Tiramisu Your Life How I fought my depression with dessert
[Applause]
tiramisu
is an italian coffee soaked sponge cake
made up of three layers
coffee cream vanilla sponge and espresso
and i believe these layers are critical
in the fight for overcoming depression
two years ago when i got pregnant what i
was expecting was very
different to what happened in reality
all i had known was what pregnancy was
supposed to be like
when in reality at one month pregnant i
lost my job
at two months pregnant i was homeless
at three months i was in hospital with
pneumonia
at four months i couldn’t afford to eat
at five months i almost lost my parental
rights
and at six months i ended up single
wanting to kill myself
after my baby was born i was rejected
from getting into my chosen university
for the second time i managed to get
into another university
but failed the end of your exam
i tried to start a dessert business but
i just couldn’t get my tiramisu right
the chocolate was always too runny the
sponge was too thick the coffee flavor
was too weak
eventually i gave up and ended up seven
thousand dollars
in debt
so after the pregnancy from hell in a
string of failures
how do you think i was feeling pretty
awful right
wrong all it did was make me more driven
and ambitious than
ever i decided i was not
going to be defined by my failures
i learned how to channel my energy and
developed the ability to turn rejection
into motivation
i realized the solution to my happiness
had been in front of me
all along i took my tiramisu
back to the market after having
persevered with a new recipe
and it sold out in 45 minutes
my hardest recipe became my best
i realized i had to tiramisu my life
the first layer in the tiramisu is
connection
which i remember as the coffee cream
i was about two months pregnant sitting
in my car on the side of the road
wondering where i’d sleep the night
it should have been a time of glowing
happiness
but i’ve been staying at my boyfriend’s
friend’s house who had just come home
and told us that we had to be out
as well as physical needs we all have
psychological needs as well
depression is a response to our needs
not being met
we need to reconnect with ourselves and
those around us
now there are two parts to this being
connected to yourself
i.e knowing and believing in your core
purpose
and being connected to those around us
being connected with your core purpose
can be one of the hardest things to do
one way to reconnect with who you really
are is to ask yourself this
if money were no longer an issue what
would i be doing with my life
secondly it’s about reconnecting with
those around us
a study by relationship charity relate
found that in the uk alone
one in ten people doesn’t have a single
close friend
that’s an estimated 4.7 million
lonely people
social scientist renee brown found that
being lonely can affect the length of
our life expectancy
similar to smoking 15 cigarettes a day
during the culver 19 lockdown in new
zealand calls to mental health helplines
through an increase by 25 percent
during my pregnancy i was eventually
invited back to the family home
and that’s when i realized that the
first layer in the tiramisu
is connection i remember this as the
coffee cream
because without it it wouldn’t be a
tiramisu
you see depression lies to us it says
things like
there’s no point talking to anyone
nobody cares about you
you’re just a burden to people
but feeling socially accepted is a basic
human need
if you feel like you’re not being
welcomed somewhere then find somewhere
that does welcome
you and if you feel like you don’t have
a place anywhere
i can assure you that you do you just
haven’t found it yet
the second layer in the tiramisu is
mindset and perspective
i remember this as the vanilla sponge
i had a meeting with my accountant to go
over the numbers for my startup
they lead me into a room with shiny
glass doors and leather chairs and a big
board table
and as i sit down they start entering
all my numbers into their system
and it becomes evident that my business
is not viable
as i looked up at the screen i have
never felt so stupid in my life
how could i have gotten it so wrong
but almost as if i was throwing a
lifeline from god the next day
i was finally offered a place into my
dream university
as i stared out my window that night i
realized
failure is a mindset
you haven’t failed until you have
accepted failure
as your reality
i decided that just because my business
wasn’t going to work
at that time didn’t mean that i’d failed
one closed door had opened another and
it just wasn’t the path for me
at that time
this is how i realized that the second
layer
in the tiramisu is mindset and
perspective
i remember this as the vanilla sponge
because that’s what holds it all
together
now i get it it’s easy to say switch
your mindset
i know as well as anyone you know you
know i don’t expect you to hear this and
instantly feel better and likewise
changing your mindset is not something
that anybody expects you to do alone
i’m fully aware that there’s a school of
thought that depression is actually a
chemical imbalance in the brain
that simply needs drugs to fix
now i’m not a doctor or a psychologist
so i’m only talking from my experience
but when you’re that low down
antidepressants can really help to bring
you up a little bit
and hopefully what i’ve learned will
help bring you up the rest of the way
and keep you there
in terms of mindset i believe that two
of the major causes of depression
are a sense of failure
or a sense of powerlessness
a study by the norwegian institute of
public health found that young men with
no history of a previous mental disorder
were taking their own lives
they found that the young men had
exaggerated the importance of success
thereby developing a vulnerability to
failure
they found that the young men had valued
their perception of success so
highly that they were unable to cope
with anything less
in new zealand success is filtered
through what is known as tall poppy
syndrome
it basically means that people don’t
like to see other people being
successful
that if you are successful then you’re
somehow
showing off or even asking to be taken
down a notch
you wanna you wanna know why the suicide
rates are so high in new zealand
because it’s also a place of rampant
tall poppy syndrome
a study by the university of otago found
that 57 percent
of new zealand business owners felt as
if they’d been emotionally affected by
tall poppy syndrome
the second major cause of depression is
a sense of powerlessness
for example if someone is diagnosed with
a mental with a sorry terminal illness
or suffers a sexual assault
in these circumstances it’s not that the
person feels that they’ve failed
but rather that they feel powerless
just when i thought i was finally on the
road to success
i suffered a similar event
depression at its core is essentially
giving up
it’s thinking that our circumstances
will never get any better
no matter what we do
i had to consciously tell myself that i
would not let the event determine who i
was
you see the most important power there
is is the power of self
i had to change the thoughts i was
telling myself
when you decide that you have your own
inner power is when you can truly
succeed
so overcoming a sense of failure and
overcoming a sense of powerlessness
can both be done with a change of
mindset
finally i learned i learnt about the
third layer in the tiramisu
the espresso
one night after a busy day being that i
have stairs at my house
i decide that i’ll run up and down my
stairs 10 times between each set of
weights
let me tell you the first set was fine i
ran up
came back down into the weights second
set that was also fine
ran up came back down and did the
weights
but i got to about number six and i was
so tired
i could have felt bad about myself and
unfit
and lazy but then i realized
no i’m doing fine i had just set the bar
too high for myself i had set
an unrealistic expectation
this is how i realized that the final
layer
in the tiramisu is unrealistic
expectations
i remember this as the espresso
how does that relate to espresso i hear
you wondering
because you can’t expect to have a
powerful shot of coffee in every bite
as women we have incredible expectations
placed on us
right there’s the happy of this idea of
the happy pregnancy and happy family
all the while striving for career
success and
getting back to your pre-baby body as
soon as possible
but where do these expectations come
from
well one of the culprits of social media
a study published in the journal of
social and clinical psychology
found that by decreasing our social
media use to just
half an hour a day we have a
significantly less chance of getting
depressed
what we can sometimes forget when we’re
looking at social media
is that people always want to put their
best facebook
we start to constantly make what’s
called upward comparisons
where essentially we start comparing our
own lives to what we’re seeing
and because we have so much choice and
freedom in life
we feel that we should be able to design
our own lives
to the same high standards
one of the secrets to positive mental
health truly is
low expectations
one thing oprah winfrey said was you can
have it all
just not all at once
a little while ago an acquaintance came
around for dinner
when we asked what they’d been up to
recently they said
here’s my card it explains it better i
look down at the card
and it says author
artist creative musician
so i ask about the book
and it turns out the book is still being
written
so i asked about the artwork
and she hasn’t had an exhibition either
it turns out that she plays an
instrument in the local music group
but it really got me thinking about the
way that we present ourselves to the
world
i had also heard of another woman who at
50 was struggling to cope with the fact
that she
felt as if all she’d done with her life
was have children
i started to see a link between it all
and came up with the word
foben to describe the sense of what i
felt was missing
it’s an it’s an anagram that stands for
fear of being a nobody
it’s this idea that we need to reach
certain levels in our life
and pass certain milestones before we
have any true value
and have finally become somebody
so my question is this
if we constantly feel like we’re not
good enough
but then we get torn down when we become
successful
like what happens with tall poppy
syndrome then where does that leave us
the problem is things like lack of sleep
can become an issue
as we lay awake trying to figure out how
to get ahead or stay up trying to work
harder
and harder and unfortunately there’s a
definite link between lack of sleep and
depression
studies show that for every hour of lost
sleep levels of psychological distress
rise by five percent per hour the next
day
ultimately it is up to us to determine
what we consider success to be and
develop resilience
how do we develop resilience
one word faith believing that things
can and will get better
i learnt that when you reconnect with
yourself
and others change your mindset
and perspective and have realistic
expectations you can reclaim your own
inner power
and overcome depression
tiramisu to me represents perseverance
it represents determination
but above all it reminds me that failure
is never the end
i’m on track to finally graduate i
finally have a house that i can call
home for my child
and i’m not afraid of attempting
business again
the ingredients of my life made a
tiramisu
but yours could be an apple pie
whatever it is it will all turn out
sweet
in the end
thank you