Anna is a dual board certified Nurse Practitioner - specializing in both family medicine and psychiatry. She worked as a primary care provider in the community health center setting in rural Oahu for just under a decade before transitioning into the field of mental health. During her work in primary care, a few things became clear to her:

• Poor mental health impairs the improvement of physial health. Both must be attended to, and often mental health must come first.

• An individual must make their own health choices. Each of us must take charge of our health. The correct information, access to evidence-based treatments and consistent support can help.

• The current healthcare system does not cure disease, it only treats its symptoms. Treating disease requires the factors that contributed to the disease to be addressed. This may be harder but is more effective.

After several additional years doing work in mental health for other organizations, she now maintains her own practice with the goal of supporting individuals in a comprehensive fashion aimed at restoring health. She has also served as faculty at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and coordinated the Family Nurse Pracitioner program since 2018.

A Helpful Analogy

1. Realize that your life, including the state of your mental and physical health, is like a ship at sea. It is going somewhere. Do you like where it is going? This journey can either be guided by external factors, like a ship being pushed by the wind and waves, or someone can steer the ship.

2. Realize that you must take the helm. If no one steers, the shipʻs destination is dictated by the environment. If someone else is given the helm, they dictate your journey. You have the privilege and responsibility of being the captain.

3. Your physical and mental health are part of the same interconnected system. Both need to be addressed to be well. Both captain and ship must function for the journey to succeed. Poor sleep, chronic pain, insulin resistance and the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle affect the mind and emotions. Fear, avoidance, lack of self belief and trauma impair us from making choices that are good for our body.

4. Once you take full responsibility for your health, the challenges donʻt change, but your outlook and choices will. The storms still come, but you are no longer a passive traveller. The more work you do to sustain a healthy mind and body, the more resources you have to weather the storm.

5. Change requires work. Work takes energy and time. Only you choose how much energy and time you devote to change. However, not changing is also a choice. Be aware of that choice.

6. You donʻt have to change everything to feel better. Changing just enough to feel a little better is often enough to give you more energy and motivation to change the next thing or carry on with the other priorities in your life.

7. Sometimes you need someone to help provide a map for your journey, to help with navigation, or even to take the wheel with you for a time. This is a normal part of every journey and how I see my role.