What do you do when your own mind stops feeling safe? How does a person sing on stage while panicking inside? How do you learn to catch your thoughts before they catch you? And can creativity become a survival tool. Today we're talking with singer songwriter Jewel about mental health, the battles that she has lived, the wisdom she's earned, and the lives she's helping to shape. Welcome to Inner Cosmos
with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Every year.
We're reminded this month to look directly at what is typically hidden. A broken arm is obvious, a fever is obvious, But a troubled mind can stay incognito, often for a very long time. As we talk about here every week, the brain locked inside the skull builds our reality and interprets our social world and generates the private weather that we live inside. And when that internal weather turns dark and stormy, that struggle can remain invisible even to the
person sitting one chair away. Mental Health Awareness Month exists because that sort of invisibility carries a cost. This month asks us to bring these struggles into the light, and by doing so, to reduce stigma and to widen the pathways to care. This matters to everyone on the planet. But today I'm going to zoom in a little to talk about mental health health struggles for young people. Adolescence and early adulthood are years when the brain is tuning
itself in public. You have your identity under construction, and the notion of belonging matters with an unusual amount of force. That wasn't true before, and it's not as potent later. So social feedback lands with intensity, and the numbers tell us something urgent about the state of that inner landscape.
The CDC reports that forty percent of US high school students have persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and twenty percent seriously consider attempting suicide, and almost one in ten actually attempt suicide. So what we're looking at is classrooms full of young people carrying invisible storms. This issue matters to me deeply because, like many people, I have known and loved people who have taken their lives, So where can young people turn well happily.
There are many options.
They can turn to friends and families and teachers and communities, and now that we're in the second half of the twenty first century, there are also new digital options available. In a Stanford study of college students using chat GPT, some fraction of the participants reported that the AI companion
halted their suicidal ideation. So that kind of signal points toward a future in which support can be available at two in the morning, in moments when a person feels stranded inside their own mind and beyond, the digital organizations matter enormously here. An organization can create continuity and culture and a place where a person can return on the hard days. They create rituals and language, and accountability and mentorship and the rare feeling that somebody has built a
structure with you and mind. There are many organizations doing extraordinary work in the mental health space, and one that I want to highlight today is the Inspiring Children Foundation, which is an organization built by my friend Ryan Wolfington with the help of singer songwriter Jewel and some others. And the goal with this organization is a whole human approach to mental health that includes the physical, and the social and the emotional, and that brings us to today's
guest singer songwriter. Jewel has lived several public lives at once. Her music became part of the emotional architecture of the nineteen nineties and beyond. She's a four time Grammy nominated artist, and she has sold more than thirty million albums worldwide. She's also an author and a visual artist, and she's a forceful advocate in the mental health space. A lot of people know Jewel's voice and songs and the success that she had, but presumably most people don't know about
her interior origin story. Today's conversation feels so important to me because it opens a window onto mental health from the inside. It's one thing to speak clinically about anxiety or trauma or self regulation, but it's another thing to hear someone describe how that all cashes out in real life. What does panic feel like when it takes hold? How do you begin to build a gap between stimulus and response. How do you learn a new emotional language when nobody
has handed you a textbook? These are questions that matter to millions of people, especially young people. So here is my conversation with Jewel. Okay, so, Jewel, you've been very open about struggles that you had when you were a young person, So let's start there, if you don't mind, what was life like for you on the inside.
Yeah, So just a little context in case people don't know my story. I was raised in Alaska. My family were homesteaders and kind of pioneers in Alaska. My parents got divorced when I was eight, and my dad took over raising us and we moved to Homer, to the homestead where my dad was raised. My dad started drinking then after the divorce, my dad, I mean today we'd use the word trauma triggering, those words didn't really exist
back then. You know, my dad's childhood was so traumatic that when when he went to Vietnam, it was the first time he relaxed, Oh, it'sn't that wild. Like. The amount of yeah, just trauma and abuse that he had during his childhood was so intense. So after the divorce, he began what we would now call trauma triggering, and he began to drink to try to manage that, and he started to be physically abusive at that age, and it went rather predictably. I was also singing in bars
at the time. He and I became a duet. So we were touring, like you know, lumberjack joints and fisherman haunts and biker bars. And what I really noticed is that everybody was in pain, and everybody was managing it in different ways. You know, we were singing for career alcoholics, career drug addicts. You'd see people I was in a lot of pain, and so I was just very acutely aware of it, and I realized nobody outruns it. And I would watch people use PCP or anger or sex
and it never worked. And so because I'm a really visual person, to me, I saw like this original wound or pain, and then you would try to bury it with whatever drugs, alcohol, toxic relationships, and it you still would have to, like if you wanted to heal, you still have to get rid of all these layers and then still deal with this.
And how old were you at this time that you were starting.
Probably nine ten in there?
Oh were you? And you were starting to realize that.
Yeah, oh wow, okay.
And I had just learned that the buffalo was the only animal that went into a storm, and that the quickest way was through, and it just changed my life. Like learning that, I was like, you have to be the buffalo. Like the quickest way is through, and you move toward it, you don't move away from it.
Wow.
And so I made myself a promise that when I was in pain, I would go closer to it, I would look at it. And I was already journaling a lot at this point, and I realized that when I wrote, that was taking me toward it. My curiosity was taking me toward it. And it did relieve the pain a little bit and didn't cure everything, but it took enough of pressure off, like a pressure valve, that it became manageable. And I learned things, and that was fascinating to me.
So I once sartainly say something that you made a shift from you realized that you could either be bitter about something or curious about it.
Is this the same sort of thing about moving into the storm.
Yeah, I don't think bitterness had kind of like entered my consciousness quite yet.
For whatever reason. It was just when something.
Hurts, look at it, get toward it, don't move away from it. Okay, the quickest way is through.
And so what does that mean in terms of the tools that you took on the earliest tools that you took on to manage with your mental health.
That was definitely writing. So like journaling was the way that I went towards something. So when something hurt, instead of doing an I mean, I didn't have these word avoidant behavior, So I'm using words now that obviously I didn't have them. But when I was in pain, instead of avoiding it, I would sit down, get quiet, and journal and that would let me move toward it. And then I realized when I journaled, I saw patterns. I
saw things in the day I didn't realize. I saw there was a wise part of me that showed up that I could access and I found that, Yeah, very interesting.
Can you give an example of the type of pattern you might see at the end of the day.
Yeah, I would notice, like if it was, you know, maybe a conflict with my dad, I noticed what was going on for him that day that I didn't notice. I just noticed he got mad, you know, or yelled at me. But I I would sort of see the things that led up to it. Not that that makes abusive behavior okay, but it brought understanding, which in itself can be very helpful.
Yeah, and so you started realizing that you could do things actively in terms of dealing with mental health in an active way.
Is that right?
Yeah, it really turned a corner when I moved out. I wanted to move out at fifteen, but I knew that statistically that wasn't a great idea. Typically abused kids don't move out at fifteen and have the movie and better. And so I would only let myself move out if I had, you know, a hope, a real reason to think I might do better. And I had been studying philosophy for quite a while at that point and.
Just so familiar just reading things.
Yeah, and in school I had a philosophy I was deeply dyslexic, and I had a teacher take an interest and just sort of learn. I was so in in philosophy that I was very dedicated to like figure out like why can't I read well? Like what's going on? Because in those days I just wasn't a lot known
about dyslexia. And so I experimented. And what I did is I took a blank piece of paper and I used an exactoblade to cut a sentence window out and then I would limit my visual field, so all I saw was one sentence at a time that I was reading, and then I would paraphrase whatever I was reading. And so I had a whole separate book of the book of the book in my words. And that caused me to have a really deep understanding and retention of the text.
And so this teacher just taking an interest in me and my own kind of fascination with the concepts or ideas, he let me teach my own class. I got to teach like high school teachers about philosophy.
And run seminars and it was really empowering.
It was when you were fourteen years Wow. Amazing.
Yeah, it was just one of those great teachers that change your life and you know, just empowering. And so when I did decide will I move out, I sat down with it and just looked at it sort of like a problem, and how do you solve this problem? And I we was just just learning about like genetic inheritances, how you know I might have a predisposition to diabetes or heart disease. And when I thought about my emotional life,
I was like, I have an emotional inheritance. I saw it like a Milky Way, like you're in this huge system that has a that goes way far back and it gets projected into the future and it's like a family system. It's an emotional language. And I realized I had already been taught this language. I was already done. It was done, like I learned this emotional way of relating to the world. And so I realized my job was could I learn a new emotional language like learning Spanish?
But there was no school to go learn emotional Spanish, you know, And so if if I wanted to learn a different emotional way of relating to the world, how would I do that? And that was so interesting to me that I felt like at a really clear goal, a really clear objective. And that's why I let myself move out, which is very stressful taking on that responsibility and then making it trackable, like how was I doing? What were the metrics around it? And it was exciting.
Yeah, oh that's great.
Yeah, it's interesting because we think about ourselves as being free agents in the world, but in fact we're made up of our genetic inheritance and all of our childhood experiences which shape our brain. This is brain plasticity, and we don't have choice about either of those things, and so at some point we come to realize that we have to be the sculptors of our own brains. Yeah, and I think you've used the term rewiring. You're thinking you figured out along.
The way how to do this.
Do you feel like you were already figuring that out of fifteen when he left home, or you figured it out subsequently, or are still.
Figuring it out?
Yeah, I mean it was something I started at fifteen. I'd say the next huge phase of development was for me when I was eighteen. I ended up homeless. I wouldn't have sex with a boss. I was in San Diego. He wouldn't give me my paycheck. I couldn't pay my rent. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen and I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. If I left my little street corner, this little tree I liked to sleep under, I thought
that I would, you know, get terribly ill. I was sick a lot. I had bad kidneys. I was having constant like almost died of sepsis. An emergency room wouldn't see me because I didn't insurance. Like it was definitely very rough, and I realized, especially with the shoplifting, that I would end up in jail or dead if I didn't do something. And it was really an eye opening experience because three short years later I had this lofty goal of like, I'm not going to be a statistic,
I'm going to learn a new emotional language. And here I was three years later, and I was a statistic. I was homeless and stealing, and so I remembered, I want to say, it was a stoic quote, happiness doesn't depend on who you are or or what you have. It depends on what you think. And I was like, I don't have anything left but my thoughts, and so can I really change my life one thought at a time? And I took it sincerely and like earnestly, like I'm going to try, and I.
Think I can change my life one thought at a time. And so I left.
I had been stealing something and I was in a dressing room where I had this like epiphany. So I leave and I'm like, all right, I realized I don't know what I'm thinking in real time. If you're going to change your life one thought at a time, you better be aware of what you're thinking. And now I know the word disassociative, but I was so disassociative. I had no ability to track my thoughts in real time. I called it waking up after I would kind of
wake up after I stole. I would wake up after these big events, you know, I would wake up in the middle of a panic attack. I don't know what led to the panic attack. And so what I I was like, if you can't witness your thought in real time, your actions, our thoughts slowed down into things you do. So maybe I could reverse engineer into what I was thinking by watching what I was doing. So my huge life plan was I'm going to watch my hands for two weeks.
I gave myself two weeks.
I'm going to watch everything I do, and that's going to tell me something about my thoughts. So I had a journal and I was like, I opened a door at eight fifty seven am, I washed my hands at whatever time.
I didn't know what I was looking for.
I literally just wrote down everything my hands did for two weeks, and at the end of it, I sit down and I'm like.
Okay, what does this tell me about myself?
Like what am I thinking? And it dawned on me. I hadn't had a panic attack that whole two weeks. I'd never gone two weeks without a panic attack in years. It was like stumbling on the most random side effect, and I was like, what has caused me not to have panic attacks? What I stumbled on was being radically present? Ah, forcing myself to watch my hands. I was so presently engaged I was. I was feeling my hand on the door,
I was feeling my hand shake somebody's hand. I was so radically present that I didn't have time to worry about a future that didn't happen. And that's when I realized, like, fear is a thief. It robs you of the present moment to try and solve for a future that hasn't even happened.
Ah.
So you know, so brains are prediction machines. We're constantly simulating possible futures, and when people have had trauma, they tend to simulate dangerous futures. It sounds like you were able to get yourself off of that path with some intentionality there, or it sounds like it happened accidentally first, yes, but then what did you learn from that about how you could keep yourself from constantly simulating fear.
Yeah, for me, it was you know, Descartes said, I think, therefore I am. I realized in that period of time it's not what I think. Therefore I am. I perceive what I think. Therefore I am, and that I'm the observer of my thoughts. I'm actually not my thoughts. And that was very powerful because there's something in me that can observe my thoughts. There's something in me that can observe my actions. So if I was a car, you know, my brain isn't the driver. My brain is a steering
wheel the observer. I call it capital o, like the observer is the driver. And I realized I needed to cultivate a relationship with my observer, so I didn't over identify with my thoughts because and so I called it my gap method. But like you perceive something, you have a stimulus, a really intense emotional or intellectual reaction, and then you act and so power like to get off of autopilot. If I was a car, I'd already been trained,
right I was. I had maps downloaded neurologically genetically, and so I had predictable ways.
Of responding to stimulus.
And I realized that if I put a gap in it, then I could change the course of my life. Then I could go somewhere different. So if somebody you know, did X, I stopped. I created a gap, and then that got me off autopilot, so I could have my own thoughtful response instead of just a knee jerk reaction. And once I realized that I knew I was on, that was powerful. I know, I just became very powerful.
So this is cool.
One of the things that I mean, the thing that distinguishes humans from our nearest neighbors in the animal kingdom is that we have a lot more cortex that wrinkly outer three millimeters. And it turns out that because of the massive expansion of the cortex, one of the things we got was a lot more real estate in between the input and the output. So if you throw some food in front of a cat, it's going to eat the food. Me you throw food in front of human to human says I'm on a diet, I won't eat it.
Now.
Whatever, We've got.
All these pathways that we can take through the system, but we typically don't. We take the path of least resistance most of the time, so it sounds like, wait, what.
You got there was?
Hey, there are different paths I can take here, given the stimulus, given somebody being mean to me or doing something, whatever the thing is, I don't have to react right away in the way that is the path at least resistance.
Yeah, or just the most familiar. I mean when cook comes to shove, we do the familiar thing, and it is hard to do the unfamiliar thing because it's invention. I've never done it before. I've never related to the world that way, you know.
So it sounds to me like you figured out a lot of stuff the hard way on your own. If you were advising somebody now with depression or anxiety, what is the first lever that they can pull on?
People do need to learn to be present because until your present, you can't make different choices, and so that has to be the number one requisite thing. And to be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. You learn to do it for longer and longer periods of time. And so what meditation is is teaching people to be present. I think what people don't realize about meditation and why a lot of people quit, is because there's.
A withdrawal symptom.
You know, when you start being present, your mind is prompting you to be distracted. You think about all these other things, and now you feel like a failure, that you're failing at meditation. And so I think the first thing I tell people is that every time you're meditating and you get distracted, that's a bicep curl for your brain. That's the moment where you go, oh, awesome, and so to feel.
Excited that you were distracted.
Instead of feeling defeated. And I think that perspective shift really changes so that you're like, oh my god, I'm so excited. I just noticed I was thinking about my grocery list. I'm going to come back to my breathing or my accounting. That perspective shift really helps people stick with meditation and realizing that is the success, getting distracted, coming back, getting distracted coming back. If that's a hundred reps and a one minute meditation, that's great, you just
did one hundred reps. Once people build the ability to be present, I think one of the most foundational things that helped me. I call it making an ally out of anxiety. When I was having all those panic attacks, I was like, there has to be a biological reason I have anxiety. It can't just be God made a mistake, Sorry, humanity about that anxiety. And I realized I was like, what else is like this overwhelming physiological response like anxiety?
And I came up with food poisoning. You eat something bad, you get sick, you throw up. You shouldn't get mad at throwing up. You should get curious about what you ate. Like a car alarm, You shouldn't be mad at the car alarm. You should wonder who tried to break in? What if my anxiety was actually something going right with me?
What if it didn't mean I was broken? What if it meant my body.
Was reacting correctly to me consuming something that didn't agree with me. And so I stopped being so avoidant about my anxiety, and I started getting curious, like, Okay, my body's giving me a correct signal. What was I just thinking, feeling, or doing? And so what I encourage people to do is to have like notes in their phone or on their journal that says thinking, feeling, doing, And every time you're anxious, try to fill one of those categories. And
after a month, you're gonna see a pattern. To your nervous system. You're just going to write down what were you just thinking? What were you just feeling? Or what were you just doing? So I might You know, you don't honestly get aware until you feel anxious. You just now I'm cripplingly anxious. So then you get curious about what was I just doing?
Got it?
Like what would I just eat? Who did I just talk to?
What did I just think? And you don't try and change any of it. You just start to keep a law, you know, like talk to Gary, didn't sleep whatever is, You don't try to change it.
You just observe it.
And you in your own life started seeing patterns emerging that you can recognize.
Yeah, what I realized is we only have two states of being. Were either dilated or contracted.
That's all we have.
Means you're either you could probably put in like sympathetic compair sympathetic nervous system state, like your system is either dilated literally where your blood pressure drops, your voice drops, your relaxed, your calm, your posture changes, or you're contracted and that can be whatever you know, your sympathetic nervous system your fight or flight taking over your voice raises, your blood pressure raises, your pulse raises, your anxiety raises. And so what I realized is you can't be in
both states at one time. And I don't believe in many hacks, but you really can get yourself out of a contracted state by participating in something that gets you into a dilated state. So to do this, I just started having these lists of dilated, contracted, and every time I was dilated relaxed, I would write down what I was thinking, feeling, or doing. Every time I was contracted, I would write down what was I thinking, feeling, or doing.
And it was a very clear set path. You know, every time I had this certain thought that would always undo me. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I would get myself worked up and that would send me into a panic attack. And so can you abstain? And that's really where the rubber meets the road for people is once you make these lists, can you stop consuming the things that make you anxious? Will you give
up that relationship, will you stop skipping sleep? Whatever it is that you know? But this list is so helpful because it's your personal map to your nervous system, and nobody else knows that better than you.
That's amazing that you did this work on your own, and now you're so good at explaining this to other people to take care on. So let's get to that. So you've dealt with so many young people right now, and the first question I have for you is we see the way that trauma can end up shaping identity. What patterns do you see in that when you look across all the young people you've spent time with now.
I like to think of trauma as an overwhelming experience that you don't know how to process, and we often want to shut down, we contract, and then we start to avoid. And I think that stays trapped in your body until you deal with it, and that takes dilating moving towards getting curious and understanding. And we don't have great systems in our society to help give people a safe enough environment and enough context that they can expand
let those intense feelings come, because it's so intense. I mean, it's amazing how trauma stays in your body and when you are ready to deal with it, you will experience it. Just distensely is the first time. And so creating safer spaces for people's nervous systems.
Where they know they can do it, where you know it's going to pass.
Those things are important space of a safe space.
Like in our foundation it's called Inspiring Children. Everybody knows that we show up in a certain way, like in a therapeutic saying. A nice way of giving it context might be to say, you know, if you were to tell me something like think of something really traumatic in your childhood, something you don't want to tell anybody, what would it take.
For you to tell me?
Like what agreement would it take between us for you to tell me? And it would probably be confidentiality, not being rushed. You know, there's certain things that are a recipe to creating an environment that, with time, would give you the confidence to say, I'm going to take a huge risk. I'm going to tell you the secret I've never wanted to share.
Yeah, and so let's move to Inspiring Children foundations. So you're a co founder of that, and it combines the tools of athletics and mentorship and emotional tools.
So why that combination, because that starts.
To create an environment for you to change you know my goal. When I got discovered from my record deal, I almost didn't sign it because I knew I had a lot of trauma and if you add fame to my background, it's what every movie is about, of every musician.
It leads to drug abuse.
The movie doesn't end well, and I wanted, you know, during that year, I learned how to stop shoplifting. I learned how to stop having panic attacks. I learned to heal my agoraphobia. I didn't want to give that up just because I was being offered a record deal. Being offered a record deal was like being offered a very dangerous drug to me. How would I interact with that so that I could have a different outcome where I
wouldn't become a drug addict. And made myself a promise that my number one job was to learn to be a happy, whole human, not a human full of holes. My number two job was to be a musician, and so I stayed really loyal to that. And what I realized about happiness is you can't just get happy. It's just impossible, you know. You don't get to just flip a switch and like I'm happy now. Happiness is a
side effect of choices. It's creating a different environment where happiness is a side effect, because happiness is a side effect of choices. And so it's like building a different house. You know, the house I was raised in doesn't lead to a happiness as a side effect.
I had to build a.
Different internal structure or internal architecture. And so with the kids, it's creating an environment that starts to help them make different choices where happiness can be a side effect. So athleticism, exercise, moving your body.
I also, you.
Know, I wanted to learn to be happy, but I a also I'm very competitive, I'm ambitious. I didn't want to like disappear from the world and just disappear from the things that stressed me out. So I wanted to be high achieving. And so what we did with the Foundation was create a high achieving environment where people push themselves. And it's life that triggers us. It's life that brings up our issues. It's striving that brings up our issues. And so then when those issues come up in real time,
we address them for the kids in real time. So we kind of turn the model inside out. Instead of bringing kids to a therapeutic environment where it's you know, therapy every day at two we do no therapy in a one on one setting. We create a high achieving environment that's healthy, that helps people make healthy choices, that has healthy mentorship, healthy relationships, and then when life triggers them, we give them tools that help them in that moment.
Now, this is a very special foundation.
One of the things that's quite cool is you get to track people longitudinally for a long time.
Yeah, what patterns have you seen there?
These kids are just heroic.
You know, anytime anybody chooses to take responsibility for their own happiness, that's gritty work. It's not for the faint of heart. You know, you will never change if you blame other people for why you're not happy. And we all have a lot of reasons why we're not happy, and they're valid, they're real, valid reasons, but if you let them be an excuse, you're just never going to change. And so seeing every kid take on this mantle of like no one's coming for me, I'm coming for me,
like nobody owes me, what do I owe myself? When they start to make that switch, you just know they're going to be unstoppable.
What's the longest young person that you've worked with in the show.
Oh my gosh, I mean our second graduate, Trent is now our CEO. Right.
Our kids stay.
Around a long, long, long, long time. They stay around and become mentors Max. Yeah, it's incredible.
I've met many of them, and they're so special. They seem like the most well adjusted kids that I've met anywhere.
Yeah.
Yeah, and they are. But it's so it's so wild to think where they came from. They came from really tough spots in their life. Yeah, with suicide attempts and other you know, deep depressions, deep anxiety, and now they're just they're just.
On top of the world. Yeah.
We don't often get to see the other side of suicidal ideation, you know. We just hear about the losses we have in the world. Yeah, but you don't often see what the other side looks like, you know, and that these are deeply engaged, deeply happy, deeply passionate. And it doesn't mean that your life like. Mental health doesn't
mean you're happy all the time. Mental health just means you're going to have the appropriate response, which sometimes is anger, which sometimes is sadness, which sometimes is grief.
That's all healthy.
Yeah, having seen a bunch of these young people go through inspiring children foundations. Are there any interventions that seem to change the trajectory for people?
One is what I just mentioned of, like when you stop making an excuse for why you're not happy and you start saying I'm going to be responsible for it, your life will change. Another one is when you start learning to apply these tools. It takes discipline, you know, so you have to build awareness and then you have to apply discipline, and really it's learning. There's a lot of tricks that work. You know, cold water on your face when you're ruminating. Oh, when you get ruminating thoughts
and you just have these circular thoughts. Like if you put cold water on your face or you get in an ice bath, like it really breaks those ruminating thoughts. And it's because you're having a neurological chemical reaction to that and it just.
Helps reset you.
What are some other tricks for panic attacks? I mean, I'm telling you this. You'll explain this better than me, But it's fascinating to watch an MRI. I have a brain that's having a panic attack. The blood drains out of the frontal lobes, your migdala lights up and it goes offline. And that's why when you're having a panic attack,
it's you're so unreasonable. And so what I realized was if I force my brain to deal with information like taste, color, touch, it forces my brain to process the information, and so it forces that part of my brain to start engaging again, and it helps me get out of a panic attack. So things like peppermint oil, for some reason, works really really well smell Basically, you.
Just grab a little violin, you take it with Yeah, I.
Find like peppermint oil.
If you feel a panic attack coming on, sometimes peppermint oil will intervene enough to get your brain to come back online and start processing ice cubes on the back of the neck.
It's different for everybody.
I have a friend who gets obsessed about reading when they're heading into a panic attack, because it forces your brain to deal with the information, you know, like you start spelling words. He'll look at signs on the street if he's on the street and be like that, says Simon Simo in and he just forces his brain tough function and work, and that'll really help people.
Oh that's great, Okay. So then in the pandemic. You started the Not Alone Challenge. First of all, what did that moment in time teach you about what was going on with our collective mental health?
We knew, like I see, we started the foundation maybe twenty five years ago, and we really thought mental health was going to be the next frontier, like the big epidemic when COVID hit. I remember just thinking people are locked in their house houses with their televisions, and remember just the absolute terror and.
The news and what was on the news.
I mean, it was really scary, and you had people constantly twenty four hours a day, terrified for their lives. And so we knew we would see a huge spike and mental health issues. We knew we'd see a huge spike in domestic abuse because you have people locked up with their abusers and they can't get to work or do the other things during the day that might help them avoid that domestic partner. And so we really dug in then to see if we could like develop resources that people could use.
And so what kind of things did you introduce?
We started the social media challenge hashtag not Alone Challenge. And I've always been really like, I love one on one therapy is great, it's not very accessible. Like the very best patient to therapist ratio is one hundred and fifty six to one. That's the state with the best and the most therapists. It goes sharply downhill from there, and so there's just not enough therapists. We really have a bottleneck in the industry. And there's different types of therapy.
Not every therapeutic model works for everybody. You have somebody finally willing to go to therapy, they may not be matched to the right therapeutic model, so they think they're broken instead of saying it might not.
Just be the right type of therapy.
And so for me, it was about democratizing access and realizing these skills I taught myself, like anxiety as an ally, they're tools you can practice for free, with no guidance. And it really bothered me that, you know, misery is an equal opportunist. It doesn't care like if you're rich, poor, black, white, homeless, a celebrity, but if you want to learn to be different, that's an education. An education costs money. You know, therapy
should be a re education, and that's expensive. And so how could we help create scalable tools that would help people without that.
You know, I'm very optimistic about AI therapists because they are twenty four to seven, they remember everything you said, they've got good guardrails on them. I think it's going to change the world quite a bit in terms of people in the middle of the night, when they're at their lowest moment, having somebody right there.
Yeah.
I helped found a small tech company. It was a mental health that we did in virtual reality, and it's amazing because that's like a thousand percent scalable. You have a live guide twenty four hours a day, day, seven days a week, so at two am, if your cat dies, you can get on there when you need help. And it was all around therapeutic tools helping solve for depression or anxiety or addiction or whatever.
It is great. Great. Are you just out of curiosity?
Are you still interested in VR as the road for that or do you feel like having an AI therapist on the phone?
Is it better? We are you right now?
And then I think all those tools are really helpful. Yeah.
I mean with Inner World there's an overlay of AI and it'll become more and more outprevalent. But just because the way VR works, especially you have a human intervention is coupled with AI, you have a single guide that could run several groups simultaneously, you know, but it's an amazing thing.
What can be done.
Yeah, that's right as I understand it, Females are much less likely to use VR than males.
Yeah, yeah, we're surprised.
You know, therapy is usually female driven, Like men are slow adopters. So we thought we get like young gamers, maybe young female gamers when we started it, but we realized it was we were getting mostly men, which was incredible because men felt safe to show up. It was virtual, you had an avatar, and so we had a lot of male engagement.
Yeah.
It turns out the reason females don't like VR as a general thing is that they don't like to be to not be able to see what's going on around them.
Yeah.
Yeah, oras men don't care.
As Yeah, we have the responsibilities.
Yeah, okay.
And so one of the things, you know, I went to this wonderful conference that you put on recently. It was so it was so lovely, and one of the things that struck me about it was that you have really somehow allowed people to be vulnerable in mass and one of the things that was so amazing about this conference to me is that after person was getting up.
These people are all people with big lives, celebrities of various sorts, and people were so vulnerable and open about where they were and what kind of hard stuff they went through. I found that absolutely amazing. Tell me about how you spread the word of vulnerability.
I think it really is about creating that environment where people know intuitively and instinctively it's safe to share. Nothing feels better than connection, human connection. I mean, what, we're a carbon based you know, being what doesn't carbon have like eight balances? Like it's built to connect for more before I thought.
It was eight.
Really, yeah, it's like a period.
Anyway, we're built to connect, like we're built to bond, and connection feels really really good to us. And when we're vulnerable, we're actually able to connect. When we're armored, we don't actually connect. And for me, I really learned that, Like when I started singing in coffee shops, I was homeless and I was so lonely, and I realized it was because nobody knew me. I didn't ever tell the truth. I always was like I'm good, great, how are you?
I never told anybody what I was really doing. Nobody knew I was stealing. It was like I had the secret life and secret sadness. And so when I started writing songs, it was the truth. It was honest, it
was vulnerable. And when I made the decision to go on stage and tell the truth, I remember being this huge risk and when I did it, the people in my audience cried and they were like, I didn't even be able to felt that way, and I was like, I didn't know anybody else felt that way, and it felt so good to be seen for who I actually was, flaws and all. So I decided to make that my way as I developed my career was I would be honest, I would be vulnerable.
I would tell people the truth.
That has a lot of good benefits because then you never have imposter syndrome. You're never pretending to be something you're not. You talk about all of it. And I was able to talk about all of it my fan base because you know, the Internet was just coming online and it gave me an avenue to have very real discussions with people. And so at the Summit, I think it's a lot just how we lead and how our organizers lead, and when you know great suffering, you want
to help suffering, and you're driven to help suffering. It causes you to care in a way it breaks you open and that's beautiful.
Yeah, you know, I'm really interested in the fact that you took creativity and artistry as the road out because one concern that a lot of people are talking about is with AI, are kids going to stop doing creative things because you can have it write a song for you or have it make a painting for you or something.
But I actually am not worried about that.
Because creativity is such a great outlet for people to do exactly this kind of thing, to explore their feelings, to generate something on their own that communicates honestly with other people, to see where there's resonance going on. What's your take on creativity as a tool for fighting anxiety or depression?
You know, creativity again helps us move towards something instead of moving away from something.
It brings curiosity.
And again because every thought, feeling, emotion leads our nervous system into one of these two states, you realize like engaging in curiosity gets you into rest and digest. You can't be curious unless you're relaxed, you know, and so you can have the tail wag the dog in a good way. You can when you're anxious, get curious and it causes you to relax. And creativity is investigation. It's exploring its curiosity, and that has a really positive effect on our nervous system.
I am really curious as we use.
AI just neurologically, if that'll it causes us. I think it can cause us to get neurologically lazy. I'm curious. You know, writing a short story is hard work. And if you get an idea for a short story, but you don't do the hard work of like h doing all the problem solving, and you give it to AI and it does it so great, I'm curious if it'll people will have the muscle to push through, you know, those uncomfortable problem solving spaces.
I'm very curious about that.
Yeah, nobody knows the answer yet.
I happen to be sort of techno optimistic about this for a couple of reasons. We've all seen these eras even during our lifetime, like when calculators were introduced in school and people had a lot of concerns about what that would mean. But you know, we learn how to do long division, but we don't spend a year on long division because we can use the machine to speed things up. People had these same concerns in fourteen forty
when the printing press was invented. They thought that children were going to be much dumber in the next generation because if they wanted the answer, they could just pull the book right there there was the answer written down.
So historically you've seen this over and over.
My hope is that ai I will enhance creativity, that we can all surf the wave of it and do bigger and better things rather than have it do stuff for us and I The reason I'm optimistic about it is because, just as a dumb example, I happen to love fixing things in my house, and AI has three x to me on my abilities to do things. I take a picture or something, and I figure stuff out
with the AI. Everybody I'm talking to seems to be having this sort of experience where whatever they love doing, they're able to do it better and faster, but there's still I'm still learning stuff, just at a better pace than I would have.
Yeah, what's your experience with it? So far?
I've found this to be incredible tool.
I'm not like building my own agents yet, you know, I have a long way to go. I'm using it pretty passively, you know, I'll put pictures in like you, tell me how to do things, tell me how to you know, tell me more about this or things like that. So I find the learning aspect really fun.
But yeah, we're up for a huge change.
Rough for a huge change. But do you think creatively? I mean, what does it mean for you as an artist? But I mean you're well known as a musician, but also you're a visual artist and you're doing all kinds of other cool products which we'll come to. But yeah, what do you think this means for you? Do you feel like you're able to move faster as a results?
It's interesting, you know, I'm fifty one, I have a life experience, and I'm able to engage with AI in a specific way. I'm so curious what it's like when you're young and you don't already have that foundation. That'll be interesting, Yeah, you know, be very different for a twelve year old coming up with AI versus US that already kind of has a different type of foundation.
It's right, I mean, just as an example, with my son. We have a fireplace and there's a blank sort of shield right in the middle of it, and so we're.
Looking at it.
I took a picture and ask chat gip to generate a picture of an eagle that would fit right in that funny shape space.
And then my son found.
A program that allowed us to take that picture and turn into a three D structure, and then we three D printed it and put it on and it's the coolest sculpture of an eagle that we generated in sort of ninety seconds of work in total.
But what I love about that my sense about the same age as your.
Son, and what I love about that is just the seeing, oh, I can really create something in the world and do it fast. And that means that when he wants to dig in and do longer term projects, he's already thinking at a higher level than we ever did.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
Yeah.
What do you think about social media? One of the concerns has been that it's caused a lot more depression anxiety in the younger generation. As a side note, I find it a little hard to know with certainty if that's the issue, because we all, I mean, we had magazines and there were movie stars with perfect bodies and beauty and whatever. So we all grew up with that stuff.
The question is, you know, whether it's more intensively spend more hours on it now, But the question is what can we do to protect young brains.
I think it always comes down to skill bases, you know, gripping a lot with a lot of you know, guns are a very big thing up there, I were hunting. Guns are very very dangerous, and so you have to learn a lot of skills to be able to handle a gun well. And I think social media the thing I find fascinating about it is, you know, when I was nineteen or twenty, I got famous, and fame is a huge lesson, Like it's a huge thing to contend with.
Your people are aware of you on a mass scale, and you get feedback on a mass scale, and you have people writing articles about like, oh she's fat, or oh she's this, or oh she's washed up, and so you're getting feedback that isn't normal. You know, it's not a normal thing psychologically to weed through the type of feedback you get when you're famous, even positive, like I thought the positive stuff made me feel just as lonely because they don't know me, They don't know if I'm
a good person, they don't know if it's warrented. So it all was a very isolating thing. And you have to make a choice as a famous person of will this make me more authentic? Will I choose to be more authentic or will I start changing who I am to be liked? Now, you could argue we go through that in high school too. You start to deal with like clicks, you know, will I be my authentic self or will I start trying to change who I am
to fit in. I think social media has caused every person to deal with what it's like to be famous a little bit, and that's interesting, you know, and not, by the way, not a lot of famous people handle it great either, like a lot of famous people are drug addicts, or you know, everybody's coping with something that's deeply traumatizing. In all honesty, it's very stressful. So I think it's about giving our kids a lot of tools, But most of us aren't equipped to help our kids
intellectually really understand what those tools are. We don't have frameworks to talk to our kids about what is our authentic self? Who are you if you're not Jonathan Myers. You know, if you're not this person, what makes you you?
You do?
You make time to be with yourself and understand who you are? That isn't your identity, That isn't I mean, those are serious skills to learn, and those are our skills we need to be teaching our kids, but we weren't taught them as parents, you know what I mean? And so I think that's kind of where the rub coms is. Social media and technology came up quicker than our ability to give real psychological skill sets around them.
How would you advise a young person to go about that task of figuring out who they are?
I call it dating yourself?
You know, like we're so interested in dating other people, and what do you do when you date somebody? You spend time, you are curious about them, you know, you dedicate resources and create frameworks, And so I think you have to date yourself. You have to ask yourself questions like really, who am I? If I'm not Jewel the singer?
Who am I?
Who am I? When I shut my eyes? And I'm not anybody's daughter or anybody's sister? Like what makes me me? What is essentially me? Yeah? What's just my personality that's reacted to trauma? Am I just my trauma? Am I a bunch of decisions I made about myself based on my value or my worth. They're interesting things to think about, and they're not things we're typically encouraged to think about.
How do you get people to ask the right questions on that? I mean, do you have a guide of some sort, maybe on the website that tells people like, look, why don't you ask you shelf this question?
That ask yourself that question?
I should?
I started writing a second book and I haven't. I need to get back to it, but it had a list of questions that I find very provocative to to sort of get you on that journey.
Yeah, you know.
As a side note, I ran a company for the last ten years and one of the questions that I would ask people when they were interviewing was if.
You had to date yourself, what would drive you crazy?
Which is a really interesting question because it really caused people to think about what, you know. It's easy for people in a job interview to talk about what they are great at, but the things that would drive them crazy something they hadn't examined necessarily. Yeah, what would you say is the biggest myth about mental health, maybe a dangerous myth about mental health that young people don't know.
I'd say it's kind of a prevailing feeling that somebody's broken, that something's wrong with them, that if they're anxious or they've anxiety disorders, that they're broken or something's wrong. I went through a really terrible experience where I don't know how to describe it. I have an autobiography where I talk about my relationship with my mom, but I was when I was thirty two. I realized everything I had thought I had known wasn't true. All my money was gone.
I was three million in debt. It was a really really rough awakening and I felt devastated. I've been through a really hard life and then this thing happens and I'm like, oh my gosh. I turned down the tour I was on. I really needed the money, but I was like, I can't. I'm going to have a mental health breakdown if I go on the road. Like I'm not okay, and I don't know why. These moments always happened the mirror.
I lood in the mirror.
I was washing my hands, and I remember this parable of the golden statue. It's just a little terrible of a village heard that a warring tribe was coming, and so they had this golden statue. They covered it in mud to hide the value. The war came, there was a lot of trauma, and aftermath, villagers were rebuilding. For years,
they forgot about the golden statue. They even forgot it was valuable until one day, after a rainstorm, a child was sitting at the feet of the statue and saw a little bit of gold and picked it off, and they realized, Wow, this thing has value. It's been golden all along. And I suddenly realized, what if I'm what I mean. A soul isn't a teacup. It isn't a
chair that can just be broken or shattered like. It has to be a sustaining energy that exists, And so what if my job was just to do an archaeological dig back to my whole self. It's there intact all the time. And I think that reframing is really important, because fixing something that's broken is really daunting, but uncovering something that's whole intuitively makes a.
Lot more sense.
And so that for me was a huge change and something I has helped other people when they adopt it.
Oh that's so lovely.
And so you have taken on all kinds of creative projects, So tell us what you're doing right now with both oceanographic data and space data.
I grew up in big nature. It had such a positive impact on me and my being. I believe nature is always there reaching for us, and I think we only value what we're in a relationship with. So whatever we're in the biggest relationship with is what we value the most. And as we've become industrialized, we've really moved away from having a relationship to nature, so we don't often know where a food comes from or how heavy
water is to haul it. I was raised on a homestead, though, so I was raised so close with such a big relationship, and it's been a mentor. Like a lot of the skills I learned was by watching nature, by watching natural systems. So I wanted to see if I could build an instrument that would give nature a voice and would give nature the ability to affect you and your nervous system and your brain wave states. And then I wanted to see if it worked. So what I did is I
created for heart of the ocean. I created an eight foot tall sculpture and inside are these organelles that are wrapped in LED lighting and it's sixty thousand points of programmable light. And then I created a sound vocabulary, and then I worked with NASA, a woman named Shelgentiman and a guy named Gregni and Marr where we went out and I created data sculpture, so that data is surfaced like surface data, so like wave height, precipitation, things like that.
Then there's the wind mixed layer in the ocean, which is critters like dolphins, salinity currents, things like that. Then you go into the midnight zone where there's seismic data and deeper sea creatures like anglerfish, and then you cycle back up. So it's this twelve minute loop of data. Every time we come back up to the surface, our satellites grab new fresh data, so it's live every twelve minutes,
it's changing. And so this data there's a computer in the base and the data is live streaming, and that data then chooses a color and chooses a sound, and it was really fun. It was fun to work with the data. Sonifying data is like its own thing. I could nerd out on, but we did end up studying it in the University of Mexico City, So it's been really fun to do that. And it's like a wave combining music and my visual art practice and my mental health practice all into one thing.
Yeah.
So when you look at this, I've seen the sculpture, it's extraordinary. You're hearing the data from the ocean turned into sound and lights.
Yeah. What do you think the effect is on mental health? What's your experience? Is a new sit in front of it for a while.
Yeah, it's altering, like you get altered, like you really relax and you really get altered.
So you are a visual artist as well, you paint. And am I right that You've got an exhibit coming up?
Yeah?
Yeah, opened my seventh the Venice Bianale Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and it'll be up for the next eight months.
Wonderful. And I've seen some of your work. It's very beautiful.
Thank you.
And what I found out I hadn't realized was before, but you have synesthesia, as my listeners probably know, I've studied synesthesia for a long time and so your form of synesthesia is where you where musical notes will trigger colors and shapes. Tell us about that for your experience.
Yeah, so I see colors sometimes when people talk, most often with music, when people talk, I see like clouds of color that have movement to them, kind of like the Aurora borealis maybe is a good example. But when i'm I see much more structured shapes with color and the tone when I sing or the vibrato affects the shape and how those shapes move and collapse and expand.
And the way I hear pitch I realized is doing this.
I hear pitch as a shape like I see a little like a if you've ever seen like the signatures of like you pluck a guitar string and it makes that sound wave.
That's what I see.
And so when I get pitched by hearing slash seeing this shape, and I match the shape with my voice, and then that's how I tune my guitar or things like that. So for me switching to in your monitors where I'm not hearing the sound push the air, I'm not as good at my pitch. It's very interesting. It's like it happens in space. It's I don't fully understand it.
Do you have perfect pitch.
No, are you able to tell when your guitar is flat or sharp based on the shapes and colors?
Yeah, because I hear I hear the pitch, but I hear one.
I see a sound wave of signature and how high and low the valley peaks are. And so when I'm singing, I have to get it's a pitch. But you're all, it's how it's pushing the air. It's the one wo yeah, creates the pitch.
I guess. Nice.
Yeah, and you had previously told me the the way you discovered you had synesthesia. Of course you didn't know the words for it the time when you were a little girl.
Yeah.
My earliest memory is somehow I got in the basement of our house and my mom was looking for me, and she called down the stairs and she was like true, and I just saw this explosion of color and it was like a dark room, and so this color was just so bright in my head and I was like, that's me, Like, I'm those colors.
That name means those colors.
Oh, it's wonderful.
Yeah.
Okay, So, in wrapping up, what do you think is the most important lesson about mental health that all of us listening should be keeping in mind.
Gosh, I would just say, if you want to work on your mental health, if you make that your number one job, Like, what is it like to really take that on and really say I'm going to care more about my mental health than any other thing that really starts to change your life?
And what tools should people use for this?
Yeah, so there's a lot of types of therapy. There's talk therapy, there's cognitive behavioral, there's DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy. They're all different, they all have different tools available For me. Personally, talk therapy doesn't really work. It doesn't It helps me feel connected, which is therapeutic, but it doesn't help me make changes. I'm personally interested in making changes. That's when
I notice I get the best results. And so I think it's just being a really good advocate for yourself. You know, now that we have AI, you can just say what types of therapies are out there, what types of modalities are out there, and then also just knowing like you can do a lot on your own. You know, if you just like the types of exercises I mentioned, those are free and if you want to apply them, they will really change your life.
Okay, well, thank you for inspiring so many people, and for being vulnerable and for finding your own golden statue under the mud ah.
Thanks for having me.
That was my conversation with Jewel. One of the ideas that stayed with me most after this conversation is the role of vulnerability. Vulnerability is easy to praise from a distance, and it becomes even more interesting when you look at what it really asks of the brain. To be vulnerable is to let another person see something frightened or uncertain or ashamed inside of you. It requires relaxing the impulse
to conceal and pretend. Vulnerability is about letting go of performance for a moment, and that is nothing small for a nervous system. Because the brain is always managing risk, it's always estimating consequences. It's asking what happens if I reveal this? What if I say this out loud? What if everyone turns away? So from a neural point of view, this is a real risk. But vulnerability is one of the most important.
Doors that we have.
In our conversation today, Jewel reminded us that when we are armored, we don't actually connect. We can only meaningfully do that when we're vulnerable, and this is why loneliness can persist even in very crowded lives. A person can be surrounded by attention and starved for something deeper. They can be praised and remain unknown. In Jewel's case, a person can become highly legible in a role and remain nearly invisible as a self. The neuroscience story underneath all
this is that brains are extremely social. They are relational, by which I mean we regulate each other constantly. We calm one another, we alarm one another, we reshape one another, and so just the presence of another human who says, in effect, I know something about pain too, this can change the chemistry of a room. When one person tells the truth, permission spreads and people feel like their private interior becomes shareable.
And that really matters.
In the domain of mental health, because shame thrives in silence and secrecy. Openness creates oxygen. Every time one person speaks honestly about what's happening in their inner cosmos, the universe becomes just a little bit easier to inhabit for the next person. And I just want to return to the quite striking metaphor that jewels shared near the end, this golden statue covered in mud. I love that story because it offers a different way to think about suffering.
For a lot of people, mental health struggles come with the conclusion that there is something wrong with me at the core. But her story offers another lens on it, which is that the gold is still there. Life lays down mud, and so the work is archaeological. You uncover, you remember, you return, and that gives a frame shift. And I hope that many people hearing this conversation were able to feel something loosen when they encounter that image. So let's wrap up. I think of hope as an architecture.
Hope is what happens when a person has somewhere to turn. Hope is what happens when there are tools to practice, or when a person is given a language for their experience.
It's what happens when there is.
A mentor or a teacher, or a therapist or a friend, or an organization or just a song or a hotline or an AI therapist, or sometimes it's a family member or a stranger or some structure that's says you do not have to carry all this bad weather by yourself and this landscape of help is a lot broader than it used to be, and I think with growing societal attention and new tools like AI, the help.
Is going to keep on growing.
So my hope for today is that you or someone that you know asks for help a little sooner. Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos