You Were Never Meant to Be Alone: The Forgotten Biology of Belonging

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:32Before we start this podcast today, I want to tell you about my sponsor, Therisage. You know, there's a reason Therisage has become one of the most trusted names in natural healing. Because it's not just a brand, it's a family. Robbie and Melody, who I've known for a very long time, built Therisage from the ground up, driven by love for their family and a belief that nature already gave us everything we need to heal. We just have to activate it. For 25 years, they've led the world in infrared, red light, natural frequency technologies, not by chasing trends, but by standing in truth. Every Therisage product is built with integrity, backed by science, and made with one purpose.

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2:10Darin Olien:Hey, friends. It's me, Darren O 'Lean, and this is the Super Life Podcast. This one runs deep for me, and I hope it does for you too. You were never meant to do this alone. You were never meant to do life alone. Community as a forgotten biology of being human. Let me say something that might sound obvious, but somehow forgotten in this modern day world. You were never meant to be alone. Not for healing, not for your growth, not for your awakening, not the work of becoming who you actually are. And I mean this biologically, neurologically, anthropologically, and also from the soul. Your nervous system is literally designed to regulate itself in relationship.

3:01Darin Olien:And this is real science. It backs all of this up. We now know that the vagus nerve, which controls safety, digestion, immune signaling, and heart rhythm, It activates most fully when we feel societal safety. This is part of what the research calls the social engagement system. When you feel safe with another human, your heart rate actually becomes more coherent, your cortisol levels drop, and your body moves out of survival. Sometimes we don't even know that that is what's going on. Science calls this the need to belong. psychologist Roy Balmester showed it's not a nice to have it's a biological requirement the brain experiences social rejection in the same neural regions as physical pain the anterior signal it cortex lights up in the same way don't need to understand what that is in the brain but it shows the same pathways.

4:09Darin Olien:So it's not a weakness. It's actually the architecture. We were built in tribes of 30 to 150 people with eye contact, touch, shared meals, shared purpose, shared myths, shared stories, interaction together in physical proximity. Anthropologists called it the Dunbar number. They estimated that the cognitive limit of stable human relationships weren't thousands, not millions. The max that you could register and understand in your community was hit the peak at 150 people. Now we've got 5 ,000 friends, 10 ,000 friends, 2 ,000 friends, 100 million friends, quote-unquote, but zero village and an algorithm deciding what you see.

5:06Darin Olien:So I sit here and think, no wonder why anxiety is everywhere. No wonder why people feel lost. No wonder why self-help feels actually lonely. Loneliness isn't just an emotion. It's actually chemical. Chronic social isolation increases cortisol. It raises inflammation cytokines like IL-6, suppresses the immune system, disrupts sleep cycles, shrinks the actual gray matter in regions involved in emotional regulation. This isn't poetry, it's physiology. Here's the part no one wants to admit in our modern world. Personal growth was never meant to be personal. It was meant to be communal. In the research, there's something called self-determination theory.

6:07Darin Olien:It says three things are non-negotiable for human thriving. And I'm actually going to throw in my own fourth. Number one, autonomy. That you feel like your life is your own. Competence. That you feel capable of your life, of what you're doing. And number third, relatedness, that you feel connected. And the fourth that I add, that you feel love. Of course, you get that when you do all of these other three, because that ultimately is the language. And when relatedness is removed, guess what? Motivation collapses. The dopamine systems dysregulate. Discipline turns into burnout So you can meditate, you can journal, hell, you can cold plunge, you can sauna, you can biohack, you can optimize until you're freaking blue in the face.

7:02Darin Olien:But if you've got no one who sees you, the nervous system never fully exhales and relaxes. And here's what's wild. Here's the rub. The people who change the most aren't the ones with the strongest willpower. They're the ones with the strongest mirrors in their life. The people reflecting back to them. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler showed something called the social contagion of behavior. If your friends exercise, you're more likely to exercise. If your circle quits smoking, for example, the chances improve that you will too. Health is a network transmitted. You get me? All of this, you're trying to be better, you're trying to do your thing.

7:53Darin Olien:It's not because you're weak. So the questions become, who are you wired into? Who are you connected to? Who are you actually practicing becoming a human with? outside of the goals of making money and all of that stuff. And all of that is important. But if you understand what I'm saying, the undertow of expression and the magnetic attraction of all of those other things will only improve when you've shifted your environment to include the very fabric of who you are. Because your environment is not neutral. It's literally teaching your cells what to expect from the world through the epigenetic signaling.

8:40What is in your environment, your body is constantly receiving and giving to that environment. Stress, safety, belonging, and certainly threat.

8:53Darin Olien:And here's the thing. Most online spaces today, social media, are built for noise. It's the hot pictures, the perfect picture, the dopamine spikes of scrolling, the comparison that naturally happens. And then, of course, the vitriol, the anger, sitting behind a screen, vomiting negativity. That kind of environment reinforces stress, cortisol. all. It actually shortens the tension span and it starts to train your brain to stay in a low-grade fight or flight. It's attention, not transformation, not the betterment of you. You see, I absolutely at my core want something different. Just because these tools exist, and I'm saying you can use the tools, but I want something different.

9:47Darin Olien:I want something that is not a platform, that is not for a follower base to get more followers. Not fans. I want a place where people don't just consume. They practice. They move forward. They get tuned into what they want to create in a community. You don't need to perform. You can just belong. Where you don't need to pretend. You just tell the truth. Honesty. Radical honesty of yourself and others. You know, I don't even don't want to say stuff like this, but this isn't me selling anything to you. And I'm going to tell you what I'm doing, but this is way beyond that. This is from my heart to your heart and to what we know is true.

10:29Darin Olien:If you've ever felt like you've done so much work on yourself, the inner work, the self-help, the next quote that you want to embody, but still feel alone and it's not quote-unquote working you're not broken it's just understanding what's going on what's really going on you're you're responding normally to this abnormal environment so by 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since i've started this ad you don't think of these small little things but they add up a lot over time and we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean.

11:29Darin Olien:Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different? Plus, maybe that exposure to that plastic, getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea. There's some great solutions. You can DIY stuff. I've got many of these in my fatal conveniences, but the easy ones that I use every day, and I'm about to travel a lot more, and the traveling makes them really easy, I go to bite. I bite down on a little tablet, which is not interacting with any plastics because it's in a glass bottle and it's refillable and reusable and sustainable and there's no unwanted toxic fluorides flow agents and solvents in my mouth so my favorite is this bite toothpaste 100 % home compostable pouches subscription models you don't even have to think about it again you're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth and you're helping the environment because bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices.

12:49Darin Olien:So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E forward slash Darren20 or just use the promo code Darren20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste without using the tube. What if growth wasn't a grind? What if it was tribal again? What if learning didn't feel like isolation but an initiation? The future of healing isn't about information at all. It's about connection, truly. And here's where I want to speak plainly for a second. I've chosen to build a small intentional space for people who feel this.

13:39Darin Olien:Not to create fans, not to build a following, not to sell you something. Even though some of those things occur because I care, I vet things, I do things that have worked in my life, that I've spent decades in this health space with and for. I have a degree of passion around this stuff. So that's naturally going to happen. I give superfoods to people. I give motivation to people. I show up for people in my life. That's natural for me. So I've created this room. I've created a place where people can practice this together, ask better questions, support your nervous system in a community that aligns with something greater rather than just this freaking scrolling and wasted attention.

14:31Darin Olien:A place where we can tell the truth and build something real using some technology instead of scrolling, scrolling away our lives and our attention. That space happens to live on Patreon, my super light Patreon. And this isn't about money. It's a little over seven bucks a month. but it's because it allows for the structure and the privacy and the intimacy instead of the noise. Now listen, you don't need to join. You don't need to follow. You don't need to do or be anything. But if you're looking for a space that feels more like a circle than a feed, then this might be a great space for you. And so listen, if you look at it and get connected to it and it feels like it's for you, great.

15:18Darin Olien:There's no pressure. There's no pitch. There's no chasing. It's just a door that I'm opening because of these much, much bigger issues in our modern world. The bottom line is there are people out there who feel like you, who see the world like you, who want depth. I want depth, not noise, truth, not trends, growth, not performance. And they're looking for each other. We are looking for each other. It's not to be perfect, but to be real. Not to impress, but to become. So wherever you are, start building the foundation of this connection. Find one. Build one. Become brave enough to create the kind of space that you always wish existed.

16:04Darin Olien:Align with the people that align with you. Learn, grow, expand, be curious. You don't need to be fixed. You don't need to be saved. You don't need to be sold anything. You just need to be seen. And we can't do that alone. Let me say that again. You can't do this life alone. And just a little personal thing. I recently have been blown away. I got in touch with a friend, an acquaintance that I kind of knew. And I reached out to her and we started a dialogue. And we got on the phone. We four hours later in a conversation and then the next day and the next day conversation after conversation connection being seen throwing out hard things showing up and then getting to meet in person and all of that stuff the bottom line is one person can change your life one person mirroring your life and then you know had the gratitude of the guys that i go and work out with every day who I've been doing that for nearly two decades.

17:08Darin Olien:Men's group that I'm involved with. So it's love relationships. It's friends that align. We work out together. We see each other. But the willingness to open yourself, to be seen by others, and to be free to be yourself is the most powerful thing that we can do. It is hardwired in us to connect. So it is my shout out over the bow to you if you feel lost or lonely or not feeling connected or you want a deeper connection to things and people that matter to you and your values and your heart and what you care about, what you want to create in the world, it is out there. But you have to be willing to look and receive.

18:02Darin Olien:I am in a place now, I am overflowing. I'm overflowing with gratitude and love. It's been a hard year for me. It's been pain, physical pain, back and knee. Thank God I had the stem cells. But before all of that, I was digging into myself. But the real healing was not just me having a perfect morning routine, even though the space of the willingness to dive into pain is really important. But if you can find people to mirror that, share that space openly and honestly and safely, just the mere fact you might be going, I don't have the level that I want. That's okay. Just by you hearing this and the willingness to want deeper connections in your life is now moving every cell, every quantum particle, every part of the universe, every God shot you can to just say I'm open to that.

19:07And it's already happening.

19:09Darin Olien:I care more than money, more than fame, more than anything else about the human experience. And I just want to be the greatest expression of life possible. Yes, I have physical goals. I have mental goals. I have many financial goals. I have all of that too. But you're going to miss out without the love in your life, without the connection, without being seen. Be willing to share yourself so that someone can share themselves back. And I promise you, it is the greatest part of life. Sharing the space of connection and love, openness and honesty. It's beyond. I don't even have any other words for it.

19:52Darin Olien:Welcome to my brain. Welcome to the things that I think about. Welcome to super life is literally mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually there for me in my life so that I can live into my own super life and I can share and we can share together. So if you're sick of this world, that's just giving you stuff, nothing wrong with stuff. I like it too. But there is an opportunity here to understand your biology, to understand your humanology, to go, you want love, you want connection, you want care, you want safety, You want to be seen. You want to be heard. And you want to be embraced by love.

20:36Darin Olien:Okay? This is a vulnerable one. I get it. Many of you say, what do you eat all day? And what are the supplements you take? Yes, I got you. I'll tell you that too. But sometimes I just got to cut through all of the BS of that stuff and go, man, what is the most important thing to the fabric of our life? And this is a big one. Joy and happiness connection. We are built for it. So let's open up. Let's receive it. And let's say yes. I say yes. What do you say? Love you all.