Transcript
Use with ChatGPT / Claude Auto-scroll A
The speaker reflects on a recent change in how he relates to memory, describing a new present-focused mindset he calls "caterpillar mode." He contrasts this with earlier years of being pulled by the past and explains how this feels like a developmental stage of life.
Speaker A
In any case, if I spend any amount of time thinking about anything of the past, I can easily drift into it.In fact, until very recently, very, very recently, much of my cognition each day was a battle between trying to anchor in the present and thinking forward and being pulled into memories of the past, kind of orienting towards something happened in the last eight, nine months where I feel hyper focused on the present.Very, very little focus on the past, very little.I have exquisite memory of the past, but very little.And then recently, I was on this long run.I do these long Sunday rucks and runs, and I was thinking to myself, like, where am I at right now?And all of a sudden I just went, oh, shit, this is about the least exciting animal I could think about.And I realized, like, right now, at this stage of my life, I don't know how long this will last.
I'm.And this is very personal, but whatever effort, like lately, I'm just kind of opening up on podcasts, my own and others.
I realized.And no, it has nothing to do with butterflies.I realize I'm in total caterpillar mode, and it has nothing to do with becoming a butterfly.Not that that would be a bad thing.It's that I'm able to orient towards the tasks of the day, the day divided into three parts.
I can basically.I basically have vision about this far in front of me.Despite what I said a few minutes ago.I can think about what I need to do.I know where I'm headed.I can move forward, not backward.But I can't seem to bring my thinking any further than that.And it's so.It's such a new place for me.I can't think.
I have to consciously try and think into the past.Like, that was yesterday.It was yesterday.I can't do it now.I'm not in denial.I can do it if I need to.But for me, this is a very functional way to be at this point in my life because of the enormous number of tasks in my life, fortunately, the enormous number of people that I love and that I want to spend time with and make time for, but somehow I have just like.So I drew it out.I was like, bringing caterpillar, you know, and we'll see what happens.And right now, by sort of like identifying with this kind of mode of caterpillar vision and movement, everything is in small increments.
You know, I even feel it in the way that I talk and the way I parse ideas.I'm writing the bonus chapters from my book comes out in April of next year.Like, everything is line by line.Everything is iterative.And I am not oriented toward the past.
It's there if I need it.It's like a book on a shelf.I can go grab and look things up.But I, until now, have existed very much in, like, sort of thinking about the losses of past, the winds of past, identifying with that.And I don't know what caused this.
I can't point to one single psychedelic journey.Not that I've been doing a lot of psychedelics.We could talk about that.I was involved in some psychology, psychedelic trials, but I don't think that's it.I think it's that I've matured.I think the brain matures your whole life.I don't think we have childhood and adulthood and then death.I think we have a developmental arc that starts when we're born, probably before we're born.I mean, after all, you know, we were embryos, which who knows if we have consciousness, but we were alive, right?Born, and then we have a developmental arc.
And the great psychologist Erickson talked about at every stage of life, from birth until death until one's 80s and 90s, you're working out some core conflicts of agency versus, you know, autonomy versus having to do what other people have you do.And, you know, I forget the stages off the top of my head because it's not my area of expertise.But look at my dad, who's turning 81 in November, who, fortunately, you know, God willing, is going to live another 20, 25 years with immense vigor.And he's still cognitively super sharp, and he's working out whatever it is you work out when you're 80.I'm working out whatever it is now, but right now it's like caterpillar vision.
And as a consequence, the past, while important and informs a lot of who I am and what I do.It's like.It's not.Like.It's not in my consciousness at all.
The discussion turns to fear learning, neuroplasticity, and how single or repeated negative experiences can become deeply embedded. He explains classical conditioning, trauma cues, and how the brain consolidates threat responses.
Speaker A
And I must say, it's a great place to be because throughout my 30s, I felt very stricken, very, like, pulled in different directions based on past, present, and efforts toward the future.And so the way to think about this is that for many people, one intense experience, one burn, one bad breakup, one bad experience.Public speaking, one bad experience with somebody's pet snake or whatever it happens to be, can cause intense fear in the moment.A long, reverberatory experience of fear, like trouble sleeping that night and the following night.Memories of the experience that are troubling, physiological responses that are troubling essentially, it gets wired in as a fear fear with one trial, which is quite different than the other forms of neuroplasticity.Neuroplasticity, of course, just being the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience.Other forms of neuroplasticity, like learning a language, learning music, learning math, those take a while.
We don't generally get one trial learning to positive or neutral experiences.We get one trial learning to negative experiences.So there's this asymmetry in how we're wired.
So now you should understand how classical conditioning, as it's called, occurs.Who go to give a piano recital as a kid, you sit down and you freeze up, and it's horribly embarrassing.And even if you just freeze up for a few seconds, the heart rate increase and the perspiring, the sweating and the.And the shame that you feel leads you to want to avoid playing instruments or public displays of, you know, performances for a long period of time unless you do something to overcome it.That's one trial learning.
Some people, it tends to be more an accumulation of experiences.They have a bad relationship that lasts an entire summer, an entire year, or, God forbid, a decade.And then they have what they feel is kind of a general sense of fear about closeness to others and attachment.These are common fears that people experience.Fears can be in the short term, fears can be in the long term, they can be in the medium term.Again, the fear system is very generic.And all of a sudden, crack, crack.And someone gets shot right in front of us.Whoa.Okay.
Now, you know, all sorts of things are going to happen.Okay?Hopefully no one's heard of it.Let's say it's a bad, tragic incident.Now, the adrenaline released into your system grabbed and consolidated the memories of this house, of the lawn, of walking out there.This is why people who experience trauma oftentimes have kind of odd recollect, like seemingly odd or unrelated recollections about the things leading up to an event.Okay?So because ultimately, what did you need to learn?Not to avoid streets, not to avoid this street necessarily.But like, what were you doing?
Speaker B
Your
Speaker A
brain is trying
Speaker B
to grab something.
Speaker A
What brought you to that location?What things brought you to that inside?
And of course, some people dump these experiences more readily than others.You know, part of the logic behind a lot of, not all, but a lot of trauma therapies is to literally bring the brain and body back into a state of high intensity intensity and then to rescript the story.Others are designed to bring you back into the story, but keep you Calm, you know.You know, if something terrible happened to you in a garage, we're in this beautiful garage with all these vintage cars around.But if something bad happened to you in a garage, it doesn't have to be that garage, it can just be garages.
The smell of metal, you know, different sensory cues get embedded in those memories and then can feed into these alertness systems.And this is why, you know, there's, it's such a challenge to undo.To unpeel a trauma or a chronic anxiety, you have to sort of get to the combination of things that, that, that is the combination lock that lets you undo it.And the way that we do that is by giving a new story or a new narrative to this experience that we call threat.But the threat reflex inevitably involves the release of adrenaline into the system.
And then it becomes a question of whether or not you remain still, move forward, or retreat from that adrenaline experience.And when I say the adrenaline experience, I mean the threat reflex.So this fourth component of fear is really our ability to attach narrative, to attach meaning, and to attach purpose to what is by all accounts and purposes a generic response.There's no negotiating what fear feels like.There's only negotiating what it means.
There's only negotiating whether or not you persist, whether or not you pause, or whether or not you retreat.So long term potentiation is one of the main mechanisms by which we take formally innocuous or irrelevant events and we make them scary, we make them traumatic.Our neurons have mechanisms to do this.Now, fortunately, the NMDA receptor and long term potentiation can also run the whole system in reverse.You can get what's called long term depression.And that doesn't have anything to do with the depression associated with low mood.What we're talking about is a weakening of connections.You can go from having a very high speed Ethernet connection between neurons, so to speak, to a connection that's more like Morse code or is like a poor dial up connection or really weak signal.And that's what's happening when you extinguish a fear, when you unlearn a fear.
He outlines how therapies reduce fear by repeatedly retelling traumatic events until the emotional response weakens. The chapter emphasizes that true recovery also requires building new positive associations, not just extinguishing fear.
Speaker A
So now I'd like to talk about therapies that are carried out in humans that allow fears to be undone, that allow traumas to be reversed, such that people no longer feel bad about a particular person, place or thing, either real interactions with that person, place or thing, or imagined interactions with that person, place or thing.
That process, as I just mentioned, also involves things like the NMDA receptor.But rather than strengthening the connections, the first thing that has to happen is There needs to be a weakening of connections that associate the person, place or thing with that threat reflex.Subsequent to that, we will see there needs to be a strengthening of some new experience that's positive.Okay, this is a key element of where we are headed.Contrary to population belief, it is not going to work to simply extinguish a fear.
One needs to extinguish a fear and or trauma and replace that fearful or traumatic memory or idea or response with a positive response.And this is something that's rarely discussed, both in the scientific literature, but certainly in the general discussion around fear and trauma.There's this idea that we can extinguish fears, we can rewire ourselves, we can eliminate our traumas, and indeed we can.But that process has to involve not just becoming comfortable with a particular fearful event or trauma, but also attaching a new positive experience to that previously fearful or traumatic event over time.When people recount or retell their trauma that the first time they do that, especially when it's recounted in a lot of detail, there's a tremendous anxiety response, sometimes even as great or greater than the actual exposure to the fearful event or trauma.
And obviously this is something that is done with a clinician present because it is very traumatic to the person.They're literally reliving the trauma in full, rich detail.And they are encouraged to provide full, rich detail.They're often encouraged to speak in complete sentences, to flesh out details about how they felt inside, to flesh out details about their memories going into this traumatic or fearful event, going through it, and after really digging into all the nuance and contours of these horrible experiences.But what's remarkable is that in the second and the third and the fourth retelling of these traumatic or fearful events, that anxiety response and the amount of the physiological response, I should say that the amplitude of the physiological response becomes progressively diminished with each retelling.
Now, some of you might be saying, well, duh, tell a story enough times, you know that eventually it wears off.Just like if you watch a movie enough times and you hear the same joke enough times, eventually it doesn't have the same impact.But that needn't be the case, right?You could imagine that this high amplitude anxiety response, this high amplitude activation of the sympathetic nervous system in retelling would actually create a even deeper routed fear response and trauma.But that's not what happens.
Every clinician I spoke to in anticipation of this episode, which include clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and people who actually work on the fear system at a, at a biological level, Said the exact same thing, which is that a detailed recounting of the traumatic and fearful events is absolutely essential in order to get the positive effects of prolonged exposure.Cognitive processing and cognitive behavioral therapy.Again, this has to be done with the appropriate support.This isn't something that should be taken lightly because, you know, as we mentioned before, the fear response can have a very long lasting contour to it.People can sometimes have trouble sleeping for days and days, and afterwards.We'll talk about sleep in a little bit.The point is that the retelling is important.And the idea here is to take what was a terrible and extremely troubling, meaning physiologically troubling, psychologically troubling story, turn it into what is essentially a boring, bad story, okay?
It never really becomes a good story at this point in the treatment process that we're describing.So a terrible event is a terrible event, period.
But there's a way in which the retelling of that event starts to uncouple the threat reflex from the narrative.Each successive retelling in detail of these traumatic events, of these fearful events, the threat reflex is activated at a progressively lower and lower amplitude, such that eventually it just becomes a really bad, really boring story.Now, that's one part of the process of getting over a fear.It's what we call fear extinction.So I'm going to give a kind of basic example.It's a.It's a kind of a silly example, But I'm giving it as a template for what could be any number of other different examples.Example I'll give is, let's say a kid is biking to play soccer, soccer practice, and they get into a bad car accident, okay, Terrible thing to happen.But they survive, they recover, and somehow, and we really don't know why, certain fear memories get worse wired in more broadly or more narrowly somehow.
This kid just doesn't even want a bicycle anymore.And they actually don't even want to play sports.And they actually just don't want to go anywhere.They're kind of isolating and not interacting with friends very much at all.It's a pretty broad response.It didn't have to be that way.
Some kids would just, you know, decide they don't want to cycle anymore down that particular street.Well, the process of retelling the narrative to a clinician would allow an extinction of the fear response, right?So a reduction in the heart rate, a reduction in the narrowing of focus, a reduction in all the things that we consider fear.But a really good cognitive behavioral therapist or somebody that understands the neuroscience of fear and trauma would understand that that's not sufficient.That's what's really important is that this child, this hypothetical child, relearn a new narrative.
That they don't just manage to bike to soccer practice or manage to spend time with friends, but that they actually start wiring in new positive associations with biking to practice, with playing soccer, with social events.And, and this is the somewhat surprising feature of this and that they link that back to that early traumatic experience, that it's not just that they're replacing at bad experience and memory with a good experience and memory, but they're actually holding in mind in these top down narrative circuits, if you will, they're holding in mind, ah, I'm not just biking to soccer practice, I'm actually biking to soccer practice and I'm enjoying it.Despite the fact that I was in a bad car accident, despite the fact that two months ago or two years ago, or maybe even 10 years ago, I couldn't even leave my room or I didn't want to associate with anybody.
So the building up of the positive associations are key.Okay, so there's the three part process.
One, diminish the old experience through repetitive narrative.Almost inevitably the initial repetition of that is going to be very high amplitude and quite troubling, but over time it will reduce.Right, you're turning the terrible, really upsetting story into a terrible, boring story.That's the extinction process.Then there's a relearning of a new narrative that includes some sort of sense of reward.And that sense of reward has to be tacked back onto the traumatic event or what was previously a traumatic event.And that is all through narrative.It's all through cognition.And I think this is a very important point.Oftentimes I think we tend to undervalue the importance of rationalization and, and of story and of narrative.
But the prefrontal cortex is this amazing capacity of our brain, real estate, to create meaning, to attach meaning and purpose to things that otherwise are just reflexive.And in the example of an ice bath, it might be a little trivial.In the example of the kid with the car accident, it becomes a little more relevant.And in the example of things like people surviving, you know, genocide, or attaching stories of, you know, of great victory to what were previously thought of as stories of great loss of time, of people, of any number of things.That process of narrative is one of the major ways that the human brain rewires itself.
Narrative should not be undervalued as a tool for relieving fear and trauma.So basically, narrative should not be undervalued as a tool to rewire our nervous system, but it has to be engaged in the correct sequence.And that correct sequence is first extinction, then relearning a new narrative with positive associations and attaching those positive associations to the formerly traumatic or fearful event.
The speaker shifts into a more philosophical reflection on suffering, joy, and whether pain itself may be partly an illusion. He closes with practical advice on aging well, training, sleep, nutrition, and building a healthy, fulfilling life.
Speaker A
So the important point here is that trauma is traumatic in and of itself.Fearful events are hard in the, in and of themselves.And if people are working through them, either through clinical work or through individual work, it is important.And ideally, one would still be trying to access social connection outside of that specific work related to the trauma.But I woke up and I said, you know, maybe the illusion is the pain.Maybe the illusion is the pain.Maybe the mental anguish I feel, Maybe the, the, like the challenge of life, like, maybe that's the illusion, right?Because we hear so much about how, you know, the, the pleasures are the illusions.Now dopamine is a real thing, and chasing dopamine is a real thing.At its extremes, it can be addiction.At its less extremes, it can be compulsions, and it can also be a joyful life.
But I was thinking myself, pain is the illusion, right?Maybe the idea that there's all this like, challenge and discuss, maybe that's the thing that we're supposed to remove.And then I thought back to something that a friend who's a very, very talented trauma therapist, his name is Ryan Suave, he's out in Florida, runs a trauma treatment center out there, once told me.He said, yeah, you know, in some of the Buddhist traditions they talk about that your work in this life is in part not completely is to.Burned down, I think they call them.I'm going to get the pronunciation wrong, but someone will tell us in the comments, the scumsaras, like burning down to the, to the roots, like the, the, the weeds of life, like your, your misperceptions about what things are.And I started thinking about this especially after Martha Beck was on my podcast, who I really love.
She said, you know, you're not here to suffer.And I thought, I'm not.And she was like, you know, you're not here to suffer.You know, I've, I've endured a lot of suffering in my life.
More than some, less than others.But I think we all endure a lot of suffering largely as a consequence of what happens between our ears.Unfortunately, some of us also because of things that actually happen to our bodies.But we're self induced or otherwise.You know, maybe we're not here to suffer.Maybe a lot of the suffering that we experience is this illusion that we create.And so I started.Really, I wrote it down.Maybe the illusion is the pain.And so maybe we need to challenge this.Like, maybe it's okay to be joyful.A little more joy.Yeah.I think people exist on a continuum.Bias toward more joy or bias toward more pain.And I agree that we have a lot of cognitive control over the middle range.Right?Because of course, there are experiences that are awful, traumatic, unequivocally, unequivocally excellent or terrible.
There's no question about that.So if anyone's.I say this in part because if you're struggling, like kind of feeling stuck in your life story, there's great advantage to just letting some time.Just getting older is the best.As long as you train with weights three times a week, run three times a week, long, medium and short, it runs.And you take a cold shower and you eat mostly unprocessed and minimally processed foods, and you try and get sleep and you limit your alcohol and you deal with any addictions you might have and you work on your traumas like you're gonna have a great freaking life.You're going to be healthier than 90% of people in the world.
Right?Are you going to take gold at the Olympics?Are you going to be Cole Hawker and take the gold from fifth position in the final 100 meters of the 1500?No.Unless you're Cole Hawker.But you can still have an amazing life.