To the uninitiated, Brazilian jiu jitsu would seem like a terrible activity for a person with anxiety. After all, the grappling-based martial art looks like it’s comprised of people simulating murder with their bare hands.
But for Erin Herle, Brazilian jiu jitsu, know as BJJ, has become a crucial, therapeutic activity—and eventually, a source for activism.
Herle, 27, comes from a family with a history of mental illness. Over the course of her adolescence, her once outgoing father retreated from the world more and more. By the time Herle was in her 20s, he was suffering from depression, living largely in one room, drinking, chain-smoking, watching movies, and avoiding people as much as possible.
Herle struggles with depression, an anxiety disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In 2009, as she was first coming to grips with her illness, she stumbled onto jiu jitsu via an online forum—a man was selling cupcakes to raise money to get to the Pan-American Jiu Jitsu Championships.
“We were both in Southern California, so I was like ‘Let’s take this opportunity to hang out,’” Herle tells GOOD “When I met up with him, he brought me to this tournament.”
She was hooked. It would take her another year to actually start training, but jiu jitsu quickly became a major tool in her quest to manage her various conditions. On the mats, she was forced to confront her anxiety head-on, but in a safe, controlled environment. In her training partners, she found a supportive community.
“It really helped me,” Herle says. “I found my people. I never had anything like that (sense of belonging) growing up.”
Before long, Herle was competing regularly and winning often. As a blue belt, she decided to start competing in BJJ full time.
In July 2015, Herle was living in New Jersey, where she had moved to be with her boyfriend. Late one night, she got a call from her aunt, back in California. Initially, she ignored it.
“Then she texts me like, ‘I really need to talk to you.’ So I’m like, ‘Oh my God, something is wrong.’”
Her father had committed suicide.
“My dad was depressed and isolated,” she says, “but we never thought he would take his own life.”
Herle decided to use jiu jitsu as a platform to talk about mental illness. At her next competition, the Pan American No-Gi Championships, she won the bronze medal in the open weight absolute division. When she took the podium, she held up a sign reading “Submit the Stigma of Mental Illness.” (In grappling-based martial arts like BJJ, one of the ways to win a fight is to get your opponent to “submit,” or “tap” out to a choke or hold.)
“I realized that I wanted to use (the platform) as an opportunity to tell people about suicide and mental health,” she says. “Like ‘Ok, this happened to me, and I’m going to make it a positive somehow.’”
Herle says she only told a handful of people before holding up the sign. She says that, at least initially, it didn’t feel like people were receptive to her message.
“No one really approached me about it until I started posting about it online and making the website and spreading more background,” she says.
Once the site went up, Herle quickly discovered she wasn’t alone. Many people were, on some level, using BJJ to help manage their mental health. For Herle, it’s about being able to exist and engage without the specter of mental illness looming—and indeed, there have been studies suggesting participation in martial arts might have a positive impact on mental health. Some of these effects also result from participation in other athletic activities, but some seem unique to martial arts.
“It allows me to focus on just that moment,” Herle says. “Just that technique, just that roll, just that match. So for the length of class time, I'm all there. And jiu jitsu is so much like chess and you have to have both muscle memory and quick thinking.”
Other tournament champions began holding up “Submit the Stigma” signs. #SubmitTheStigma became a hashtag, and Herle began selling #SubmitTheStigma gi patches and donating the money to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. When that wasn’t raising money fast enough, she started to do a series of charity seminars at BJJ schools across the United States. So far, she has raised roughly $20,000 and sold hundreds of patches. Now, she’s is in the process is developing another seminar.
The patches are a way of spreading awareness and getting people to start conversations about mental health with their training partners.
Among them was Valérie Brosseau, who is finishing a psychology degree at the University of Toronto, as well as volunteering for a number of crisis hotlines in the region. She also has struggled with mental health issues and says that BJJ has been a crucial part of her fight to maintain balance.
“It's multi-faceted,” she said. “I sweat. I am engaged. I am stimulated and challenged. So it keeps me occupied and goal driven.”
As soon as she heard about Herle, she felt the need to reach out and get involved.
Brosseau was catching up with a friend at a BJJ tournament. “I was talking about my struggle with mental illness,” Brosseau says. “She said ‘Yeah, I know a girl who holds up signs.’ And she started telling me about Erin. I sent (Herle) an email, and we just really opened up to each other and realized that we had a lot in common.”
Brosseau has become what Herle calls her “right hand” in Canada, handling distribution of the #SubmitTheStigma gi patches and generally getting the word out.
“It’s been really sweet to see people reach out to me and be like ‘Yo, I’m having a tough time, can we talk about it?’” she says. “That’s the spirit of the initiative, to make talking about it accessible to everyone without having that fear of judgment.”
Thomas Beach, 27, won a gold medal as a blue belt at the 2009 BJJ World Championships. A year later he took silver as a purple belt, and the following year another silver as a brown belt at the World Jiu Jitsu No-Gi Championship.
Beach was lucky to make it past 15.
Now a black belt, the Toronto-area instructor says jiu jitsu “literally saved my life.”
“There was violence, drugs, blah, blah, blah,” says Beach, who left home shortly before his 15th birthday. He tells GOOD his life was “chaotic.”
Some of that chaos was due to the fact that Beach was struggling with a host of undiagnosed mental health issues including obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and a panic disorder. His brother, meanwhile, suffered from bipolar disorder.
“I was always taking care of him,” he says. “bailing him out of jail, getting calls in the middle of the night ’cause he was having problems with people, saving his ass.”
All the while, Beach was fighting in the streets.
“I fought a lot as a kid, and I was thinking about fighting (professionally),” he says. “I started by trying to do some MMA (mixed martial arts), and a few months in, I found that I was really enjoying the jiu jitsu aspect of it. Eventually, I just wanted to do jiu jitsu.”
Jiu jitsu gave him stability, order, and a sense of purpose.
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“I started training three times a day,” he says. “I sold all my stuff and rented a small room and started working at the gym, cleaning the mats, putting up posters, handing out flyers at the mall—just doing everything I could.”
It also brought him acclaim and recognition. Beach’s list of accomplishments in BJJ are almost overwhelming, including the aforementioned medals.
When he first heard about Herle’s campaign, it struck a chord with him, both because of his own struggles and because he too had recently lost a friend to suicide.
“I watched the story she put up about her father, and it just really hit home,” he said. “I watched that video, and I was crying.”
Beach reached out to Herle and asked if he could start selling the patches at Toronto BJJ, the gym where he teaches. He also plans to put together a series of Canadian charity seminars.
“I want to get Erin doing a seminar up here,” he says. “But I also want to do one of my own. I want to send more money to National Alliance for Mental Illness.”
For Herle, the campaign is only just beginning. She’s planning more seminars, more patches, and more videos. But most importantly, she’s hoping to start more conversations. She wants BJJ practitioners to take the message of #SubmitTheStigma out of the gym and into their broader communities. And she wants people to help each other get help.
“I’m an advocate for professional help,” she says. “Talking about it, that’s amazing, but you need to seek treatment and recovery. Jiu jitsu is a great supplement, but it’s not a substitute for professional help.”
Why do some folks use social media but don't engage?
Psychologist says people who never comment on social media share these 5 positive traits
For over 20 years, social media has developed into a staple in many people’s day-to-day lives. Whether it’s to keep in communication with friends and family, following the thoughts of celebrities, or watching cat videos while sipping your morning coffee, there seem to be two types of social media users: commenters and lurkers.
The term “lurker” sounds equally mysterious and insidious, with some social media users writing them off as non-participants at best or voyeurs at worst. However, mindfulness expert Lachlan Brown believes these non-commenters have some very psychologically positive and healthy traits. Let’s take a look at how each one of these traits could be beneficial and see how fruitful lurking might be even though it can drive content creators crazy.
1. Cautious about vulnerability
Consciously or not, making a post online or commenting on one puts you and your words out there. It’s a statement that everyone can see, even if it’s as simple as clicking “like.” Doing so opens yourself up to judgment, with all the good, bad, and potential misinterpretation that comes with it. Non-commenters would rather not open themselves up to that.
These silent users are connected to a concept of self-protection by simply not engaging. By just scrolling past posts or just reading/watching them without commentary, they’re preventing themselves from any downsides of sharing an opinion such as rejection, misunderstanding, or embarrassment. They also have more control on how much of themselves they’re willing to reveal to the general public, and tend to be more open face-to-face or during one-on-one/one-on-few private chats or DMs. This can be seen as a healthy boundary and prevents unnecessary exposure.
Considering many comment sections, especially involving political topics, are meant to stir negative emotional responses to increase engagement, being extra mindful about where, when, and what you comment might not be a bad idea. They might not even take the engagement bait at all. Or if they see a friend of theirs post something vulnerable, they feel more motivated to engage with them personally one-on-one rather than use social media to publicly check in on them.
2. Analytical and reflective mindset
How many times have you gone onto Reddit, YouTube, or any other site and just skimmed past comments that are just different versions of “yes, and,” “no, but,” or “yes, but”? Or the ever insightful, formerly popular comment “First!” in a thread? These silent browsers lean against adding to such noise unless they have some valid and thoughtful contribution (if they bother to comment period).
These non-posters are likely wired on reflective thinking rather than their initial intuition. Not to say that all those who comment aren’t thoughtful, but many tend to react quickly and comment based on their initial feelings rather than absorbing the information, thinking it over, researching or testing their belief, and then posting it. For "lurkers," it could by their very nature to just do all of that and not post it at all, or share their thoughts and findings privately with a friend. All in all, it’s a preference of substance over speed.
3. High sense of self-awareness
Carried over from the first two listed traits, these silent social media users incorporate their concern over their vulnerability and their reflective mindset into digital self-awareness. They know what triggers responses out of them and what causes them to engage in impulsive behavior. It could be that they have engaged with a troll in the past and felt foolish. Or that they just felt sad after a post or got into an unnecessary argument that impacted them offline. By knowing themselves and seeing what’s being discussed, they choose to weigh their words carefully or just not participate at all. It’s a form of self-preservation through restraint.
4. Prefer to observe rather than perform
Some folks treat social media as information, entertainment, or a mix of both, and commenting can feel like they’re yelling at the TV, clapping alone in a movie theater when the credits roll, or yelling “That’s not true!” to a news anchor that will never hear them. But contrary to that, social media is a place where those yells, claps, and accusations can be seen and get a response. By its design, social media is considered by experts and the media as performative, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. Taking all of the previously mentioned traits into account, one can see why they would prefer to “observe the play” rather than get up on the stage of Facebook or X.
On top of that, these non-commenters could be using social media differently than those who choose to fully engage with it. Using this type of navigation, there may be nothing for them to comment about. Some commenters are even vying for this for their mental health. There are articles about how to better curate your social media feeds and manipulate algorithms to create a better social media experience to avoid unnecessary conflict or mentally tiring debate.
If you go on a blocking spree on all of your accounts and just follow the posters that boost you, it could turn your social media into a nice part of your routine as you mainly engage with others face-to-face or privately. In terms of commenting, if your curated Instagram is just following cute dogs and all you have to offer for a comment is “cute dog,” you might just enjoy the picture and then move on with your day rather than join in the noise. These non-commenters aren’t in the show and they’re fine with it.
5. Less motivated by social validation
The last trait that Brown showcases is that social media users who browse without posting tend to be independent from external validation, at least online. Social media is built to grow through feedback loops such as awarding likes, shares, and reposts of your content along with notifications letting you know that a new person follows you or wants to connect. This can lead many people to connect their activity on social media with their sense of self worth, especially with adolescents who are still figuring out their place in the world and have still-developing brains.
Engaging in social media via likes, shares, comments, and posts rewards our brains by having them release dopamine, which makes us feel good and can easily become addictive. For whatever reason, non-commenters don’t rely on social media as a means to gauge their social capital or self worth. This doesn’t make them better than those who do. While some non-commenters could have healthier ways to boost their self worth or release dopamine into their systems, many get that validation from equally unhealthy sources offline. That said, many non-commenters’ silence could be a display of independence and self confidence.
Whether you frequently comment online or don’t, it’s good to understand why you do or don’t. Analyzing your habits can help you determine whether your online engagement is healthy, or needs to be tweaked. With that information, you can then create a healthy social media experience that works for you.