ROCK Talk: The Telehealth ROCKS Podcast
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ROCK Talk: The Telehealth ROCKS Podcast
The Operator's Manual: Thomas Eisenbarth on Regulating the Nervous System of a Farmer
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Thomas Eisenbarth, founder of Grounded Ag, joins us to explore the often overlooked link between a regulated nervous system and resilient farming. We dig into how chronic stress shapes decision-making in the field, why grounding practices matter, and the heart behind his "Operator's Manual" project—a set of metaphors connecting tractors, tools, and terrain to the inner workings of mental and emotional well-being. A grounded conversation for anyone who works the land.
Website: Grounded Ag
Welcome to Rock Talk, the Telehealth Box podcast. I'm Julie Fryson, your host. Telehealth Box is a federally funded program that brings behavioral health and pediatric care directly into schools. We partner with local communities to address social determinants of health, support school-based services, and provide telementoring training. Thanks for learning with us.
SPEAKER_02All right, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. It's good to be back. Um, this is your host, Brad Gerard. I'm guest hosting for the rest of the summer, so I'm excited to be helping out with the telehealth rocks crew. And I've been really excited to connect with our guest today. It's someone who is doing just so much cool work tying together mental health and rural communities and how it relates to things like agriculture, for example. So welcome to the show, Thomas Eisenbarth. Thanks for having me excited for it. Absolutely. Yeah, we made the connection through the Telehealth Rocks team, and I was immediately excited to talk to you. And I'll tell you why. It's because my wife and I got into hobby farming. So we had some chickens and tried to grow some stuff, but we learned very quickly that that's not real farming. So can you help uh maybe the listener just understand the scope of the type of farming you've been doing over the last several years?
SPEAKER_01I mean, just kind of my rural upbringing and being involved in agriculture. You're probably gonna be like a row crop farmer, you're probably looking at a soybean and corn rotation. And then me personally, I grew up more the livestock side. Uh, we had a cow calf operation growing up, and just I don't know, kind of fell in love with that and was cursed, I guess you could say, at a pretty young age. Uh, got got hit with the the bug pretty good.
SPEAKER_02So that's awesome. And so you grew up in Kansas your whole life?
SPEAKER_01Uh, yep. Grew up in a little town about an hour north of Topeka, uh, Onega, Kansas. Population like 690 last time I checked.
SPEAKER_02So nice. Well, growing up, I had some family members and grandparents that farmed, and they always kind of had, you know, the classic attitude of like, you think your life is hard. I grew up walking to school for five miles in the snow with no chain on my bicycle, kind of vibe. So I'm curious.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, uphill both ways, and I carried the horse through the snow.
SPEAKER_02Is that kind of the mentality, would you say, in the farming community?
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, but I mean, rightfully so. I mean, hearing some of the stories like my grandpa talking about which he was raised by people that survived the depression, he survived the 50s, uh, made it through the 80s. So, I mean, yeah, it's always fun to laugh and joke about kind of that sentiment, but at the end of the day, it's well deserved. I mean, they they did it, they deserve it.
SPEAKER_02So, absolutely, and I think really at the heart of that mentality is just work ethic and discipline as just values of life when you're working land like that. Would you agree with that? And what else comes to mind in terms of the values that you've established through agriculture?
SPEAKER_01Values, yes, but also a big part of it is necessity. I mean, you don't you don't have a choice if you're which I don't know, for me, I'm blessed and plenty lazy. I mean, I have a town job and work in the air conditioning and all the things, but to truly try and make a living off of a piece of land with some animals and to provide for yourself and a family is it's just a whole whole different deal. So, values, yes, but also necessity.
SPEAKER_02I love that answer. Just pure necessity. It's not even like you're trying to develop the grit, you just it's either do or die out there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you don't you don't have a choice.
SPEAKER_02Well, I want to hop right into a conversation around the work you've been really focused on with mental health advocacy. And I want you to tell us a little bit about your project called Grounded. What's it all about?
SPEAKER_01For me, I mean, especially like in agriculture, we talk about science a lot because there's so much science to it, whether you're an agronomist trying to grow a crop or if you're around like livestock, like everything is science. And it really dawned on me how mental health it's purely science. Because if you think about nervous system regulation, and if we look at like mental health in general, or even some mental health issues that people have sometimes, it's all nervous system regulation. I mean, when you actually dive into the science and you look at our body and our nervous system, and if you think about stress, I mean, stress is it's just dumping a cocktail of chemicals into our body, whether it's adrenaline or whether it is cortisol, how we manage that cocktail and how we manage our thoughts, I mean, it directly affects our actions. So, like I said, when you really dig into the science of it, like it all it's all fairly black and white as far as making sense to why this way of life would kind of carry some of the challenges that it does. I always think about it kind of in a joking manner, like if we think about our biology and our ancestors, our cavemen ancestors, I mean, if they were being chased by a saber-toothed tiger, you better have a good dump of cortisol and adrenaline, because you better start running. But once hopefully you outran that saber-toothed tiger, you your body had a chance to kind of settle down and that cocktail kind of leveled off, and your nervous system could hopefully return to safety in kind of a regulated state. But if we look at agriculture and then just society in general, I mean, we're constantly running from a saber-toothed tiger like 20 hours a day that's not there. I mean, just the pressures of the weather, the financial piece, family pressures, all of it. It's just a constant stress, like we're constantly turned on. And so we have to be able to find ways to kind of throughout the day be able to take a deep breath and remind ourselves that we're we're not being chased by a saber-tooth tiger. Like maybe we're being chased by the seed salesman or our banker, but we have to find a way to try and settle in because the way that society is running and and agriculture, it's just it's not it's not conducive for health at the end of the day. So it's it's all just science.
SPEAKER_02That's interesting, and it reminds me of recently I was at the school mental health initiative here in Kansas, and the keynote was all about the nervous system and calming the nervous system. And it was more from like the teacher to student perspective, but one of the key points was that if someone is regulated as an adult, you can almost lend your nervous system to the student. They they can reciprocate that and calm themselves down. But it seems like one of the challenges of rural living or agricultural lifestyle is that there's so there's more isolation. So there's probably less opportunities to have that opportunity for someone to kind of lend their calmness to someone else, if you will. Do you feel like isolation is one of the main challenges of that lifestyle?
SPEAKER_01It is, because if we think about like a normal average person that lives in town, has a nine to five job, and isn't really involved in agriculture, I mean, the way society is paced right now, that person is still gonna be apt to struggle at times. But if we look at kind of life through the agricultural lens, every piece of ag life is dumping gas on that brush pile. I mean, the isolation piece, I mean, if you look at statistics, that's one of the leading indicators that someone is struggling, is they naturally isolate. But in agriculture, most times you don't have to go out of your way to isolate. I mean, that it's lending itself and it's that opportunity is there. So there's just so many little caveats of the agricultural life, like I said, that just dumps gas on this brush pile that's already stacked up against us.
SPEAKER_02But so true. And I love your ability to kind of translate agricultural topics into something that makes sense with mental health. And I read a quote from yours online when I was doing some digging here that says, I always think about it like a tractor cab. There are dials and then there are switches. And so take us into that metaphor when it comes to mental health and a tractor cab, what do you mean by the difference between a dial and a switch? And where are we landing as a society where we could be elsewhere?
SPEAKER_01Any change in life, I mean, it doesn't have to deal with agriculture or mental health at all. But any change that we want to make in our life, it's gonna start with small, minute changes. I mean, let's say I want to lose weight and get more healthy. If I go all out and if I buy a gym membership and just dive in and try and flip the switch from off to on right away, it's not gonna be a winning formula. But if we can think about it like a dial and just kind of fine-tune and make small little changes, then we're more apt to have success. So that that metaphor, it was something that I heard early on in therapy, whether it's emotional intelligence, recognizing things in our body, just being able to read our own emotions. It starts with those small, minute little changes. So it's not just a switch that gets flipped on or off, it's like a radio dial for kind of tuning tuning ourselves in.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And that also kind of takes some of the pressure off to make these big sweeping changes all at once, which isn't usually great for people either. Um I want to dig a little bit into when you decided to start bringing some of your thoughts around mental health to kind of this agricultural framework through things like workshops and manuals. When did you take that step from learning about your own mental health to deciding, hey, I want to go out and start advocating for this stuff?
SPEAKER_01Uh, it would have been the beginning of my own therapy journey. And to be a 30-year-old in a town of 700 and to seek out talk therapy and some cognitive, like behavioral therapy type things, like being able to kind of check out my own thought patterns and kind of dial on that switch the dial a little bit. But that really kind of started uh my natural tendency to kind of dive down some rabbit holes and really learn. I was like, holy smokes, like what I'm seeing in myself, this is powerful stuff. But then also being a Kansas farm kid at heart, I saw the need to bring this, I don't know, to agricultural people as a state, as an industry. But that second thought was this is gonna be a tough, tough game here, trying to trying to get farmers to not necessarily buy in, but maybe just understand a little bit of it. But I kind of found myself in a rare spot to be able to translate between the two worlds, to go to therapy and I don't know, still go every two weeks and still keep working on myself, but to also be able to translate it to kind of what I what I know and what's dear to me. It's been an interesting journey.
SPEAKER_02Well, I commend you for coming up against that pressure, probably in a smaller town where things like mental health maybe aren't as openly spoken about, to kind of take a stand and say, hey, this is what you know, this is what we need to be thinking about and doing. How do you have that conversation with maybe someone who's a little bit more old school, if you will, and they're thinking, how do you convince someone that something like therapy or even just going to a mental health resource at all is could be potentially helpful for them if they don't believe that?
SPEAKER_01For myself, like metaphors and analogies have been pretty powerful. And kind of the one that I've latched on to and I'm kind of working with is like this time of year where hay season's kind of gearing up in northeast Kansas. And I don't know, to speak to that rancher, that farmer, I would ask them what kind of work they put into their tractor, their baler, their swather. Before they get out to the field, hopefully, which fingers crossed, hopefully, there's a little bit of maintenance to that tractor, to the swather, to the baler. Like you don't it's not a great idea to just kind of pull out in the field and just kind of start getting after it. But to check over the machine, to grease some things, to fuel it up, hopefully check tires, check the oil in the tractor, like those type of things. Like our bodies are no different and our minds are no different. Like to put in a little bit of extra time to kind of pop the hood and check things out, it's it's more of a maintenance thing than anything else. Because if you don't do that to that tractor or that swather, you're gonna probably run into some problems out in the middle of the field during prime hay season when you need to be getting some things done. You don't want to have a machine breaking down, but we're no different as the operator. Like if we can put in a little bit of time, some preventative maintenance, if you will, it'll it'll go a long ways.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I love that metaphor, and it reminds me of the first time I met you. You're really excited to be talking about your new project around an operator's manual, which is kind of a well, you can probably explain it better than I can. So let's just launch into it. What is the operator's manual?
SPEAKER_01No, I've spent my whole life like around machinery and watching machinery get taken care of. But the same people taking care of the machinery, uh, they've probably never really thought about themselves in that same light. So I wait on it for a while and kind of toss the idea around. But all of that equipment is always maintenance using the equipment manual. I mean, some kind of technical field guide where it's like, hey, you need to do this, this, and this. And then if this happens, some troubleshooting things like hey, if you break down, like try this, and if that doesn't work, then you try this, kind of a flow chart type deal. But then also in all those manuals is a spot that's like, hey, this is a dealer's number, this is a mechanic's number. If it's something that you can't handle, then it's okay to reach out, call the mechanic, get some help so you can get up going again. And it really dawned on me. I said, Why can't we treat ourselves as the operator? Why can't we treat ourselves the same way? So I took four key kind of ideas that have really helped me personally, and also those four ideas kind of go back into the nervous system, the science, pretty heavily too. But I've lined out those four ideas in the same technical manner as what a manual would be. And my hope and my goal would be to have the operator manual sitting in the shop right along with those other equipment manuals to where if someone was struggling or kind of felt a poll to kind of maintenance themselves and take care of themselves that they could flip through that and it would be familiar and technical in nature. And then also the the biggest analogy is in that operator manual, having kind of a couple pages it's like, hey, I mean, these are some things you can do to help yourself, but if the issue is bigger than what you can handle, there is absolutely no shame in reaching out and getting help, similar to how you would reach out to a mechanic or or to the dealership. But to really have it lined out in a technical and troubleshooting type way, I think is going to resonate with a lot of producers.
SPEAKER_02And I love the imagery of just thinking about someone in a shop or someone in the agricultural world just having that manual right there along with the rest of their machinery so that when they're working on maintenance externally with their tools for the job, they're also working internally with their own bodies and minds. That's super super cool.
SPEAKER_01And just day-to-day life in agriculture, I mean, it's just it's it's not like anything else. I mean, rural healthcare, they're doing a great job, but it's just a tough, it's a tough gamut to ask a farmer to give up a few hours during the day, drive to town, take the chance, they feel like they're being judged for getting help or what have you. But if we can work upstream and kind of deal with the stress, this is a really, really practical, quick way. It's not going to interrupt the producer's day too much, and just kind of some quick check-in type deals.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's that's awesome. And it's like you said, it's those minor changes on the dial and its maintenance so that if there is an emergency, you know what to do, you know where to go. Are you willing to dive into the four concepts in the operator's manual? Should we start off with number one?
SPEAKER_01Uh, number one, and it's been the biggest thing for me personally, has been my sleep. I mean, sleep is where your nervous system has a chance to rest itself, to recharge, to kind of process everything throughout the day. So that that sleep being kind of the shutdown phase of that tractor, like you can't just run a tractor hot and then just shut it off and expect it to function. So the sleep part has been such a big deal. I mean, just for me personally, but I know I mean the science, the importance of it, like sleep is the thing that's gonna help us.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm in a season of life. I I think I saw you have a family too, and I have a two and a half year old and a nine-month-old. So needless to sleep, needless to say, sleep is hard to come by, and it's it it really is crazy how much you take it for granted if you're sleeping regularly. It's in the absence of sleep, how different your body and your mind feel. It's night and day. So I really appreciate you pointing that out.
SPEAKER_01Right, and it's like our actual sleep and that success sleep, it starts a couple hours before we even try and close our eyes. Trying to stay away from screens, putting the devices away, and just being able to wind down a little bit before you put some pressure on yourself to actually try and sleep.
SPEAKER_02Right. And you know, I was listening to some stories with family members the other day talking about being raised on a farm farm and being out there for 14, 15 hour days. So tell us about why sleep is important in the agricultural setting.
SPEAKER_01From a nervous system standpoint, I mean it's everything we've talked about, but I mean, just from a peer safety standpoint, I mean, if you're kind of in a brain fog and you're not rested and just not in a good place mentally, I mean, you're around deadly equipment on a daily basis, usually. So that part kind of falls into it too. But I heard a quote at a workshop I was at, or not a quote, but a statistic, but at a workshop that I was at a while back. And like significant sleep problems increases the desire to harm yourself, it increases that by three times. So if you're not sleeping, then your brain switches from a logical state to kind of a fight or flight, freeze or fawn type of situation, and that's when we're gonna start seeing some significant issues as far as how we're treating ourselves and those types of things, that it increases it by three times. That blew my mind.
SPEAKER_02Wow. Three times, and I know you opened up uh in another conversation before we hit record about some uh recent events in your own community uh related to self-harm. And I know that this is a problem all over the nation and the and the globe, so it sounds like sleep is a major key to preventing self-harm, even if people can't make that connection right away. You're you're saying that that's part of the dial gradually without that sleep, it starts ratcheting up towards self-harm potentially, even if you're not aware of it.
SPEAKER_01It is because all roads lead back to that nervous system situation. And if we're not giving our if we're not giving our nervous system a chance to kind of reset and get started back up again, we're we're gonna start seeing some problems.
SPEAKER_02Nice. All right, so we got number one asleep. What's number two in the operator's manual?
SPEAKER_01Uh number two, I always picture myself sitting in a tractor cab. Number two is gonna be like our emotional IQ, emotional intelligence. If you're sitting and if you're bailing hay and a warning light comes up on on your tractor dash, I always think about that warning light being like anger, frustration, just extreme stress. But if we can pause long enough and at least hit the brakes on that tractor and at least think through things, you can usually start to pick up those types of things in your body. Where for me personally, like if I get really stressed, like I'll start to feel it in my jaw, like my shoulder, my shoulders will get sore because I'm so tightened up with stress. Like for me, anger, like I get really flushed, my face gets hot. But if we can start to pick up on some of those warning light type things, then we can hopefully take a deep breath, go for a walk, like those types of practical things. But we can't get to that practical state if we're first not aware of what's going on. So that awareness piece is huge. So sitting in that tractor cab and recognizing warning lights for what they are before we have catastrophic failure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I love that analogy. Actually, my tire pressure light came on in my car the other day, and it does bring attention quickly to the fact that hey, this could get bad if you don't address this. So I love that analogy of taking inventory of what's going on and what are the physical symptoms before you have some kind of blow up that leads to more damage.
SPEAKER_01Yep, and like things like anger, frustration, and stress, like the more we can kind of dissipate those and work with them, then like we can kind of clear our system and move on. But if we don't do anything with them, they don't go anywhere and they kind of build up.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. And too, the other thing, the other thought I'm having as you're talking is all of this is, yes, very introspective in terms of what's going on in my mind and my body, but this everything so far is also going to deeply affect the people around you and the relationships around you.
SPEAKER_01Right. And that leads into the third one really well. Because uh, like relationship with yourself and a relationship with others, I kind of compare that to like greasing the machine or keeping oil in the machine because the friction of life, all these moving parts, and just all the junk of life sometimes, they can rub against each other and wear pretty good. So if we have like a solid relationship with ourselves and a solid relationship with others, it can kind of act as that lubricant to hopefully dissipate some of the friction of life sometimes.
SPEAKER_02I will usually try to get a friend hang out in at least once a week. So that way, if the job is crazy and the home life is crazy, even if it's something with other another family and kids are still around or whatever, just to have that social time where I get out of my head and stuff, like you're saying, it makes the rest of the friction feel so much easier. But then also sometimes it sounds like that could be too just taking time for yourself. So when you say your relationship with yourself as it relates to grease in the machine, does that mean hobbies and stuff? Or what do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, it could include hobbies, just anything like you said, to get out of your own head. And like for me, like CBT, like cognitive behavioral therapy, like being able to recognize my thought patterns and kind of how I was talking to myself, because our self-talk is so powerful, whether it's negative or whether it's positive. So, really like having that solid relationship with yourself too is huge. But we were, I mean, humans were wired for connection with other humans. And so, and especially in agriculture, like we have to be intentional at times to to seek out like another human being, somebody on two legs and not four all the time, but to have some kind of social connection is it's gonna be powerful stuff.
SPEAKER_02Super powerful, that's awesome. All right, this brings us home to number four.
SPEAKER_01Number four is like having positive coping skills and like positive emotional processing, I compare that to the exhaust on the tractor or the exhaust on the combine. Because if your exhaust is plugged or your radiator's plugged and you're not able to dissipate all this heat and buildup and stress and just all the things that an engine produces and all the things that life produces, if we don't have a good way to expel all that and get it away and get it what's away from the motor and just out of the system somewhere, our emotional processing and those coping strategies are absolutely paramount.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's so good, man. And if you have someone who's newer to this type of information, in terms of a hierarchy of what you would recommend addressing first on that list of four, what do you feel like is kind of is there a hierarchy here, or can someone start anywhere with these four uh aspects, or what do you think about that?
SPEAKER_01Personally, I'm gonna say sleep hands down, because if we look at your emotional IQ, if you're not rested and if you're brain foggy, then you're not gonna be able to recognize things in your body. You're not gonna be able to sustain relationships with yourself or with others if you're burned out, worn out, and you're not gonna be able to think through like some positive coping skills and how to like emotionally process things on a nervous system level if you're not rested. So it all starts with sleep.
SPEAKER_02I love that. And I'm gonna tell that to my wife who's not getting much sleep. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh, that's on you. That's that's a that's a bold move.
SPEAKER_02Well, hey, I really appreciate your time. I know you're a very busy man, but I don't want to let you go without people understanding where they can find your work, how can they get their hands on this manual eventually, where can they book you for workshops? Tell us where people can find you and how they can connect.
SPEAKER_01I've been rocking and rolling with the website uh www.groundedag.org. And I don't know from an agriculture standpoint or even just a societal standpoint, I really see these types of ideas being able to be delivered uh like in a community type framework or to build some structure around it to where if we can get some basic knowledge out to the people that are around producers on a daily basis, whether it's an ag lender, crop insurance agent, an equipment dealer, somebody that works at a co-op, but to be able to get these trainings in this workshop out to those people and then have those people I don't know, quasi-certified, like grounded, certified, just to be able to help out people in the most efficient way possible. I think because farmers are busy and they're not gonna they're not really necessarily gonna go out of their way to a training, to a workshop. But if we can get the information to them on their natural daily path, I think we're gonna be able to hopefully make a dent in the situation itself.
SPEAKER_02I love that approach and I just want to say thank you for this work because it takes a lot of courage to speak up on these details. It also takes a great mind for both people and business to get anything off the ground. So I just commend you for all the work that you're doing with Grounded. And I I seriously can't wait to see it take off, especially with the operator's manual, because I can see this helping so many people.
SPEAKER_01Yep. And it's just kind of the way agriculture life works. Like if someone's shop burns down, you bet the entire neighborhood's gonna be there to help. If someone has some health issues or type things, some medical things, I mean, castrels are gonna get delivered and all the things. But I I would hope that we can get to a point to where if someone's struggling and just, I don't know, just not really feeling like themselves, that we could approach it in the same way and just have ag folks helping ags.
SPEAKER_02Thomas, thank you so much for your time. Again, we had Thomas Eisenbarth and founded AG. Stay tuned for the next episode and make sure to seek out Thomas's work online for now. Yep, thank you. Alrighty, take care.
SPEAKER_00Thank you all so much for tuning in to this episode of Rock Talk. We want to take a few moments to give a special shout out to our partners at the Chase program who are lending us such a wonderful space to host this podcast. This podcast was funded by Hursa through the telehealth technology-enabled learning collaborative grant, number UEU7-TH-54332. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. And follow our social media to keep up to date on all things related to pediatric behavioral health. You can find us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube at TelehelpCal. Keep listening to Keep Learning Podcast.