Coming back from a 10-day silent Vipassana retreat—arguably the best way to escape the chaos of the past three weeks—I was met with your thoughtful comments and suggestions on my last poll. They truly filled my heart with joy.

Thank you.

Catching up on global headlines, I found myself wondering if I should do a quick U-turn and go back to being a monk for 4 years.

(By the way you could listen to these essays and take me with you on a drive or walk by downloading the Substack app)

Join The Nothing Revolution

So I’ve been doing more nothing, keeping the meditation alive day and night, going to the gym, working like mad on my book which I will share a snippet of with you today, and now doing health mentoring work that I love. Life is beautiful. I am immersed in it.Yet, I keep falling into a dark spiral. While there is always more I can do to tend to my own wounds, the heaviness I feel is not related to my circumstances.

The heaviness is in the world. The heat is rising. The suffering is exponential. America has beef with all its neighbors and most of its allies. Israel is on a six front war, with Egypt and Jordan getting weary of these antics. Everyone is adjusting, and even the best of us realize that we are hanging by a thread.

There is a harshness to the soil of humanity right now.

It feels dry af, man.

I isolate, I search for weed, or porn, or sugar, or Instagram, or anything to numb the painful existence.

So today, I explore with you

1. where we are in terms of collective health

2. what our potential could be in this new Maga-death era we’ve entered, and

3. what the two things that keep me from despair are.

In the meantime, I am hosting a four-part free online health workshop series every other Thursday, starting March 6th at 6pm PST.

I will cover:

• The new scientific health paradox about 1st and 2nd gen immigrants who work in science, tech or engineering fields.

• How to navigate a toxic environment and how it impacts your health

• How to excavate identity through intergenerational trauma techniques.

• How trauma relates to health behaviors and habits and how to break the cycle

• How to measure health to have meaningful comparisons with your own baseline rather than comparing to others.

• Conversations, Exercises and Demonstrations!

Please share this with that friend of yours that isolates rather than asks for help. This information saves the lives of many.

Register to get the recordings as well, or even better, join us and be part of the discussion!

The New Health Playbook Workshop Series

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Ok now let’s get into todays topic.

Where was I?

Oh yes…

I was saying that we are entering…

A Strange Sick Techno World

The trumpets play a sad song, bids farewell to good ol’ corporate oligarchy (the devil you know, and love to hate).
They welcome a new era of billionaire oligarchy (the devil you thought you knew). As Yanis Varoufakis puts it, “Capitalism is dead, and what we have now, Technofeudalism, is way worse”. His 2-year-old book is eerily on the nose.

I can’t comment on RFK’s plan for health just yet, although access to alternative medicine, healthier food, and more non-biased scientific studies all make perfect sense. Believing it however…is a big fucking pill to swallow!

He did eat that McDonald’s Happy Meal on Air Force One after all, so even if RFK Jr’s intentions are as great as he says they are, it will certainly be an uphill battle for him. #justsaying

Jokes aside, the President’s love for highly processed foods is not the only obstacle. If HHS follows suite with DOGE (and the President’s overall policy preferences on cutting costs on services), then we may be talking about a much darker healthcare reality where people are not just very sick, but they can’t access their meds or doctors either.

Let’s hope for more yoga and meditation yes, but also more affordable and universal coverage because that is still what most people need.

Some may say, why not believe in him? He may not know Jackshit about healthcare, but how much worse can it get?

To these people I say, Touche!

Indeed, the new Health and Human Services Head is up against a long sad history of terrible policies that have caused much suffering to the American people.

Let’s discuss that today, and take a pulse check of where we are when it comes to our collective health in America.

The following is an excerpt from the book I’m currently researching and writing a proposal for under the current title: Healthy Humans Sick Society.

For any other thoughts on the title or the excerpt below, please reply to this email or leave a comment and start a discussion about it.

Leave a comment

How the Industrial Revolution Century Shaped our Health

Over the last century, the Western world has engineered an exciting yet strange new reality. While we have inherited a world of magnificent marvels, it is also laden with buried burdens. We live in an era of technological comfort, yet we lack the fundamental rhythms of human health.

We have to ask ourselves:

• Why are anxiety, addiction, and depression at an all-time high?

• Why are more people burning out and quitting their jobs more than ever before?

• How have we become so isolated?

• Why are family relationships so fractured by politics?

• How have metabolic diseases become our biggest predators?

• Why are more children committing suicide now than at any other time before?

• Why are our bodies rebelling against us with autoimmune diseases?

Even more puzzling—why are we getting sicker in an age where we have all the tools to remain healthy? Perhaps the question is no longer: ‘How can we cure cancer?’ but rather: ‘Why is cancer more prevalent than ever before?’

My friend Paul asked a beautiful question after caretaking for a family member that had Non-Hodkin’s lymphoma:

"Is it just a coincidence that, in an age where we are obsessed with ‘Growth’ , the defining disease of our time—cancer—is a pathological, unchecked growth of cells that spirals out of control?”.

Powerful question.

Here are some more:

🔥 Is it also a coincidence that inflammation is now the biggest culprit behind chronic diseases, just as our climate heats up and employees burn out?

📊 Is it possible that our bodies serve as dashboards, reflecting the dysfunctions of our society?

⚠️ Could our bodies be warning us about what our minds refuse to acknowledge?

The current evidence says yes, the mind and the body are two sides to the same coin, and if they are disconnected by distractions then we start developing diseases.

A majority of these diseases are spiraling out of our internal and generational anxieties and work-related stress.

These “Jobs” Politicians Talk About, Suck…

In 2021, a decade after I left medicine, 334,000 physicians and other clinicians left the workforce due to retirement, burnout, and pandemic-related stress. This is not just a medical personnel issue or a COVID-related problem—it’s a societal crisis. You and I are not alone in our struggles with modern ailments largely propagated by stress and stress-related diseases.

While our parents might argue that work has always been stressful, the modern work experience is a completely different ballgame. According to McKinsey’s 2023 report, 51% of the global workforce is either barely managing, drowning in, or overwhelmed by work demands. That is more than half of all jobs in the world!

Gallup’s 2022 survey revealed that 17% of the U.S. workforce is actively disengaged, and this trend is rising. Industries most affected by severe mental health issues include government, transportation, technology, healthcare, higher education, law, and finance.

According to a 2023 survey by Mason Frank and Salesforce, the tech industry has a burnout rate of 44% among full-time employees, with 42% considering quitting their jobs!

Think about that for a second: The people running our governments, the doctors meant to heal us, the tech engineers holding some of the most coveted jobs, the drivers and pilots ensuring our safety, the visionary entrepreneurs we idolize, and the legal professionals who are supposed to protect us—are all deeply suffering.

Check that. They are dying. Although the media is focused on the CEO that got murdered, 19 other CEOs died on the job in 2024, many in their 40s.

What is happening? Why are we generating all these diseases in an era where we have unprecedented resources to prevent them?

Then there is the ‘Wellness’ Illusion, sold for an additional $5.7Tn dollars

Instead of addressing these pressing questions, society offers us quick fixes: a pill for obesity, a smoothie for IBS, a yoga retreat for those lingering feelings of angst. The $5.7 trillion wellness industry convinces us that we feel this way because we are not doing enough push-ups, drinking enough probiotics, or sweating in enough saunas.

Both healthcare and wellness industries have become bottomless wells of expensive “to-dos,” propagated by a narrative that convinces us we must navigate this world alone. These industries thrive on the same thought patterns that keep us trapped in cycles of stress and sickness. What we fail to realize is that our trauma turns into beliefs, those beliefs turn into thoughts, which turn into behaviors, which solidify into habits, and ultimately manifest as diseases and poor health outcomes.

The 2024 survey by the American Psychiatric Association found that 43% of

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Fun times! Aldous Huxley must be chuckling from his grave. “I told you fools about this a long time ago!”.

As a recovering burned-out physician, I found solace in the gym, where I strengthened my body and mind. I then got a clinical data analytics job, rose in the ranks of corporate America, made more money, and received more promotions.

I also felt compelled to build more muscle, enhance my lung capacity, and run more miles. Through my divorce, I became more lonely, and more susceptible to Hubermans, Attias, and Goggins videos reminding me that I am not enough. I also might have sent a few shirtless photos to girlfriends after a workout, definitely owned crypto before…and yes I did work in tech.

I also did psychedelics to fill the void in my lonely soul.

I am one of these people I speak of.

I am a swallower of culture.

*Gulp*

I am Jack’s disavowed yearning for more.

The Myth of Discipline and Progress

As long as I was productive at work, and my body looked like what ‘a healthy male’ was supposed to look like, I felt that my role in society was safe. There is an unspoken lonely road towards achievement that we are all privy to but seldom speak of.

Nowhere is this road more evident than in a gym in 2025.

Radiohead captured that world of “shoulds” in the eery robotic voice that matches the mechanistic melody and lyrics of “Fitter Happier”.

“Fitter, happier, more productive, Com-for-table,
not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym, three days a week
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries”
Radiohead

Here is an ad from a popular gym in SF notorious for its provocative marketing.

They’re still in business and seem to be growing, so the chord they struck must be deeply rooted in our Bay Area culture.

The stress we feel from the need to perform is transmuted into our yearning for more, which only widens the gap between us and what we want.

Let me elaborate with a few examples:

• You want a tech job with stock options. You get it. All of a sudden you are surrounded by people that have way more stock options than you. Stress rises. Now you want a promotion. You get it. Now you want to be an investor or start your own company. Etc.

• You want to get stronger. You join a gym. You are now surrounded by hot people that are way more fit and can lift more weights than you can ever imagine. You now want to be more like them. You push yourself further.

• You want to run. You join a friend and learn that they are training for a marathon. Running is not enough anymore, you want to run a marathon too. You push yourself to pain.

When anxiety rises in the short term, we become activated like hungry hamsters squirming for a snack, and if the hamster wheel that we are on keeps us in fight or flight forever, we ultimately become depressed. (More on learned helplessness in a future essay)

I am Jack’s newly acquired wisdom

Something changed when I got laid off in 2019 and decided to go out on a limb and ask myself the right questions:

As I became certified in functional medicine, learned about the different ways one needs movement, and understood the relationship between stress, sleep, and exercise, I started making exercise work for me, rather than having to work for it. It is not another thing on my to-do list. It is something that offers what I need in a way that makes sense to the context of my life.

An Ultra-brief History of Gyms

The gym dates back to ~3000 years ago in Ancient Egypt and Persia. However the word “Gymnasium” was coined by the Greeks. (Fun fact: it means exercising naked, as was frequently the case. How fun!).

It was developed for Olympians, professional competitors, and military personnel.

Regular people did not go to the gym. That is worth noting for later.

“At the peak of Greek civilization, fitness was seen as critical to martial prowess (i.e., fighting), restorative capability (i.e., healing of the body, mind, and soul,) and educational (introduced into the post-secondary education system).”

How gyms have evolved through the ages

Here is a depiction of what the first YMCA (aka “The GrandDaddy of US Gyms) looked like inside. (Can you spot the guy walking on the wall? What about the people doing the strange knee-on-knee dance?)

What do Gym Bros, Tech Bros, and Crypto Bros all have in common?

I’ll give you a clue: it’s not a life of calm contentment.

Two months ago, as I settled back in San Rafael, I decided to join a gym for the first time in 5 years to add swimming and weight lifting to my routine.

Boy have things changed.

Three observations struck me as major shifts since I was last in a gym.

1- Flex selfies (I call them flexies) are the norm. Bros now walk towards the mirror, take their shirt off, and snap that flexie. No shame.

2- Everyone has headphones air-pods on. No one is talking and nobody is listening. The gym sounds like a machine eating itself alive.

3- There are signs to remind people to work out rather than doomscroll.

If we compare the three notions behind the original idea of a Gymnasium (Martial Arts, Recover, and Education/Socialization), to how we use the gym today, we can see the sickness in our society.

The comparison to others, the envy we hold in our chest, the low self-esteem we drown in, the distractions of our scattered brains, and the loneliness… can all be noted in any modern-day gym.

While these dynamics used to exist before, one can argue that all of these elements of our collective psychology have risen over the past decade.

High-intensity training (like HIIT) activates your stress machinery

Watching people watch their phones, made me think of how we have taken our addictions to the gym. While some forms of exercise do reduce stress, high-intensity workouts increase stress.

While weight lifting or running are regarded as “good stress”, if you are burned out, exhausted, and trying to just get back on your feet, then I would argue that any stress is bad stress.

When we get our heart pumping hard, this may help our metabolism and heart health, and it may feel good due to endorphins, but it also raises the level of stress we have. It does that via both the hormonal (cortisol) and nervous (sympathetic system) of our stress response.

It is therefore critical to assess why you are exercising, rather than simply going from your high-intensity job to a high-intensity workout without understanding what kind of movement can support you the most.

Couple these with our comparison to others, our inherent feelings of “not being good enough” and you have a cortisol cocktail that may drive you towards more anxiety, less sleep, and potential injury.

No wonder we are resorting to our favorite dopamine hits at the gym and getting lost in our screens as we have all become accustomed to…

So as you choose your next exercise, perhaps first ask yourself:

• How am I doing on Stress these days? What kind of exercise do I need?

• How is my sleep?

• How has my recovery from exercise been? Am I ready for more?

And if you are looking for exercises that are proven to reduce stress…then here is today’s research and actionable insights for you.

Try one of these three research-backed exercises instead, which do not need a gym or any kind of equipment

My research compilation and actionable insights are for paid members. Be the first to get them, as well as special invites to online health workshops and early access to my book once it is out by upgrading your membership.

Today I share 3 exercises and summarize and link six research articles proven to reduce stress rather than jack it up.

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“In each of us there is another whom we do not know”
Carl C. Jung

We are currently experiencing a game changing paradigm shift of how we understand our mental, physical and spiritual health as a union of different facets of -what we call- our mind.

Today I would love to shed some light on the multiplicity of the mind approach, which has been in the dark underground belly of psychology for the past century or so. Very much like psychedelics, it is rising to the surface after a long time of suffocation.

If the term ‘spiritual’ does not agree with you, please understand that I am not referring to our relationship to a certain God or religion or faith of any sorts. All I mean by spirituality is our innate human capacity to relate deeply to ourselves, other beings, and to the Earth that we live on.

It is our spirited nature -that feeling of gumption- in its full essence that gives us the feeling of confidence in our health that can be sustainable beyond a workout or a meditation. It is that feeling of spiritedness that offers us a blueprint towards achieving our goals, having meaningful relationships and saying No to those who try to abuse us for their own spirited existence.

Also - if you are looking for someone to help you get through a stressful transition in your life and want to get a taste for how this multiplicity of the mind approach can help you reconnect with your creativity, get your physical health back on track, and connect with community reply to this email with ‘Interested’ or leave a comment. I am offering an end of year discount to those ready to work 1-on-1.

All hail Freud Almighty

The quandary into what our brains are, how they work, and what can be done to tend to their problems is an age old one. After the prophet Abraham spoke to the God Yahweh 4000 years ago, the Western world started rejecting the ancient pagan concept of multiple Gods as a belief.

Instead, we moved to a singular all-encompassing God that is omnipotent and capable of the death and destruction of all those who disbelieve him or favor the polytheistic tradition. That was despite the fact that some of humanity’s most prolific societies (the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Hindus, the Babylonians and the Sumerians to name a few) had thrived under the concept of multiple Gods for a long period of history.

4000 years later, a similar shift happened in our understanding of the human psyche. In a similar way, we outlawed the idea of multiple human minds at the end of the 19^th century. This time it was the teachings of an Austrian prophet, who would become the most influential figure of Psychology.

The prophet whom we blindly followed this time was Sigmund Freud, who famously rejected the idea that a healthy mind can be multiple. Before that, there was a long historical debate between scientific philosophers and clinical psychiatrists.

On the one hand, scientists and philosophers argued that our minds and existence are naturally multiple (lead by Founder of British Society for Psychic research Frederic W. H. Myers and ‘The Father of American Psychology’ William James). On the other side of the intellectual heavy-weight boxing ring, were the top clinical psychologists and psychiatrists of the 18^th century who argued that multiple selves can only exists in the pathological patients they saw (under the leadership of Jean-Martin Charcot—Europe’s most famous neurologist and his disciple Pierre Janet). Charcot pressed that otherwise “normal” human beings had a healthy singular existence of the mind.

That brings us to our now (in)famous Freud, who was heavily influenced and taught by Charcot. He had become such a pivotal figure in Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, that his word was revered as the word of the God in modern psychology. He famously and openly rejected the theory that the healthy person can have multiple identities, leading his followers to stifle the fire of mind multiplicity that others (such as Myers and James) were stoking for about two centuries. This was welcomed by the upper class Viennese society, that found relief to know that trauma and abuse did not impact them in similar ways as the “mentally ill”. It was a socially acceptable idea that separated the healthy from the unhealthy, the wealthy from the poor, and the sane from the insane.

🧠 One concept of a normal mind = 🤕 More diseased minds = 🤑 More prescriptions

The rising popularity of the diagnostic term “Schizophrenia” then cemented Freud’s position, and halted any further clinical or experimental research into the theory of the multiplicity of the brain. In the same way that Narcissism blocks us from experiencing self-compassion, Schizophrenia is a hangup that stops us from experiencing the transformational and healing impact of adopting the multiplicity of the mind approach.

Thankfully, that would soon change.

Little did Freud know, one of his young Swiss disciples by the name of Carl Gustav Jung, would lay the foundations that would revive this crucial aspect of cultural psychology, albeit underground for many decades.

Carl Jung is now nothing short of a cultural revolutionary icon, similar to Che Guevara and Martin Luther King. Like them, he had to fight against the system for what he believed in, and unlike most others, he found a way to survive doing that. We are indebted to him for both our sanity, and the best Hollywood movies ever made.

In 2015, while trying to understand my masculinity and an internal tug of war between what I learned growing up and what modern society was telling me, a friend gave me a book titled A Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.

Campbell famously covers how there are certain developmental milestones for every hero’s journey that they have to conquer for a healthy progression of life. This includes both external setbacks and internal hangups that result in the hero entering a world unknown to them. One of such key moments - perhaps the most sensationalized by the climax of every Hollywood movie- is when the hero has to slay the proverbial dragon.

The idea here, as Campbell describes it, is not that the hero has to face ‘the bad evil villain’ as is often portrayed, but that “The ultimate dragon is within you” as he puts it. It is really a part of the hero himself that he has been avoiding facing. Joseph Campbell did not just study Carl Jung, but he studied all the religions and historical cultural myths that brought humanity to this moment. As he outlines in The Power of Myth lectures:

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Joseph Cambell

👉 For instance, a part of me that was feeling jealous about a certain situation with my girlfriend, would be overshadowed by a more “politically correct” version of me that thought that jealousy was petty or immature.

👉 A part of me that just wanted to sit and smoke pot all day, was overshadowed by another that was more driven and wanted to achieve a lot in life.

👉 A third example for good measure is that a part of me that was angry at my parents, was overshadowed by another that valued family above anything else and was therefore willing to accept their behavior in anyway as beyond questioning because of everything they have provided me with.

Self-Leadership as a path towards Liberation

The idea, as my previous therapist and IFS teacher would say, is that all these parts were like advisors who all wanted what was best for me in their own ways. The process of therapy then, aimed to put me into my highest Self, which was able to listen to and negotiate with all these advisors to put me at the head of the table, rather than have me spiral into a single part’s agenda. The way we did that was by using Carl Jung’s method of Active Imagination, where I would imagine a part of me in a situation and , I know this sounds crazy, start talking to it. After a series of these sessions, I started to feel a lightness to my existence.

It is no hyperbole to say that the healing process transformed the way I operated completely. It gave me a liberating blueprint of my mind that helped me navigate painful moments in my relationships, maneuver tough conversations at work, deal more effectively with depression episodes, bounce back into healthy behaviors and relate to myself in a profoundly new way.

This is critical to one of the main tenants of Carl Jung’s work which is the concept of Individuation, a fundamental psychological process that allows a heroine to own and face all the different parts of her existence, especially the parts of her which she is most afraid to see.

These parts of our psyche that we would rather disown, find distasteful, and would rather live our whole life avoiding are what Jung collectively calls “The Shadow”. This shadow is what the bourgeois Viennese creme de la creme tried to avoid via their control of psychological literature in the time of Freud.

That shadow is the cave that Campbell describes as holding ‘the treasures’ that we seek, and the hero is frequently forced to face it due to a crisis that demands him to face their inner dragons for the first time. Carl Jung did not merely prescribe theories about this, but he had to go through his own manic depressive episodes which he openly describes in his (sometimes overly complex) writing.

There is a library of characters within each of us

The treasures that he came back to us with were the theories of individuation, the concept of the shadow, the concepts of introvert and extrovert, the methods of psychoanalysis and dream analysis, art therapy, and perhaps most controversially, the idea of archetypes or “Collective Unconscious” which has inspired the last few decades of underground and now modern psychology.

The Collective Unconscious, put simply, is a library of memories, experiences, and instincts shared by all of us in a layer that exists beyond the grasp of our conscious awareness. The power of this idea comes two fold: We are all part of a larger entity that we are bound to, but secondly we have access to a large database of human instinctual wisdom all the time. We have a live connection wired into that large human supercomputer of humanity’s best and worst ideas.

The question then becomes how can we access these records of wisdom, and use them to treat modern ailments? The answer comes in so many methods, shapes and forms varying from highly scientific rigorous techniques such as Psychosynthesis, Gestalt theory, Voice Dialogue, Transactional Theory, Compassionate Inquiry and Internal Family Systems all the way to wildly esoteric methods such Akashik records, Soul Retrieval and Tarot card readings.

I personally need science to be grounded in my belief that something will work, but all of the methods mentioned above are legitimate forms and pathways towards the same outcome of accessing our inner wisdom. It is really a matter of taste, although this idea will annoy many of the contemporary Viennese science dictators out there that will argue one method is better than others. The “treasures that you seek” are on the other end of many deep conversations. Whatever method helps you have these conversations and gives you insights, is the one you should use.

Dick Schwarz, founder of Internal Family Systems, has also founded the IFS institute which is a huge reason of why my medically trained and clinically minded brain loves this method. The institute has published several peer-reviewed papers showing the effectiveness of IFS on PTSD1 , child maltreatment and particularly females with depression 2 .

Deepening with the Archetypes

All of these methods, revived from the underground and making their way back into the mainstream, are rooted in Carl Jung’s theory that we can access our inner wisdom and bring unity to warring factions of ourselves, by understanding the Archetypes that drive our collective unconscious.

These archetypes are representative “perfect forms” of the different parts of our minds that exist deep beneath our projected versions of ourselves. Such archetypes as Warrior, Queen, Wizard, Hero, Lover, Trickster, Overachiever, Party Animal, Gold Digger, Renaissance Man, Mystic Poet, and Tough Cookie are all universal images that exist within each one of us.

This was also described by Plato and his idea of the cave where perfect forms of ‘horse’, ‘dog’ and ‘elephant’ exist, and then there are the actual multitude of variants of these forms in every horse, dog and elephant we see in real life. Each one of them is an iteration of the “ultimate form”, and similarly each one of us has an iterative version of these psychological archetypes within us. That is the only reason why I can say Tyrant King, and you would know exactly what I am talking about.

The more aware we are of our internal parts, the less we feel the need to project them onto others, like that high brow, upper class Viennese society desperately did to defend the delusions of its collective ego.

What would Carl Jung Think of Today’s Culture?

All of this is critical to our understanding of why in today’s culture, we all feel bad about feeling bad. Our media projects a certain form of perfection that we try to reconcile with parts of us that are weak, insecure or depressed. Because of Freud’s impact, when we feel any of these parts come online in our conscious, we blame ourselves for them or feel ashamed that we are any of those things. Thereby, we isolate ourselves from our shadows in order to please others and maintain their false narratives about us.

The point of the multiplicity of the mind then, is to allow us the space and vulnerability to experience failure, depression, pettiness, anger, jealousy or any other ‘undesirable’ without us over identifying with any of these parts as the totality of who we are. Remember the shame gremlins that fester in the dark and die as soon as we speak of them? These are the parts of us that live in our shadow, and may never see the light without a major life event such as crippling anxiety, insomnia, depression, burnout or a suicide attempt.

Luckily, we no longer live in the 19^th century, and we now have a multitude of evidence-based therapies and treatments (or esoteric methods if that is what you prefer) to approach the shadow, recollect our different parts and live a life that is authentic, meaningful, and whole.

Sadly, most people will choose to live a life in the superficial ideas handed to them by their peers, because this work is quite difficult.

Not you though. You have not come this far to live in the shadows of someone else’s psyche. You are a seeker who has accepted the call to adventure and you’re a few steps away from slaying your dragon, and returning home from your cave with your newfound ‘treasures’, and hopefully will inspire others to do that same.

Enter the cave, brave warrior, and prepare to shed light on the darkest parts of your psyche that have been screaming for your attention for so long. May you find the magic and treasures that you seek.

If you want to explore how this multiplicity of the mind approach can help you become more productive and creative in today’s world, just reply to this email or leave a comment saying ‘Interested’ and I’ll set you up with a free demo session.

As Freud’s inherited burden on society is lifted, it is expected that we see more and more studies that showcase how this model can help regular people who just need a few nudges towards better health and habits.

This is a collection of the latest evidence in neuropsychology, functional/lifestyle medicine, and clinical data to help you deal more effectively with the unprecedented burdens of stress in our modern culture.

Please bookmark this page and refer to it when you need inspiration to deal with the ebbs and flows of stress in your life.

In this report, I will cover:

Step 1: Inner Work: What is your stressor? How do you deal with it?

• How can we know the difference between an external stressor and an internal psychological trap?

• The fascinating research behind personality, and the major traits associated with higher stress response.

• How to map anxiety loops and eight examples to inspire you to build greater agency.

Step 2: Habits: Proven coping methods, their limitations, and when to use them.

• 7 Evidence-Based exercises proven to calm the brain in moments of stress

• What limitations do exercise and meditation have on stress? When do they work, how long do their benefits last, and how much do we need?

• How depression and anxiety are linked through stress.

Step 3: Clinical Data: How do we measure stress in our bodies? How do we know if what we are doing is working?

• Why is blood cortisol not the best way to measure stress? What tests are better?

• What validated surveys can we use to track psychological and occupational stress though?

Bonus Appendix: Outlines the science of how stress impacts Nutrition, Sleep, Exercise, Relationships, and Addiction.

In this report are 42 citations from studies published in notable scientific journals or a snippet from one of the following books. Click on the footnotes to dive deeper into any piece of information you find interesting.

The following books are the ones I used for my research. Dig into any of them for further reading.

• The Myth of Normal (and The Body Says No) by Gabor Mate

• Why Zebras don’t get ulcers by Robert Sapolsky

• Settled, by Chantalle Donnelley

• Unwinding Anxiety, by Judson Brewer

Below is a comprehensive summary of Stress, how it shows up in the body, and how to tackle it in modern life.

Get your free gumption report

The Gumption Stress Report

First, here is what you need to know about the biology, neurology, and physiology of stress…

• Stress happens when an external or internal trigger stimulates the Brain (hippocampus) which then releases hormones and generates a nervous Stress response.

• This is very healthy in the short term, but a prolonged and chronic stress response is detrimental to almost all of our bodily functions. The modern world gears us towards a chronic stress response.

  • The stress hormones tell the adrenal glands to release Adrenaline and Glucocorticoids (Cortisol) among other stress hormones [Important because this can be measured, see Step 3: Clinical Data section]

  • The Brain also generates stress from the nerves engaging the:

    • Central Nervous System (to activate muscles and run or fight)

    • Autonomic Nervous System. This system has two parts

      • Sympathetic Nervous System (This is activated with the Stress Response to make us breathe faster, increase heart rate, sharpen memory, and widen pupils)

      • Parasympathetic NS: This is a system mainly controlled by the vagus nerve, that opposes the stress response and tells the brain to relax. [Important because this is how we can use the body and Somatic therapy to relax a stress response see Evidence-Based Habits]

  • In addition to the famous Fight or Flight action mode, studies have shown that under prolonged stress, humans and animals go into a “Freeze” mode where we ‘play dead’. (This is explained by the Learned Helplessness hangup below.)

  • Massive, prolonged stress response causes anxiety in the short term and depression-like symptoms in the long term. When we go into a stress response, dopamine rises in the beginning, but after sustained exposure, we can start experiencing the loss of pleasure associated with Depression. The medical term for that hallmark system is ‘anhedonia’.

  • The body sends nerve signals back to the brain and therefore we can use exercises such as breathing, proprioception, touch and eye movement effectively decrease our stress response. This is helpful if the stressor is internal. Using such methods to cope with external setbacks can backfire.

  • The evidence-based coping mechanisms mentioned below are effective only if they do not cause more stress to adopt them. For example, exercise is only stress-relieving if you enjoy it.

  • Stress has a vicious cycle vis-a-vie addictive behaviors, broken relationships, and sleep deprivation. It also impacts nutrition and exercise. (See Appendix for more)

Step 1 Inner Work: Understanding the Triggers

What is the nature of that lion your body is running from?

👉 Is it an external setback such as financial difficulties, a terrible work environment, or diseases?

👉 Or is it an internal Hangup, such as social comparison, overachieving, and compulsive worrying?

The distinction is critical.

If the trigger is an external setback, then you have to fight it with discussions, advocacy, social/political activism or escape!

Example 1: Low Socioeconomic status

• Poverty, political displacement, and racism constitute uncontrollable factors that cause disease and can’t be addressed by “working harder”.1

• Example Anxiety Loop
  Trigger: Poor living conditions

  Behavior: Alcoholism and smoking

  Reward: Numbing the stressor

  Result: Addiction and further worsening of stress

Example 2: Job loss and Unhealthy work environments

• High-pressure, fast-paced jobs with low autonomy are associated with increased stress and ill health2

• Job insecurity or fear of job loss can instigate disease, even after accounting for stress-related behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and eating. [17]3

• According to Christina Maslach’s research, fulfillment at work depends on Control, Reward, Workload, Fairness, Community, and Values. (More on this in the data section). 4

• Here is an example of how that gets us anxious:
  Trigger: Fear of lay-offs

  Behavior: Working over the weekend

  Reward: More control

  Result: Exhaustion

Example 3: Early Trauma, Epigenetic Changes and Chronic Diseases

• Children cared for by mothers early on have less cortisol and active stress machinery. This is even true for rats held by students for an extended period. Early childhood abuse or neglect has a proven impact on stress system activation.5

• Examples of Anxiety Loops:
  Trigger: Get a Diagnosis

  Behavior: Feel guilty for getting the disease

  Reward: Understanding brings some calm

  Result: Guilt and shame keep us locked in the same behaviors

If the stressor is out of your control, blaming yourself for it will only render you more helpless in the situation.

Talk to others, observe your environment, or plan an escape from the lion hunting down your neck.

However, if it is an internal hangup -such as your personality or a psychological trap- your body may suffer from unnecessary high-stress levels due to your brain’s thought patterns.

Now let’s Map the Psychology of an Anxiety Loop

Like a seed needing fertile soil, the old survival brain creates the conditions for anxiety to sprout in your thinking brain (chronic). This is where anxiety is born. Fear + uncertainty = anxiety.

Brewer, Judson. Unwinding Anxiety

---

The next time you get anxious or stressed, notice…

What is triggering you? [Trigger]

What are you doing to cope with it? [Response]

How is the coping helping you [Reward]

What also happens as a consequence of that coping? [Result]

Take some time to observe the hangups and map them out.

Here are some examples of internal hangups that can be addressed via the coping mechanisms in the habits section.

Hang up Example 1: Compulsive Worrying (to get more certainty)

• Anxiety itself can trigger worry as a way to avoid negative feelings. Conversely, worry leads to more anxiety and it becomes a cyclical behavior of worrying.6 (Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety)

• Example:

  Trigger: Someone is late

  Behavior: Text them 30 times and call four times

  Reward: Increased sense of control

  Result: Sustained release of stress hormones damaging the body

Hang up Example 2: Learned Helplessness (to increase predictability)

• After prolonged exposure to stress, animals, and humans have shown a tendency to give in, and even ordinary tasks seem too much. We adopt a mindset of “this is just how it is going to always be.” 7 (Sapolsky, Why Zebra’s Don’t Have Ulcers)

• Example:

  Trigger: Work keeps piling up unpredictably

  Behavior: Staying home and social isolation

  Reward: Increased predictability of the environment

  Result: Being stuck in an unhealthy environment

  Subjected to enough uncontrollable stress, we learn to be helpless—we lack the motivation to try to live because we assume the worst; we lack the cognitive clarity to perceive when things are going fine, and we feel an aching lack of pleasure in everything.*

  Sapolsky, Robert M.. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Hang up Example 3: Feelings of unworthiness (due to low social support)

• Trigger: Seeing a hot person online

• Behavior: Eat cake

• Reward: Delicious serotonin to counter the negative feelings

• Result: Gain more weight

Hangup Example 4: The Overachiever, Type A, John Henryism

• Type A people who tend to Overachieve are more liable to have cardiac diseases through stress or attempting to overachieve (John Henryism8).

• Example:
  Trigger: See insurmountable task

  Behavior: Offer herculean efforts to finish the project

  Reward: Pouring the frustration into extreme effort

  Result: Exhaust heart and nervous system

Hangup Example 5: The Stress-prone persona (Type-C)

• On the other hand: People who compulsively put others’ needs before theirs, repress healthy anger, have a problem saying No, and have an over-identification with a sense of duty or responsibility, are more prone to stress-related diseases. (Gabor Mate, When the Body Says No)

• Example:
  Trigger: Boss says hurtful comment or acts inappropriately

  Behavior: Repress anger to avoid confrontation

  Reward: A sense of calm and predictability

  Result: Putting oneself in the same situation over again

What purpose is this hang-up serving?

Before we dive into the habits you can do to improve coping with stress, there is one last crucial step of inner work remaining, which is to understand how the hangup is serving you.

This boosts self-compassion which is proven to increase healthy behaviors and health outcomes.

When we develop parts that look angry or “protective” on the outside they are usually trying to get us one of the following proven things:

1- Control

2- Predictability (fear + uncertainty = anxiety)

3- Social support (the lower the social capital, the more the anxiety)

4- Outlets of Frustration

Which one of these rewards do you notice recurring the most when you map your anxiety loops?

These are your current unmet needs driving these anxious parts of you to act.

Get Your Free Personalized Report

“Emotional competence requires:
• the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress;
• the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries;
• the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past.
What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood.”

In summary, we have to understand whether the stressor is a setback or a hangup and deal with it accordingly by either setting new boundaries (setbacks), or healing old emotional wounds via therapy and coaching (hang ups).

Now we can dive into lifestyle changes and proven habits that work.

STEP 2: Behaviors and Habits - Evidence-based habits proven to regulate our stress response.

The research is clear that reducing stress is possible in various forms and methods. Selecting the one that works for your life’s context is crucial.

We are not short on evidence for well-proven ways to reduce stress where it does not need to be activated.

Work with me

1- Sustained, Low-intensity, aerobic exercise (one that does not make you go out of breath) for 30 minutes a time, several times a week. It has to be enjoyable for you.

• Slow sustained exercise that you enjoy is best for stress reduction. Yes enjoying it is a most important qualifier!

• Low-intensity, sustained (aka Zone 2 exercise) is the most effective. This is the type of exercise that you can do while still having a conversation or being on a call.

• Higher-intensity exercise increases stress, but it offers other benefits for heart health and metabolism. Your HIIT workout or hot Yoga makes you feel better but does not reduce stress like lower-intensity movement.

• Exercise only reduces stress hormones within 24 hours of activity. You need to do about twenty or thirty minutes at a time, a few times a week, of sustained aerobic movement to get the stress reduction benefits of exercise

  Learn about Zone 2 Training, how much to get it, and how to know you are doing it with Dr. Inigo San-Milan here

2- Building abdominal strength and improving postural alignment can decrease the stress response.

• Stronger abdominal muscles and better posture improve stress response via better breathing.

• Abdominal activation and a strong “core” are connected to the adrenal glands which secret the stress hormones. (Drum, Levinthal, and Strick 2016)9

Check out this Ab strength youtube series made for all levels.

10 minute spine alignment and posture enhancement exercise

3- Stretching the muscles involved in stress

• Neck pain and back pain are strongly confirmed to correlate with stress. The more neck pain we have the more stressed we feel. (Ortego et al. 201610)

• Stretching helps the body to feel safe and can act as a reset button11. The muscles have a sweet spot for flexibility and how it impacts anxiety. Too much or too little flexibility can trigger the stress response.

• Overall guidelines are to stretch at about 50% of the intensity and for 30 seconds each stretch 12. More than that can cause more damage than good.

• Sitting can activate the stress response by contracting the Psoas muscle when we run away and to take extra-deep breaths that keep us running. This theory explains how sitting may be causing a lot of our stress13.

• Important muscles to stretch for stress:

  • Scalene (in the neck), Sternocleidomastoid (SCM) muscle, Trapezius, and the Psoas. They are all directly related to the stress response14.

Check out this amazing, short collection of stretches videos by physiotherapist, and author of Settled, Chantalle Donnelly

4- Consistent Meditation and Mindfulness

• Meditation decreases stress hormones while one is meditating, but it is less clear if all the health outcomes persist long afterward. (Sapolsky, 2004)15

• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction designed by Jon Kabat-Zinn has been proven to decrease the stress response in eight weeks 16. Try a 10 min MBSR meditation here

• Self Compassion six-week programs developed by Dr. Kristen Neff, have been shown to improve overall wellbeing and a decreased stress response.17 Learn more here.

5- Breathing with the exhale being longer than the inhale

• The same neurons that control breathing, also control the panic area of the brain. (Yackle et al. 2017).

• Abdominal breathing let’s the body relax, while upper chest breathing upper chest breathing is associated with a high stress response.

  

• When the exhale > inhale, our bodies relax. When the inhale > exhale our bodies go into arousal. Try this relaxing sequence out the next time your are stressed.

  

6- Vision and Eye movement Exercises can relax the stress response system

• Our visual system is one of the strongest ways we can shift our stress response. Our retinas (back part of the eyes) are part of the Central Nervous System.

• EMDR and moving the eye from side to side can calm the brain. (Baek et al. 2019)

  

  

• In addition, eye movement releases tension in the neck, with the aforementioned benefits of that stress. (see above)

• Expanding our visual field to the panoramic view, and dilating the pupils can relax the stress response system. This can be done by relaxing your eyes, blurring the object in front of you, and focusing more on expanding the environment around you. Believe it or not, this is proven to relax the stress response.

  Watch the Huberman 10-minute breakdown of this here.

• Learn more about Rapid Eye Technology (RET) and Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy if this sounds interesting.

7- Being with Uncomfortable Feelings when triggered by others (versus avoiding them) helps improve our stress response in challenging relationships (this extends to race, gender, and other social justice issues)

• Leaving an intense situation to ‘gather your senses’ and settle into your body is a great way to improve relationships long term. However avoiding the relationship discomfort altogether can worsen stress.

• Diversity training does not address the idea that things like racism, gender imbalance, and white supremacy live in our bodies, not just our minds. 18

• Being more aware of bodily sensations (for example feeling your toes on the warm sand), touching your belly or chest, or connecting with nature in a way that brings joy all drive resilience and improved stress response.

• High-frequency friendships can help regulate our stress response, and decrease the impact of cortisol.

Are you ready to deep dive into some of these old patterns weighing you down?

Schedule a Free Call to Learn How

STEP 3 - How to Measure Stress: Subjective and Objective Measures

I hope that by now you realize that stress is a well-studied multidimensional phenomenon that is as physical as it is psychological.

Therefore, measuring stress accurately needs to take both objective physical biomarkers and validated subjective surveys.

I - Subjective measures of work burnout and psychological distress are critical data points

• 1- Self-Compassion Score: A 2024 study of undergraduates taking their final exams, showed that stress measured by a survey based on Dr. Kristen Neff’s Self-compassion Scores correlated with the level of stress hormone levels in their urine. (2024).

Get your score here

• 2- Occupational Stress: The Areas of work-life balance survey by Christina Maslach is an accurate predictor of burnout and occupational health. Click on the footnote to learn more about measuring subjective stress in the workplace. 19

II -Labs, Wearables, and Objective measures of stress

We can easily measure our biological Cortisol Awakening Response (CAR) levels to assess how stressed our bodies are.20

You may want to save your money on the new shiny wearable that claims to releive stress. Wearables claiming to improve stress by Heart Variability work in theory, but their studies are done in academic setting, with limited populations, and have not show to be conclusive in improving stress alone.21

Acute Stress: There is an endless list of ways to measure a momentary stress response all over the body.

• Pulse and Blood Pressure: The OG duo measure the impact of acute stress in the blood vessels. These can be measured with the hand or an regular blood pressure device.

• Heart Rate Variability via wearables: High variability means better functioning of the Vagus “Rest and Digest System”, while low variability is associated with more stress and increased risk of stress-related health problems.

• From the heart electric activity: Electrocardiogram (ECG)

• From the muscles: Electromyographic activity

• From the skin: Electrodermal activity (EDA) - one of the most accurate measures on this list.

• From the saliva: Cortisol or alpha-amylase (a metabolite of Cortisol). Saliva tests are not as dependable as urine.

• From the blood: Cortisol (Most popular, but most useless since it is a single point in time, and lacks the full picture)

• From sleep: As discussed below, stress and sleep are intertwined through cortisol, and sleep analysis via sleep study or wearable can show signs of stress.

However, other tests do a better job of capturing Short/Medium-term stress which is more meaningful since Cortisol activation happens over time and changes throughout the day.

✅ Urinary Cortisol ✅ (DUTCH test). I recommend this test for both its convenience and its longer accuracy.

• You can do it at home and measure cortisol multiple times a day so it shows a meaningful picture of what state your body’s stress response is in. For example, the blue curve here shows a normal cortisol graph, versus the orange where the body sustains a stress response until sleep time.

• The Urine test also measures Cortisone and other adrenal metabolites of cortisol which are important for understanding the bigger picture of adrenal function. Learn more about this from Peter Attia’s summary here.22

Urine epinephrine and norepinephrine

• These “Catecholamines” are good indicators of sympathetic system activation in the short-term. They can be measured using 24-hour urine samples.

Lastly, these tests detect the long-term chronic impact of stress on the immune system and promising results from studies measuring long-term cortisol levels!

• Interleukin (IL)-6: Measures inflammation from chronic stress but is not specific to stress. Can be altered if you exercise 24 hours before the test.

• C-reactive protein (CRP): Does not need to be measured several times a day, and is a good measure of chronic inflammation. Not specific for stress.

• Herpes virus antibodies (including Epstein Barr virus, herpes simplex virus type 1, and cytomegalovirus): Show that the immune system has been hyperactive with white blood cells, possibly triggered by the prolonged exposure to stress.

• Hair cortisol: 1 cm of hair has been shown to store cortisol for a month’s duration. So hair could be a good cumulative measure of stress23, just like HbA1c for sugar (more on that in the Gumption nutrition report).

APPENDIX: HOW IS STRESS RELATED TO OTHER FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE AREAS?

Exercise

• Exercise helps us cope with stress via energy expenditure24, hormonal balance25, and acting like a stress coach26. It also reduces various metabolic and cardiac diseases that stress increases the risk of.

• Exercise can also cause stress27 through injury, overdoing it, or thoughts of guilt around not doing enough exercise.

• Exercise has tremendous benefits on stress relief as long as we enjoy the exercises that we do. The evidence is clear that we generally require 20-30 min of aerobic exercise (where we don’t go out of breath) to relieve stress a few hours to a day afterward. We need sustained exercise over some time to get the benefits.28

• Abdominal muscles and posture have a huge role in stress.

• When we understand how exercise helps us with our work, we are likely to have improved health outcomes from exercise and be more consistent.29 (Crum and Langer 2007)

Sleep

• Stress impairs sleep, and sleep deprivation increases stress. Increased cortisol removes adenosine and deprives us of sleep, leading to more stress. This decreases melatonin, leading to lethargy, and low motivation. 30

• Anticipating waking up unpredictably at an abnormal time (such as in shift work) increases the level of stress hormones in the body.31

  Stress dysregulates melatonin, which disrupts sleep, and decreases your energy to get moving while stimulating your appetite for salty or sugary snacks. And here we are—caught in another vicious cycle.

Nutrition

• If a diet creates stress, it may be more harmful to the body than eating unhealthy food. 32(Godoy 2020)

• Diets have been repeatedly shown to cause weight in the long run. (Tribole and Resch 2020) This is likely due to the stress of comparing oneself to standards and going on diets that one does not enjoy. Stress can diminish the benefits of healthy foods.(Kiecolt-Glaser et al. 2014)33

• The gut is often called the “second brain”. Stress and the microbiome are bidirectional: Stress can cause digestive and absorption systems, and gut inflammation can drive a stress response by the brain. 34

• Stress and cortisol lead to weight gain and insulin resistance in many ways as the body attempts to store fat, and we crave more sugary foods. (Tribole and Resch 2020) 35

Addiction

• Variable rewards (think social media) and immediate availability (think Amazon Prime) are key drivers of dopamine-driven compulsive behaviors. This is very new to us humans. This rate of instant variable gratification and our stress response to that have both exploded over the past twenty years (Brewer). 36

• People who are “High Reactors” to stress are more likely to take on addictive behaviors. When stress is coupled with drug consumption, they both boost dopamine in the short term and deplete it later, amplifying each other’s effect. (Sapolsky) 37

• Vicious cycle: Stress can create the conditions for both addiction and relapse. Addictive substances relieve stress in the short term but induce more stress when the dopamine effects wear off. 38

• Returning to the same settings or stressful environments where compulsive behaviors were used to cope may be sufficient for relapse into addiction.39 (Think of someone who goes on a retreat and quits smoking cold turkey, only to relapse a few weeks after they return to work.)

• The tendency to fall into the loop of stress and addiction is heavily related to early trauma, early relationships, childhood conditions, and personality. This requires deep work to untangle emotions at their root, rather than dealing with the symptoms of anxiety and addiction. 40

• The “Rest and Digest” part of our autonomic nervous system is supplied by the Vagus nerve which is linked to the nerves of the face that help us communicate with one another. 41

• High frequency friendships help us counter adversity, and help us improve our longevity even more than losing fat and quitting smoking.42

• We have evolved to feel social rejection and physical pain in the same brain region. We experience heartbreak and pull muscles in the same way.

• When we get triggered, protective parts of us or “reflexive constrictions” are old patterns that block our ability to connect with others in new or stressful environments.43 Research shows that identifying and being with the uncomfortable feeling helps disarm these reflexes. (Menakem) 44

Thanks for reading the report! I hope you have found what you need in it.

See you next Sunday and don’t forget to bookmark this page and come back to it for more later!

Let me know when you get out of it in the comments.

Talk to us about the six week program

FOOTNOTES AND FURTHER READING

In each of the six essays, I will cover a different area of health, share the best science I have found, and offer reflections from my new life as a Volunteer at San Pablo Harbor and Farm.

This essay is about Stress, and the next five will be about Sleep, Nutrition, Exercise, Addiction, and Relationships.

But first, we have two exciting things going on!

👉🏽 Try out this gumption health readiness report and schedule time to inquire about the six-week program

📅 5 tickets left for the next Gumption Gathering on July 15th. Join us in San Francisco’s Marina District, where we’ll have tea, live music, and record Gumpcast conversation with Oshan Anan, founder of The World Folk Jam.

PART 1/6: Understanding the human stress response by staring at goats

I remember telling my mom as a seven-year-old that I felt like “something is chasing me and I have to keep running away from it”. She gasped and said I was “too young to feel that way.”

I remember thinking back to myself:

Too young to feel this way.

Was that how grown-ups felt like?

At 36 now, I know exactly what this feels like. I have been running for quite some time now. This is why I decided to come and volunteer on the farm. I got tired of chasing my tail into the quicksand achievements.

I wanted to be able to write this book, and if I were to write, I’d need my nervous system to be running on cool, flowing fluid. Over the past four years, I have developed a much healthier lifestyle that includes regular exercise, meditation, better food, and sleep to maintain that ability to create.

However, as long as I lived in the city and felt like I was struggling as an entrepreneur compared to everyone else with a full-time job, the stress still broke through my good habits and sent me spinning late nights, falling back into smoking, and isolating myself in my misery.

I could not imagine that a place might exist thirty minutes away, was an environment that could make me feel the exact opposite.

When I arrived at San Pablo Harbor, I could feel my nervous system shift into a lower gear. Dissolving into the pretty scenery. My engine slowed down as I drove through the winding oceanside road hugging the Bay, onto the green land of grass rolling down the hills, and was greeted by the Harbor Club House, with its white boats, colorful floating homes, and the vast open backdrop of the San Francisco Bay.

To the North is a vast open space, offering the hundreds-of-years-old Eucalyptus tree unhindered visions.

To the West, where the sun sets is Marin County, the Golden Gate Bridge, and mostly rich white people.

To the East, where the sun rises, is the smorgasbord of Berkley student activists, Oakland’s melting pot of middle and lower class, a few rich people in the hills, and great live music.

To the South, is San Francisco, the tale of two cities: one mega-rich stressed about what they have; and another homeless population buried under the stress of what they don’t have.

I was shown the garden, goat pen, and chicken coup that I would tend to, and then the bus turned into the cozy wooden cottage that I now call home.

Welcome to my home for the summer

It is perhaps not a coincidence that I find myself with this amazing life opportunity to spend a summer at a farm, so close to nature and animals, while I write my new book about how we can stay healthy in a modern world geared towards sickness.

The book covers the emotional roots of behaviors that lead to poor health outcomes and incorporates everything I have found in a decade-long research and personal healing journey.

I find myself writing the chapter on Stress right now, and thereby researching many of my favorite books on the topic such as Gabor Mate’s When the Body Says No, Judson Brewer’s Unwinding Anxiety, and Robert Sapolsky’s classic lecture and book titled “Why Zebras don’t get ulcers”.

“This is the critical point of this book: if you are that zebra running for your life, or that lion sprinting for your meal, your body’s physiological response mechanisms are superbly adapted for dealing with such short-term physical emergencies.

A large body of evidence suggests that stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping

The point is that the Zebra gets to relax after it escapes a lion. We humans, on the other hand, have carefully twisted our minds around endless to-do lists. Not to mention horrible bosses, stock prices, fashion, social media trends, relationships, heartbreak, war, news stories, text messages, complex social situations, Bitcoin, and every other dopamine-depleting trend in society.

In Unwinding Anxiety, Brewer breaks down each stress response that drives behaviors in a simple elegant format that summarizes most of what we know about human habits.

Our brains remember that.

I’ll need your brain to remember that too because we’ll return to it in a second.

But first…

Meet my Goats

As I write these words, I look outside the old squeaky windows of the bus and see a bunch of horned goats grazing the grass to my left.

I watch the strong ones lock horns with each other, defend territory, ensure survival, bully the non-horned ones, and rebel against my commands.

These goats are perhaps the most time-consuming and stress-inducing of my responsibilities on the farm. I have to take them out to graze twice a day, amongst many other gardening, chicken, and build projects I have to complete.

Bringing the goats back into their pen is a real bitch sometimes.

There are always four or five of them that will lock me in a game of chess, snatching more play time out on the field, and taking away precious time from me to finish my shift and go back to writing and working on the gumption health program. Not to mention, relax!

Since I arrived here ten days ago, I have been trying to figure out how best to bring them back into the pen.

Armed with all the science about behavior that I was reading and writing about, I decided to put it all into action.

Watch out goats, here comes evidence-based goat habit-hacking.

Act 1: Pleasure and Pain

The farm manager suggested the two options of Carrot and Stick, or in my case, the goat feed and the squirt gun.

What I learned this week is that neither works to change behavior permanently.

This is a lesson I had already learned while running wellness and behavioral health programs, but my agony with the goats was a good reminder of how short-lived pain/pleasure short-term rewards are.

The first few shifts comprised of me squirting at these goats like a game of whack-a-mole or Call of Duty. The water gun keeps them running away from me, but then they run in the other direction, getting further away from the pain.

The pain of the squirt gun works well when they have completely strayed into the restaurant or the parking lot and I need to push them out of there.

Trigger: Goats see water gun

Behavior: Goats run away

Reward: Goats Avoid Squirt gun

This was very short-lived. Yes, they responded to my squirt gun pain trigger, but they were not behaving how I wanted them to. Quite the contrary.

First of all, goats scared of the gun ran away from me, not towards me. This makes it impossible to guide them somewhere. Instead, I scatter them everywhere.

Secondly, the true rebels (whom I admire and hate) get pretty desensitized to the squirt gun if I use it over and over again in a fit of anger and frustration. I might have done that once or twice.

Don’t judge me. These goats are pretty fucking naughty.

Being less sensitive to an old trigger happens due to something called downregulation. It is a common feature shared by animal and human body receptors in response to a repeated trigger that gets boring.

Our receptors stop being responsive to that stimulus eventually. Our brains decide to shut it out like we shut out the world when we sleep. Things lose their novelty, and unless they generate a Coyote-level stress response, we stop registering them and so old behaviors come back.

Later that week, I learned about pleasure.

I figured that a certain chime sound made by knocking on the goats’ metal bucket brings them running back home for their favorite goat feed snack. I was at first pleased to see flocks of them rush into the pen, following my magical bell. It’s working!

However, the result of this approach proved treacherous. When I am holding the feed in my hands, these goats will corner me in the pen, and climb on my body and on the fence to reach for the food. Driven by the dopamine of food, the response now looked like this:

I was terrified of these hunger games that I had started. The goats stopped seeing me as a human and only saw the food in my hands. They were under the spell of dopamine. They stopped caring about where their horns went.

It was clear that the Pavlovian pleasure approach was not going to work out long-term either because

a) it was dangerous since they have horns and jump all over me if the food is in my hands and

b) it was still not quite the behavior I wanted them to do. Some of them would eat from my hand and if I did not trap them immediately in the pen, they went back out into the field.

By the end of week 1, I was quite deflated and frustrated by these goats. I started blaming them for taking away from my writing time and held a grudge that a feeling of defeat around their pen.

My adrenaline was rising. These fucking goats.

That is when I slowed things down and started observing (rather than trying to control) the goats. I still wanted to control their behavior, but I had become so helpless that I had no redemption outside of paying attention to them, and understanding what I was missing.

The answer to my goat worries soon started to show me itself.

Act 2: Understanding the Stress Response

As I braced myself to return the goats to the pen the next morning, I had blocked off an hour, practiced a new strategy with the feed, loaded my water squirt gun, and walked out on the uneven field ready to jam.

That’s when the most miraculous thing happened.

Without missing a beat, all eighteen goats lined up in the middle of the field in a straight perfect line, and within a whoosh of a second, they were all deeply tucked in the pen, begging me to close the gate behind them.

Bewildered by this scene, and lost for any way to understand it, I stared at them in disbelief, mustering a wide silly smile on my face.

How could this be? I didn’t even lift a finger. I had barely been on the field for a few minutes. Most of them didn’t even see me.

A family came wandering from behind the garden, with an old white-bearded man and his two grandkids. I looked at them, still with a silly smile on my face. “We must have scared them,” he said. I was relieved that someone else saw this scene and that I was not crazy. However, I knew that he was wrong. People are around the goats all the time, they never zap themselves back to the pen.

One of the grandkids came running to us with the answer.

“Coyote! Coyote! Grandpa! We saw a Coyote!”

Mystery solved. A Stressor event jolted the goats back into the pen.

That is how powerful the stress response is. It can jolt an organism and those around it, into an instant, sharp, and compulsive behavior.

If only that Coyote can come around twice a day and put the goats back in the pen so effectively for me.

Here’s what you need to know about the Human Stress Response:

Sopolsky’s description of the human stress response started playing back in my head. Here is a summary of what we know about the science of Stress as described by the latest evidence in the field.

When the world triggers us with a stressor, which it always will, the Brain tells the body to tense up and get ready for “fight or flight” through both nerves (the sympathetic nervous system) and hormones (adrenaline, cortisol, and glucocorticoids).

These changes shift the body away from luxury projects such as cell growth, repair projects, complex immunity protein synthesis, and so on, and use its energy more for running, seeing, breathing, fighting, and escaping.

For the vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short-term crisis, after which it’s either over with or you’re over with. When we sit around and worry about stressful things, we turn on the same physiological responses—but they are potentially a disaster when provoked chronically.

The stress response goes on for decades unhindered, our bodies stop healing, our hearts falter, our immune system weakens, our sleep is deprived, our brains feel exhausted, and our energetic and hormonal balances go out of whack. Stress does not cause disease, but it predisposes us to many lethal ones.

That got me thinking about the work that I do with people dealing with work-related stress, and how our nervous systems jolt us into all sorts of good and bad behaviors through these strong emotions.

These questions laid the foundations for my latest strategy.

Act 3: Compassion as a herder of better habits

The little scientific fact I mentioned above about our Brain being in charge of the human stress response is our biggest and only source of hope when it comes to healthy aging and the prevention of disease.

Chances are, we will not reverse the stressors of the industrial world, or cancel the news or social media stress, or ban advertising that makes us feel poor and ugly.

Our saving grace lies in our ability to stop the brain from producing high levels of stress hormones all the time in an unproportionate way to the stress and trigger.

This dawned upon me on a sunset walk down the hill, after a long day of work, listening to Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers on my phone, and riddled with stress about writing progress, my health coaching business, my social life, Palestine, the elections and my drama with the goats.

I walked by the pen now serving like a goat spa with perfect dusk weather and a gorgeous view.

I spotted a goat by the fence munching on hay, with its eyes closed, and its lips widened just enough to muster a gentle smile. It meditated, slowly chewing from side to side, closing its eyes, and traveling where I imagine Zen monks go in their minds.

I envied the fellah. This goat and I shared the same environment, why was I not as relaxed as this guy is right now? I have food, I have a home, and I have the same sunset.

The goat opened its slit rectangular eyes and stared right back at me. In that moment I realized that I was more like this goat that I am staring at, rather than the screen I am writing this blog post on.

I heard a banging sound on the other side of the goat pen. I looked across and realized it was not so rosy for all the goats.

A small brown non-horned goat, Cassie, was trying to get into one of the feeding stations, but a white goat came in between her and the food and rammed her in the belly with his horns.

Motherfucker! I ran inside and scolded him for doing that, and then it dawned upon me…These eighteen goats have different personalities, pecking order, and a clear hierarchy.

Here’s what research tells us about the role of personality and psychology on the human stress response:

Scientific research clearly outlines a propensity of certain personalities to be more prone to larger and more frequent stress responses to others, even if the stressor is identical. This is true even for genetically identical twins.

This means that by addressing certain aspects of our personality (which live in our brains), then we can modify and reduce the toll of the stress response by choosing not to treat the work deadline like a lion threatening our existence.

These patterns are highly associated with our brains deciding to flush our system with stress hormones, without allowing our anxieties to relax and our bodies to recover. The great news here is that these four factors are completely reversible.

I now believe that personality is the holy grail towards behaviors and long-lasting lifestyle change, that is the whole science behind the gumption health program.

If you’re in the Bay Area and interested in learning more about the health program set up some time and get your gumption report here.

When I saw that little goat get bullied, I finally learned why some goats are so ready to get back into the pen on their own, and why others wanted to stay out as long as possible.

These ‘rebel goats’ were not trying to defy me or undermine my authority. They just hated being in there with the bully alpha goats in the pen.

In this case, the goat’s stress response looked like this:

In this case, Cassie the goat was finding a stressor inside the pen and therefore wanted to be outside of it. In the case of the Coyote, the stressor was outside the pen, and so all of them were naturally happy to be safe in the pen.

That was when I realized my role as their herder: To help them feel the opposite of how the Coyote made them feel. If so then I can excite them enough to follow me into the pen.

In closing, the strategy of compassionate inquiry

All these realizations made me understand that I needed different approaches with different goats, and now I finally have a strategy that works.

When I want to herd the goats now what I do is:

1- Go where the alpha goats are and start rhythmically clapping to draw their attention.

2- Once the brave ones get closer to me, I show them a little bit of feed. The first one to get to me is the only one that gets the reward.

3- I walk to the pen dragging the highly motivated alpha goat and about ten other goats that follow him.

4- I go back out for the naysayers with the gun. Without the protection of the alpha ones, they are more receptive and go back in the pen.

5- I go back for Cassie and her two children.

They’re lways the last ones. I get close to them and kneel and tap on their heads and bellies. I shower them with love and care and perhaps offer a little treat bribe. Magically, they want to follow me. We get to the pen, give them some more treats, and pat them on their heads, and they say goodbye and walk themselves in.

Next Sunday I’ll share the Gumption Stress Worksheet covering a summary of Neuropsychology, proven lifestyle habits that change it, and ways to measure Stress in modern times.

👉🏽 Try out this gumption health readiness report and schedule time to inquire about the six-week program.

📅 5 tickets left for the next Gumption Gathering on July 15th.

If you missed the essay you can read it for free here:

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Do you ever feel like you are living in a glass box and unable to tap into how you feel? Today we’ll explore awareness of the mind and body connection.

In Today’s essay we’ll cover:

1- The myth of separation between mind and body and how research is clearly showing that they are one and the same.

2- The functional medicine model and using modifiable lifestyle factors to impact the mindbody connection

3- Internal Family Systems as a strategy for deeper and more sustainable healing from depression.

4- Somatic therapy and armoring bands where we hold trauma and tension.

5- Three guided exercises to practice reconnecting mind and body in a practical way. [For Members 🙏]

Disclaimer: This blog provides general information and discussions about health and related subjects. The information and other content provided in this blog, website or in any linked materials are not intended and should not be considered, or used as a substitute for, medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. This blog does not constitute the practice of any medical, nursing or other professional health care advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Somewhere towards the end of medical school…

I started feeling like I was a guy living in a big glass cube: isolated and muted from the world of feelings and sensations.

This self diagnosed depression was also self analyzed as my fault for not doing enough.

I needed to have more hobbies, go out more, study more, get better grades, hit the gym more regularly.

I was living a life of “I will feel __X__, when I achieve __Y__.'‘

Had you met me then in some kind of social gathering, you would see: A doctor-to-be with a great future ahead of him, given a privileged life by loving parents, surrounded by friends, involved in projects that he believed in, and a driven individual with a perfect life.

Had you really gotten to know me however, you would see the truth: A self-conscious and self-loathing individual, that is only driven by how people saw him, who was an addict, felt depressed most of the time, had troubled relationships, and was mostly beating himself up.

I walked around feeling completely numb to life, with short bursts of aliveness due to external events, but would fall back into a general grey monotone of a funk.

Symptoms started appearing soon thereafter. Namely:

• bouts of dysfunctional sadness

• narcolepsy (lots of sleep)

• social disengagement

• loss of appetite and libido

• a debilitating back pain.

My doctor brain went to medicine to try to fix its bodily problems. I went to:

1. a psychiatrist who prescribed Prozac

2. a neurologist and spine specialist who told me that “Everything looked healthy” despite the screaming pain in my vertebrae

3. a chiropractor who started giving me adjustments and massages.

4. A radiologist for an x-ray

I went on a depression and back pain rollercoaster ride. I would experience slight improvements and go back to more back pain, until I stumbled upon the game changing understanding that I want to share with you today.

Healing the Separation Wound and Regaining Our “selves”

It is now clear that the separation of mind and body that I learned in medicine is nothing but an illusion rooted in ignorance. A wound of its own accord: A self conviction that we can save ourselves without nature, that the rich can escape the suffering of the poor, and that each organ in our body can be healed alone.

This is eloquently debunked with hard science now with new research from various parts of the globe that show the relationship between personality1, immigration2, child maltreatment3 and more on autoimmune diseases in women, as well as a higher incidence of prostatic cancer in men with suppressed healthy expression of anger4.

Upon the emotional graveyard of what she could not afford to feel, Mee Ok erected an impressive edifice: a positive, can-do persona that not only kept her from experiencing her despair and impelled her to ignore her own needs, but also helped her achieve success beyond what she really believed was her due…Such hyperfunctioning on top of hidden inner distress is a recurring theme among the many autoimmune patients I’ve encountered in my years of practice and teaching.

Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (pp. 75-76). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Finding Functional Medicine

The first clue I found was functional medicine, which adopts a model of health that incorporates everything that we are.

Family history, trauma, and genetics impact our mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing which in turn affect our physiology, immunology and inflammatory pathways.

What was most liberating was that it promised a way out of disease via modifiable lifestyle factors. I started “hacking” my habits, my back pain and my mood. It worked for a while and I was excited about my data-optimized life for a bit as my health improved.

It made so much sense to me, and I became a certified functional medicine health coach.

However, I was still plagued by feelings of inadequacy and lived in a fear of the next episode of depression.

It was as though if I stopped doing these habits I would fall back into the spiral immediately, and I was working extra hard to make sure that never happened.

I needed something that helped me internally, rather than the layer of habits that seemed shaky and privy to life’s ebbs and flows.

A Deeper Path Towards Wholeness: Internal Family Systems

A few years later, after a big breakup, I found the first clue to a more sustainable path of healing: Internal Family Systems.

I stumbled upon it while reading Carl Jung and learning about the Shadow: that which we disown about ourselves and . I was frantically trying to make sense of the pain I felt in the breakup and finally found a therapist to work with who seemed to understand all of this stuff.

“The mono-mind paradigm has caused us to fear our parts and view them as pathological…we shame ourselves for not being able to control them. In other words, we hate what gets in our way.” Ph.D. Schwartz, Richard,

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

This was revolutionary for me, because it gave me a path to avoid over identifying with one feeling that was on my mind.

I started being aware of the overachiever in me, as a separate entity that I can talk to. Another part of me was the depressed guy that had an important message for me about how I lived my life. Suddenly I could hear him out and learn about what was making him so sad.

Even deeper, I could reach out to the younger insecure part of me that had carried wounds of insecurity and anxiety from adolescent middle school years and hold them with the tenderness and care that they yearned for.

This helped me realize that even if I were still living in a glass box of separation, I was certainly not alone inside of it.

The ice started to melt, and out of that process a certain feeling of confidence started to emerge in me.

I became much more outgoing, and I started tapping into a feeling of happiness I had only known from childhood.

I felt more like…myself. I started to love the guy again.

This was a very quick change to a problem that existed for a very long time.

“When we open to the reality of what is, even if we don’t like what is, it helps almost immediately.” Kristin Neff, Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive

As I became aware of more and more of these parts however, old patterns seemed to emerge out of nowhere: Beating myself up for not taming a part, or even worse, intellectualizing these parts of me and trying to fix them or discipline them.

In other words, I was still playing a mind game.

There was something else that was itching to heal.

Once again, I needed to go deeper.

The Missing Piece: Somatics and Body Sensations as Building Blocks of Experiences

The third piece of the puzzle came screaming at me through another back attack that was so bad I had to inject myself with pain killers to calm it down.

During the process of divorce, I somehow was lucky enough and clearly destined to be introduced to the magnificent Somatics teacher Staci Haines, author of The Politics of Trauma : Somatics, Healing and Social Justice.

She agreed that Internal Family Systems, while powerful, is done while sitting down, not moving, and was more ‘up there’ than ‘down here’. Even though it does go into the somatic sensations, it is still in the realm of the mind. Somatics then offered a new path for me to go deeper into what was blocking me in relationships and my path of healing.

As I started to learn and practice Somatics, I started to feel certain parts of my body that I did not feel before. My field of awareness expanded dramatically and suddenly what I understood intellectually started to become experiential.

The glass box I lived in started unveiling itself as a strong protective layer of armoring that Staci outlines as “armoring bands”. I was finally onto something.

This totally made sense to me from my years of medicine. There was this gigantic interconnected web of tissue underneath the skin called The Fascia,

‘I know this may sound strange, but so often what we are reacting to is not being able to tolerate what is happening in our own sensations, emotions, and experience. We react to get rid of the feeling, to push away the sensations, because they are associated with something intolerable, painful, and uneasy. Increasing our ability to “allow for” sensations and emotions gives us more choice and decreases our reactivity.’

Haines, Staci. The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice

This was all turbo charged by my Vipassana retreat which trains one to be with these feelings and accept the mindbody phenomenon as a continuum with which awareness and compassion as the way towards healing what ails us.

This is ultimately what brought me to the old wound of medicine, and being able to open these parts of my body that I had not felt before. As I know continue down this path of healing this wound of isolation, the sensations start coming back to me.

My response now is not to hold my breath or numb my pain, but to stand with dignity and courage and allow it to show itself to me.

“Lions aren't used to other creatures staring them down. It's a good tactic for life too; even if you're terrified inside, stare it in the eye.”
― Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home

Final Thought: A True Sense of Freedom

What I hope you take away from today, is that by increasing your awareness of your mind, your body, and the interconnectedness of mindbody, you can start building your body’s natural capacity back, regain old powers in parts that we have shunned away, bounce back faster in conflicts, and become more innovative, confident, and compassionate .

In the next health essays, I will tackle further aspects of Somatic IFS that you can do to improve your health and tackle various parts through accessing the breath, movement, resonance, resilience and touch.

Sunday Practice Session, Meditation and Research Links

Here are 3 guided exercises that you can try out this week to expand your awareness of parts of your psyche and the bodily sensations they hold. You can also find the research footnotes and written instruction below.

This is available to paid members ($7 a month or $65 a year) to continue supporting this blog and podcast.

If for any reason you can’t afford this but still want access just email me by replying to this email and I will grant you a complimentary pass - no questions asked.

Many thanks to all of you supporting this work!

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Health data is like a sonar for your long term health vision

I hope I have prepared you well thus far for what I am about to teach you today.

Over the past month, I told you that we are swimming in the dark when it comes to our health and that we need a vision for it.

We spoke about how realizing that and doing inner work helps us understand what is dragging us down.

And then we covered how to start building our boat of habits that can help you float through your health journey.

Today I will share how data is the final component that will give you a long term edge when you inevitably fail at your habits and feel too overwhelmed to be your best self.

Data will help you when you are your shittiest self. That is why I teach it, and that is what drew me into digital health and health informatics.

How can data become part of our toolkit to keep us going when times get tough and all our habits and healthy routines fall apart?

Data is the world’s sharpest double edged sword

The truth is that there is only so much we can do for our mindset and our habits, when our collective health is ailing. Our society has evolved in a way that is unnatural to our humanity and bodies.

That’s why we will continue to fall on our faces with habits.

The world we live in acts as a turbulent tsunami that shuffles our boat’s point of sail and can either wreck us or violently push us towards one of the icebergs we talked about (Heart Disease, Cancer, Diabetes, and Alzheimers/Dementia).

So today, I present you with the crucial component of learning about your health data and how we can use it as a sonar to navigate the dark seas.

Data literacy is the final and most important piece of the toolkit I described in these essays so far.

Data is the atomic bomb of this day and age.

Giving health data to someone that does not understand it, is like giving nuclear energy to a little child. The result is an explosion that we can’t undo.

This happens when our anxious parts get too attached to the numbers, but we do not know how to see them in the bigger context and meaning.

We are addicted to numbers and progress, and we are trained to shame ourselves when the numbers are bad. This stops us from seeing the truth, even if it is right in front of us.

That is why the I wrote the last two essays first about knowing yourself and building long term habits. Only then are you ready to become health data literate. Otherwise data will hurt and further demotivate you.

I’ve spent my whole career in the field of data analytics since leaving medicine. I had no background in data when I started my traveling consultant life, but I was lucky enough to have worked with brilliant minds in the field of data science that taught me a lot over the past 10 years.

My interest in digital health and informatics was always about: How can we know if our health is on the right track?

I will share with you the basics of what to track and how track it today, so that you can build your own health sonar device.

Before I do, I want to make sure you understand one thing:

My Truth

Data requires brutal honesty, and so I want to be brutally honest with you today.

In this past month of July when I dedicated myself to these four video essays about health, I snapped into my overachiever mode and fell off my habits bandwagon completely.

While I edited the last video about habits and motivation, I started falling into the old patterns that I was writing about. It felt like a self fulfilling prophecy of overworking and being unhealthy.

That person that I wrote about last time, as though he was someone in my past, has risen from the dead last week and reminded me of how alive he still is within me.

In order to accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish this month, I stopped exercising, prioritized work, lacked sleep, ate on the go and started smoking again.

This is the reason why I started making these videos, is to tell you that you will fail and that you need to build something to help you always be grounded in the bigger picture in these moments.

This sonar of data is what can help you see where you are going long before a crash. It is quite simple if you know what you are looking for.

My hope is that data and dashboards can save human lives. I believe they can, if we start using them in a way that makes sense to our own individual context.

The healthcare system collects data about your sickness, and it is getting smarter at predicting and curing it. However, they are not going to use their data analysts to make you life better. No way.

They are incentivized against taking any measures to keep you outside of the hospital. Let that sink in. No one cares about how well you live, hospitals just care about how long you stay alive after you have contracted a disease. That is what they will use their data power for.

So the truth of the matter is that you need to learn how to collect your own data and analyze it in a way that gives you foresight into what you are dealing with on a daily, monthly and yearly basis.

To have a meaningful sonar, you need to understand both yourself and data.

You need to be able to ask it questions like:

• Am I getting enough sleep? How long can I go with this much little sleep?

• How many days have I been smoking this month? Which parts of me or driving this increase/decrease in addiction?

• Is the exercise that I do helping me manage diabetes long term?

• Is the environment that I work in hurting my health?

• Is the food that I eat giving me the nutrients that I need?

You have to steer away from others owning your data and claim that ownership for yourself.

That is my message to you, because once you own your data, you can steer your boat effectively.

First, map out your family history, inner world and genetic history.

This is a one time exercise that teaches a lot about yourself with little investment. Repeat every year or as needed.

Let’s start with the basics.

Your family history says a whole lot about you, and it is much more than what you tell a doctor on your first visit and never talk about it again.

There are both complex and simple ways to go about it, but the most important thing to remember is that your family history and inner dialogue are the most important pieces of data to tell you what you are up against.

The most simple and zero-cost method is to become your own health investigator.

1- Map our your external family genealogy

Go talk to family members that are still alive.

Ask them what health issues they had and ask them about other family members too.

Find the patterns by organizing that data and visualize it using a family tree or a genogram/pedigree chart such as the one below.

What disease keep reoccurring in your family?

2- Map our your inner world using IFS or Somatics

We talked about inner work before because that is your inner family of personas living inside of you. Some of them do not want you to be healthy because they have other agendas (such as overworking and achieving).

To gain control and persevere through your health setbacks you have to understand these parts of you, many of which hold shame that controls you and keeps you locked in addiction or an unhealthy lifestyle.

Find a health coach that can support you in understanding this inner world. I highly recommend Internal Family Systems and Somatics for this part.

Ultimately you want to have another chart for you inner world that looks like this:

3- Get genetic and microbiome tests.

If you are interested in learning more and spending money, then do a 23 and Me, Color genomics or a gut microbiome to dig deeper into what you you have inherited in your genes, what your gut flora is made up of and what problems you need to solve for. This could be once in a lifetime exercise/cost.

All of this mapping out prepares you to focus and save money on the second step, which is about getting regular labs that show you how your body is doing.

Second, do labs annually, quarterly, or monthly.

We’ve all had labs done before, we all understand their importance, but we all somehow accept the cryptic results.

As long as we are not in the red and the lab or doctor are not telling us that there is a problem, we go back to our regular habits…until there is one.

Let that sink in for a second.

Not being able to read labs is like not being able to read your financials while running a company.

A bigger problem beyond that is that labs only come in PDF versions which are very hard to analyze (read: impossible to analyze).

We need to solve for both problems of biomarker literacy and understanding.

I am on a mission to help people understand their lab results because they contain crucial information for navigating you through health:

• Which disease icebergs is your boat getting closer to/ at risk of crashing into?

• What actions do you need to focus on in the next quarter?

• Are you getting closer to your health vision?

Answers to these questions become crucial during storms. This your only way of surviving the demands of society.

Here is a sample dashboard that I built for a client of mine who is trying to manage stress with a family history of heart failure and diabetes.

Here are the steps you need to build your health lab data sonar:

1- Get the labs you need to tackle what you have uncovered in your family history. The above list is a good start, but far from comprehensive. For a full list see links below.

2- Measure the labs that are related to family history problems on a quarterly basis, measure the ones that are not on an annual basis, and measure the ones that are both related and trending towards disease on a monthly or biweekly basis.

3- Collect all your results in one google drive for easy historical access.

4- Learn the difference between a “normal” lab test and an “optimal” result range. Remember that it is not binary.

Labs will only tell you something is off if you are in the red. However the yellow and orange states are far more important.

4- Learn a process that allows you to capture the lab PDFs into a google spreadsheet and create a visual way to represent it.

This can be a manual process that is time intensive or an automated process that has a steep learning curve. Either way it is worth the effort.

To understand your labs and be able to visualize them, it takes some time to learn.

This is what I want to teach you.

I will be breaking down all these parts in future essays and will get granular about each lab result, how to map that to your family tree and how to make sense of it all in a pain free way.

Third, track how you feel daily, weekly, or monthly.

Now that you have collected all the objective information you need for informed decisions, you are now ready for subjective data.

We are so driven by numbers and KPIs and we have been trained to forget about our emotional health.

One way to do it is to simply ask yourself how you feel every single day and you can use an app like Insight Timer - which is also my favorite mediation app, or you can track it manually like with this excellent visual from wellella.com.

You can also start tracking subjective measures such as burnout or wellbeing over time using any validated survey.

Validated surveys are another topic that deserves its own essay and I will break that down to you someday.

Here are examples of other work I have done for clients to support them.

You can measure your burnout overall indicator such as this:

Or track your fulfillment at work with a wheel like this…

Or visualize your self-rated areas of wellbeing.

After you track it for a few months, you can start seeing trends like these:

As I mentioned this is infinite and needs to be tailored to your needs.

Then, and only then, are you ready to add other layers of data

There are many other things to track and refine our health sonar with. There include but are not limited to:

• All kinds of freakin wearables to track vital data.

• Microbiome and bacterial swabs to track gut health.

• Specific genetic testing for cancers and other diseases.

• Meditation minutes, fasting hours, or

• whatever it is that you are into these days.

I will elaborate on these in the coming weeks and months.

For now, I wanted to help you prioritize so that you do not get overwhelmed by your own data.

That’s it folks, but more to come!

To summarize what we have covered on this four part essay on The Gumption Method for long term health gains.

First, create a health vision for yourself.

Second, explore you inner blockers and master your emotional health.

Third, start building habits that can sustain themselves beyond motivation.

Fourth, keep track of your data so that you can be reassured you are on the right path when all of the above falls apart.

Lastly if you find this blog helpful, please consider becoming a paid member to support myself and the Gumpcast team.

Support the Gumption

I’ll see you next Sunday,

Omar

Additional Links

National Human Genome Research Institute on Family History and geneaology

Full list of labs from Dr. Mark Hyman’s Function.health

Learn about optimal lab ranges on elevateme.ai

Fight burnout wheel of fulfillment

Fulfillment

8.1KB ∙ PDF file

Download

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Christina Maslach’s Research on the 6 areas of fulfillment

The patient will see you now by Dr. Eric Topol for a full list of the different layers of human data we will be tracking.

Learn about how data improves health coaching conversations.

Buckle up, kids.

Last week, I presented you with The Gumption Method: A realistic framework for long term health using Inner Work, Health Habits, and Data.

Today, we will talk about the most underrated and yet crucial component of our wellbeing: Emotional Health and how to address it with Inner Work.

I’d like to start by sharing a story that I received from one of my readers.

While you read this, notice the triggers that come up for you.

Noticing your triggers is half the battle.

“I find now, at 70, I am the healthiest I’ve been in decades. The number one reason is—and I know this is going to sound horrible—my mother died in 2021.

With her death, I finally feel free of being judged, free of being misunderstood, free of being criticized, and free of never feeling good enough.

How did I cope? For most of my life, it was through eating terrible food in response to the stress she triggered in me. And that made me feel predictably worse. When she died, I decided I had to take care of myself. Pure and simple, I wanted to feel better.

So I did. I now exercise, eat a mostly plant-based diet with some protein, and try to practice mindfulness. And as I said, I feel better than I have in decades. For me, and maybe for many other people, my emotions were in control of my behavior. That has subsided significantly since my mother died. We can’t underestimate the effect that emotions have on our behavior, for better or worse.

I don’t think behavior exists in a vacuum.”

This story shines a light on the issues we rarely discuss: the long-term impact of childhood pain on our health and behavior.

I relate to my reader - not because my mother is the same way - but because I grew up wanting to please my parents and needing their approval defined my life for so long.

It was the driver behind many heroic things I’ve done in my life: going to medical school, working hard to make it in SF, writing a book, and even getting married.

Dr. Mark Goulston, a renown psychiatrist and suicide specialist, calls it the syndrome of disavowed yearning. It is where high achievers seek external validation and later feel unfulfilled due to continued people pleasing.

Here is the point of today’s essay:

No Orange Theory workout, half-marathon, years of meditation, keto-diet, hours of intermittent fasting or climbing Kilimanjaro will give you better health if you do not start tending to your deepest wounds.

The idea is simple: Tend to your wounds and all aspects of your health will improve.

However, accomplishing it is complex.

Your physical health and your emotional liberation are like two strands of the DNA. They dance around each other and mirror one another.

Let me explain.

I’m not saying that trauma causes chronic disease, rather it is a huge contributing factor. The kicker is that this factor is reversible (unlike your genetics, for example).

That is why I believe that Inner Work is the first key to health, and wrote about this before we even get into health habits (part III) and data (part IV).

The science backs this up strongly, and yet your doctor never had a single lecture about trauma. Your doctor is actually experiencing trauma in real time and may not even know it yet.

I had a severe depression while I was an intern, and felt like I lacked resources to handle it, even though I graduated from medical school with honors. I even aced my psychiatry round. A Prozac prescription was the only thing I could think of.

It helped for a short while, but then I felt numb to the experience of life. I've spent the last ten years learning what my body and self were communicating through the depression and making lasting changes to support both.

Before I share what we can do about inner work, let me ground you in some new realities that the top thinkers and researchers are finding out.

The unconscious is a marvelous universe of unseen energies, forces, forms of intelligence—even distinct personalities—that live within us. It is a much larger realm than most of us realize, one that has a complete life of its own running parallel to the ordinary life we live day to day. The unconscious is the secret source of much of our thought, feeling, and behavior. It influences us in ways that are all the more powerful because unsuspected.

Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work

Let’s define (and speak about) trauma

Trauma is a word that is so overused in our politically correct world that it has lost its meaning.

We rarely use it in situations that are truly traumatic:

• death row sentences

• war crimes

• hospital wards

• child development problems/abuse

• chronic disease patient visits

Instead, we use it in situations that are not considered trauma at all:

• someone standing you up on a date

• watching a gory video

• someone having a strong political opinion opposing yours

So what is trauma?

Here is a definition by one of my personal heroes: Dr. Gabor Maté who has spent his whole life studying trauma and how it relates to our addiction, child development, chronic diseases and ADHD.

The word trauma has Greek origins and means “wound.”

As Dr. Gabor Maté explained, “It’s a psychic wound that leaves a scar. It leaves an imprint in your nervous system, in your body, in your psyche, and then shows up in multiple ways that are not helpful to you later on.”

It is a tragedy that we do not acknowledge this in society yet.

It is not what your mother or father did when you were 12. Trauma is not the bully that beat you up in the fifth grade. It is not the Nazis or the Zionists or Putin or Trump.

Trauma is the wound that your body carries today because of these past actions. The distinction is important. Trauma is not the external blunt instrument, but the internal scar tissue that formed as a result.

When we do not tend to these traumas, they live in our bodies, impact our health, and even get carried on to future generations through our Epigenetics.

You do not have to look far into society to find the reasons of why we cannot deal with our traumas collectively.

We use words like “Your precious feelings” sarcastically. We tell people to “Suck it up and continue working”. We numb mental health issues with medications instead of exploring why they are happening. We call women “too emotional” in the workplace. We tell men that our gender “does not cry”.

Welcome to the society that you live in.

In his book, When The Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Maté has defined 4 characteristics of personality that are driven by early trauma and result in disease:

1. Difficulty saying no

2. Automatic and compulsive regard for the needs of others without considering one’s own

3. Rigid and compulsive identification with duty, role and responsibility rather than with the true self

4. Habitual suppression or repression of healthy anger and assertion

Sounds familiar?

He describes that as a stress-prone persona.

Stress is a significant factor in the onset of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and cancer. But that research is…not part of medical education. Doctors are trained to understand disease as a random event usually caused by external agents — bacteria, viruses — or genetics. We’re not taught to look at patients’ formative experiences or multigenerational stress patterns. Yet both my own observations and the research literature clearly indicate that you can’t separate people’s bodies from their environments.

So what actually happens when we look in the mirror of our lives?

What heals a narcissist?

Notice the feelings that come up for you around the word narcissism.

Could you tell me why we find it so appealing to label politicians, celebrities and our exes as narcissists?

The answer is that it is easier to point our fingers at others than look at what we lack ourselves.

If you go on YouTube or ‘the gram’, you will find all these people talking about how they were victims of narcissistic behavior and warning people about it.

Let me take you back to the Greek origin of this word really quickly.

Narcissus was a hunter of great physical beauty.

He longed for love and sought many partners, but could never feel at ease with himself, no matter how much approval others gave him.

That is when a goddess seduced him into the forest and forced him to look at his reflection in the lake.

As Narcissus looked at himself, he fell in love with his own reflection for the very first time.

When Narcissus fell in love with himself, he then got swallowed by the lake and was transformed into a flower, which we now know as Narcissus.

That last part of the myth is weird, I know, but it holds the wisdom of this tale.

“Narcissism is a condition in which a person does not love himself.” Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul.

From this lens, the cure to narcissism (which is defined by an empty, unfulfilling life) is to look in the mirror and have your beauty reflected to you.

To improve our health and start living more fulfilling lives, we need MORE self-love, not less.

Narcissus is you, me and every human: 
We all want to be loved.
The lake is inner work.
The flower is a healthy life. 

“Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional” A buddhist saying made popular by Haruki Murakami

Darkness is the absence of light

Darkness does not exist as a unique physical entity.

Only light waves do.

The absence of light waves is what creates darkness, and most of us are traveling through our emotions in the dark.

“Shame hates having words wrapped around it. If we speak shame, it begins to wither. Just the way exposure to light was deadly for the gremlins, language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.” Brene Brown, Daring Greatly.

Your job is to shine a little bit of light every day, and to start understanding what is in there.

You may not like what you find, you maybe disgusted, you may tap into a feeling of self-loathing that is quite hard to fathom.

If you do - then you are doing it right.

It will get more palatable with time.

Remember that light can also be blinding, so take it one step at a time.

There are plenty of ways to explore our traumas and bring healing (or light) to ourselves. There is no ONE way, or ONE method.

It is more about cultivating a way of being.

Start somewhere.

Start today.

An easy and effective approach to inner work

At its core, inner work is getting to know yourself. Looking in the lake is something you can do alone, or with a facilitator.

I will cover a lot of the methods of inner work that have been proven to work over the next few months, but for now here is a very simple and helpful way to start practicing this everyday and to get to know yourself.

A simple and safe method to get you started:

Set 10 minutes aside every day. Best if this is the first thing you do in the morning.

Ask yourself: Who is Here?

• Start writing whatever comes up in response. Treat this as though you are getting to know someone.

• See if you can identify that voice that is responding to you as a personality that has needs, fears, desires, and so on.

• Write it out as a dialogue that is between you and that part. Imagine yourself writing a script.

• Treat it like a friend who came to visit you and needs to get something off their chest.

• Do not overthink it. Do not think at all. Just write whatever comes up until the timer ends.

• Be welcoming to that part of you that answers your initial question.

• See if you can give it space to express what it wants.

• If you judge what is coming, note that, and keep going.

• Your goal is to be friends with that part of you.

• In the end, thank that part of you for showing itself.

• Tomorrow, it might be the same part or a different one.

• Do it for a week, and see how many sides of you show up.

I am writing this series while launching my practice in San Francisco to put this proven health framework of inner work, health habits and data into practice with a handful of clients.

Join the Waitlist

Further Reading:

• Start following Dr. Gabor Mate, and read his books: When the body says No, and Myth of Normal.

• Read about Internal Family Systems and “Parts” psychology by reading No Bad Parts, and watching this Dick Shwartz and Rick Roll podcast.

• Learn about Somatics from my last Gumpcast guest: Staci Haines and her book: Politics of Trauma.

• Learn about psychedelics and how to explore them safely (and if they are right for you to begin with)

• Learn about Shame from Brene Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability lecture series/audiobook.

• Other excellent readings for more advanced gumption seekers: Care of the Soul, The Tibetan book of Living and Dying.

• Listen to Awareness

See you next Sunday where we will dig into the myth of motivation, which kills our habits early in their development.

✌️

Omar

Humanity is on the cusp of an exciting new way of being.

We dare to imagine living a chronic-disease free life in our fifties, sixties and seventies. A life that is fulfilling, both emotionally and cognitively.

It is an exciting time to improve our individual and collective health.

I have spent my entire career searching for that exciting new health frontier.

First as a doctor, then as a clinical data/digital health strategist, and now through my functional medicine practice.

While my career path has set me up to understand “the human body”, I received my true education when my body stopped working properly.

Over the years of my medical and data careers, I developed a:

- crippling depression in my last year of medical school (requiring prozac)

- terrible back pain in my late twenties (requiring analgesic injections)

- flirtation with insulin resistance (HbA1c of 5.6%) in my early thirties.

Today, I am 35 and I live a life that is free from all three (and their required medications).

There was no panacea. No silver bullet. No shortcuts. It continues to be a daily practice to keep those ‘health icebergs’ from sinking my ship.

My appetite for studying my health and my behaviors led me to address these issues in my twenties and thirties.

It would’ve been easy to numb these experiences with medications until they become huge problems twenty or thirty years from now. At which point, I would go see a doctor and s/he would tell me to do the things I am doing now to battle these demons.

Today, I present you with a process that you can follow to identify your own health problems before they become insurmountable.

I feel confident that you too can achieve this.

That is what I want for you.

But first you must understand this: If you neglect your health in your thirties, forties and fifties, NO ONE will give it back to you.

This may become possible with more research going into longevity drugs and precision medicine, but I doubt that this will be available for you and I. Maybe our grandchildren - or their grandchildren.

What we know for sure, is that if you do not take full ownership of your health right now, no healthcare technology, institution, or amount of money will bring that back to you.

Not your hospital.

Not your insurance.

Not your lab.

Not your doctor.

These entities care about your sickness, not your health.

That is what we train them for.

That is why most doctors are leaving medicine now, like I did it 10 years ago. It is not an industry that leads with health.

We built it to prevent death, and it only does it effectively after we have contracted chronic diseases.

That is why many people spend their last twenty years (post retirement) living as patients rather than humans who are enjoying a life that they have created.

Understand that deeply.

Frankly, I don’t think anyone should care about your health more than you (and your loves ones).

Over the past century, we have collectively exchanged our wellbeing with the glory of work.

“I will sleep when I am dead,” says a walking zombie in the office as he pours his fifteenth cup of shitty coffee.

It is a travesty.

People are leaving their jobs to prioritize their health. We realize now that our health is the true north star.

I am here to invite you to wake up and join us.

I want you to enjoy the life you have built.

Otherwise, what is the point of all this work?

A Realistic Framework

I call it The Gumption Method for now.

This will help you achieve a balanced view of health with long term gains (provided you are ready to put in the work).

It has three crucial components that complement each other.

1- Inner work and vision: What do you long for and what is holding you back from being healthy?

2- Habits and Practices - What system do you need to put in place for long-term gains that do not depend on your motivation alone?

3- Data (Objective & Subjective) - What problems lie ahead? What is working and what is not?

By iterating through those three elements, you will gain immense clarity on what you want for yourself and you’ll start improving daily.

By studying your own body, emotions, and habits, you can stop sacrificing your health to satisfy others.

This is your responsibility, and you have to start now!

I leave you today with three practical steps to apply what you know from business to your health. 👇

Start treating your health like your business.

Since we all know how to make money, allow me to use our day to day lingo, to help you start ‘making’ health as well.

Step 1- Figure out your Vision, Strategy and Tactics

Let’s be clear: 
Health requires daily tactics
tactics require strategy
strategy requires vision
vision requires deep inner work
Inner work requires looking at trauma

Here is a simple exercise you can do right now to get started:

• Create a list of things you want for your health (Mine are a healthy back, life free of depression, and Type II diabetes)

• Visualize it to make it tangible. (Mine is I imagine myself sitting at a desk writing fiction when I am an eighty-year-old man. I would like to speak to my readers and interact with them. To achieve that, I need to be energized and not be bedridden in a hospital with disease or depression.)

• Write a statement starting with I am a commitment to… (Mine is I am a commitment to living a life that allows me to stay healthy and creative for as long as possible.)

• Put that statement somewhere visible. This is your declaration. It has to feel good, real and reasonable.

This step requires you to know yourself really well, and it also requires you to map out what inner obstacles are stopping you from achieving this vision.

Digging deeper takes effort, but the rewards are great. Your ability to regulate your emotions will pay off for the rest of your life. Learn that now.

I will go into these methodologies for inner work next Sunday, but you can listen to my Gumpcast episode on Internal Family Systems and on Somatics to get a flavor.

Step 2- Start with small sustainable investments

We like talking about health being like wealth, but how many of us treat health the way we treat money and investments?

We spend AT LEAST 40 hours making money every week. How does that compare to how many hours we spend ‘making’ health every week?

Do you ever check the ROI for your health investments? Do you check your labs the same way you look at your bank account?

"Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement." James Clear, Atomic Habits

To figure out what investments you need to make, you’ll want to map out your vision from Step 1 into:

- key focus areas of health (depression management, diabetes prevention, avoiding hypertension, etc.)

- and specific actions related to each area (meditate every day, HIIT exercise, stop eating sugar, etc.)

You’ll need to:

• Research which actions can really help you

• Understand which of these actions will bring you joy

• Start small and go long. Remember that you are building for the rest of your life, so meet yourself where you are at.

  • Want to run? Start with 10 minutes of HIIT exercise at home.

  • Want to go to the gym more and lift weights? Start with 5 push ups daily.

  • If you want to do a 10 day Vipassana retreat, start with 30 minutes of meditation.

Make it reasonable.

• Use a method of accountability that works for you (text a friend, use an app like habit share, print out a calendar and mark an X on each day you do the thing).

• Gradually add challenges. Make it harder over time, and your dopamine system will thank you.

• Reward yourself.

• Iterate, iterate, iterate.

Step 3 - Leverage data and measure progress

Longevity expert Peter Attia has this great metaphor about our health being like the Titanic, cruising in dark waters and trying to avoid the iceberg. He refers to heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and type 2 diabetes as "The Four Horsemen".

You can learn a lot about what challenges (or icebergs) lie ahead by looking at your biomarkers, lab tests and genetics.

The problem with labs is that they give you a healthy range - not an optimal range. You must learn what optimal is.

Look beyond what they consider “normal” to support yourself long term. You want to solve for optimal.

If it was not for a high HbA1c, I would not have made the small investments to fight insulin resistance and reverse it. My lab results said that 5.6% was normal. But it was far from optimal (5.3%)

You will not get on the healthcare system’s radar until you are sick.

Therefore, you need to build your own radar. I will explain this in the fourth essay.

Next week, I will break down the Inner Work aspect in great detail. Subscribe to get notified.

In the end I wish I have convinced you that your dreams for a healthy lifestyle are possible, if you take small steps and think of the long term gains, and I hope that you can take sometime today to do one thing to support yourself, as you continue to support the world.

See you next Sunday,

Omar

Want personal 1-on-1 support that will get you the best long term results for your health?

Get on the Waitlist

As promised, are 10 ways I have discovered/created over the past couple of years.

What are yours? Let me know in the comments.

1- Open Monitoring Meditation:

Learn more about its relationship to creativity with Andrew Huberman’s podcast episode on the topic.

Open monitoring helps divergent thinking which opens your mind to the precise neuron activation that allow it to get into that creative space (as opposed to convergent or single point focus meditation).

Check out this video below, I think it does a good job at summarizing it.

2- The 15-10-5 method 

🏃 Move for 15 minutes (yoga-walk-qigong)

🌬️ Focused breathing for 10 minutes (surface the emotions using diaphragmatic breathing)

🧘 Meditate for 5 minutes. (allow the insights to bubble up)

Then get into a creative zone and work on something.

I came up with this one, it works for me!

Let me know if this helps you.

3- Good morning and Good night method

This one really helped me stay motivated and creative throughout my novel.

The idea is to work on a creative project first thing in the morning and before you sleep.

It creates a really powerful feedback loop.

The gold shines through when you lay in bed and think of what you will create the next morning.

You let your creative project work itself out in your subconscious while you sleep.

It also helps you get out of bed in the morning because creativity is play.

Try it and thank me later.

4- The Rick Rubin Process

If you have not read The Creative Act: A Way of Being yet, do it.

It is a book that I anticipate reading for the rest of my life.

5- Morning Pages:

This is from The Artist’s Way: Wake up and write three pages of pure stream of thought. Do not judge it, do not read it, and do not think about it.

Just let it out, and then go create.

This is powerful and has helped me a lot. The idea is that you let go of all the feelings that block you from creating, and after the pages are written, you have a clean slate.

6- Internal Family Systems

If you know me, you know how much this process is helpful to me. I use it in my coaching and have been in therapy with it for years.

The idea is that you have inner protectors that stop you from accessing more vulnerable parts of you because they are too painful.

However these inner parts are what hold a lot of creative juice. We did an episode on that earlier:

7- Other methods of fighting demons. 

If you go to therapy,

or do yoga,

or art therapy

or have a deep truthful conversation with a friend,

you are still tapping into the deeper well of human experience and creativity.

Remember that your creativity is just your demons unleashed.

8- Research not consumption

We all consume media in all forms all day.

The next time you are listening to a podcast or watching a youtube video, take note of what ideas resonated strongly with you.

See if you can stitch a group of ideas in a new way that makes it your own.

9- Change your scenery and Observe

Another concept from the Artist’s Way is the Artist’s Date - you basically take your inner creative child out for a date to get him/her inspired and nourished.

It really works.

Go out for a walk.

Watch a mother carry her baby.

Witness birds hover over a cafe.

Smell freshly baked pastries.

Watch a construction worker smoking a cigarette.

Hear the sounds of traffic.

Watch a father play with his son.

Hear a conversation between an investor and a founder.

Take in the human experience, and see what observations make you curious.

Make something out of that.

10- Write a letter to a friend

This is pretty straightforward. To be witnessed is to heal. That is why having a penpal has always been a worthy endeavor.

Write a long letter to a friend that lives far away who you do not see often. Tell them about your creative pursuits.

Get the juices flowing.

Simple but powerful.

There is an infinite number of ways to be creative.

This is my main message today.

If this was helpful, don’t keep all the gumption to yourself…

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