As many of you know, I’ve been focused on writing my book this year rather than Substack articles. But in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, I feel compelled to say something. Two years ago, I published an article titled The United Stance arguing that improving our collective mental fitness as a nation relies on recognizing common values, being curious about different points of view, and bridging ideological divides through civil discourse. Now more than ever, that message is worth revisiting and expounding upon. Because we are becoming increasingly emotionally dysregulated as a country.1

Kirk's killing came one day before 9/11's anniversary, a stark reminder of how a horrific tragedy can either unite or divide us. In 2001, we chose the former option. Political affiliation took a back seat. We recognized ourselves first and foremost as Americans. We didn't care about party lines. We were nicer to one another because a real enemy was targeting us and what we stood for.

Twenty-four years later, many voices still fall in that camp. In the days following this most recent act of deadly violence, they are urging restraint, calling for everyone to turn down the temperature, and promoting togetherness.

Alternatively, some are stoking division and vilifying the “other side.” That kind of rhetoric has grown sharper and more poisonous in the last few decades. Many relentlessly demonize and blame an ominous, opposing “they” for just about everything: they are ruining our country, they are destroying our values, they are the enemy. But who is “they,” exactly? Usually, the implication is that it’s half of America, painted with one dark brush.

The people who propagate such a message do it because they derive enormous amounts of money and power from making their consumers angry and afraid. Modern-day politics and media profit by convincing us to despise one another with sweeping statements about everyone on either “the left” or “the right.” It gives us license to feel righteous and keeps us tuned in.

However, the problem in this country is not our neighbors who vote differently from us. I’m not a card-carrying member of either major political party. Yet I have many friends who are staunch Republicans and others who are way more liberal than I am. In fact, not a single person I know agrees with me on absolutely everything, including my closest family members. None of them are the evil monsters we’re told to fear. Americans are simply trying to do their best to live a happy life. Most are not criminals, nor are they tied to violent acts, just because of their political affiliation.

The real issue is the message of division itself. Of course, the ones behind it are citizens too, and under our system of government, they have every right to speak freely. The path forward isn’t to demonize the demonizers or try to silence them. And it’s certainly not to cause them physical harm. It’s for the rest of us to recognize our complicity in this process and avoid being part of it. It’s about doing the exact opposite of pointing fingers at others and instead taking a hard look at ourselves and what we can do better.

Part of being mentally fit is appropriately responding to our own anger and fear. These are natural human emotions, but left unchecked, they can consume us and severely distort how we see the world. If you find yourself constantly dialing into outrage TV, social media, or talk radio (what I collectively refer to as anger porn) to seek gratification and confirmation bias for how you feel, ask yourself honestly if you aren’t just indulging in emotional masturbation.

Breaking free from this cycle requires decisive action. Turn off the broadcast. Don’t share the clip. Stop electing leaders who thrive on division. Recognize that emotional dysregulation is driving our national conversation, and commit instead to having rational, civil discussions with those who may have differing viewpoints. We can still disagree and argue without denigrating and belittling one another. The goal isn’t to impose your will but to find common ground.

We refer to our nation as the “Union.” It’s a coming together of diverse ideas, backgrounds, and cultures to form one country under the motto E Pluribus Unum (one out of many). Yet, if we are honest, the state of it isn’t very good. Perfection isn’t attainable, but we can be a more perfect union than we’ve been as of late. We did it following 9/11.

When we talk about that day, we say “never forget.” Often, it means to remember the attack itself. But we should also truly never forget how we treated one another afterward. Perhaps the most fitting way to honor Charlie Kirk’s death, whether or not you agreed with his ideas, is to remember where unchecked anger and fear can lead, and never forget that we have the power to make different choices.

It’s not someone else’s job to fix things. It’s ours—all of us. That begins with internal work. Be aware of your emotions and build a healthy relationship with them. Pay attention to the message you are amplifying. Ask yourself if you’re part of the problem or the solution. You aren’t required to love or even like everyone. It doesn’t matter how you vote. Just don’t be a divider.

Mental fitness relies on the right viewpoint, the right emotion, and the right knowledge. Our nation desperately needs all three right now. The state of our Union, and each one of us, depends on it.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

It’s been a while since my last update, and in that time, I’ve been fortunate to welcome a substantial number of new subscribers. To all of you who’ve recently joined and those who have been here longer, thank you for being part of this journey. Today, I want to share some updates about why I’m mainly staying off the net right now and give you a glimpse of what’s ahead in 2025.

This post is an extension of The Future of RARE SENSE from April 2024. At that time, I decided to discontinue paid subscriptions to avoid the constraints of a rigid publishing schedule. Staying true to my guiding principle of quality over quantity, I want RARE SENSE to remain a thoughtful and evolving body of work—not content churned out merely to justify repeated payments. I’d consider offering a one-time fee for lifetime access, but Substack’s structure doesn’t currently support that model. On a personal note, I’ve also grown increasingly disillusioned with the subscription economy as a whole. Nowadays, everything—from music to software—is about endless renting rather than ownership. But I digress…

Additionally, this platform presents some limitations that make it less than ideal for what I envision. For instance, I can’t reorganize the existing pieces into a preferred sequence, which would make it more accessible to readers. Maybe one day I’ll move everything somewhere where I could do that. Until then, the best option is to keep it all here as a largely fixed but free resource.

My primary focus now is completing my upcoming book, a project I’m deeply invested in. Apparently, 2025 is the year of the brain, which seems like auspicious timing for its release. My goal is to present the core ideas of RARE SENSE in a concise, structured, and actionable format. I’m about three to six months away from finishing and dedicating the time needed to deliver something truly impactful. Once the book is complete, I’ll return to Substack to finish the mind-killer article series and evaluate next steps. For now, I encourage you to explore the archives. Much of what defines RARE SENSE is already waiting for you in over a hundred articles, training posts, book recommendations, and podcast episodes.

In other news, I co-hosted a one-day workshop called The Mindful Athlete at CrossFit New England with Ben Bergeron and the CompTrain team this past November. With a small group, we explored foundational concepts and practices for mind fitness, including meditation and breathing. It was an inspiring experience that reinforced the importance of this work. Additionally, I’m being featured in a series of interviews on their Chasing Excellence podcast, diving deep into the mind-killers. I highly recommend checking those out.

Lastly, I’ve decided to suspend the RARE SENSE Podcast indefinitely. As the Communications Director for the Navy SEAL Foundation, I now host On the X, a weekly broadcast that leaves me little bandwidth for a second show. This was a tough decision, but I had to make it.

I sincerely appreciate your patience as I navigate the challenges and opportunities ahead. RARE SENSE continues to evolve as an idea and a company, and I’m excited about the future. Thank you for being here. Your support makes all the difference, and the best is yet to come.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

To date, the most viewed training video by far on my YouTube channel is the 5.5-minute perfect breathing exercise. However, I’ve had numerous people ask me for an extended version up to one hour long. So here you go. Outside of the length, it’s the same basic track. The idea is to cycle five and a half liters of air with five and a half total breaths per minute by breathing in and out for five and a half seconds each. I cue you for the first few cycles, but after that, just breathe along with the two tones or the visual prompts. Go for as long as you like, up to sixty minutes. Check out my original post for details on why this technique is effective.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

Most people often overlook two obvious truths regarding how best to counter fear. The first is that its opposite is not courage, as we tend to think. Courage can undoubtedly be useful and is worthy of praise. But bravery is acting despite fear. Being afraid is a prerequisite. Valor is also a temporary fix that has zero impact on chronic fear. Consider those with dangerous professions who suffer from hypervigilance. These people are undoubtedly courageous. Yet despite their heroic actions at times, many still walk around with persistent limbic system impairment.

The second is that nothing is innately scary. Some people are terrified of spiders, while others study them for a living. Many people fear flying. Others are pilots. We see the same juxtaposition in humanity’s attitudes towards snakes, heights, and countless other things. Of course, any of those can present a situation worthy of a time-bound fear-based response. However, none of them are somehow imbued with an inherent scariness quality. We only choose to view them that way.

Armed with these facts (that fear is usually unjustified outside of truly perilous scenarios and that we need a strategy other than courage to counteract unhealthy or unwarranted forms), we must seek an alternative. I first found one thanks to a man named Charles Linden.

When I started experiencing perplexing physical sensations around the time I was exiting active duty, I initially sought medical testing to diagnose the problem. It seemed like the clear place to look but yielded no answers. So, after a few months, I started Googling for them. Typically, this is a highly ill-advised course of action as it can further scare you into thinking you have every disease on the planet. While part of me did believe that, luckily, I also assumed that some portion of my condition was mental health-related and searched the internet accordingly.

The results presented me with something called The Linden Method. Decades earlier, its eponymous creator suffered from severe anxiety. He spent years convinced he was dying while experiencing debilitating symptoms that, in his mind, confirmed this belief. He took various medications that didn’t help and, in many ways, made things worse. Meanwhile, his fears only intensified.

After years of suffering like this with no improvement, he eventually decided to take a completely different approach. He quit all his prescription drugs, which were aimed at treating symptoms, and instead started focusing on addressing his anxiety head-on as the root cause. What Linden posited was that maybe his mind was the real culprit behind his entire condition. What if constantly thinking this way had somehow created the somatic sensations he felt, and worrying about them merely fueled the fire?

The crux of his theory was that substantially repetitive conscious thoughts can get offloaded to the subconscious like a software program running in the background. It’s the same as any other skill the brain learns and wants to make automatic so it can focus on something else. Driving is a perfect example of how this process typically works. It's a deliberate act when you first try to operate a motor vehicle. You must pay attention and concentrate on every move you make. But after hundreds of hours, you no longer have to think about it. You can cruise down the road and even parallel park while talking on the phone, playing with the radio, and drinking coffee. It’s subconscious behavior now.

Linden surmised that the same thing can happen with anything we do often enough, including thinking. In fact, the typical patterns of behavior that make us feel like ourselves are simply the result of repetitive action. So, if we spend long enough in a state of fear, eventually, it runs on autopilot as part of our standard subroutine. Now, we are an “anxious person.” And given fear's somatic effects, it can wreak havoc on you physically. This is what he postulated had happened to him.

Somehow, he needed to overwrite the destructive program. Eventually, he discovered effective methods through trial and error and fully recovered. The critical component he realized was that he couldn’t simply think his way out of it. It took action. He had to do things differently if we were to develop new subconscious patterns.

His story read like an autobiography of my life at the time. Everything he had experienced was exactly what I was feeling. But I had never fathomed that your mind could have that kind of power over your body from a symptomatic standpoint. I thought if I experienced physical dysfunction, it had to have an equally physical cause. He was the first person who opened my eyes to the fact that this isn’t always true.

Thanks to his method, I made substantial improvements. Years later, when faced with an even more severe chronic illness, I would need to adopt additional systems and exercises aimed at calming my limbic system to recover. Below, I will recommend some of these in addition to Linden’s. But first, I need to discuss the overarching countermeasure to fear that his content revealed for me—curiosity.

The Linden Method is anchored around the concept that engaging in an activity like a new skill or hobby requires conscious attention that does not allow deleterious subconscious patterns to get up to their old tricks. If you do this enough and expand that attitude to everything you do, interest eventually replaces fear as your standard operating condition. You become a curious person instead of an anxious one. It takes a lot of repetition and commitment, and depending on your level of dysfunction, this can be much easier said than done, but it is possible.

Kids act like this naturally. My youngest son is twelve. He’s been scared plenty of times in his life thus far. But he’s never anxious. This is because he’s too busy being amazed. He walks around with a sense of awe about the world around him. It can be as simple as a giant icicle hanging off a building, and his response will always be, “Whoa, look at the size of that!” He never thinks, “That might fall off and hurt someone.” Linden’s brand of curiosity is similar and focuses on external interests as a form of distraction. By getting out of your head and placing your focus elsewhere with an aura of wonder, you can break free from the downward spiral of anxiety.

But you can also take this tact with your own anxious thoughts and become curious about them. As with other emotions like sorrow and anger, our initial reaction isn’t the problem. Fear is natural and sometimes wholly appropriate. But how we respond to that impulse, especially when it’s unwarranted, makes all the difference in the world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” However, in the context of mental health, it’s the only thing we shouldn’t fear. Fear itself can’t hurt you, and fearing fear is often what sends us down a dark path.

Instead, we must also cultivate curiosity about our internal workings in addition to external interests. Dr. Russell Kennedy, another long-time health anxiety sufferer, describes anxiety as an “alarm” in his book Anxiety Rx. It’s a warning system and a feeling (not a thought) that your body (not your mind) has developed over time. So, when that feeling presents itself, the worst response is resisting it or pushing it away. That’s just another form of fear. Think of anxiety like a small child who is upset. You don’t get them to calm down by screaming at them to stop. You do it by taking an interest in what’s bothering them, reassuring them, and lovingly wrapping your arms around them. When we repeatedly do the same thing with our fears over time, this shifts our brain into a rational mode and eventually convinces our limbic system that it’s safe and no longer needs to stay on high alert.

This is especially true for physical sensations we may experience because of chronic fear. Every time we push against them, they intensify. If we consequently resist them even more, it creates a snowball effect. The solution is to do the opposite. Look at those symptoms as just sensations. Treat them with curiosity and even go one step further and become comfortable with them.

When I was in the midst of ketamine treatments back in 2021, one day, I remarked to my facilitator buddy about the grip anxiety held on me. He said, “Stop giving away your power.” He meant that my condition only had as much influence over me as I chose to give it. The sooner I realized I was in control, the sooner I could start changing my approach to the situation. The second you take imagined threats and turn them into objects of interest, you begin to understand them instead of fearing them. And as the familiar axiom goes, knowledge is power.

A year or so later, I was at a dinner party speaking with a woman I had just met about mental health and my journey. She expressed to me how she suffered from panic attacks and worried often about when one might strike. I jotted a note down on a yellow stickie and gave it to her. It said, so what? “Next time you have a panic attack,” I stated, “take this attitude. The problem isn’t the attack itself. It’s how you are responding. I used to have panic attacks, too. I don’t anymore because I finally realized they can’t harm me. Instead, I became curious about them. Don’t give them any power they don’t deserve. Say to yourself, ‘I’m having a panic attack. That’s interesting. But so what?’”

Exercises

I don’t want to minimize how challenging it can be to overcome fear. I know firsthand the insidious way it can permeate your life and the difficulties in reprogramming yourself. It takes time, but even for those with debilitating limbic system impairment, it can be done with enough tenacity and commitment to the process. From methods like Linden’s to breathwork to journaling to neural retraining, here are the most effective countermeasure exercises I’ve found, from the easiest and least amount of time involved to the most demanding. All include links to more detailed descriptions and guided tracks where appropriate. Some of these work directly with curiosity, while others help change your biology to make you more resilient in the face of stress. The goal of these is twofold: break the cycle and turn off the alarm. Depending on where you fall on the fear spectrum, you may need to go deep with these practices. As always, seek for yourself and know yourself.

Statement of Intent

This exercise complements the statement of gratitude. Here, you are focusing on the future instead of the past. First thing in the morning, write a simple declaration on a yellow stickie about how you intend to act that day. Make it positive, hopeful, and optimistic. For example:

• I intend to assume the best-case scenario in all circumstances.

• I intend to give the best possible interpretation of situations.

As before, place it somewhere you see often. If you put your statement of gratitude on the bottom left of your computer monitor, put this one on the right. As any anxious thought arises during the day, change it to this declaration.

Fear-Setting

This exercise comes from a TED Talk by Tim Ferriss and is excellent if you are prone to catastrophizing. It’s a version of the Stoic practice of premeditatio malorum, which means “the premeditation of evils.” Simply put, it’s envisioning the worst-case scenario so you are best prepared if it transpires. I’ve modified Ferriss’ exercise slightly, and it involves creating four columns on a sheet of paper or in a journal as follows:

1. DEFINE. What is it you are worried might happen? List out as many of these as possible in detail.

2. PREVENT. For each, establish a mitigation measure to prevent or decrease the likelihood of that outcome.

3. REPAIR. If that doesn’t work, what could you do to repair the damage caused by the fear coming true?

4. ANALYZE. When the scenario in question came to pass, what actually happened?

This fourth component is the crucial one I added. Most calamities you have anticipated didn’t occur. Fear-setting is a way to show us this objectively so we stop focusing on imagined tragedies with such trepidation. That column allows you to see this for yourself. Maybe it’s time to stop assuming the worst.

Box Breathing

We can use breathwork for various reasons. In the case of Integration, the goal was energy flow. Here, it’s to make us more resilient to anticipated stress. Box breathing is a simple technique done before a situation you know might make you nervous to help reduce that response. Breathe in, hold, breathe out, and hold, each for a four-count repeatedly. These segments represent the figurative box's side, top, side, and bottom. As always, breathe quietly from your diaphragm and through your nose. Try it for five to ten minutes before a big game, presentation, or other situation where you might be on edge.

Resonance Breathing

Resonance breathing is a technique developed by Dr. Leah Lagos, detailed in her book Heart Breath Mind. It consists of a four-second inhale through the nose and a six-second exhale through the mouth. Lagos guides readers through a ten-week protocol based on this practice, doing it twenty minutes twice daily. This exercise strengthens your natural resilience to stress by increasing your heart rate variability (HRV). When done correctly, things naturally won’t bother you as much. And that happens without you having to think any differently about them.

Skill Development

Much like The Linden Method, finding a skill you are passionate about and devoting focused energy to it daily can temporarily distract your subconscious mind away from anxiety and eventually shift it toward curiosity and interest. When starting, it helps to dedicate a fixed amount of time to this hobby. Commit to thirty minutes every day for a month and see if it changes how you feel, specifically while engaged in the activity.

Past Visualization

Your brain can’t distinguish between what it perceives in reality and what it vividly imagines. If you can engross yourself in a favorable scenario from your past, this reassures your mind that it’s safe and needn’t be on guard. The trick is to describe the situation verbally and tap into your five senses as part of the process.

Pull up an especially joyous memory, close your eyes, and imagine you are there. Detail what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch out loud. If you are on a beach somewhere, conjure up the feeling of sand under your toes, including texture and temperature, the way the waves sound, and the smell of the sea. The more immersive, the better. Remind your brain that there’s nothing to worry about and everything is OK.

Neural Retraining

Several systems are specifically designed for those suffering from limbic system impairment in the form of chronic illness. They include Annie Hoppers’ DNRS, Ashok Gupta’s The Gupta Program, and Ben Ahren’s re-origin. All of them are self-paced video courses that expand upon the spoken visualization described above to re-program the limbic system back to an appropriate baseline.

Each method requires varying levels of commitment, from thirty to sixty minutes a day for up to six months or more. But they do work and have brought profound improvements to those who have struggled for years with mysterious conditions. Participants can also sign up for group sessions or individual coaching with their staff. I’m partial to re-origin as I think it’s the simplest approach.

Somatic Tracking

Curable is an app based on “somatic tracking,” detailed in the book The Way Out by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv. The authors derived their method from work done by Dr. John Sarno. He studied how patients would undergo back surgery to relieve pain, but it would persist. Much like chronic illness conditions, he theorized that the feeling of pain could get locked into the nervous system by the brain even after the injury was gone. This is similar to the way an amputee can experience phantom limbs. Dr. Sarno called this condition Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS). To me, this is yet another form of chronic fear. Accordingly, Curable uses techniques similar to other neural training programs that shift people from fear-based responses to curiosity-based ones about their pain.

Closing Thought

When I think of fear personified, it’s the images of Evgeny Stepanovich Kobytev, a Soviet soldier from World War II. Two photos taken four years apart show the toll that the war, including time in a concentration camp, took on him. In the first picture, he is young, good-looking, and calm. In the second, it looks like a shotgun blast went off in his face. His forehead is wrinkled, his eyes wide and haunted, and he’s locked in hypervigilance.

Fear is something that can get coded into your very being. You carry it around even when you don’t consciously sense it. The only way out is to start taking an interest in what’s happening and changing your relationship with it. By and large, the world is pretty safe these days. And so are you. Fear itself isn’t dangerous. Any “symptoms” you feel are just sensations. Don’t treat them as threats. Don’t resist them. Welcome them. Love them. Become a curious observer.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

If you recall from my overview article about the mind-killers, I adopted this term from the Litany Against Fear in Frank Herbert’s Dune. So, from an origin story perspective, fear is, in fact, the mind-killer. However, as it relates to the RARE SENSE® theory and practice, it’s our fourth one.

Fear is an emotion like sorrow or anger whose gaze is pointed in the opposite direction. Whereas those are reactions to something that look backward into the past, fear focuses on the future. It isn’t concerned with what already happened but with what might occur.

It also serves a specific purpose—to keep us from harm. Fear is a trigger that not only alerts us to danger but also tries to protect us from it through physical processes. When we are afraid, our brains alter our bodies to give us the greatest chance of dealing appropriately with a potential threat. Our autonomic nervous system shifts from a sympathetic state to a parasympathetic one. Our adrenal glands fire while blood and oxygen are diverted toward our muscles and away from things like digestion, which are less critical now. Our field of vision narrows. We can then use this heightened condition to fight, run away (flight), or freeze. Fear significantly impacts our physiology, and we feel it viscerally.

Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Like any other mammal, for most of human history, we faced daily, legitimate, mortal threats from predators, other members of our species, and Mother Nature. An essential function of our brains is to mitigate these risks to the greatest extent possible and ensure our survival.

Today, we call the structures that do this the limbic system. It’s composed of parts like the amygdala, hippocampus, and thalamus. There’s some scientific contention about whether these various components represent a system, but it doesn’t matter to laypeople. The critical piece to understand is that a portion of your brain creates a fear-based response at times with the intent of keeping you alive, and it’s deeply rooted in your biology. For our purposes here, I will continue to refer to it as the limbic system.

However, modern humans are rarely in any real danger. Life has become comfortable and safe. Our homes and society largely protect us from the elements, animals, and nefarious individuals. Regardless, we still feel fear at times. We also experience its accompanying somatic byproducts because we still carry the vestiges of a primitive limbic system that has yet to evolve into something more attuned to current living conditions.

Of course, occasionally, this is completely warranted. If a car crash is imminent, fear hopefully does its job and assists us in avoiding it. Much more often, though, we are simply anxious or nervous. These are nothing more than less intense forms of fear, and we can detect their physiological impact via sensations like sweaty palms, racing heart rate, and butterflies in our stomachs. Luckily, we recognize there’s no real danger in these circumstances, and the feeling eventually subsides. That just might not happen until the scary movie or big presentation is over.

We also worry about things like our health, politics, the environment, etc. Some measure of that is healthy. It can help you objectively assess a situation and make better decisions. But many of us take this response to extremes and make it omnipresent. Maybe we grew up in an environment that wasn’t safe, and now we view the whole world that way. Our profession might put us at risk daily, so we are constantly on edge.

This situation can be further exacerbated by all the external messaging in media and advertising constantly telling you to stress about everything. Whether it’s regarding some illness or the possibility of nuclear war, we receive a constant barrage of fearmongering from outside sources every day.

As a result, we can get locked into a perpetual state of assessing the current terrain of life and fixating on what lies ahead. This is where we run into trouble—when modern fears extend beyond acute scenarios and become chronic. Because this is no different than our instinctual primal response. We’ve simply habituated it, teaching our brains to always be on high alert and our nervous systems to constantly be in parasympathetic mode. That can take the form of anxiety, catastrophizing, or hypervigilance, to name a few examples. Anyone dealing with those behavior patterns probably wouldn’t describe themselves as being afraid all the time. But biologically, they are.

This obviously negatively affects our minds. However, it can also have disastrous consequences on our bodies. It doesn’t take a medical degree to understand that constantly spiking your cortisol and shunting your digestion isn’t healthy. It’s also a case whereby the energy incessantly created by the limbic response essentially has nowhere to go. When an animal freezes (aka “plays dead”) to deal with a predator, it utilizes a process called “tremoring” once the threat has passed to bleed off its internal energy. Humans don’t do this. But if we are constantly in a hypervigilant state, we may develop similar sensations like shaking, numbness, tingling, dizziness, brain fog, or panic attacks, to name a few.

When this happens to people, most have no idea what’s going on. Since they are already in such a heightened state, many react with even more fear. They become fixated on these sensations, assuming they indicate a disease. This further compounds the problem, which continues to snowball. It creates a closed feedback loop that can eventually leave you physically debilitated. Many sufferers end up bedridden and unable to function for years as a result.

Interestingly, it doesn’t even take a conscious fear-based response to trigger limbic impairment. A physical one like a virus or bacteria can also do it if our overall health is worn down enough. This means that even a subconscious defense mechanism like the immune system can generate the same scenario. Unfortunately, many people never realize this and end up chasing a physical solution to what’s essentially a mental problem.

I know this struggle all too well. While storytelling was my first mind-killer, fear was my most prevalent and destructive. In 2011, continuous ruminations on how I felt I’d failed my teammates on active duty slowly morphed from regret to dread. Alongside a shameful story of the past, a dark and fearful one emerged about the future. Because men I considered far better than me had died in combat or training and I had not, I felt there must be some fatal disease coming to take me out. I started to believe that any twinge or gurgle in my body was proof of a terminal condition.

As a result, they got worse. I began getting tremors and numbness in my extremities. I’d be tired and dizzy all the time. And I had my share of panic attacks. Like so many others, I had no idea what was happening then. Years later, when I suffered my acute mold exposure and my system collapsed, I experienced these symptoms again but on an entirely new level. It got ten times worse.

These two stages of my life represent separate times when I had to learn how to counter systemic fear differently. They were, without a doubt, the most brutal internal battles I’ve ever had to fight. As I discovered in both cases, practical self-directed exercises can help anyone escape fear’s clutches, regardless of how badly this mind-killer affects you. In my next article, I’ll discuss how to do this through the countermeasure of curiosity.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

Dr. Paul Conti is a renowned psychiatrist whom Lady Gaga credits with saving her life through his work. As you might expect, his book Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic dives deep into the title subject, including why it’s at the root of numerous conditions and how to heal from it. Dr. Conti was also featured in a four-part series on the Huberman Lab about mental health. It’s worth a listen if you have the time.

#BeNotDumb

This meditation invites you to focus on your breathing. While many practices begin this way, I often find it easier to direct my attention to the darkness behind my closed eyes or the sounds around me. Unlike my respiration, neither of these is within my control. Conversely, I can consciously alter my breath in many ways. So, it can be challenging to observe it without intervening. However, some prefer this method.

After a brief introduction, I guide you through the practice for the first five minutes. For the next five, my voice is replaced by a music track. You can use either segment or both, depending on your preference. As always, the goal is to gently notice when your mind wanders and bring it back to your focal point.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

When countering Suppression, it’s crucial to highlight upfront that we are not trying to change our emotional reaction to anything. We typically think of this as the feeling itself, and it’s a reflex. Getting startled isn't a choice if someone jumps out from a concealed location. Initially being sad, angry, or otherwise due to any experience is no different.

What we want to analyze better and potentially alter is our response to that reaction. Whether it’s stored trauma or the impulse to commit road rage, our aim is to notice these feelings and then express them appropriately. The term I use for this overarching countermeasure is Integration. It’s the healthy movement of stored energy within us and the ability to process emotions effectively in real time.

As I’ve discussed, we are primarily dealing with sorrow and anger, as these tend to have the most energetic impact on us. Things like shame, regret, and guilt can also be troublesome, but they are primarily associated with Storytelling. In my experience with these feelings, once I reframed the narrative about my past from the viewpoint of Gratitude, they dissipated. Sadness and rage are different animals, though. Not only are they undoubtedly justified at times, but they require healthy expression.

Harkening back to our first countermeasure for Oblivion, Integration starts with a basic awareness of what’s happening. You must be able to make the leap of faith that your body does keep the score regarding previous traumatic experiences. If you have ongoing aches and pains that modern medicine can’t explain or parts of you that never feel quite right, consider the possibility that it’s due to energy dysfunction. Of course, you may not have anything like that, which is perfectly fine. But recognize this scenario if and when it arises.

In my article Learning to Cry and on Episode 9 of the RARE SENSE Podcast, I spoke about how psilocybin opened my eyes to this reality and forced me to release a torrent of pent-up emotional energy. In my case, this was an overcompensatory action. I’d held the pendulum in one direction for so long that it swung back hard the other way once released. However, one needn’t pursue such an extreme course of action. Even if you go down the entheogen route, remember your experience may be completely different than mine, regardless of what you desire. Expecting emotional relief through their use by no means guarantees it.

Besides, the crucial part of my psychedelic journeys was teaching me the overall mechanism. I learned how necessary this process was to my holistic health and how I needed to allow it to overtake me when my body gave me signs. In the months and years that followed, I would have similar outpourings of emotion that were completely independent of ingesting a psychoactive substance.

Even as recently as last month, I watched a show about the 2004 Red Sox as we approach their twentieth anniversary of winning the World Series. As if it summoned the ghost of Bill Buckner, I found myself breaking down a little as I watched a replay of the final out at first base that clinched the title. My reaction only lasted a few seconds, but I didn’t resist. That’s the critical part. You don’t need an exogenous chemical catalyst. You need to pay better attention to somatic cues.

Then, you absolutely must get comfortable with crying. There are a few songs I know of called Learning to Fly. Pink Floyd has one. Tom Petty has another. But I wish some band had a popular tune named Learning to Cry because it’s something so many of us need to do. You don’t have to be in the presence of others. However, you must be willing to let go on your terms because it’s not a weakness. It’s a strength. It’s being vulnerable, which is a sign of being mentally and emotionally fit. That’s a vital difference. And it’s much more likely and necessary than sprouting wings.

You might even try finding a trigger that you know gets you there. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you harm yourself physically. I’m talking about a song, picture, or video that gets you choked up. Find a place where no one can hear or see you if necessary, and allow the emotions it triggers to flow unencumbered.

For example, there’s a video on YouTube by DDP Yoga about the incredible physical transformation of a disabled veteran named Arthur that gets me every time I watch it. Being a paratrooper during the Gulf War took a toll on his knees and back. After his service, he relied on canes, leg braces, and a back brace to get around and gained lots of weight. For fifteen years, doctors told him he would never walk again unassisted, and he believed them.

He then came across Diamond Dallas Page’s yoga program and, through his own initiative and discipline, lost 140 pounds in ten months. He went from being nearly crippled to running. The video has over 109 million views, and even Joe Rogan tears up while watching it during his podcast episode with Page. It’s masterfully edited, and the layering of Javier Colon’s cover of Fix You by Coldplay with footage of Arthur’s journey tugs on my heartstrings like nothing else. The freeze frame of him sprinting overlaid with “They were wrong” (addressing the doctors’ prognosis), and the lyric “I promise you I will learn from my mistakes” punches me in the gut even after dozens of viewings. Find something like this that has the same effect on you and use it if needs be.

In addition to processing trapped energy, we must begin responding better to emotions as they arise. Philosophies such as Stoicism are heavily in favor of such a practice. However, this can be misinterpreted as counsel to treat feelings as annoying nuisances to an otherwise pristine human existence. Remember, that’s not the idea here. We are humans, not Vulcans. The goal is healthy expression, not dismissal.

The trickiest of these situations involves anger, which is often largely a secondary reaction to something deeper. Many of us engage in it regularly to avoid what’s beneath the surface. If someone cuts us off in traffic, and we react by screaming from behind the wheel of our car where they can’t hear us, what’s the true source of that response? Chances are, it has nothing to do with the current circumstance.

We would be much better served by performing some serious internal reflection as to why we allow something to make us angry in the first place. Whether it’s compensation for our inability to express sadness or something else, it’s the result of a situation you’ve suppressed that, once again, your body is looking to dissipate. Maybe it is a personal relationship or a disappointment at work. The point is, that’s the thing to work on.

Don’t ignore your anger. Instead, pause, take a breath, objectively look at it, assess its utility, get to the heart of the matter, and then address it appropriately. For more on this, check out The Acidity of Anger.

Several exercises can also facilitate the healthy movement of energy in our bodies, thereby assisting in holistic integration. Some of these build on practices from previous countermeasures like meditation and journaling. Others, like breathwork, address your nervous system. I’ve included brief overviews below with links to training posts and complete instructions for each method as applicable.

Body Memory Meditation

If you are having trouble finding stored energy within yourself, this can be a helpful practice. It allows you to spend ten minutes tuning into your body and sending comforting messages to parts of it if necessary.

Memory Journaling

This method uses journaling to help process traumatic memories and improve brain function, immune response, and physical health. By spending four sessions of 15-30 minutes within a month writing in detail about a troubling memory, one can resolve and integrate negative energy and somatic memories.

Alternate Nostril Breathing

Five minutes of alternate nostril breathing a few times daily can help balance your internal energy. Place your index and middle fingers on the bridge of your nose. With your thumb, close off one nostril and breathe in through the other. Then, release your thumb, close the other nostril with your ring finger, and breathe out. Breathe back on the same side before swapping your ring finger and thumb. Breathe out and repeat this cycle.

Perfect Breathing

According to James Nestor, the ideal breath rate is five and a half liters of air per minute, achieved by inhaling and exhaling for five and a half seconds each, totaling about five and a half breaths per minute. I love this technique, and to date, it’s the most-watched instructional video on my YouTube channel.

Qi Gong

Qi Gong, meaning "life energy work," combines meditation, breathing, and movement, similar to Tai Chi. It’s a great way to release pent-up energy. Even a seven-minute routine has profound benefits for my emotional well-being.

Physical Exercise

This is one of the easiest and most obvious ways to get energy flowing. A workout almost always improves things, even when I’m not feeling great physically. It’s a highly positive way to channel emotions to benefit your health.

Block Therapy

A few bodywork practices, including massage, can also help physically release stored energy. I’m a fan of Block Therapy, which I learned about from Gary Sharpe. It’s a form of self-administered myofascial release. Lots of emotion can get stored in our fascia, and breaking that up through pressure applied on a wooden block allows us to release what’s trapped and let energy move around us more freely.

Acupuncture

I love acupuncture. Even though it’s much older, traditional Eastern medicine tends to be much more progressive than its Western counterpart when recognizing the need for healthy energy within the body. Along with the practices of Qi Gong and Tai Chi mentioned above, it can help to have a licensed practitioner perform this technique on you.

Closing Thought

Remember that our somatic energy, precisely our emotions, might be the most underserved part of our makeup regarding care and feeding. The longer we continue in this vein, the more harm we inflict upon ourselves and potentially others too. Don’t be afraid to let tears stream… down on your face.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

Weed’s experience as a licensed mental health professional at the VA provides welcome expertise to the ideas presented here. He and I often have phone conversations about this stuff, and I thought, why not record some for public consumption? So I hope this is the beginning of more to come.

He also recently did a guest series on The Detroit Lions Podcast about mental health, and his first episode sparked my idea of where to start. Today, we are talking about the mentality around sports teams in general. When we root for a club, how does that impact us for better or worse? Have you ever considered what it means to be a fan from a mind fitness perspective?

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

I’ve written a few articles dealing with emotions, namely Learning to Cry and The Acidity of Anger. As the names of those posts suggest, they detail the challenges people face in responding properly to and effectively processing sorrow and anger. This concept is the essence of our next mind-killer, Suppression—a failure to integrate emotional energy, whether accidental or intentional. As with our last mind-killer, Storytelling, I want to build on previous work and make things accretive, not redundant. So, before proceeding further, please read these two articles, even if only as a refresher.

In summary, we often view ourselves from a strictly material perspective, as if we are nothing more than matter. But we function via energy. It differentiates our living selves from the moment we cease to be. It animates us. One way to frame these two elements is to consider our bodies as the matter portion and our minds as the energy portion. It’s not quite this simple, but it’s an adequate model for general purposes. These components are connected via our nervous systems. It’s the highway on which our internal energy moves. And an enormous piece of that energy is our emotions. It’s how we process our experiences.

However, when we resist the healthy expression of certain emotions, we often end up with trapped energy within us. Bessel van der Kolk refers to this as a “body memory” in his outstanding book, The Body Keeps the Score. This situation can lead to ongoing mental and physical dysfunction in our daily lives.

If you find that difficult to believe, consider the concept of memory itself. We retain the information from our existence within the organic matter of our brains. We can further retrieve this data at will. Nobody disputes this. But neurons exist in other parts of us as well. Whose to say that a particularly traumatic memory can’t be kept within your solar plexus, liver, or other tissues? After all, if we don’t integrate the energy from our experiences properly, it doesn’t just vanish. It has to go somewhere.

What causes an emotional backlog depends on the person. Some are very young and cannot deal with a traumatic event. Others continually bottle up frustration with a partner or friend. Or they may be unwilling to express their grief over a tragic loss as adults. This means that the emotions in question are primarily variants of the two aforementioned, although they can be accompanied by others like guilt, shame, and regret.

While storytelling deals with what we think about certain past occurrences, suppression concerns how we feel about it. More specifically, it’s how we respond to how we feel. It’s the other half of the equation in conditions like PTSD. And it can go on for years or decades, eventually crippling us from the inside out.

I first learned how much of an issue this was for me through the use of psychedelics, specifically psilocybin. Under its influence, I released an absolute deluge of what one facilitator called “divine energy.” Basically, I cried for hours, and I recounted this experience in Episode 9 of the RARE SENSE Podcast if you are interested in learning more. It opened my eyes to the fact that while both mental and physical healing modalities had been necessary during my journey, there was another type I had yet to consider that was equally important—emotional, the energy between the two.

As a service member, I experienced a lot of tragedy. Many friends died in extremely violent circumstances. They were shot, blown up, or impacted the ground at terminal velocity. My father also passed away at the age of fifty-nine from a sudden heart attack while I was on deployment in Afghanistan. It was only a few weeks after I had informed him on a satellite call that my wife and I were expecting our first child, and he would be a grandfather.

In a flash, that all changed. I went from conducting combat operations one day to flying home the next to be with my mom, brother, and sister for the memorial service, then returning overseas to finish the tour. A few months later, my son was born. Three weeks after that, I once again departed for another deployment. Through all of it, I barely cried. And I always did so reluctantly and within the confines of what I deemed acceptable for a modern warrior. Consider how much sorrow is warranted throughout that scenario and how little I allowed myself to express.

Conceptually, none of this is unique to me, though. Every veteran I know has experienced the death of teammates while serving our country. Professions like police officers and firefighters witness tragedy all the time. Everyone has lost or will lose a loved one to disease, an accident, or simply old age.

Yet many of us resist expressing sadness whenever a situation calls for it—maybe our entire adult lives. Of course, our job may require us to put our emotions on hold to ensure the team's safety. But even when off the clock and in our homes, we find ourselves pushing back, especially alpha types, who perceive such behavior as weak. The more we do this, the more it becomes second nature.

Interlaced with this sadness is often the curious case of anger. When we don’t allow the energy of our grief to flow correctly, we can end up overcompensating by leaning into our rage instead. The result is an emotional imbalance that can severely impact those around us. This was certainly the case for me when I exited the military. I could fly off the handle easily and did so in wholly inappropriate ways on more than one occasion.

Of course, others stifle their anger due to societal norms or (understandably) not wanting to hurt others. Like sorrow, they can bottle their angst and keep it to themselves. However, regardless of how we have maladapted the flow of this emotion, we are still dealing with an issue that traces back to suppression.

This gets increasingly pressurized over time until we are ready to burst, like shaking a carbonated drink with the top still on. You can even think of it like holding in a fart. The gas doesn’t disappear. It simply festers inside of you and gets worse. Now think about doing this repeatedly, never allowing any of it out. How long would you last before it became excruciatingly painful and disruptive to your life?

That analogy, while crude, isn’t any different from how we treat our emotions. Much like flatulence, the energy is a biological necessity. But we must also figure out the right time, place, and way to release it. And do so in a way that causes the least negative impact on those around us. Then, we can adopt practices that keep us emotionally healthier in the first place.

These are the subjects of my next article, where I’ll discuss the countermeasure of Integration.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

Resonance breathing comes from the work of Dr. Leah Lagos in her book Heart Breath Mind, which I recommended earlier this month. The basic exercise consists of a four-second inhale through the nose and a six-second exhale through the mouth. She guides readers through a ten-week protocol built around this technique, done for twenty minutes twice daily. Via that regimen, one can increase their heart rate variability (HRV) to (as the subtitle suggests) conquer stress, build resilience, and perform at their peak.

However, every individual’s optimal frequency will vary slightly. Dr. Lagos recommends dialing it in with the help of an app like Elite HRV or Awesome Breathing, which uses visual cues for when to breathe. I prefer an audio track, so I’ve recorded a video with both. It utilizes the standard 4/6-second ratio and should work for most people.

As with my other breathing videos, there is an underlying sixty-bpm track with two tones to distinguish when to breathe in and out. My voice guides you to start and then trails off. Twenty minutes is ideal, but I’ve also included alerts at the five, ten, and fifteen-minute marks for those with less time. Something is always better than nothing. Remember to breathe calmly from your diaphragm.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

Leah Lagos is a health and performance clinical psychologist who’s worked with numerous college and professional athletes. She specializes in increasing heart rate variability (HRV), a key indicator of overall health, via resonance breathing. Her book, Heart Breath Mind, takes the reader through a 10-week process of how to do this on your own. It’s systematic and super easy to follow. It’s also empowering, which is right up my alley. Using a simple biofeedback monitor and an app, you can reduce anxiety, boost resilience to adversity, and optimize mental and physical well-being through twenty minutes of breathwork twice daily.

#BeNotDumb

Today’s episode is a narration of my article from 01/01/24, The Mind-Killers. This is my current focus and the crux of the RARE SENSE theory and practice, so it seemed like the best place to start. Thanks for listening, and I hope you find these valuable.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

If you are going to combat storytelling, the obvious countermeasure is straightforward—change the story. More specifically, you need to revise, reinterpret, or overwrite it. Traditionally, this practice is referred to as “reframing.” Of course, that’s a lot easier said than done. But as with anything involving mind fitness, it starts with a realization that the job is yours alone. You are the author and the audience.

The critical component is making the new narrative come from a perspective of gratitude. You can be grateful for anything that’s happened to you, even the “worst moment of your life.” Become thankful for it. The world is rife with people who have turned tragic scenarios of enormous personal consequences into defining moments of positivity.

None of us can alter our past. Even if you could rewind the clock, the same scenario would unfold. So you might as well veil every memory with “I’m glad this occurred.” In my case, I started to view both my tactical error and the chronic mental and physical struggles I endured for over a decade as sources for incredible personal growth and wisdom. Now, I’m able to share those lessons with others. I’m happy I went through all of it. But that interpretation is a choice I had to make.

The trick is to start cultivating gratitude daily to make it a habit. You want it to become the way you automatically view things moving forward. This isn’t to say you can’t be disappointed about something. But you need to be able to learn and move on in short order instead of dwelling on a mistake, a stroke of bad luck, or worse. Here are some ways to do that.

Tactic 1 - Basic Journaling

The simplest practice I’ve found to become more grateful is through various forms of journaling. It’s the easiest technique to get your internal stories onto an external medium so you can better analyze and change them for the better. If you don’t usually journal, set aside ten to fifteen minutes daily and write something on paper. It doesn’t matter what it is. Just exercise the muscle of journaling itself at first. Here’s a training post with more detailed instructions that can help.

Tactic 2 - The Five Minute Journal

A starter kit I also found helpful was The Five Minute Journal. Each day is a page where you list things you are grateful for, what would make today great, and an affirmation in the morning. Then, in the evening, you write down highlights and lessons from the day. As the name suggests, it only takes five minutes. Even if you don’t use this specific product, the simple practice of detailing a few things to be grateful for in the morning and at night can help you start reframing anything from your past in a positive light.

Tactic 3 - Statement of Gratitude

Here’s an even simpler version. Come up with just one thing every morning. It needn’t be profound or complex. “I’m thankful to be alive” is fine. Use a Sharpie to write it on a sticky yellow note and place it somewhere you often see throughout the day. I usually hang it off the lower edge of my computer screen at work. Anytime your mind starts drifting to some past regret, failure, or otherwise destructive tale, become aware of it and replace it with this statement of gratitude. Say it out loud if needs be. You may have to do this repeatedly daily for weeks or months, but eventually, you can train your mind to default to gratefulness about your history versus other interpretations.

Tactic 4 - Combo Exercise

Then, start combining meditation and journaling. Spend ten minutes quietly becoming aware of your thoughts and some of the stories you tell yourself, and immediately jot down what you find. Next, come up with ways to counter anything destructive and repetitive. If you do this consistently, it can significantly improve the flavor of the narratives you cling to.

Tactic 5 - EMDR

RARE SENSE® is about self-empowerment, so I typically don’t recommend any therapeutic intervention. There’s nothing wrong with therapy. It’s just not the focus of this content. That said, I mentioned the success I found with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) during my journey in Telling Stories. Those two treatments taught me that the story I was repeating to myself was a massive part of the problem. Since the practice is non-invasive and doesn’t involve putting anything in the body, it may be something you want to try. As always, I’m not a doctor, so please consult with a licensed professional first. I found it to be highly effective. However, I still recommend doing all the work above to build better mental habits.

The Minds of Others

Before closing, I need to discuss this concept briefly. Many of the tales we tell ourselves involve the perceived judgments of others. Put plainly, we worry about what people think of us, placing thoughts in their heads that become part of the narrative. Having our own opinion about the scenario in question isn’t enough. We must also include the presumed feelings of family members, friends, co-workers, or even strangers to round out the story.

That was certainly the case for me, and it makes perfect sense. Selective units like those in the special operations community greatly emphasize reputation. Because, more often than not, it’s accurate, and lives are at stake.

However, leaving reputation within a tightly knit community aside, people consistently inject the imagined beliefs of other humans into their daily lives. As social animals, we seek approval and recognition. We want other people to like us, regardless of who they are.

Because of this tendency, some messaging from influencers is often to the effect of “you can’t care what anyone else thinks about you.” While that’s good advice, it’s based on a false assumption. The reality is that no one is thinking about you. Most of the world doesn’t know you unless you are a worldwide megastar. The ones who do occasionally ponder your thoughts about them, but that’s about it. You mainly focus on yourself, and others fixate on themselves. In the remaining time, we only think about someone else to consider what they might be thinking about us in return.

When I was in the thick of my negative storytelling, I thought everyone judged me the same way I did. But that wasn’t true. They weren’t even telling a story about me. They didn’t care. They were too busy narrating their own stories. In all cases, there was only one main character and one person in the audience. It’s the same person—oneself. So, influencers should really say, “Stop worrying about what other people think of you because they don’t.”

No Past You

Lastly, as a matter of direct experience, there is no past you. You only exist right now. So, anything you’ve done is only perpetuated through the conscious interpretation of your memories. To the extent that you choose to engage in such an endeavor, it should only be to improve your life in the present—to elicit a lesson you are grateful to learn from. If you want to get out of the prison your stories have made of your mind, you must realize and accept that those walls are just made of words, and changing them is vital. If you inject meaning into a story about your past, make sure it’s helping you in the present. Because that’s the only time and place you are.

This is a necessary component of healing, especially if we’ve endured trauma that we continue to carry in the form of PTSD or otherwise. It doesn’t matter if you had a “Bill Buckner Moment” or something worse. Go from judgment to analysis. What exactly am I telling myself now? Does it serve me? How can I reframe it? Root for the Mets in your head if you must. It’s better than living in abject misery because of a story you refuse to change. You can reboot and rewrite it as many times as you want. Flip the script.

However, storytelling is only half of the equation when it comes to mental health and our past. As I’ve mentioned, in addition to this intellectual component of trauma, there’s an emotional one as well. As I learned, even when I changed some of my closely held stories, it didn’t rid me of the physical effects of these events that had built up in my body. We’ll get to that next.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

I learned about this journaling exercise from the Huberman Lab. It’s a scientifically backed method designed to help you properly process traumatic memories by positively impacting neuroplasticity and brain function, thereby improving your mental health. The effectiveness of this protocol has been demonstrated in hundreds of studies.

What’s truly remarkable is that it also appears to enhance immune function and overall physical health. Participants with conditions such as fibromyalgia or migraines reported reduced symptoms after implementing it. That outcome further supports the concept of somatic memories and the idea that we store negative energy in ourselves in various ways. Using this technique, we can potentially allow our brain and body to resolve and integrate these issues.

I highly encourage you to listen to episode 151 of his podcast for a full breakdown of the method. Here are the basics:

• Spend four sessions of 15-30 minutes journaling (by hand or typing) about your most difficult or troubling memory.

• Do these within a month at any interval: consecutive days, once a week, or another cadence you prefer.

• Detail everything you can remember about the event and associated experiences.

• Write consecutively for the entire time. Avoid pausing for more than a second or two during the exercise.

• Use complete sentences, but don’t worry about perfect grammar, spelling, or handwriting.

Once you are done, review what you’ve written. Note how your language may have changed and see if you feel differently. Admittedly, I have not tried this protocol yet, but I found the evidence so compelling that I thought I might try it with you. I’m curious to hear your feedback.

Lastly, please remember to prioritize your well-being. If this causes undue stress or hardship at any time, it's essential to stop. Things might get emotionally challenging but shouldn’t be unbearable or debilitating.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

If anxiety is your thing, you should check out Russell Kennedy’s work. In addition to his book Anxiety Rx, he has a podcast of the same name. What I appreciate about him is that he’s a doctor and a long-time sufferer. His particular brand is health anxiety (my most tenacious and pernicious personal issue, too). The book comprises three parts: Awareness of Mind, Body, and Self, each containing thirty-six short chapters. While I found it to be about a hundred pages too long, I still view his approach to anxiety as a feeling problem versus a thinking one as essential material for the afflicted.

#BeNotDumb

Back in January of 2022, I wrote an article entitled Telling Stories. This was before I had codified the overall mind-killer concept. At the time, I simply wanted to share how spinning a destructive internal narrative for years had been a significant factor in the downfall of my mental health and highlight some tools that helped me no longer do it.

Since then, I’ve gained a more comprehensive understanding of storytelling as a mind-killer and its most effective countermeasures. However, I don’t want to rehash anything I’ve already written and make this article redundant, so I will build on that content. Therefore, I highly recommend reviewing my previous post on the subject before continuing here. Whereas then, I focused mainly on my personal history, now I will dive deeper into how we bring about this mind-killer in the first place.

As I already discussed, my struggle with storytelling started after I committed what I call a “tactical error” during my active duty career. This was because my memories of that event were particularly traumatic. “Trauma” is a term used in various ways relating to something that negatively impacts us. In my case, it was a thing I did. But it can also be something done to us, like an assault, or something we witness, such as being at ground zero on 9/11. In any of these cases, “trauma” can refer to the event itself, the resultant immediate injury, or the lasting impacts we feel moving forward. We can experience trauma mentally and physically and often endure both simultaneously.

For any situation that fits into this category, the crucial question becomes, will we experience enduring trauma after the fact? After all, it’s not the occurrence that’s the issue. Whatever happened is gone. Even in the most horrific circumstances, the incident no longer exists. Ongoing trauma is purely a question of how well we deal with it physically, emotionally, and intellectually so we can move on.

The successful execution of the first of these is usually a given, assuming you don’t have any permanent damage. If you are in a car accident and suffer numerous broken bones, your body will heal. It may take time, but any acute somatic effects will eventually subside.

Emotionally and intellectually can be a far different story, though. We often struggle with trauma in these ways, and it’s what leads to persistent problems. Amazingly, our inability to process an event emotionally can even lead to physical dysfunction, as brilliantly detailed in The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk. Unraveling and overcoming this scenario can be challenging but is an enormous part of healing. Accordingly, I will discuss it in forthcoming content. For now, I want to deal exclusively with our intellectual difficulties in coping with trauma.

On that level, all we are dealing with is a memory. However, unlike many others, we now label this one as “traumatic” because it sticks in our craw and bothers us incessantly. This only reinforces that our reaction is the issue, not the memory itself. We are simply interpreting it destructively. Ultimately, we inflict enduring intellectual trauma upon ourselves by perpetuating these occurrences in our minds. It’s the only place they live, and we keep them on life support.

The question is, why do we do this? Why do we fixate on specific memories and allow them to define us this way? Why do we sometimes let our past consistently overtake our present? It’s because of our desire to find meaning.

Human beings are storytellers by nature. We recount historical tales and create works of fiction to thrill and amuse. Used as such, they are fun and serve as entertainment. But we also use them to teach a lesson or moral. Stories help highlight greater truths above and beyond the narrative alone when we can extrapolate a why from them. By doing this, we can reconcile any twist or turn because all of it now makes sense in support of some more significant meaning. There’s a reason it happened that way.

We do the same thing with our memories and lives in general. We don’t see any of it as a series of and thens. We transform the entire thing into a chronicle with a purpose. Anything that transpires must then support it. Of course, meaning can inspire us to do great things. But it can also get us into trouble when we seek to find it in everything, especially when a specific event from our past doesn’t align with it properly. We start fixating on the details of this particular passage because it throws off the why. Things weren’t supposed to happen this way. We wish it had been different. Struggling to make sense of it all, we ruminate on this occurrence (or several) until the action consumes us.

That’s precisely what I did. Like most people, I always wanted to be the hero in my own story. Until my tactical error, I had no trouble fulfilling that desire. But my tale no longer made sense when a particular incident threw a wrench in the narrative. So I changed it. And as much as I hated the new story, I kept telling it and building upon its new direction because I felt like I had no other choice.

I was wrong. We can decide the story we tell about any memory. The event itself is objective. It’s purely what transpired. However, the meaning we apply to it and, therefore, the narrative we construct around it is subjective. It’s a spin we apply that isn’t inherent. To illustrate this, I often refer to my personal example as a "Bill Buckner Moment.”

Bill Bucker was the first baseman for the Boston Red Sox in the 1986 World Series. With two outs in the bottom of the tenth inning of Game 6, Mookie Wilson of the New York Mets hit a routine grounder down the first base line. All Buckner had to do was scoop it up and step on the bag to give his team another chance at bat. But the ball went through his legs into right field, allowing Ray Knight to score the winning run from second. The Mets would also prevail in Game 7 and take home the championship.

Because of Buckner’s mistake, some people laid the loss for the Series at his feet. He even received death threats. They saw him as personifying the Curse of the Bambino. The Sox hadn’t won it all since trading Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920, and many believed they were doomed never to do so again. These fans were proved wrong in 2004 when Boston finally secured a title. In time, most of them changed their tune about Buckner, too. But if you ask anyone what they remember him for, it’s still that single error.

I grew up outside Boston and vividly remember watching that moment on TV as an eleven-year-old kid. As an adult, the personal situation I faced was similar. It wasn’t on such a grand public stage, but within my professional sphere of influence, it felt like an equally enormous letdown to my teammates. I was humiliated and embarrassed by it. That basic reaction is ubiquitous. Almost everyone has something from their past they wish hadn’t happened the way it did, if at all.

Although there wasn’t just one side to Buckner’s story. Boston fans created a tale of failure about that moment and leveraged an imagined hex to make sense of it. But New York fans told one of triumph, even proclaiming the fulfillment of destiny. However, in either case, the event was identical. The fact that it can be the worst moment in sports history for half the people watching and the best moment for the other half proves that the interpretation is purely a matter of perspective. “Bill Buckner Moment” can make you feel completely different depending on who you are.

To take it further, anyone watching that game could have theoretically decided to root for the other team wholeheartedly and derived the opposite meaning from the outcome. That may seem outlandish, but it’s certainly possible. Even without going that far, a fan of the losing side could have made that loss into a positive account with an appropriate lesson of, “We just have to close games better.” Conversely, a winning fan could have turned the victory into a negative story like, “We should have had them in five games, not seven.” No one changes the events, just the narrative and resulting lesson or moral.

The bottom line is that you can freely decide the story and resultant meaning to shape from your memories, even the traumatic ones. You can even tell no story and elicit no meaning from them. This can seem unsettling to some, but we should consider it liberating. Nobody is forcing us to interpret what we’ve seen, done, or had done to us in any specific way. We don’t have to be tied down by a narrative we’ve constructed about our past if it isn’t serving us. And we certainly don’t have to let it define us. Unfortunately, too many people do the opposite, as I did. The result is often what we refer to as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “PTSD is a disorder that develops in some people who have experienced a shocking, scary, or dangerous event… People may experience a range of reactions after trauma, and most people recover from initial symptoms over time. Those who continue to experience problems may be diagnosed with PTSD...”

Other sources define the condition similarly. In my estimation, storytelling separates those who recover from trauma from those who succumb to PTSD on an intellectual level. It’s the result of the worst narrative possible, at least in part. As stated before, there can be other mitigating factors, and the emotional processing component is also enormously important (more on that later). But a massive element of PTSD is simply the story one insists on telling themselves. It’s exactly what I was doing. Note that I use the word “doing” deliberately. I was engaged in self-destructive behavior, not the sufferer of some disease.

Unfortunately, many with this condition, including veterans like me, often fail to realize this. Instead, we believe PTSD is something we are powerless against or even a permanent state of affairs. I know conditions like this are complicated and can hinder people’s day-to-day functionality. I do not deny the horrific things people go through, nor am I belittling their ongoing plight. But I can unequivocally state that a considerable portion of that struggle rests firmly on storytelling. Even if you have endured the most egregious injustice or abuse, you can tell yourself a story of survival instead of victimhood. And if you are sitting there thinking, “No, I can’t,” that’s just another story. Altering it for the better is 100% your responsibility. In the following article, I’ll detail exactly how you do it.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

When I started RARE SENSE in August of 2021, I honestly wasn’t sure what direction it would take. I simply wanted to share all the lessons I had learned through a decade of mental health and chronic illness struggles with others, especially veterans like me.

I started by writing articles and, over time, added book recommendations, podcast episodes, and training exercises to the mix. As those elements have grown, I’ve refined the theory and practice of mind fitness to the point where I now feel that RARE SENSE represents a comprehensive and revolutionary approach to optimizing mental health (and even overcoming certain chronic illnesses).

However, the ideal application of that approach requires the proper organization and sequencing of its constituent parts. I’ve been trying to provide such structure for a while now by creating an online course, a coaching curriculum, and a book. Unfortunately, the effort I keep putting forth here detracts from my ability to make much headway with those projects. In my article Shifting Focus last November, I expressed this same sentiment.

Despite writing that post, I plowed ahead on Substack as best I could and even reached what I thought was a sustainable cadence of publishing four pieces of content monthly. However, it’s now apparent that I must genuinely reduce my efforts on this site if any of these other endeavors are to become a reality.

Besides, most of the core RARE SENSE components are already contained herein. I do a greater service to the consumer by synthesizing it all into a specific process of developing mind fitness one can follow, versus adding potential fluff to fulfill a self-imposed schedule. I’d prefer to focus on value and quality over quantity.

So, with all this in mind, the RARE SENSE Substack will now be free for everyone. If you are a paid annual subscriber, you will receive a prorated refund for the remainder of your billing cycle within the next few weeks. If you don’t, please let me know by responding to this email, and I’ll correct things. I sincerely appreciate your support to date!

Instead of publishing on a set schedule, I will add content when warranted, but it will be infrequently. I do plan on finishing (albeit slowly) the Mind-Killer article series, as it forms the foundation of everything else I’m working on. Other than that, I’ll only provide new training exercises and book recommendations when I come across something worth sharing. And the podcast will pause for a bit. Although I may create some audio versions of articles as a stop-gap.

Overall, the platform will be more of a repository of information to support my other work, which you can check out on my personal website (thischrisirwin.com). I offer keynote addresses for organizations where I cover the basics of mind fitness, including the seven Mind-Killers and how to counteract them. I also provide individual and group coaching if you want more in-depth training. Please book a call or fill out my contact form if either interests you. The online course and book will hopefully be forthcoming at some point as well.

Thanks for your understanding as I make this shift for RARE SENSE. I truly believe it’s the best move for everyone involved, including you. Also, note that the Substack now has a simplified URL. Just use raresense.com!

Cheers, guys.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.

Neil was a Captain in the US Army Special Operations 2nd Ranger Battalion who deployed once to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. After his time in the military, he suffered from depression and PTSD while studying at Columbia University. This led him to explore mindfulness and meditation practices that marked the start of a profound healing journey involving the use of psychedelics. After graduate school, Neil worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Co., co-leading the internal mindfulness program and was the Chief Growth Officer for a $450M private equity portfolio company.

He credits meditation and psilocybin with saving his life and ultimately found his true calling when he joined forces with Amanda Feilding of the Beckley Foundation, which is dedicated to furthering psychedelic research and advocating for policy reform. Together, they founded Beckley Retreats, combining the latest science in plant medicine with ancient wisdom and traditions to create a unique healing experience for attendees.

DISCLAIMER: RARE SENSE® content is not medical advice. Nor does it represent the official position or opinions of any other organization or person. If you require diagnosis or treatment for a mental or physical issue or illness, please seek it from a licensed professional.