If you read history, it is abundantly clear that mental health issues have always plagued our species. They may be more widespread today due to lifestyle, but the main difference between then and now is the level of seriousness and intelligence with which they are being addressed.

Fear ends where faith begins.

Any year the word “pandemic” is among the most popular search terms in Google, you know you’re in for a ride. If you’re like most people, the word itself is synonymous with some special challenge or circumstance you’ve had to endure. Many people have gotten sick. Many people have died. And an even great number have been compelled to make unwanted lifestyles changes. I have a few friends who entered the year physically and mentally unscathed, but they are the exception to the rule. The rule is that pandemics suck, and it takes special coping skills to make it out on top.

This week, I brought in my guy and newlywed, Chase Ridgway, to serenade us with his wisdom on the theme. Chase is the ultimate insider. He graduated from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, with his Bachelor’s degree in Nursing. Chase worked in a pressure cooker environment for four years in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit [ICU] at Ohio State Wexner. Chase also recently spent a few months on assignment to a unit that treated a number of Covid 19-positive patients. Due to his background and even-tempered personality, our interviewee is uniquely qualified to address the topic of stress management amidst a global pandemic. Never at a loss for words, I hope you find Chase’s experiences and reflections, taken from a 90-minute in-person interview, to be exquisitely practical, eye-opening, and down-to earth. FYI, I defined a few medical terms in brackets to save you time and give your thumb a break from all that scrolling.

Tell the people about yourself. 

My name is Chase Ridgway. I’ve been a nurse for five years. I spent my first four years in the ICU before transitioning over to endoscopy [procedures to look inside the body’s digestive system]. I am also currently taking classes to become a Family Nurse Practitioner.

As far as my personal life goes, I am recently married and the proud father of a black and white greyhound named Franny, and two black cats, Arnold and Mena. In my free time, I like woodworking, lifting weights, yoga, biking, boxing, and frequently hiking with my wife and family. I try to maintain an active lifestyle to stay healthy first and foremost, and to make sure what I preach and what I practice are one and the same.

What informed your interest in the medical field?

It was a family thing. My sister, my cousin, and my aunts were nurses. They liked their jobs. I’m also a people person. I knew I wanted to do something that involved people. Nursing is also a pretty steady occupation. You are never going to run out of people to treat. In fact, the healthcare profession is actually gaining patients.

I was also a heavy kid growing up. I had a really cool pediatrician, Dr. Heiny, who helped me get on the right path. Dr. Heiny didn’t ignore me and talk to my parents. He was very personable, very friendly, and talked to me on my level. He was also very upfront with me about losing weight, and told me very plainly in middle school that I was prediabetic, and without lifestyle changes, I could develop type-2 diabetes. To help combat this eventuality, Dr. Heiny made getting healthy into a point system and a game. He had me participate me in Weight Watchers and count the calories of everything that went into my body. He also suggested trying out sports to see what I liked. This led me to volunteer to play football in middle school, which along with many years of baseball, helped me trim down about 90 lbs from my freshman to senior year of high school. My background explains part of my interest in bariatric care [management of obesity] to this day.

How did you start out working in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit? Was your temperament a factor in the decision?

I knew it is what I wanted to do straight out of college. I thought the intense stuff would be the most interesting, and I thought it would give me the opportunity to help the largest number of people. In reality, it was mostly about managing preventable conditions. A lot of people were chronically ill. Some had done permanent damage to their bodies. I watched the health of a lot of our patients deteriorate. This led me to want to shift to primary care to focus on the prevention side. People in hospitals often need band-aid care. We fix them up so they can return home and go about their lives. As a Nurse Practitioner, I want to help fight health issues before they develop and prevent these terrible conditions that people get admitted to the ICU for. It starts early, by being proactive and with the proper education.

I am generally a calm guy, but the stress of the ICU will take its toll on anyone. There were a lot of sad cases of drug abuse and overdose that were very difficult to manage. We also had cases where a single sick patient might have 10-12 different medications running through their IVs. Family members would often ask questions that nobody could be sure of. And about once a month, one of my patients would pass away. I was also working nights. I would typically work 7 PM to 7 AM, several days a week, and pick up a lot of overtime. On days I worked, I would sleep from 9 AM to 4 PM. I barely saw anyone, and when I did see someone, I would lose sleep. Whenever I had several days off in row, I would typically sacrifice two of them just flipping back to a normal sleep schedule.

My first few months in ICU were rough. I had a hard time going to sleep, thinking of everything that happened that day and playing out different scenarios in my head to make sure I was prepared. I got better at stress management over time, but it’s something you have to constantly stay on top of in that environment. ICU was intense, and it was fun. I liked it, and I learned a lot, but I knew it wasn’t something I could continue for life. Around year three, I could sense that it was time for a change.

What’s the most chaotic situation you’ve ever had to deal with? 

We once had a patient who had just suffered a heart attack. He was in cardiac arrest and came to our catheter lab to receive treatment. By that time, he had already been unresponsive for a couple hours. His blood pressure was very low and his organs were starting to shut down, and began doing CPR and giving meds. It was basically I and a few nurses running a code [trying to save a dying person], and we were fortunately able to get him back. The patient had a bunch of occlusions in his heart and was admitted from the cath lab to the ICU floor. He had like 20 family members with him, and they all wanted answers. They stayed up all night in the waiting room because they didn’t know if he would make it to the next morning.

The patient wasn’t showing any signs of life neurologically. His lab values from his blood showed massive organ breakdown and death. His family was camped out, praying, hoping for the best. They wanted to wait until his daughter could come see him before he passed. And so we spent the whole night trying to keep him alive long enough for his daughter to say goodbye. As for the doctor, he was sitting outside his room the entire time, ordering meds and directing us what to do. The patient’s electrolytes would get out of whack, and we’d have to correct it or he would go into cardiac arrest again. He needed blood drawn every hour and meds every 20 to 30 minutes. He had 5 or 6 IV drips going. Three of them are called vasopressors to help keep his blood pressure high enough.

It was a chaotic situation. I would go out and talk with the whole family as often as I could, every 2 or 3 hours, to give them updates. One thing they talk about is not giving false hope but remaining positive, which is not easy to do. It’s hard to tell the truth and be honest about his condition and not inspire false hope. “He’s still fighting, and he’s not doing any better.” You try to ride the line and be as respectful as you can.

The man wasn’t in good shape, but he made it through my shift. We stabilized him long enough so his daughter could some see him the next day. When I came back the next night, he was gone. The family decided to reverse his code to DNR [do not resuscitate], and turned off all the medication. It was a tough situation for everyone. I’ve had a lot of patients in critical care, but he was one of the most difficult to keep alive, and one of the most emotionally taxing to take care of.

How do you stay calm under pressure? Is there a special motto or breathing technique or prayer or meditation that you resort to?

I’ve always been a guy who doesn’t overreact to things. Some of it is built into my personality. I can’t say that I have a special secret or mantra, but I have learned from working in ICU that work stress isn’t worth bringing home. Don’t worry about anything you can’t control. I don’t think about it or dwell on it. At the end of the day, it’s a choice. I know it’s not always easy to do, but knowing that is what makes the difference for me.

My calmness also comes from being sure that I am in the right place doing the right thing with my life and that I have the right knowledge to help. I gave it my all in my schooling and in my training and I felt like as long as I kept learning and getting better, I could remain calm in every situation. Listen to those who know best in an area, and you can feel confident enough about what you’re doing to experience that same effect. Knowledge is key here, as is the ability to keep learning and listening.

I’ll add that physical activity is the number one way for me to de-stress in the moment. Early in my career, like I said, I was very stressed out. During the first few months, I’d be so keyed up from work that I would come home and work myself out to exhaustion and hope to be able to fall asleep after that. I would get home at 7 AM and wouldn’t go to bed until 1 PM, because I was so focused trying to remember everything and make sure I did the very best I could. I eventually got better at the work-life balance, but it wasn’t always easy.

Music is another big one. I rarely ever drive in complete silence. Music and comedy, but between the three, physical activity for me is king. They were also pretty big on deep breathing in my undergraduate program. Whenever you can, take a moment to deep breath, focus, and try to process as much stressful input as you can.

Based on your reflections, it sounds like there is a lot of grace built into our biology. In a word, physical and emotional health is capable of changing for the better.

Health outcomes can always be improved with diet, exercise, and stress management. Even in cases where permanent damage has taken place, lifestyle changes can help prevent the situation from getting worse. Take diabetes, for example. The pancreas is no longer able to secrete its own insulin after irreversible damage has occurred. However, diabetics who make lifestyle changes will likely need less insulin, lose weight, and generally feel better. Immune function may go up. Fatigue may go down. It’s not a cure all, but it makes a huge difference. And that is a kind of grace.

Hypertension [high blood pressure] is another example. Depending on the cause, hypertension can be reversible. Salt intake. Fat intake. Caffein intake. Weight. Stress. And some people also have other conditions that influence it and need managed. You should always first develop a plan of treatment with your doctor, but generally anyone can improve their health at least a small amount with lifestyle changes. The goal is to get your body working better, feeling better, and hopefully living longer.

The sicker and more out of shape you get, the harder it becomes to reverse health outcomes. If you’re immobile, for example, or if you’re very old. It is always best to make lifestyle changes as soon as you can wherever you are.    

How has the pandemic influenced the healthcare industry, in general, and your occupation, in particular? 

Healthcare has become a lot more careful about what visitors they let in and who is being treated where. They’re a lot more careful about making sure employees call off when they’re sick. I know a lot of nurses who are workaholics and would come in no matter what. With Covid, they realize their health can deteriorate if they put extra stress on themselves, and they also run the risk of getting their coworkers and patients sick.

I also see a lot more people doing touch point cleaning in and around our work stations. As a nurse, we wear a lot more PPE [personal protective equipment]. Masks. Gloves. Eye shields. For example, we all wear N-95s or respirators whenever administering an upper endoscopy to patients. These tests look for infections, inflammation, ulcers, genetic diseases, things like that. And we have all our patients get tested for Covid before entering our unit.

You recently got assigned to a unit that saw a number of Covid-19 patients. What was it like working in that environment?

It was an in-patient Covid overflow unit. About fourteen of us from endoscopy received this assignment. The unit was created because Covid cases were rising and they were trying to isolate Covid patients on the units these people came from. It was difficult for everyone. I was gone from in-patient nursing [overnight care] for about a year, and some had been gone even longer. And so we were all worried about patient safety and making sure we were back to being competent and patients were getting appropriate care. It was dicey at first. I oriented for about two weeks, and there was the option to orient for even longer for those who needed it.

We took care of patients who had tested negative and others who ended up testing positive. It was a brain and spinal hospital, so a lot of people had neurological issues. Some patients had liver disease and some were there for surgeries. Time management was the biggest thing. It’s a skill that often gets lost in the moment. In endoscopy, we would hyper focus on one patient whereas on this unit were taking care of 3 or 4 patients at a time and needed to divide that time adequately to care for each patient. In this way, it resembled the ICU.

A few weeks ago you received a vaccine. How did that go?

Healthcare workers were one of the first populations to get offered the vaccine. It wasn’t required, and some were hesitant, but most went ahead and got it. A few weeks ago, I got my second dose of the Moderna vaccine, which consisted of two shots four weeks apart from each other. My only symptom after the first shot was a sore arm. It felt just like a flu shot. People who had got it before me said the second one was pretty rough, at least rougher than the first. After my second shot, I felt very fatigued. I had body aches and nausea. Not everyone experiences these symptoms. They say two thirds of all people don’t feel anything beyond a sore arm.

To my mind, it’s well worth it. If you do contract the virus, there’s a less likelihood of developing severe symptoms. However, it’s still unclear if you can spread it after you get the vaccine. People still need to be careful, wear masks, and take all the other precautions.

What’s the most challenging part of working in healthcare? 

It’s very physically exhausting. You’re constantly in motion, gathering resources, going from room to room to take care of different patients. It’s not an easy job. Some patients are less appreciative of your help than others, which can be frustrating.

What about the most rewarding? 

Making a positive impact in the lives of others. Helping people get home and live healthier lives and hopefully not have to come see us again. The job can be demanding, the job can be stressful, but I know the work we do is meaningful. And, in spite of everything, there have been very few days where I didn’t feel like going in.

How does your current job in endoscopy compare to working in the ICU and the Covid Unit?

Endoscopy is all out-patient, so people generally go home the same day. There are 30-40 employees on any given day, and we see anywhere from 60-80 patients in a day. It’s a very high-functioning environment, and we get each patient in and out of the hospital within a couple hours. Each procedure lasts anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more, and they take place in any one of 9 procedure rooms. I prefer endoscopy not because it’s low pressure but because we deal with one patient at a time. This allows us to get know that individual a little bit and fully focus on what we’re doing. We also have a good camaraderie among the staff, as we take care of the same patient in different phases. There are also fewer life or death situations, and so that helps with the stress. The biggest difference I find is I’m physically but not mentally exhausted at the end of the day.

The flexibility is one of the things I appreciate the most about nursing. There’s opportunity to try something new if you get bored or unhappy where you’re at, no matter where that may be.

You’re currently in school. Tell us more about the endgame you have in mind.    

My end goal is to become a Family Nurse Practitioner. FNPs can prescribe medication, examine patients, diagnose and treat conditions, whether that be with medication or other kinds of interventions. A typical visit covers a lot of what you would have done during a normal doctor’s appointment. Eventually I’d like to specialize in bariatric care, preferably with kids, or diabetes, or maybe become a general practitioner who sees patients of all different kinds in an out-patient setting. I’ve got about a year and a couple months left of the 3-year program. OSU Wexner has a full-time work, part-time study program where they offer tuition assistance.

I’m currently taking around 9 credits. We’re learning assessment techniques and pharmacology, where you learn about all the different drugs to prescribe and their various contraindications [reasons not to prescribe a medication]. It can be stressful to work full time and do school, but I feel like with the time management and study skills I’ve acquired, it hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be.

Your wife is also a nurse. How has being married to someone in the same field influenced your life? 

I think being married to someone in the same field makes it easier to destress, especially for people with stressful occupations. Megan works with cardiac patients at Nationwide in the ICU, and I’ve already said a lot about the challenges of working in that environment. It helps to connect with someone of similar interests or work because you have shared experiences, and communication become that much easier.

Healthcare, in general, is a specialized thing where there is a lot of intimacy between patients and coworkers and everyone involved because it’s the work of improving lives and providing the best possible care. Healthcare is a lot different from other fields. There’s a very real healthcare community, and it helps to have someone who is a part of that and can relate to that. When my wife and I first met, we were both on the night shift, which helped us connect and made it a lot easier on our relationship. Megan is currently studying to be a CRNA [certified registered nurse anesthetist], and so were both doing the work-study thing and can relate to each other’s experiences in a big way.

What advice would you give someone who came to you for help with stress management and emotional control?

The key is to take a minute and think about all the resources you have, whether that’s knowledge, giftings, skills, or people. My ability to stay calm and in control, in my relationships, work, and the goals I’m working toward, is about having confidence in those resources. It’s also important to have good coping skills to destress, and to find activities or hobbies that have a relaxing effect on the mind. Stress management, like good health, is all about prevention. You don’t want to wait until you’re in an emotional crisis to act. You want to take steps now to set yourself up for success in the future.

Boundaries are also important. Don’t pull yourself in too many directions. Don’t get too emotionally involved with your work. Don’t take things personally. And don’t dwell on negative experiences. I know that’s easier said than done, but it’s a skill that can be developed. I made the choice to sacrifice social time, and time spent on hobbies, to dedicate to being a full-time nurse and student. My lifestyle works for me, but everyone should weigh their emotional health and well-being before taking on any new commitments. Think about the sacrifice that will be involved and whether you will be able to follow through. And remember, you can still be happy while you make sacrifices to pursue your goals and ambitions.

They say success in nursing is as much about taking care of yourself as it is taking care of patients. The same applies to other areas of life. Self-care is important because it affects your outlook on life, how others see you, how you see yourself, and how you interact with the people around you. If you’re not allowing yourself time and space to decompress and relax, whatever that looks like for you, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.

You have the last word. 

Wear your masks. Stay away from people when you can, and be safe when you can’t. Also, maintain communication with the ones you love. Don’t take for granted the time you get to spend with them because tomorrow’s not promised.

If we can model the ability to embody nonfear and nonattachment, it is more precious than any money or material wealth. Fear spoils our lives and makes us miserable. We cling to objects and people, like a drowning person clings to any object that floats by. By practicing nonattachment and sharing this wisdom with others, we give the gift of nonfear. Everything is impermanent. This moment passes. The object of our craving walks away, but we can know happiness is always possible.

Today I want to share an easy, yet powerful technique to improve mental health. It’s called somatic tracking. It’s simple, so let me break it down. Somatic refers to the body as distinct from the mind. Somatic tracking is about mindfully attending to our internal state and whatever bodily sensations we are experiencing in the moment with calm, curiosity and compassion. Those of you who meditate may already be doing this on a regular basis.

Wherein lies the power of somatic tracking? One, it communicates a message of safety to our entire organism. Picture a crying baby or a distraught child. The fastest way to cure their stress is reassurance on the part of a parent or loved one. When we experience anxiety or physical pain as adults, our body is sending out distress signals. We can’t help but hear the signal, like a crying baby, but we often don’t attend to it. When we mindfully attend to our body’s distress signals, our mind gets the message that it is safe to turn off the fight-or-flight response that feeds chronic stress and illness. In a word, you and I have the ability to console ourselves much like a parent consoles a child, or a friend consoles another friend.

Before you go, I want to share a few fascinating quotes from an article on somatic tracking written by Alan Gordon, a TMS Therapist who specializes in mindbody medicine. It was his work that introduced me to the concept several months ago. I recommend you check out the complete article on somatic tracking. It is an easy read and well-worth the time, as is the entire free 21-day healing program that it is a part of.

It feels wonderful just to be checked in on. It can make you feel cared about and attended to, and can remind you that you matter in this world. But many of us don’t check in on ourselves, and this subtle self-neglect can actually have many physical consequences.

Neuroscientists have found that mindfully attending to our bodily sensations can actually shrink the “fight or flight” center of our brains. Furthermore, this practice enables us to have better control over our brains’ processing of pain and emotions.

Somatic Tracking is the most important component of overcoming neural pathway pain. When you attend to your physical sensations mindfully — without fear, without judgment, and without motive — not only are you communicating safety, you’re giving yourself the message that you deserve to be treated in a loving way.

Until next time, happy somatic tracking.

When I was a kid, I always identified with the hero in movies. Nothing could be more natural. The hero is portrayed as a sympathetic character. The hero’s perspective dominates the narrative. The hero is the good guy. Villains, on the other hand, typically aren’t given much of a platform. Attention is paid to their background and psychology only when it condemns them for being the way they are. Villains are always wrong. And if you identify with the villain, then something is wrong with you.

Villains often lose their status as such when their side of the story is told.

Today I am still typically persuaded that the villain filmmakers have invented is more or less in the wrong. The villain simply doesn’t stand a chance against complicit costumes, makeup, dialogue, disturbing music and the occasional smoke. But I also realize that life is more complicated than a hero-villain binary would let on. The most realistic villains are normal people motivated by a sense of grievance. They learn to resent those they deem responsible for their plight and lose faith in the institutions they represent. Sooner or later this process leads to a desire to get even. In the extreme, destructive, anti-social behaviors manifest. How many people say that they have lost faith in their political system due to a sense of grievance? This is a dangerous sentiment because in it lies a seed of revolution. The same seed that villains nurture in response to an offense.

A prime example of this comes from the movie 300. Ephialtes of Trachis was a deformed man whose parents ran away from Sparta, a huge no-no in that culture. Ephialtes hoped to redeem his father’s honor by returning to Sparta and serving in Leonidas’s army. However, he was quickly turned down by Leonidas himself for being too weak to raise his shield. Leonidas said to Ephialtes, “If you want to help in a Spartan victory, clear the battlefield of the dead, tend the wounded, bring them water. But as for the fight itself, I cannot use you.”

Rather than accept a downsized role, Ephialtes reacted by informing the Persians of the Anopaea, a path that only the locals knew. This treasonous act that gave the Persians a tactical advantage was motivated by revenge. Had Leonidas accepted Ephialtes in the Greek army, the outcome of the story would obviously have been very different. In reality, however, his noble intentions turned sinister. The truth is there is both a hero and villain inside every man. The one that triumphs is the one that gets nurtured the most.

Today there are countless wars being fought around the globe. And there are many interests being represented. Leaders notoriously demonize the opposition in motivating their side to support a conflict. It’s a lot easier to kill villains than ordinary people with differing interests. You know the expression, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” To be clear, I’m not saying there is a moral equivalence in every conflict. There isn’t. What I am saying is people tend to portray their enemies as evil even when there is no often appreciable difference in morality between the two sides.

[You can follow me on Twitter @creatorvilla.] Sometimes the emotional scars of living become so wrapped up in our identity that we cannot conceptualize life without them. It takes a tremendous amount of strength to process emotional trauma. In fact, I would say this is one of the great challenges of life that all must face sooner or later. Make no mistake—I’m talking about death, divorce, injury, disease, abuse, a breakup, and you can fill in the blank. Nothing can eradicate the pain of loss, but wisdom can be the difference between staying stuck in the past for a lifetime and finding the strength to move forward after a period of grief.

I’ve transcribed a poignant clip in which former US Navy Seal Jocko Willink addresses the topic of emotional pain in a way that only he can. (You may remember him from his July 4 feature last month on discipline equals freedom.) In the clip, Willink responds to a man who wrote-in about losing a child—obviously one of the worst traumas anyone could ever go through. However, much of Willink’s insight into pain has universal application. For example, Willink analogizes pain to waves, and I cannot think of a better metaphor. No matter how absolute and all-encompassing pain may feel at times, it is not the absolute truth. It is a wave—a true but partial expression of the sum total of who we are.

I’ve never experienced the loss of a child, and I can’t imagine how difficult that is. But one thing I do know from experience—the more courage with which I “ride the wave” of whatever it is I’m going through, the faster it tends to let up. And what emerges from that process is a stronger, more compassionate version of myself.

Transcript:

My wife and I suffered three weeks of turmoil, which included losing a child. How do I expedite that moment when we pick up ourselves–basically how to push through?

So the pain that’s going to come, it’s going to come in waves. At first, you won’t even notice that they’re waves because all the waves are going to be so close together, it’s going to feel like you are drowning in sorrow. You’re not going to get any air, and you’re not going to be able to escape that sadness.

That’s what the waves feel like at first. And then at some point there’s going to be a little break, just a little break. Just a little bit of light in the darkness. Something is going to make you smile. Something is going to make you laugh. Something is going to show you just a little bit of light.

And then another wave of pain is going to come back again, and it’s going to be strong, and you won’t have any control over it. All of a sudden, you’re going to be just crying uncontrollable. You won’t be able to say, “No, no. I’m in the light now. I’m smiling right now. I’m not going to go back there.” No, you’re not going to be able to control it, and that’s scary. You’re at the mercy of this ocean of sorrow.

But don’t let that scare you. Don’t let that scare you ’cause I’m telling you that that wave is going to subside again, and this is going to go on. It’s going to go on, and the waves–they will become weaker. And what you need to realize is just because the waves are becoming weaker, this doesn’t mean that you love your child less or you miss them less or that you aren’t crushed at their passing. It just means that you’re starting to be able to deal with it, which is what you’re supposed to do.

When you feel a little bit of a break, what you can do is you can row the boat. You can row the boat, and what I mean by that is start doing something productive to get your mind moving forward. Let’s sort out the drawers in the bedroom. Let’s vacuum. Let’s do something productive. If there’s something that distracts you, that’s fine. Do it. Let there be some calm in the water.

As the calm comes, also you’re going to find moments where it’s like you can have things that are going to bring all of the waves. And that’s OK, too. Bring on the waves. Go look at the pictures. Write down the memories. Read the letters. Read the notes. Read the emails. Remember, and then there’s that standard service. You’re going to do the memorial. You’re going to do the burial.

And when that’s over, let a little bit of more time go by. Give yourself another week of washing around. Of feeling that sorrow. Of letting the waves toss you around in the ocean.

But after another week, what you do is you go and you write a letter. You write a letter to your child, and you explain to them–explain to them how much they mean to you. Explain to them how heartbroken you are that they are gone, and then explain to them why you are going to carry on. And explain to them how in losing them, you have learned without a shred of doubt, how truly precious life is. And that they have taught you the immeasurable value of your own life and your family’s life.

And explain to them that you know. That you know that they loved you, and that you know that they would want more than anything for you to be happy and productive and impactful in the world. And explain in that letter, what you will do to make them proud by how you live your life.

Then take that letter, go to their grave, and read it to them. Then cry and kiss their soul. Tell them that you will see them on the other side. Then go–live your life. And those waves are still going to come, and there’s going to be pain, and there’s still going to be sorrow, but you go and live your life. Live it well. And make them proud.

[You can follow me on Twitter @creatorvilla.] Have you ever chased after something that didn’t satisfy you? We’ve all been there before. We set goals, and we achieved them, only to discover that they weren’t what we needed after all. Materialism is one of the most common values responsible for inspiring deficient life goals. If all we have to live for is a bigger house, car, or nicer pair of sneakers, then we are unlikely to ever experience true fulfillment.

Per his Wikipedia, Johann Hari is a Swiss-British journalist. He has written for syndicated publications including The Independent and The Huntington Post. Hari is author of Chasing the Scream: The Opposite of Addiction is Connection and Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression — and the Unexpected Solutions.

Today, I’ve transcribed a clip from The Joe Rogan Experience in which Hari expounds on the emptiness of materialism. He explains that there are two kinds of motivation in life–intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from the enjoyment of an activity itself, while extrinsic motivation is transactional–we perform the activity to get something else out of it. An example of intrinsic motivation is playing piano because you love piano. An example of extrinsic motivation is playing piano to please your parents or impress a girl.

Hari argues that the more extrinsically motivated we are, the more likely we are to experience depression and anxiety. Our culture, he laments, is overrun with extrinsic motivation in the form of people-pleasing, image-conscious behaviors–a manifestation of junk values. Junk values, Hari argues, are exacerbated by social media. According to Hari, the remedy for junk values is knowledge. By educating people on the art of happiness, people will develop intrinsic values more in line with their well-being. More controversially, Hari suggests that top-down ad regulation is another importance piece of the puzzle, and idea that Rogan pushes back against on the grounds that it violates free speech.

Check out the thought-provoking video and transcript, and let me know where you stand down below.

Transcript:

Hari: Nobody had ever scientifically investigated this until an incredible guy I got to know called Professor Tim Kasser, who’s at Knox College in Illinois. And Professor Kasser made some really important breakthroughs in this. There’s two ways–everyone listening to your show has two kinds of motivation in their life–we’re all a mixture of both. Imagine if you play the piano in the morning because you love playing the piano–it gives you joy. That would be what’s called an intrinsic reason to play the piano. You’re not doing it to get anything out of it, that’s the thing you love. Jiu Jitsu is like that for you, writing is like that for me. Everyone will have something in their life that gives them joy as they do it, right.

Now imagine you play the piano not because you love it but because your parents are massively pressuring you. It’s their dream for you. Or at a dive bar that you can’t stand to pay the rent. Or to impress a woman. That would be what’s called an extrinsic motivation to play the piano. You’re not doing it because that thing gives you joy, you’re doing it to get something further down the line. Now obviously we’re all a mixture of both, but Professor Kasser showed a couple of really interesting things.

Firstly, the more you are driven by extrinsic values, the more your intrinsic values are starved, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by quite a significant amount. He also showed as a culture, as a society, we have become much more driven by these junk values. We’ve become much more driven–think about how Instagram makes you feel. We’ve become much more driven by this hollow external sense. . .

A little while ago it was Elton John’s last night at Caesar’s Palace, an amazing thing to be at, and about half the room is filming it–not even looking at Elton John, just watching it through their phone. That’s a small example, but you can see what they’re doing. In order to display their life, to invite envy from other people, they are not living their life. No one wants to watch your sh*tty video of Elton John. There’s thousands of videos of Elton John that are much better than yours. Why are you doing that? You are never going to watch it either. You are doing it to say to other people, “Envy me.” It doesn’t make you feel good in that room, it actually makes you feel worse. You’re not enjoying the experience, and it makes them feel like sh*t because you’re trying to invite envy in your friends.

That’s a small example of a much wider thing, of a kind of junk values that have taken over. The reason that relates to what you’re asking about Brazil is that Professor Kasser has shown that there’s two sets of solutions to these junk values that have taken over our minds. One is–it’s like f*cking air pollution–get the messaging out of your head. More 18-month-old children know what the McDonalds M means than know their own surname, their own last name. Professor Kasser put it to me–from the moment we’re born, we’re immersed in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life. None of you listening to this will lie on their death beds and think about all the sh*t they bought and all the likes they got on Instagram. They’ll think about moments of meaning and connection. That’s like a banal, obvious thing, but we’re constantly pushed to not think in those terms, to think about show it off, buy, spend. These junk values have taken over our minds, so part of the solution is just f*cking get rid of most of this advertising, get rid of most of this very tightly regulated. . .

Rogan: But in doing so, you limit commerce, you’re limiting people’s ability to sell things. You’re changing the current market that a lot of people don’t have any problem with.

Hari: I know this is a heresy in the United States, but limiting commercial speech is fine by me.

Rogan: I think it’s fascinating, I think it’s a fascinating discussion, but in a sense it’s limiting free speech as well. And we have a real problem with that. The problem with it is as soon as you start to put any regulations at all. You say, “You shouldn’t be allowed to advertise,” even if it’s advertising honestly about a great product, people will have real issues with that.

Hari: We already have advertising regulation. You can’t put an ad saying “I’ve found the cure for cancer.”

Rogan: That’s what I’m saying, honestly.

Hari: I would argue this is a tightening. For example, in London there was a controversy a little while back. There was a billboard of an impossibly hot woman and an impossibly hot man, and the billboard said something like, “Are you beach-body ready?” The clear implication being if you don’t look like these people who you’ll never f*cking look like, you’re not ready to go to the beach. And the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said you can’t do this.

Rogan: But that’s so silly. I mean it’s not an unobtainable ideal, you’re looking at two examples of it. They’re real human beings. Look, I’m not saying that you have to be that way, but if you do want to look that man and have that body, it is a possible goal.

Hari: It’s not possible for the vast majority of people.

Rogan: If they don’t have the time or the effort, it’s not. But very many people have radically changed their body. I’m not saying that you have to do it, I’m not saying you should do it. But it is a possible thing to do. And if you’re trying to sell fitness, wouldn’t you sell an example of someone who’s really good at it. Like if you’re trying to sell a business course, wouldn’t you show a guy with a giant house and a Ferrari. This is a guy who’s done really well at business. Look at his penthouse apartment overlooking Manhattan. You wouldn’t say, “Well, that’s an impossible goal. I’m going to show you a person in a middle-class suburb because this is as good as you’re going to get.”

Hari: I think that’s a fair point. I think there are two things going on, isn’t there. There’s the freedom of people to market what they want to do, and there’s. . .

Rogan: It’s a nanny-state issue that people have a problem with. By saying these are impossible-to-achieve body goals. . .

Hari: We already have regulation of these things. And people don’t call that a nanny-state thing.

Rogan: We have regulation, but I don’t think this is a good example.

Hari: What’s a better example–Professor Kasser said there’s two sets of solutions to these junk values problems. There’s “Get the contaminants out of the atmosphere sort of thing,” which he says is actually a weaker one than the second set of solutions. So how do we stop people being pumped full of bullsh*t values. .

Rogan: Educate them on what is happening to them and make it less appealing.

Hari: And this is the second part. And you’ve got to what I think was the most important part of the research that Professor Kasser did. He was working with a guy called Nathan Dungan–who I interviewed. Nathan is a financial advisor in Minneapolis, and his job was to work with adults who were having trouble budgeting, and explain budgeting to them and help them do it. And he gets a job from a school. It was a kind-of middle class school–wasn’t super rich, wasn’t poor, it was middle class, where they’re having a problem. The kids at the school we’re becoming obsessed with getting like the latest Nike sneakers or the latest iPhone or whatever it was. And if the parents couldn’t afford it, the kids were really freaking out.

So they said to Nathan, would you just come in and explain budgeting to these kids. So Nathan goes in and he tries to explain budgeting, and he quickly realized these kids don’t give a sh*t about budgeting, there’s something else going on here. They are so obsessed with getting these things. So with Professor Kasser, he designs this program that led to a really interesting breakthrough, and it’s something people can try at home. You don’t have to do it in this context. And you can do it just as adults, but they did it with parents and they’re teenagers.

They come in, once every couple of weeks, for I think 4 months. The first meeting they had, they just said, “Write a list of everything you have got to have.” They didn’t define that. And people, of course, say like a home, a car, whatever. But quite quickly people would say Nike sneakers. The parents would name expensive things. “Tell me how you would feel if you got these Nike sneakers.” And very rarely, I don’t think any of them were like basketball players where it was like “I need to jump,” or whatever, if that’s the right phrase. Almost immediately they would say, “I’d be accepted by the group. People would envy me.” These insights are just beneath the surface. Who put that idea in your head? Where did you get that idea? Of course, everybody thinks they’re smarter than the ad, but giving people the ability just to see how hollow those junk values are–that was the first part.

The second part was much more interesting and took longer. Then they would have in future sessions–they’d say, “Given that has not actually made you feel better, what are moments in your life when you have felt satisfied, happy, in a flow state? What are things that are meaningful to you?” A whole range of things. Playing sports, playing music. Reading–whatever it was. They said, “How can we build more of that in to your life and less of these junk values? How could you do more of this every week and just meeting–we don’t have these conversations in our culture very often–just meeting once every couple of weeks and checking in with each other.

Actually I managed to play guitar for an hour every day. I managed on Saturday to take my kid to the beach, and we went.

Rogan: That’s going to stifle materialism?

Hari: What it led to, monitored by Professor Kasser, it led to significant shifts in people’s values. They had a significant decrease in junk values, and a significant increase in more meaningful intrinsic values. And we know that that correlates with lower depression and anxiety over time. The weird thing is I sometimes feel like with both of my books–Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections–I sometimes feel like I’m giving people permission to know the thing they already know.

There’s a famous segment on SportsCenter entitled “Why We Love Sports.” It consists of inspiring and memorable highlights like an incredible catch, a big come-from-behind victory, or an athlete making the wish of his #1 fan come true. Today I want to address the same question–why we love sports–but from a different angle. In this post I address a reason behind the popularity of sports that may surprise you.

Over the years, I’ve cut out many activities in the interest of becoming the best version of myself, but sports is not one of them. Sometimes I’ll watch sports with my friends or in a foreign language for added benefit, but I’m not against watching sports by myself. People say that watching sports or other repetitive TV adds little measurable value to one’s life. After all, the inventory of sports is infinite–you can never “catch up” or “be ahead of the game.” It’s easy to spend an entire today absorbed in matches that quickly become irrelevant. And if you were raised around sports, you can already converse about them with little time spent actually watching the game. However, there’s a benefit to watching sports that transcends the highlight reel and the pop culture savvy, and it is has to do with human psychology.

Life is a delicate balance between order and chaos. Chaos is the natural state that everyone is born into and that exists apart from human institutions. It’s a state of discomfort, insecurity, and fear. Chaos is the absence of order. Bringing order to the world is the goal of every progressive activity. Order creates comfort, security, and confidence–order is ultimately what people are after.

Let me illustrate the difference. Chaos is sleeping outside in a tent in a predator-rich environment not knowing what your next meal is. Order is having a roof over your head with AC and a pantry full of delicious food. Chaos is the first day of a new job in a new city with unfamiliar people and technology. Order is day 250 of that same job. Order is going out with friends and family. Chaos is going out with total strangers. Order is being married to someone for 10 years. Chaos is when that someone passes away or the relationship stops working. You get the point.

Not all chaos is bad. We need a measure or chaos to progress. Too much order and you may get complacent. When someone tells you “get out of your comfort zone,” what they mean is you need a little more chaos in your life. Chaos that can stretch you and grow you into a better person. The problem is that some of us are way beyond the chaos threshold for growth. Too much chaos has become an obstacle to growth and leaves us feeling uncomfortable and insecure. What we need in life is more order.

What does any of this have to do with sports? Sports, simply, are a source of order in the world (in other cultures, family, society, and religion play an outsized role). Sports are highly predictable despite some uncertainty over the outcome. We know how much time each game lasts; we know how many players are on each team; we know how the mechanics of the game work; we know the rules and violations; we know how players are expected to perform; and we know how players and spectators are expected to behave. “Why We Love Sports” is all about chaos. But the majority of games ending in chaos, and the entirety of games ending predictably, are defined by the order of the sport itself. There is no room for chaos in sports outside the confines of the game.

Sports add order to people’s lives. Sports give people a space where their expectations about what is going to happen can be met. And the more professional the competition, the more this is so. To be sure, order isn’t the only reason people love sports. There’s community and connection; there’s the fond memories of playing the game recreationally or as a child; there’s the knowledge that “anything can happen”; there’s the big money and real life drama; and there’s the sheer amazement of seeing the product of talent and countless hours of hard work on display.

Order, however, is the one benefit that people experience but do not rationalize. And that’s the gap I’ve hoped to bridge in this article.

As people, we often do things without thinking. Especially harmful things, like smoking, overeating, or lashing out in anger. We get in this numb state of mind where we aren’t rationally processing what’s going on. And that leads us to make bad decisions. Many people have discovered that when we stop and focus on the present moment, we are less likely to make decisions that go against our well-being. This is called being mindful. Mindfulness is how we live life with intention and purpose rather than being dragged from moment to moment like subconsciously programmed robots.

Judson Brewer is author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love — Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits. Brewer gave a Ted Talk in which he argues that the easiest way to break a bad habit is to practice mindfulness. Our brain likes to wander to distract from unpleasant feelings (the numbing effect I talked about in the previous paragraph.) People seek distractions in the form of food, drugs, or relationships. Mindfulness, however, is about cultivating interest and curiosity in the present moment such that our brain no longer seek a distraction. And when it does seek a distraction, mindfulness enables us to evaluate its effects.

Brewer and researchers have found that mindfulness can help people quit smoking and break other bad habits. Check out the inspiring video and complete transcript down below. I leave you with a provocative quote from Thich Nhat Hanh.

When you drink whiskey, learn to drink it with mindfulness. “Drinking whiskey, I know that it is whiskey I am drinking.” This is the approach that I would recommend. I am not telling you to absolutely stop drinking. I propose that you drink your whiskey mindfully, and I am sure that if you drink this way for a few weeks, you will stop drinking alcohol. Drinking your whiskey mindfully, you will recognize what is taking place in you—in your body, in your liver, in your relationships, in the world, and so on. When your mindfulness becomes strong, you will just stop.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Transcript:

When I was first learning to meditate, the instruction was to simply pay attention to my breath, and when my mind wandered, to bring it back. Sounded simple enough. Yet I’d sit on these silent retreats, sweating through T-shirts in the middle of winter. I’d take naps every chance I got because it was really hard work.

Actually, it was exhausting. The instruction was simple enough but I was missing something really important. So why is it so hard to pay attention? Well, studies show that even when we’re really trying to pay attention to something — like maybe this talk — at some point, about half of us will drift off into a daydream, or have this urge to check our Twitter feed.

So what’s going on here? It turns out that we’re fighting one of the most evolutionarily-conserved learning processes currently known in science, one that’s conserved back to the most basic nervous systems known to man. This reward-based learning process is called positive and negative reinforcement, and basically goes like this. We see some food that looks good, our brain says, “Calories! … Survival!” We eat the food, we taste it — it tastes good. And especially with sugar, our bodies send a signal to our brain that says, “Remember what you’re eating and where you found it.”

We lay down this context-dependent memory and learn to repeat the process next time. See food, eat food, feel good, repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. Simple, right? Well, after a while, our creative brains say, “You know what? You can use this for more than just remembering where food is. You know, next time you feel bad, why don’t you try eating something good so you’ll feel better?” We thank our brains for the great idea, try this and quickly learn that if we eat chocolate or ice cream when we’re mad or sad, we feel better. Same process, just a different trigger.

Instead of this hunger signal coming from our stomach, this emotional signal — feeling sad — triggers that urge to eat. Maybe in our teenage years, we were a nerd at school, and we see those rebel kids outside smoking and we think, “Hey, I want to be cool.” So we start smoking. The Marlboro Man wasn’t a dork, and that was no accident. See cool, smoke to be cool, feel good. Repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. And each time we do this, we learn to repeat the process and it becomes a habit.

So later, feeling stressed out triggers that urge to smoke a cigarette or to eat something sweet. Now, with these same brain processes, we’ve gone from learning to survive to literally killing ourselves with these habits. Obesity and smoking are among the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in the world. So back to my breath. What if instead of fighting our brains, or trying to force ourselves to pay attention, we instead tapped into this natural, reward-based learning process … but added a twist? What if instead we just got really curious about what was happening in our momentary experience?

I’ll give you an example. In my lab, we studied whether mindfulness training could help people quit smoking. Now, just like trying to force myself to pay attention to my breath, they could try to force themselves to quit smoking. And the majority of them had tried this before and failed –on average, six times. Now, with mindfulness training, we dropped the bit about forcing and instead focused on being curious. In fact, we even told them to smoke. What? Yeah, we said, “Go ahead and smoke, just be really curious about what it’s like when you do.” And what did they notice?

Well here’s an example from one of our smokers. She said, “Mindful smoking: smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals, YUCK!” Now, she knew, cognitively that smoking was bad for her, that’s why she joined our program. What she discovered just by being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like shit. Now, she moved from knowledge to wisdom. She moved from knowing in her head that smoking was bad for her to knowing it in her bones, and the spell of smoking was broken. She started to become disenchanted with her behavior.

Now, the prefrontal cortex, that youngest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective, it understands on an intellectual level that we shouldn’t smoke. And it tries its hardest to help us change our behavior, to help us stop smoking, to help us stop eating that second, that third, that fourth cookie. We call this cognitive control. We’re using cognition to control our behavior. Unfortunately, this is also the first part of our brain that goes offline when we get stressed out, which isn’t that helpful. Now, we can all relate to this in our own experience. We’re much more likely to do things like yell at our spouse or kids when we’re stressed out or tired, even though we know it’s not going to be helpful. We just can’t help ourselves. When the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we fall back into our old habits, which is why this disenchantment is so important.

Seeing what we get from our habits helps us understand them at a deeper level –to know it in our bones so we don’t have to force ourselves to hold back or restrain ourselves from behavior. We’re just less interested in doing it in the first place. And this is what mindfulness is all about: Seeing really clearly what we get when we get caught up in our behaviors, becoming disenchanted on a visceral level and from this disenchanted stance, naturally letting go. This isn’t to say that, poof, magically we quit smoking. But over time, as we learn to see more and more clearly the results of our actions, we let go of old habits and form new ones.

The paradox here is that mindfulness is just about being really interested in getting close and personal with what’s actually happening in our bodies and minds from moment to moment. This willingness to turn toward our experience rather than trying to make unpleasant cravings go away as quickly as possible. And this willingness to turn toward our experience is supported by curiosity, which is naturally rewarding. What does curiosity feel like? It feels good.

And what happens when we get curious? We start to notice that cravings are simply made up of body sensations –oh, there’s tightness, there’s tension, there’s restlessness — and that these body sensations come and go. These are bite-size pieces of experiences that we can manage from moment to moment rather than getting clobbered by this huge, scary craving that we choke on. In other words, when we get curious, we step out of our old, fear-based, reactive habit patterns, and we step into being. We become this inner scientist where we’re eagerly awaiting that next data point.

Now, this might sound too simplistic to affect behavior. But in one study, we found that mindfulness training was twice as good as gold standard therapy at helping people quit smoking. So it actually works. And when we studied the brains of experienced meditators, we found that parts of a neural network of self-referential processing called the default mode network were at play. Now, one current hypothesis is that a region of this network, called the posterior cingulate cortex, is activated not necessarily by craving itself but when we get caught up in it, when we get sucked in, and it takes us for a ride. In contrast, when we let go — step out of the process just by being curiously aware of what’s happening — this same brain region quiets down.

Now we’re testing app and online-based mindfulness training programs that target these core mechanisms and, ironically, use the same technology that’s driving us to distraction to help us step out of our unhealthy habit patterns of smoking, of stress eating and other addictive behaviors. Now, remember that bit about context-dependent memory? We can deliver these tools to peoples’ fingertips in the contexts that matter most. So we can help them tap into their inherent capacity to be curiously aware right when that urge to smoke or stress eat or whatever arises.

So if you don’t smoke or stress eat, maybe the next time you feel this urge to check your email when you’re bored, or you’re trying to distract yourself from work, or maybe to compulsively respond to that text message when you’re driving, see if you can tap into this natural capacity. Just be curiously aware of what’s happening in your body and mind in that moment. It will just be another chance to perpetuate one of our endless and exhaustive habit loops … or step out of it. Instead of see text message, compulsively text back, feel a little bit better — notice the urge, get curious, feel the joy of letting go and repeat.

Thank you.