The Hidden Cost of Reinventing Yourself

[00:00:00]So, up until this point in the episode, we've covered what we'll call the slow way of growth. You identify your personality traits. You understand your own adaptations. You deduce the behaviors that are most targeted towards the adaptation you want to change. And then you build a series of habits and systems to help you implement those behaviors. And then eventually everything will change over the course of months, maybe even years, depending on how deep that adaptation is in your consciousness. But this isn't what anybody wants to hear.

[00:00:28]>> No. Nobody.

[00:00:30]Nobody buys a book or gets this far into a podcast because they're like, "Yeah, I want to spend the next 18 months like slowly chiseling away at myself." The thing that is always sold to people and that everybody gets excited for is this idea of spontaneous massive transformation and this does happen, but I think it happens in the circumstances and in a way that most people don't expect and if they really understood it, they would not be excited to do it. So, for full transparency, this sort of like instantaneous massive transformation, I've really only experienced it once in my life. And it happened when I was about 19 years old.

[00:01:08]So, a little bit of background. When I was a teenager, I was pretty lazy, spoiled, entitled, depressed a lot of the time. Smoked a lot of pot. I wanted to be a musician, but I didn't really have the work ethic to like succeed as a musician. Turns out being a musician is extremely difficult. And I was kind of just floating through life. And I was in music school. It was not going well. I was pretty sure I was going to drop out.

[00:01:33]And I had a really good friend by the name of Josh. And Josh was much more extroverted than I was. He was very charismatic. He was a year or two older.

[00:01:41]So like he was a good friend, but I kind of looked up to him maybe as like an older brother type figure. He really helped me get get out of my shell. And so it was the summer after I decided to drop out of music school, but I didn't know what I was doing next. And he and I were just hanging out all summer. We were partying together. He was inviting me to a bunch of cool stuff around Dallas. And I would drive up there and I would stay with him. And you know, we were just having a really nice summer together. And he invited me to this lake party. It was kind of this apartment complex built on the side of a small lake just north of the the Dallas Fort Worth area. And we didn't know anybody there. I think he knew like one person there, but we just kind of showed up and I don't know, like Josh was always this guy he could just show up to any party and like immediately make friends with everybody. So, we just showed up and started talking to people and it was going well. It was fun. It was it was pretty cool. And next to the swimming pool, this was like mid July, so it was super hot. Next to the swimming pool, there was like a maybe a small cliff 20 feet high overlooking the lake. And after a few hours, people started jumping off that cliff into the lake. I had actually wandered away for a short period of time, but basically came back out and there was just like police and ambulances and fire department everywhere and the party had stopped and I was like, "Holy [ __ ] what's going on?" And so I started walking around and I'm like, "Wow, okay, this seems pretty serious." Like somebody got hurt, something happened. I looked around like girls are crying everywhere. Like nobody's talking. And so I start looking for Josh and I'm wandering through the crowds, wandering through the police cars and the ambulances [clears throat] and everything and I can't find him. And after maybe two or three minutes, it like dawns on me of like, oh [ __ ] maybe he's the person that something happened to. And so it turned out that he had decided to jump off the cliff. The coroners later said that his legs had cramped up, likely from dehydration, from the heat, drinking all day, some drugs. His parents later told me that he was a terrible swimmer, which I had no idea. So basically, he jumped into the water, legs cramped up, couldn't swim well. It was starting to get dark. And so when he started crying for help and he went under water, nobody could see him and nobody could find him. So he died that day. And it kind of it shattered my entire life really in that moment. Up until that moment, I I would say that while there were obviously like problems in my childhood, I had never really dealt with any sort of hardship or had to confront my mortality in any meaningful way or had been forced to have any sort of perspective on like how lucky I was and how fortunate I was. and how much time I was wasting and how much of my potential I was wasting and and like Josh's death like really it just forced me to sit with myself for a couple months and re-evaluate everything that I cared about and really question all of my own behavior because there was a very real sense of like that could have easily been me. And I think anytime somebody experiences a tragic death very close to them like that, it it it starts bringing up a lot of those thoughts of like, am I using my life well? Am I living well? I think if you could point to one event that had more of like where I did a 180 change in my life, it was probably that one. I immediately stopped smoking pot and doing drugs.

[00:05:21]I immediately signed up for a bunch of business courses at the the college I was attending. I started making really good grades. I stopped partying as much.

[00:05:31]I just really got my [ __ ] together and for the first time in my life like really thought about my potential and what I was doing with my life and like set ambitious goals for myself and like really took myself seriously.

[00:05:43]Interestingly enough, it's weird. You know, I've talked about Josh and this story quite a bit publicly. It's in my book. It was an awful and tragic experience, but like it was one of the most important things that ever happened to me. And that is the fast way to change, >> right?

[00:06:02]>> And this is why I don't think people actually want the fast way to change.

[00:06:08]Even if it doesn't involve a tragedy, there's actually a few ways it can happen. None of them are particularly pleasant [laughter] or or like easygoing. I think there's a a real false impression that's been generated by the self-help industry that instantaneous transformation kind of this euphoric epiphany that happens at a weekend seminar that it's like a party that it it feels like a celebration. It's this out-of- body experience and you go home and just everything's great and you're never the same again.

[00:06:42]I think that's a myth and we'll get into the psychological reasons in this in this chapter. It largely has to do with the nature of that instantaneous change.

[00:06:52]It requires a certain amount of collapse of everything that you've known and understood prior.

[00:06:59]>> So for you it was a very clear before and after is what you're saying. You had your life before it then you had your life after. At this one point it all hinged on that and you had a very clear almost break I would say in a there's like an identity shift there. A lot of your adaptations, I would say, probably shifted quite a bit.

[00:07:19]>> I would say almost all of them.

[00:07:20]>> Almost all of them. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

[00:07:22]We'll dig into that a little bit more.

[00:07:23]But >> yeah, yeah, >> there's like some sort of foundational questioning of everything. Even let's say I had gone and done 100 hours of therapy, right? And like me and the therapist dug that deep to to get to that layer. I don't think it's something that you can necessarily simply intellectually question or at least not over a short period of time. Like I do think there needs to be some sort of intense life experience that goes along with it. But let's get into the science of it. The science itself is interesting. And then also what's interesting is how little science there is on it, right?

[00:07:56]>> It's just crazy cuz this is like one of the most fascinating.

[00:08:01]>> It's also common.

[00:08:02]>> Yeah. And and actually fairly common.

[00:08:03]It's just incredibly hard to study as we'll see.

[00:08:05]>> Yeah. It's shocking. I mean I I imagine a large percentage of people have like had some sort of experience in their life that has felt extremely transformational in a short period of time. The experiences themselves are not common but I think across a lifetime it is it's not uncommon. So really the the first person to take this seriously as kind of a scientific subject was William James. And William James is interesting because he also went through a sudden 180 transformation in his life, >> but his was was quite a bit different than mine. So William James, he was maybe the most prestigious in American intellectual ever. Definitely one of the most revered American philosophers ever.

[00:08:49]He's often called the father of American psychology. Um he's just hugely influential. And interestingly, he came from a very prestigious and influential family. His brother was a famous novelist. I believe his sister was a famous writer as well. So he came from this family of absurdly high achievers.

[00:09:07]And he was kind of the black sheep. Like he kind of [ __ ] up at everything he tried to do for like the first 30 years of his life. So originally he wanted to be a painter. His dad highly disapproved of this. He was not very good at it. It didn't really go anywhere. and he kind of just floundered around into his early 20s until finally his dad was like, "You know what, son? You gota you gotta do something with yourself." And of course, like any good father, uh he went and got him placed in Harvard Medical School.

[00:09:40][laughter] >> Wouldn't it be nice >> just shoved him in there?

[00:09:44]>> Yeah.

[00:09:45]>> Wouldn't it be nice if if all of our fathers when they disapproved with us just made a phone call and uh got us into Harvard Medical School? So, William James got admitted to Harvard Medical School and then he kind of just bounced around from program to program. Nothing stuck. He didn't really like anything he studied. The medicine at the time, it like made him squeamish. Apparently, the first time he saw a cadaavver, he fainted.

[00:10:08]Again, he just felt like a complete and utter failure. It's also worth noting up until this point like he had suffered a lot of health issues growing up. He had eyesight issues. He had severe back pain. He had been ill on and off throughout a lot of his adolescence. I mean, at this point, he's probably around 25. He has had every advantage and privilege handed to him. Nothing has gone well. All he's experienced is suffering in failure. And finally, desperate, he signs up for this expedition to the Amazon. So, it's basically this like drastic moonshot sort of project where he's going to go down the South America. He's gonna ride a boat down the Amazon and chart all of the unexplored territories and stuff that had not yet been charted deep into inside the Amazon. It's like a very extreme sort of life decision. So he goes down there and of course this is the 1860s and to get to South America in 1860s as you can imagine takes months.

[00:11:10]He gets down there, he contracts smallpox and almost dies. In fact, it takes him months to recover. By the time he gets home, he is depressed to the point of being suicidal. And he's journaling at this point. And he's journaling about how horrible his life is and how awful everything is and how nothing has ever gone right.

[00:11:30]And he starts writing down thoughts of ending his own life. And so in his journal, he made an agreement with himself. He said, "For the next year, I will take responsibility for everything in my life and I will put all of my effort into improving my life as much as possible. And if at the end of the year nothing has gotten better, then I give myself permission. It's I at that point I have tried everything." And what is interesting is that something in that journal entry cracked something open in him because up until that point he was very much the product of the influences around him, right? He has brilliant siblings who are doing amazing things.

[00:12:14]He's supposed to go to Harvard. He's supposed to do this amazing expedition.

[00:12:18]Like nothing he was doing was really for himself. And in that moment in his journal, he gave himself permission to just do something for yourself to just own your own decisions and try to make lemonade out of whatever lemons life is handing to you in that moment. And much later he wrote that he attributed this this moment this journal entry was the thing that turned it around for him.

[00:12:45]That was his 180°ree pivot point in his life where the trajectory switched. And of course he went on and became William James and you know all the things that I said earlier about him and that experience would largely influence the the school of thought that he became known for which is pragmatism which is this idea that you should adopt the beliefs that are most useful to you and most helpful to you. Now the cool thing about James is that once he did get into psychology he noticed that there was nothing in the literature that described what he went through. You know kind of this like sudden lightning bolt moment where everything turned around for him. And so he decided to research that and he spent a number of years meeting and studying different people who had had similar experiences. He gave a lecture series um in 1901 and then that lecture series eventually became his book called the varieties of religious experience and I would say to this day it's probably his best known book. Now what's interesting about William James' framework around this is that he divided the world up into two types of people. He said that there were the healthy-minded individuals and the healthy-minded individuals tended to direct their own change slowly over time by altering behavior and their own beliefs.

[00:14:01]Everything we've talked to up until this point. But then he said there are another group of people which he called the six souls. Sounds like a metal band, [laughter] >> right? And he said that the six souls suffered intensely. were kind of like these broken individuals.

[00:14:17]And it was only under the unbearable weight of their own suffering that they would have to kind of crack open and have these massive epiphies and huge transformations that seemingly happened overnight or happened over a short period of time. And of course, James couldn't help but notice that in many of these cases, that kind of crack open moment was often a a mystical or religious experience.

[00:14:46]And so, a lot of what he wrote around this topic had to do with people becoming born again or people having, you know, visions of God or people, you know, uh, having like a deep profound spiritual experience, becoming one with the universe, etc. We're going to come back to that later in this chapter because that is a huge part of this. This episode is brought to you by waking up. Most attempts at changing yourself fail because you can't talk your way into being a different person. You have to actually do something long enough that the inside of your head starts to change, too. And one of [music] the only practices that does this reliably is meditation. Now, I've been meditating on and off for over 20 years, and I've tried every app on the market, but the only one that I've stuck with is Waking Up. It was designed by Sam Harris, neuroscientist and philosopher. And you can feel that in the app. It doesn't treat meditation like a relaxation hack.

[00:15:38]It's designed for people who actually want to understand their own minds, not just turn them off for 10 minutes.

[00:15:43][music] So, if you want to change something about how you experience your life from the inside out, this is a practice that can do it. And Waking Up is giving Solved listeners a free 14-day [music] trial. So, if you've gotten anything out of today's episode and want to actually change something about how you live in your own head, this is where I would start. Go to wakingup.com/solved.

[00:16:03]That's wakingup.com/solved.

[00:16:05]But I think what's most interesting about James' work is that nobody really picked up the baton and ran with it after him. He did a lot of work on this in the early 20th century and then it just lied dormant for like almost a century. And it really wasn't until the 1990s a researcher named William Miller picked up this subject again and decided to start researching where William James left off essentially.

[00:16:33]>> He did pick up and it was in the '9s. He started getting interested in this. He was at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and one of the first things he did was put an ad in the newspaper, right? for people. Basically, if you've ever had one of these experiences where you've had this very fast, sudden positive transformation, we want to talk to you. 55 people responded to this ad in the in the paper came in and they interviewed them. So, there were people who had been, you know, terrible addicts before that. All of a sudden, the next day they weren't they were free of their addiction or severely depressed or something just terrible. All of a sudden, they just turned their life around in a day, you know, and started doing everything they needed to do. What they found from this was kind of these basic characteristics of this experience that happened. One of them was that it was sudden and very unexpected just like James and all these other people found too. Often literally overnight, you know, it could be maybe a couple days or something like that, but usually, you know, minutes, hours, days at the most.

[00:17:33]And this sudden rapid change like that profound generalized change too like you talked about with yours like almost everything seemed to reorganize and that's everybody described that same thing too.

[00:17:44]>> Everything in my life just reorganized all of a sudden. There's an enduring aspect to it as well. It wasn't just that oh I felt this way for a couple of weeks and then it kind of petered out you know like a lot of us when we do try to change that's what happens. That wasn't the case for them. Another important one too they perceived that it was externally driven in a way. It came from the outside. This happened to them.

[00:18:02]Everybody described that phenomenon.

[00:18:04]This is something that happened to me. I didn't really have any control over this. It just happened to me. Okay. So, they came up with a name for this. They called it quantum change. It's kind of a reference to physics, you know, >> like a quantum leap, >> right? A quantum leap of sorts. It's this sudden enduring lasting change that just happens. They also found two types of this quantum change, too. There's mystical quantum change which is kind of what more like James talked about this more as the religious experiences or doesn't necessarily have to be religious but some sort of like deep spiritual it often involves something like a l wind or light or something in the natural world was kind of there or or they had a presence with them a transcendent presence with them of some kind. Then they had the insightful quantum change though too. There were some people who didn't have that necessarily. It was just something all of a sudden clicked in their brains like, "Oh god, I've been doing this all along and it's the exact wrong thing and I just need to change my entire life." And we're somehow able to do that. Interesting differences, but it doesn't take like a spiritual or otherworldliness uh, you know, force to to cause this necessarily. Some people just do it from an insightful vantage point. Okay. Like I said too, it it was enduring. So they did some follow-up work on this. So, it was originally, I think it was 1994 when they published this. And in 2004, they they found 30 of those original 55 and interviewed them again. And every single one of them said, "Yes, that's still the most important thing that's ever happened in my life. And yes, the changes are still real. They're still enduring. They're still here. I'm still that person that that changed." There were hints of people kind of poking around this. We've talked before about Dowrosski's theory of positive disintegration.

[00:19:39]>> My man, >> right? And you love him, right?

[00:19:42]>> That's kind of a similar category like he found that people sometimes just everything disintegrates and then rebuilds all of a sudden too.

[00:19:50]So he kind of got at this too.

[00:19:51]>> Yeah. I mean to to just summarize really quick his work I mean first of all what's fascinating about him is that he was doing work behind the iron curtain.

[00:19:58]So he was in Eastern Europe right he was disconnected from Western psychology his theory basically positive disintegration like literally means what it says which is that it is a positive result of the disintegration of your understanding of yourself >> your identity. Yeah. He studied World War II survivors and Holocaust survivors. And what he found was that the majority of the survivors that he interviewed years later said that it was one of the most important things that had happened to like it while it was a horrible experience, it had had an incredibly profound positive effect on them. And it was because it forced this experience of positive disintegration.

[00:20:34]It destroyed all of their assumptions and identity of who they were before.

[00:20:38]And so that it allowed them to recreate themselves from the ground up in a much more healthy and holistic way.

[00:20:45]>> Yeah. And he kind of described like these three stages. The disintegration um phase where the existing self structure like you said just goes away.

[00:20:52]Then there's an emergence of a new consciousness, a new realization that you have and then a reconsolidation of that identity around it. Very similar to everything that what James saw, what Miller saw. Very very similar. And there's been some work around this where it's like yeah there's these people who have these quantum change events very much matches up with that as well too. I just want to hit before we get going though too a couple of things about this. Okay, >> as you can imagine this is incredibly difficult. So what they did is you know Miller they they put an ad in the paper >> and has had people come tell us about what happened. They didn't interview anybody before one of these happened, right? And then measured their personality traits or anything.

[00:21:30]>> It's all self-reported. It's all observational. You know, every now and then they'll try to get other people in their life and be like, "Is this can you corroborate this? You know, this change and is it real?" And it usually um matches up pretty well. But it is a retrospective design. There's some survivor bias too and people are like, "Oh yeah, I've changed. I'll come tell you all about it." Where the people have, you know, probably the opposite way. It won't. We don't have a ton of cases like in the literature either um from this, but as you said, it's pretty common. I feel like if it wasn't common, then like just the self-help industry wouldn't exist. Like my sense is that a lot of what is perceived as kind of a sudden transformation in a self-help seminar, it's actually people who are kind of already in this spot and they're they are like highly influencable in that moment. It's interesting.

[00:22:18]>> Right. Right. So with all those caveats in mind, it's more common than we let on to. We can't predict it very well. It's hard to describe. That's another thing about it is people are like it's really hard for me to describe this and so you know getting a good handle on it has been difficult but one of the things I did notice was that what's really collapsing so we've talked about this collapse or this disintegration or whatever it is what's actually collapsing here are values okay people's values change overnight in these situations which we did a whole episode on values it's very hard to change your values intentionally right and usually they feel very innate to us. What they found, especially in this, like before the quantum change, what people reported, men would rank things like wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, being respected as their top values.

[00:23:06]>> Women ranked family, independence, career, fitting in, attractiveness. That was before the change happened. After the change though, all of them, men and women, converged on really around just a few things. Spirituality, personal peace, family, inner peace, those kind of like deeper values. So all of the just a complete values reshuffle >> overnight in just maybe even just a few minutes too. So that adaptation itself >> is what shifted and then >> everything else organized around that.

[00:23:36]>> I think it's worth double clicking on the values piece for a moment because in many ways I do think values are the deepest form of adaptation. Values underpin all of those other things that we talked about. So the way you prioritize your behaviors, the things that you're motivated to do, the goals that you set for yourself, all of those things are largely dictated by your values. What you choose to find important. Even your emotions are largely a product of your values. Two people can both experience the same thing. One gets really happy, one gets extremely upset. Why? Because they have different values. One person sees the same instance as a good experience. The other one sees it as a bad experience.

[00:24:17]Similarly, a lot of our ego and identity and belief systems are largely built and dictated by our values. So, it's it's the values are kind of like the base foundational layer of all of our adaptations. And so, it makes sense that if you go through an experience that causes your values to collapse, essentially causes you to question and doubt what you value in the first place.

[00:24:42]everything existing all the scaffolding on top of that will just come down with it. So this experience of quantum change of everything just suddenly changing overnight. I think what has to happen first is that that value structure has to fall apart and that can fall apart in multiple ways, right? So, in my case, it was a traumatic sudden traumatic experience. You actually see this quite a bit in the literature that um there's a concept that we've talked about before called post-traumatic growth.

[00:25:11]Everybody's heard of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Turns out post-traumatic growth is actually way more common. Most people come out of a traumatic experience believing that they're stronger, that they have more clarity in their life, that they have a stronger sense of what's important to them and what's not important to them. A massive sudden negative event can cause that collapse of your values and cause you to question everything and, you know, reassemble every your entire adaptation structure. I think another example is what's these days known as hitting bottom, hitting rock bottom. And I think that's more of like a William James type story. Things just have to devolve slowly over a long period of time. Like you basically have to watch all of your decisions fail, all of your relationships fail, all of your goals and ambitions fail for an extended period of time. And you have to reach a point of such intense pain and suffering that you're like, "Okay, I'm willing to just start over from scratch. I'm willing to throw everything out the window and adopt any belief that just gets the pain to stop.

[00:26:19]>> Yeah, that's the arena of addicts, right? This is where you see, you know, hitting rock bottom and they they talk about how beautiful it can be for for an addict even.

[00:26:27]>> Yeah. In addiction circles, too, you know, it's like people will suffer intensely, but they still won't drop their base assumptions.

[00:26:34]>> Oh, right.

[00:26:35]>> Like they'll still kind of hold on to some of the narratives and adaptations and habits that they have. I think we can all relate to that a little bit.

[00:26:43]>> Yeah. And then and then it's interesting because in addiction circles like the recovered addicts will say like okay you still haven't suffered enough. You haven't hit bottom yet. Right. Like bottom when you hit bottom it is everything is destroyed. Like you have nothing left of yourself of your life of anything. And then that's when you can start rebuilding from a new. And then the third way to achieve quantum change is is through this mystical experience.

[00:27:10]And this could be a sudden spontaneous religious experience. It could also be induced through things like psychedelics and meditation. But I think what's interesting when you look at uh what is happening when somebody has a very spiritual experience or when somebody's on a like lot of psychedelics, what is happening is that there is ego dissolution, right? It's like all of your narratives and understandings of who you are and what's important kind of unravel and loosen up quite a bit. And so that creates an opening where you can kind of rebuild in in its place. I think this is why psychedelic therapy is like really becoming hot right now because it does seem to be a way that you could potentially shortcut this a little bit and help people reach this place of like letting go of their stories and their beliefs and their values relatively quickly and then and then helping guide them build something up in its place. So yeah, those seem to be the three ways to induce quantum change, >> although still not reliably. I'm I would say >> yes I that you will have a higher chance >> in one of those situations but it's not guaranteed. It's very unpredictable.

[00:28:23]>> Yes.

[00:28:23]>> Yeah.

[00:28:23]>> Two of them require an intense amount of pain and then the third requires either some sort of psychoactive chemical or like the [ __ ] hand of God moving you.

[00:28:32]So this is not exactly a repeatable process right >> that we can like prescribe to people.

[00:28:39]Well, as you said, this has happened once in your life, and for a lot of people, it doesn't happen at all. Yeah.

[00:28:44]Yeah.

[00:28:44]>> Have you ever experienced anything like this?

[00:28:46]>> I I don't think I've ever experienced like that real sudden type. I think there are kind of I don't know what you want to call minor uh quantum changes that maybe that's an oxymoron. I don't know. My my mom had a health scare last year. Um and it was it was intense. It was pretty intense for the whole family.

[00:29:04]I went and I helped as much as I could.

[00:29:06]And um I always said I valued family and there I was. because I was valuing family and and helping out. I did notice though even even at this age I still had some lingering resentments around my parents just you know like people do >> who doesn't >> who doesn't right yeah like whatever you did this or didn't do that or all of that and I was still kind of holding on to that she spent a week in the hospital after that week that was just gone like all of that was just gone there's no resentment for what anything they had ever done no matter how terrible I thought it was or traumatic somebody else might have thought it was I just let go of all that and that like that did reshuffle narratives. It reshuffled beliefs. It reshuffled a lot of my behaviors and habits around them. Like that's one of the closer things I think I've ever had. Yeah. To that. So it's kind of like a more minor one which I think that's that can be more common for people. It's usually with relationships too. It's interesting because if you think about what is the evolutionary role of pain and suffering, it is to get you to change your behavior.

[00:30:07]>> Right.

[00:30:08]>> Right.

[00:30:08]>> Right. And everything we've talked about up until this chapter has been like the pleasant way to change, right? Here's how to make uh a gym habit more fun, right? Like here's how to improve your relationships on autopilot, right? But it takes months and you have to do it for years. Pleasant experiences don't change you nearly at the same rate or intensity that painful experiences do.

[00:30:33]And that is by design, right? It's like pleasure is nature telling you. So, it's your biology telling you, "Don't change.

[00:30:41]You're doing good." Like, "Stay right here." Right? [laughter] Pain is your biology telling you, "You need to change, [ __ ] cuz this is not working." So, it makes sense that rapid, highly intense change requires highly intense amounts of pain to achieve it. So, all of these cases of rapid transformational change, they look different on the surface. you know, mystical experiences, traumatic loss, hitting rock bottom, but underneath them all, there is one sequence that runs through them all. So, the first one is your initial adaptation structure needs to fail in some way. It has to stop working. And the consequence of it not working is that you experience a lot of pain and suffering, right? So, you're failing to achieve your goals. A lot of the things you believe to be true are actually not true. A lot of your relationships that you thought were good are actually not good. That is what your adaptation structure failing is. It's like [ __ ] suffering. Step two is that there has to be a consequential crisis of meaning. You watch your adaptation structure fail and then there's this questioning of like h how could I have been so wrong? Like do I know anything?

[00:31:50]>> Is everything I've done meaningless, right?

[00:31:53]>> There's a lot of that that goes on, right?

[00:31:54]>> Exly. Exactly. I would say this was like what I felt intensely after my friend died is I really just sat around for like the next month obsessively thinking about like what have I been doing for years? Like I've been wasting my entire life for years. Step three is that there is a forced reconstruction. They often call this uh the crisis of step two an existential vacuum. It's basically there's a a void of meaning of like where your understanding of yourself and the world is and vacuums they always get filled right so at some point you start to reconstruct meaning in your life you start deciding on new values a new identity new things that you want to be in the world even though you're deciding these things this is still not really a euphoric thing it's still there's a lot of uncertainty right it's like okay the old me was doing everything wrong. The new me, I have some ideas about how I want to be in the world, but I've never lived this way before. I've never been this person before. So, I don't totally know if I'm doing it right. I don't know if this is actually the way I should be. I really experienced this after I stopped drinking. There was definitely this extended period of like, I don't know what I like anymore. I don't know what type of people I like going out with anymore. I don't know what my hobbies are anymore, right? Right. And so then I was like kind of just being like, well, I guess I'll be a surfer and see what happens, >> right? [laughter] Yeah.

[00:33:24]>> And then there's this period where you're like going out surfing. You're like, do I like this? I don't know if I like this. Is this is this me? Like am I this person? And so there's this like just this kind of awkward teenage phase that happens I think as you kind of reconstruct your identity. And then finally step four is the reorganization kind of coalesce simultaneously right so it's at some point everything kind of starts slotting together of like new belief systems new value systems new relationships new behaviors these adaptations exist in in a network in a web you can't only get new relationships without also getting new behaviors and new beliefs and new values right like all of them have to change simultaneous viously, >> right? And if it is a value that has collapsed at that point, if once you find the value, like everything is built off of that and it's it's fairly clear, right? When you have a strong value, the behaviors change instantly. The narratives, the beliefs, everything changes right around that. It becomes a forcing function. Let's say you go through some sort of uh existential crisis or something or or traumatic experience and you come out of it and you decide my family is the most important thing in the world.

[00:34:40]That prioritization of family like that becomes the lens by which you make all your decisions, by which you create all your behaviors, by which you generate all your new beliefs. Everything optimizes for that.

[00:34:53]>> You just told me the steps.

[00:34:54]>> Yes.

[00:34:55]>> Right. Why can't we do this on purpose?

[00:34:58]>> Why can't we make this happen on purpose? If if we know the steps, we can describe it. We like I said, we've just went through all these frameworks.

[00:35:05]>> I can tell you how it works. Everybody does goes through these phases. do these steps? Why can't we do this on purpose?

[00:35:11]>> You know, I don't know if we can't, >> but it if we can, I think we can only really do it on like a very minor scale.

[00:35:19]These massive sudden changes like they I think part of what makes them so powerful is that they they cannot happen on purpose. Like you said, they have to happen to us because the part of you that needs to change the most is the part of you that is the most determined to stay the same. You can't voluntarily collapse your identity, right? That's kind of what you're saying because your identity, its whole job is to have this like cohesive story about who you are.

[00:35:44]It's literally there to say, "No, this is who I am and I'm not going anywhere."

[00:35:48]And so if you're deliberately trying to say, "Hey, get out of there." Like it's going to rebel right away. Right.

[00:35:54]>> It's also the thing that's trying to get it out of like Right. It's you >> Yeah. Yeah. Right.

[00:35:59]>> Who is trying to get rid of your identity? Your [ __ ] identity.

[00:36:02]>> The [laughter] dog chasing the tail, right?

[00:36:05]It's almost like a survival mechanism, you know, that it's just that's just not going to happen. You're not going to destroy your own identity just by thinking about it or just by trying really hard to do it. It's just not going to happen. I think another one is the, you know, your values clarification. If you're aiming at I'm trying to change this value, that's also a story that you tell yourself. And it's looking for coherence, not truth. And so the the narratives um all around that, those are there to protect you as well.

[00:36:33]They're there to um just give your life a coherent story no matter if it's serving you or not. And so dislodging that again, it's it's like a survival mechanism. We need to make sense of the world.

[00:36:44]>> And so just trying to pull a random value out of the the mix of all the values and and habits and beliefs that you have and narratives and all that, that's very very destabilizing. And so again, you just have the self-protective function that's just not going to allow you to do that.

[00:37:02]>> Yeah. I feel like the value change piece of this I feel like you can't really change more than one value at a time voluntarily, right? And and like what we're talking about is just like a complete and utter collapse of your entire value system, you know? It's like the entire value hierarchy just just gets inverted or something overnight.

[00:37:23]That's not going to happen willingly, >> right? the closest approaches that we do have. Uh William Miller um the same guy who who coined the term quantum change also came up with he was the co-inventor of what they call motivational interviewing which is like a less intense kind of like deliberate trying to show people okay you say you value this but here you're you're behaving this way and now let's get in and do the work in between. It's slow though it's not you're probably not going to get quantum change out of that necessarily.

[00:37:48]Meditation and other contemplative practices can kind of get you there as well. It's very intense, very long. uh probably years if not decades worth of that. So again, not really quantum change, but you know, you're aiming at that. I think psychedelics might be the closest thing we have, but again, it's not guaranteed. It can do a lot of things that don't equate to quantum change. Yeah.

[00:38:08]>> Right. And you probably also need to be in in the presence of like a very skilled >> Yes. the therapist who's used to working with people on psychedelics.

[00:38:19]>> Yeah. You do a lot of prep work, you you do the experience, and you do a lot of integration work after. Yeah. I've experienced ego dissolution on psychedelics. Like I've lost complete sense of myself and became one with the universe and all this stuff. And I came out of it thinking that I was like a new person. I was the same [ __ ] idiot.

[00:38:33]Like it I just had new things to laugh at. That was pretty much all that happened, >> right? Yeah. I think there's a real risk there of thinking I've went through this experience and I've oh look at how much I've changed and you haven't. I think that's the risk with psychedelics. So I would caution.

[00:38:46]>> Can we just like pause for a second cuz that happens all the time. And I think I think not just with psychedelics too. I think you see >> big change in general. Yeah.

[00:38:54]>> Yeah. You see it happen. People read a book and they're like, "Oh my god, this book changed my life." And they're doing the same [ __ ] Like it's endemic, particularly in the personal growth space. I see it all the time with with people. People become kind of addicted to telling themselves they changed without actually living the change or implementing the change. Or there's also a little bit of a dopamine hit of changing something small in your life, right? like having like a new smoothie in the morning with a new supplement and then like convincing yourself that that has completely altered your energy levels for the last month straight and you're a new person because of it. It's narratives like that that we want to believe and because we want to believe them, we're more likely to believe them.

[00:39:36]It's not real. [laughter] I the the thing around psychedelics, like you said, the highly structured, highly intensive work that you do around, it's not the experience itself necessarily. That's the opening up experience like you talked about the dissolution, the eco dissolution or this the identity dissolution. That's what that's there for. It's all the work you do before around and after it. Um they've showed this to you with the terminal cancer patients. Roland Griffith famous researcher uh who did this work found that you know if you put them through this pretty rigorous therapeutic protocol involving psychedelics, okay, that you could really get them to it was around end of life anxiety. you could really get them to um accept it more and and have these big changes and there were probably a quantum change at some point also in those settings too they interviewed people the people around them >> so before during and after too to see and they're like yes uh this person definitely did change really did change >> but it's a again it's a highly structured highly intensive very expensive >> uh process and quite painful again too like I said yeah >> yeah it can be scary and I would argue too that like you probably need to be in a certain amount of pain for it to be susceptible to the benefits of it. One of the things that I run into all the time out of here is like people are doing psychedelic therapy is like a [ __ ] hobby. It's like going to the doctor and not being injured, right?

[00:40:59][laughter] >> Yeah.

[00:41:00]>> And then being like, "This doctor changed my life." It's like, dude, you weren't injured. [laughter] >> Do you know what you want to know what the one of the best predictors of actually coming out with like a a powerful mystical experience through psychedelics is?

[00:41:14]>> No.

[00:41:14]>> Having low expectations. So the people who taking a thing I'm going to get like I'm going for some wisdom or something like that >> this is life chang what you said you know you had to have some amount of pain these people they're they're on their death beds facing cancer they're like whatever give me sure why I have zero expectations that this is going to work and for whatever reason that's like one of the most best the best predictors that it actually will work just from my anecdotal point of view like most of the people I've met who have done it like I can't really see anything that has changed or anything that's different. But I do have one friend that it it like seems to have actually made a massive difference in a short period of time.

[00:41:53]But again, the thing about him is that he was literally on his last resort.

[00:41:57]Like he was dealing with some issues that had been going on for years that he had gone everywhere, right? He had gone to therapy, he had gotten marriage counseling, he had gotten psychiatric medicine, he had tried all he tried everything. and he was just like on his last leg and he was like, "Fuck it, let me try this." And then that was the thing that broke through for him. So, it's almost like he was probably pretty close to bottom to begin with.

[00:42:24]>> Um, so maybe it might even be that the the psychedelics just accelerate the process that's if it's already in motion, which is probably true of like the self-help seminar thing, right? Like I I think there probably are people that do seemingly have quantum changes at self-help seminars, but they are probably people who are near or already at bottom when they attend and they're just like, "Fuck it. What do I have to lose?"

[00:42:49]>> That's actually what they found too in the in the little research that they've done. Like Miller has found that it's actually not as sudden as you would think. there's actually this whole big period that builds up to it and it just gets to a breaking point at some point and for whatever reason all the factors come together and produce it. So that's that's actually very important. So there's usually a building up period that comes with it.

[00:43:10]>> That's the how to change your life in one day kids. [laughter] >> You also you recently did a YouTube video on this. I encourage people to go check this out too. But yeah.

[00:43:19]>> Yeah. So, in that YouTube video, I really do take a stab at like, okay, if you can intentionally force this in your life, like here's probably how you would do it. I have this whole idea around an anti- vision and this like exercise and process you go through. It's ultimately to get that really profound lightning bolt moment, you probably don't want to go through what it takes to get it. And and if you do go through what it takes to get it, you deserve to have it [laughter] essentially.

[00:43:48]>> Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so probably not the conclusion people were hoping for, but here at the Solve Podcast, we're not in the business of telling you what you want to hear. So, up until now, we've we've covered all of the mechanisms and processes of changing yourself, how to change your life. There's one more aspect to this topic we still have not talked about yet, and it is arguably the most important aspect of change and how to change your life. And that is the cost and the maintenance of change. What are you going to have to give up to change? And how much effort is it going to take to sustain the change? I think a lot of people unreasonably want to change and not give anything up and that's why they don't change. So, in the next chapter, we're going to talk about what is the price of change and how do you know if you're willing to pay it.

[00:44:34]What's up everybody? Thank you for watching. This video is just one chapter of a much larger podcast episode about change where Drew and I cover everything from specific ways to change and annoying behavior to deep identity level changes. We'll be releasing new chapters every few days on YouTube. But if you want to watch or listen to the full episode right now, click on the links in the description to watch everything on Spotify. And if you like the show, please don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide and workbook with all of the resources, citations, and exercises at solve podcast.com/change.

[00:45:11]So, I will see you soon.