May is becoming nationally affiliated as Mental Health Awareness Month, and I'm here for it. Personally I don't think we talk about mental health enough, and we need to. Two years ago, we hosted one of our first Connecting for Women virtual events and had the pleasure of hearing from Jami Haberl of Iowa's Healthiest State Initiative as one of our speakers. The topic? Normalizing talking about mental health, which is why I am proud to wear a green OK button often. The number of people (just today, in fact!) who ask me what the button means, allowing us to have a quick conversation about mental health is astonishing and encouraging. 
While talking about mental health is all fine and good, our speaker at this years' Connecting for Women event, Hayley DeGreve of the Gray Matters Collective, talked about mental health in the context of brain health, and for many on the call I think that normalized it even more. You see, we talk about general health often, right? We know we should eat healthy, get exercise, visit our doctor routinely, etc. but our brain health isn't necessarily at the forefront of those discussions. But it should be. We need to take more time for ourselves, find our passions, seek help and medications when we need them.
I encourage you to seek your own brain health, whatever that looks like for you. Perhaps it's taking more days off, seeing a mental health specialist, or simply taking better care of you and looking out for those around you. Whatever it looks like, please do it. Our brain health is critically important to the way we function each and every day. Normalize talking about it, and make it OK!
--Rachael Kinnick
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