then again eventually your circadian rhythms get out of whack. So what do we do get out of bed roughly the same time each morning. If you want to give yourself a little bit more leeway on the weekends your body will adjust to it. It's not all that rigid just like if you want to stay out late one night on the weekends. You're not going to be awake until 1am every night after that. So your body is somewhat resilient but try to get out of bed you know before noon generally a good thing. Get dressed in your day clothes out of your jammies so you don't feel as sluggish. Part of doing that for some people involves taking a shower. Some people shower at night some people shower in the morning whatever you know does it for you. But a warm shower will actually help wake you up. Turn on the lights and or sit in front of a window or get outside to get your day clock started. Get some bright light get some of those daylight bulbs. We have some they're Cree bulbs and they're LED so they're energy efficient but they are obnoxiously bright with that bright daylight. It's not the soft yellow color but it definitely helps wake us up. If you must take a nap and if you're taking opiates or just not doing a whole lot you're you're stuck at the house. You may get sleepy you may want to take a nap keep it under 45 minutes to avoid getting into that deep sleep. Encourage people to understand their pain what makes it worse if you are anxious depressed or angry does that affect your pain level. Keeping logs I keep baselines I have my clients keep baselines of how they feel what their mood is every day of the week and just a Likert scale one to five nothing too crazy. But also if they have pain they keep a pain scale one to five nothing too crazy and we can find a lot of times not always but a lot of times that as their mood. Is worse their pain is worse. What mental factors make your pain worse thinking about all the things you can't do. If you're foggy headed because of the medication that can have an impact if you're foggy headed because you're in so much pain and that's totally understandable when you're in a lot of pain it's hard to concentrate. But that can also increase frustration. Physical things that make your pain worse not getting enough sleep not stretching sitting in the wrong position. I am notorious for having very very bad posture when I'm working on the computer when I'm watching TV. And I will notice that my back hurts the next day and I'm also really bad along with physical for not stretching after I work out and then I wake up the next morning and I'm kind of like stuck in one position. I'm not recommending it you should you should always stretch. Don't do as I say not as I do. Identifying those things can help a lot toward mitigating the number of bad pain days. Environmental things that make your pain worse if you're somebody who has pain because of migraines certain fluorescent lights can make your pain worse. Fluttering lights flickering lights you know right before a ballast goes out can make your pain worse. If you've got low light somewhere and you're struggling to read because it's so dim or maybe you need glasses and you're not wearing them which is giving you a headache that can make your pain worse. So what easy environmental factors can you address. My daddy when he got old enough that he needed reading glasses was notorious for getting for forgetting them everywhere. So he ended up having five pairs of them he'd have one at the house one in the car one in the office and then a couple others who knows where. But that way wherever he was he always had reading glasses so he wouldn't get a headache and he could read the menus and things. Sometimes it's simple interventions like that if you have low back problems maybe driving in the car is uncomfortable. So what environmental modifications can you make are there any kind of pads that you can get that will help make it more comfortable to sit in the car. So think about things do an environmental assessment to see if there are things and when you sleep. That's the other big time that you're in bed for a while. Are you on a comfortable mattress. Do you have the right pillow. Talking with your physical therapist will help identify some of those issues and some of the interventions for those issues and social exacerbating factors. Sometimes people can make you feel really bad for being in pain and not being able to do stuff they kind of try to guilt you into going out. And most of the time and you know I try to give give the best interpretation of it. Most of the time I think people are trying to go to you to go out in order to get you out of the house because they think it'll make you feel better. But socially sometimes people being able to do things that you can't and you seeing them do them or putting you on guilt trips because you can't do things can make your pain. So how can you deal with those for the mitigating factors and most people have some in their toolbox they know things they do that makes the pain go away a little bit. Emotionally if they're feeling down what can they do to feel a little bit better. It still may have nothing to do with the pain. It may just be distracting themselves looking at maybe they go online and look at silly videos or I don't know what people do to make themselves happy but whatever it is do some of that. Mentally how can they make their situation better how can they help themselves focus if I'm taking medications which I'm real sensitive to medications so I get loopy easy. I take a lot of notes I keep a notepad with me or I put it on my iPhone. That way I know what I need to do what I need to get at the grocery store what I need to do at work that day. It helps me focus and maintain my concentration if I'm feeling a little bit off. Physically yoga stretching hot baths massage therapy there are a lot of things we can do that can make our pain. Somewhat less and it obviously depends on the type of pain a migraine is going to be treated differently than low back pain which will be treated differently than arthritis in your knee but understanding those speaking of arthritis now we're down to environmental. I can tell you when the weather is getting ready to change because there are sometimes like if it's getting ready to rain or get cold my joints will start to hurt a little bit. So environmental things sometimes you can't control them and it's just the way it is but some things you can control in your environment what you sleep on what you sit on your posture the temperature level in the house taking a hot bath. All of those things can help and having positive social supports who understand and take you seriously with the level of pain that you are expressing. Medical interventions Tylenol and non story steroidal anti inflammatory is there over the counter. These are things that a lot of people take they talk to their doctor they figure out which one's best. Most of the time they found that NSAIDs your ibuprofen and your leave are better at relieving pain but that's. They also have a lot of stomach side effects so it's something people need to discuss with their doctor opiates provide relief by attaching to your opioid receptors. Your body stops making natural opioids when flooded with prescription opiates so you need to be aware of this it's easy to get addicted or tolerant to opiates your body will start to adjust in a matter of days. When you stop taking prescription opioids the body often takes a few days to start making natural opioids again so your pain threshold is markedly decreased. So let's think about that person who's in a lot of pain and they start taking opiates and it feels better and they go through their prescription and you know they've healed and they're actually doing a lot better but then they stop taking the prescription opioids. Their body hasn't kicked in to start making the natural opiates again. So they start feeling more pain and they go back to the doctor and they're like Doc something's wrong. It may be obviously it's worth a medical doctor checking out if they think the pain is increased that much but helping people understand that when you stop taking opiates if you've been taking them for a couple of weeks especially. You may have some kind of what we call rebound pain and understanding that and being prepared for that helps a lot of people not freak out. Muscle relaxants like flexoril and soma can help if it's a muscular issue. Flexoril is less abusable than soma. Soma has a high frequency of abuse but muscle relaxants do help if that's where your pain is. Gabapentin has been used for brand name Neurotin for pain control for fibromyalgia and for a lot of other things where people may have pain. It's also something a medication that I've seen used in some of my patients who have who are in recovery from addictive disorders. SSRIs specifically Simbalta but anything that increases serotonin levels may help with pain levels. Nerve blocks are something that a physician can do not your general physician but a anesthesiologist to help block the pain to a certain part of your body. Obviously that's going to be a lot more aggressive of a therapy than taking some sort of oral medication but sometimes it helps people and sometimes it helps people when oral medications are not helping or if they don't want to take oral medications. And I put acupuncture and acupressure here under medical interventions just because it uses needles and it's not something you can just do at home. But there is a lot of research that has shown that acupuncture and acupressure can be very, very helpful in addressing all kinds of pain from migraines to arthritis to back pain. Guided imagery. Now these are a couple of my favorite ones. There are a lot of different guided imagery scenarios you can use. Color imagery. Think of a color you associate with pain such as red and picture the painful area of your body as red and then imagine shrinking fading or just dispersing the red. And it takes people a little while a little bit of practice to get used to this but if they're open to guided imagery this is one that can help. Not only are they seeing it disappear but they're also focusing on a color which is more tangible than some abstract pain they're feeling. Symbol imagery. Think about how the pain feels if it feels like a knife sticking into your joint. Imagine you're pulling the knife out of your joint and throwing it away. I had somebody suggest to me one time for neck and back pain to imagine angels rubbing the knots out of your upper neck and back. That was one imagery that stuck with me. Scenic imagery. And this comes completely different. We're not focusing on the pain now. We're focusing on a place that's calming and focusing all of our senses there instead of on the pain area. So your favorite vacation place when you were a kid where you want to go this summer on vacation, whatever it is but you want to take a break. Take a mental vacation from your bodily pain. Mindfulness. Alternate focus activities. Stop thinking about the pain and how to relieve it. So we want to focus on something else. Look at a vase that's in the room and look at how many colors there are. Just really focus on everything. Find a picture and see how many different things you can find in the picture. Anything to take your entire mental focus will help. Deep relaxation and breathing through the pain. When you feel the pain, especially if it's something like stabbing or throbbing, breathing through it can help you when it's worse and then exhaling. But just generally breathing through the pain can help your body relax and when it relaxes, then it can send out the all clear signal which counteracts the stress signal. Distract yourself. Sometimes it's about finding something. A Netflix show, a video, music. Loud music can sometimes distract you. Not so loud that you hurt your ears. Going outside. I like going outside and watching the birds. They're cute. Little titmice and chickadees are kind of my favorite because they just flit everywhere. Anything you can focus on that distracts you from thinking about the pain. And sometimes it just comes down to one moment at a time. Not an hour, not a day, not okay, I'm going to get through this. I'm going to get through this moment. If you've had toothache pain, getting through the moments, plural, until you can get to the dentist. Sometimes it's just taking it moment by moment and realizing that you can survive it. It sucks, but you can survive it until you can get some relief. Radical acceptance. Life can be worth living even with painful events or even with pain. Why? Encourage people to look at and answer that question for themselves. Why is life worth living despite this pain? Focusing on what they have to live for. Helping them understand that rejecting reality doesn't change it. Rejecting the fact that you're in pain and saying, no, it doesn't hurt. It doesn't change the fact that it hurts. So just accepting the fact that it hurts and you're going to have to figure out how to deal with it. Changing reality requires first accepting reality.  Now what parts of this can you change? Accepting that pain can't be avoided and it's nature's way of signaling. Something could be wrong. Your body is healing from something or there's an injury or we may not know what causes the migraine. We may not know what causes something, but it's your body's signal that something's wrong and okay, so my body's doing its job. I wish I wish it wouldn't do it so thoroughly, but it's doing its job. Rejecting reality turns pain into suffering. So when you start to try to reject the fact that you can't do something, then not only are you rejecting this pain, but you're also starting to suffer. If I say I can do this, whatever it is, even with my pain, I'm probably making whatever the physical pain is worse and then when I'm not able to do it, it increases my suffering and sense of frustration.  So refusing to accept the fact that okay, this is going to hurt for the next three weeks or six months or I may not be able to ever run a marathon again. Accept that, refusing to grieve that loss is going to keep you stuck. Non-medical interventions. Stretching and balancing exercises. We have multiple planes. Our body wants to balance your right versus your left. So what are we talking about there? The right side of your back and the left side of your back. If one is injured, the other is going to get wonky. You know, if one's weak and the other one's strong, you're going to feel pain. So making sure there's balance there. When there's an imbalance between front and back, it can also cause pain. If your quadriceps, for example, are really, really, really strong and your hamstrings are really, really, really weak. When you start doing activities, you can actually rip your hamstring. Your body wants balance. If your abs are weak, your back may spasm and you may have sway back and low back problems. It's all about maintaining that balance. You can use ice or heat packs to address pain and going back to those, the balance and stretching exercises. Figuring out ways to make that imbalance less noticeable. And a lot of times it comes to stretching exercises or if you have scoliosis, you may have to strengthen one side of your back more in order to get it to be on the same level of strength with the other side. But once they're both equally strong, the pain actually remits. Ice or heat packs. Pretty simple at home things. One life hack that I've found that is really useful is to put, obviously, if it's safe in your household, put isopropyl alcohol in about 20% with the water when you put it in the Ziploc bag and put it in the freezer because then it never solidifies. So it's more malleable to whatever area you want to get it, but it gets really, really cold. Heat packs. They have wonderful heat packs now that you can actually put on and they stay hot for 18 hours. I can't think of a company that makes them, but it's the one that Shaq does the commercials for. And I found those to be extremely helpful if I wanted to be up moving around and I had low back pain. Massage. You can do massage on most places on yourself. Just learning how to do it, finding out what will work, what will help, or you can go get a massage. TENS units and it's so wonderful that they're becoming more available now than they were when I was younger.  So it doesn't notice or send a signal that there is pain and it helps the muscles relax. Improving sleep and do more things you enjoy can improve your mood and improve your serotonin levels, which will improve your pain. Stress management. Because stress causes digestive upset and pain, back pain because we carry our stress back here. Migraines and headaches because we may clench our jaws or it just causes pain that way. And jaw pain from grinding our teeth. We want to manage our stress. Stress management goes a long way towards managing other sources of pain besides maybe the initial injury. Meditation. Distract. Don't react. And identify your most important values and this is the ACT intervention again. Decide whether stressing over whatever it is you're stressing about gets you closer to or further away from your goals and values. If you Google, go on to YouTube and search for ACT matrix, M-A-T-R-I-X.  Pain is inevitable but we know it impacts our mood, thoughts, behaviors and relationships. We can do a lot of mitigation there. It doesn't have to have significant negative consequences but we have to be aware of it first. Addressing pain will also help reduce related anxiety, depression and I use the term anger, anger, irritability, frustration, guilt. All of those are forms of anger and addressing your pain will help address some of those. Pain management can be medical or non-medical. A lot of people use a combination of both but being aware of the non-pharmacological interventions is really important for a lot of people.  Pain management requires a comprehensive approach to addressing the physical causes of pain, your mood as a result of the pain, how to handle and interact with social supports and the effect that your pain may have on your relationships and how to get the best quality of sleep despite your pain. Are there any questions? Unfortunately for us as mental health clinicians it's really, there's really no easy way to identify psychosomatic pain. If my clients are complaining of pain I always have them go to their physician and let their doctor kind of rule out what's going on. If they have something like scoliosis or some sort of ongoing pain that they're going to be going to physical therapy for, I try to get releases of information so I can communicate with the physician and the physical therapist in order to make sure that I am aware of what pain they may be experiencing when they may be experiencing exacerbations. I know for me after I would go to my physical therapist the next two days I was in a lot more pain and then once my body got used to those new exercises it would the pain level would go down. But so it's important for me to know when my patients are going to their physical therapist and we can talk about what to do when the pain gets worse. When someone has multiple medical problems causing pain and struggling with depression and trauma which do you address first? That's a good question. My question to them would be what is it that you want to work on first? You've got all these things and they're all affecting each other. So if we start working on one you're probably going to find relief in some of the other areas. What do you think would be most efficient and effective to work on first? Alrighty everybody have an amazing weekend and I will see you next Tuesday. This episode has been brought to you in part by allCEUs.com providing 24-7 multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006.


What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today we're taking our very first look at Analyst Builder. Now no intro today because I'm too excited and I have way too much to talk about, so let's just jump right into it. Now, if this is your very first time hearing about Analyst Builder, I'll give you a really quick introduction to what it is, why we created it, and then I'm going to pull up the platform and we're going to dive into everything that is on there. So we created Analyst Builder to be a one-stop shop for people who are trying to become data analysts. It's going to have full-length courses that I created, so I will be your instructor, as well as having a questions page that you can go and practice your technical skills in SQL and Python. It's meant to be an all-in-one platform, so you don't have to go to three or four different websites and get memberships to all of those. You can just go to one place and it's all going to be there. Now at the very end, I'll talk a lot more about how and why we created it, which I think is really interesting, but I'm too excited. I want to show you the website. So let's jump onto my screen and let's take a look. So this is the landing page of Analyst Builder and one thing I want to mention before we really dive into the platform and take a look at everything is that this is not currently available yet.  Just put your email in here. You'll get an automated email saying, hey, you're part of the waitlist. When we launch, the only way I'm going to notify anybody is if you were on this waitlist. I'm not going to put it on Twitter or LinkedIn or YouTube, only people who are part of this waitlist. Now this is the beta launch. So this is the first time that anybody is testing it out and anybody is trying it. So we know as a team, because I have a lot of people I'm working with, we know that there are going to be, you know, little things that we need to fix or update and improve. And that's where you guys come in because you guys are beta testers. You guys get to try out the platform and we are extremely appreciative and we're so excited about it. But let's take a look at the platform and I'll talk a lot more about that as we go through. So this is the landing page and you can see we can explore courses and explore questions. We'll get to that in just a little bit. But if we scroll down, talks a little bit about what AnalystBuilder is, some of the features and what you can get out of it, as well as just comparing AnalystBuilder to other platforms as well and a little bit about the editor and how that works, as well as right down here, you can watch this video about how we created AnalystBuilder, why we created AnalystBuilder, just highlights kind of what it is. This video that you're watching right now goes a lot more in depth. The next thing is that we are going to have a Discord server. The Discord server is for your feedback. We want to hear what you think, if you're finding bugs, if you're finding any issues, if there's something you don't like, you can put it in the Discord and I along with everyone on my team is going to be on that Discord all the time, making sure we're picking up all these bugs and issues so that we can fix them really quickly. And really, we're just trying to improve the website to make it as good as humanly possible as quickly as possible. But let's go up really quickly. And what we're going to do is we're going to go to this questions page first. Now, this might just be my favorite part of the entire platform because it's just so fun and there's over 100 questions on here. There's of course free questions that anybody can take. And then of course, we have premium questions as well. They range in difficulty.  Now, these easy questions are just that. They're pretty simple questions. They're really just testing your super basic knowledge of SQL or Python. For a technical interview, this is for like entry level or maybe even like internship level. Again, it's pretty simple. If you go to more things like the moderate or hard, that's going to be like mid level or even senior level. These very hard ones. And these are fantastic. These really hard ones are what I would consider extremely hard. I don't know if you're going to be asked questions that are this difficult in an interview. I don't think I've been asked questions this difficult, but I created them because they're extremely fun. In fact, I tested them with chat GBT. I plugged in everything. Chat GBT could not solve any of these. Now, if you're studying for a technical interview, especially for mid level or senior level, focus on those moderate or there's hard technical questions. These very hard ones are just that. They're super hard. They're really, really fun. They're super tough to actually get right. And they're more of a challenge because I don't think a lot of people are going to be able to solve them. So if you're able to solve these without looking at the answer, that's extremely impressive. So you should send me a screenshot of that on LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever I will be in high praise. Like that's really impressive. Now let's actually go and take a look at one of these questions. I don't want to do one of the very hard ones because those are really hard. Let's just come down here. Let's go to gamer tags. I think that one looks like a good one. So we have gamer tags here. And here's the question. And then we have down here, we have hints and your expected output. So at least gives you, you know, here's what you're trying to get in your output exactly. And then down here, we have our gamer tags, table or data frame. Now really quickly, you can do these questions in Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL server. Now really quickly, I want to stop and give you some context to why this is so amazing because you can buy online editors and I could have just integrated it into the platform, but you probably only would have gotten Python and MySQL or Python and PostgreSQL. Most of these online platforms don't have all of them. So we created from scratch our own custom editor, which is genuinely, I think better than almost any other one that I've seen out there. And I've used a lot of them, but you can come in here and go to MySQL and we can run this and we'll get, we're just getting the table because we're just selecting everything. But then you can come in here and try to solve this problem. And I'm not going to go through it right now.  Now this is going to check if your answer is correct. If it is correct, it's going to give you this little green check mark, which is great. That's what you want to see. And if not, this little red X makes you feel terrible. But if you're having trouble, we always have hints and you can come over here and check the solution. So I have the solution in everything, whatever you need it in. Now we're doing it in MySQL. Let's just pull this over because this is a fairly, I mean, this is a semi simple one. I hate to say that, but it's like a medium one. We're just using concatenation. We're taking the first three letters and their first name, the year and their birth date and creating a gamer tag. That's what the question asks. And we can run this code. And this looks like our final output. And then we check the solution. So we're going to click check solution. And then we get that green check mark, which means it was correct. Now, don't do that. Don't just go to the solution and, you know, get the answer. This is supposed to be for learning, right? You're supposed to come on here. You're supposed to really work through these problems and learn from it. And if you get stuck, you can always come over here to the video solution. This is one of the biggest benefits of analyst builders that I walk through this question with you. I walk you through the logic, how I'm actually thinking about it. And there's almost no other platforms that do that. They just have the answer. And I always wanted somebody to walk through it with me, especially when I was first starting out, because I didn't understand it. And so now I get to do that with you. I get to actually walk you through every single question on how to do it, my thought process. I go really in depth and I think it's just really, really fun. And then of course we can come up here to your submissions. Now, if we look at this, I have a lot of my sequel, PostgreSQL, MySQL. And you can go and see exactly, you know, when you submitted that. And if you want to, you can take a look at your answer and you can even copy that answer as well and bring it right over here and paste it. And so it's all there. And it's the same for all the questions. Now, again, if we go back to the questions, we're going to have our free ones right here. We have over a hundred questions right now, but this is just the beta launch. We'll be creating more and adding to this. And then there'll be more free ones as well. But if you want to access to the very difficult questions, you will have to get the premium. And there's like over a hundred of these, and they're just all really unique, really interesting. They really challenge you. And honestly, this is one of the ways that I learned when I was starting out. And so I feel like I had to have it on the platform. And I feel like we just did an incredible job with it because it is so good. It is flawless. It runs so well. And so it's just a really great experience.  I'm a dark theme guy. So it just turned out exactly how I wanted it. So that's enough raving about the questions section. Let's go back and we're going to come over here to the course section. Now for the beta launch, we're going to have these four courses. I already have more that are being edited that will be done in a month. So I'll be releasing more courses very consistently. The first one is a MySQL interview crash course. So if you have an interview coming up in SQL, you want to pass that technical interview or really know what you're talking about. This is the one for you. I go into even general technical interview questions. I'm not going to dive into every single one of these, but go in and check it out. For this one, I'll go into the Python programming one. And you can see we have 80 lessons, 12 questions and five projects. That's another thing that's really unique about these courses. So this is the Python programming one. You can come in here. What's really unique about this platform is that we don't just have video lessons. We also have built in with the editor. You can come in here and there are technical questions as well. So while you're learning, you're learning, oh, I'm learning comparison operators. Then you get to practice comparison operators right here in the editor window. And I can check if it's right or if it's wrong. And if you can't solve it, that's okay. We always have the solution in here. So you can go ahead and go to the next lesson. This is exactly how I had envisioned it when we were creating this. But then you can come over here to the comparison operators. This is the lesson before that. You can watch the lesson on comparison operators. And then you come down here. You can read a little bit about it. You can mark that this lesson was complete. Then we'll go on to the next one. And then you have the question on comparison operators. You get to practice as you go, which I just think is really, really fun. Now I'm going to come back here really quickly just to this course page. Because if you come down here in this course specifically, so this is Python, this is like, I think one of the best Python courses that I've seen out there. I am incredibly, incredibly proud of it. The thing that I like the most about it is it's just a one time buy. Okay, it's kind of like the Udemy style, right? You just buy it one time and you have it forever. I didn't want to create a platform where you have to pay to keep access to something. Once you pay for it, I think you should just get it forever. That's kind of my motto. And I've tried to keep it really affordable and we'll look at pricing in just a little bit. But with this, you can kind of get an overview of what you're going to learn in this course. And then of course, you can purchase it right there. Now this is just one course, right? We have multiple courses. And so go through, take a look at all of them. Honestly, I'm super, super proud of all these courses. And again, we have more on the way already, like they're already being edited. I've already recorded them. And I'm recording more as we speak. So I have so many courses that are going to be on here with even just like three months. And so this page is just going to be filled. You're going to have to scroll down because there's going to be 10, 15 courses just in the next like six or nine months. It's going to be amazing. Now let's go over to pricing because pricing is very important. This is everything you see on here is the beta pricing. I'm not doing anything like you have to enter a discount code. If you are coming on here and you're part of the beta launch, then you can get these prices. Now once we do the full launch, it might be a little bit higher, but I'm going to try to keep it pretty affordable all the time. Now, you always get the free. This is just the questions. We also have courses and bundles for the questions. You're going to get it free. So you get those free questions. You don't have to purchase anything for those. But if you want access to all the premium questions and the very hard questions, you can do any of these. And all of these are great options. The monthly is really cheap. It's just 10 bucks a month. And you get access to everything or you can pay for a whole year, which would be 99. So just, you know, kind of the same thing except instead of paying monthly, you get a little bit of a discount paying for a year. And then for a lifetime, so you can have it for the rest of your life. You can pay 149. Now, if you're just trying it out and you're not sure if you're going to like it or not, I highly recommend just going with the monthly just to test it out. Just try it out. See if you like it. I'm going to be adding massive amounts of content to this platform. So, you know, every time you get on, it's most likely going to have more questions or more courses on there. But let's go over to the courses. So for these courses, again, I tried to keep them as affordable as they could. I hope you know that we are doing all the video hosting. We have all the servers on the back end running. This is not a free website to maintain. It's several thousand to maintain per month. So it's not cheap. But I'm trying to keep this as affordable as possible. So for these advanced MySQL course, it's $24. Again, all this is beta pricing. This is the interview crash course 24, beginner Python 31 and my analytics 31. Now, I worked hard because originally I had these priced a little bit higher because I thought our servers in our hosting were going to cost a little bit more. But when I saw that it was a little bit less than I thought, I reduced the pricing because again, I want everyone to be able to come on here and learn on this platform. I don't want to make it 50, 60, $75 per course that just that would hurt me. I would feel really bad if I ever did that. So never let me do that. The last thing we have is a bundle. So these bundles will give you access to more than just one item. The first bundle we have is this ultimate beta course bundle. So it's going to get all those four courses for $89. So instead of paying, I think it was like 110 for all of them, you can just buy, you know, all of them in one bundle for $89, a reduced price just for beta users. Then we have lifetime access to analyst builder. And so this especially is one of the best deals that you're going to find because $249 is what you pay for like one year of Coursera. This you're going to get lifetime access. And so every course that I create in the future, you're going to have access to immediately, you won't ever have to pay for it. So if you're going to get the lifetime of the questions, which was $149 and you wanted to buy some of these courses, the beta bundle, that's already like 250. So this 250 is just going to give you access to this plus all of the future courses that I will ever make. Again, this is only available during the beta launch. Once we actually fully launched this and hopefully around two to three months once we get a lot of the bugs worked out and you help us with that. This is going away. So you can only get this within the next like month or two. So if you're wanting this, highly recommend getting this one because it's just going to be a fantastic deal. When I have like 20 courses on here and you get all the questions forever, it's going to be the equivalent of getting it for like $10 a course and the questions for free. It's just, it's a really good deal. I'm not trying to pressure you into anything just pricing wise. It's a really good deal if you really want to invest in the platform and like the future courses that I will be putting out. Now, one small thing to note just on beta because we're going to try to fix this in the future is you can only purchase one thing at a time.  If you want individual courses, you're going to purchase one at a time. And so that is the platform as of right now and I'll just go back to the home page. That's the platform and this is just the beta. I cannot tell you how many things we have planned for this website. I mean, I don't want to ruin them all, but we're absolutely going to be integrating some AI into here. So that'll be really, really cool. Once we get that integrated, we're also going to have something where you can practice data visualization on here. So you can go in and code and you can practice your data visualization with data sets. We're going to have a resource page that'll have data sets, resumes, cover letters, and a ton of other things as well. So that is analyst builder. That's what we're going to have for the beta launch. If you have not already, go sign up on analystbuilder.com for the waitlist. That is the only way that you're going to hear that it is launched and you can go and start taking it because as of right now or the morning that I'm recording this, we have over 5,000 people on the waitlist. That's a lot of people. So if we open it up to just everybody, that could be 10,000 people, it could potentially break our website. And we don't want that. So we're really trying to limit it to just people who are interested in it. We'll send out an email and then as, you know, people wake up throughout the world and they see that email, they can go and do it kind of spreads, kind of softens the load on the servers so that they can handle a lot of people testing it out and trying it out at the same time. So now that we've looked at the platform, I'm just going to talk for a little bit about how we created it, why we created it. And just chat for a little bit because I'm extremely, extremely excited about this. I started talking with the person I ended up partnering with to build this over a year ago back in July of 2022. We started having conversations about the feasibility, how difficult it is, the cost, all of these things. And then we started building it almost a year ago, like right around one year ago. So this is a long, long, long project. My initial vision for it was really simple, a lot simpler than it was. And I wanted to use a lot of built-in stuff just to get it up and running faster. But as we started getting into it, we realized that a lot of these built-ins had a lot of limitations. Like I couldn't add the editor into the courses section for a built-in course platform that we could just purchase. Or I couldn't have the editor how I wanted it. So it would only give me Python in my SQL, but none of the other ones. And I was like, I really, really, really want all of those different things. And we want to add more to that. So, you know, we're going to try to integrate R as well for people who want to use R. And all of these things were just really customizable things that you just can't buy. And so I started working with this guy named Kasan. He is genius level. He has been just the best partner in this out of anyone. He runs a company called WaveSync and they've just been amazing to work with. And Kasan has been by my side the entire time helping me make revisions, just kind of bringing some logic to it. And he's basically built a lot of this platform himself. And so I along with him, we've just been building up the content, building up the infrastructure. And it's taken so long because I did not want to kind of skimp on the quality. I've seen a lot of other platforms out there that just were not that great that people are putting out. And I'm like, I don't want to be that guy who puts out this like inferior product and wants people to pay for it and charge a lot of money. I wanted to put out a superior product to almost anyone out there and charge less than them. That's just what I wanted because I remember when I was first starting out, I had a very small budget. So I couldn't afford, you know, all these boot camps or these really expensive programs. And so I'm trying to make it for somebody who is in my shoes when I was first starting out. Somebody who's trying to break in, but doesn't have a thousand dollars to spend just on whatever. So it's a really reasonably priced platform, which I'm super proud of because again, I was trying to keep the cost down. But building it just in and of itself was really difficult on the back end of everything that you saw is a really complex infrastructure. We have multiple databases running at the same time. We have, and I'm not going to give too much information because I intend on having Cassan, if you're watching this, I intend on having Cassan on the channel to kind of break down a lot of the how we built it. Because it's just, I have learned more than I ever thought I'd learn about this. It's absolutely fascinating. And so I'm not going to dive deep into it, but we have all these databases on the back end running, which you're hitting off during the questions. We're using Vimeo to host our videos. So that's just some random background information if you're interested. But everything else, all the designs, you know, I had these preliminary designs in my head. The company I'm working with WaveSync has changed almost all of them for the better. I'm not a graphic designer. And I was like, here's what I want it to look like. And we kind of built that out initially. And then we were like, let's make this so much better. And then we did that. And that's what you're seeing. Like that is just a lot of hard work has gone into that and a lot of planning and graphic design, things that are not my crazy strong suit. So this platform was not just me. It was an entire team of like really smart people really working hard and making this happen. So just kudos to them. But now I just want to touch on why I created this platform, because I had a lot of opportunities to create courses and do things in the past. And I kind of turned all of them down mostly because I was working a full time job. But secondarily, because I didn't just want to create a course and put it on something like Udemy, which I partnered with Udemy before. I love Udemy. Great prices. But I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to have that editor integrated. I wanted to have, you know, more control over the pricing and all these different aspects that I just couldn't do through Udemy or any other platform. I actually tried to partner with several different platforms to kind of make something like this with their existing platform. But that just wasn't their vision for their business. So they turned me down, which I totally get. And so that just led me to, I'm going to create it myself. I had no idea how to do it. I just knew that I wanted to do it.  And what's so great about analyst builders, we get to keep adding to it and add anything I want. So all those different things that we were talking about, I have a sheet right now that has 15 different things that I want to add to it that are just going to be really unique and things that you don't find on other platforms. And so, you know, I just didn't want the quality of what you're going to get or how I teach you to suffer because other platforms didn't have what I wanted.  With all that being said, and I know I can be kind of long-winded, I could talk about this forever. Analyst builder is going to be an amazing platform. I cannot wait for the beta users to get in and start using it, start giving feedback in the Discord. I really, really, really want to hear your feedback. If you liked it, if you didn't like it, if you found any bugs, all these things you can tell us in that Discord. And lastly, I just wanted to say thank you to you guys for being beta users on this platform. It's a completely new platform, hasn't been tested. And so you guys are kind of the early trailblazers to help make this platform amazing. With that being said, if you want to be a beta user and you are not already on the waitlist, go to analystbuilder.com. So you can sign up for that waitlist. You will be hearing from us very, very shortly.


So how do you know that you're ready for that first UX design role? Have you gone through the entire design thinking process yourself? Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test? Make sure you do this multiple times to get the hang of it. Can you clearly communicate why you did what you did? Ask yourself this.


All right, thank you. We'll get started. It's the Wednesday, May 15th meeting of the Amherst Planning Board and the first item on our agenda is minutes. We have two minutes in our packet from April 17th and from May 1st. If members have had a chance to review those minutes, I'd entertain a motion on them. There's one amendment that we'd like to make which is to the May 1st minutes. There's a reference to planning code among the conditions and we wanted to make sure that that was changed to a plumbing code. Number seven. All right. With no objections. We'll consider that change approved. Mine is set so it can be either on or off and I leave it on. Is there anything else that I need to Is something supposed to happen on this panel up here? Why don't we just give it a little test now? And if it's not working, you could come back and let us know. Yes, but I can't recall if she was being amplified with someone testing testing. Thank you. System is working as expected. All right. So we have one amendment to the minutes of May 1st and with no objection. We'll consider that amendment approved. I'd also entertain a motion to approve either set of minutes. Jack, let's start with the minutes of April 17th, if you could. I move that we accept the minutes of April 17th. I second. All right. Moved and seconded. Any discussion? Yeah, question. Yes. On page four of the third paragraph. I think it would be clearer if the two dash one bedroom units, seven dash two bedroom units, two dash three bedroom units were the first two and the second, all the twos were in Arabic numerals rather than written out. It's a little confusing. Two dash one bedroom units. It looks like that's two or one bedroom unit. Or some other kind of way. Maybe some punctuation could clarify it. But it's a little confusing the way it is. Yes, Chris. So we'll change the first number to an Arabic number? I would suggest the unit breakdown includes a number two dash one bedroom units, a number seven dash two bedroom units, and a number two. A number two dash three bedroom units. All right. That change will be reflected. David? I'd like to make a comment about, it's not a proposed provision to the minutes, but comment. And I know that this is being addressed or was being punted or pushed to the town council for clarification, too. But it had to do with the situation. This is the April 17th minutes. After a site plan review with the tree warden to look into the tree warden to look at the trees that needed to be considered for removal for that project out on southeast street. And then a letter of opposition was written, was, was, was, was, was, was, was introduced by a resident. And that took it out of the planning board in the town and the tree warden's decision making. Because it got now essentially kind of appealed to the town council. I think, and I know that that's being, I think that that's being addressed procedurally. But I think that it seemed to me that it makes a lot of sense to, for it to go to town council, if a citizen, if the resident objects. But that, it seems to me that there's a lot of consideration. And after considerable time of planning board members going to site plan review with the tree warden and considering those trees, it seems to me that, that are not having the ability to, to make a recommendation to the town council for that sort of denies the effort that was put into it. And consideration. Because a lot of consideration was made to those trees. And there, and it's, the town council is not benefiting from that. It's just time and thought that was put into it. So, Chris. So I'm exploring that issue. I've sent an email to the town, to our town attorney about it. And he's written back kind of an equivocal answer. So I have to talk to him. But I, in rereading the state law, I think that the letter of opposition can only be used against the opinion of the tree warden. So I have to go back and look at that again. But I don't think the letter of opposition can be used against the opinion of the, of the planning board. So then I am wondering if we should re advertise and re hold the planning board portion of the public hearing. And then let the letter of opposition stand against the tree warden and his, his thought process. But I'll get back to you on that. That's interesting. Thank you, Christine. Would town council refer it back to us or you, you weren't just like Sarah kind of pretended didn't happen and start over again. Chris, I think I need to talk to the town manager about how to handle this. But one thought I had was that you could reopen or re advertise and hold your public hearing and that the town tree warden could do something separate. So anyway, I'll get back to you on exactly what should be done. And I will talk to the town manager about it. Great. Thank you. So we have a motion and a second on the minutes of April 17. And we have a change that's been adopted to those minutes. So further discussion on the minutes of April 17. Not all in favor. All opposed. And all abstaining. So that's six in favor, zero opposed one abstaining. And then I entertain a move motion on the minutes of Wednesday, May 1. Move to adopt the minutes of May 1. I'll second. All right. That's been moved and seconded. Is there any further discussion? If not all in favor. And that's unanimous. All right. Thank you. Next we have public comment period for any items that do not appear on the agenda. We have no public present. So no public comment. Moving on to item three, planning and zoning, zoning subcommittee reports. The zoning subcommittee just held a meeting which was in part a joint meeting with the town council's community resources committee. We had a good conversation about the zoning priorities chart that the zoning subcommittee has prepared as well as the draft articles that have been prepared, including a new draft article prepared by staff. The zoning subcommittee will meet again on May 29th. Any comments, questions on zoning? All right. May I? Yes, please. Greg totally rocked the house. I appreciate that, David.  I think we should reduce the stuffiness like a lot because zoning is really pretty stuffy. That's fair. Some of us were not in attendance at this meeting. Could you be a little more specific, David, about how what the rocking was? Sure.  However, there were a lot of the CRC who I now understand better are also all town council meeting members, town council members. And Greg demonstrated with no notes going through that very to me still confusing zoning issues priority list going through two thirds of it in a great level of clarity and detail, but not getting stuck in the weeds. And those are mean from the parking to the zone form based codes to the transitional zoning in the BL. I mean, there are a lot of different levels of complexity and detail and Greg just navigated it very well for however many others who were here. And that's like my third or fourth time hearing this spiel too. And so I'm just catching on. And so Greg is, you know, leading that led that very well. Thank you. Thank you. I want to give credit to the CRC members who joined us also. We had a really productive conversation and I think all of us in the zoning subcommittee look forward to working with them in the future. Was there any other planning and zoning items? All right, moving on to old business item for a signing of decision for SPR 2019 dash 05. I have a decision to sign. Yes, Chris. So the decision is essentially what you have in your minutes of May 1st, which you just approved. So I'm going to pass the decision down to you. And Mr. Let's see. This gray mullin was the chair at that time. So she should sign in the second spot. I mean, on the second page of signing. So she's going to be up. All right, we'll circulate that for signature. Is there any old business topic not reasonably anticipated? Any new business topics not anticipated? Chris. I think I'll go over what we talked about with this CRC about the bylaw. And I'm not sure if I've talked to you about this before, but you know, you held a public hearing in December. I think it was December 12th and you reviewed some changes that had been proposed by the bylaw review committee. The changes were to make the zoning bylaw comport with the new charter. You recommended to the town council that they adopt that version of the zoning bylaw as the base version. But the town council at that time was busy with other things and they decided not to act at that time. They're getting ready to be able to act now soon. So since they didn't act the first time within 90 days of your having recommended it to them. You have to hold another public hearing. So my understanding of what the process is going to be is that the town council will refer this zoning bylaw to you. And then you will hold a public hearing and I'm thinking that that could be either June 5th or June 19th, depending on when town council refers it to you. And then you would probably make the same recommendation that you made last time. And then you would pass that recommendation on in the form of a report to town council. So the report would be similar to the reports that you used to write to town meeting. But I think it could probably be a pretty short version of one of those. So anyway, that's what's going to be coming up in the near future. And depending on what I hear from town council, I'll let you know exactly what date you'll be holding the public hearing. Great. Thank you. And if I could ask if we've heard back from the town attorney about the voting requirements question that we posed to them. We have not heard back from him, but I'll prompt him. Thank you. All right. Do we have any form A in our subdivision applications? Any upcoming ZBA applications? Ms. Field Sadler can explain the upcoming ZBA applications. There are several. The first one noted here is a public meeting for Cooley Dickinson Healthcare, which is at 170 University Drive. They are requesting that the ZBA amend their 1972 approval for their driveway. They actually want to construct a new driveway off of Northampton Rowe right into the parking lot. So that's expected to be heard by the CBA on May 23rd. So is that next week? Chris. The TAC will be reviewing that on May 22nd. So if people are interested in finding out more about that project, they could attend the TAC meeting, which starts at five o'clock on May 22nd. Are they going to abandon the driveway off University Drive or keep that and then add the driveway? It is my understanding that this will be an alternate drive. So no, they aren't abandoning the original one. And also, so a request for a special permit is being made by John and Jessica Brown. And they are, oh, they want to create a flag lot out at 389 391 Road. So that also will be coming up on May 23rd. The golf course solar project will go in front of the CBA on May 23rd. And herbology will be there as well. And they're requesting two special permits, one for recreational marijuana and one for offsite medical marijuana dispensary. Christine. Could you remind me, what's the address? Which one is that? For herbology, I'm sorry, it's 422 Amity Street. And there's two more. So let's see, at the CBA meeting on June 16th, Jill Greenbaum is going to request a special permit to construct a non-owner occupied duplex. And that is going to be located at seven P's place. Chris. So this is an interesting one because it already has a single family house on that lot. And the CBA will have to make a finding that the duplex is compatible and complimentary with the use of the single family house. It has a lot area for three families, three units. And the last one is a request for a variance by Heather Sheldon for lot 15D93, which is on Auburn Wood Road in between number 67 and 87. And they are requesting that the building area of this lot be reduced from the 120 feet in diameter that's required to 105 feet. And the reason being is if they keep it as it is, the building placement is going to be out of line with other buildings on that street due to the frontage. It's my understanding. So a reduction in the building circle. Is that something that gets reduced often, Chris? The frontage stays the same. And there is currently a building circle drawn on the ANR map, which you approved, the ANR plan. And the request is to move the location of the house closer to the road than the building circle can be. And so that's why they're asking for a variance. They're asking that essentially that the size of the building circle can be smaller so it can move closer to the road. So they're going to have to claim a hardship based on something having to do with the property. And we'll see if that actually gets through the zoning board of appeals. I'm only aware of one other variance having been approved in recent years and that was for Jim Hurrell's property on Southeast Street. My recollection was the bylaw does not allow that reduction, but a variance would be the way to go. It's interesting. Was that all for upcoming ZBA? That is all. But we would also like to know if you would like to have presentations for any of these projects. Have there been any major changes or developments in the solar project application? Chris? The only changes that they've, well, I should say one of the changes is that they've eliminated the western driveway. So they only have the eastern driveway and the eastern driveway will come in towards the east part of the site and then wind its way up to the two solar sites. So they're not going to have two driveways. So that's really the essential change. I'm satisfied with that. We discussed that at length already. All right. Any upcoming SPP, SPR, SEB applications? You've heard about most of these already, so I won't go through them. But I did mention the fact that you would be looking at the bylaw amendment bringing the bylaw into conformance with charter either June 5th or June 19th. And we have at our next meeting, yes, please. I'm sorry. If we happen to get the flood maps sooner rather than later, you would be looking at the flood maps also on June 5th or June 19th. That is a mandatory part of the process. Yes. It's really what we would recommend that you hold a meeting about it. It doesn't have to be a public hearing, but it would be probably a joint meeting with the Conservation Commission to have a presentation about the new maps and then have people, the public, come and hear the presentation and will probably have maps lined up around the room so people can look at the maps individually and ask questions if they have any. So I think the fact that you had a presentation in 2017 alleviates the formal requirement that you hold such a meeting, but we think it would be a good idea to hold it. So that would be a joint meeting of the Planning Board and the Conservation Commission, and we would encourage the public to comment. So a slightly different format than our last presentation from those consultants. And what was the date? Do we have a date on that? We don't really have a date yet. You have meetings in June on June 5th and June 19th. Alternatively, it could be held on a Conservation Commission night or it could be held on a Tuesday. And perhaps that might be more convenient if we're having a big meeting with the public. All right, so we can figure out the details of that at our next meeting. Were there any other upcoming SPP, SPR, SBB applications? Not that we know of at this time. At our next meeting we'll hear Amherst Media again. And do we have the application for the project in East Amherst, the mixed use building? We haven't received the application from Amir yet. Amir McChee about the mixed use building in East Amherst. And nor have we received the application for the dog park. So I think those are more likely to happen towards the latter part of June. Okay, thank you. I move on to Planning Board Committee on Liaison Reports, PVPC. I just want to remind everybody the annual meeting is June 13th. And it may be an opportunity for all Planning Board members to gather outside of the, you know, auspicious building here and formality and that and break bread together, that sort of thing. Yeah, free food. And it's going to be at the Northampton Center of the Arts, which is on Holly Street, which is where Spilettos is. You just take a left right there. But June 13th, time wise. I have a postcard invitation from them. It does not mention a time. It's a save the date. So I guess they're firming up the details. Yeah. You were invited. I haven't. Actually Steve was. I would think like five, they would open the door and then things usually start around six perhaps. All right. That sounds like a great idea. And we have two Planning Board meetings before then to share reminders about that. Yes, Chris. So I don't know if Mr. Jemsak mentioned that it was the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists who's going to speak about climate change. Yeah. Interesting topic. And he was the former head of Commissioner of Environmental Affairs as well. A qualified guy. Kimmel was his name, right? Yeah. Excellent. Thank you. All right. Community Preservation Act Committee. Oh, there's no new information we have received. Any specific feedback from the Finance Committee about our recommendations as yet? Okay. Ag Commission. Okay. All right. Design Review Board. We have had no meeting since our previous Planning Board meeting. Housing Trust. Met recently. Working through its housing policy document, which is a document that will likely be passed on to this group for our consideration and possibly endorsement. It's essentially a policy that Trust is looking to say how the town should approach affordable housing, what percentages we should provide of housing at different affordability levels. So we should be seeing that in the next month or so. So in the subcommittee, we've already gone over a UTAC no longer meeting, I believe. And the downtown parking working group. Have not met. Okay. Meeting on Monday. I think it's 9 or 9.30 in the first floor of town. All right. Thank you. Report to the chair. This is one of the shorter meetings we've had. So I hope folks can get out and enjoy the rest of the nice weather we're having. Christine. Just a scheduling thing. I wanted to confirm that we don't have a meeting on the 29th of May. And I wanted to ask about July. We do have one. Yeah. It's going to be a long one most likely. Good to know. And then I just wanted to bring up July. Because when they were talking, nothing said May 29th. So I was hopeful. Anyways, July 3rd. I wanted to ask if you think we'd have a, you know, I don't know if people have travel plans or whatever being the third and the fourth. You can decide now that you don't want to meet on July 3rd. Okay. I will not be here. Others. Preference. As of now, I'm fine meeting that date. So, sorry, Christine, you are away. Okay. All right. I do have an announcement. Are we down to my report? Yes. Report of staff. So the consultants who are working with us on the 40R district are coming back on June 4th. And they're going to be meeting with us in the Woodbury room. And I think I don't exactly know the time yet. But maybe Mr. Stutzman knows. Or maybe Ms. Chow knows. It's at six. Six. Okay. So they're going to be presenting sites. Sites that have been talked about with staff. They'll be presenting the sites kind of overall. And then people have an opportunity to react to that and to come up with scenarios that they like. I'll also be hearing from the architect in a very conceptual way. He's planning to present information about massing and numbers of units that might fit into these various locations. So I think it'll be an exciting meeting, especially coming on the heels of the one that we recently had about what is a 40R district and how could it benefit Amherst. So that'll be in the Woodbury room at six on June 4th. Excellent. All right. Well, we're adjourned. Thanks everyone.