How to Become Resilient, Solved

Resilience isn’t about pretending you’re fine or never feeling pain—it’s about learning how to act in your best interest despite the pain. In this episode of Solved, we dive deep into the science, psychology, and real-life examples of resilience—from Ernest Shackleton’s crew surviving two years stranded in Antarctica to my own slightly insane decision to run an endurance race with basically no training. Spoiler: I didn’t die. We cover it all: the biology of resilience, why some people are “dandelions” and thrive anywhere while others are “orchids” who need the right environment, the mindsets that let you push through hardship without losing your mind, and why humor and community might secretly be your best survival tools. And of course, we deliver the real, practical, evidence-based strategies you can actually apply when life inevitably decides to kick you in the teeth. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, stuck, or like you can’t take one more setback, this episode is for you. And if you’re one of those psychos who enjoys doing hard sh*t just to see what you’re made of… well, you’ll feel right at home here. Get your free PDF guide: https://solvedpodcast.com/resilience⁠ CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:44 Reframing Resilience — Definitions & Misconceptions 00:13:11 The Word That Started It All 00:16:30 Bounce Forward, Not Back 00:23:50 Developmental and Biological Foundations of Resilience 00:29:26 The Evolutionary Puzzle 00:38:54 Biological & Physiological Foundations 00:44:45 Training Your Brain to Be More Resilient 00:48:43 The HPA Axis: Our Central Stress Response System 00:51:19 Heart Rate Variability: The Resilience Rhythm 00:54:32 Physiological Interventions 01:00:07 Gut-Brain Axis 01:17:17 Psychological, Philosophical & Evidence-Based Frameworks 01:20:19 The 5 Mindsets of Resilience 01:21:46 Mindset #1: Anything Is Possible 01:38:22 Mindset #2: Stories Are Just Stories 01:44:16 MIndset #3: Focus on What You Control 01:58:55 Mindset #4: Make It Fun 02:10:34 Mindset #5: Assume a Resilient Identity 02:20:21 Pheidippides 02:27:00 Sociocultural & Community Dimensions 02:37:40 Social Connection and Resilience: Why Strong People Don't Go It Alone 02:45:33 Blitz Spirit: Myth vs Reality 02:48:23 How to Build Your Resilient Circle 02:57:28 The 80/20 of Becoming More Resilient 03:11:36 The Hidden Costs of Resilience 03:22:25 What We Learned ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  Welcome back, everybody, to the Solved Podcast, the most over-researched and evidence-based life advice podcast in the world. I'm Mark Manson, number one New York Times bestselling author. This is my co-host, producer, and intrepid lead researcher Drew Burney. And for those of you who are new to the show, the point of Solved is to go so deep, be so exhaustive on one single topic, that by the end of the episode, you feel like you have everything you need to solve this issue in your life. Now, today's topic, Drew, is resilience. And I have to say, you and the research team went fucking hard on this one. We did. We very much did, yes. I think, so, every episode, we include a PDF guide,

• 0:45Mark Manson?

  which is a full summary of the episode, including all the research and citations. This PDF guide has 164 citations, and from what I understand, you guys cut like 100 of them. Uh, more than that, actually. Closer to like 250, but yeah. What is this monster I have created? And as always, we cover a lot of material in this podcast. So if you, at any point, feel like you're being overwhelmed, or you want to follow along, or you want everything written out for you, or you don't trust Drew and I, and you want to check our work, you can go to solvedpodcast.com/resilience and download a free PDF guide. It's over 100 pages long, has like 160 whatever.

• 1:29Mark Manson?

  You're just looking at me with death in your eyes right now. So it's hundreds of citations. There we go. All of our studies and work is cited there. So you can go check that out for free. And finally, if you love the show, please leave us a review. Leave us a rating. I think last month, we got up to number 12 on Spotify. So, yeah. Worldwide, which is huge. Applause line, Andrew. Very proud of that. Let's see if we can do better this month. So if you're enjoying the show, please, wherever you're listening to podcasts, leave us a rating, leave us a review, and be sure to follow us there. And finally, some exciting housekeeping news. Solved is going to twice a month. Yes, folks, it is true. Drew Burney doesn't actually sleep.

• 2:14Mark Manson?

  Or at least, he's not going to anymore. Because we're going to be doing two of these every single month. Basically, the way we're still gonna do it is where the first of every month is going to be kind of the large flagship episode and then on the 15th of every month, we're going to do kind of a either a smaller topic or a subtopic of the primary episode. So this month, in two weeks, we're doing an episode on Stoicism. Most people associate Stoicism with resilience. It is one of the most famous philosophical frameworks, often used to build resilience. So we will be doing multiple hours on Stoicism and we will be joined by my good friend, Ryan Holiday. Yeah. So be sure to subscribe to the podcast.

• 2:58Mark Manson?

  Make sure you're following on every platform so that you will be notified as soon as that episode drops. Like I said, that will be on October 15th. Now with that, Drew, do you have anything you want to say before we get started? How resilient are you feeling in this moment?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Well, okay, if you are listening to this, chances are like maybe you're going through something right now.

• 3:16Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Maybe a little bit.

• 3:18Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  And so just to let's give, let's give you a little reassurance right out of the gate. Okay. Resilience, like you don't have to be emotionless or stoic about this. Okay. We're not gonna, we're not gonna tell you to do that. It's, it's normal to feel like a little bit wrecked.

• 3:32Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  And you can still be resilient through that. Okay. So if you're going through something right now.

• 3:36Mark Manson?

  I usually feel wrecked.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But you can still work through that, right? And probably most importantly too, it's trainable.

• 3:42Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Right? It's not something that you have or you don't. Okay. So we're gonna try to convince you of those things as we go through this, but I just want to put that out there right away to let people know.

• 3:49Mark Manson?

  This is, this is the biggest thing about this topic, resilience. Not only is it trainable, I think, I would argue that there's like a moral duty to train it.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:00Mark Manson?

  Within ourselves.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 4:02Mark Manson?

  Within children and young people.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Society even too, yes.

• 4:05Mark Manson?

  It actually kind of blows my mind that a lot of the stuff that's gonna be in this episode is not more widely known or discussed or like taught in a school, much less, you know, listened to on podcasts.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Right, and here we are.

• 4:18Mark Manson?

  We got a lot to get into. Cue the intro and we'll get started.

• 4:29Mark Manson?

  All right, Drew, I want to start this off. I want to go back to 1914, where a man named Ernest Shackleton posted what has now become a world famous classified ad in the newspaper. And it read as follows: "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. 5,000 men applied for that posting." I don't know about you, like, we're hiring right now. I cannot get 500 people to apply to anything, much less 5,000. Yeah, maybe you need to write an ad like that. Yeah, maybe the next job posting is gonna be hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness.

• 5:14Mark Manson?

  And we'll see who turns up for it. But of course Ernest Shackleton was talking about one of his famous expeditions to the South Pole. So at the time, nobody had actually been to the South Pole, and there was a bit of a race among various explorers to be the first one to get there. Ernest Shackleton, unfortunately, very famously, came within 20 miles of reaching the South Pole before being forced to turn back in one of his previous expeditions. But this expedition, which I don't know if it was named at the time Endurance, or it was later called Endurance, but it has gone on to become world famous and one of the great stories of resilience in world history. So Shackleton recruited 28 men.

• 5:58Mark Manson?

  They set sail in January of 1915, and they reached the shores of Antarctica. And pretty much immediately, the ship got caught in ice floes of icebergs floating in one of the bays. And so the men had to get off the ship and basically wait and hope that the icebergs would recede and the ship would be freed, and then they would be able to potentially leave again. They waited for 10 months. For 10 months, they sat as they watched their ship slowly get crushed by an iceberg, not knowing if they were ever gonna be able to go home again. And finally, after 10 months, the ship was crushed.

• 6:37Mark Manson?

  So stranded on Antarctica with basically no supplies, no way to get home. These men had to figure out what they were going to do to survive. So the ship sinks in November 1915, which is the beginning of summer down there. And so there's a, there's a small hope that maybe another expedition is going to come. If the, the new expedition comes, they can, you know, catch sail, go home on that ship. So they wait five months. No expedition comes. After the five months are up, the summer ends and they look around and they realize, okay, we have to try to go for help. They create makeshift small boats out of the remains of their, their primary ship.

• 7:18Mark Manson?

  They sail for 800 miles through some of the most treacherous waters on earth, full of icebergs and killer whales and sharks and storms. They survive hurricanes. They eventually arrive to an island where, where Shackleton takes five of his other men and they sail in a small 20-foot lifeboat for another 800 miles to where they finally reach a small deserted island on the south of South America. They climb an uncharted mountain because nobody's been to this island before. And it's from the top of that mountain that they're finally able to signal help from somebody. They get help, they get a ship, they go all the way back, they pick up all their men.

• 8:01Mark Manson?

  After almost two-year ordeal of being stranded in Antarctica, every single man survives. Didn't lose a single one. Nobody died. Incredible. Nobody died. Nobody killed each other. Nobody killed themselves. Everybody got home, safe and sound. And as we go through this episode, we're going to use this as kind of a case study to unpack a lot of the concepts that we're going to talk about and kind of the, the importance that I guess Shackleton intuitively understood from doing so many dangerous expeditions throughout his life and, and certain rules or practices that he enforced on his men to make sure that everybody survived. Now, the key insight, I think, to take away at the start of this episode is that resilience is really,

• 8:45Mark Manson?

  it's not what most people think it is. It's not about not feeling the pain. It's not about, as you said, being impervious to challenges or setbacks. It's feeling the pain and just being good at dealing with it. So if you look at the journal entries of a lot of Shackleton's men, they were absolutely despondent. In fact, Shackleton himself wrote many, many times that he thought they weren't going to make it. He thought they were going to die in Antarctica. So the point here is that resilience isn't about people who suppress their feelings. It's not about people who ignore their feelings. It's not people who are delusional and don't have feelings. Resilience is about people who feel their feelings very deeply, but they

• 9:26Mark Manson?

  are able to act despite them in their best interest. They are not hijacked by their feelings. They are not consumed by their negative feelings. They are not, they don't let their thoughts and feelings dictate their actions to them. They dictate their actions to their thoughts and feelings. And it turns out that this is incredibly powerful and valuable skill in life. And it also turns out that any of us can develop it and practice it and get better at it. So this episode's going to be structured a little bit differently than some of our previous episodes, as longtime listeners know that most of our episodes, usually the front half is all about theory and definitions and the science, and then

• 10:08Mark Manson?

  the back half is all about implementation and practices and exercises, things you can do to actually like improve this area of your life. This episode's a little bit different because I think resilience is so action-based. Like, there's not, it's kind of difficult to talk about it in a way without speaking about what behaviors or actions you should be doing. So the way we're going to break this episode down is that we're going to have three sections. We're going to have a biology section where we talk about the biology of resilience and how that manifests through our physical actions and behaviors. And we're gonna talk about the mental practices and mindsets that you can adopt to become more resilient, both physically and mentally. And then finally, we're gonna talk about social resilience and the importance of social

• 10:51Mark Manson?

  networks, community, the people you hang out with, but also the resilience of the community and culture itself, which is an interesting twist. And then finally, at the end, we will do our usual 80/20 segment, and we will talk about some of the hidden costs of being a highly resilient person. And this one's fun, Drew, because I did something a little bit unconventional for this episode. You know, usually when we prep for these episodes, we are just like buried nose-deep in books and research papers and going super, super hard on all of the psychological literature. I decided to actually do an experiential test.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I'm excited to hear more about this, because we haven't really talked about it. You and I haven't talked about it.

• 11:40Mark Manson?

  We have not talked about it at all.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  I'm excited to really hear about this.

• 11:42Mark Manson?

  We have not talked about it.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And I think you're right, probably one of the legitimate criticisms is that we over-intellectualize stuff sometimes, so now we're putting the rubber to the pavement here. I like this.

• 11:52Mark Manson?

  So for listeners, I signed up for an endurance race with basically no training, and I completed it. And I will share much more about this later. It was intense, we'll just say that. But we actually made a YouTube video about it as well, it's on the channel for those of you who are watching on YouTube. But it was actually a lot of fun, and it was cool to actually put a lot of this stuff in the practice myself. Because it is one thing to like, as you said, you and I are both at home intellectualizing things. And it was really cool to like, take some of the stuff that I've been reading about like the week before and be like... Okay, I gotta train for this fucking thing.

• 12:35Mark Manson?

  How can I adopt this mindset or this practice? To make sure that like I don't die out there when the rubber hits the road.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  I'm excited to see what worked for you and what didn't too. All this theory and like putting it in practice, that's gonna be an interesting thing to see too. So, yeah.

• 12:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll have some interesting discussions around that. So, all right. So let's start out with the definition of resilience. And resilience is actually, I think it's a more interesting word than most people suspect. Generally speaking, when we do episodes on topics like the root meaning of the word is thousands of years old, it comes from Latin or Greek or something. And it basically kind of means what you would expect it to mean. Resilience is a little bit different. In a lot of ways, it's a bit of a misnomer. So resilience made its way to English through French only in the 17th century. It comes from the verb, the Latin verb, "reziliri",

• 13:30Mark Manson?

  which means literally to leap backwards, which you wouldn't assume that that means resilience. So what happened is that for centuries, resilience was actually used as a term in engineering. And it was used to describe something that a substance or a substrate that if you bent it, it would return to its original form. So if you're talking about steel rods or, you know, some sort of like fabric that like takes its, reverts to its natural form when you put pressure on it. Engineers would use the term resilience to indicate that this is a substance or some form of matter that would like hold its form through a lot of external stress.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  An example is like bridges too. They would build bridges so they could sway in the wind.

• 14:17Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  You know, like the Golden Great Bridge, like 27 feet or something like that. It can sway one way or the other. That was described as resilient, yeah.

• 14:24Mark Manson?

  So it didn't actually make its way into the psychological literature until the 1960s. When a psychologist by the name of Norman Garmesi was studying kids who honestly had every reason to be a total mess. We're talking about like parents with deep mental illness, orphans.

• 14:46Mark Manson?

  Growing up in crack houses, like you name it, like name the worst circumstances that these kids were growing up in it. And interestingly, what Garmesi noticed is that there was a small percentage of these children who seemed totally fine, despite how fucked up their circumstances were around them. They still went to school, they still got good grades, they still seemed like mentally functional, and they weren't completely collapsing from the external pressure around them. For example, he studied one boy who was 10 years old, his mom was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, never knew his father, he was living well below the poverty line, and he was totally holding it together. He was crushing school, taking care of himself, like literally packing his own lunches before

• 15:31Mark Manson?

  he went to school every day. At 10 years old. At 10 years old. Parents are not around, making good grades, teachers like him, not misbehaving. And when Garmesi interviewed him, the boy talked about how, you know, sure, he was sad, but he didn't see any reason for that to prevent him from doing what should have been done. So Garmesi was blown away by this phenomenon. He like, he couldn't really believe it, you weren't really, these kids weren't really supposed to exist, and at the time, there wasn't really anything in the literature to describe what this phenomenon was. And so he went looking for a word, and the word that he landed on was resilience, which was bouncing back, or something that holds its form.

• 16:13Mark Manson?

  Now, what's interesting is that, as we'll discover as we kind of go through this episode, is that resilience is a bit of a misnomer. It's not actually accurately describing what happens, because you're not actually bouncing back. When you suffer some sort of stress, or external event, or trauma, you're not getting back to baseline, you're actually, people who are, who we typically call resilient, what they're actually doing is that they are adapting to their external circumstances in a way that is highly functional. So they are finding a way to either leverage that event, or leverage the emotions, or adapt to the new thought patterns, or the new circumstances, in a way that is Ultimately beneficial to themselves.

• 16:57Mark Manson?

  And so I think probably a more accurate term that you could use, I mean, we could even probably call this podcast episode, is the more recent term from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which is antifragility, which is basically things that gain from stress or disorder. Because what we tend to see is that in most cases, not all cases, but in most cases, when resilient people go through stressful events or go through a challenge, not only do they bounce back to their baseline, but they actually improve. They get stronger. They get more adaptive to future challenges.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  They change in some way. It's not, you don't bounce back to what you were.

• 17:34Mark Manson?

  Exactly. There is a transformation that happens consistently. And this is super, super important. And it's something that Garmesi, you could argue, missed at the time, but he called it resilience, and so we're left with the word resilience. For whatever it's worth, the American Psychological Association does define resilience as this more transformative form of dealing with setbacks, like they have kind of updated their definition beyond what Garmesi called it. It's a bit of a mouthful, this definition, but it's pulled from the APA website. They define it as resilience is the capacity to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, or significant stress involving a dynamic process of successful adaptation rather than

• 18:18Mark Manson?

  just bouncing back. It is not a fixed trait, but a developable ability to maintain or regain mental or emotional well-being by using the flexibility of one's thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to adjust to life's challenges. It's like fucking poetry.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  No, but there is that, there is that element of the, not just bouncing back, right? They acknowledge that right there in the definition. And so it's a specific technical term in psychology.

• 18:44Mark Manson?

  It's something that I think, you know, if you look at the early days in the psych literature, they, they kind of assumed that it was an ability to like maintain normality. But I think it's, it's in the decades since research has shown that it's, that actually what's happening is people are What we classify as resilient people are just people who are highly adaptive and flexible in dealing with setbacks, challenges.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  But I still think most people would think or they want resilience to be, "I want to just get back to where I was." Why is that? Why do we, "Let's just get back to normal."

• 19:21Mark Manson?

  Well, because that's safe, right? You know, that's known and it's, changing is unknown and so it's, there's its own form of scariness that comes with it. I also think what happens too is, you know, if you look at somebody who is highly resilient, right? Like, we'll talk a lot later about how resilience kind of operates a little bit like a muscle. Like, it's like a muscle you strengthen within yourself. So if you imagine somebody with like an extremely strong resilience muscle, somebody who's extremely adaptive to challenges and setback, from the outside, it looks like they are not changing.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Just not phased, right?

• 20:00Mark Manson?

  Like, if you think about somebody like David Goggins, who I'm excited, because like, we finally have an episode where we get to talk about David Goggins, so I'm super excited. If you think about somebody like David Goggins, like, running 100 miles, he makes it look effortless, right? He's such a, like, an absurdly resilient person, like, it appears effortless from the exterior, but that's only because his resilience muscle is so absurdly large that, like, the struggle within him is imperceptible to the rest of us. So I think some of it is a perceptual bias. If somebody's not externally suffering or changing dramatically, like, we just assume that they, you can see why Garmesi thought it's like, "Oh, he's just bouncing back to whatever normality was."

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:44Mark Manson?

  But really, they're subtly changing.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The last thing I want to say before we jump into the biology section is that resilience is actually far more common than people realize. And this is something that I actually consistently run into with readers and journalists and people that I talk to, like, especially in this day and age where trauma is such a buzzword, people assume that anybody who goes through a traumatic event is completely, irrevocably fucked up from it and is going to have to go through years, if not decades, of therapy and is going to be struggling for the rest of their life. It turns out the research shows that this is not the case. It actually shows that... The majority of situations, people do bounce back from extremely difficult events

• 21:29Mark Manson?

  or traumatic events. There was one researcher named George Bonanno, who ran a meta-analysis on this, and he came back estimating that as much as 75 to 85% of people eventually recover from extremely difficult or adverse events in their lives. The concept of like being traumatized, it's actually a minority case for most people. I want to put a pin in this because when we come back to the psychological section, this is going to matter a lot. And I definitely want to dig into this a little bit. This perception that trauma is debilitating, because it actually matters quite a bit in terms of outcomes.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Does that surprise you, though, too? Like, the research findings that it's so common? Was that surprising to you? Because I think there is a cultural, at least some strain running through, especially today's culture, like, ah, people are just weak, we don't have, people are, they crumble, and trauma, this, and anxiety is rampant. Is that surprising to you?

• 22:27Mark Manson?

  It's not surprising to me. I think, I mean, maybe it was surprising that it was that high, but I don't know. When I think about, okay, so if I think about all the traumatic events I've gone through in my life, I think about all the traumatic events that people I love and care about have gone through in their lives, like, you quickly add up a list of a dozen, two dozen traumas, right? Right there. And then I think about all those people, and we're all still pretty functional and doing okay, right? So if I think about the people in my own life, and the things that they've gone through, and the deaths and tragedies and misfortunes that have happened to the people that I care about, and I see how they've handled it, like, I'm like, yeah, okay, yeah, 85% kind

• 23:10Mark Manson?

  of checks out intuitively. I think if you spend all of your life on TikTok,

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 23:16Mark Manson?

  That, those percentages probably get reversed. But that's probably just because of that's what the algorithm, you know, serves.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Right, there's a bias in it, yeah.

• 23:23Mark Manson?

  So, but like I said, we're going to come back to this. The perception of this is actually critically important, and we'll talk about that in the psychological section.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  To kick off kind of the biological stuff, we're going to go through some of development, some genetics, and then some of the like actual biology, what's going on in your brain, your body, all that kind of stuff.

• 23:43Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  But to kick this off, so the Swedish actually have a kind of folk wisdom around children, the different kinds of children that you interact with, okay? They have what they call dandelion children, and I'm going to try this, maskrabarn, I'm sorry to our Swedish listeners, I tried on Google Translate, and I'm not going to get the pronunciation right, but what they call dandelion children, right? Dandelions, as you know, like they'll grow anywhere, cracks, cement, terrible soil, dry conditions, any of that, they'll grow anywhere, they seem to thrive anywhere, anybody owns a home, there's dandelions all over your lawn, okay, great. They survive, they adapt, they push through terrible conditions, okay? So they have these dandelion children who they characterize like that, very similar, right?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  You throw anything at them, they seem to be just fine. Then they have what they call orchid children too. So any gardeners out there have ever tried to grow orchids, right? I don't know how many of those, I don't know, Mark, have you ever tried to grow an orchid?

• 24:39Mark Manson?

  You know me and orchids.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:42Mark Manson?

  Can't get enough of them.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  The Swedish word, to keep butchering this, is orchid barn, that's got to be so off.

• 24:48Mark Manson?

  I appreciate you trying.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  That's got to be so off, I'm so sorry to everyone for this.

• 24:51Mark Manson?

  I'm sure our listeners appreciate you trying.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Orchids, orchids though, they're fragile, they need like perfect conditions, they need good quality soil, they need the right amount, not too much water, not too little water, they need the right nutrients, they need the right amount of sunlight, all of that, right? They need the perfect condition, but when they do have those perfect conditions, you get a very beautiful, beautiful plant out of this, and they seem to thrive and they'll be fine in the long term, right? So the Swedes have had this folk wisdom around kids and people in general for a very long time, and they've always treated it as, okay, you need to treat these two types of children differently, like dandelions, you can throw whatever at them, orchids, they need a little different attention, okay? With just folk wisdom, whatever.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Well, the research you've already brought up by George Bonanno, and also later by Thomas Boyce and Bruce Ellis, confirmed a lot of what you've already brought up as well, about 70 to 80% of kids show some degree of being a dandelion, you know, there's a continuum kind of, but...

• 25:53Speaker 01

  They're resilient in most situations. You throw anything at them, they'll adapt, they'll work through it, they'll figure it out. That other 20 to 30% though, seem to be the orchids.

• 26:02Mark Manson?

  I like that you wore your flower shirt to match our orchid dandelion.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  I got some color.

• 26:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  One of the critiques I get is I wear too much black, so here we are. And talking about orchids.

• 26:13Mark Manson?

  Talking about orchids.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  The thing, though, this, the research, along with this Swedish folk wisdom and the research that came to kind of confirm it, was that it kind of changed the way we thought about resilience. It wasn't so much that these orchid children were like, they're weak and they're, oh, you know, they're, they get sick really easily, or they crumble under stress, or you give them a tiny, just a little bit of adversity and they just collapse on themselves, right? It was more that resilience is really more about fit. Okay, it's fit for your environment. If you are one of these orchid kids, you can actually do very, very well, given the right circumstances, given the right support, given the right environment, and you can thrive. And you can even find some form of resilience. So it wasn't just about like, oh, these kids are weak. Dr. Thomas Boyce's research and Bruce Ellis, they

• 27:01Speaker 01

  came up with this idea of the biological sensitivity to context. Okay, there's some genetic factors, some just biological underpinnings that we have that make us either more sensitive to all environments, or just more resilient to any environments, okay, the dandelions and the orchids. What they've kind of come to conclude, though, is that these like ultra sensitive kids and people aren't, they're not weak, but they're just ultra sensitive, they're malleable to their surrounding environments. And so they just need a different set of environmental factors that will help them thrive. This was interesting. So in preparation for this, we've already brought David Goggins, right? I read his newest book, it's never finished.

• 27:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Right? I also read Ross Edgley, his book called The Art of Resilience. Now Ross Edgley was a guy who, he swam around Great Britain. Like, it took him like 150 some days to do this, right?

• 27:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  He never stepped foot on land. He had a boat that followed him around and he would rest on the boat. But he never stepped foot on land for like over 150 some days. When you read their stories, you know, you might know David Goggins, the story that came from Abusive household, alcoholic father, a black kid growing up in rural Indiana with a Ku Klux Klan chapter like 10 miles away, severe racism. Ross Edgley grew up in Great Britain, had a very good relationship with his father, was very educated, went into sports science, gets really into the nitty gritty of sports science. These two men are incredibly resilient, but I would argue that Goggins is more the day and the lion, and Ross Edgley is more of an orchid. He needed the right set of circumstances. Now, if you look at Ross Edgley, he's a huge jacked dude, like huge, huge.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  So you wouldn't say he's probably, oh, this is an orchid or anything like that. But when you listen to him talk, I've heard him on podcasts and stuff like that, he's got a smile on his face. You know he's just smiling while he's talking the whole time, and he's very much, and he's even said, "I'm not like David Goggins. That's not my style of resilience." I bring this up, though, because if you are one of those people who thinks you're not resilient, it probably is just like an environmental fit thing, okay? And finding that environment for you is going to be key in developing more resilient habits and a more resilient mindset as well. This also presents, though, an evolutionary puzzle, right? So you think, think about this, when, why would Mother Nature create these orchids? Why would, why would Mother Nature create orchids, both the literal orchids and orchid

• 29:22Speaker 01

  children and people? How would being more sensitive and more, apparently from the outside, "weak," quote unquote, how is that evolutionary adaptive? In an evolutionary way, anyway? It really comes down to, these orchids, they're not evolutionary errors, as it turns out. You've actually kind of written about this before, but the, in, the key really is malleability in these, what looks like resilience, what Bruce, Bruce Ellis and Thomas Boyce said about these resilient kids is, they might just look resilient because they're not that malleable. You know, you throw everything at them and they're, they're fine, they can work through it, they can, whatever. These more, the orchid kids are more malleable, they're more sensitive to their environments, right?

• 30:07Mark Manson?

  I mean, I could see it being as like a evolutionary, high risk, high reward.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's exactly what

• 30:13Mark Manson?

  Where it's like the dandelions are, they're gonna be fine no matter what happens. But we should probably have some part of the gene pool that thrives in good conditions.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:23Mark Manson?

  But also is a little bit more fragile and harsh conditions.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Right. And that's exactly what the, kind of their theory that they've, they've formulated over the years is that this is kind of mother nature's way of taking a a high risk, high reward bet.

• 30:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  On the species. Okay. And there's plenty of examples to go around for this. I mean, talking about evolution. Darwin himself was probably, was probably, he was considered an orchid.

• 30:46Mark Manson?

  What a pussy.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, just a huge wuss, right? Actually, at the time, like, he went to medical school and he couldn't hack it because we would go into these operating rooms. This is before anesthesia. And he just couldn't stand the pain that people had to go through to be, to, to sustain an operation.

• 31:03Mark Manson?

  I've read some of Darwin's journals. He was a little, he was a little emo.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  He was. He absolutely was.

• 31:08Mark Manson?

  He was a little emo, yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  He absolutely was. He couldn't stand, I think he watched two surgeries and he was like, I'm out.

• 31:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  And then his father was just like, you're, you're a failure, you're weak. He just wanted to go look at beetles, you know, he was, he was one of those nerd kids, I'm sure. Yeah, huge dork, right? But given the right circumstances, that like, he had this, like, he was, he was a very empathetic person, a very, he was very attuned to emotions and, and social interaction.

• 31:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  And I think that's probably exactly what led him to kind of make these connections between animals and humans. Right? Was that sensitivity and that.

• 31:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  A perceptiveness that he had, yeah.

• 31:45Mark Manson?

  I think that's a good point to raise here. It's funny because the whole time I was reading about this.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:49Mark Manson?

  The dandelion and orchid thing, like, I couldn't stop thinking about my wife and I.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:53Mark Manson?

  And my wife is very much an orchid. Like, she is very sensitive to the environment she's in. She, the house has to be like perfectly clean all the time. If anything is out of order, she gets like very upset. If the weather is slightly bad, she gets upset, like it. And I'm very much a dandelion. Like, I, I spent multiple years of my life essentially living on a couch. I built my first business on a laptop laying in bed. Like, I didn't really care where I was. I was living in third world countries. I was, you know. Eating terrible food every day, I didn't care. I tend to be very happy whatever environment I'm in. Or it's very easy for me to be happy in whatever environment I'm in.

• 32:37Mark Manson?

  I, it's easy for me to like shut things out and just focus on whatever I need to focus on. Where she is like always perturbed by like disturbances that are going on. The flip side of that is that she has some incredible talents that I simply don't have. Like I, she has an eye for detail that I don't have. She has a, an understanding of like design and you know, what makes a, a good living room or why a window was installed incorrectly. Like she can just look at it and know within two seconds and I, I'm like completely clueless.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:16Mark Manson?

  And so it is, again, to come, kind of come back to that. It's almost like unfair to say that they're, they're less resilient.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:25Mark Manson?

  It's just, it's a, as you were saying, it's a different type of resilience. Like I think she gets annoyed with more stuff than me, but like she also puts up with way more shit. Like as a result, she puts up with way more stress and shit than I ever put up with. So in a way, in some ways I feel like she's more resilient than I am.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  And I mean, it's, it's not just, not just your wife and not just Charles Darwin. But there's like so many examples of this throughout history too. And some of them that I came up with were like William James, the father of psychology.

• 33:52Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Right. He made a pact with himself that he was gonna kill himself in a year if he didn't kind of get his shit together, basically. And he did. And then he founded modern psychology, what we think of as psychology.

• 34:01Mark Manson?

  He also had a, an experience of, he was in medical school and the first time he saw a cadaver, he was like, he's like, I can't do this.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, but he was a brilliant, brilliant person. He just needed, again, that right environment for him too. Henry David Thoreau, I guess he was, legend is, he was actually kind of emo too.

• 34:19Mark Manson?

  Don't get me started on Thoreau.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Even his best friend, his best friend Ralph Waldo Emerson was like, yeah.

• 34:24Mark Manson?

  He's like, dude, get it together, man.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Emily Dickinson too, she was like a shy, reclusive.

• 34:31Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Kind of neurotic person who, you know, really, I mean, she died in obscurity.

• 34:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  But was later, and found out, oh, she was a brilliant, you know, she stayed home, she wrote poetry. And that was her environment that she needed for that. So Isaac Newton.

• 34:49Mark Manson?

  I feel like a lot of brilliant artists are like, kind of associated with orchid type personalities. And I feel like their art is, is an adaptive reaction to how sensitive they are to all the stimulus.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:02Mark Manson?

  It's their, it's part of their way of coping with everything.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  And that's kind of the point I want to make. That's why I'm spending so much time on this is because I think, you know, the kind of person who's going to be listening or watching this is, is probably going to think that, oh, I'm not resilient. And it's like, well, what is resilience, first of all? And maybe you just don't have the right tools and the right environment to consider yourself resilient or to engage more resilient acts. And so I, the, the point though, is that, again, kind of, nature has preserved this orchid style because it is a high risk, high reward phenotype in the population. And it's a matter of finding the right fit for you. It's a matter of finding the right tools, the right environment.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  And, and then that allows you to be more resilient in your own way. So, again, go back to that Goggins versus Edgley. There's different kinds of resilience. There's different ways to approach it. You know, we'll talk a whole bunch about Goggins, I'm sure, at some point, but there isn't just this one, like, stay hard. You know, that's not necessarily, that's one form of resilience. Yes, it might work for you. Yes, I can see why it works for Goggins. That's not the only way to do it.

• 36:13Mark Manson?

  I got an example coming up that I think is definitely an orchid example of extreme physical resilience that I'll talk about later.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Ah, awesome, awesome. All right. I'm excited for this. There are, there's been several studies too around this from the genetic side too. So early genetic behavioral genetic stuff. It pointed to these like, oh, there's, there's these kind of like high risk genes, right? That you saw all the time. So one of them was like the serotonin transporter gene. Serotonin, it's in your brain, it's all over your body, actually. It's in your brain, it regulates mood, it's implicated in depression, anxiety, these sorts of things, right? So the early, early antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds target, targeted this system and still do. So people still get a lot of benefit from them. But early on, what it was thought was like, oh, if you have this one type, one, one type of this gene, that you're more susceptible to depression, that you're more susceptible to mental illness in some way, right?

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Again, though, what they later came back and found was it was this environmental fit thing. If you have these genes that are quote unquote, uh, kind of like high susceptibility or high risk genes. No, it's actually in a, in the right environment, you're fine. The same thing with like, uh, the dopamine receptor genes. This one, when it came out, it was kind of hailed as the, oh, it's the ADHD gene, right? Again, that's just not how it worked. Like if you have this gene, oh, you have ADHD. But as you know, as a person with ADHD, in the right environment, it doesn't matter if you have this gene or not, it's actually, it could even be a benefit in some way.

• 37:42Mark Manson?

  How would you define a good environment?

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Right, okay. So that was part of the, like, what, what Boyce, Thomas Boyce found was that you had, even if you had like, let's say socioeconomic stress or something like that, right? You at least had the social support around you. It could be a family member, it could be a teacher, uh, it could be friends of some sort. There was usually some sort of social support that you could lean on, uh, which we're gonna see that's gonna be a recurring theme as well. That was actually the biggest one. That's one of the biggest factors that they have, um, that they show. Also, just things like access to good nutrition, access to good, uh, clean water. Like those sorts of things are obviously gonna help quite a bit as well.

• 38:21Mark Manson?

  Safety as well.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Safety if you're living in a, uh, yeah. And if you aren't really though, that, the, the social support behind all of that was really one of the key factors that they found. Uh, schools, families, uh, social networks, those sorts of things. Yeah.

• 38:33Mark Manson?

  Gotcha.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Now, let's get into a little bit more of the biology and the physiology of this. Okay, so from your brain to your gut, even to your heart, resilience, it's not just mental, it's actually deeply biological. Okay, so what if I told you that there was a resilience engine, okay, right in the middle of your brain? Choo choo. Yes, that's right. It's right in the middle of your brain, and just like an engine in a car, you can fuel it, you can tune it up, you also have to maintain it as well. Okay. And if you do so, you can get that thing kind of like blasting on all cylinders. Fuck, yeah. Okay, there is such an engine, okay, and it's actually the anterior cingulate cortex,

• 39:19Speaker 01

  specifically the anterior medial cingulate cortex is really where a lot of the action seems to be. Okay, thanks for clarifying that. No problem, Mark. I don't want to get too bogged down in terms- I was so confused which cortex, angular cortex it was. There is, a lot of times when we do this, I'm like, so what, you know, like the neurobiology, I'm like, so what, this part of the brain does it, like, so what, but this is actually kind of cool, and I think this is actually, there's, there's a little bit of so what-ness to it, but it's actually just kind of interesting as well. All right. This, this region, the anterior cingulate cortex, specifically the anterior medial cingulate cortex, seems to be very, very involved in what we would call, what we're calling resilience now, is basically, um, energy allocation, deciding on whether you should push through

• 40:01Speaker 01

  or pull back. It's kind of a hub for whether or not you stay in the fight, right? Okay. And it can be trained, and there's differences between people who are more resilient and more not, as we'll see, and it's, it's actually pretty interesting. The core functions of this, the anterior medial cingulate cortex, predicts outcomes, okay, so this is going to be a painful or rewarding outcome, calculates cost versus value, so effort versus return, that and resilience as well. It monitors the body, so it's, it's, where it's positioned and all the connections it has, it's like, it's, it's connected to sensory, it's connected to motor, it's connected to your prefrontal cortex, so decision making, it's connected to memory, it's connected to your brainstem, uh, for energy allocation, like, it's just this huge hub for integrating all of this different information, right?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Adjust your expectations as well, so allocates energy based on what you, what you think is going to happen, right? Preps the body for action. So it regulates your, it helps regulate your blood pressure, your heart rate, arousal states, all of that. And then it's a really is, like I said, it's that top down regulator integrating all of this information and then kind of throwing out a, okay, keep going or okay, quit. So that's resilience, right? It seems to really be the hub for that. What happens with, in the anterior medial cingulate cortex in more resilient people, what, what appears to happen anyway, is that these people are downplaying the cost of the effort that they need to get through whatever difficult situation

• 41:28Speaker 01

  they're going through. And also at the same time, they're overvaluing the reward at the end of that.

• 41:34Mark Manson?

  Oh my God. This is the story of my life.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  It's the, it absolutely is. And when you look at it-

• 41:38Mark Manson?

  I feel like, I feel like this is every entrepreneur who's ever lived.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, right? So, and there's a genetic basis to it. We talked a little bit about genetics already. There's, is a little bit of a genetic basis to it. But what they found, and this is the fascinating part, is that people who engage in things, especially difficult things, things you don't want to do particularly, there's, there's both a structural and a functional difference in this part of your brain.

• 42:01Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  It's fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. So there's more gray matter. So there's just more, more cells there basically. And there's more functional connectivity with different parts of the brain. Actually, it's kind of interesting too. There's more functional connectivity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. You're welcome. Which is, which is, it's a part of your brain. It's like executive functioning, basically.

• 42:21Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Okay. So in more resilient people, there's, there's a stronger connection between these two brain regions.

• 42:26Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  In less resilient people, there's a stronger connection to your motor cortex, which they kind of think is like, okay, just quit.

• 42:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah, firefly.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Just stop. We're just shutting it down right here. So just, it's a, it's a fascinating little area of the brain that it's been implicated in all sorts of things. I just, there was just a study that came out that this region is very important, what they call super agers. So people when they're older, there's a specific definition, it's really around memory. So if you're 80 years old and you have the memory of a 50 year old, they, they call you a superager.

• 42:58Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Right? It's very specific, but this part of their brain is, it's thicker and- There's more connectivity there. They could, it's completely independent of a lot of different factors like lifestyle factors, although those do influence this part of your brain.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  You know, whether you exercise a lot, whether what you eat, whether you drink or not, all of these kinds of things. There's one thing, and I'm gonna come, I'm just gonna throw this out there now, and we'll keep coming back to it.

• 43:24Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Do you want to guess what one thing predicts this? How well this part of your brain functions at 80 years old?

• 43:30Mark Manson?

  So I don't know, but I feel like I've, I've done enough research and I'm, I'm, I'm gonna cheat a little bit, because I'm, I'm just getting, knowing everything I know about human nature, I'm gonna say socializing.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. Yeah, social connections, video, it does, it does.

• 43:46Mark Manson?

  Yes. If there is a resilience muscle, would this be it?

• 43:50Speaker 01

  I, I think so. I think the evidence is starting to point more and more towards this. There's even some people who, who are hypothesizing that this is like the part of the brain that's like, this is, this gives you the will to live, the will to perse, not just to persevere, but like, this is where the will to live comes from, even too. So, like, right down to the very bare bones of resilience, are you gonna live or die? This is like, very, very instrumental part of the brain.

• 44:15Mark Manson?

  Wow.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  There's a lot of things that the anterior cingulate cortex does, the cingulate cortex in general, is a, it's a big part of your, the middle part of your brain.

• 44:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  There's a lot of things that it does, but this part in particular, really seems to be involved in that.

• 44:29Mark Manson?

  Crazy.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there are, and there are things you can do, okay? So it is a muscle, like we said, it's a muscle you can work out. There are things you can do to train your resilience brain muscle.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  One of those is, yes, it is, the social connection, like I said. Aerobic exercise, though, too.

• 44:46Mark Manson?

  It does?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  We bring this up in every episode. I know we do, we're gonna talk about nutrition, we're gonna talk about exercise, we're gonna talk about sleep, all these things. This one, though, I just thought was crazy. They, because people who do exercise more, they have bigger anterior cingulate cortices, specifically anterior medial cingulate cortex is, is a higher density of gray matter, more functional connectivity.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  You could, I guess, and they've shown too, it's not, it can grow over time even in this. There's some evidence to suggest that as well. So it's not just like people who have this brain area are more likely to exercise. That probably is true, but it's a, it's a two-way street here as well. I think what that is, is going back to you're engaging in something that's unpleasant.

• 45:31Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  More and more, and that works this part of the brain out and it, it works out your resilience muscle, basically. And, you know, I've always thought like, there's these things you can do to like change your brain or whatever. So what, kind of. But at the same time too, this is really interesting because there's like, the biological reflects the psychological in this case.

• 45:55Mark Manson?

  And vice versa.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  And vice versa.

• 45:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  So that's pretty amazing.

• 45:57Mark Manson?

  Is, so aerobic exercise specifically more so?

• 46:01Speaker 01

  What I've found is aerobic, but I'm sure anaerobic.

• 46:05Mark Manson?

  So I actually wouldn't be surprised if it was more aerobic and, and I, this is just my pet harebrained theory, but as somebody who's done a lot of anaerobic exercise and a lot of aerobic exercise, the, the challenge or the experience is quite different. You know, like if, if I imagine, if you imagine, say, going for a max deadlift or a max squat or something, it is a singular moment. It is like a very adrenaline fueled moment and you do need a lot of courage and stamina and resilience in that moment, but it's over in like five seconds, it's over.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:44Mark Manson?

  Whereas let's say you're trying to PR in a half marathon, dude, you are suffering for like 45 minutes. You have, it's 45 minutes of non-stop, can I stop now? I want to stop. This fucking sucks. Can I stop now? You know, and you have to like, keep battling your brain over a very long period of time. And so it actually wouldn't surprise me if.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  There again, what like it's that's I think that's a big takeaway too, just for resilience in general. It's like doing the hard thing kind of 80% of the time is better than doing the the impossible thing once at 100%, right?

• 47:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  And so I

• 47:22Mark Manson?

  We'll get into that later.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah. That's acute stress versus chronic stress.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:27Mark Manson?

  Is another way to look at that. And coincidentally, the best way to sustain acute stress is to train yourself on chronic stress.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:35Mark Manson?

  In many ways.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And just like, you know, with with marathon training too, the way you get faster is you run slower for longer periods.

• 47:41Mark Manson?

  Longer period of time.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Right. So again, there's a reflection there, but yeah. So, okay, exercise is one of those challenging in your mind too, you know, they do old people. Oh, you should be doing crossword puzzles and stuff like that. Well, I mean, just engaging in kind of the higher level cognitive tasks, you know, reading, writing, strategy games, that kind of thing. It can, because again, it's that small kind of exercising and working out that resilience muscle in your brain.

• 48:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Same type of thing. So if there is a resilience muscle in your brain, this is it, and it is trainable.

• 48:14Mark Manson?

  Sweet, we found it.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  We did find it. That's kind of the the brain side of it. There are more brain regions involved, but that I thought was pretty cool, that there is an actual muscle.

• 48:25Mark Manson?

  It is cool.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  In the brain that we can work out.

• 48:26Mark Manson?

  It's super cool.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  It's pretty awesome. Moving more to like the body kind of stuff, though, there's this whole orchestra of biology that influences your resilience and your your aptitude for resilience.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  One of those is like your HPA axis, okay? Your hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, okay? This is basically the backbone of the stress system in your brain, especially with hormones. Okay? Stressful event happens, your brain registers it, it sends out a little signal to the rest of your body, and then your body is flooded with stress hormones. Okay? The normal way this works in, you know, in our evolutionary past, that was supposed to work ideally was you have an acute stressor, you deal with it, and then you're over it, and you come back down. Okay? And what they find is in resilient people, that's kind of what happens. They have a very adaptive stress response. So again, it's not just this Like you don't feel things.

• 49:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you actually feel things. You respond to them and you respond to them flexibly.

• 49:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  And then you're able to come back down to what they call baseline in this, in this situation. Right? So your stress hormone spike, your, your, your pupils dilate, your attention is very, very focused. Your heart rate rises, you deal with whatever's in front of you. Then when it's over, you come back down. Okay? Most people are like this. Again, it's like that 50, 60, 70% of people navigate this pretty well. And they have these profiles, but there are the other people who you can be either too reactive, where you have this very high stress response and then you don't come back down. Or you get the opposite end of this too, where it's very blunted and you don't, you, you don't have a very, like adaptive stress response to it at all.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  So again, that, that's not a, that's not a, a, like a mark of a healthy stress response is not having a stress response. This is what we're going to see over and over again, both psychologically and physiologically. It's flexibility.

• 50:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  In your response to any adverse environments or situations in your environment that's going on. Okay?

• 50:30Mark Manson?

  Cool.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  With the HPA axis, this is also a system you can train as well, though. Meditation actually helps a lot with, with your, specifically with recovery.

• 50:41Mark Manson?

  So that's why people see meditation as like a stress relief.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So it's more about recovery, recovery and coming back down to baseline with that. Therapies like CBT, which we'll get into later a little bit. Again, exercise, nutrition and sleep.

• 50:56Mark Manson?

  God.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  I know, I know, I know. This was one thing I just don't, I'll get into this minute. Well, we'll say this.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Let me get into the next thing too, because that's heart rate variability.

• 51:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Very related as well. Okay? Heart rate variability, it's the measure of how much variation, how much time there is between your heartbeat, between each of your heartbeats and.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  What they find is that more resilient people, both psychologically, biologically, they have a higher variability in their heart rates, which seems a little counterintuitive.

• 51:28Mark Manson?

  I've always wondered why this is.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 51:29Mark Manson?

  So I actually don't know.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Again, it's the flexibility.

• 51:32Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  It's a flexibility. It's your, it's your ability to adapt. It's not your ability to stay strong through.

• 51:37Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  It's the flexibility. Can you respond to your environment appropriately, quickly, and then get back to, to normal quickly as well? That's the thread through all of this that I've, that I've found. Anyway, your HPA axis, even, even in the, the brain too.

• 51:51Mark Manson?

  Physical flexibility, cognitive flexibility, emotional flexibility.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Social cotton flexibility.

• 51:56Mark Manson?

  Social flexibility.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  It's gonna show up over and over and over again. It represents that high, high variable heart rate. It represents an efficient toggling kind of between like stressful responses and just a normal resting response as well. It's a healthy system that can navigate between those two quickly and efficiently without doing too much damage otherwise. Okay. This is also trainable as well. Breathing exercises, resonance breathing, aerobic exercise again, meditation again. Yoga is a really good one too. I've noticed this, I've been doing yoga for a while now too, and I've really noticed with my heart rate has been, I get more heart rate variability during, both during yoga, but then after as well, for like a few hours after, I'll even see that as well, when I do monitor it.

• 52:40Mark Manson?

  It's so interesting to hear this because, you know, I, so I've, I've worn bio trackers or, you know, I've got a garment on now. I've used Apple Watches, I've used a bunch of stuff. My wife wears an Oura ring. You know, they always show you HRV and that seems to be, that's kind of like the primary metric that they focus on, most of these, these bio tracking devices. But it's always framed in terms of, I guess, exercise recovery, right? So you do a big workout, the next day, your HRV is low and that your little thing tells you like, oh, you should rest today, or you, today's a recovery day. I always saw it in those terms, but it is interesting because over the years I have noticed a bunch of these other things. If I don't sleep well, my HRV is crap.

• 53:25Mark Manson?

  If I eat a bunch of garbage one night, my HRV is crap. If I am, let's say I have a huge fight with a family member or something terrible happens and I'm, I'm like really upset about it, my HRV is crap. I never understood why, though. Like, I never saw the through line between all these things.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Think about, think about somebody who doesn't exercise, doesn't get out, doesn't move their body, doesn't really take care of themselves. Their heart rate is pretty much the same all the time, right? They're sedentary. They're not moving around. They're not able to, they're not working out, just like you're not working out a muscle. You're not working out your heart muscle either.

• 54:04Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  So, heart rate variability is very much, it's a reflection of how adaptive you are, from a physiological standpoint, too. And reflects in your psychology as well, as we'll get into.

• 54:14Mark Manson?

  The more you know.

• 54:15Speaker 01

  So, that's the more you know, right there. So, there's actually one nerve in your body that acts like a reset button for your entire nervous system, okay? It's called the vagus nerve. You might have heard of it.

• 54:25Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  And learning to activate it can mean the difference between, like, panic and calm, okay? So, the vagus nerve is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, okay? This is the rest and digest part of your nervous system. This calms you down, keeps you, in homeostasis, keeps you calm. It's kind of a superhighway between the mind-body connection. And there's certain things we can do to kind of manipulate it and to use it to our advantage and calm us down when we are facing stressful events.

• 54:52Mark Manson?

  So, as someone who lives on the west side of LA,

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:55Mark Manson?

  there are a lot of woo-woo spirit crystal people that talk about their vagus nerves. I'm on the edge of my seat right now, like, Drew Barney, is this a thing?

• 55:04Speaker 01

  I know. I know. I wanted to bring this up with you, actually.

• 55:07Mark Manson?

  Is this a thing?

• 55:08Speaker 01

  I wanted to bring this up with you because I have always kind of thought that this is baloney. Or, not baloney, but just like, it's like, "Oh, you're gonna make me do some breathing exercises so my vagal tone, like, gets higher or whatever?" Like, yes, that does sound crazy. But the more I looked into this, the more I'm like, "Oh, okay, this actually does make a lot of sense." And I've always kind of been like, "Oh, don't give me breathing exercises, don't give me cold plunges, don't give me all this stuff to, like, improve my vagal tone," or whatever it is. This is more of the, but though, like, on the acute regulation side that we're talking about. Not more of the long-term, chronic stuff.

• 55:43Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  You know, we talked about in the emotions episode, when you're hijacked, right?

• 55:47Mark Manson?

  Right. Like, panic attack.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Panic attack, or just, like, super emotional about something.

• 55:51Mark Manson?

  Just flying off the handle.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Yes. This actually, like, there's some science behind this.

• 55:55Mark Manson?

  Gotcha, okay.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  It's bastardized by West LA, I would agree, like all the West LA woo woo crowd.

• 56:01Mark Manson?

  As many, as many good legit things are.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:03Mark Manson?

  So, okay, so it's not the sort of thing where you just like decide to cozy into your meditation corner on a Thursday night and be like, "I'm gonna stimulate my vagus nerve tonight." Like, it's more of a crisis management type thing?

• 56:15Speaker 01

  That's how I would use that. That's how I, what I think is the most adaptive way to do this.

• 56:19Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say so. Okay, so a high, what they call a high vagal tone, which is just like a fancy way of saying high vagal functioning.

• 56:26Mark Manson?

  By the way, sorry to interrupt you. I, I have so many things in my section that I'm like, "I can't believe this is fucking true." Like, there's so much woo shit on this episode that I'm like, "I have shat on this idea for so many years, and it turns out it's actually useful. God damn it."

• 56:43Speaker 01

  I wanted to bring this up.

• 56:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah, so there's, uh, this is gonna be a running theme today.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  High vagal tone, again, is just a way to, to, to characterize the quality of your, your vagus nerve and how well it's functioning, okay? If you are able to train it, you get better stress recovery, there's lower inflammation throughout your body, you know, so like lower incidences of like arthritis and things like that, and just better emotion regulation, which is really kind of what we're going for here with the resilience part. And again, it's, this is more on the acute side, okay? You can train this by slow exhale breathing. So, one way I've done it before anyway is, like, I'll inhale for, I think I do a count of three, and exhale for a count of six.

• 57:25Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  That signals to your, your body, your vagus nerve really, that you're safe. Because if you can spend more time exhaling, it's like, okay, instead of having to take in more air, you're signaling your body, "I'm safe, I'm good, I've calmed down."

• 57:37Mark Manson?

  This is sometimes, sometimes called box breathing.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Box breathing.

• 57:40Mark Manson?

  And there's so many different, it's so funny, because it's one of these.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Tons of variations.

• 57:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah, the, the one that I learned was four, seven, eight. So, it's breathe in for four, hold for seven, exhale for eight. I've heard of four, four, four, I've heard of eight, eight, eight. I think Huberman has this like double inhale thing that he talks about.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:57Mark Manson?

  It's all the same shit.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:58Mark Manson?

  It's basically the same stuff, like, the exact seconds, I don't think, matter a ton. I mean, there might be like marginal benefits for holding your breath for five seconds instead of four, or breathing out for eight instead of seven, or whatever, but like, ultimately, the principle seems to be spend more time exhaling than inhaling.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:16Mark Manson?

  And it will. forcibly calm you down. And by the way, if you've ever been around somebody who is having a panic attack, this shit is magic. You know, like it actually solves it within a minute or two.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does.

• 58:28Mark Manson?

  It's crazy.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy. It really is. Also, too, you mentioned Huberman there. He has this non-sleep deep rest protocol.

• 58:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  That I think is very much, it's also aims to calm down the vagus nerve quite a bit. I use this because I don't get very good sleep. And like even, I was on a plane the other day and I hadn't had good sleep the other night and I just, I pop that on. He's got, it's on Spotify. Go check it out. I pop that on and it's like, it's vagal nerve, like calming. It's medicine for that, for sure.

• 58:58Mark Manson?

  Nice. So Drew Burney, looking for a woman with a large anterior medial cingular cortex and a well-trained vagus nerve.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 59:07Mark Manson?

  Ladies, reach out. He is single and ready to mingle.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  There's, so the slow exhale breathing, there's, there's that. Humming and singing, you can do some humming and singing will actually, like if you're.

• 59:24Mark Manson?

  It stimulates the vagus nerve?

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, stimulates the vagus nerve. Cold exposure, there is some benefit from that as well. Gargling as well. You can do some like, you know.

• 59:33Mark Manson?

  Oh shit.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:35Mark Manson?

  That's surprising.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Can help.

• 59:36Mark Manson?

  The singing, I'm not surprised.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:38Mark Manson?

  You know, music.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  Just in general, yeah. A lot of people use that for mood regulation, just in general.

• 59:43Mark Manson?

  But yeah, I get that. The gargling's a little, little strange.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Okay, that's enough on the vagus nerve. We won't get, we won't get going on that too much. There's lots of stuff out there about that. Okay, next one though. The bacteria in your stomach can shape your mood, it can shape your energy and even your resilience as well, too. Okay. Again, this one, this is one of those things that you've seen it forever, right? The last like decade has kind of been in the zeitgeist for sure.

• 1:00:07Mark Manson?

  I mean, it sounds like you're full of shit, Drew.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  That's what they come for.

• 1:00:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that's why, that's why you're here, folks.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  There are something like a hundred trillion bacteria in your stomach.

• 1:00:20Mark Manson?

  Hundred trillion.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Something like a hundred trillion, yeah.

• 1:00:22Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Your gut also produces a lot of neurotransmitters as well. So we talked about serotonin.

• 1:00:28Mark Manson?

  It is, it's the highest concentration of serotonin.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Ninety percent of the serotonin produced in your body is produced in your stomach.

• 1:00:35Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Okay, and it's a neurotransmitter, like, functions all throughout your body, but also in your brain as well. So it regulates immunity. There's a direct signal to the brain from your brain to gut. You know, they talk about the brain-gut connection. It's absolutely there. Emotional stability, stress resilience, all of this is actually, there's tons of studies showing that, yeah, your gut biome matters. I can say from personal experience too, that when I quit drinking, I didn't realize this for a while, but I was like, oh, I don't have the stomach issues I used to have. My mood's better. I used to think I was mildly lactose intolerant. Now, I eat dairy all the time now, and I'm fine.

• 1:01:16Mark Manson?

  Fascinating.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  And, and one of the, one of the things I do is I eat a lot of yogurt and fermented foods like yogurt, kefir, kimchi, those kind of things are very good for your, your

• 1:01:25Mark Manson?

  Your microbiome.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Your microbiome.

• 1:01:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  So things like, you know, eat, they, they recommend, I don't know, I don't think I do this, but thirty plus different plant foods per week. I don't think I'd probably get that.

• 1:01:36Mark Manson?

  Couldn't even name thirty plants.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  I guess. I do, yeah, like, but like, I get like, I do get a good, like, berries and salads and broccoli.

• 1:01:44Mark Manson?

  Fruit counts, nuts count. Okay, yeah, I could probably.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Like I said, daily fermented foods. I eat yogurt almost every single day. But you can do kefir, you can do sauerkraut, you can do kimchi, those sorts of things. Prebiotics, like raw garlic, onions, green bananas, asparagus. Resistant starches, which are like potatoes.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Green bananas again, legumes.

• 1:02:09Mark Manson?

  I can't believe we're actually-

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  I can't either, but this is, it's actually-

• 1:02:12Mark Manson?

  What is happening to us, Drew?

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  It's, it's, I, it is a little bit crazy.

• 1:02:17Mark Manson?

  I've seen some of this stuff work. It is very new. Like, this is, this is kind of the frontier of, I guess, mental health.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Mark Manson?

  Right now is, is microbiome stuff, gut health. But yeah, I mean, there's some like very fascinating early research and, and interesting case studies. And I've talked to a couple of people who have, like you just said with alcohol. Like, I've talked to a couple of people who have like removed or added certain foods to, to their diet. And it's relieved anxiety issues, sleep issues, inflammation issues, like tons of stuff. So, there's something here.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  There is.

• 1:02:49Mark Manson?

  We're, I don't think we're like, we're not the expert nutritionists in the world. But it is interesting that this is, this is, the, 10 years ago, this was like quack science.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:00Mark Manson?

  And like a lot of quack science, it's turning out to be legit.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Right. Or, you know, they, they would take, and I, I think there is actually some science behind this too. But if you take like the, either fecal matter or-

• 1:03:14Mark Manson?

  Fecal transplants.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Fecal transplants, that kind of stuff.

• 1:03:17Mark Manson?

  I know somebody who got a fecal transplant and it was life-changing for them.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah. If you have a lot of gut issues, that could be part of it.

• 1:03:24Mark Manson?

  No judgments, right? Like, but it's, it is, it is wild. It's very wild.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  The thing though too, that I've noticed lately, I've kind of like fallen a little bit off the wagon here and there with my diet. And the times where I kind of just, I just go wild on something, I feel like shit afterwards. No surprise, I know, that's like obvious to a lot of people. But when you, when you, if you do clean up your diet and then you go back at any point, you'll notice this a lot more. So if you have a terrible diet now, you probably just don't notice it. You're like, I just feel like shit all the time, whatever.

• 1:03:53Mark Manson?

  This is an interesting, this, I actually want to like double click on this. Because this isn't, this is actually an interesting corollary to this whole discussion around resilience. And, and it's something that like, as I have gotten healthier, so I've implemented a lot of this stuff in my life. I've quit drinking, my sleep has gotten way better, I exercise way more than I used to. Uh, my diet is much better. What I notice is that the, the tighter I get on these lifestyle habits, the more sensitive I am to fucking any of them up.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:22Mark Manson?

  So, five years ago, I could go out drinking all night, sleep four hours, get up, work a full day. Uh, eat, smash a cheeseburger and, you know-

• 1:04:33Mark Manson?

  Go to the gym and to me that felt that was like a normal day. There's a perceptual shift that happens like the more, I guess, the more volatility there is to your mood and physical state. The less sensitive you are to that volatility and then the more, the more you minimize that volatility and just like are always at a very high baseline. Yeah, the more sensitive you become to it like these days, if I, if I fucking eat a piece of cake. I feel like I have a hangover that day and I'm just like, well, where did this come from?

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Is it though, is it that you're more sensitive or you've just adapted? Because like if you're, if you just like, oh, this is just how I feel all the time and I feel like shit and then whatever.

• 1:05:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  And then you get to like, I'm feeling good all the time and then any little perturbation to that.

• 1:05:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Just.

• 1:05:24Mark Manson?

  So I, I actually don't know like this is, I actually was not planning to bring this up, but when you were talking about it, it just occurred to me. And it's, it's interesting too. This is coming up in a episode about resilience because sometimes my wife and I joke around and like. How fucking weak we are, you know, it's, we went to a wedding a few weeks ago and, and we went to bed at like 12:15 and we're like, oh my God, I'm so tired.

• 1:05:53Mark Manson?

  And we were thinking, we were thinking like, you know, five years ago, I mean, she and I, I mean, she and I met at 3am in a club.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Mark Manson?

  So it's, it is, I do think to what you were saying. All of these things, right? Like garbage food, alcohol, drugs, partying.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Lack of exercise.

• 1:06:14Mark Manson?

  Lack of, like, there's a numbing quality to them. Like the thing that makes them appealing is that they kind of numb how bad you feel. Uh, and so I, I think maybe a more accurate way of looking at it is that. You're going from being a highly numbed person to a not numb person. And so when you, when you're not numb to everything around you, you actually are quite sensitive to. The quality of the food that you eat or how long you slept last night or whatever. And I guess maybe this is. An important point to make, which is that this comes back to the original point at the top of the show. Resilience is not numbness. It's not not feeling. It's not.

• 1:06:57Mark Manson?

  It's not just like blindly powering through, you know, being hungover on three hours of sleep and still powering through. I had a friend who, uh, crazy motherfucker, shout out to Leo, if you're listening. I had a friend who had a business trip in Shanghai and flew back the night before a marathon and ran the marathon.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  My god.

• 1:07:22Mark Manson?

  Completely jet lagged that hungover.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Mark Manson?

  And I was like, what the fuck were you thinking? He was like, I don't know, it was the worst day of my life. And I just think, uh, you know, he was like, I was, I was drunk as shit. And, uh, you know, I drank the entire flight home with my, like, we just closed a huge deal in China. And so we were just like drinking on the flight and I landed and I was like wide awake. And I was like, fuck it, I'm gonna run the marathon.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:48Mark Manson?

  So I, I think it's like, that's not what, there is like, a person, like that, that seems resilient, but that's not sustainable.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:07:59Mark Manson?

  So I, that's not what we're going for.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:01Mark Manson?

  And numb, and I guess the difference is that numbing yourself is not sustainable. So it can't, it's not the solution.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Right. I, I think, I, I really think with the, the big takeaway from the kind of physiological, biological side and these trainable things. So, you know, we, we talked about the diet, we talked about, um, there's also exercise and sleep, we'll go into this too. We don't need to get into that, but just know that, you know.

• 1:08:25Mark Manson?

  Obviously, goes without saying.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  So, I'll give you an example, recent example from my life. Um, this, uh, at the beginning of the summer, for whatever reason in my life, shit just started, like, things were going great and then shit just started, like, like personal stuff, there's work stuff, there's, everything just kind of like piling on, it felt like. Now, for the last couple of years, I've been very good about exercise. I've been very good about diet. I'm still working on my sleep, but you know, it's whatever. I really did though, like when all this stuff started happening, I felt like I had like a reserve that I could pull from. Okay. I felt like I had energy to address all of this shit that was coming up in my life. I have been across three different time zones consistently

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  for the last several months. That throws my sleep off, but I've had a very good baseline of nutrition and of exercise as well. One of the things I was helping out with, I was helping my parents out with was some stuff around their house and it was very, very hot when we were trying to do this stuff. And I was outside and I was sweating my ass off, but I was fine. And that's because I've been like, I've been training in heat and exercises for heat for long periods at a time. I had this reserve. I had this pool that I could draw from. I'll tell you that right now, I'm, my tank's about empty. I'm like, because I haven't been training as much, I haven't been doing the yoga, my diet's been kind of all over the place, my sleep's been all over the place. I'm starting to feel, I'm

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  like, okay, I need to get back to that if I'm gonna kind of fill my tank back up. So the point I want to make about resilience is that once you have it, you don't just keep it too, right? And, and I think another point you're kind of making as well is that there are trade offs. You're not, just because you're resilient in one area, doesn't mean you're resilient in another area as well. However, if you have these biological, kind of physiological, physical health habits underneath all of that, that can definitely spread to other areas of your life. Okay. That's the big takeaway I want to, you know, we got in the weeds a little bit here, but that's

• 1:10:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah, we're way off on a tangent, but I think there are a lot of great points here. First of all, the, the reserve, that's a hundred percent correct. I did either a brilliant or a stupid thing this year in that I started a second company. I say as Drew shakes his head solemnly.

• 1:10:48Mark Manson?

  I mean, this is the last time I worked this much was probably 2018, 2019, when I was writing two books at the same time. Back then, my habits sucked. And I wrecked myself mentally, emotionally, and physically. This year, it's been extremely difficult. But because I have that foundation of like, good lifestyle habits, stability, consistency. It is hard, but I do feel like I'm managing it. Like, it's not, I don't feel myself kind of spinning out of control or losing track. But yeah, I think, so I think that's a super, super important point. And then the other point is also massively important. You can actually over-index on resilience in one area of your life.

• 1:11:33Mark Manson?

  Like, you can go too hardcore and neglect the ability to be resilient in other domains. Goggins is as much of a badass as he is. I think he's been divorced. So it's like, that's not a lot of resilience there.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Relationships, right?

• 1:11:48Mark Manson?

  Just because you're crushing ultramarathons or triathlons or whatever, doesn't mean that you're being emotionally resilient at home, or being resilient as a parent, or being resilient at work, being willing to have your idea shot down, or fuck up a project, or whatever. There's like a domain-specific aspect of this as well, I guess. Is the important takeaway.

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  No, absolutely.

• 1:12:12Mark Manson?

  What other biology do we have?

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I mentioned the exercise piece. I didn't really get into the weeds on that. But they say 150-plus minutes of moderate to aerobic exercise per week.

• 1:12:25Mark Manson?

  Easy.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:12:27Mark Manson?

  Fucking easy.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  That's two and a half hours, yeah. Two to three strength training.

• 1:12:31Mark Manson?

  I did that this morning, bro.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, right?

• 1:12:34Mark Manson?

  I did not do that this morning.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  What that exercise does, though, it's like, it's a controllable, predictable, time-limited stress event. Right? And so, again, it's like a practice. You're going back to that practice where you're doing something that's maybe unpleasant a little bit, but you do it because you know it's good for you. And you build that resilience muscle. Goes back to the brain aspect of it as well. Sleep, we're going with sleep. Consistency over duration with your sleep. I think that's one thing I want to highlight that we haven't necessarily highlighted before, is going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time. But I think the other thing too, another Huberman thing is like the light exposure stuff.

• 1:13:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  This can actually help a lot to reset your circadian rhythm and get you into a better energy space, get you like, I don't mean energy like crystal energy, I mean like

• 1:13:24Mark Manson?

  The universe, the universe is speaking to me Drew.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  But, you know, I've noticed this too, even as little like, start with like five or 10 minutes in the morning. And get some light throughout the day as well, and then turn the lights down at night. These types of things, again, they kind of, what they're doing is they're giving you a reserve to pull from. So when you need to face these difficult situations, you can.

• 1:13:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Those are kind of the big ones anyway, from, from the biological side that we can hit. Why is it Mark, that you think like the vagus nerve, right? Or, you know, like having some sort of reset for your stress. I felt the same way going into this. I'm like, oh God, we gotta talk about breathing exercises. We gotta talk about, you know, cold exposure, hot exposure, whatever. What is it about these that just kind of turn us off? And they, they're like, are they too simple? Are they too?

• 1:14:13Mark Manson?

  I think you and I both have a bias.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Mark Manson?

  Like, like we like, we intellectualize stuff.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Mark Manson?

  We're both philosophical. We enjoy the complexity of, of, of the science behind things and, and sometimes stuff is simple. Sometimes it is like, I think also I just have a very intense skepticism of this industry and this market. So anytime I see something being promoted as A, very simple and B, like curing or fixing like massive problems. My immediate assumption is that it's bullshit until evidence stacks up otherwise.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Mark Manson?

  And I would say too, for, you know, for everything, for every vagus nerve, there's like two or three things that are actually bullshit.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 1:15:00Mark Manson?

  And we just, they get lost to the annals of history, like and people don't remember them anymore. You know, like remember when you were supposed to put butter in your coffee? That was, that was what was gonna like, give you energy in the morning or like, there's a bunch of stuff like that. And it's, it's also, I mean,

• 1:15:17Mark Manson?

  We have to be careful because you and I have seen this go the other way too, where there's something that is discovered and is evidence-based, and then you get another 10 or 20 years out and more studies come in, and it turns out that a lot of the early research was poorly done, or not analyzed correctly, or p-hacked, or not good sample sizes. And it turns out that if you go to Indonesia or Japan and run the same study,

• 1:15:47Mark Manson?

  stimulating the vagus nerve doesn't do anything. You know, so it's, we have to reserve some judgment, but you and I are gonna eat a lot of humble pie in this episode. Like, we're gonna keep coming back to this. There's some stuff in the psych section that really does help, and it's, a lot of it is stuff that I've kinda trashed throughout my career. So, I definitely had to, I'd be like, okay, I need to, how am I gonna, how am I gonna thread this needle here? So, I guess, I guess we'll, we'll carry on this conversation as the episode goes on. But, my sense is that, like, I like to intellectualize, and I tend to be very skeptical, especially of simple things. But, that doesn't mean I'm always right.

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I mean, the big takeaway from this section again is just that the biology really does lay the foundation for psychological resilience. And so, getting these things right, that's why we're spending so much time on it. It's important.

• 1:16:39Mark Manson?

  It is important, and it is also a reflection. As we get into the psychological section, we're gonna see that a lot of this stuff is, it's almost like a training ground. Like, it's like a mental training ground for a lot of this stuff.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Tame the body, tame the mind.

• 1:16:52Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Because if you can't have control over your own body, then you can have, that is a form of control over your own mind. So, it's a great place to start.

• 1:17:00Mark Manson?

  Absolutely.

• 1:17:05Mark Manson?

  So psychologically speaking, how do we take our biggest struggles and turn them into greater strength? And the solution to this is the Goldilocks zone of pain.

• 1:17:16Mark Manson?

  Very much like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. This porridge is too cold. This porridge is too hot. This porridge is just right. Sometimes in life, you have too little pain. It's like, you know, a rock in your shoe or, you know, you stub your toe on a table or something, or you gotta take out the trash again. It's an annoying pain. It's a nuisance. It's obnoxious. It's not really developing character. You're not getting stronger. You're not overcoming any sort of meaningful challenge.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  Not motivating you to do anything, really.

• 1:17:42Mark Manson?

  Totally.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Just annoying.

• 1:17:43Mark Manson?

  That's too little pain. On the flip side, there's too much pain, where something is completely overwhelming, traumatizing, just completely wrecks you mentally, physically, emotionally. And what we find is that when you go too far to the other end of the spectrum, when there's way too much pain, people break down. They have a very intense stress response. It can become a chronic stress response. It can result in things like PTSD or various mental ailments, different conditions and whatnot. So it's that Goldilocks zone of pain. Not too little, not too much, just right. Just enough challenge to feel meaningful and feel doable, which will keep us growing and overcoming

• 1:18:28Mark Manson?

  and developing more resilience in our day-to-day lives. Now, if you think about this, I think it's the easiest way to illustrate this is like, it's the same thing with our physical body, right? Like, imagine if you go to the gym and you pick up like a one-pound weight and you start doing bicep curls with it. Like, it's not gonna do anything. You could sit there all day and you're not really gonna do anything. Whereas if you go try to pick up 200 pounds and bicep curl it, you're either gonna break your arm or you're just not gonna move. So the trick to build your physical resilience, your build more muscle and strength and durability, is to find the amount of weight, the amount of stress that is both meaningfully challenging but also doable, and then do that repeatedly over and over and over. That's how you get stronger.

• 1:19:13Mark Manson?

  And of course, the same is true with our minds. And in the literature, this is known as stress inoculation training. It's something that you can be very regimented about. It's something that you can make very repeatable. Or if you're like us, you can just do hard shit. Like just make a habit out of doing hard shit. And you will eventually develop a certain amount of mental resilience. And I think the most important takeaway of stress inoculation training is that ultimately, you don't become a strong person by feeling good all the time. You become a strong person by getting good at feeling bad.

• 1:19:53Mark Manson?

  At knowing how to adapt to pain, knowing how to use pain and struggle to benefit yourself. Throughout this section, I've kind of broken this down into five mindsets. You know, when I was doing research for this, I really, there's a lot of overlap and there are a lot of different schools of thought that kind of talk about similar things. And you know, they're technically different, but they kind of get at the same thing. So I lumped everything into five mindsets that can help us narrow and focus on this Goldilocks zone of pain. Okay. And consistently surmount and overcome these challenges. The first thing I want to talk about is something that I actually didn't think about for years, which is, you know, in that I've been talking about the Goldilocks zone of

• 1:20:38Mark Manson?

  pain for a long time now. But I never asked myself, what is the difference between a small amount of pain and like a meaningful amount of pain? Like where is that dividing line? And similarly, on the other side, what is the difference between something that is a struggle that's overwhelming and debilitating and a struggle that is just really, really, really fucking hard? And what's fascinating is that it turns out a lot of this comes down to your perception of it. And this is where we get into some of the woo woo shit that I have always ripped my entire career as being ridiculous and touchy feely, but it turns out there's something to it.

• 1:21:22Mark Manson?

  So excuse me while I eat my humble pie for a second. It turns out that it's been repeated over and over and over again through the psychological literature that typically, the more you believe you're capable of doing something.

• 1:21:39Mark Manson?

  The more likely you are to do it. Yeah. That's, I don't know, it just doesn't sound right, does it? Fucking, it's the fucking manifestation thing. I know. Okay. When I was prepping for this episode, so.

• 1:21:53Mark Manson?

  This kept me up at night. True. I, I thought very hard about this. Okay. Cause I'm like, I'm like, fucking manifest, it can't be true. It can't be true. It is true, but here's, so here's where I think the difference is. Okay. All the woo woo fluffy manifestation stuff. It's, the way it's generally sold or like talked about in the self-help market. Yeah. It's always talked about as something that, uh, getting something that you want. Right? So it's like, you know, if I'm like a couch potato and, uh, can't get out of bed in the morning. If I just think about having six pack abs and being able to run a marathon, um, I'll manifest it into my life. Right?

• 1:22:38Mark Manson?

  It's like, it's, it's often used as a way to convince people that they're going to get something without having to put any effort in. I think one day we should do an episode on like manifestation and then. We've toyed with the idea, yeah. Yeah, the cognitive biases around it and, and like why it quote unquote works and why it also kind of doesn't work. Without getting into all that, I think the difference here is that this is like, this is when you're already in a struggle. Right? So this is where it actually does work is when you've already signed up for the marathon. When you're already in the gym on rep 11 and you're trying to get to 12. Okay. When you decide, I'm going to get there. It turns out it drastically helps you get there.

• 1:23:23Mark Manson?

  So, so you're saying the timing is very important here? I'm saying the context is important. Okay. So where I would say the manifestation thing doesn't work is when you are experiencing no struggle. When you're comfortable and you just want to be more comfortable. You just want to have a thing that you don't have. Okay. You're just like, I, I want to find my soulmate, so I'm going to manifest them. And meanwhile, you're like, you know, I don't know. scrolling on TikTok and whatever. You're not doing anything. Gotcha, okay. Where it does work is when you're already doing the thing. Okay. Right? So it's like when you are going on dates and you're like, I'm gonna find the one. Or when you are

• 1:24:05Mark Manson?

  working late hours on a weekend and you're like, I am gonna get a raise like that. That's where it does work is when you are already putting in the effort. And the reason it works, basically your resilience increases in proportion to your, your, how much you perceive your ability to accomplish the thing. Because if you don't perceive yourself as being able to accomplish it, then you're gonna be too far outside the Goldilocks zone. It's gonna be too much and you're gonna give up. You're gonna become demotivated. Whereas if it falls in your Goldilocks zone, then it's gonna be engaging, invigorating, and you're gonna be motivated to keep going. So it's interesting though, I guess, to return to my initial point, the thing that's super interesting about it is that

• 1:24:48Mark Manson?

  the borders of the Goldilocks zone are very much perceptual. On this side, it is, am I capable of handling this challenge? Yes or no? If it's yes, it's in your Goldilocks zone. If it's no, then you're gonna freak out and panic and feel overwhelmed and give up. And on this side, it's actually super interesting. The question is, is this meaningful or not? Ah. Right? Okay. So if I'm annoyed that I have to take out the trash every day, part of what annoys me is that it doesn't feel meaningful. It's like, I have to do this bullshit, like fucking, fucking mom make me do chores, all this stuff. Whereas if you find meaning in it, if you've decide that like,

• 1:25:32Mark Manson?

  actually, I want to really take care of my home and I want to be responsible and I want to like live in a clean area because that represents how I feel about myself. If you add meaning to it, if you imbue it with meaning, and we're gonna come back to this later as well. It pushes it into the Goldilocks zone. And suddenly, it's like, taking out something as simple as taking out the trash every day, it is a form of building your character. You know, you are, you actually, it becomes easier over time. You become more resilient to the nuisance. Like, think about it. It's like, things that annoy you, they never stop annoying you. You never like, there's never a day where you're like, I suddenly like taking out the trash. What happens is, is you actually, you find meaning in it, and then, then it stops being annoying.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Your relationship to it changes at that point, right?

• 1:26:17Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:26:18Mark Manson?

  The borders of the Goldilocks zone are very much, are like largely determined by our perception of the challenge in front of us. Which is actually great, because we have a lot of control over how we see things. We get to decide how we see things. And I'm gonna go through a number of examples of some pretty extreme ways people have chosen to see things and the results that happened afterwards. I mean, ultimately, this is mindset number one, is anything is possible. Even if we know, you know, if we put on our science hats, we know like, okay, there are certain things that are physically not possible.

• 1:26:56Mark Manson?

  Mindset number one is, it's probably, if we're optimizing for resilience here, it's, it's worth believing anything is possible.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  See, I don't, I don't think this is necessarily all that woo-woo. I came to this with the kind of the same trepidation, I think, as well. But, like I said, I, you know, read David Goggins's book for this, and David Goggins's book for this, Ross Edgley, they talk a lot about mindset.

• 1:27:21Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  They talk a lot about this. But you're right, they're in the middle of doing something very hard.

• 1:27:26Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  And I didn't make that connection. That, I think, is really the key here, yeah.

• 1:27:30Mark Manson?

  So, I've got a great case study in this. Have you ever heard of Yannis Kouros?

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Yannis, I don't believe so.

• 1:27:37Mark Manson?

  He's a Greek guy. So, I actually became aware of him actually prepping for this episode. Widely considered the GOAT of ultra endurance events. So, he, he grew up in Greece. He started running marathons, I think, in the early 80s. And he was good, not great. But what he started to notice was that he would do a marathon, and he'd feel fine afterwards. Like, all the other people he ran with were like, just like wiped, gassed, oh my god. Get me into bed. I need to recover. And he was like, I could actually, I could kind of do that again. So after doing some of these marathons and realizing this, he decided

• 1:28:20Mark Manson?

  that he would sign up for some ultra marathons, just see how it went. So the first one he signed up for was called the Spartathlon, which starts in Athens and ends in Sparta. It's 153 miles. He'd never run an ultra marathon before. He didn't even train specifically for this ultra marathon. He ran it in 21 hours and 53 minutes, not only setting a world record, but beating the previous world record by like multiple hours. Wow. In fact, the record still stands today, 40 years later. Yeah. Like, he crushed it so fucking hard. In fact, it turns out that most of his world records that he set in ultra endurance running, still haven't been broken. Wow.

• 1:29:04Mark Manson?

  Even though he's been retired for 20, 25 years. Okay. A few of his other world records, he ran 100 miles in 11 hours and 46 minutes. My god. 24 hours straight, he did 188 miles. 48 hours straight, he did 294 miles. Good god. Six days straight, he did 635 miles. Six days. Six days. And then he did 1,000 miles in just over 10 days. He's the only person to have done that. I have never heard of this guy. I don't get crazy. What's wild is that many of these records, like I said, still stand. Nobody's broken them. In some cases, nobody else has even attempted them. Understandably, yeah. Yeah. Like, this guy is so hardcore. Wow.

• 1:29:48Mark Manson?

  So hardcore. And interestingly, Coros was very famous for saying that his secret wasn't, had nothing to do with training, it had nothing to do with his body. It's funny, scientists even tried to study him because they suspected that like he had different muscle recovery from other people, or something like that. There's always those things always come up with this. Of course. He insisted emphatically that it was mental transcendence. And we're going to get into some of his mindsets that he adopts and believes very strongly in. He claimed that when he was on one of these runs, that he would enter a kind of poetic altered state. He said, quote, "When other people get tired, they stop. I don't. I take over my body with my mind. I tell it that it is not tired, and it listens to me."

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  That's wild. This is Ross actually talks about this in his book, The Art of Resilience. He talks about the psychobiological model of resilience.

• 1:30:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  And, and do you hear this from military guys all the time too?

• 1:30:42Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  When you think you're tired, you're, you've only spent 40% of your time or whatever, right?

• 1:30:46Mark Manson?

  So it's actually, so Kuros was actually, um, on one of his runs, it's been a while since I read about it. Um, I think it was in a, there was a book called Born to Run. I think they talked about him. Cause I mean, his, his runs literally last multiple days and he would like, he would start hallucinating. He would like forget where he was, all, all sorts of stuff would start happening. And I think on one of the runs, like the, uh, some scientists were in the follow car, like with them. And like measuring his biometrics and stuff. And, and basically what they found was when his biometrics hit where everybody else gave up, he like wasn't even halfway done yet.

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:31:22Mark Manson?

  And he would just keep going.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  And he claims this was all based on his mindset. This was all based in his, his approach.

• 1:31:30Mark Manson?

  I believe, I believe, I don't know.

• 1:31:32Speaker 01

  Obviously training goes into all this.

• 1:31:33Mark Manson?

  I don't know if this is a direct quote, but I, I saw somewhere when I was reading about him, um, that he, he said that he believed it was 90% mindset.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 1:31:43Mark Manson?

  It might've been Goggins who said that. It was one of those two.

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:45Mark Manson?

  He said it was 90% mindset. So yeah. Um, I think the thing to take away from Kuros, and I mean, there, there's a ton of examples. We'll, we'll get into a lot of them, but so talking about that Goldilocks zone of pain. If one of the borders is almost purely based on perception, one of the things that we find over and over again, is that our perception of what is possible, especially with ourselves, is often wildly off base. Like we are generally capable of, of doing and accomplishing and enduring a lot more than we give ourselves credit to. In fact, um, David Goggins actually talks about this, uh, in one of his books. He calls the mind a drama queen. And he said that your mind is not optimized for growth.

• 1:32:29Mark Manson?

  It's optimized for comfort and safety.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:32:32Mark Manson?

  And I think that's a really important point that like the, there are defense mechanisms that happen naturally inside you that will come up in the form of thoughts and stories and assumptions that they're not necessarily true. They're probably not even accurate. But they're designed to keep you safe. And so there's a tripwire that's going off well before you're actually in danger of your mind telling you to stop. We can talk about whether it's good or not to ignore those tripwires, but I think it's useful to know that those things are there.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:09Mark Manson?

  And so one of the things that I think it's really important to do, one of the, I guess, the most practical takeaways for people listening to this, is that I think it's important to commit yourself to doing difficult things that feel slightly outside of your Goldilocks zone. So things that feel just outside the realm of possibility, like that's the sweet spot, and then commit yourself to it. Like basically, put yourself in a situation where you can't back out.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:38Mark Manson?

  And you'll be surprised what happens.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is that stress inoculation training you're talking about, right?

• 1:33:42Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:33:43Speaker 01

  So you're being very intentional about it, but it's very calibrated at the same time.

• 1:33:47Mark Manson?

  Yes. And again, to bring it home, back to like a gym metaphor. You know, you go into the gym, you're like, okay, I bench pressed 165 last week, let's do 170 this week, right? You go just slightly outside of where you feel your limit is, and then it turns out you can do it. And then sure enough, your body adapts and you push into it. So it's similar with mental stress or mental challenge. Like you want to find things that feel at the edge, like they're either on the challenging side of the Goldilocks zone, or they feel even slightly outside of the Goldilocks zone, and then commit yourself to them. And then, I mean, the commitment thing, I don't think is part of SIT. That's my thing.

• 1:34:32Mark Manson?

  That's what I've found is like, if you don't make the commitment or put stakes on it, like you're gonna back out, right?

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:38Mark Manson?

  You're gonna find a reason not to do it. So as you know, as we talked about earlier, as part of my research for this, I decided to do just this. So I signed up for a Tough Mudder. For those listening who don't know what it is, a Tough Mudder is an endurance race. It's a combination of, it's about 10 miles of running through rough terrain, so hills, rocks, trees, mud, water.

• 1:35:05Mark Manson?

  And then it's about 25 military-style obstacles. So climbing walls, crawling through barbed wire, going over, you know, balance exercises, grip strength, you know, doing like rings and monkey bars, American Ninja-type stuff. And then there's also like some pretty unpleasant aspects integrated into the obstacles. So I ran it with my camerawoman Jess, who's here in the studio with us. And we got electrocuted, we got tear gassed, we had to swim through ice water, we like were waist-deep in mud multiple times.

• 1:35:49Mark Manson?

  And it's funny because this was a race that I was always aware of. I never had any, I never had any desire to do it. And as I was prepping for this episode, I was like, man, it would be really cool to like basically run like these mindsets and everything I'm about to go through in this section. It'd be fun to like run myself through this, right? So what is something I can commit to that feels outside of my Goldilocks zone? Like, I actually don't think I'm prepared for, but I probably can handle it. And so I signed up for it. And on top of that, I committed, I committed, I got Jess signed up for it, I got the team committed to it, we shot it, we ended up doing a video on it. So there was no backing out. Like, it's, I think I had 12 days to train for it.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  So what made it slightly outside of your Goldilocks zone, or just within it, or just slightly out of it?

• 1:36:39Mark Manson?

  So I, I am, I'm in good shape.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have a baseline, right?

• 1:36:44Mark Manson?

  I'm fit, I have a baseline of fitness. I did run a half marathon, maybe four months, four or five months ago. So I felt like, I'm like, okay, the fitness side of it, I think I can get back enough of my cardio in a couple of weeks to like, struggle bust my way through it. The side of it that I wasn't so sure about was the obstacle side. I didn't really know what to expect. I did get on YouTube and I like looked at a lot of obstacles and I'd say about half of them, I was like, that, that looks fine, I can handle that. But then there was about half of it that I'm like, that could be rough.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  Probably just outside of your zone there.

• 1:37:17Mark Manson?

  Exactly. I'm gonna come back to, this is actually a mindset number five, but I'll, you know, I'll tease it a little bit here. I've done enough hard shit in my life to know I can do hard shit.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  Right, right. Your mind is already telling you at that point like, "Oh, I don't know if you should." It's like, "Yeah, you're playing tricks on me."

• 1:37:35Mark Manson?

  I've built, and I've built, at this point in my life, I've built enough evidence over time.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:37:41Mark Manson?

  That, like, there have been enough things in my life that I initially thought I couldn't do it, and then I did it, and I was like, "Oh, I'm actually capable of a lot more than I thought." So, but we're gonna come back to that, because that is, that is a very important piece, actually. So, when I signed up for it, I did start training, went up into the Santa Monica Mountains here outside of LA, started running, running hills and through dirt and stuff, and doing cold plunges and a bunch of grip exercises. And it's funny, because this takes me into mindset number two, is that stories are just that, they're stories. And that psychological safety system, that, that tripwire that tries to stop you halfway

• 1:38:23Mark Manson?

  from doing the thing, like I said, it will, a lot of stories and narratives will start emerging in your head. You'll find all sorts of reasons why, you know, you're probably not ready for this, or like, "This could be dangerous," or, "Maybe you're putting an employee in danger," or, "Maybe you're just gonna look like an idiot on the internet, and everybody's gonna laugh at you." All this stuff starts bubbling up to the surface, and it's important to recognize that these things, they're not necessarily true, they're just stories. And this comes from CBT. Like, we've talked about CBT a couple times on the show.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

• 1:38:59Mark Manson?

  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, it is the most predominant form of therapy in the world today, or at least in the Western world, originated with Aaron Beck in the 1950s. And the essential insight of CBT is that there's kind of this chain that happens inside of all of us, which is that our behaviors create emotions, and then the emotions create thoughts, and then the thoughts create behaviors. And so, there's this like loop that goes around, and you have to find a way to intervene into one of those three. Links in the chain to change the entire loop. Like, you can't just only change your thoughts or only change your emotions. All three have to change, but you need to find an entry point.

• 1:39:42Mark Manson?

  And Beck believed that thoughts were ultimately the easiest entry point. It's kind of, it's very hard to change how somebody feels about something, and it's definitely hard to change somebody's behavior about something, especially if they don't believe they should change their behavior. But if you can get somebody to see something differently, or reframe something in a certain way, or give them a new perspective, you can, you can create a chain reaction. Leads to different behavior, which leads to different emotion, which now you've got an upward spiral going. And so this idea of like, not necessarily believing your stories is like, it's central to any form of resilience. And I think if you listen to anybody who deals with a decent amount of hardship, you hear them talk about this, right?

• 1:40:25Mark Manson?

  Like, there's so many interviews with athletes who talk about, you know, "I wanted to stop. My mind told me we weren't gonna make it," or "It told me to quit. I wanted to quit, but I didn't listen to it." Like, you hear these things come up over and over and over again. I think there's a certain skill that has to be developed of like, being able to recognize your own stories and essentially just being willing to ignore them. You know, the same way you would like, ignore, you know, if your parents told you not to do something when you were a teenager. Like, it's just sometimes there's things in your brain that you're just like, "Yeah, what do you know?" Right, right. Fuck off. Right. But that takes, that takes practice, and it takes effort.

• 1:41:07Mark Manson?

  And our default position is to buy into those narratives, and to follow them blindly, and to just assume that whatever narrative pops into your brain is capital T true, and that's the way things are, and there's nothing you can do about it. This is an area where mindfulness plays a role as well. I think a lot of, you need to get a certain amount of separation from the narratives, like, being able to observe your own thoughts to a certain extent, to like, know what's a narrative and what's not. It's interesting, you know, as I went through the experiment of the Tough Mudder, I like, I really tried to pay attention to what kind of narratives popped up into my brain. I would say beyond the first few days of training, and especially once I was there, like, once I was there, there were no... Narratives.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:41:51Mark Manson?

  None.

• 1:41:51Speaker 01

  This is just, this is what we're doing. That I have the task in front of me and that's it.

• 1:41:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:41:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah, like I imagine myself 20 years ago. That would not have been the case.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, okay.

• 1:42:04Mark Manson?

  I mean, part of this too was just like, I wasn't allowing those narratives to even show up in the first place. I think early on in the training, they were showing up and I was just like, this is not helping.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Mark Manson?

  Fuck off.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  It was so clear.

• 1:42:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  That that wasn't helping. Yeah, okay.

• 1:42:16Mark Manson?

  And again, it comes back to mindset and number one, right? It's you just decide you're doing it. I'm fucking doing it. No matter what, I have broken legs and crawl across the finish line, I'm doing it. And once you decide that, there's not really a whole lot of room for those narratives to start showing up.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  I think I want to, I want to highlight there though, too, go back to what you kind of opened this up with. So this is cognitive reappraisal is kind of what this is called in CBT, right? And, and lots of other modalities in psychology. Because I, I tend to dismiss this kind of out of hand too as well. But I, I think that is a really important point that you made when you brought it up. And I just want to highlight it again. It's that when you're in it, when you're, when you're going through it and you have a task in front of you, you have a challenge in front of you, that's when it comes in.

• 1:42:58Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  It's not when you're sitting on the couch and saying, oh, I should do this. I just need to talk myself into it. No.

• 1:43:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  No, it's when you have the challenge in front of you that you need to reframe it.

• 1:43:07Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  That's the important part. That's the important, that's the leverage point, actually.

• 1:43:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:43:12Mark Manson?

  And it's funny because I never thought about that before.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  It's, and it's very simple and it kind of, it gets me on board is what I'm saying. You know, it's like before I was just like, yeah, I'm going to talk to myself.

• 1:43:20Mark Manson?

  It's actually really ironic too, because you know, a lot of this stuff that I'm going to go through is stuff that, again, it's, it's like a lot of like the, the stuff that I see on Instagram or TikTok. And I just roll my eyes. I'm like, come on, guys, seriously? If you take that same advice and give it to like a Navy SEAL, it's actually incredibly.

• 1:43:38Speaker 01

  Packaging matters.

• 1:43:38Mark Manson?

  It is vital and absolutely necessary. Or if you give it to like an F1 driver or a firefighter who's about to run into a burning building, like, it's actually excellent advice for them in that moment. Where it's terrible advice is when it's just a, you know.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  For when you're scrolling.

• 1:43:54Mark Manson?

  A mopey person scrolling TikTok all day and not doing anything.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  Ah, okay, okay.

• 1:43:59Mark Manson?

  It's, it's very, it is interesting.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  I find that incredibly useful then. Yeah.

• 1:44:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  That's a useful distinction there.

• 1:44:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The next mindset is a classic stoic mindset, which is focus on what you can control and ignore everything else. There's a little bit of a tie in here with acceptance and commitment therapy, which is. Essentially, accepting the things that you cannot control. It's interesting. So I grew up with a guy who went on to be in the special forces and he served in Iraq, did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he told me a lot of crazy fucking stories over the years. And so the second thing I did in preparation for this episode is I reached out to him and I was like, hey, can I just like, I just want to, I remember some crazy shit you told me. Can I just ask you a couple of questions about

• 1:44:46Mark Manson?

  it? And he was like, yeah, of course. So I talked to him and there were two stories that like really stood out to me that he told me. One was when he was in training, he was doing a, he was doing an exercise where they were, they were jumping out of a plane into the, into the ocean. And then they had to swim from the ocean to shore. And I forget how far it was, but it was, it was far. It was like a mile or two to shore. So you parachute out of a plane, you land in the ocean and then you swim on the shore. And you're supposed to do this like covertly in the dead of night or whatever. So he was doing this exercise and he was parachuting down from the plane. And what you're actually supposed to do is, is I believe you're supposed to undo your, your parachute like a few feet

• 1:45:29Mark Manson?

  off the water. Cause you don't want to land in the water with your parachute on, cause then you can get all wrapped up. Okay. Yeah. It becomes a disaster. And so you're supposed to actually like cut loose, like right before you hit the water, or right as you hit the water. But he said that as he was coming down, there was like a massive gale of wind and it like basically pulled him sideways and just slammed him straight into the water. Parachute never released or anything. Okay. Yeah. So he's, he's in the ocean, he's flailing around and he's got, he's like all wrapped up in his parachute now and he's underwater and he doesn't know how far underwater he is. And I remember he told me, he was like, yeah, in that moment, I thought, yeah, I could die here. But he was like, all I can do is just get my parachute off. So I guess I'll do that.

• 1:46:13Mark Manson?

  To clarify an event? Yeah. Yeah. He calmly like went to his harness, got everything off, started kind of trying to pull himself out of it and eventually pulled himself out of it and he came up to the surface of the water and everything. Like, so when I went back and I talked to him, I was like, dude, weren't you fucking freaking out? And it was interesting because he said he was like, part of him, there was like a, there was like a very, a level very deep in him that was, that was like, oh shit, this could be it. He was, I guess from the training, he was just so focused on like, just do the thing in front of you that you can control. Just get the harness loose, just get the parachute off, worry about everything else later. And, and he's like, yeah, then you just, you just do that. But he also pointed

• 1:46:57Mark Manson?

  out, he's like, when you're in training and when you're in theater, like, there are so many moments like that where you're like, yeah, I could die. Like, it's, but you just focus on the next thing. So the, the second thing he told me about, when he was in Iraq, he was, he was on one of those, have you ever seen American Sniper? Yeah. So you know those task force that go door to door? Right. They, they were like the guys who like literally kicked on the doors. Right. So he was on one of those task force. And he said, he's like, every house, you're thinking to yourself, this could be the one, right? But in that moment, it's like, what is there to do? What else is there? Yeah, what else is there? Well, you, you followed, they've got protocols, you train through them a bajillion times, to the point that they're automatic. And it's

• 1:47:42Mark Manson?

  just, it gave me an appreciation of the logic and military training of like, breaking down everything into such granular processes, not just to make sure that everything is standardized and like, it goes the same way every single time. But I think it's like, just for the mental sanity of the soldiers themselves, because it, like, they need something, they always need something in front of them to focus on next. Because if they don't have that thing right in front of them to focus on next, then they're probably thinking about, oh my God, what if this is the one? Oh my God, what if this guy gets shot? Oh my God, what if this happens? You know, what's my wife gonna think? What are my parents gonna think? Like, They need to always have the next thing in front of them.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:19Mark Manson?

  So I, I thought that was super interesting as well.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  Isn't that how our civilian lives kind of go though? It's usually not that there's just this like really one thing that we have to focus on. I, I get the point that you're making that like it's imperative that you focus and do the thing that you can control in this situation and those high stakes situations like that. But like, you know, if you've lost a job, you know, um, it's not necessarily clear that one thing you can control in that situation, then you do start thinking about what's my family gonna think? What's my girlfriend, boyfriend gonna think? What are people gonna think?

• 1:48:51Mark Manson?

  Well, it's funny you bring that up because there's another, there was a book that was really popular about 10 years ago, that at the time I thought was stupid as fuck, that now I have a deep appreciation for it. It was called Make Your Bed and it was written.

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:49:06Mark Manson?

  It was written by an admiral and former Navy SEAL, which was that he was like, if nothing in your life is going right, make your bed.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  Make your damn bed. Yeah.

• 1:49:15Mark Manson?

  And, and now like.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  I remember you shitting on that. I remember, I remember piling on with you, I think too.

• 1:49:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I mean, at the time I was like, really, man? Like make your bed, come on. But I, I, I think I get it now, right? Cause you do need something in your life that you feel like you can control.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:33Mark Manson?

  And you do need something immediately in front of you that you can focus on. And you do need that small win that you can build upon. Like there's a lot of subtle value in that. If anything, to just keep your mind off of the eight million bullshit things that are going on in the world. So.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  It's no, it's funny you bring this up because like I, I kind of mentioned a little bit that the last few months have earned me have been, there's a little bit of a shitstorm, not, not, nothing I can't handle, I get it. But it was like there, I had issues like water damage at my house, but like my mom's had some health issues. I've been, you know, work's been crazy.

• 1:50:04Mark Manson?

  You've been flying home, flying here.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Been flying, yeah, gone a lot. And there was one time I got home, my house is a disaster. It's torn apart, it's a construction, blah, blah, blah, you know? So it's a more mundane example, this isn't life and death type of stuff. But I was like, you know what? I haven't made my bed in like a month. Like I just, I hadn't been doing it and I took the time, I made it the nicest I've ever made it.

• 1:50:24Mark Manson?

  Nice.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  In a very, very long time. And it was weird, but I felt a little bit better. I was like, okay, I can adapt the day now. So yeah, I shit on it at one point too. So I get it, but it it's kind of funny. You brought that that up. Anyway, and again, that's a mundane example, but it is just an example of this is what you can control right now. If you need some sense of control in your life, then do it.

• 1:50:45Mark Manson?

  There is something to it. It's interesting. So when I was doing the Tough Mudder, I felt pretty good for most of it. There were a few moments that were really hard. There was actually only one moment that I was like, I don't know if I can do this. Which was the tear gas. That fucking sucked, but.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Tear gases. That's not fun.

• 1:51:02Mark Manson?

  Everything else, I was like, okay, this this is hard. This hurts, but I'm okay. I'll get through it. I would say it was really just the last mile or two that got very hard. And so one of the things that I did, because like I said, we were filming it. One of the things I did as I went through is just like every couple of miles, I kind of pulled out the GoPro and I just did like a status update of kind of where my mind was at. And it was interesting, kind of going back and looking at some of the footage because early on, my mindset was very, it was very preparatory. So like, if you look at my, in the first few miles, I'm like talking about, you know, okay, so the terrain is much more uneven and difficult than I was expecting. So our pace has been slow and

• 1:51:45Mark Manson?

  but the early obstacles have been easy. So I'm like trying to save my energy for the harder ones later. It was like all very like rational and planning and organized and everything. And as it went on, it, you know, in the middle of it, it became more emotional. It was just like, hey, we're making good time and we just did this obstacle. It was fucking hard, but we did it, you know, on to the next. It was just like very like rah rah, let's go. It's funny, the last one I did, I got to the end and I remember I pulled out the camera. And I just kind of sat, I was running and I just kind of sat there for a few seconds because I didn't know what to say. And then I realized I'm like, I don't have anything to say because I'm literally not thinking about anything.

• 1:52:30Mark Manson?

  Like all I'm thinking about is just put the next foot in front of the other, like just, just fucking put one foot in front of the other. Now the next foot, now the next foot, now the next foot. And that was really, that's probably pretty much how the last 20 minutes went. It was just, and every single moment, every obstacle, it was like, okay, hand goes here. Okay, now hand goes here. Okay, foot goes here. That's as far as my mind went. And obviously, some of that is due to exhaustion. But again, I think there's that narrowing of focus. I think some of it too is that if I let myself think too much about the situation, I probably, all those narratives would have started coming up.

• 1:53:14Mark Manson?

  All those things, you know, hmm, maybe you should stop and walk. Maybe you should take a break. Maybe you shouldn't be doing this. You know, maybe that obstacle is actually dangerous. You shouldn't go up it, you know? And it was interesting living, living all these things that we're talking about and researching. It was very, very illuminating. So yeah, maybe I would, I would even change this mindset number three. I originally wrote down, control what, you know, focus on what you can control. It almost seems like the takeaway here is actually that narrowing of focus. Of just like the immediate task at hand and just try to block out everything else. I do want to return to one point and I want to return to it because it came up with,

• 1:53:59Mark Manson?

  with my buddy. I've seen Goggins talk about this quite a bit. Obviously, my life has never been in danger. Yeah. With a lot of the stuff, the difficult stuff that I've done, or at least to my knowledge, it hasn't been in danger. But it's funny because I've said this to myself before, like there's kind of, there's a, there's a point you reach where you just decide like, I'm either going to do this thing or I'm going to die and I'm okay. Like, kind of like reaching that level where it's like, I will either accomplish this thing or I will fucking die trying. I think there's, if you can actually say that and buy into it with conviction, there's an immense amount of power behind that. And it's actually a very dark place.

• 1:54:44Mark Manson?

  And I wrote down, I put in my notes here, there's a darkness of extremely resilient people. Yes. I did not research this. This is just an observation, but it's something I've noticed. It's something I've noticed with people I know as well as like, I guess, kind of celebrity, famous, very famous resilient people, but like.

• 1:55:07Mark Manson?

  If you, if you look at extremely resilient people, like there's like a darkness to them. And there is a, there is a like, oh yeah, I'll fucking die to accomplish this. Like, I don't fucking care. I will, I will go to the darkest place. I will be miserable. I find that very interesting.

• 1:55:25Speaker 01

  I, I think, I think what it is, is that they just understand their own mortality on a level that a lot of us just don't think about most of the time.

• 1:55:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  I think that's where it is. I seriously think they're like, well, I'm gonna die at some point.

• 1:55:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:55:38Mark Manson?

  Might as well be doing this.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  It could be now. I, I think they have a, a, a very visceral understanding of just the precariousness of life too, that takes them to that dark place.

• 1:55:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  Um, and allows them to be like, well, this is the end, this is the end anyway. There, there's at some point, that's what it is.

• 1:55:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  And so I may as well accept that, that you talk about the acceptance piece, I may as well accept that and I may as well do what I can in the meantime. I, I think, yeah, I, I totally agree with you. There's just this darkness. You talk about Goggins, man, he like, there's a darkness to that man.

• 1:56:13Mark Manson?

  It's very dark, yes.

• 1:56:16Speaker 01

  And he knows that, he knows that, you know, and, and, yeah, I, I think that's a big part of what it is.

• 1:56:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:22Mark Manson?

  It is, it feels memento mori-ish.

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:26Mark Manson?

  Again, it's, it's interesting that it's another, it's another one of those pieces of advice that like, when it changes context, it kind of, the tinge on it changes a little bit, right? And so like, I've often written about memento mori, or like just remembering your, your own mortality, or, or the fact that, that you're gonna die one day, like, it can be very inspiring and motivating. So if you are in that place where you're sitting on the couch and you need to do something with your life, like, thinking about your own death is very.

• 1:56:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:56:55Mark Manson?

  It can be motivating. It takes on a very different power when you're doing something extremely difficult and/or dangerous, right? If you're running a 200 mile ultra marathon, or, uh, you know, training to be in special forces, um, or, uh, you know, whatever it is, training to become a firefighter, like it's, that memento mori in that moment, it actually forces you to actively decide.

• 1:57:28Mark Manson?

  Okay, I could die doing this, so to continue doing it, I have to be okay with that.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:33Mark Manson?

  I have to be okay with this.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:35Mark Manson?

  And it was interesting, because my friend told me, I kind of asked him, I was like, do you feel like, you know, coming back to the resilience muscle, I told him, I said, do you feel like you like built

• 1:57:47Mark Manson?

  a resilience muscle in the military that like has stayed with you? And he just started laughing, he's like, bro, like, he's like, since Iraq, life's fucking easy.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:57Mark Manson?

  He's like, none, none of these, like, all my whole career, like, kids, everything, he's like, none of this is hard. None of it.

• 1:58:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I've heard military personnel, vets who've come back from combat zones, especially, they say, life in the military, especially in a combat zone, it's very difficult, but it's very simple.

• 1:58:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  When you come back, it's very easy, but it's very complex.

• 1:58:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  And I think that's, most of us live in that world, obviously, right? And so, yeah.

• 1:58:22Mark Manson?

  And that's interesting, because it's the complexity itself, it can introduce a different type of stress.

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  All the stories come in there, right?

• 1:58:29Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  All the stories come in the complex.

• 1:58:31Mark Manson?

  Who am I, what am I supposed to do, am I doing the right thing?

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  My parents, my friends, the wider society I have to worry about, yeah. That's where the stories and the complexity come in.

• 1:58:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I guess it comes back to that, you know, the military, the narrow focus and everything.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44Mark Manson?

  All right, moving on, this is, mindset four is about the clash very starkly with mindset three. But I do think they can go together, so mindset four is make it fun. Find a way to make it enjoyable.

• 1:58:57Speaker 01

  Okay, so, yeah, we just went from, yeah, think about your death and darkness, and, oh, let's make it fun.

• 1:59:03Mark Manson?

  But you know what's funny is the people with the sickest sense of humors.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:59:10Mark Manson?

  Military guys, police officers, doctors and nurses, right? It's the people who are exposed to the most heinous shit. Going back to Shackleton and the doomed voyage to Antarctica. It's interesting, when Shackleton came back with all of his men, obviously, it was like a huge story at the time. And tons of people talked to him and interviewed him, books were written about him.

• 1:59:36Mark Manson?

  And when they asked him how they survived, the number one reason that Shackleton gave was he said, he called it enforced cheerfulness. So when they were stuck on the ice, he made it mandatory that all of his men carry on and live and do all the fun things that they used to do when they were at home. So they had game nights, they played soccer together. One of the guys had a banjo, and so they would sit around and sing songs, they would tell stories. And it wasn't optional, like they, they had to do it. It was part of, he

• 2:00:14Mark Manson?

  implemented it as part of the culture. And I think this is yet another piece, as you know, I've shat all over the think positive thing. I think this is totally another piece that when you're sitting at home and your life's a mess and you're not doing anything, think positive is probably not the best piece of advice. You probably need to, you need a slap in the face a little bit. Whereas if you are going through one of the hardest things that you've ever gone through in your life and you might die, yeah, thinking positive is probably a good thing.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 2:00:50Mark Manson?

  Like, finding something to be cheery about is probably a very healthy response.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  Bring it back to your Goldilocks zone, right? It's your Goldilocks zone. If you're so far the other way, like, hey, maybe we need to bounce this out just a little bit.

• 2:01:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:02Mark Manson?

  Okay. That is a good way of thinking of it.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:01:05Mark Manson?

  If all the struggles in your life are meaningless and inconsequential, like if you're on too far on the other side of the Goldilocks zone, then yeah, thinking positive is just going to keep you over there. Whereas if you're on the traumatic side of the Goldilocks zone, then thinking positive and finding ways to have fun or cheer yourself up is, might be the only thing that keeps you. Keeps you from being traumatized. So here's the fun thing. Going back to Yanis Kouras, the goat of ultra running. He was a very weird guy, very interesting guy. I mean, obviously he was a weird guy. Yeah. Fucking ran a thousand miles at a time, but very interesting guy.

• 2:01:45Mark Manson?

  So he claimed the way he was able to endure such long distances is that he would compose music and poetry as he ran. Interesting, okay. So this was also his creative time too, huh? Really? Okay. Yeah. Isn't that weird? That's a little weird, yeah. It's super weird. He claimed that it wasn't, that basically his runs were not a physical experience. He called them the, to him, they were a spiritual experience. And part of that spiritual experience was the creativity that emerged as part of the endurance. I don't totally get it, but I find it fascinating that the guy who seems to have more endurance

• 2:02:27Mark Manson?

  than anybody who's any known human in human history, spent most of it writing songs and poetry to himself. Like that's. That's wild. Like from a psychological point of view, that's so fascinating. Yeah. So fascinating. So not only does it make it fun for him though too, but it's imbuing a lot of meaning in it as well, right? Exactly. Like it's multiple layers to that. So it keeps him in the Goldilocks zone from both sides, right? Cause we were actually, it's funny, cause we were actually talking about this with Jess at lunch today. Like we were talking about, you were saying that you were thinking about getting into, you know, more endurance sports and running. Oh, don't call me out now, I gotta do it. Oh, yeah. Committing, you gotta commit to the thing outside of your Goldilocks zone, Drew. No, but we were talking about it and I told you, I was like, yeah, one of the, actually

• 2:03:11Mark Manson?

  one of the biggest struggles for me when I was training for the marathon last year, like the biggest struggle for me was boredom. Just getting bored, yeah. Like you're just spending hours on your feet, like literally running in circles around the neighborhood. Just being like, what the fuck am I doing? There's so many other things I can be doing right now. Right, right. So I actually, I do think the meaning piece, you know, if you think about it, like this guy's literally running for days on end.

• 2:03:36Mark Manson?

  So if he can, if he can find ways to create things that feel very meaningful and special and apparently spiritual to him.

• 2:03:42Speaker 01

  I think that's how Goggins approaches it too. If you didn't listen to him, it's like, when I'm going through this, he builds himself kind of as a student of his own mind, right? And when he's going in there and those long runs he's on or endurance events that he's doing, whatever it is, he's saying that I'm trying to figure out some part of my mind that I don't know. I'm trying to pick it apart. I'm trying to see where the flaw is or with something new that I can get into.

• 2:04:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Speaker 01

  And so for him, it's obviously a very spiritual thing. He doesn't put it in those terms necessarily, but I think that's what, what's going on.

• 2:04:15Mark Manson?

  He has a lot of interesting metaphors for his process. You know, he talks about the pain cave.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:21Mark Manson?

  Carrying the boats.

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:22Mark Manson?

  You know.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  Taking souls.

• 2:04:24Mark Manson?

  Taking souls. Yeah. You know, it is, we're going to get to that. This ties into mindset number five, but a big piece of this too is, is, you know, making a game out of it. You can gamify it. You can find friends to do it with, for lack of a better term, you know, anytime you can add good vibes to your suffering, you're probably going to be able to endure more suffering. So it's not shocking, but it is one of those things that there's a bit of an art to it and it's, it's a little bit difficult. But I think a really important component of it, we alluded to it briefly a few minutes ago, is humor. And it turns out there's like tons of research on humor and dealing with hardship, dealing with challenge. And then it's actually a very healing force for a lot of people. It's

• 2:05:09Mark Manson?

  cool that like laughter is not just about fun jokes. It actually, in your brain, it mirrors the actual process of resilience and that it builds tension, releases that tension and then recovers from it. If you think about what a joke is, it's you like find some sort of tension or two concepts that don't quite sit right together. And then you find a way to resolve that tension. And then there's like this release and recovery of laughter that happens as a result. And I think there's, it's just like a very beautiful parallel of what healing and strengthening oneself actually is. And I don't know much about the evolutionary origins of humor, but. It wouldn't surprise me if there's something there.

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:05:49Mark Manson?

  Right, if there is some sort of healing power in laughter. And I mean, sure enough, like, there is a lot of evidence, like, humor increases endorphins, which are natural painkillers, your cortisol drops, your HRV improves, your blood vessels dilate. So it really does, when you are laughing, it puts your body into a recovery state. It also increases social bonds, which we haven't gotten to the social portion of the episode yet, but as we'll discover, social bonds are fucking massive for building resilience in your life. And nothing really, I mean, what builds social bonds more than laughing together?

• 2:06:24Speaker 01

  Also, too, what is humor if it's not a cognitive reappraisal, in a way, too? It's a reframing, right?

• 2:06:29Mark Manson?

  Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, it's, there's a great quote, I don't know if anybody said it, it's just like an old axiom, but it says, like, every joke is made half in jest, like, there's a half-truth to every joke.

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:06:40Mark Manson?

  I think that's true, especially with, like, coping humor. When my, in subtle art, I wrote about my friend Josh who drowned when I was 19, and I talked about how that summer, I was, like, deeply depressed, to this day, the worst depression I've ever been in. And it was funny, because I was living with my brother that summer. And my poor brother, like, I don't know, can you imagine, you're 20, I think he was 21 or 22 at the time, can you imagine, you're 20, 21, you're rooming with your brother for a summer, and one weekend, your brother, like, one of your brother's best friends, like, fucking dies.

• 2:07:16Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 2:07:16Mark Manson?

  And, like, now you have to, like, live with him.

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  And tiptoe around it.

• 2:07:20Mark Manson?

  And, like, try to, like, support and figure out. So, I spent most of that summer just sitting on the couch playing video games. And strangely, one of the things that I found very comforting, or enjoyable, or satisfying, so my friend's name was Josh, every video game I played that summer... You know, video games let you rename the main character. Or a lot of them let you rename the character. I renamed every character I could, Josh.

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:51Mark Manson?

  And then every time the character would die in the game, I would fucking like verbally abuse him. I'd be like, fucking Josh, fucking dying again. God damn it, Josh, why can't you stay alive? And I just remember my brother sitting there like horror.

• 2:08:08Speaker 01

  I'm uncomfortably laughing right now. I'm laughing to try to release some attention here now.

• 2:08:13Mark Manson?

  It's sick.

• 2:08:14Speaker 01

  So I think I know what he went through a little bit.

• 2:08:16Mark Manson?

  It was very sick.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I get it. Like that gallows humor you're talking about.

• 2:08:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it was, there was something like healing about. There was something cathartic about it. Cause it was like all the anger and sadness and frustration that I, I didn't have anywhere to put it. And so like by naming the video game characters Josh, it allowed me to put it onto the video game.

• 2:08:37Speaker 01

  Like you needed that.

• 2:08:38Mark Manson?

  I could yell at the video game and like get it out. It was also funny though.

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:08:44Mark Manson?

  In a sick fucked up way.

• 2:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:47Mark Manson?

  Anyway, apologies to my brother.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  I mean, you're right though. There aren't like the half truths that you were talking about. Like that's why we, that's why we gravitate towards comedian, comedian so much too, right? Because they're, they're often saying the things we don't wanna say out loud, but they do it in a way that's like, it's a half truth.

• 2:09:03Mark Manson?

  And it's kinda therapeutic, right?

• 2:09:05Speaker 01

  Super therapy. Why do people pay hundreds of dollars these days to go see a comedian?

• 2:09:09Mark Manson?

  Cause it's, it's the stuff that everybody's uncomfortable about. And then it like, the comedian gives us a way of, of feeling comfortable.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:09:16Mark Manson?

  You know?

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:09:17Mark Manson?

  It's interesting, the, uh, I forget where I learned about this, but court jesters. So like the, the original role of the court jester was that, the court jester was the only one who could actually criticize the king.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:09:30Mark Manson?

  Like rightfully. And so things that the king needed to hear, but nobody else was willing to risk their neck.

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:09:37Mark Manson?

  Saying, literally, uh, the court jester would say.

• 2:09:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:09:40Mark Manson?

  And he would make it funny and then the king would hear it. But also kind of understand like, okay, yeah, all right. I should change that.

• 2:09:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that's the modern utility of a comedian.

• 2:09:51Mark Manson?

  Standup comedian, absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, humor is cathartic, it's therapeutic, it is socially bonding. And even when it's dark and fucked up, it's, I would actually argue, like, the darker, more fucked up the humor is, the probably the more important, the more work it's doing for the person. Like, again, I don't know if you've known any cops, but like, cops have.

• 2:10:11Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, yeah.

• 2:10:12Mark Manson?

  Cops and doctors have like, the darkest, sickest sense of humor.

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

  I have some EMT friends too, who, same thing, yeah.

• 2:10:18Mark Manson?

  I'm sure, I'm sure. That's not an accident.

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:10:22Mark Manson?

  That is not an accident. All right, so, so far, we have mindset number one is, anything is possible. Mindset number two is, everything's just a story, and you don't have to believe it. Mindset number three is, we change to narrow your focus, and only focus on what you can immediately control in front of you. Mindset number four is, find a way to make it fun. This brings us to mindset number five. So, I mentioned earlier that, I think one of the reasons why the Tough Mudder race, like, wasn't as big of a deal, or as hard for me, is just that, at this point in my life, I'm 41, I've done a lot of hard shit, I've like, pushed myself through a lot of pain, in various circumstances.

• 2:11:07Mark Manson?

  At a certain point, when you do hard things consistently, you start to develop an identity of someone who is capable of doing hard things. And so you, in this way, you get like, a self-reinforcing loop of the mindsets, that if you survive difficult things long enough, you build an identity of somebody who is capable of overcoming and surviving difficult things, which then feeds back into mindset number one, which is, believing that anything is possible, right? The more you've stacked evidence of your success, over the years, the more you identify as somebody who confronts challenges, instead of running away from them, the more you see yourself as someone who is capable of surviving, the more likely you are to overcome and survive in the future.

• 2:11:52Mark Manson?

  The identity piece also doesn't have to be limited to just seeing yourself as someone who does hard shit. You can adopt identities that help you in other ways. If I ever meet Goggins, this would be one of the things that I'd want to talk to him about is whether his perception of himself or his ability to, you know, do his training or his races or whatever has been affected by becoming a celebrity. Because I do think there's probably something very valuable of him having such a public image as just a hard ass. Like it probably

• 2:12:25Speaker 01

  Holds him accountable.

• 2:12:26Mark Manson?

  It holds him accountable. It gives him less exits. I mean, I, Goggins does not strike me as somebody who's like

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  Looking for

• 2:12:33Mark Manson?

  Looking for excuses or reasons to not do something.

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:12:36Mark Manson?

  But, you know, I'm sure he has those thoughts like everybody does. I'm sure he has days that he like struggles to get up or struggles to push himself. And I, I wonder if just kind of knowing that he's David Goggins, if that reinforces that identity for himself and has made it easier for him to face those challenges. Or not.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, he, he does address this a little bit in his, his newest book, I Never Finished. I, I think he addresses it anyway. Well, one thing I've heard him say a lot before, you know, he talks about, this is where I think some people probably kind of get lost with him sometimes too, is that he talks about there's Goggins, you know, stay hard, you know? And then there's David Goggins, which was, you know, the overweight loser guy he used to be.

• 2:13:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:18Speaker 01

  And then he turned into a guy, and he says he switches back and forth between those and he knows when he's being, when he, when he finds himself being David Goggins, he needs Goggins to come out and kick that guy's ass. Right? Like that kind of thing. Right? But I, I also think, um, he, he did mention in the book, he was like, you know, I, he did go through, it was actually kind of a little bit the opposite for him where he went through this phase where he had the money and he had all the comforts and all of that and he started getting a little bit soft. But then I think what you're talking about kicked in and he's like, no, I gotta go back. I gotta like, I'm never finished. That's the name of his book.

• 2:13:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  Right? So I think there was probably some, some to that. And then, I mean, I, I consider myself to be somebody who was a little bit, um, sensitive to the external pressures like that too. And if you leverage them in a healthy way, I think that's okay.

• 2:14:01Mark Manson?

  But I'm curious because last, last episode you talked about, we talked about how you kind of got thrust into this podcasting thing unexpectedly and, like most people, like when you're suddenly put online in front of

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:13Mark Manson?

  thousands or millions of people, like it's nerve wracking. It's fresh. Like there's a lot of emotions that go on. I'm curious, if you have seen any change, like A, has your identity shifted? Like, do you see yourself as a podcaster now? And then B, if so, has that changed the stress or difficulty that you experienced early on?

• 2:14:36Speaker 01

  So I think in some ways, I think right out of the get go, I mean, I was kind of on my way off of social media anyway, before we started this, and then this kind of came along, I'm like, I'm out. Like where a lot of people will be like, I need to get my social media and I'm like, I would rather just focus on the job and do that and not try to self promote too much around this. So that's kind of helped keep that tamped down a little bit. There are definitely things like, you know, I would say definitely my, my, my exercise workout schedule, I will do that. There's days where like, I don't know, a couple of weeks, gonna be in front of the camera again. There's definitely that.

• 2:15:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know if my, I don't know if I've really taken on a strong identity as a podcaster necessarily.

• 2:15:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:16Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I don't think I've, I don't know. It doesn't, it doesn't feel like it.

• 2:15:20Mark Manson?

  The identity thing is, as you know, like I'm so fascinated with identity stuff and we actually have an identity episode coming up.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15:28Mark Manson?

  And next month.

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's gonna get weird.

• 2:15:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's gonna get super weird, but I'm excited about it.

• 2:15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:35Mark Manson?

  It's interesting for a couple of reasons. One is like, an identity is just, it's such an arbitrary thing. It's like literally just a self-definition. You just decide like, I am this.

• 2:15:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15:43Mark Manson?

  And that simple statement, assuming you, you actually believe it, it has so many knock-on effects and ripple effects and so much power. But it, it's funny too, because it's interesting what identities we take on and which ones we don't. You know, sometimes I found myself in situations where I haven't taken on an identity, just because it hasn't occurred to me.

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:07Mark Manson?

  You know, like it's, it, there have been other times where I've tried on an identity and I'd be like, ooh, this does not feel right. And I've like let it go and tried to get away from it. So, and then there are other times too, where I've kind of like willfully forced myself into an identity that I wanted. And, and that's been hugely helpful. So.

• 2:16:29Speaker 01

  Well, how much, so how much of it, how much is as being, and you've been in the public eye now for 15 years, more than 15 years at this point. And then this industry where it is constant improvement and kind of you gotta this and that. You've been very open about like, hey, I fail at this kind of stuff all the time. So like, I'm sure that took some of the edge off, but what have you experienced around that?

• 2:16:47Mark Manson?

  It's funny because I don't feel.

• 2:16:52Mark Manson?

  It doesn't bother me.

• 2:16:53Speaker 01

  That's kind of how I feel too. I'm just like, you know, somebody doesn't like what I do. I'm not so identified with it that I take that so personally. I don't know.

• 2:17:02Mark Manson?

  I don't. It's interesting because there are a lot of people in this industry that like, it drives them crazy. They feel tons of pressure and they feel like they need to live up to all sorts of expectations and they get nervous when they're in public because they think, you know, or fans.

• 2:17:15Speaker 01

  Who's watching?

• 2:17:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah, or fans come up to them. They kind of, they get super weirded out and stuff and like, I don't know. I've just never really given a shit. I don't have that separation between Goggins, like Goggins and David Goggins or whatever. I don't have like a Manson and Mark Manson. Like it's just, I feel like I'm the same guy everywhere.

• 2:17:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:17:34Mark Manson?

  For me, the big one was identifying as an author. This is gonna sound really funny, but, you know, when subtle art blew up.

• 2:17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:44Mark Manson?

  I guess there's kind of this default thing, at least for me, it was very default, which is like, well, this is the thing I've been most successful at. So I guess this is what I am.

• 2:17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:52Mark Manson?

  Right? So I wrote a book and that book has been more like 10 times more successful than anything else I've ever tried. So I guess I'm an author. That identity never sat right with me and I could kind of sense it at the time, but I think I was just riding this roller coaster of success through the late 2010s that I never really stopped and processed it or thought about it very much. But looking back, there were like, there were a ton of hints and moments where I would meet other authors and they would, you know, so Ryan Holiday is coming on in the next episode and Ryan is one of these authors, that dude is born to write books.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  That's all he does is write. My God.

• 2:18:36Mark Manson?

  He's fucking built to write books. That's what he does. And he has had a daily writing practice for probably at least 15 years now, maybe 20. He never misses a day. You know, it's, it's, his output is just absolutely prolific. And so I would meet authors like him and I'm like, I'm not like that. Like I can go six months without writing a word. I don't really care. And so it took me a long time to realize that like, I'm not necessarily an author. Like that's not, that's not the identity that is best suited to who I am. And I guess maybe this.

• 2:19:16Mark Manson?

  Maybe I'm reaching here, but we talked early in the episode about genetic fit for the environment. Like if you are, if you are like an orchid who grows up in the wrong environment, if you're mismatched with your environment, your results end up worse. You lack a lot of resilience. There might be something similar there with identity as well. If you've got a mismatched identity, if you've adopted an identity that is not suited for you at all, and is not who you actually want to be, and not what your actual strengths are, then you're actually probably going to struggle quite a bit, and you're going to be much less resilient than getting your identity straight. But if you do find the right identity, it can be, A, it can make all of your problems and struggles that

• 2:19:58Mark Manson?

  much easier, and then B, if your identity includes somebody who is good at dealing with problems and struggles, then it's just like fucking...

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  It's a meta-identity there, yeah.

• 2:20:09Mark Manson?

  It's like nitro.

• 2:20:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:11Mark Manson?

  Last example from our guy, Yannis Kouras. So the cool thing about him, so apparently he's like a hero in Greece. Like he's a, he's like a Michael Jordan type figure over there. And I didn't realize this, but, so the guy who ran, who ran the first marathon, he was the famous messenger from the ancient world, the best long-distance runner in ancient Greek history, his name was Phidippides. People started calling Kouras the modern Phidippides. And they were like, there was a proud ownership that the best long-distance runner in the world was Greek, because this is like, this was part of their, their lore as a nation,

• 2:20:56Mark Manson?

  and their...

• 2:20:57Speaker 01

  National identity, and yeah.

• 2:20:59Mark Manson?

  And Kouras just adopted this wholesale. He started a movie as Phidippides. He like wore, wore the name as a badge of honor, and to the point where, so here's the most interesting thing. I thought this was super cool. So Phidippides, he's most famous for apparently running from Marathon to Athens to deliver the news that the Greeks defeated the Persians. Supposedly, he died after that run. I discovered that that actually, his death was entered as dramatic effect by playwrights later on, that he actually didn't die when he did that. And in fact, his greatest feat of running was apparently he ran from Athens to Sparta and back.

• 2:21:42Mark Manson?

  Which is the Spartathlon doubled, which is 306 miles. And apparently, nobody had ever run that, I guess, since Fidipides purportedly. And so Choros decided to be the only other person, other than Fidipides, to run Athens, Sparta, Sparta, Athens in one go. So in 2005, he recreated Fidipides' greatest feat, running from Athens to Sparta and then back again, 306 miles without stopping. He was the first to ever do it. And that, talk about adopting an identity as somebody who does hard shit.

• 2:22:18Speaker 01

  That is wild. We went through these five mindsets, right? We use as examples of Choros, Choros?

• 2:22:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, Yanos Choros.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  Yanos Choros. We've talked about David Goggins. We talked about Mark doing a Tough Mudder, Mark and Jess doing the Tough Mudder. I opened up, I'd say, look, if you're listening to this episode, it's probably you're going through some shit right now. There's a good chance, anyway, or you will at some point if you're not. Maybe you just lost your job.

• 2:22:41Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  Maybe you just broke up with your boyfriend or girlfriend, got divorced.

• 2:22:45Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:22:46Speaker 01

  Maybe you just lost somebody very important to you in your life. How can we apply these mindsets, do you think, to those types of situations? Because I think there are a lot of these lessons we can glean from endurance athletes, from military.

• 2:22:57Mark Manson?

  I'm glad you brought this up.

• 2:22:58Speaker 01

  99.9% of us are not going to be in those situations.

• 2:23:00Mark Manson?

  I'm glad you brought this up.

• 2:23:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:23:02Mark Manson?

  Okay, let's start with, let's start with like a deep loss.

• 2:23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:04Mark Manson?

  Breakup, lost loved one.

• 2:23:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:07Mark Manson?

  Even lost a job or a career or something. Mindset number one, anything is possible. When you lose something really meaningful in your life, most people's default assumption is, I'm never going to get that back. That love I used to feel, or that opportunity that I used to have, or that support that I felt in my life, I'm never getting it back. Anything is possible. It's anything you can go out and create anything in your life. The exact accuracy of that statement is less important than the fact that you believe it. Because if you believe it, it's gonna be far more likely to happen. Mindset number two. The stories are just stories.

• 2:23:50Mark Manson?

  So, let's say you lose a job, or you get divorced, or whatever. There's gonna be a lot of narratives swirling around in your head about what you should have done, or why is this, why did this happen to you? Or you didn't deserve this, or it's not fair. These are just stories. It's the cognitive, the work of the cognitive reappraisal of deciding that like, you don't have to buy into all the shit that your mind is saying to you. Mindset number three. Focus on the task at hand. Narrow your focus to the few things that matter. Take it one step at a time. Just do the thing in front of you. Make your fucking bed. Make your bed. Take a shower today. Seriously, I know that sounds. I know. Yeah, I mean, but if you're in a really dark place. Yeah.

• 2:24:33Mark Manson?

  Making your bed and taking a shower, like, that's a successful day. That's like, that's a good day. So, take it one step at a time. Narrow your focus to the immediate task at hand, and just stack those small wins slowly over time. Mindset number four. Find a way to make it fun. It could be humor, it could be a friend. Maybe I should, we should start a movement to replace positive thinking with Shackleton's term, which is enforced cheerfulness.

• 2:25:03Mark Manson?

  Because I, like, there's an acknowledgement there, right? Yes, that it's enforced, right? Because it's like, the positive thinking thing bugs me because it, I feel like it encourages people to be delusional. Right. Whereas when it's enforced cheerfulness, it's kinda like, everybody understands, like, we're not actually happy right now. Right. We're stuck in fucking Antarctica. We're cosplaying happiness right now. Yes. But we're gonna play the banjo and play soccer. Like, and we're gonna, and we're gonna enjoy it. We're gonna make ourselves enjoy it. And I do think there is some value in that, and I think that's a much better term than positive thinking. Again, the acknowledgement that, like, we get it. This isn't actually fun, and this isn't actually a happy time, but guess what? But we're gonna, we're gonna make ourselves pretend that it is. Yeah. Until it is.

• 2:25:48Mark Manson?

  Okay. And finally, mindset number five, which is, you are a person who does hard shit. It is part of your identity. You decide that this is, this is the type of person you are. You are a person who does very hard shit consistently. Emotionally hard shit, physically hard shit, mentally hard shit. That's just who you are. Wear it as a badge and then go prove it to yourself. Also, as a reminder, if you want to follow along with all this material that Drew and I are discussing, get a better understanding of it, review it in your own time. We have free PDF guides available at solvocast.com/resilience.

• 2:26:30Speaker 01

  All right, Mark, so we've done the biology and physiology of resilience. We've done the psychology of resilience and the mindsets, right?

• 2:26:39Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:26:39Speaker 01

  There's a third, very big aspect, and we've alluded to it several times already. And that's the social and cultural side to resilience, right? Okay. I want to take you back to 1950s rural Pennsylvania.

• 2:26:52Mark Manson?

  Let's go.

• 2:26:52Speaker 01

  Let's go there.

• 2:26:53Mark Manson?

  Let's go. My favorite. Let's do it.

• 2:26:57Speaker 01

  There was this little town called Rosetta, Pennsylvania. Okay. And in the 50s, doctors noticed something kind of strange. That people in this community, it was an Italian immigrant community. People in this community had half the rate of heart disease as the rest of the country did as a national average. Half back then, okay? So they're like, oh, okay, we're going to go in there. We're going to find that they have this like amazing diet, maybe, or they exercise a certain way or something like that. Right?

• 2:27:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:23Speaker 01

  They didn't find any of that. These were Italian immigrants. Okay.

• 2:27:27Mark Manson?

  Lot of pasta, lot of wine.

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  Lot of pasta, lot of fried meatballs and lard, right? Lot of wine, they smoked like no other. They weren't doing yoga in 1950s rural Pennsylvania. I can guarantee that.

• 2:27:38Mark Manson?

  Sound baths, energy healing.

• 2:27:39Speaker 01

  None of that. Red light therapy, nothing, nothing like that. No cold plunges.

• 2:27:44Mark Manson?

  Shocked.

• 2:27:44Speaker 01

  Shocker, right? But they had half the heart disease. They lived longer. They had lower rates, lower incidence of mental health disorders. Anything, just about any health measure you could measure, they did better than the national average, even though their lifestyles really weren't any different and probably even worse than some other areas.

• 2:28:03Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:28:04Speaker 01

  So, I mean, we've already kind of spoiled it here, but what they found- Maybe they socialized? They socialized, their social structures were very robust. They had very tight-knit communities there. Yep. And extended communities as well that they could tap into. Grandparents, this was a big one they found, so I thought was very interesting. Grandparents, you know, they weren't kind of shuffled off into the corner or even off into homes or anything like that. They're very much integral as a part of the family structure. They helped with childcare. They, people would go to them. There was a reverence for their elders, all of this kind of stuff, right? You also, you lived in extended families too, and there was more communal living as well. It might be, you might be living with cousins or even people you're not even related to,

• 2:28:46Speaker 01

  but you really leaned on the community for a lot of your social life and just to get by in everyday life, okay? Once they realized this, once these researchers and the doctors realized this, they knew from past experience that when immigrants come in within a generation or two, people tend to assimilate to the culture around them, right? This is just how things happen. And they predicted, they said, okay, if that happens with this community, which it almost certainly will, you're going to see all these health benefits gone within a generation or two. And that's exactly what they found. Okay, so the children of these immigrants assimilated into kind of more American culture, independent living, go off to the suburbs, don't socialize quite as much, you don't

• 2:29:29Speaker 01

  live in these extended families, and sure enough, heart disease went up, mental health disorders went up, crime went up, all of these, all of these different lifestyle factors that you can think of, all of these got worse over time. This is a really stark example of how resilience isn't really, it's not an individual sport, it's a, it's a team sport. It really is a team effort, a collective effort of your social circle, the greater community around you, and largely the culture as well- Yeah. -what you grew up in. So they called this the Rossetto Effect. Actually, it's got a name called the Rossetto Effect.

• 2:30:10Speaker 01

  And really, again, it does show that the, just what a huge factor this is. We've spent a ton of time on the biology, okay, how to make yourself resilient, psychology of the mindset that you need, when really, I mean, we're a social, hyper-social species. We cannot survive without other people. Therefore, it stands to reason we're not resilient without other people as well, without leaning on our social circles.

• 2:30:34Mark Manson?

  Well, in the call back to our emotions episode, one of the things that kept coming up in that episode over and over and over again is that emotional regulation does not happen in a vacuum.

• 2:30:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:30:44Mark Manson?

  You regulate your emotions with the help of other people.

• 2:30:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:30:47Mark Manson?

  You co-regulate each other's emotions. And that's why relationships and social support and family supporters like so consequential, not just to mental health, but physical health as well.

• 2:30:59Speaker 01

  Right, right. I mean, some of the effects too. So everybody's, we're aware of the loneliness epidemic right now going on. And I think, I think more than anything, when you think about, you know, earlier I mentioned, oh, there's this idea out in the culture right now that we're soft and we're not resilient. I think honestly, that's a big part of it. That's, that's one of the driving forces behind it is that we're not resilient because we're not, we're not connected in the ways that we used to be.

• 2:31:24Mark Manson?

  I believe it.

• 2:31:26Speaker 01

  Loneliness, in fact, has deleterious health effects as well. They say that chronic loneliness, if you, if you feel loneliness on a regular basis over long periods of time, it's the same as like smoking 15 cigarettes a day, you know, which is, I used to be a pack a day smoker and I can't imagine.

• 2:31:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's funny because I hear, I've heard this stat so many times now and, and I believe it, I take it at face value. It makes sense to me, knowing everything I understand, like knowing everything I know about psychological and health outcomes and whatever. It just blows my mind that like the, the amount of anti-smoking campaign that there's been over the past 30 years, like the amount of education and advertisements and like social policy and all this stuff to like get people to stop smoking or get them away from cigarettes or get smokers away from non-smokers. There seems to be absolutely no urgency or imperative around loneliness, around this. Like it doesn't seem like anybody's really doing anything about it or talking about

• 2:32:28Mark Manson?

  it or even like. Pretending to, I don't know, try to create policy around it. So I don't, that just shocks me. Like knowing how the negative outcomes are comparable to smoking cigarettes, yet the social outcry and the stigmatization and the policymaking and everything is just non-existent.

• 2:32:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think it is really, it's seen as an individual problem still. It's not seen as a collective problem yet.

• 2:32:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:55Speaker 01

  And that might be changing to some degree.

• 2:32:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:57Speaker 01

  Hopefully it is, but I think it's, it's seen as a, oh, you're lonely. That's on you. I'm sorry. Like that sucks for you.

• 2:33:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah, nobody likes you.

• 2:33:04Speaker 01

  Nobody likes you, but then that's your problem, right? I think there's a lot of that. That's, I think that's one of the barriers to

• 2:33:12Speaker 01

  a social connection right now is just that it's, one, you don't really talk about it. I mean, we talk about it in the abstract, right? We're sitting here talking about the abstract.

• 2:33:18Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:33:18Speaker 01

  We're not talking about specific individuals. So when it comes down to if it's you that's lonely, well, that's, that's kind of hard. That's one of those things you're not going to share with a whole lot of people either.

• 2:33:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It, but it's tricky because it is a, I mean, it is quite literally a social problem. Like there, there's a

• 2:33:32Speaker 01

  I know. It's great. It is. It is. I know. It's a paradox.

• 2:33:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah, there, there's a game theory aspect to it where it's like, okay, I can put all of my effort into going out more often and inviting people to stuff more often. But it's like, if all the people that I encounter don't change their attitudes, then my effort's not going to matter. So yeah, it's just, it's a very frustrating, strange time.

• 2:33:52Speaker 01

  Yes. No, very much so.

• 2:33:54Mark Manson?

  Good thing we're doing an episode on friendship next month.

• 2:33:57Speaker 01

  That's coming up. Tune in for that one. There are though, I mean, when you do have a good, strong social group or at least some connections in your life, you don't have to have a ton of friends. Okay. We'll get into that. You don't have to have a huge social circle. You need a quality social circle. But there's physical health benefits to that. We've mentioned in the Rossetto case. Buffers against heart disease, dementia too. I mentioned this a little bit earlier, the super agers.

• 2:34:20Mark Manson?

  Super agers.

• 2:34:20Speaker 01

  Okay. And the single biggest predictor of that was how vibrant of a social life they had. I mean, not necessarily how many, how many social connections they had, but the quality of those social connections that they had. Did they have a, a social group that they could lean on or family members even too, even just one or two people? You can get the effects out of that.

• 2:34:39Mark Manson?

  Co-regulation.

• 2:34:40Speaker 01

  Co-regulation.

• 2:34:41Mark Manson?

  I feel like the word co-regulation is like my word of the year.

• 2:34:45Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:34:45Mark Manson?

  So far. Yeah. I just, since coming across that idea in the emotion, when we were researching for the emotions episode, like I, I just. I don't know, that that just like threaded so many needles for me and and pulled so many different concepts around psychology together in a way that that makes sense, right? Like it's the super agers, right? It's not about the quantity of social interactions, it's the quality of it. It's because it's it's they are getting co-regulated by the people around them.

• 2:35:11Speaker 01

  Higher.

• 2:35:11Mark Manson?

  They are able, their nervous system is is more imbalanced, like their

• 2:35:15Speaker 01

  Your mirror neurons are firing.

• 2:35:16Mark Manson?

  Their hormones are probably hormone profile is probably healthier, they're probably getting better sleep at night, they're less stressed day to day, like it is

• 2:35:23Speaker 01

  Less anxious.

• 2:35:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it is. There's almost like there's like a social nutrition that that exists.

• 2:35:30Speaker 01

  We're built for it.

• 2:35:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah, that literally. That nobody thinks about.

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  Right, right. At least we don't in the modern culture. There is just such this like emphasis on, you know, the the lone wolf or doing it alone or

• 2:35:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:45Speaker 01

  bootstrapping yourself, whatever. All of that is overblown. A good example, you know, we were talking, we've talked about breakups a little bit, we mentioned those. A friend of mine recently just broke up with her girlfriend and she's just, she's beside herself about it. They've been together for a while and it it's really

• 2:36:02Mark Manson?

  Hitting her hard.

• 2:36:03Speaker 01

  Yes, hitting her really hard. So she came over this last weekend and I said, you know, let's we'll start a fire in my backyard, we'll, you know, hash it out. It's it's cool. And she even mentioned during this, she's like, um, you know, thanks for having me over all of this. She's like, I'm I'm using you as an external source source of regulation right now. She even said it that way. She's a nerd like me, so she like thinks about this kind of stuff. That kind of dawned on me. I was like, oh, this is great. I could use this for the podcast now, right? But but at the same time, too, she was absolutely right. What do you do when you when you break up with somebody? What do you do when you lose a job? What do you do when you lose someone close to you? You go looking for other people to help regulate your emotions.

• 2:36:40Mark Manson?

  I I almost actually find it funny that she felt compelled to explicitly say that because I I don't know, maybe I'm being idealistic, but I feel like 50 or 80 years ago, that's already understood. That's just like tacitly understood by both people. Like

• 2:36:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:36:53Mark Manson?

  You just got out of a relationship. Here, let's have a beer. Let's talk about it. Like you don't even, it's not even a thing.

• 2:36:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:36:59Mark Manson?

  Right? Whereas whereas now it's kind of like, oh, well, this is the thing I'm going through and, you know, like we've just kind of like Therapy eyes to everything.

• 2:37:07Speaker 01

  We absolutely have, yeah. You know, the other thing, though, to, you know, I've mentioned David Goggins a lot, Ross Edgley, those guys who, endurance athletes. And I always kind of thought of Goggins as like that lone wolf type, like he kind of is this lone wolf out there, whatever. In his newest book, though, he's got a whole chapter on his crews that he uses. And he emphasizes, you know, surrounding yourself with the right people, that, that kind of thing. He talks about a lot in this. And it's like having, having the right crew. He doesn't recruit like crazy athletes to be his pacers or grow crazy athletes even being his, his crew, whether it's helping them out with the nutrition or hydration or just logistics of the whole thing.

• 2:37:48Speaker 01

  It's just people who kind of understand him, I think, in some, at least in some aspect of his crazy mind. They, they understand some part of him better. And he feels like they do. And he knows that he can kind of lean on them at some point. So even, even somebody like Goggins, the, the man who's out to be the baddest motherfucker ever, in his own words, that's his own words. He still acknowledges that he hasn't done it alone. And then he goes back in his life, too. He talks about his mom. Seriously, go and listen, get the audio book for this, okay? Cause he does like these little mini podcasts between each of the chapters. They'll read the chapter, then he does a little mini podcast with the author. He brings his mom on at one point. So you hear about these characters in his life that have really shaped him as well.

• 2:38:31Speaker 01

  And I think he would still, even though he's a savage and he's the baddest motherfucker alive, right? I think he's, he still will tell you, he didn't do it alone.

• 2:38:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:40Speaker 01

  And there's all this sorts of science, I'm not even going to get into it all because it's just, it's, it should be obvious to us, even if it's not.

• 2:38:48Mark Manson?

  Isn't it interesting that we tend to celebrate, and maybe this is just a, a Western culture thing or an American culture thing, but we celebrate self-made people so much? Like, there's kind of this mythology around some of our heroes in our culture.

• 2:39:06Mark Manson?

  That they, they overcame, they came from nothing and they overcame all the obstacles and they're just kind of these like. You know, superhuman type characters. We don't celebrate community made success.

• 2:39:18Speaker 01

  It's another one of those things that feels too woo woo, touchy feely.

• 2:39:22Mark Manson?

  I don't know. And I don't even know what that would look like, right? Like, like, imagine if instead of Michael Phelps being on the podium at the Olympics, it was his coach and his family on the podium.

• 2:39:34Speaker 01

  Oh, right, yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:35Mark Manson?

  That would just feel weird.

• 2:39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:39:37Mark Manson?

  I don't know.

• 2:39:38Speaker 01

  I guess so. I mean, it's something we just take for granted, I think, too, when we have it. I know I definitely do. Like, I've been very fortunate and even if I didn't, you know, I had, there was certain hardships or whatever went through, I always, there was always somebody I could turn to. And that 100% has made me who I am today.

• 2:39:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:54Speaker 01

  There's just no, there's no way around the outsized effect that this has on how you can deal with all the shit that life throws at you. There's just, there's no way around it.

• 2:40:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:07Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I think you're right there. We idealize this self-made person, the lone wolf too. I never quite got that one. I'm like, you're not impressing anybody by being a lone wolf. This lone wolf, whatever. I don't know. I, that's not gonna, that's not sustainable.

• 2:40:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:24Speaker 01

  Definitely not sustainable, yeah.

• 2:40:25Mark Manson?

  I find the Rosetta thing a little bit interesting because it was a small, poor community. You're seeing this quite a bit with the Blue Zones that were popularized maybe about 20 years ago, without getting into all of the potential data issues with the Blue Zones, which there are many. One of the things that's unique about the Blue Zones is that they are all small rural communities, relatively poor communities in wealthy countries. That's kind of

• 2:40:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:40:51Mark Manson?

  The magic combo. But what they're finding is that the Blue Zones are disappearing as well. As the economic development shows up, you're not seeing that sort of longevity or super aging anymore.

• 2:41:04Mark Manson?

  This kind of raises an interesting question, I think, in that, you know, that those intense social networks and social support systems probably emerge out of necessity from hardship.

• 2:41:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:41:18Mark Manson?

  Right? Like, it's a poor community. You have to rely on everybody. You have to live with a bunch of people. You have to have your grandparents help raise you because there's no other option. There's no money. And so as soon as there's money, people kind of go their own ways and maybe they enjoy life a little bit more, have a little bit more freedom, but then they lose those social systems that we seem so like evolved for.

• 2:41:44Speaker 01

  Think about this. You've talked about this before, but think about this. When you lose that social aspect, it's not that you're, yes, you're losing that co-regulation. You're losing, you can rely on these people, yes. What you're also losing too is your, that practice of navigating difficult social relationships. That stress inoculation training, you're losing that too. You're losing interacting with other people and having to have difficult conversations, having to deal with people that you don't necessarily like. You're missing your family. You're losing that when you're not engaging socially. You're losing that resilience muscle in a social aspect way too.

• 2:42:22Mark Manson?

  Because as we talked about in the happiness episode, money doesn't buy happiness, it buys away friction. Like, as soon as wealth enters into the community, you can go get your own house. You don't have to live with grandma and grandpa. You can send your kid to their own private school. You don't need to rely on your neighbors to help homeschool your kid. You can buy your own car. You don't need to carpool with people anymore. And so by removing the friction, like you said, you remove those, kind of that enforced co-regulation that has to happen frequently. Yeah, it's so fascinating. This reminds me, you know, with the old podcast, we had David Brooks on and he and I ended up talking about this quite a bit. And I think really one of the kind of the revolutionary ideas he had in

• 2:43:07Mark Manson?

  his last book was just that like, a certain amount of social friction is optimal.

• 2:43:11Speaker 01

  That's the point. Yeah.

• 2:43:13Mark Manson?

  Yes. That like, you should be forced to be around people who are a little bit difficult to be with sometimes. Like, that is a very, not only is that a very human experience, but it is by dealing with that friction.

• 2:43:29Mark Manson?

  A, you develop the emotional skills and toolkits to become more emotionally resilient. But B, you also strengthen those relationships and those bonds and yeah, have a better social network.

• 2:43:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, with the trend in remote work and everything like that, now you're not necessarily in the same place as your coworkers.

• 2:43:50Mark Manson?

  You don't even have to be in the same room if you don't want.

• 2:43:52Speaker 01

  You know, for the longest time, our small little team we have, it was just a few people. We were very independent, go off and do your own thing, then come back and we, you know, do that. Now that we have more people on the team, I've definitely noticed, like, I have to be a lot more, I have to regulate emotionally a lot more now, too, with people that I have to deal with different personalities. I have to adjust. Some of us are working, some of us are dandelions, you know? I have to navigate that now. And it's made me better at doing that. It's made me better with my own emotions around dealing with people in situations where things come up where you're like, okay, there's something wrong here.

• 2:44:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:26Speaker 01

  That's helped me quite a bit, too.

• 2:44:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:27Speaker 01

  You know, otherwise, though, I'm very much introverted, but I like, my ideal, we talked about environment fit, my ideal environment is usually by myself and, you know, I'll go home after this and I'll crash and I'll just be exhausted and whatever. That's also part of resilience training, though, as well. But at the same time, too, you, yeah, you do need to expose yourself to some degree of social friction. It's not just the co-regulation, it's not just having friends and being happy, it's actually the conflict.

• 2:44:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:55Speaker 01

  That I think makes us a little bit more resilient, too.

• 2:44:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's so counterintuitive, but I think it's so important.

• 2:45:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely is, yeah.

• 2:45:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Another example we found, too, the, you know, after, during World War II, Hitler was sending planes and bombs into London. And at first, all the experts there were like, oh, this is just gonna tear apart the social fabric here. There's, we're screwed. Kind of the opposite ended up happening. And there's this, I think it goes a little bit to your point of where communities kind of develop through, there has, there's some underlying agitation.

• 2:45:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah, or external hardship pushes people together.

• 2:45:31Speaker 01

  Pushes people together.

• 2:45:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:32Speaker 01

  The pressure, it pushes them together. And that's exactly what happened in London during World War II. Every bomb that didn't hit you was just like, hey, Hitler missed me, right? And then you would go and you would, out of the rubble, they would find new, new things to build or make with each other or... Come together and clean it up, or whatever it was. And that's kind of where the British stiff upper lip kind of diatribe came from, or the old trope about this British stiff upper lip. I mean, suicide rates dropped. That's insane to me, right? Like, you're under war, like, this could be your last day on earth.

• 2:46:07Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:46:07Speaker 01

  And suicide rates drop. Psychiatric hospital admissions plummeted during this. And then, like, a lot of psychosomatic, like, back pain, leg pain, whatever. A lot of the headaches, migraines, stuff like that. Incidences went way down.

• 2:46:21Mark Manson?

  I talked about some of this research in my second book. Everything is Fucked. And it is so paradoxical. But the conclusion I came to there, and this actually relates back to kind of the psychological section, is that hardship creates clarity. Like, it makes it extremely obvious what matters, what you should focus on, what you care about, and what the people around you should care about. And there's a real comfort and well-being that comes with that clarity, even if the world's burning around you. The fact that you don't have to sit and question all the time, is this worth doing? Should I stop? Should I try this other thing instead? Are they gonna make fun of me? Like, as soon as all those thoughts are removed, there's almost this liberation that happens

• 2:47:04Mark Manson?

  in some of life's toughest moments.

• 2:47:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:47:07Mark Manson?

  Which is very paradoxical.

• 2:47:09Speaker 01

  There does kind of have to already be a community underneath of that. They can push communities closer together. And rarely, I don't think it necessarily creates communities necessarily.

• 2:47:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:18Speaker 01

  But it can definitely strengthen the ties between communities.

• 2:47:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:22Speaker 01

  Example like this is from Hurricane Katrina. The Vietnamese community in New Orleans really came together. They were the ones who actually bounced back much quicker than a lot of other communities in that area. And it's because they already had kind of that, those social ties. Now, they had a history together. A lot of them were refugees from the Vietnam War. They had all these social networks kind of already set up, these social ties. Again, it's not an individual sport. It's a team sport.

• 2:47:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:50Speaker 01

  Resiliences, for sure. Yeah. How does it look to build kind of a resilient social circle? If if there is a list of things we can give to people, let's try. I'm not sure. We might find some nuance and messiness in this.

• 2:48:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:04Speaker 01

  I think a little bit. We've mentioned a few of these things already, though. One of them, and I think that the top one is to prioritize depth.

• 2:48:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:48:10Speaker 01

  Over breadth. You've kind of mentioned this. You have all these loose connections around and wish you had more depth. And I think that's really the key to resilience there is having those one to two to maybe three people where you could go to them for anything. I'm not saying that's easy. Again, that takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of repetition with this person. It takes a lot of intimate knowledge with them. Shared experiences, which is another thing on here that we could get into. But depth over breadth is always is going to win every time in social connection, especially when it comes to resilience and being able to lean on these people, these relationships.

• 2:48:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I think unconditional acceptance.

• 2:48:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:48:46Mark Manson?

  Compassion.

• 2:48:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:47Mark Manson?

  Is is a is an absolute necessity. The other thing that comes to mind, too, and this ties into mindset number one, which is finding people who believe you're capable more than you think you're capable.

• 2:48:57Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 2:48:58Mark Manson?

  When I think about some of the most impactful people in my life, they've often been people who actually believed in me more than I believed in myself.

• 2:49:06Speaker 01

  That's actually a protective factor. I don't think we mentioned this at all. That's actually a protective factor for a lot of kids who grow up in adverse environments is having at least one adult in their life who did believe in them or who did show them.

• 2:49:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:20Speaker 01

  Some some way that they can do something different in their lives and that be something more than what they thought they could be. That's a protective factor. There's definitely been that in my life. Like, I think back on the teachers or the coaches or mentors that I had growing up and I they just they were instrumental, essential to my own development.

• 2:49:39Mark Manson?

  So, yeah.

• 2:49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. Investing in shared rituals is another one, okay? Again, we're not getting into the.

• 2:49:45Mark Manson?

  Getting culty.

• 2:49:46Speaker 01

  No, no, no. No, no, so I am part of.

• 2:49:48Mark Manson?

  I mean, I'm down. I'm ready for my cult, guys. I'm ready.

• 2:49:52Speaker 01

  You are.

• 2:49:53Mark Manson?

  Show me where to burn the candles and drink the goat blood. I'm in.

• 2:49:57Speaker 01

  The goat blood.

• 2:50:00Speaker 01

  I mean, more like, for instance, I am a part of what we call the dinner club. A dinner club, I guess, where it's a group chat we're on. And even though we actually haven't gotten together in the last few months because we've all been crazy busy and just gone and people get married and all this kind of stuff. We have, we try to get together and have a monthly dinner, just with a small group of people. And we rotate who hosted, or we go out to a dinner or something like that. And it's just, it's just dinner with friends. It's all it is. But that group has now also become like when something bad happens, somebody has somebody in their family die. This has happened before too. We like, everybody kind of.

• 2:50:37Mark Manson?

  Come together.

• 2:50:38Speaker 01

  We rally together around this. Okay. And it's because we have that repeated exposure with each other. And it's, you know, fairly low stakes and it's just dinner and whatever. But, you know, it's, it actually means a lot to me.

• 2:50:48Mark Manson?

  The initiation rites, I'm sure are brutal. The hazing is just.

• 2:50:53Speaker 01

  No, it's.

• 2:50:54Mark Manson?

  Unbearable.

• 2:50:55Speaker 01

  Got to eat a hot pepper or something. No, it's not like that. You could do a dinner. That's like a creative act though, too. You're creating a dinner for other people around you. And that's going to just attract more people. One thing I've been toying with too is like, oh, you, we should all invite one person that the rest of the group doesn't know or doesn't know very well. Those sorts of things. Introduce more people into that. That I think is a cool way to do it. It could be mountain biking or hiking, or you could do whatever around some activity.

• 2:51:23Speaker 01

  And commit to it. You know, it's not just one of those things you just kind of, we'll do it every now and then. But it's like, we have a, it's called the dinner club.

• 2:51:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I feel like structure is important for stuff like that. I guess this kind of comes into like the looser bonds. You know, if you can implement some sort of structure, like you said, ritual.

• 2:51:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:51:41Mark Manson?

  And then if you can adhere to it for a certain amount of time, you kind of develop, there's like this psychological reluctance. Like, whoa, we've been doing this for two years. Like, let's not fuck it up now. I remember I had a book club in New York when I lived there that was like, honestly. One of the social highlights of my life was the group of guys. It was just four of us, really close friends. We all read super nerdy books. And we actually reached a point where it was like, we've, we have gone two and a half years and never missed, never failed to finish a book, never failed to have a meeting about it. Like no, like no man left behind. Everybody's finished every book. And it kind of reached a point where it was like, guys, don't fuck this up, man.

• 2:52:25Mark Manson?

  Don't be the one who ruins it.

• 2:52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's stakes.

• 2:52:28Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 2:52:29Speaker 01

  There's stakes.

• 2:52:30Mark Manson?

  There's stakes. You gotta create stakes somehow.

• 2:52:32Speaker 01

  Right, right. Now, those kinds of stakes are built over time. It's not just immediately built in, but yeah. Well, what do you, so I've kind of already ragged on like, you know, joining, let's say, yoga, CrossFit, whatever it is. But I do think there is something to like more purpose driven groups. Okay. And you and I have also talked about where we seem to be way more, way too indexed globally and not enough locally.

• 2:52:56Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:52:56Speaker 01

  So I really do think there's gonna be, I think we're about to see this, where we are seeing this in some pockets even too, where volunteering, that used to be, I don't, my grandparents, I look back, they volunteered all the time. It was insane. It was like food banks or just the, you know, they were both, my grandpa was in the VFW, you know, and my grandma was in the, what was it, Rotary Club or whatever it was, right? They did all of those sorts of things and it was all very community focused. They never got paid for any of it. They would show up. There was a very social aspect to it, but they would also help others as well. And it was community based too. But that purpose that you're sharing with somebody, especially you go like volunteer at the food bank or something like that. You're gonna find some people you probably, if you're that kind of person who's gonna go do that,

• 2:53:39Speaker 01

  you're gonna find people who are very much in line with you. And then not only that, but they probably have this, a looser network as well that you'll be able to tap into eventually. Again, that's gonna take some time, but.

• 2:53:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The thing that I'm thinking about, and it's interesting because I did not expect this through line

• 2:53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:53:58Mark Manson?

  to emerge before we started recording, but you know, in the psychological section, I talked about the importance of making a commitment to something hard. I feel like with the social stuff, especially these days, like there, there needs to be some degree of commitment. Right? So like, I think about the food bank thing. It's like, there have been a bunch of things in my life that I've tried. Some of it volunteering, some of it social stuff, some of it, you know, like a yoga class or whatever. And I'll go do it once or twice and I'm like, oh, okay, that's cool.

• 2:54:27Speaker 01

  I think that's what most people do, yeah.

• 2:54:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and I think there's, the thing that is missing is the stakes and the stakes are created through some form of commitment. Not just volunteering for a food bank, but finding some higher reason or higher purpose to promise yourself or promise your community or promise somebody else at the food bank that you're gonna, you're gonna volunteer there once a week for an entire year, right? It's like you create, you create expectations for yourself, you create stakes for yourself. And then, once you're locked in to that friction, you start doing the hard thing. And then, that actually is what builds the relationships and the meaning and purpose and whatever.

• 2:55:05Speaker 01

  Right, right. Again, I just wanted to kind of reiterate though, it seems better, if you are gonna try this route, it seems better to do something like that, other than not just like yoga or, you know, all of those things.

• 2:55:17Mark Manson?

  Something, something you're giving instead of getting.

• 2:55:22Speaker 01

  Yes, very much so. You know, we spent a lot of time on the biology, the physiology, the health aspects, all of that. I think you should treat this much the same, like social connection, treating it as part of your, your health. Now that we know all of these things, you know, it used to be that this is just what people did. They just, social connection was just that, that was the fabric of, of culture and society. Now that we know what it is though, I think we just have to be a little bit more conscious of it. We have to be, we have to treat it, okay, I'm doing this for my health, but also, you know, it makes, it helps other people as well.

• 2:55:54Mark Manson?

  I saw, I think yesterday, an amazing tweet. It's actually one of the best tweets I've seen in a long time. It was a guy, he posted, I'm probably gonna butcher this, but he said that, he said societies have amnesia. So, a society will have a problem, they find a solution, the solution becomes a tradition, and then the tradition works for so many generations that they forget what the problem was that they were solving. And so, they get rid of the tradition and then the problem reemerges.

• 2:56:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:28Mark Manson?

  And I feel like...

• 2:56:30Speaker 01

  This is definitely one of those.

• 2:56:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:36Mark Manson?

  All right, Drew, it's that time of the episode. It's time to talk about what is the 80/20? We just spent three, four hours talking through resilience, talking through all the biology of resilience, the psychology of mental and emotional resilience, and the sociology, I guess.

• 2:56:53Speaker 01

  The social side, yeah.

• 2:56:54Mark Manson?

  The social sociability of being more resilient. We just fire hose the audience with information. So this is the point of the show where we break down, gun to your head, you can only take one or two or three things with you and implement them into your life. What would they be to get the highest leverage results? So why don't we start with the biology side?

• 2:57:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57:19Mark Manson?

  What would you take?

• 2:57:20Speaker 01

  I think, I think the most important thing from the biophysical side of resilience is really getting a good exercise routine, or at least getting more physical activity in your life. It does so many things. There's a reason that we talk a lot about like endurance athletes and all of that, right? And resilience. And yes, it's a certain type of resilience, but it's like a lot of practice around resilience as well. You're doing things that are hard, first of all, right? You're doing things you might not want to do sometimes too. And it's, it has to be consistent as well to build that resilience muscle, muscle as well. We also talked a lot, you know, I spent a lot of time nerding out about the neurobiology and the anterior medial singul- cingulate cortex, mouthful there.

• 2:58:04Speaker 01

  Studies have shown that physical exercise, regular exercise, changes the, not only the, the function of that part of your brain, but also the structure of it as well. And it's very, very instrumental in other areas of resilience in your life. So using, it's like a foundation, like I said, when we were talking about that. Physical exercise, getting the, the, kind of your, your, your physical health in order anyway, it's a foundation for the rest of resilience, whether psychological, social, all of that. It gives you that pool, that reserve that you can draw on. And I really think that physical exercise is really the entry point to that. Sleep's important, yes. Nutrition's important, yes. Gut health, all of that we talked about. But I think if you're only going to focus on one thing to start out with,

• 2:58:49Speaker 01

  like, get, get your ass off the couch. What do you think of that?

• 2:58:53Mark Manson?

  So I don't disagree. I struggled with this. I struggle between sleep and exercise.

• 2:58:58Speaker 01

  Sleep is a very, very, very close second.

• 2:59:00Mark Manson?

  And I see like-

• 2:59:01Speaker 01

  And if I had to choose one, you said gun to your head, so.

• 2:59:04Mark Manson?

  It's, so here's why I struggle with this.

• 2:59:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:59:07Mark Manson?

  Sleep, it feels like it's more of the, it's necessary but not sufficient, right?

• 2:59:13Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 2:59:14Mark Manson?

  So if you, if you're not getting good sleep, then probably nothing else is gonna matter.

• 2:59:19Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 2:59:21Mark Manson?

  But if you are getting good sleep, that's not enough.

• 2:59:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:23Mark Manson?

  Like, it's a baseline.

• 2:59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:59:26Mark Manson?

  So like, it's a little bit of a different situation, whereas I totally agree with you on the exercise point, on the physical activity point. Not only are you building that, that physical resilience, you know, altering your own brain, developing your body, developing your nervous system, but you are getting those psychological reps as well. Like, you are training yourself to be a person who does hard things. And you are teaching yourself to stay with the suckage for long periods of time. And I just think that that is, that is so psychologically useful. So I think I agree with you.

• 3:00:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:00:03Mark Manson?

  And, but it's, maybe you convinced me. Because when I walked in here today, I was thinking, I'm like, man, if you're not getting good sleep, then you're like-

• 3:00:10Speaker 01

  I would agree too. If I had to choose though, like I said, I'd pick the physical activity. One of them, physical activity is showing to get you better sleep as well, so.

• 3:00:18Mark Manson?

  That is true.

• 3:00:18Speaker 01

  If you're struggling with sleep, go ahead, start with the exercise, and maybe you'll get better sleep too.

• 3:00:22Mark Manson?

  You convinced me, Drew. You convinced me.

• 3:00:24Speaker 01

  Usually I would say like, sleep is a foundation for, like, it is the foundation for so much of your mental health, just in general.

• 3:00:30Mark Manson?

  For sure.

• 3:00:30Speaker 01

  So, yes, it's very, very important. When we're talking specifically about resilience though.

• 3:00:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:35Speaker 01

  I think the, a high-impact activity is just more physical activity.

• 3:00:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:41Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 3:00:42Mark Manson?

  Okay. On the psychological side, I went back and forth between, we talked about five different mindsets, and we also talked about kind of some sub-practices or mindsets related to each of those five. I went, trying to pick just one, I went back and forth between two of them multiple times this morning. And-

• 3:01:03Mark Manson?

  I can't escape. I ultimately think the 80/20 really comes down to that first mindset is believing that you are capable of doing things.

• 3:01:12Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 3:01:13Mark Manson?

  In the psychological literature, it's known as self-efficacy. It's basically a belief in your own capability or your own adaptability. And it just like, the results are just so stark. And I do think all the other mindsets are super important. I do think the cognitive reappraisals are super important. I think the enforced cheerfulness is super important. But it's funny because I feel like if you don't actually believe that you're capable of doing the thing you want to do, then none of that other stuff is really going to matter. Like, or you're not even going to have an opportunity to really use it, right? Because you're just, you're going to feel unmotivated from the start. So, I don't know, that's kind of where I landed.

• 3:01:57Mark Manson?

  That feels just so foundational to me that if that's not there, like, nothing else really works. But, I don't know, I might be able to be talked into the cognitive reappraisal piece.

• 3:02:06Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so I think, because if you're not somebody who does have a lot of self-efficacy, I think you first need the cognitive flexibility first. You need the cognitive reappraisal to be able to get there.

• 3:02:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:19Speaker 01

  That's one way to look at it, anyway.

• 3:02:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:21Speaker 01

  The flexibility, though, I think just in general, is kind of the defining feature of resilience. It's not toughness, it's not stoic, you know, just taking whatever comes at you, like, with a, you know, you got a bulletproof vest or whatever. It's the flexibility to change and adapt.

• 3:02:38Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:02:39Speaker 01

  And cognitively, that's, you know, we saw in the physiology too, heart rate variability, for example.

• 3:02:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:46Speaker 01

  HPA axis, your stress response flexibility, all of that. I think the same is true for psychology as well. So, yes, I agree, like, self-efficacy, you won't try to do something if you don't believe you can do it, absolutely.

• 3:02:59Mark Manson?

  It feels like a chicken and the egg thing.

• 3:03:00Speaker 01

  It is a super chicken and the egg thing. And that's what I was trying to think of, is like, how do you get there if you're not?

• 3:03:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:06Speaker 01

  Already, so it's, you need some cognitive flexibility.

• 3:03:08Mark Manson?

  You need cognitive flexibility to have the belief that you can do something difficult.

• 3:03:14Mark Manson?

  But you also need to believe that you can do something difficult to exercise the cognitive flexibility to like to manage the setbacks and challenges that come with it.

• 3:03:22Speaker 01

  We didn't bring this up, but like Jocko Willink has that, you know, that good.

• 3:03:27Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:03:27Speaker 01

  Good. Like something bad happens. Good.

• 3:03:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:29Speaker 01

  And good, you know, wife leaves you good.

• 3:03:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:34Speaker 01

  You know, with him, where he was a Navy SEAL, you know, like, oh, the, the, the mission got delayed. Good. I have another day to prepare for it.

• 3:03:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:40Speaker 01

  You know, that, that's a cognitive.

• 3:03:42Mark Manson?

  It's a great little tool. Yeah.

• 3:03:43Speaker 01

  It's a cool little tool you can do. You can use, you know, oh, um, I got injured. Well, good. I can catch up on my rest or all of that. That kind of stuff is.

• 3:03:55Mark Manson?

  Counter argument.

• 3:03:56Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 3:03:57Mark Manson?

  If you don't believe you're capable of doing the mission in the first place.

• 3:04:01Speaker 01

  It is a chicken and the egg thing.

• 3:04:02Mark Manson?

  How can you reappraise it?

• 3:04:03Speaker 01

  It's a chicken.

• 3:04:03Mark Manson?

  As being something good.

• 3:04:05Speaker 01

  Maybe you have to practice both at the same time.

• 3:04:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah, maybe they come together.

• 3:04:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:04:08Mark Manson?

  I don't know.

• 3:04:09Speaker 01

  I a hundred percent agree that like you have to develop some self efficacy around this, but um, I, I just don't know. Like, I think that's part of the process of becoming resilient.

• 3:04:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:18Speaker 01

  Is developing that self efficacy. And so developing a cognitive reappraisal, cognitive flexibility around challenge in your life, seeing it as something different. Because if you are just the type of person who goes, oh, my life sucks. Every time something bad happens. Oh, my life sucks. This sucks. Uh, or I can, you know, I, I got the raw end of the deal every time, this and that.

• 3:04:40Speaker 01

  The thing you have to do very first is catch yourself right there. It's a very CBT thing, right? Catch yourself right there and say, okay, hold on. This presents a, it's a challenge, not, not like a, a handicap that I have around this. So I see what you're saying. It is very much a chicken and the egg thing.

• 3:04:56Mark Manson?

  I do think you're, I was just, as you were talking, I was thinking about CBT as well, because self, the self efficacy piece for me, I think the way you get that outside of cognitive reappraisal is stacking evidence. Right? It's like it, the way you, you believe you can do something is you stack evidence that you can do things similar to it. And, and I do think this is kind of where that, that, that triangle in CBT comes in of like this kind of cycle of thought to behavior to emotion to thought to behavior to emotion. So like, if you can. You can find something small that you can, that feels, that you do feel like you're capable of handling and you start there and then you handle it, that builds a little bit of

• 3:05:40Mark Manson?

  evidence for yourself.

• 3:05:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:05:43Mark Manson?

  Like, okay, I'm the type of person that can handle something like this. And then you try something a little bit harder and then you get that evidence and you just start stacking evidence.

• 3:05:50Speaker 01

  And the cognitive reappraisal gets easier with each wrong. Okay.

• 3:05:54Mark Manson?

  And you're practicing it as you go.

• 3:05:56Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. So if you start small, I think you're, I think you're absolutely right. Like, just the other day, you know, like I was on plane the other day and there were, there was a mom and her sister and then two kids that she had and they screamed for the last 45 minutes of it. Right, right. This was a small, so this is a mundane example and usually what I do is put the headphones on and be like, oh my God, but I was just like, I'm just gonna take this.

• 3:06:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah. You're gonna raw dog this screaming kid.

• 3:06:21Speaker 01

  I took my headphones out and I just closed my eyes and I was like, I'm not gonna get upset or anything. I felt bad for the mom at the end of it too. She was crying herself. I'm just saying, but like something is even as mundane as that.

• 3:06:30Mark Manson?

  That's something, that's something Goggins would do. You'd be like, oh, there's a crying baby on the plane. I'm gonna listen to it.

• 3:06:37Speaker 01

  Let me, let me. Give me that pain. I feed off that pain. Yeah, absolutely.

• 3:06:42Mark Manson?

  All right. The social piece.

• 3:06:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:06:46Mark Manson?

  So I feel like, I feel, I feel like we didn't, we didn't land on like, super tangible advice for people on the social piece.

• 3:06:55Speaker 01

  Well, I don't, I'd like, it is, it's, it's hard to give tangible advice around that, I think.

• 3:07:02Mark Manson?

  I, honestly, as we were going through that section, I kept thinking to myself, this is just a relationship. Like, to give advice on this, we would have to do a relationship episode.

• 3:07:12Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:07:13Mark Manson?

  Or we'd have to do a friendship episode.

• 3:07:14Speaker 01

  Which is coming up.

• 3:07:15Mark Manson?

  Which is coming up. So it is hard to give very tangible advice on like, how to make friends or make better friends or make sure you have good friendships. Like, those are all very deep, complex subjects.

• 3:07:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, my advice is take the next one to three years and like, focus on one to three good relationships.

• 3:07:35Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:36Speaker 01

  Good friendships in your life. The quality over quantity, we mentioned that. Quality over quantity, I guess if there's an 80/20 around it, is that.

• 3:07:44Mark Manson?

  I would say so. I would say like, one really good friend is probably worth a lot more than like, half a dozen.

• 3:07:51Speaker 01

  Ten acquaintances.

• 3:07:53Mark Manson?

  Ten acquaintances.

• 3:07:54Speaker 01

  A million acquaintances, honestly, at that point, yeah. So, like, if you don't have that in your life, yeah.

• 3:08:03Mark Manson?

  I do feel like that is, that should probably be, potentially be priority number one.

• 3:08:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:08:10Mark Manson?

  Just getting out, meeting people, getting close to people. And also, I would, I would add to that, getting away from toxic people. You know, if you, you can have good people in your life, but if you have somebody in your life who is just berating you, completely unsupportive. This is the interesting, we didn't really talk about this, but like, talking about those five mindsets, if you're surrounded by people who don't have those five mindsets, who, if you, if you're spending most of your time with somebody who has no self-efficacy, can't cognitively reappraise situations, can't enforce cheerfulness on themselves, can't narrow their focus to what's most important in front of them, it's gonna be extremely hard for you to do those things as well.

• 3:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:08:56Mark Manson?

  So, I would, almost equal weighting, I would put, finding one person who has these mindsets, as well as getting away from people who don't have those mindsets.

• 3:09:06Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah, and I mean, I think too, is, reaching out to people and, like, offering help, offering to help make them more resilient.

• 3:09:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:16Speaker 01

  I think is actually a really good way.

• 3:09:18Mark Manson?

  It's a counterintuitive way to, to.

• 3:09:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:09:20Mark Manson?

  To foster it.

• 3:09:21Speaker 01

  To foster it in your, in your own life, and, and also build relationships, resilient relationships at the same time. So, yeah, I would agree with that. It's, it's a lot more complex one. Again, like, we mentioned this, it just takes a lot of time.

• 3:09:32Mark Manson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:09:33Speaker 01

  It takes, I think people underestimate, they're like, "Well, I don't have any friends, like, and I go to these events," or whatever it is, and it's like, you're not gonna make a friend in a weekend.

• 3:09:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:40Speaker 01

  You know, we're gonna get much deeper into that.

• 3:09:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll get into that in next month's episode, but yeah, just as a little teaser.

• 3:09:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:09:52Mark Manson?

  It's, it's almost impossible to, to make a friend in a day.

• 3:09:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:09:57Mark Manson?

  It, it just doesn't really happen.

• 3:09:59Speaker 01

  And you can't, you, you cannot be the most resilient version of yourself without other people, I just wanna put that, like, that, this is something you just have to think about, and you just, it's.

• 3:10:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:08Speaker 01

  It's part of life.

• 3:10:09Mark Manson?

  Okay, so our 80/20, exercise with sleep as a close runner-up.

• 3:10:15Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:10:18Mark Manson?

  For mindsets, it sounds like stacking evidence is kinda like where we landed.

• 3:10:22Speaker 01

  I think so. I think you're right. Start small and work out kind of that self-efficacy muscle, I guess. And go the small ways, work up the ladder.

• 3:10:32Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And then on the third one is, is find either one really good friend or get away from somebody who is super toxic.

• 3:10:42Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:10:42Mark Manson?

  Let's talk about trade-offs of resilience. What are, you know, we, one of the things that we do here and that I talk about a lot in my work is, it's easy to think about all the benefits of something. We rarely think about the costs of something or the downsides of something. So, this is where we discuss what are the potential downsides of becoming an extremely resilient person?

• 3:11:03Speaker 01

  One I thought of is now, like, once you get to a point where you are resilient, people see you as like a competent resilient person. Now you're the competent resilient person that people come to a lot. And so, you know, you get to putting out a lot of fires or you're seen as like this rock or whatever, right? There is more responsibility put on you when you, when you get this part of your life kind of figured out, right? We kinda talked about this in procrastination episode as well, right? Like when you get good at doing things, people just give you more things to do.

• 3:11:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:34Speaker 01

  Same thing with resilience. I think you gotta, you know, there's a, there's an image that develops of you in other people's minds and you kinda feel like you have to live up to that a lot.

• 3:11:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's also a bit ironic. Like you, you see this dynamic in a lot of families. Like there'll be one person who's like very strong and reliable and, and then a bunch of people in the family who are not strong or reliable. And so the strong, reliable person keeps taking on all of the burdens of the people in the family, which then makes them stronger and stronger and stronger. Cause as we talk about, resilience is like a muscle. You get better at it, things get easier. You, you, you get, become more adaptable. And meanwhile, all the people in the family are not developing that muscle. And so you. You can see situations where being the strong resilient one, you enable a lot of situations. I think this probably happens in a lot of relationships as well.

• 3:12:30Mark Manson?

  If you're always the rock who's there supporting, or if you're always the breadwinner who's like paying the bills and covering for your deadbeat partner, like it's it's a reinforcing dynamic in a very subtle way.

• 3:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then in a kind of an ironic way as well, you end up maybe long-term being less resilient because you're taking care of everybody else's problems and not your own. You know what I mean? There was kind of like you said, the enabling part. You end up kind of ignoring your own, your own shit, I guess. And yeah.

• 3:13:02Mark Manson?

  One that I will definitely speak to that's on our list is hyper-independence.

• 3:13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:13:07Mark Manson?

  And death of intimacy. Like this, this definitely, I've definitely felt this a little bit in my own life. I enjoy challenges. I actually really, really enjoy challenging myself, pushing myself, doing difficult things. It is, it has become a very core part of my identity. The downside of that is that a lot of people aren't really up to come along, right? It's, it's, or you often end up kind of doing these things by yourself. So. And it's not necessary, it's not like I'm going out and running 600 miles like Yanis Kourou or whatever. In some cases, you know, it's like starting a second business. Well, now I'm like working 60, 70 hours a week,

• 3:13:47Mark Manson?

  which means I'm not seeing friends. I'm not seeing my wife as much. I'm not talking to my parents as much. It could be something like, so my wife and I, we had a friend years ago who her marriage kind of fell apart. I mean, I'm sure there were many reasons for this. It wasn't just the Iron Man's fault, but basically her husband started training for an Iron Man. And for anybody who's trained for an Iron Man, like you are you were sitting on a bike like six hours a day, every day. So this guy was waking up at 3:30 in the morning to go bike for two or three hours, running a marathon every weekend, you know, just all this crazy stuff.

• 3:14:27Mark Manson?

  Basically, he was never home, never home, never around, never helping with the kids, never helping with the house. And, uh, you know, after six or 12 months, like. Basically, the marriage fell apart. She's like, where the fuck are you, dude? And, you know, he's, he's out like running, biking a hundred miles. So if you do become a person who enjoys challenges and enjoys pushing yourself and testing yourself, you do need to be careful because it is kind of easy to get way out on the frontier by yourself.

• 3:14:57Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:14:58Mark Manson?

  And, yeah. And forget that everybody else is, is left behind.

• 3:15:04Speaker 01

  Right. Well, one of those, another risk of that too, is like losing empathy, I think.

• 3:15:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:15:11Speaker 01

  This is definitely one thing, um, you see, if you, if you get to a point where you're like, I can handle this part and this is, you know, this tough thing, whatever. Then you start looking around like, why is everyone else so, such a wuss about this, right? It's like people in your family too, even my, yeah. Again, there's orchids, there's dandelions, right? And so some people don't have, like, if you've turned yourself into a dandelion in one area of your life, another thing too, maybe we should have highlighted throughout the episode is that just because you're resilient in one domain, doesn't mean you're resilient in all the others, right? But, uh, so like having a little empathy along the way for other people who might not be as resilient of you in one particular way.

• 3:15:49Speaker 01

  This kind of, it all kind of ties back into the community thing too. Like still being resilient, but still like having a space for the community, your community within that space is, is super important. And, you know, like, like you're talking about though with the, um, like the hyper independence. When I've, you know, I'm, I, you, you mentioned this, I'm thinking about like kind of getting into more endurance stuff. And I'm, the, the trade offs are already like boiling in my, my mind here. I'm like, this is going to be a lot of time. I'm going to have to take out. There's a few relationships that are probably gonna like, I'm not going to be able to spend as much time on with all of that. And then I gotta also remember that not all of those people are trained in for whatever endurance thing I'm going to be doing.

• 3:16:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:31Speaker 01

  And that's not their life and they're, it's not, it's not my world and they're just living in it. So the, the empathy part I think is really important too.

• 3:16:38Mark Manson?

  And the thing you don't think about too with stuff like that, and this is true, not just, this was, so this is why I, I, I was training for a marathon last year and, and I actually stopped.

• 3:16:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:16:49Mark Manson?

  Uh, and part of it, most of it was for this reason. Yeah. I was just never home.

• 3:16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:16:55Mark Manson?

  Always tired, never had free time to do anything else, see anybody else. And, but. Part of that's true as well, like with working too much, or traveling too much, or pushing yourself too much. Like, I'm definitely feeling that this year to a certain extent, where, you know, I'll come home some days from, you know, I'll work through a weekend, and then I get to Tuesday or Wednesday, and I'm just like, my brain is fried. I don't have any energy to talk to anybody, to do anything, to hang out with my wife. Like, I just, I just wanna like, be a vegetable on the couch.

• 3:17:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:28Mark Manson?

  The entire night. So, yeah, that's, the recovery side of that is an issue as well.

• 3:17:34Speaker 01

  Well, that's actually one of them I had here, with like, the physical wear and tear, but I would put mental wear and tear on that too. Once you, once you figure out that you can do hard things, you're like, I'm gonna push this a little bit more. You're, what you just mentioned is that I've seen you do that over and over and over.

• 3:17:49Mark Manson?

  I've got on my list, you can be, be careful of becoming addicted to it.

• 3:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:17:54Mark Manson?

  Because I do think, once you start, once you do build that self-efficacy, like, I am a person who can do hard things, and you build up all that evidence of consistently accomplishing hard things, there's a rush that comes with it.

• 3:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:10Mark Manson?

  There's a real high that you get when you do something very difficult.

• 3:18:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:18:15Mark Manson?

  And, and you can get hooked on it.

• 3:18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a masochism that can be a little bit, you know, talk about Goggins. He's a definite masochist.

• 3:18:22Mark Manson?

  Dude, like, pounding surgeries, like, he has no cartilage in his knees. I saw, there's a, there's a video of Ronnie Coleman, who's the eight-time Mr. Olympia.

• 3:18:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:18:35Mark Manson?

  I think, probably the largest Mr. Olympia ever. I mean, just an absolute freak.

• 3:18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:18:41Mark Manson?

  Of, of a bodybuilder, one of the greatest bodybuilders ever, and the dude can barely walk now.

• 3:18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:18:48Mark Manson?

  He's had hip replacements, knee replacements, he has to walk with crutches. I think he's like, I think he's in his 50s now, but I mean, he, he's probably as hobbled as your average 80-year-old. And the fucked up thing is, the dude is still going to the gym. And he's like, still trying to lift heavy shit, and it just, so at a certain point, like, it can become an addiction, and you have to be careful. You have to know when to pull yourself back, and when to chill out.

• 3:19:15Speaker 01

  No, for sure.

• 3:19:15Mark Manson?

  When to let the inner bitch take over, as Goggins would say. I would argue, the inner bitch should take over occasionally.

• 3:19:22Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:19:24Speaker 01

  Um, I, you know, you, we kind of mentioned this, I guess, already too, but the loss, your, this is all related, I guess, but the loss of community that you might have around this. I guess you kind of, you kind of already touched on this, but like, there are some of those codependent relationships that you might have where you, if you start like, no, I'm going to take this over. Well, somebody else was, that was their thing. They latched on and they, they kind of, they got off a little bit on, on taking care of you in that situation. Oh, don't worry about it. You, you sit over here. I'll take care of this. And you have this codependent thing going on.

• 3:19:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:56Speaker 01

  And you decide now I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this for myself now and I'm gonna be the one who takes care of it and be the resilient one here. That might not sit well with him. That, that was part of, that was, they got, they got a little bit of a whatever out of it, an ego boost, or they didn't have to take care of their own problems because they're taking care of yours. That codependence, uh, it might be a little bit of a destabilizing factor in your relationships.

• 3:20:18Mark Manson?

  It could. I would argue it's probably a good thing.

• 3:20:21Speaker 01

  That's probably is a good thing. You're right. You're right. But when you're going through it, I'm just saying like you might, there might be some fireworks in some of your relationships.

• 3:20:28Mark Manson?

  At some point, we will definitely do an episode on codependent or toxic relationships. And we will talk about the roller coaster, the, the, the high upsides and downside, low downsides of exiting one of those relationships.

• 3:20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:20:46Mark Manson?

  But yeah, it can be very destabilizing. It can be very like emotionally tumultuous to, to become self-reliant in a lot of ways. Like if you've, if you have built your entire kind of emotional support network is kind of based off of you being the weak one who always needs help. As soon as you stop being that weak one, it is going to destabilize a lot of people, a lot of the relationships that you have and how people around you see you. I would argue that the people who genuinely care about you and are there for the right reasons will be happy and supportive and proud of you. Not to mention probably fucking relieved. Uh, and, and then the people who get upset by it are, are probably the people that weren't there for the right reason.

• 3:21:30Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Cool.

• 3:21:32Mark Manson?

  Awesome. Anything else?

• 3:21:35Mark Manson?

  Or should we close it out with some personal thoughts?

• 3:21:38Speaker 01

  I think we should, yeah, I think I'm ready, we can close it out.

• 3:21:41Mark Manson?

  What, what would you say you learned in the process of making this episode?

• 3:21:45Speaker 01

  Um, I-

• 3:21:46Mark Manson?

  Anything you would apply to your own life?

• 3:21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, I really do think that the, the, um, environmental fit stuff, the orchid and dandelion stuff.

• 3:21:55Mark Manson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:21:55Speaker 01

  Um, I guess I kind of, I kind of knew a little bit about that, but having the empathy for some people um, in certain situations where I have been a lot, I have been one of those people who was like, you like toughen up.

• 3:22:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:22:11Speaker 01

  Just toughen the fuck up. That's what resilience is, is just harden the fuck up and get over it and, you know? That is not helpful. It's not, it's not helpful for anyone. I think that, um, if we can build systems, you build workplaces, we build schools, we build a society that's more just, um, accepting and, and flexible itself. It's more resilient society itself for those kinds of people. Um, and instead of just saying there's only one way to be resilient.

• 3:22:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:41Speaker 01

  I think for me anyway, that was very much like, oh, uh, like I just mentioned just a minute ago too, is that just because you're resilient in one area, doesn't mean you aren't another. And I think that's where those orchids kind of come in too, is like, they might actually be really well suited to like one specific thing and we should let them be.

• 3:22:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:57Speaker 01

  Um, so I don't know, I think I have a lot more empathy for that sort of thing and it's not anymore, you know?

• 3:23:02Mark Manson?

  I would say for me, it, it was the two mindsets, the, you know, believe that anything's possible and then the enforced cheerfulness. I think it was kind of the revelation that, uh, that, that is actually very, very good advice in the right context. You know, I, as we talked about, I spent most of my career kind of trashing that advice of like, hey, man, if shit sucks, like admit it sucks. You don't have to be happy all the time. You know, don't be delusional. Don't tell yourself that you're gonna be the fucking queen of England just because you, you tell yourself, you look in the mirror and you tell yourself you're the queen of England. Like it's- So much of my career has been built around bringing realism into self-help and self-help

• 3:23:46Mark Manson?

  has violated like a lot of these basic realistic principles in so many ways that I think I probably wrote off those the power of those two mindsets more than I should have. And what I realize now is that, yeah, if you're not struggling with anything, if you're just kind of like being lazy and comfortable and like wishing you had, whatever, like a horse and carriage to come pick you up every morning, like, yeah, that's terrible advice. So believe you're capable of anything. But like, if you're actually going through shit, if you're actually doing something extremely hard, if you're actually suffering both the self-efficacy

• 3:24:28Mark Manson?

  piece, like just believing that you're a person who's capable of handling this, and the enforced cheerfulness, I love the word enforced, enforced cheerfulness of like, you know it sucks, you know it sucks.

• 3:24:41Speaker 01

  There's an acknowledgement there, yeah.

• 3:24:42Mark Manson?

  Yes, you know it sucks, you know you're miserable, you know you might not make it, but fuck it, let's make a joke about it anyway. Like, I really love that. And so, yeah, those are the two, I guess those are kind of the two shifts in perspective that I took from doing this.

• 3:24:57Speaker 01

  The context is everything. I think you're right. And I think the difference is the passivity versus the active nature of it. Like, if you're just passively trying to, you know, manifest these things into your life, not happening. But if you're actively going through some shit, that's when it, that's when it actually works.

• 3:25:13Mark Manson?

  Yes. All right. Well, we're resilient now.

• 3:25:16Speaker 01

  We are.

• 3:25:17Mark Manson?

  I'm glad we got that figured out.

• 3:25:19Speaker 01

  On to the next one.

• 3:25:21Mark Manson?

  And we will be back in two weeks with an episode on Stoicism. It's gonna be a little bit of an experimental format. It'll be the first time that we've, we've had a guest on Solved. We're not interviewing Ryan, basically. We're basically inviting Ryan Holiday to sit in and do this format with us. And Ryan has been literally studying Stoicism his entire life. I think he's written nine books or 11 books on Stoicism at this point. He is, he knows everything there is to know about the Stoics. So I'm very excited to sit down and talk with him and hear all of the amazing stories and wisdom that he has. And then we will be back in November with an episode about friendship.

• 3:26:05Mark Manson?

  Thank you for sticking with us, for being so resilient to listen to us for four hours and change. It takes a lot of resilience to get this far into a solved episode. Again, if you love the podcast, please like and subscribe, follow us on any platform, leave a review. It's the best thing you can do for us. And feel free to reach out. We are at solvedpodcast.com. Shoot us an email. Let us know what you'd like to see. And we will be back in a couple of weeks.