Mo Gawdat, Africa Brooke, Bear Grylls: 4 Moments On The Diary Of A CEO That Changed My Life
Guests: Mo Gawdat, Africa Brooke, Bear Grylls, Mel Robbins
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Since starting the Diary of a CEO, one of the most popular questions I get asked is, what are your favorite episodes? And what are your favorite guests? Now, I don't think about it in terms of that. I think about moments and insights.
So in this episode, we're going to do something a little bit different. I'm going to show you four moments from the Diary of a CEO that genuinely changed my life and changed how I think about one of my core beliefs that I then actioned that made my life better.
The other thing that you mention in your book, that little voice in your head, is this concept of neuroplasticity. It says it on the back of the book, it says "retrain your brain for maximum happiness." This concept that we can retrain our brain physiologically seems like nonsense. I can't change my arm. So when someone asserts that you can actually change your brain—
You can change your arm.
I can change my arm? What, a tattoo?
No, you work out. When you work out, you're building muscles in your arms, and that same exact process is exactly what happens inside our brains, and it's called neuroplasticity. The only difference is that you don't see it. You don't see it visibly. You can see your muscles growing because that's the function they need to perform.
But in your brain, what actually happens, again like computers, it's almost as if you loaded a new piece of software, a new piece of operating system on your brain. Literally, for every one of us listening to us right now, at the end of this conversation, their brain will be wired differently than when it started.
Every single instance of anything that you do literally rewires the hardware itself. The neurons that fire together, wire together. Imagine the old days of the switchboard. Steve wants to call his mom, so you crank your phone and the operator says, "Hi, how can I help you?" And you say, "Can you please connect me to that number?" And she would literally take a wire and patch you and your mom's phones together.
After a while, the operator constantly, every time you call, you ask for your mom, so the operator goes like, "Why am I even wasting my time on this? Let me just patch that wire to his mom all the time." That's exactly what happens in our brains.
If you perform a certain function, your brain starts to build networks that make that function easier to perform in the future. If you do it one time, it becomes a little easier. If you do it 20 times, it becomes permanent. There are tons of studies. If you take a simple task like tapping your finger on the table and you're requested to do that, say, 20 times every hour, after a few days you'll find that you're so much better at tapping your finger on the table.
You can do it much faster, you can do it consistently, and you can do it in the background. Gamers know that for certain. The problem with neuroplasticity is if you tell your brain to wire for tapping your finger, it will. If you tell it to wire for solving complex mathematical equations, it may take a little longer, but it will.
If you tell it to wire for hating people, it will become very good at hating. If you tell it to wire for fearing the end of the world because of what the media is telling you, it's going to become very good at fearing the world.
I know some of those people.
Absolutely, and you don't want them in your life. The challenge of our modern world is that we think that this brain is supposed to be there to make us successful. First of all, it's not the primary function of the brain. The primary function of the brain is to make you safe.
And then the secondary function that we push as humans for that brain to do is to invent iPhones and create podcasts and have amazing things. That's a secondary function. But believe it or not, before that secondary function, your brain is supposed to make you happy, because happy is the ultimate form for you to perform in life.
If you're not happy, you're not as effective as you could be at achieving survival. Think about it. If you're grumpy all the time at work, people don't like you. You're not focused. No one wants to help you. You're wasting most of your brain cycles thinking about the negative, and so you're not innovative or creative. It degrades your performance.
Happy is a better place for you to be at work because it will make your customers want to do business with you, it will make your colleagues want to help you out, and it will make your boss welcome you in their team. We are social animals by definition, and we want to have that in our life. The easiest way to connect and to open up and to discover the world is to be in a happy place. That's a primary function of your brain.
It's hard for some people because we can all think of someone in our lives who has certain wiring, very stubborn wiring that almost seems impossible to unwire. And I think we all have that ourselves as well, certain wiring in our brains where something happens and our reaction to that thing might be to catastrophize. It's the end of the world. That feels like it's a certain set of wiring where: trigger, and then the brain goes through the circuitry and it goes catastrophe, panic.
And the answer to that I found was to actually guide that person or yourself, if that's yourself, to the opposite of your wiring. If my wiring is to look at everything and see what's wrong with it, I should deliberately force my brain to look for what's right with it.
When I was coming here, it was very busy in the morning and so I came late, if you remember. And my brain's immediate reaction is, "Oh, what's going to happen? I'm going to be late for Steve." That's the immediate reaction of a brain because something is wrong, so it looks for what's wrong. I could also say, "And what is good about that? What is good about being a little late?" He's been recording for the last few days, so it may give him a little bit of extra time.
Do you want to know the truth? I was so happy you were late because I was late. So I was doing upstairs reading the book and I was thinking, "I just hope he's like 15 minutes late." And then I'm looking at my phone and I'm like, "Perfect." So I carried on and carried on, and I just finished as you arrived.
You see, that is the truth that your brain tries to deny you from seeing. And interestingly, you can train your brain. So basically, what you can do is for every thought, for every negative thought that your brain gives you, task it with the task of giving you a positive one.
Or two positive ones.
Nine, I say. Nine because in reality, if you look at life around you, more than 90% of life is okay. For your brain to contribute more than that as negative is not fair. Right? So if literally if your brain says, "Hey, by the way, this studio is a little warm," what else is about this studio? My friend Steve is there, the lighting is perfect, the crew is amazing, the coffee is not that bad, you guys got me honey. I can go on for hours.
And the idea is, by training your brain to look for that, what are you actually doing? You're firing the neurons together.
Gratitude.
Exactly. Your book basically says it is the answer. The answer is when you find gratitude. That gratitude journal that you kept for years every day, what was it telling you? It was training your brain to look for what's right. Your brain every night that you did it was like, "Okay, it seems he's going to be asking to call his mom a lot more often. It seems he's going to be asking for good things a lot more often. I might as well observe them. I might as well find them."
And so yes, you said some people are impossible to rewire. They're impossible to rewire if they've been practicing a certain wiring for 21 years. It's not going to take 21 seconds to rewire either, including me and you. It will take 21 days, let's say, for your brain to recognize I need different wiring. And it will take maybe 21 months for your brain to say, "And I don't need the old wiring anymore." And the game here is, can you actually keep doing that? Can you keep tapping your finger in a way that trains your brain that this is the wiring that you need?
Like can I keep going to the gym and working on my guns?
Absolutely. Believe it or not, research will tell you that a big part of being athletic is wiring of your brain, not your muscles. For your brain to be able to say, "I will go even if I feel a little tired. I will go even if I feel a little busy. I will go and I will do the right exercises even if the last push is a little painful."
A lot of people will hear that and go, "Well, what's the evidence for this? What's the evidence for neuroplasticity? Is there science?"
Oh, there is a ton of science behind neuroplasticity. Anything between neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Neuroplasticity is to rewire the connections between the neurons, and neurogenesis is to actually create new neurons, for example, if you're hit with a ball and part of your brain is damaged, how we can recreate that. If you have a stroke, how do you recreate that?
Ample evidence. One of the very famous stories is Matthieu Ricard, whom we spoke about him in the beginning. Matthieu's brain looks different than the average human brain. His insula is much bigger in relative comparison, his prefrontal cortex is bigger, and it fires more often. It's simply because of the constant neuroplasticity of "I need you to meditate, I need you to stay quiet." Some of Matthieu's journeys would last four years in isolation.
He would meditate for four years?
Be in isolation in a hermitage for four years. And so at that level, your brain starts to do very different things. And by the way, that's not unusual. Many farmers around the world live in isolation for a very long time. Believe it or not, you and I, when we spend a long time on airplanes—I chose a long time ago to not watch a lot of stuff. I maybe watch one movie, but not the entire trip. The other bits of silence, that's actually a form of meditation.
My absolute wonderful friend Jimmy Nelson, the photographer, he photographs indigenous tribes. The way he does it is he would go and spend a few months outside their village in silence, camping out there. He doesn't speak their language, he's just sitting there waiting for them to accept him. And then he would start to communicate to them in sign language because he doesn't speak their language.
And he's one of the wisest people I know. And I said, "How did you become this wise?" He never studied any of those things. And the reality is, it's because he's in constant reflection and meditation. He's sitting out there and he's spending hours and days in reflection and meditation because you're sitting alone.
All of those things are our habits. And all of us have the chance to do it. You could be on the tube for a commute of 40 minutes a day, and you could be in that commute cursing life, and that's a very good 40-minute exercise to work, and another 40 minutes going back. Or you could be spending the 40 minutes in gratitude. You could be spending the 40 minutes listening to music. You could be doing whatever. What you will do for 40 minutes a day will rewire your brain.
It really is like a paradigm-shifting thought that our brains are in this constant growth and evolution. But when we look at, as you said, my muscles are changing state, size, growing more fibers to achieve their objective in a different way. And of course, my brain is as well. And when you think about that, it's really liberating because you realize that you're not stuck with who you are.
Absolutely not. So let's choose which parts of it are we going to grow. I think that's the whole point.
And we grow it with our actions and our thoughts.
Repetitive actions, thoughts, and memories. Believe it or not, one of the interesting things is if you take a memory in the past and you think about it over and over and over, it's as if it's happening over and over, and you're growing the neurons that are needed or you're growing the connections between the neurons that are needed to trigger that memory.
Think happy memories. If you sit next to your partner and focus on one thing that they do and go like, "They say do this, they do this, they do this, they do this," and forget that they do a hundred other things that you love and appreciate, your neuroplasticity is making you completely obsessed about that one thing.
And you can only see that one thing. And eventually, some of my friends after a breakup, I go like, "So what happened?" and they'll say one thing. Like they obsessed about it over and over because your brain is growing to say, "He needs to think about this. I'm going to make it easier to think about this. I'm going to make it faster. More accessible."
One of the things I've heard you talk about a lot is your journey and your evolving relationship with sex and sexuality, and how that changed from when you were very young through the period when you were drinking a lot until today. Can you talk to me about that evolution and what you've learned about those topics that might benefit me?
Yes, absolutely. So I'm going to sort of keep referring to my sobriety in that period of my life because it was so transformative and it revealed so much to me, so much that I could have never imagined at the time. So something that also happened when I got sober, I think this was about a year into my sobriety, I realized just how much sexual shame I was holding. So much of it.
And I initially sort of wanted to fix it, wanted to do something about it. What are some surface-level things that I can do? What can I read? What can I sort of dive into? How can I deal with it from where I am now as a 25-year-old? But I quickly realized that I actually had to trace it back to see where it even comes from.
And I realized just like so many things, it did come from my childhood. Being raised in a Christian home, I learned—again not directly, more so indirectly—that being a sexual being was not something that was of God. It was not something that was supposed to be a part of who I am. Pleasure was never discussed, sex was never discussed.
Even intimacy in general. I never saw my parents hold hands. I never saw my parents hold hands. I never saw them kiss, I never saw them hug, I never saw any sort of affection. But I knew that they loved each other. I knew that they cared about each other. But affection and intimacy—I just never saw that, not for a moment.
When I sort of wanted to really understand where a lot of this sexual shame was stemming from, or just more so even outside of sex, intimacy—feeling very disconnected to other people when it came to intimacy, but also from myself—I realized that I could only be expressive as a sexual being if I was drunk or if I was high.
If I was in that place where, of course, my inhibitions are low, but I had no insecurities, I didn't have to feel like I'm doing something wrong, I didn't have to feel like my pleasure was wrong. But then when I got sober, all of those things came to the surface and then I had to look that in the eye.
So that also became something that I started sharing over time. As well as sort of sharing my journey with sobriety, I then started sharing the things that were revealed as a byproduct of me getting sober, and sexual shame was a huge one, was a big part of that.
My relationship with sex has evolved a lot over time. I think it was early in my early years influenced by porn, as it is for many people. So that's the way I went into the game. I just went in trying to be those male porn stars. And I think over time, and I think there's this wider issue in our society, specifically I've got to be honest, with men—what they think sex is in terms of this kind of very aggressive, often dominating, transactional encounter.
And then there's, again, I'm just talking freely here, I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks. But I'm seeing a lot in my close friends, they're often in relationships where they're having problems with their sexual relationship with their partner. They're basically saying things to me, and I'd say this is crazy, I'd say 75 to 80% of my male friends are saying, "My partner doesn't want to have sex. She doesn't like having sex."
And I was there at one point too. My partner said that to me at one point too. And I took it on face value. I thought they don't like sex. What I came to learn is that wasn't true. But what I'd learned to be sex and what I was bringing as sex, this kind of aggressive, whatever, was not the language that they spoke.
And I feel like I'm surrounded by men that need to start seeing sex as a language, because then you can ask yourself, "Well actually, she's speaking Spanish and I'm speaking English. That's why." It's not she doesn't like English, she just speaks a different language, you know what I mean? That's a lot, I'm just dumping that on you.
No, no, no. That resonates so much and I'm really glad that you said this because I think you're speaking something that is on so many people's minds, or something that they've just never really put language to. And a big part of my awakening, if you will, and really addressing that sexual shame is because I also learned sex from porn at 10 years old.
So by the time that I had sex for the first time when I was 14, it was very much like a porn performance to put it very simply. And I speak to so many people, men and women, about this very specific thing. A lot of us learned that we should perform, that sex should be driven by orgasm and ejaculation and this sort of production, if you will, which is not actually accurate for most people when it comes to what really actually feels pleasurable, especially for women.
So I started to realize when I got sober that every time that I was having sex, for example, I faked every single orgasm. It was all a performance. I didn't know much about my body because I'd learned from porn, and because the men that I was with had also learned from porn, we were just in a performance and no one's actually talking about it, right?
So in times where I was in relationships and I made myself think, "I don't want to have sex. I don't want to have sex anymore," it actually was not that. I didn't want to have this type of pornified sex. That's what I actually meant. So what you just said is really important. And I realized, that's when I first found tantric sex, actually.
Around 2018, because I realized that I had always felt like sex was being done to me, that I was not a part of it. And that is how most women feel.
I felt like I needed to apologize on behalf of men because that's what I came to learn. Was that the reason why the person I was with had turned around to me and said "I don't like having sex" is—and when we got talking about it after I acted like, I mean, let me be clear, the first time she said that, I did not understand.
My little Neanderthal monkey brain went, "What is this, something that I didn't do right?" Ego steps in, of course. Ended up breaking up with this person, got back with this person a year later when I was maybe a bit more mature. I apologized and I said I want to have a conversation.
And I also said to her that I'm going to be here regardless of whether we have sex or not. And then she had a safe enough space to start talking to me about it. And what I discovered is she'd had three previous boyfriends over the course of seven years. Her view of sex was this person comes and takes from you, treats you like this object.
And she was with him for five years. Treats you like an object, takes what they want from you, and then he was actually going and cheating on her as well. So not only was he taking, he was then hurting her. And that cycle just repeated. Her relationship with what sex is was really, really toxic. She didn't like that. She didn't want that anymore.
And that's what she and me probably referred to as this word "sex." So it was kind of like learning a new language of sex and what it actually is. That meant she went from the place of like, "I don't want to have sex anymore" to absolutely loving to have sex. And I didn't think it was possible. I thought if they don't like sex, dump them and go find someone that will let me take.
Right, and you know what? You've articulated that so beautifully in terms of sex being a language. And it's going to look different for every single person. Because something that I realized is that I could tell when I was with a man sexually, I could tell if it was like a script almost, like a play-by-play. Like, "This is exactly the method. We do this, we do this, switch into this, switch into that." It wasn't sort of flowing and very intuitive as to what's actually needed in that moment, which reminded me of porn.
And I would also realize actually—and this is something that I've spoken about so much because I ended up starting a sexual wellness company called Cherry Revolution over time—and I realized that even some of the positions I would get in were very much like porn because certain positions in porn are like that because the camera is there. Not because it's comfortable, because that's the shot for the viewer to be able to see it.
So when I started to see that I'm starting to replicate this in my most intimate private moments, but we're both doing it, I made myself believe that I didn't enjoy sex. So then drinking and drugs and everything that came with it, I felt like those were the moments that I could be fully expressive without needing to perform, which is very interesting because you would think it would be the opposite, that I would then perform more.
But I felt as if I could actually speak my mind. If I didn't enjoy something, can we try this? Can I do this instead? Or I just want to give or I just want to receive? Can we be slower? And then when I was sober, I felt like I couldn't say those things. Because if I say it to you as my partner, I might be emasculating you, I might be embarrassing you, you might think something is wrong.
So I would just perform, and you're performing as well. And then it just causes a huge disconnect. So tantric sex was the first thing that I came across that made me realize and really articulated that sex is actually not a specific destination. Did you know that you can actually enjoy sex without an ejaculation? That you can have a full-body orgasm, that you can be very slow, that foreplay can be the main thing that you do, that you can experience orgasm without penetration?
Just so many different ways of articulating that experience of sex. And it's just that—an experience. And that changed so much for me.
It's such a narrative violation for so many people who have spent their whole life watching porn and then recreating it—this idea that you can have an orgasm from touch, that you can use energy to cause someone orgasmic pleasure. I think people need to talk about it a lot more.
And I think just saying to someone that's listening to this that might be in a relationship where they're in a sexless relationship—just proposing the idea that what if you both just speak... say there was 10 languages. What if you're just speaking the wrong language? And what approach would you then take? You'd probably try and learn the language and also communicate to them what language you speak and see how you can be bilingual, I guess.
You know what? It reminds me of—are you familiar with love languages and that whole thing? I realized that a lot of people expect someone to give in the way that they like to receive, you know? So no one really says, "Okay, how do you like to receive love? How do you like to give love?" And the moment that I started asking those questions—even though I believe me, I fucking cringed in the beginning, I'm like, "Really, am I going to ask this?"—it's been a game-changer to just ask the person that I'm dating or my current partner to be like, "How do you like to be loved? How do you like to receive love? And how do you like to give it?"
Because just those simple questions can change so much, and then you can use the same with sex. What do you like and what do you not like? What have you changed your mind about? What do you like to do now and again or maybe not so much sometimes? How much time do you need? How does your arousal actually work?
And I know that some people might not know how to answer these questions for themselves, so it's actually very good to start asking yourself those questions before speaking about it with someone else, because I think we get into relationships and make so many assumptions based on our individual experiences and our worldview, and we expect the person we're with to reflect the exact same thing back to us, but we don't ask questions.
I watched a lot of interviews of you before you arrived here today, and I think in pretty much all of them you said, "I'm a normal guy, I'm a regular guy." And I get that, I understand what you're saying. However—
Well, it's not false modesty. I don't want to—I'm not going to let people build me into something I'm not, you know? And I think as I get older, I know the frailties more and more, and I'm not ashamed of them. Do you know what I mean? It's okay. Many mistakes, many struggles. It's okay. Otherwise, things become all too—you know, it's hard to relate to.
But you got through SAS selection.
Just. I got through all these things just. And people turn to you and said things and as they turned back and quit, right? That for me is a filtering process of something. Whatever that something is.
Resilience, all it is, is it's something we can control. It's not a filtering of talent. It's not a filtering of "you're brilliant, you're through, you're not through." The genius of selection for the special forces is it's all about heart and spirit, and we can all have that. That's not a God-given talent. That's a muscle that builds with walking through the door of failure time and time again and keep getting back up.
So I like that. It's why I say I am an ordinary person and it's why I also say "just" to so many things, because yes, I passed or yes, you reach the top of this mountain or yes, you do, but it's always "just." And that's okay. And it's also often by standing on the shoulders of many giants who have helped me.
Many times, if I think of SAS selection, there were so many times where somebody just believed in me at a critical time. It might have been something where two corporals running something go, "Do we want that guy? Do we want that guy?" A bit of luck falls on your side, somebody backs you, or you know, just—the more I look back at so many so-called achievements, the more I see the hand of good people in critical moments.
But as you know, you have to win the hearts of those people in the first place, but also the role of just that dogged determination to keep going. And that's not a thing of being brilliant, it's just trying to keep going, often sliding another step back but keep moving forward.
And you say that to... I've got three boys now, three teenagers. And I think if you said to them what one thing does your dad say to you day after day before you go to school? It's always just, "Don't give up. Never give up. Be kind. Be determined, but never give up." And they roll their eyes, but you know what, one day they'll know that's the key thing of life. You don't have to be the best, just do your best.
Did that resilience muscle, as you call it, grow over time?
Of course, just like everything. It's like the little seeds to the mighty oaks. How do we build it? Just inch by inch. And that's a great thing because it's not something only some people can have. It's universal for us all. We can all become... people think it's a God-given gift for someone to be resilient. Resilience is that muscle and you build it by failing and trying to stay positive and trying to get back on your feet and going again.
I look back and I remember being really excited about being picked for the fourth 11 football team as a linesman. I wasn't even in the team. And it was like my job was to bring on the oranges at half-time. But I remember my dad was the only dad on the side of the pitch cheering me on. I thought it's so embarrassing, I'm not even in the team and Dad's come to kind of—but actually those little steps of like, "I'm going to do this and I'm going to bring on those oranges," you're never going to forget it. It's going to be great.
Incremental tiny little things. But having to fight for things, you know? How often do we see at school the school hero actually in life doesn't always do that brilliantly. And why is that? It's because schools reward that, but they've never tested this.
Where little Johnny, who doesn't have that, doesn't get the awards, is a linesman bringing on the oranges, struggles, doesn't even get noticed, never wins anything, but never gives up and keeps doing his best and still doesn't really get noticed, but doesn't matter. But when he leaves school, this might not be the biggest thing, but this is like ninja-like. That resilience muscle inside is strong. And as you know, and as I know, in life that's the one that is going to carry you further. And the unseen people at school often do better in life. It's like don't peak too early. Don't peak at 14.
I certainly didn't. I sat here with Eubank, and I've been thinking about this idea of resilience and what it really means. And as we sit here today, my current hypothesis is basically resilience is the story—it's kind of this contract you have with yourself, this self-story about who you are.
And in those moments where no one is looking—I was talking to Eubank about me being on the running machine and knowing I've got two minutes to go because I said before I started I'd run until 45 minutes, but my legs are hurting and they're cramping. And I could give up and walk away and no one's going to know because no one's here. But what I ultimately do is alter my own self-story in a way and I send a message to myself that I am the type of person that gives up when it's tough.
So do you relate to that? This kind of crafting this story about who you are to yourself with every small decision you make? Doing the linesman job, you said "I'm going to do it the best I possibly can" and although it's not what I wanted, I'm going to give it everything I can and not give up.
Yeah, and also I think the thing of giving up is that, you know, what is it? Temporary pleasure, long-term—not, you know? And for me, I just developed this thing where whenever people were quitting or complaining, I like those moments.
For me, it was like, okay, this is where all the chat and the bravado is always there at the beginning. Everyone's full of that. But bring it down, put the squeeze on. We're like grapes. Squeeze us, you see what's inside. Bring the squeeze, bring the squeeze, now we see character, we see what people are like.
And for me, it just became whenever I saw people quitting or complaining—especially complaining, you see it so much—in the military you see it on big expeditions, you see it even when we're filming TV shows of people, when it gets hard and you're hungry and you're scared and you're up against it and you're dehydrated—those are the moments.
And for me, it just became a trigger: whenever everyone's complaining and giving up, it's time to give more. You don't have to give more in the early times, just wait until it's... and that's how you separate yourselves in business and in life and in relationships. In the big moments. Look at a relationship when you're under that real tension, is everyone throwing that nasty comment or are you going to hold it and just try and be gracious and kind in those big moments?
And I like that. It wasn't complicated to think about under pressure. It was just like when everything's going wrong, that's the time to give more rather than give up. And I held on to that in many difficult moments across many different arenas. And it's helped me.
I remember this guy saying to me once, he said, "And you can do anything for another 10 seconds." I like that. When you're in that moment, you keep going another 10 seconds.
That makes you different though. You've got to admit, because most people don't want another 10 seconds.
Well, it hurts. It hurts. I'm not saying it's not going to hurt. It's going to hurt. But that fire inside is in us all. You've just got to dig sometimes. But it's a great truth to know that it's there when you dig. It is there. And I think, as you say, once you get used to it and you start to practice it, the muscle gets stronger. And then you almost seek out tough times because you know this is a chance to shine. And as you say, that's how you separate yourselves in life. You're going to reach these points, but in those big moments, how are you going to act in those big moments? And it's always what separates reaching those summits from not reaching those summits.
When you look back on the person you are now and the tremendous wisdom that you've just demonstrated just speaking to me just then—do you recognize the Mel that was, couldn't get out of bed, was feeling depressed, couldn't find, you know, describe herself as being lazy? Do you recognize that person? And what's at the very essence in the engine room that drove that change? Was it passion? Was it finding your calling?
Dude, it's also been 31 years. I mean, come on. I've been changing for as long as you've been alive, for crying out loud. So and also human beings are designed to grow.
But not everybody seems to.
Because they don't understand being stuck. Being stuck is one of the most universal feelings of the human experience, and nobody understands what it is.
What is it?
Oh, it's amazing when you hear this. It's like... so remember how we've talked about how human beings have this crazy amount of natural intelligence wired into us. And inside your body, we've talked about one of the signals: anxiety. Anxiety is a signal that means pay attention. That's why you go into fight or flight, you're in an alert mode, okay?
That's all it is, it's a signal, an alarm system. And your body has a sophisticated system of signals and alarms. And they are all tied to fundamental needs. Anxiety is tied to your fundamental need for safety. That's why it's a signal. Let's talk about your most important fundamental needs. Let's go right back to psychology 101, Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
You need food or else you die. So when you need food, what is the signal that your body sends you? Hunger. When you need water, what is the signal? Thirst. When you need air? You're catching your breath. When you need rest, what do you feel? Tired. When you need connection, what do you feel? Lonely.
Human beings are designed to grow. When you've stopped growing, what do you feel? Stuck. Or stagnant, or still, or trapped. Feeling stuck is a signal that you've stopped growing. That's it. And when most people feel stuck, since they don't understand that it's tied to a fundamental need for growth, we believe it's an existential crisis and we blow up our lives.
For most human beings, what actually will get you feeling like you're not stuck is having something in the future that you're looking forward to. Or taking a class where you're learning something. Or changing a routine so that you try a new class at the gym. Learning anything gets you back in touch with a fundamental need, it makes you start to feel like things are moving, and from that place of feeling a little bit more empowered, you'll be able to make better decisions about what big things need to change in your life.
And would you also describe that as a moment where your life has like an absence of purpose? I think about various examples—Olympians that come back from the Olympics and they have an 80% chance of depression after they've... and then I think about people who have lost purpose in their lives for whatever reason, been fired from their jobs or whatever, or people that are in jobs that are absent of purpose completely.
That feeling of being stuck—and then we talked also about the importance of goals and ambitions going forward. When humans don't have that forward ambition or that thing to look forward to in the future and their current situation lacks purpose, they become very psychologically disorientated. Would be the way I'd describe it.
I actually have a different take on purpose. I think everybody's purpose is exactly the same. I think your purpose is to share your true self. To be fully seen. And for the Olympian, when you are training and you're in that arena, that is an experience of being seen.
And for most people that are lacking purpose, they feel profoundly invisible. And being seen fundamentally comes back to whether or not you even see yourself. And when you start to feel empowered and you start to see yourself and meet you where you are, what happens is every day that you're able to stand with yourself, to accept where you are, to give yourself the compassion, to give yourself the support and the love and the worthiness that you deserve, you're going to go out into the world and share more of yourself.
That Olympic athlete is sharing more of themselves. And so I think our purpose in life is to come back home to ourselves, to reconnect with ourselves, and to empower ourselves to go back out into the world and share our stories and share our experiences and share our full selves with the rest of the world.
And look, if I can save anybody the heartache and the headaches that caused myself, that's a life well-lived. You know, if I can laugh at myself along the way, if I can punch a wall and drink a gin martini and then share with you like, "Okay, this and then get out," because how I got out of that—because I could have been in that cycle, the old Mel would have been there for a month.
"Everybody's out to get me, I never get recognized, why even bother, it doesn't matter." It allows me to share in real time that I feel all the shit, but I don't like to stay there. And this is not toxic positivity. It is important when you're disappointed to allow yourself to feel disappointed. It is important when you lose something to give yourself the grace to grieve for as long as you need to. It is important to have a good cry, to have a good scream, it's important to feel the highs and the lows—you're meant to feel it all.
But you can shorten the length of time you stay down. And what always helps me is I just kept saying to myself, I refuse to believe that if I'm a good person and that if I'm working hard, I refuse to believe that this doesn't work out. I refuse to believe that I'm not going to be okay.
Look, I know that this moment's going to pass and I know that I will look back on this moment five years from now and I'll see exactly what I was meant to learn. And redirecting your focus to what actually matters and the fact that you believe in your heart that you got the mindset, you got the work ethic, you got the ability to figure this shit out and to keep going and that eventually if you do, what's meant for you is going to find you, you will be rewarded for all this in the way that you're meant to be rewarded—that's amazing.
It's an amazing feeling because you can pick yourself up no matter what happens. I spent so long being dysregulated, having a nervous system that was constantly on edge. Like what it felt like to be me any moment in my life, whether it was sitting in a classroom or I was sitting at that law firm Bates stamping, or I'm sitting as a young mom with postpartum depression or I'm sitting in yet another job I don't like—is it felt like being in a car at a stoplight that had a green signal and the emergency brake was on and the gas was floored and I was going nowhere.
Just the engine revved and the sense that I needed to go but not being able to go. And when I finally started to get control of my own thinking, when I finally started to understand anxiety and how to quiet it in my mind and then how to quiet it in my body, when I finally got serious about understanding trauma and healing it in my nervous system first—through EMDR, through therapy, through guided MDMA sessions—I finally had the experience of being in my body and being safe and being okay.
And I hadn't had that in a really long time. And I'm so aware of when I'm not in my body now. I'm so aware of when my nervous system starts to go on edge that my tolerance for staying there is zero. Because I lived for far too long feeling on edge, anxious, dysregulated, self-loathing. That when I dip into that space—and everybody, you dip into that space once a day—if not like I used to live there.
And so when I start to dip into that dysregulated, anxious, on-edge, intense space, it's like get this out of my body. We got to get back into my new default, which is grounded, centered, in control of what I'm thinking, what I'm going to do next. And it's a fluid situation. But you just gave me the insight as to why it's so quick for me now. Because I've made a commitment to myself that after spending 30 years that way, 40 almost, that I don't want to live another year that way, another week that way, another full day that way.
Now, do I have things that happen in my life that are tough, that put me into a mode where I'm anxious and on edge? Of course. Do I disassociate when I get really awful? Of course. But I now have the tools to bring myself back into my body, to give myself the encouragement, the assurance, the support that I need so that I can face whatever's happening and know that I'm not only going to be okay, I'm actually going to be awesome eventually.
When your cat is acting weirder, or your dog is being louder, your turtle moves slower. Hello, Ted? Your cat seems thirstier. Whoa, slow down buddy. Or your puppy is acting clumsier. Day or night, if you don't know what's wrong, know where to go. Vedge ER for pets, this is Kate. Vedge, the better, kinder ER for pets.
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