Throughout parts of his life, Karamo Brown’s relationship with chronic stress has been “toxic.”
“It’s like that person you should break up with, but you just keep going back to,” the television personality says in a video interview with Variety. “What I’ve been learning as I’ve gotten older is I don’t have to be in a relationship with chronic stress.”
Brown is sharing his personal experiences with stress and how to manage it in support of the American Heart Association to raise awareness about the impact that stress can have on overall physical health.
“Now I rejoice in getting home and not having to talk about a stressful thing at work or something that happened on my drive. I’ve released it,” the author shares. At age 42, Brown says he’s gotten a handle on techniques to help navigate stress, including breathing exercises, meditation, journaling and vocalizing issues.
“Talking to yourself out loud is one of the greatest gifts you can do for yourself,” the “Karamo” show host says. “What happens is when you can’t release stress, it becomes heavier and heavier. It becomes more chronic. It affects your health. It affects your heart.”
By releasing stress, Brown says, the power it has over him is lifted. However, he didn’t always have the presence of mind to recognize how stress was affecting him.
Brown remembers a dark period in his childhood, around age 4. He was the youngest of five and lived in a home where he says his father was abusive toward his mother. “Everyone tried their best to protect this little boy from that, but this little boy had two ears and could hear everything that was going on,” Brown recalls.
Brown also describes how he thought the fighting was his fault: “There was a lot of stress on that young little boy because he wanted to figure out how to solve everything that was going on in his family so that everyone could be happy.”
Recalling his early 20s, Brown says he was burdened with confusion about how to navigate the world as an adult — and it all played out on national television when he was a cast member on a reality show in 2004. He also felt the “pressure” of being one of the first openly gay African Americans on reality TV.
While shooting the reality show, stress manifested in Brown, but he didn’t pay attention to it. “I knew I was stressed, but I was too afraid to speak up,” he remembers. “I was too afraid to say to someone, ‘I’m dealing with a lot of stress. My heart is aching. Someone help me.’”
Brown says the way he displayed stress at the time was through dramatic weight loss and by lashing out at others: “All I did was say, ‘Get out of my face,’ and I think about how many of us do that in our own lives because we don’t know how to understand the signs and what it’s doing to us physically and we don’t know how to tell that to people. That was where that lesson started to come in.”
These days, lessons learned are passed down to the next generation. Brown makes it his mission to instill healthy habits in his two sons, Jason, 26, and Chris, 22, by fostering an open relationship built on honesty where they can talk about anything.
Brown, who raised his sons as a single father, as detailed in his 2019 memoir “Karamo: My Story of Embracing Purpose, Healing, and Hope,” says he didn’t want to raise men who “lie all the time” because they’re scared of telling the truth.
“One of the things I encourage them to do is to manage the stress they’re dealing with by asking: What voice do you listen to?” he shares. “Trust your voice, but if your voice feels a little shaky, trust my voice. Trust that I’m going to help you to know that you can release this [stress], that you don’t have to know it all. You don’t have to figure it all out, and that really guided them in being better.
“It’s all about releasing [stress], getting it out, talking about it. This is why therapy and support groups work. The more you can get it out, the less it holds you down.”
Another reason Brown finds working with the American Heart Association so important is because heart issues affect African Americans at an “extremely high rate.” According to the organization, barriers to equitable health — including factors such as stress and structural racism — increase the risk of hypertension, heart disease and stroke.
“I want to make sure that my heart is healthy,” he says. “I want to make sure that people in my family, their hearts are healthy. But also, if anyone knows my career, I’m somebody who is always talking about how you feel, what’s on your mind, what’s on your heart, so I want the world’s heart to be healthy.”
For more tips about managing stress for better health, visit heart.org/stress.
