Brad Stulberg on The Practice of Groundedness

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day life that spiritual habits dot net. I hope to meet you in this special program that starts very soon. There is a linkage between being and doing, between love and putting your cell phone away when you're doing the dishes. Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our

thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear we see we don't have. Instead of what we do, we think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for

joining us. Our guest on this episode is Brad Stahlberg, researcher, writer, and a coach on health well being and sustainable performance. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Time Magazine, Forbes. I had to include that one just because it's my last name, but that's actually true. In his coaching practice, he works

with executives, entrepreneurs, and physicians on their performance and well being. Today, Brad and Eric discuss his book, The Practice of Grounded Nous, A Transformative Path to Success that feeds, not crushes your soul. Hi, Brad, welcome to the show. Hey Eric, it's great to be here. I am really excited to have you on your book, The Practice of Groundedness, A transformative Path the success that feeds, not crushes your soul. I just resonated with every bit

of it. You know, so much of it. I was like, this is just my worldview. So I think We've got a lot to talk about there, and I'm really excited. But we will start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the grandchild stops and thinks about it and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Well. I'd be remiss not to mention the zen master and teacher Tick nat Han, who has had an enormous influence on my philosophy of life and certainly on my writing as well. And as we're recording this, it's really just a not even a week after his passing, and he wrote so beautifully about the seeds you water are the seeds that grow, and within us we all have seeds of love and openness and presence and care, and we also have seeds of

delusion and anger and greed. And to me, that parable is really about trying to align your doing out in the world with the being that you want, and watering the right seeds, feeding the good wealth. I think that in spiritual and psychology circles, there's this perception that being informs doing, but I think people often forget that doing also informs being. It's a cycle, so to me, that parable is all about the doing part of that cycle. You know, one of my favorite phrases that I use

on the show all the time. I got it somewhere in a A. I don't know if I've ever traced it back to who actually first said it, but it's sometimes you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking. You know. It's that idea. I absolutely love it, and I'm sure we'll get into this. It's such a big part of grounded nous is this notion that mood follows action. Yeah, or as you say, right doing often proceeds right thinking. Yeah. Yeah,

well let's jump into grounded nous. You use that term groundedness, so what does that mean to you? Yeah. I like to use the metaphor of a mountain to convey the two predominant meanings of groundedness. And the first is if you think about a big, beautiful mountain, most people immediately gaze up, they look to its peak, and perhaps if the mountain is really prominent it has a very steep slope,

they'll take note of that too. Very rarely does someone see a big mountain and admire its base, it's foundation. But without that base and foundation, there is no slope, there is no peak, and when rough weather comes over time, a mountain is only as strong as its foundation. So all the beauty that you see up top is impossible without the base, without the ground. And I believe and I argue in the book that we are very much

like mountains. We focus a lot on our own proverbial peaks and climbs, and at times that can cannibalize energy and attention focused on the base, the foundation. The second metaphor of a mountain and groundedness is about actually climbing

a mountain. So you can imagine that you've got two mountain climbers and each really want to get to the top up and one climber is constantly thinking about whether or not she'll make it to the top and the selfies that she's going to take when she gets there, and how her self worth will be validated when she's on the top of the mountain. Another climber, she's just focused on every step that she's taking. She's also enjoying

the view from the side of the mountain. Now, both climbers have an equal chance of getting to the top. What I argue in the book and what the research supports is that the second climber, the one that's enjoying the process, has a much better chance of climbing for a long period of time. That first climber is more susceptible to burn out, to emptiness, to feelings of longing. That second climber they might still care about the result.

Don't get me wrong, They want to get to the top, but they're where they are along the way, which is the number one most important thing for sustainability and whatever it is that you're climbing towards. So it's really about this idea of paying attention into where we are as we continue to strive for other things, yes exactly um, and not letting the outcome supersede the process in our minds, because we spend a lot of time thinking about outcomes. So do I get the promotion, do I get married

to the specific attractive partner? Is my book going to be a best seller? But when you think about it, of our life is the process. So even if you have the ultimate of outcomes, you're on the gold medal

stage at the Olympics representing your country. Well, you only get to be up there as long as the national anthem is so maybe you get a good ninety seconds worth of your life up there, But the rest of it is process, and being grounded is about really being firmly in the process, and I think that that's just a much better way to strive. Yeah, you've got a sentence you wrote, and I'll just I'll read it because it's a question that I ask people often on the show,

is about is sort of tension? You say, it's okay, even admirable to set a high bar, but and this is a big butt, you need to be present and accepting as you strive. So you're sort of actually saying to the question of like, is it better to strive? Is it better to be present, you're sort of saying both, yes, exactly.

And I think that there's this misconception, particularly amongst people that have perhaps some more Eastern sensibility, that striving is the cause of suffering or not necessarily a good thing. But one of the eight principles on the eight Full Path in Buddhism is right effort. And if you actually look back at the polycanon, right the old tax that's been passed down from the historical Buddha, right effort sounds

a lot like grounded striving. So the Buddha didn't say that you should just be a recluse and not engage in the world and not strive. What the Buddha said is you want. You're striving to be wholesome, and because it's Buddhism, such a big part of that is being present, striving towards worthy goal, not getting caught up in ego and something out in front of you, but being where

you are. And like so many of these ancient wisdom teachings, fast forward millennia and modern science now coins this the arrival fallacy, which is this notion that we think that if we just strive enough, eventually will arrive and then we'll be content, then we'll have our self work. But it's a fallacy. The goalpost is always ten yards down the field. So if you can't learn to enjoy the process, the striving, then you're constantly just going to be chasing

your tail and that's no fun. Right, Yeah, It is the ultimate sort of if then right or when then? You know, when I get this or if I get this, and it just doesn't work that way. You know. My experience has been your dominant mindset follows you, right. And if your dominant mindset is always there someplace better than here that I have to get to. When you get to here, which you thought would be the place that would make you happy, it just simply doesn't work. It

really is about both. And I think that you know, right, effort is always so interesting, you know, and Zen we talk about great faith, great doubt, and great determination. It's always this paradox of on one hand, there is a striving, there, there is a determination, there is an effort, and there is at the same time a profound letting go or acceptance that has to happen at least my experience for

these steeper spiritual states to unfold. And I think that you see this so clearly in a meditation practice, but also in other domains. So in meditation or any contemplated spiritual practice, if you're really striving or craving a certain state, you're never going to get it. But once you give up on that, then you suddenly have these moments of peace, freedom, wholeness, whatever word do you want to use. And I like

to think of an athlete. If an athlete is so focused on winning the game or scoring high, they're never going to perform well. But if an athlete can have that disappear, get out of their own way, then suddenly they're in the zone and the scoreboard does exist. They're just playing the game. And those are the peak moments when we play the best. So it's this huge paradox that by wanting to be the best, but then not really wanting to be the best, you have the chance

of being the best. It's like ambition works until it gets in your way. Striving works until it gets in your way. Yes. Yes, The spiritual teacher Audio Shanty said to me once and and this just made so much sense to me. He said, your will is good to get you to the meditation cushion, like you need it. You needed to get there, and then at that moment is precisely the moment you have to discard it. It's at that point it is no longer of value to you.

And I think that speaks to the same thing with like an athlete, right, like, you've got to have the practice and the work and the effort to get to the game, and then when you're in the game, you've got to be in the game. You alluded to this a minute ago, which was, we've got these ancient spiritual teachings, we've got these modern science practices of peak performers pointing

to the same truth. You say, I'm interested in convergence. Right, When multiple of these things come together, it's probably worth paying attention to. And that's something I've articulated before. Also, it's like when I see the same thing coming from multiple places, it gives me a higher confidence in the fact that, like, Okay, there's really something here. Yes. And I think that for my own writing practice, for anything to make it into a book, it's got to have

that convergence. I like to use the image of a three legged stool, where one leg is modern science and empirical findings, another lag is history and ancient wisdom teachings, and then the third lag is people out in the world actually trying to do this stuff. And a stool with three lags is really sturdy. You can be confident it's going to hold up and sit on it. Two legs maybe one or zero legs, no, And the bar

of this book was all three legs. This because I think that people want certainty and they want to know truth with the capital t but in science it's all about probabilities. And for me, again, if a finding is there in multiple domains of science, if all the spiritual wisdom traditions are pointing towards it, and then you go talk to people and they manifest it in their own life,

that gives me confidence it's true. And I think that that works opposite to what I call like the single small study or the one guru, right, the study of eight people that did something, and there's this finding that gets a headline in the newspaper, the single guru that knows the path versus lineage and tradition in teaching and meta analyzes and science and all these peak performers in different domains pointing towards it. That gives me the confidence

to be like, you know, I'm not so special. This will probably work for me too. And then I think the next leg of the school that comes in that is also an incredibly portant one is when it starts to become personal experience. You know, when your own experience of it also, then you go yeah, and not only do these three other places aligne it's working for me, okay, you know, And maybe that's where we go from faith to knowledge. I'm not sure, but it's another important piece. Yeah,

And I think that's also where it gets sticky. So so many of these concepts and books like the one I write in the concepts that you and your guests talk about on this podcast. There's knowing and then there's doing. Yes and Juts and Brewer, who I know has been a past guest on the show. He talks about knowing is in your head and like wisdom is in your bones,

and for me, I say more doing. And I think once you have that self experience, that's when it transitions from this idea that makes sense to something that has a higher likelihood of becoming a habit that you're actually going to show up in in an act in day to day life. Yeah. Use the phrase the knowing doing gap. And I talked about that so much in the Spiritual Habits program we created. I mean, that's the part of the program is how do you bridge that? You know?

How do we go from all? Right? These are really great spiritual principles that I believe in. Two ones that actually have a chance of doing something in my life that's useful, and just being able to show up and and pound the stone over and over again. And I think a lot of people in self improvement are looking for a switch, but there are very few switches that I found. It tends to be much more of an ongoing practice and and you're only as good as that practice. Yeah. Absolutely.

Do you know of ways that you do with your coaching clients of sort of bridging that knowledge to doing gap either what stands in the way for for people or what are some ways to kind of get through that gap. The thing that seems to stand in the way most is taking too big of a swing right off the bat, so trying to go from zero to

a hundred instead of zero to one. Close cousin is trying to just move too fast, so trying to expedite progress instead of being patient and taking these all baby steps and allowing yourself to have a string of little victories and build up an inertia and momentum and consistency.

That's the first thing. And then the second thing is I find that any kind of behavior change has a much higher likelihood of succeeding if it's done in a community of practice with others, and it doesn't necessarily have to be Hey, you're all showing up to do the thing together, but you're all checking in once a month to report on your challenges and your successes, and over the long haul, I think that community is perhaps the most influential factor and stickiness of hard things, because doing

hard things is hard, and if there's a striving element, as we talked about that mountaintop, it's a shiny object, man, and if you're looking at it alone, it's easy to get caught up on it, Whereas if you're doing it with other people, there can be a lightheartedness of fun, and that too, keeps you grounded, and it keeps you

coming back consistently. How have you found that community in your life or where are the places you found that community in your life, because this is such an important topic and is also a very difficult thing for a lot of people to find. Yeah, well, I found it in a few places. And I'd say that it is in some ways activity specific, and then in some ways

it's kind of overarching. So for my strength and weightlifting practice, I go to a gym and it's a small gym, and I know that people pretty well, and we're all working towards similar goals and having fun with it. For my meditation, practice. I have a meditation coach that I check in with however often I need to, and will help guide me on the path. And I have a few friends they're more Buddhist than me, so they would call it like sanga dharma brothers, and we talk about

our practice in writing. My first two books are with a co author, and this book is almost every bit his is it is mine. There was no parting. It was just as we might get into. There's a lot of my personal story in this book. But even my writing practice is not really a solo effort. So much of what I do is with Steve the promote options, with Steve the planning. He's got his book coming out, I will treat it as if it is my own.

And then I think the last step, in a really important one that I think a lot of people are struggling with, is your local community, so your neighbors, the barista at your coffee shop, the male person. Just having a sense of physical rootedness in a place. I'm sure there's all kinds of science as to why, but it helps you feel a little bit more secure. And I think that what often happens is even prior to the

COVID pandemic productivity cannibalizes time for building community. Yeah, because hanging out with your neighbors and like taking care of their dog is inefficient. Walking to the coffee shop when you could just have something delivered is inefficient. And I think if we prize efficiency, we saw at work, but then we feel empty and lonely and we wonder why.

And it's a practice. I mean, there are there are times pre COVID in my life where I am almost embarrassed say that I didn't walk to the coffee shop because I was in such a writing groove that I didn't want to spend that nine minutes commuting each way. And those are failures on my part. And those are the periods when I string a few days consecutive together, but at the end of them, I start to feel empty or restless. So in the moment, it's hard, but I do think that like there's a local element of

community too. That's not efficient, right, because all these other groups weightlifting, meditation, writing, they're still they're focused on some sort of project, which is great, But I think it's really important to have community that's not project specific, that's just there. You use the term early on in the book, you talk about what most of us are stuck in is heroic individualism. Say more about what that is? Yeah, I define that is an ongoing game of one upsmanship

against self and others. So you're constantly trying to beat yourself and other people where the goal post is always ten yards down the field. That's that notion of the arrival fallacy, right if then you think you're going to get there but you don't. In measurable achievement, in efficiency and productivity, those are the main arbiters of success, and that's the culture that we're in. It's the water that

we swim in. An extreme example of this and something that I touch on just briefly in the book, but I see more and more of my coaching clients is these devices that portend to help you be healthier and well, they have a lot of utility for many people. They've now turned sleep, which is supposed to be the most RESTful part of the day, into a game to win at because you get a sleep score. So if we're quantifying everything, and if we're trying to be good at everything,

of course we're exhausted. So many people like, why am I so exhausted? I'm doing everything right, and I'm like, well, that's why you're so exhausted, because you're doing everything right. So I think that nothing gets all green lights and nothing gets all red lights. In my mind, these devices

are but one example. They're helpful until they're not. But I think that we're in such overdrive in so many areas of our life where we're trying to quantify things and measure things and beat ourselves and think that oh then will be content, only to end up exhausted, empty, lonely, and back to what we were discussing earlier. I think heroic individualism has the mindset that successes out there in front of you and you have to go get it. And if you want to get like meta for a second,

all of consumer capitalism works that way. When I was working on the book, I did this experiment where I paid really close attention to ads and commercials, and all the people are beautiful. I would see an ad for dishwasher detergent or cat litter picking up my cat's piem poop, and it's this beautiful blond haired woman or this super strong, full head of hair masculine man, and they're not selling

you the cat litter they're selling you this lifestyle. If you just buy our cat litter, then you two can be flawless and beautiful. And it sets us up to constantly chase this elusive thing that's not there, and as a result, we don't feel very good and we get distracted from the stuff that's right in front of us that will make us feel good. Yep. So, heroic individualism, in many ways is the nemesis or the opposite to groundedness. It's this frantic, frenetic chase of the next thing without

that foundation, without that ground. Yeah. And I think you made a couple of interesting points. They're the one about sleep is a great one. I tweeted something the other day like the sleep police are helpful till they're not right. Like the idea of like, well you should get eight hours sleep, Yeah, it's probably a good idea. I went through a phase where I had restless sleeve syndrome and I wasn't sleeping well, and that constant like you're going to die if you don't get eight hours sleep it

was not was not helpful. And you know there's that old what gets measured gets done right. It's non dual. Yeah, exactly like you said, I think you no, no all green lights, no, all all red lights. It's it's useful till it's not. It's like, the two most important rules of sleep are do everything you can to get seven to nine hours of sleep. That's rule number one, and then real number two is if you don't get seven to nine hours of sleep, don't freak out about it. Yep,

yep exactly. I think the other thing that's become challenging for everyone is we want grounded nous, we want more peace. I think people are starting to see through to some degree the achievement mindset on some level, and yet what ends up happening. I think, well, I don't think I know. I see is where you then go, Okay, if I want more grounded nous, I'm going to have to move my body every day. That's really important. I need to build a community. I need to connect with more people.

I better start meditating. What boy, I hear, breath works really good, And you know, I would probably in the sauna for like twenty minutes a day, and all of a sudden, before you know it, like you said, you've added all this extra stuff on the supposed to help but doesn't. And yet just taking it all off leads you right back to, oh, I'm just running around all day focusing on work and and nothing that's really valuable. Yeah,

And I think that gets into the incrementalism. So if in the book there's a menu of I don't know thirty practices in my own life, at any given time, I'm probably only shooting a hundred percent. I'm like eight of the thirty, and that tends to be enough. And when I go down to five or six, I start to feel anxious a little sad. If I go down to two, I feel depressed, And if I try to do fifteen, I feel totally restless because I just can't.

I can't be perfect. Again, it gets back to what I would call like wholesome striving or right effort that is doable, and you're not doing it to try to win it a game or like optimize yourself. You're doing it because it genuinely feels good. My meditation teacher, when we had our our son THEO this is now, I don't know, three and a half years ago, I was like really trying to to meditate, and I'm coming off of or I guess I'm still kind of in like

really bad obsessive compulsive disorder. Meditation was such a helpful part of my recovery, and I remember him telling me, your new challenge is you're not going to meditate for six months. You can still call me once a month, but no meditating for six months. And I think what he's getting at is what you were saying. His point is you've got an infant drop the weight, like if

you don't want to go to the cushion. And this is where there's nuance, because if you don't want to go to the cushion, or you don't want to go to the gym, or you don't want to build community, well sometimes you actually do need that lump to do the hard thing and get going. But that umph can very quickly turn into an obsession or compulsion, at which

point then it's problematic. And I hope in the book I point towards that and I give people some language and some tools to try to figure out like the texture of your drive. Are you doing this because you want to or because you have to? Yeah? Yeah, I think that's it's really important. You know intention I am I doing this and reflecting on that regularly is really important. You know what's important about this? Why does this matter

to me? Yeah? That? And you know, Eric, I know that you're a master of language because you have these wonderful conversations, so I know I'm speaking to a kindred spirit. Just language is so important because once you can name something, then you can wrestle with it, you can play with it, you can make it your own. And I think a set of words that gets to what you were saying is good enough. How can you just be good enough? Yeah? So not bad, not the best, not great, but good enough.

And to me, that's what that's like, that's what we're going for. I wanted to title the book good enough, and my publisher, of course, is like, it's got to be marketable. No one's going to buy a book called good enough. You can put that on the inside, but not on the cover. But that, I think is what we're really talking about. And is it type of perfectionist driver? If it's something that I've really tried to take on. How can I be a good enough parent? How can

I be a good enough writer? A good enough friend? And it takes the weight off my shoulders to be perfect and it makes me a happier, more peaceful person. I know, you know the psychological precedent of Winnicott talking about the good enough parent. You can get into this. You have to have perfect, but no good enough, you know. And if there's anything in my opinion and my experience that will cause you to go, I'm nowhere in the

neighborhood are perfect with this? It's parenting, right, And so that phrase good enough is a really useful one there also because Boyd's parenting bring you to the edge of your capacity over and over and over. Yeah, And I'm

glad you mentioned Winnicott. Donald Winnicott used good enough in terms of parenting, specifically in not being a negligent parent, but also not being a helicopter parent and needing everything to be perfect all the time and letting your child have some frustration because your child learns that through those frustrations they're their own independent person, and you're failable. And I think that it's nice to take winn it cuts

theory and apply it to ourselves. So not just good enough parenting with our kids, but how can we be good enough to ourselves? How can we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. Let ourselves unfold doesn't mean let yourself go off the deep end, like there's a time for you know, the imagery of the zend whip. But we can loosen the grip a little bit. In paradoxically, by loosening the grip and letting go a little bit, we tend to feel better and be better. Yeah, it's

why I'm such a middle way guy. Like that idea of the middle way is just the very heart of my entire personal philosophy or whatever you would want to call it. It's so important. We're not gonna get through all the principles of groundedness, although we've hit on a number of them already just in kind of talking about it. But let's talk about one of them, which is patients. The title is be patient and you'll get there faster.

Talk to me about how that works. Heroic individualism tends to prioritize speed, and it is both speed day to day in our lives. So it feels I think I used the words earlier frantic frenetic, like you're kind of just in a rush to the next thing. And then it's also speed in projects, So how fast can I get this done so I can move on to the next thing? And what all the research shows is that oftentimes going slower on the meaningful things in your life

helps you go faster. We can even relate this just to adopting habits. If you try to go too fast, what generally happens is you get out to a great start and then you get to mile twelve of the proverbial marathon and you start to feel like crap, and you're like, holy ship, there's fourteen miles ahead now. Patients require shilling restraint early on, and it is so antithetical to the culture of crush it go all in post

your heroic workout on Instagram. In the moment, it can be hard to hit the brakes because you might be feeling really really good. And what patients ask you to do is to think of your future self. To think of yourself tomorrow, next week, next month, and have some respect for your future stealth and stop one rep short.

So I use that analogy in the book. It comes out of strength training, where the most successful strength training programs, contrary to popular belief, they never actually want you to go to failure. Maybe you go to failure like once or two times a year, but you stop one rep short. And why is that it's so that you can pick up where you left off the next day, so you don't dig yourself too deep of a hole that you

can't come out of. Then you look at what artists have to say about the creative process, it's very much the same. I stop when I know where the paintbrush is still going to go. I stopped one sentence short, one paragraph short, so I can pick up think about it in a professional sense. Oftentimes, what tends to blow up our big projects is we try to make things happen all the way and at some point, generally, especially if you're working with other people, you have to learn

to let them happen. So Patients is really about having the restraint to stop one rep short, to go slowly by slowly, and to zoom out and take a long view. Because if I wanted to make the most progress on anything in my life over the course of a week, I probably worked twenty hours a day, slam some red bulls and coffee, take a two hour and app and do the same thing, and at the end of those eight days, I'd be toasted. If I want to make progress over a couple of decades, it's going to be

very different. So It is both about in the moment having that restraint and then over the long haul, zooming out and thinking about your time scale is something that you want to be sustainable, not just lipp in time. I worked in software startup companies in my late twenties and thirties, and you know that world is just all pedal to the metal all the time. But at a certain point I went, you know what, I've really got

to measure productivity over months, years. You know, if I'm measuring it over a course of a week, like, that's not a that's not an accurate way to measure. It really got to zoom that out and go, Okay, yeah, what is sustainable? What can I keep doing? Yeah? I really like how you think about like that, what is sustainable? And I wanna hammer this point home because it's easy

to say, I'm sure. I think Johann Harrari now it's probably a few episodes backs that's something similar, and he's right that, like, oh, it's just the people posting workouts on Instagram. But I think there's an internal thing happening too, because when you're in the moment and you've got that excitement and that energy, you've got to put the brakes on yourself. It's not just about wanting to keep up the jones is. It's about forcing yourself to say, hey,

this is like a thrill. I could go on a work bender or a creative bender, and maybe I can get by doing that once a year, but any more than that, I'm setting myself up for failure. So it's easy just to put all the blame on like the social forces around us, maybe we give them fifty of the blame. And then also turned the gaze inward and realized that this is about having some boundaries for yourself as well, especially if you're a workaholic, which many people are.

And I say that with no judgment. I mean I always talk about workaholism. I'm really glad that the team that developed the M R and A vaccines were all workaholics, right right, Yeah, you've referenced it a couple of times. You talk about it in the book a fair amount. You're about with O. C. D. Talk to me a little bit about kind of what happened there and what's the healing from that been like for you. So, about five and a half years ago, I did a very

long run in Central Park one a vacation. I was training for a marathon, so probably like twenty miles, and I had all kinds of stuff during the day, and I rushed from one friend to one friend to the next family, and I just didn't eat enough. And dinner came around and I thought I was meeting a friend for dinner, but it turns out it was just a bar.

So I had a stiff drink and some kettle chips, and my blood sugar dropped precipitously and I had a panic attack, which can happen when your blood sugar drops. And the next day I went to an urgent care. I wanted to make sure that you know, it wasn't like a harder rhythmia or something more serious. And the doctor said, you know, your blood sugar looks fine now, but based on everything that you're saying, sounds like your

blood sugar dropped and you had some panic. Most people have a panic attack and they hear that and they move on. Not everyone. And I'm in that ladder bucket. So intellectually I could trust that doctor, but I just became so worried about my health. I thought, maybe that doctor is wrong, maybe I have a heart problem. So then I wore an e k G machine. I thought

that maybe something's wrong with my adrenal plan. So I saw an adrenal land specialist and I developed a real obsession with my health that spurred from that panic attack. I got with a good therapist that understood what was going on, and I was being treated broadly for health anxiety. I was making a lot of improvement. And after about two weeks of what I would call good improvement, So maybe this is like six weeks after that initial episode, I am supposed to go on a trip with friends

to do a bunch of trail running and hiking. So obviously at that point, I'm feeling pretty good about my health. And it's a four hour car ride to get to where we're going, and about forty minutes into the car ride, I just get absolutely pummeled with the thought that you should just drive off the road out of nowhere. And not only am I having this thought, it is accompanied by the most painful, intense wave of despair and anxiety

and just a ball of like anxious depression. So I'm sitting in the car for three hours just like, don't drive off the road, don't drive off the road, don't drive off the road. I get there, I try not to think about it. I try to forget it, and it's just repetitive. I wake up in the middle of a night to go pee. You should just go down to the kitchen and get a knife and stab yourself.

Just NonStop barrage of thoughts of self harm. I know deep down inside that I don't want to hurt myself, but the onslaught of these thoughts is just becoming increasingly painful. So maybe i'd have one hour of freedom from them, and then it's a half an hour, and then it's ten minutes. The drive home, I'm just praying, like maybe I'll get through. I've got all these podcasts queued up, just trying to distract myself, and of course it didn't

work out like that. That drive home was twice as bad as to drive there, the most painful moments of my life. Hours of my life, I felt like years. I get home and I tell my wife that, like, something is wrong with my brain. I need to get help asap, and I am terrified. My wife is pregnant at the time with our first kid, so you layer that on and I think I'm becoming either suicidally depressed or schizophrenic or psychosis. It just feels like I am

losing total control of my mind and my emotions. So I'm living in California and it's very hard to get into a psychiatrist. So when I had the health anxiety, I couldn't. But if you call them and you say that you're having NonStop thoughts of harming yourself, you get an appointment pretty quickly. So I got an appointment with a psychiatrist, and I go in and I tell him what's happening, and he's sitting there non judgmentally is a

good psychiatrist does. And I end by saying, like, I really hope that it don't have to be in an impatient facility, but I'm just terrified I'm going to hurt myself. And I would be okay with that if it means I wouldn't hurt myself. And he just smiles and says, you're not depressed, man, you have O c D. I had no idea the O c D can manifest like that. I always thought that O c D was about being really clean or having a set of like numbers that you have to count. But O c D is often misrepresented.

So I quickly learned that o c D is any kind of repetitive thought or feeling that causes you tons of distress, and when you try to push it away or make it not happen, it just gets stronger. And while there are visible compulsions like touching a door knob or counting to ten, there are also mental compulsions. And in my case, the compulsion was trying to reassure myself that I wasn't actually depressed. So I'd have all these terrible thoughts about harming myself, and then I'd say, well,

I must not be depressed. I'm successful, I'm this, I'm that a reason with myself, and then the thoughts would just come back. So thank god that I saw a psychiatrist that was well trained in o c D, and I later learned, and I'm still learning about o c D that it's actually a pretty common theme of o c D. It's called self harm and other harm, where these are the kinds of thoughts and feelings that you have.

In a certain point in my o c D, I definitely became depressed, because it's no fun being in your head when that's happening. For twelve hours a day, Like the first thought you have when you wake up in the middle of the night is maybe I should go kill myself. Not fun, but the depression was always secondary, and I am so thankful again that I found the

right care that could identify that. I started an s s r I, which is the medication, the first line medication for o c D, and then intensive therapy with a therapist who specializes in treating people with o c D. And therapy was probably twice a week for the first three months, and then once a week for about five months, and then after that the therapist tried to fire me and I said, no, I still want to meet with you once a month. And now it's just something that

I live with. What did the therapy look like? Broadly? Can you sketch kind of what you were doing? Yeah? I can. The evidence based model for o c D starts with something called exposure and response prevention. So what this means is you expose yourself to the thing that causes you year and then you prevent the response. Well, in my case, the response that makes the anxiety go away is convincing myself. While I would never hurt myself,

I'm not actually depressed. So it started off with just like reading scripts to myself about how I'm super depressed and how I might kill myself, and every time my brain tried to say, you wouldn't do that, I had to say, but maybe I will. So just learning to live with the uncertainty. And it starts very small. So they talk about it on a graded scale from one to ten. So maybe you read scripts, that's a one. Then my therapist had me watch a really tragic movie

about people who died of suicide. So it's just exposing myself to these things that are causing you so much fear. It ended with like pretty intense exposures around holding objects that I could harm myself with and just being terrified to hold a knife for an hour, but holding the knife for an hour and realizing that I wasn't just going to jam myself with it. So then the second phase of therapy is rooted in a school called acceptance

and commitment. I know you've had Steven Hayes on the show, so you're a veteran of thinking, which basically says that for many challenges, mental health challenges, we just have to accept that we're going to live with them and still commit to living in alignment with your core values. So the exposure therapy worked really well, and then like six months into it, the obsession switched and I became obsessed

with doing the exposure therapy. I'm like, I have to spend an hour a day doing this otherwise the O c D will come back. And at that point my therapist is like, no, no more exposures. You're done. You're just gonna learn to live with these thoughts. And at that point meditation came in, because what is meditation if

not seeing thoughts and feelings without reacting to them. And then this notion of having a rough three hours of these kinds of intrusive O c D thoughts, but not canceling what I had planned to go do exposures, just doing what I have planned taking the thoughts with me. In over a year, it's remarkable how the intensity and frequency subsided. And I say this not in any way is like um to say like, oh I've arrived, because

there's a decent chance I'll have really rough times. But more is a way if people out there are suffering. I mean, I went from not having more than half an hour of peace for a solid three months two now, maybe one hour a month, I get caught in O c D. Loube, that is really a hopeful message. I know plenty of people who are listening to this who deal with O c D. I mean I literally know

who they are. I mean, there's plenty I don't know, but I've come across a bunch of people who listen to the show, So I'm hoping that's a hopeful message from them. Just find a good therapist if you're out there, because it's very often misunderstood and sometimes even in the therapeutic community it can be. And man, when you're in it, it just feels hopeless and like it's never gonna end.

But if you look at the research, it's actually one of the more responsive to treatment mental illnesses that there is. And that's the message of hope to hold on too. And you know now, of course that I'm at the other side of this for now. When I was in the thick of it, I wasn't thinking about groundedness or my writing or anything. I was just like, dude, like

hold on for dear luck life. But now it's become just a beautiful model for thinking about our addictions to everything in our obsession with success and our we were talking about our obsession with sleep, our obsession with becoming enlightened. And again, I only can say this looking back. I would have never said it in the middle of it.

But now that I look back, and I'm sure that some of this is just my bias to create meaning from it, I feel like it's helped me be able to take something like striving or success and realize that the thought is a thought and the texture behind it can change. And our job is to pursue the right texture to feed the wolf. That's going to be the right texture. And I don't think I would have had that without having O. C. D. But again, it's so important to say this. This is not like you know,

Tidy Bow. This is where I'm at right now, and that could change in the future. I hope not, but maybe it will. Talking about convergence, I see this in ancient literature and different traditions, different ways, and I see it in modern psychology. And what I see is two broad approaches to working with difficult thoughts and emotions. One you just articulated it. It's a mindfulness approach. It's a

acceptance and commitment therapy approach. You know, in Buddhist communities we might say it's it's sitting with what's going on, but it's you just go all right, there's difficult stuff here. My thoughts are this, my emotions are this. Just let it be invited in, let it be right one approach. Then there is more of an approach that in certain parts of Buddhism is talking sort of about pulling the weeds. You're noticing the thoughts that are no good, and you're

you're pulling them out. Cognitive behavioral therapy goes in this direction. It says, look, you know you've got thoughts in there, they're not accurate. There. You know you've got fouldy beliefs behind him. Let's go in and monkey with this stuff. Pull it out. And I'm curious how you think about knowing you and having read your stuff. I know that you're going to say, you know what, there's a valid place for both those things. So I'm not asking you

to pick one of those two. I'm asking how do you think about when he's the right tool for the job? Oh man, you are going right to the heart of like an almost unanswerable question. Just because I can't find the words for it, And I've asked this question to myself. So first I'm gonna try to make it as concrete as possible, and then we'll word vomit together and wrestle

with it. Okay, So I think what you're saying is you can have an intrusive thought like I'm with the wrong partner, i should leave and you could say, oh, that's just the thought, I'm gonna let it go. But maybe it's true. So how do you know what thoughts are worth wrestle with? How do you know what thoughts are worth engaging versus what thoughts are just totally intrusive?

And that is really, really, really tough. In my own end of one experience, mindfulness practice has been the most important here because just by sitting and watching same thought patterns, same responses to them, there is a way in which you just kind of notice like, oh, this is an O. C D thought trying to ruin my day or uproot me, versus like, oh, there's it. They're there because we need

to have intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts tell me that, you know, on a much more minor scale, like that's a shitty sentence in my book, you should change it, but someone with O c D. If your mind's telling you that for every sentence you write, you're never going to write a book. So it's like, how do you discern signal from noise? And again, I think that just sitting with

your thoughts, paying good attention. And something else that I think is helpful is to imagine that a close friend is in that situation having that thought, what advice would you give to your friend? And that creates just a little bit of space between you and what's going on. And in that space, I think that you can start to know, like, Okay, this is something really three things. This is something to weed out and reason with and prove to myself it's wrong. This is a pure anxious thought.

In any negotiation with it's just going to make it worse, or holy crap, this is telling you something that I actually need to pay attention to in my life. And maybe the best that I can do is just give people those three distinct things and then over time you pay close attention. And maybe this is like the work of wisdom or becoming a more mature human being is learning for everything that comes your way, which of those three buckets it falls into. We've created elaborate flow charts

around this. We've done all kinds of like is there a decision tree to go down that might help you sort these out? And I do think there are some ways of think keen about it that are helpful. But this is kind of the question that I'm most sort of interested in these days. Is like you said, I've got kind of three choices here, right. One is this is a useful thought, I should do something with it.

To this just shows up all the time and I'm just going to ignore it or three no more and to give like concrete examples of this, right Like in my life, like there's a thought pattern based on addiction that I have a no tolerance policy on, and it is like if my brain starts to fantasize about what it would be like to be drunk or high, cut it off, Like how do you cut it off? What does that look like for you? Well, a lot of times I simply just go no, not having that thought,

and then I go in a different direction. When I was earlier in sobriety, it was harder, and so I would sort of just say any distraction is fine. That gets me away from this rouminative thought loop. That's non destructive, right, because that one was so destructive for me, right, It was a thought that was really destructive. And so for whatever reason, I've been fortunate enough that that one, when I sort of just give it the no to, it works. You know, if it turned into O C D with it,

obviously I'd have to approach it differently. And I think that at the end of the day is kind of what I get to with all of this is what works for you in the moment, right, and it may not be the same thing that works for you next week, next month, But what is working now or what have you been trying recently that hasn't been working? Maybe try something different, YEP. I think that's spot on. You want to have a big tool kit and then learn what

tools are fitting for the right circumstance. Knowing that is we've alluded to you like a lot of things work until they get in your way, and then it's time to drop that tool in and pick up the next one. And I think that that is the most rounded sound way to go about dealing with any big challenges that we have. You know, there's maybe one category of things that I'm skeptical about, which are like things that are

heralded as quick fixes. So whether it's a supplement or if you just do this, if someone is selling it like that's the solution, then I worry. It can be part of a solution, no doubt. But if you think that this one thing is going to solve the problem and someone is trying to have you believe that, then I'd be skeptical, like in my own recovery from o c D, and not just to make it about o c D, just what I see in my clients and my research and my reporting, just for like overcoming less

extreme challenges. Generally, there's a role for some kind of spiritual practice. There's a role for some kind of physical practice. There's a role for community. When it comes to mental health, there's often a role for medication for some people, there's a role for supplements. For other people, it is some kind of like art or creative expression. So there's no one size fits all. It's about you know, figuring out, hey,

these are the tools. If I can provide someone with a toolkit thirty practic this is thirty tools that I'm pretty convinced work for a lot of people in a lot of situations, then your job is to try those on and if you're sick, with the help of a therapist or physician, and figure out the tools that work for you in that moment. Yeah. I think that's really well said. And you do provide a lot of really

great tools in the book. And as you were going through your list there and you were like, you know, there's a psychological work, there can be medication, there can be community, there can be spiritual work, you know. And I've thought about, like, my ongoing challenge has been more depression, right, Addiction I kind of was a couple of times, but I handled it, but depression was the ongoing And I often joke like I just have thrown the kitchen sink at it, Like I mean, a little bit of everything

has been what it has sort of taken it. As I was thinking through that, I was thinking, like, if you took the g off the front of your book, you'd be talking about rounded nous, which is what a lot of these solutions need to be, right, They need to be sort of you know, encompassing a variety of things. Yeah, And I also think that like the acceptance in the learning as you go. So I heard this from Stephen Hayes, the developer, one of the developers of acceptance and commitment therapy.

I heard this from my own therapist and coach. I love and trust as much as anyone that when you have a challenge like depression or anxiety, or panic or o c D or bipolar, the experiences over the course of your life can be every bit as bad, but how you relate to them changes in every single time, there's maybe a tenth of a percent more of you

that knows that it's going to pass. And by the time you're sixty, going through a depressive episode still sucks, but by then, like a whole four percent of you knows it's going to pass, and then you have that four percent to hold onto and it makes the whole experience perhaps a little bit easier versus like trying to push it away or being scared of it, because that's what makes it sticky. But again, it's non dual, because if you feel a depression coming on, you're like, oh,

here's depression, I'm just gonna lay in bad. For most people, that doesn't really work. But if you're like, oh my god, here's depression. I'm scared. I need to do all of these things. Then depression is going to be like a German shepherd that snits your fear and comes right after you. Yep. The analogy I've often used is treating it like the emotional flu, and so like if I got the flu, I would try and take care of myself. I'd be like, I need to rest. You know, I should probably get

some vitamin. See some chicken soup might be going. I don't, I'm vegetarian, but you get where I'm going. So I make sure that I'm taking care of myself. But I also just go. Like you said, flu comes, it passes. I know it's gonna go, and as somebody who's fifty one, I've got that little bit more time of going. Yep. I know this is here now, and I know that

it's going to go. You know it always has now Again, that's easier to say when you're not in it, because one of the salient factors of mental illness, I think is like, I'm not going anywhere this time. I'm here for good. But yeah, knowing that that's not true, you know that it will pass is such an important east. Yep, And I think that that I'm here for good again. If this is if there's that like one percent of you. If it's like maybe but maybe not ye, then that's

the part that you can hold on to. I think a lot of people, myself included, benefit from naming it too. So sometimes I'll experience like what I would just call like an intense wave of like depressive feelings, so just like emptiness out of nowhere. Instead of running away from it, I'll just be like, WHOA, I'm feeling really depressed. And then from my own kind of like toolkit, it's just

don't change what you had planned. So if you're going to go out to dinner with your wife, go out to dinner with your wife, you're gonna watch a movie, watch a movie. Don't do it because you think it's going to make the depression go away. But just just stay the course. And for me, that's that's something that's been effective. So it's name it, acknowledge it, don't repress it, but then don't change what you were going to do. That's beautiful advice, and it leads me to the final

question I'll ask you about. You referenced acceptance and commitment therapy a number of times, and you know, one of the main principle is there right is simply just yeah, you allow the thing to be there, whatever it is, but then you act according to your values. And I'm kind of curious for you, what are some of the tools that you have found most helpful for you or for your clients when it comes to figuring out what your values are. This seems to be a very nebulous space,

you know, and so I'm kind of curious. Do you have tools that you've used that you find helpful in that area? M m mmm, I do. So there's a couple of ways to think about it. One is, some people, if you just get a list of like a hundred core values, it just gets the brainstorming going, and then you can start to identify the ones that make sense for you. Sometimes people like I'm overwhelmed, I don't know.

It can be helpful to think of someone that you admire in the world and then to ask yourself, while, what do you admire about that person? And those are generally things that you hold in hard regard. You could organize a half day or day retreat with friends that you really trust, where the whole point is like let's talk to each other about like what we value and try to come up with these values. I actually don't think it's hard to think it's hard to create space

to do this kind of reflective work. I don't necessarily think it's that hard to come up with the things what I talk about in the book. And maybe this is where it's like a slight departure from pure act and more into my way past days as a business consultant. Is it's like it's not enough just to have the values. You have to define them in super concrete terms, and then you have to come up with a list of three to five menu items that you can just execute on,

just show up and do so. An example of this might be you have a core value of love, really honorable, beautiful. Core value looks nice up on the wall hanging over your computer. But what does love mean? So then you spend some time, you dig, you think, and let's say that you define love as being fully present for the people in activities that I care about. Okay, that's good, that's closer. Are you going to be fully present always?

What if there's competing priorities? So then it gets down to the practices, and that's where you turn love into I'm gonna put my phone in the glove compartment of my car from six to nine so I can have dinner with my family with my partner and watch a TV show before I get it out again. Or three times a week at work, I'm going to block off an hour to work on one of these two meaningful

projects with full focus. So you get from like this very noble thing like love all the way down to literally like what you're doing is you do the dishes, and I think that is so important, and sometimes that gets lost. It's not enough just to have something on your bathroom mirror, particularly if you're susceptible to emotional lows, because when you're in those lows, you're gonna look at that mirror and you're gonna be like, screw this. None

of this stuff is ture anymore. But if your value under health says twenty minutes of aerobic exercise on Thursday, you don't have a choice. You just do it and maybe you'll feel better and maybe not, but there's a higher likelihood that you will. So I think the the extension of ACT and what I try to do in the book is really like connect being and doing and help people get super concrete and how they define these things well at the same time, not forgetting the beautiful

things that these seemingly trivial activities ladder up to. The writer Annie Dillard said, like, how we spend our minutes is how we spend our days. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. The philosopher Matt Crawford talks about character and the root of the word characters habits. So our character, our habits, it's what we do. So there is a linkage between being and doing, between love and putting your cell phone away when you're doing

the dishes. I love that, and I love that idea of yeah, you've got to sort of connect the dots up and down that chain. And what I see is oftentimes people get one or the two of those down. They've got the doing down. They're just doing, but they don't know why they're doing it. Necessarily it may not be the right thing. Then the are other people who really are, you know, in touch with big values and

big ideas, but it's not translated down. And if you can get both of them right connected, like you're saying, up and down the chain, you know, I often say that our plans are simply like the vehicle that we bring our values into the world. Right is v our plans, and if you've got a good plan, it's a vehicle to bring your values into the world. You know. My challenge with values, and it must because I'm an any Graham nine is that I look at him and I'm

like all of them, which isn't real helpful. So I have two thoughts. The first is, I think you'll appreciate this because earlier in the conversation you remark that you know you're such a middleway guy. Is I think that what happens with those two archetypes of people is like they lack idealism, maybe get in the way of pragmatism. So the person that's so into doing but doesn't know why they do, they can't fathom having time for reflection and being because they see that as going on a

ten day retreat. They don't see that a couple of minutes of structured reflection and silence. And the person that is so into being can imagine doing ninety things in the world because they see that as being rushed and being anxious. And I think it's just again those incremental steps while realizing there's a challenge. I mean there's a reason that monks live in a monastery where there are no distractions. That is a being environment. But there's a

whole gray area between being and doing. And then the second thing is I'm really shocked, and I wanted to poke fun at you. I would have suspected that your answer to your indiogram would have been the same as mine. So when people ask me about my angiogram, I just quote Walt Whitman and say that I contain multitudes because I look at them and I'm like, well, it depends on the day, it depends on the movies, it depends

on how I slept. I can be helpless romantic if I didn't sleep well, but if I slept well, I'm like a seven that just wants to do projects all day. Totally. I feel that way about personality tests, all of them. I'm like, well, what day. The thing about anagram, it's interesting is nine is considered the one that contains all of the other types. And I'm like, yeah, there you go. Yeah that actually makes sense to me. But I'm with you on that. Personality tests always drive me up the wallk.

I'm like, can you give me some more context on this question, please? I can't answer without context, and I think that's where like Buddhism and and other Eastern philosophies are so helpful. So I have a dear friend who may be listening, but I'm not gonna name him because he wouldn't want to be named. But if you're listening, hi, dear friend, who is like the angiogram four, right, that's like the romantic Yeah, I think so. I think it's a four, but I'm not uper familiar with which aligns.

But there's the romantic archetype and it's like dashboard confessional band, like everything is so this, and he struggled in relationships and it's like what you're telling yourself this story. So I've slowly introduced him to like more Eastern ways of thinking, which is like you can experience being a four without

being a four, like you're not a four. Four is a strong pattern, but there are other patterns available to you, and you can, in a way choose when you want to be a foreign when you don't, and again nondual because you go far east and like full on round as and then you just are. And that's beautiful if you're spending your entire life as a spiritual teacher, or maybe you're retired and your content. But if you're trying to be in the real world, it can be hard

to just be. So it's like this middle way between. It's helpful to have a story. It's helpful to have a personality, just don't get too attached to it. It's helpful to be able to just be until you need a story. Yeah, and I think that's it. That's the challenge. I couldn't agree more. All Right, we are going to wrap up because this is already a very long episode. You and I'll talk a little bit more in the post show conversation because I suspect we could do this

all night. Listeners. If you like access to the post show conversations, add free episodes, all kinds of other good stuff, and a good feeling of supporting something that matters to you, go to one you feed, dot net slash joint and learn more. Brad, thanks so much for coming on. I absolutely loved the book. I knew is gonna love this conversation, so I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. I feel

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