Speaker 1: 00:01

Line's the fundamental problem with being human. He says we have a stress response designed for acute physical stress, so like just for now, just to fight right now. That's it. Or like running from a lion maybe or running from an animal. But we use it for psychological abstractions.

Speaker 1: 00:17

So in his book and in one of the podcasts notes I have of him, he says that for most species, anticipatory stress is short term. It just happens for the moment you need to use it and then it stops. You don't think about it more, we don't long her out and drag her out, we don't make things happen now that haven't happened. But in humans, we've taken that evolutionary logic and we've really abstracted it. And he says in the quote he says, And suddenly you're turning on stress response for things one thousand years in the future.

Speaker 1: 00:51

It makes no sense. Some people stress about their funeral. How are people going to do about my funeral? You're dead. I don't know, who knows?

Speaker 1: 00:58

But they're literally stressing about things beyond their lifetime and even before their lifetime. Crazy. So we turn on this same kind of high voltage machinery intended for immediate survival because of a thirty year mortgage or an awkward email or thinking about your funeral, right? So when we cross references to Basil van der Koch's The Body Keeps a Score, he looks at it from the perspective of trauma, and he argues that trauma essentially breaks the brain's timekeeping. But he says the brain's alarm system, the amygdala, is stuck in the on position, so he calls it the watchtower of the brain, the prefrontal cortex shuts down.

Speaker 1: 01:39

And he writes, Trauma results in the fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. And the result is you're not living in the present, you're biologically reacting to the past. So Sapolsky is basically saying we're sick chronically because we stress about the future. Van der Kolk saying we're sick because we are stuck in the past. Both agree in a sense.

Speaker 1: 02:02

The body is paying the price for the mind's inability to stay in the now. That's what's happening there. And if we look at the watchtower, which is kind of what the Stoics also spoke about, this watchtower, this kind of prefrontal cortex, the decision making part of the brain, The biology, if the problem is the biology is hijacking us, what's the solution? Van der Kolk talks about strengthening the watchtower, the part of the brain that allows you to observe yourself without reacting. You know, the me maybe, you know, we consider it the me, who I am, maybe that part of the mind.

Speaker 1: 02:40

And he says, the more intense the visceral sensory input from the emotional brain, the less capacity the rational brain has to put a damper on him. He suggests mindfulness to bring the watchtower back online, and it's a similar concept to the book, Argha, what's it called now? It's about the brain, the machine in the brain, the human in the brain, the chimp paradox, and the chimp in the brain. And the human part, know, the watchtower is not as strong as the chimp, the chimp, the emotional side. But you got to have the human being watching over, being able to regulate and work with the chimp, the emotional part of the brain.

Speaker 1: 03:18

If it's not active and able to work effectively, then the chimp runs riot in the brain. Similar type of concept, right? So you need to bring the watchtower back online. And Epictetus says this, watching watchtower maintenance essentially two thousand years ago, Epictetus says that the discipline of ascent, so the discipline of accepting something or like going towards something, it's the ability, he was saying, is to you get this initial impression. So the Stoics called it impression, the initial emotion, maybe, or the initial reaction you have to something.

Speaker 1: 03:54

So whether it's sadness, a bit of anxiety, happiness, it could be, you know, a bit of stress. So like the initial feeling of something, the flash, could be anger, be fear, the main thing he says here is to be able to pause before you actually agree with what the brain is trying to put forward to you. So the brain is saying, Panic, panic, panic about this. We go, Quick, quick, panic, panic. And you go, Oh my God, oh God, my God.

Speaker 1: 04:22

And you just go with it. And then you realize, Oh yeah, panicked over like, I don't know, a leaf blown in the window. I thought it was a serial killer from the Netflix documentary. It was a relief. Oh, wow.

Speaker 1: 04:34

Feel a bit better now. My God. I'm so stressed. Sweat in. So brings it in, you know.

Speaker 1: 04:40

So Epictetus was saying this two thousand years ago. And again, the the quote is, it's not events that upset us, but our judgments or opinions about the events, just to knuckle that back in. So Van der Volk says we need to strengthen this medial prefrontal cortex to regulate the amygdala, the fear, the anxiety. And he's describing the biological mechanism of what Epictetus called distinguishing between what is up to us and what is not up to us. So the stoic is a simple person with a highly trained watchtower, in short.

Speaker 1: 05:12

Right, now I'm going to maybe throw that all out the window, give you something a bit different, a different point of view. When I first started reading this guy, Judi Krishnamurti, he was Bruce Lee's favorite philosopher. I read Bruce Lee's daughter's book. It came out in 2020, Shannon Lee, and she had the trauma of losing her father. He was a worldwide superstar.

Speaker 1: 05:32

She was never able to be who she was. She's obviously lived under her father's name in a sense, always been overshadowed by Bruce Lee's daughter, stressful. And she wrote the book about the notes he made, books she read, because he studied philosophy in university, martial arts as a way to share life lessons and philosophy and a way of being. And she said one of philosophers he loved the most was Krishnamurti. He said, Who is this Krishnamurti guy?

Speaker 1: 06:00

Read about Krishnamurti, realized, Wow, so Bruce Lee's Be Water, my friend, comes from the core philosophy of this Krishnamurti guy. And the Krishnamurti story is crazy. Might cover it in one podcast just to give you some insight in this person, but absolutely crazy life. He has the point and he's going to talk about it. Doesn't agree with what we just said.

Speaker 1: 06:21

He says his main thing is the observer is the observed, or the thinker is the thought. So the me, this prefrontal cortex that creates the me, right, if you think of it that way, so is it me, Scott, right, the thinker, we all have this thinker in our brain, The thinker thinks it's different from the thoughts around it. Right? That's kind of our default view of things. And the thinker thinks it must manage the thoughts, or the thinker must approve or deny, suppress, fight the thoughts that it has.

Speaker 1: 06:55

Oh my God, don't want to feel anxious, why am I feeling anxious? Let's suppress it. So the thinker becomes this kind of like guard, right? It becomes this maybe bully, I'm going to sort these thoughts out because they're not good, I don't want them. But the thinker, what Krishna is saying is a thinker is just another thought trying to manage the other thoughts.

Speaker 1: 07:19

And it's like a dog chasing its tail. It is the thing it's trying to suppress. And it becomes an internal always conflict. The dog will always chase the tail. It is his tail.

Speaker 1: 07:33

If it stops, there is no more running around, there's no more stress to trying to catch the tail, right? That's kind of maybe how we look at it. So we got basically Sapolsky saying the stress. We have the psychiatrist saying the trauma. We have Epictetus offering a strategy to manage both.

Speaker 1: 07:50

But then Krishnamurti is saying like, man, the entity trying to manage the stress, the I, the thinker, is actually the source of the problem, right? In The Years of Fulfillment, one of the books he never wrote a book, just did a lot of talks and people write it down he says that the very idea of time and progress is our problem. This is what he says, Thought is psychological time. Time is the psychological enemy of man. So he distinguishes the differences between physical time, me needing to walk from here to the shop, it's going to take 500 meters and five minutes, right?

Speaker 1: 08:31

That's physical time that exists, it moves around. But then psychological time is different. Psychological time is, I'm going to get better next week. I'm going to stop being anxious tomorrow. Know?

Speaker 1: 08:43

He thinks this creation of psychological time is the mistake humanity has made because we've taken what we see in the outside world and we brought it into the inside world. Does that make sense? And I actually found notes from a book called The Unfolding of Language, completely unrelated to this. This guy is a language expert, and he even says in that book, The mistake every single language in human civilization has made is that whilst we develop language from the outer world, if you think about it, when we say I'm in a bright mood, we say bright because when the sun is out, that physical feeling of the bright sun is nice. So we understand that bright mood means it's nice and we understand it, right?

Speaker 1: 09:30

It's a metaphor. Everything we say is a metaphor from the physical world. I've had a tough week. I've had a hard week. Well, we know something hard can be, you know, hurt or tough.

Speaker 1: 09:40

So we say, I've had a hard week. Your week isn't actually physically hard. You know what I mean? It doesn't exist like that. The week is just some time we've made up and hard week is something we're trying to conceptualize.

Speaker 1: 09:55

So everything we've developed in language is a metaphor. Call dead metaphors now. We don't even think of them as metaphors because They use so much now. But we understand what people mean, bright mood, tough week, and feeling soft, you know, like we understand these things. And he says in that book, the biggest mistake we've did, we've managed to develop language from the physical world through metaphor, but the mistake every language made was they took physical time and they took it inwardly and created psychological time.

Speaker 1: 10:32

So I'm going to the shop requires time. And then he says the mistake we've made is we've created our mind saying, I'm going to get better, I'm going to do this psychologically, but there is no going in the mind, there only has now. But once we've created that I'm going or, Oh my God, I pass, we've created time in the brain, and that's what He says is the biggest mistake language has made. And it makes sense, this is what Krishnamurti is saying, this is kind of what all of them are saying. This creation of psychological time, I will be better one day, that is only now in the brain's time.

Speaker 1: 11:09

The physical time of course. Does that make sense? To finish off, the few more mind boggling kind of thinking is Krishnamurti asks, Who is the controller? Who is the thinker? He says, The observer is the observed.

Speaker 1: 11:27

The thinker is his thought. He argues that as long as there is a division between me and my stress, there will be conflict. And this weirdly connects to what Sapolsky is saying. Sapolsky said that we get ulcers because we project into the future. Krishnamurti says the self is built entirely out of memory, the past, and projection, the future.

Speaker 1: 11:50

It doesn't exist in the now. And we know this is true because when we are living in the moment, when we say this, I'm living in the moment, I'm living in the now, does time or does it not go by super fast? Do we say we lose ourselves in that time? Yes, we do. We say, Oh my God, lost myself.

Speaker 1: 12:12

I was so in the zone, was so in it that I didn't realize time was passing. There was no time psychologically anymore. Your self was not even there. So if you can dissolve the psychological dime, you can dissolve the stress, essentially. And he says, When the mind perceives that any activity of its own is futile, is all part of memory and therefore of time, seeing that fact, it stops, does it not?

Speaker 1: 12:38

Therefore, the mind becomes still. Okay, so let's wrap it all up. Let's see what all these minds have been saying about this stuff. Sapolsky says, Your hardware was not built for chronic psychological stress. Van der Kolk says, If you don't regulate your body, your watchtower goes offline and you lose agency.

Speaker 1: 12:58

Epitheatre says, and offers a tool, use your reason to separate the event from your judgment of the event. And then Krishnamurti comes in and offers the ultimate release maybe. He realizes that the person trying to fix the problem is the problem. Stop fighting, just observe. And it seems that the path to health, mental and physical, is a journey from basically the biological reactivity to philosophical distance, and finally, to a total silent awareness of the present moment, if we were to encapsulate it all.

Speaker 1: 13:32

And when we think then about stuff I've said, like BJ Fogg saying, you know, it's the small things. It's thinking from now into bedtime. We're trying to bring time back to just the now, right? And then that eliminates a lot of the worry about the distant past and the distant future. So if we can do our best, and he mentions that the observing of oneself and not judging the behaviour is the key to behaviour change.

Speaker 1: 14:02

So it all weirdly ties up if you think about it. And it all comes back down to this ancient advice of living one day at a time, living in the present moment and having tools available that when our mind does start to wonder, realizing, trying to force control it maybe isn't the answer, but observing it like you would observe a flower, or observe a flower grow in a diary, whatever you want to do to visualize it, just look at it with curiosity and maybe the kind of stillness and silent of not fighting, that is what's going to stop the fighting and then we can see. Maybe, I don't know, very philosophical lesson today guys, very philosophical lesson, But it does come back down to one day at a time, I promise you. It's one of the most simple concepts that can break through and I think if you guys can genuinely live one day at a time and moment to moment, it's going to help a lot. So some of you might have had a good week right now, some of you might have had a shit week, Some of you might be thinking, what am doing?

Speaker 1: 15:03

But you've gone out to a bad time. You've a new day. Look, the clouds, look, it's blue sky with me, know, nice clouds. Look, I'm gonna get my steps in now. I'm gonna have a good day.

Speaker 1: 15:14

Gonna get more protein in me today. My LeanShield score is about 86, I think. Know, anything above 75 is awesome, really. But in the 90s, you're basically doing something called body recomposition, which means you're probably building muscle and losing fat at the same time. So I just need to do another gym workout.

Speaker 1: 15:31

I need to stop doing jujitsu so much because I love it. But I need to realize, you know, muscle retention is just as important and potentially regaining some lost muscle I've had over the years. And that's it. And I'm gonna focus on today until bedtime. I'm gonna decorate the Christmas tree, get a workout in, probably a home workout, to be honest with you, fifteen minutes.

Speaker 1: 15:49

I'm gonna ask coach, hey, coach. Give me a quick workout for my lagging body parts. I've got some dumbbells, and I'm gonna do it after I decorate the tree or bit all all around it. Get my steps in, make sure I get my protein in. I need to get some clear whey done.

Speaker 1: 16:05

It's gonna help me. So I get double scoop clear whey, so I have forty grams of protein boost. And happy days, guys. So happy days. I hope I didn't frazzle the mind, and I'll see you back here tomorrow.