282. Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal: You're Not Resilient. You're Just Coping. Here’s 5 Practices of Highly Resilient People

24:28Gary Brecka:Yeah. You know, should I become an entrepreneur? Should I become an actor or an actress? Most of which have not done what you want to do. Exactly. And what do our family say to us? They say, that is a terrible idea. You know, you're not going to make any money, you know, as an actor or an actress, like Like you're just going to be sort of like the working poor, you know, all these things, right? So we get bad advice and we either don't do it or we're like really reactive and say like, I'm just going to do it anyway. And so people can't give us directions to places that they have not been. I love that.

25:02Right? Yeah. And so surrounding ourselves with people who have done something similar or have gone to where we're going allows us to understand, is this goal for me and am I resourced to get there? Yeah.

25:16Gary Brecka:You know, I love too that you talk a lot about, you talk about it in the book, about connection. Because when you look at blue zone studies, big data studies, meta-analyses, one of the common threads that runs through the people that are living the longest lives is that they have a sense of community and connection. And I don't think we really define that. And also I think that we're the most disconnected we've ever been. That's right. In recorded history. and interestingly when I was in the mortality space we knew that if you wanted to cut a human being's life expectancy in half statistically in half and I mean at any age you put them in isolation broken heart syndrome there are lots of examples of this right isolation is so detrimental and I would assume that when you're going through some kind of traumatic event that you're trying to recover from being isolated not being vulnerable not having a way to measure whether or not you're making any kind of success.

26:16Right.

26:18Gary Brecka:Makes you less connected, makes you more distant. I wonder if you agree with that, first of all. And then secondly, I wonder for you to unpack the importance of connection. Absolutely. And what it is. Yeah, yeah. So I'm gonna throw out a percentage about how much I agree with your statement. And I will just acknowledge that it's not a real percentage for any mathematicians in the audience. Hopefully it's about 50%. Yeah. I'll cut it out of the podcast. Okay, all right. You can always edit this out, right? I won't edit it out. I 1 ,600%. Oh, awesome. I should have bought a lottery ticket. There you go.

26:53Gary Brecka:Yeah. I 1 ,600 % agree with that statement. Okay. Right? Something that we watched when I was new in psychology, and this study took place like during the Victorian era, so it's not near to us in time, but it's still very profound and also really upsetting to think about is in orphanages, they were interested in what isolation would do to a newborn baby. So they took babies and they gave them sustenance. They gave them a bottle or a stuffed animal or whatever it was, but they didn't have anyone touch the babies. They didn't have anyone talk to the babies. It's terrible, right? Hopefully this only happened once.

27:34Yeah, we're just going to, that's what we're going to tell ourselves. Yeah. All of the babies died. All of them. They had enough to eat. They had enough water. But without that human connection, they failed to thrive.

27:48Gary Brecka:Wow. And that just gives me chills, right? Not just because of the magnitude of sort of how awful that study is, but the deeply important impact of human connection in our lives. Now, for each one of these five practices, Gary, I think there's something new that we bring to the table in the context of this conversation. And here's what it is relative to connection, right? Connection has two parts. The one that we most often talk about is the connection that we have externally to other people. The one that we don't talk about as much, first and foremost, foundationally, is the connection that we have with ourselves.

28:31Gary Brecka:that's so good i want to make a note on that actually i rarely take notes during podcasts but i like that oh well i really do so let's just think about that for a moment you and i have a connection we have friends and family blue zones there's so much you know kind of data on that and it's a very exciting topic but before we get to our external connections we get to think about our internal connections, right? And what does that mean relative to like how connected we are to ourselves? I know so many people, and you do too, who don't want to be alone with themselves, who don't want to be alone with their own thoughts, who are saying negative things to themselves in, I call it the real estate of our own minds, right?

29:18We think that the most valuable real estate that we oversee oftentimes, right, is the primary home that we live in or the, you know, sort of investment portfolio of properties that we have. The most valuable real estate is the real estate of our mind. What we are saying to ourselves about ourselves in the context of our thoughts

29:40Gary Brecka:constantly, you know? And you and I, you know, we love peptides, we love supplements, we love hydrogen. We love weighted vests and cold plunges. We love all. We love those things. Sing it, sister. Right? And that's a way of optimizing our physiology. That's a way of optimizing our physiology. Right? But if we rewind, it's our cognitive resilience. Right? We can optimize our physiology without really focusing on what it is that we're saying to ourselves in the real estate of our own minds, our confidence. Do we believe in ourselves? Do we like ourselves? Do we even know who we are and what we want out of life?

30:26Do we take time to reflect, to ground? All of those things are part of the connection, but we tend to leapfrog over the connection we have with ourselves and instead think about the external connections before we really delve into the internal connections.

30:42Gary Brecka:Wow. I love too that you invented a word, which by the way, I'm going to adopt and put into my repertoire. You call it gradiosity. And this was very interesting to me because it was a reframing of a lot of life events. And I've actually, there's a friend of mine, they call him Dr. Rewire. And I have seen him in a a group of people take someone's most traumatic life event. And I sat in a room where people confessed very horrible things that happened to them. And what he did was he actually walked them from that event to how it manifested in a positive way in their life. And literally like he went in there and dug it out, put a bright light on it.

31:36Gary Brecka:And then it almost acted like a seed to grow this new reframed view of that event. You know, sometimes we get into a bad relationship and the hardest thing to do is get out of that relationship. But then afterwards, we find a real relationship and you're like, had that not happened, I wouldn't have this person in my life today. That's right. And so tell us how you came up with gradiosity, which I love the word, by the way. It should make it into the dictionary. I think so too. I think so too. Yeah. I mean, I'd like 15 % of everything that comes from that trademark word. You heard it here first, folks.

32:14Gary Brecka:Yeah, you heard it here first. But I think that the way you explain it, you know, I think it allows people to digest it and maybe put into practice in their life. So what does it mean? And are you reframing the way that people think about trauma or traumatic events? Absolutely. Absolutely. So something that I think adds value to share here is my personal story, which is, you know. These are the best. It's very much out there on the internet. It's within the first, you know, probably 30, 40 pages of my book. I talk about one of those significant challenges that I faced growing up. And for me, I had a stalker who came to my bedroom window.

33:04and it started when I was 14 years old. You know, my parents have this little house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's in a ground floor bedroom.

33:13Gary Brecka:Oh gosh, that's like the scariest thing for a young female. The scariest thing ever, right? And when it started, you know, it was in the morning, one morning before school and I was getting dressed and it was like 6 a.m. and it's dark outside, right? And so I had my blinds, you know, down over the windows, except one window kind of had this little like crack at the bottom with the screen. I was getting some nice fall air in. So I'd gotten dressed, you know, for school. And I went over to turn off my stereo, right? And for anyone who's listening in who doesn't know what a stereo is. Yeah, you just have to turn these things off, guys.

33:53Right, to see us after. It's true. We'll explain things like VCRs and butter churns.

33:59Gary Brecka:The thing that looks like this is actually a phone. That's right. That's right. why it is I needed to have my own phone line, right? We'll break it all down. Well, because you were running your own hotline. I mean, that's good. You were an entrepreneur in eighth grade. Yeah, yeah. These days people are like, doesn't everyone have their own phone line? Like, you know. We're talking about like the little spinny cord. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so I see this face at the bottom of my window, right? And he stands up, the light goes down his face. Now as a 14 year old, and this is how our minds work, when something happens in our life that doesn't make sense, What we do is we scan, you know, our mental information.

34:38We try to find information to make it make sense.

34:41Gary Brecka:Right? So what I came to very quickly was like, oh, my dad must be outside playing a trick on me. You know? So I'm like, dad? And he's like, take off your clothes. You're beautiful. And I'm like, definitely. He said that? He said that. Right? I heard his voice. Oh, my God. You know? And so I run from my room and I call from my parents and the police come. We make a police report and the police officer says, you know, this is probably just somebody passing through the neighborhood, you know, probably some kid pulling a prank. It's just a fluke. Right. So every time I got scared, I would just replay the replay those words.

35:21Right. It's just someone passing through the neighborhood, probably just a fluke. Six months later, I've got my blinds closed on that window that's on the driveway. but there's another window in the back of our house, right? I don't think we had air conditioning at the time. So I've got this window open in June, and I've just finished trying on these new clothes at the mall. And I hear his voice again. And he says, I've been waiting a long time for this. So creepy, right? Wow. The creepiest. Yeah. And in that moment—

35:56Gary Brecka:For you to change your clothes, basically. Yes. Wow. Yeah, he'd been waiting for this opportunity to like see me, communicate with me. I'm like 15 now. And so in that moment, Gary, three things happened, right? One, I realized this wasn't a fluke. Two, my childhood bedroom, which should have been the safest place for me, became categorically unsafe. Yeah. And number three, when I was calling for help, no one could hear me. And so I picked up the phone and I called the police myself. I dialed 911 myself. And he said to me in that moment when I was calling for help, he said, no one can hear you.

36:44No one is going to come and help you. Right?

36:48Gary Brecka:He said that. He said that. Through the window. Yes. Wow. Yeah. Your parents weren't home? My parents were traveling on a trip and we had some babysitters staying with us that had little kids and they were like upstairs doing the nighttime routine with their little ones. So they, in fact, couldn't hear me. And he knew that. Right? Like he cased the joint. Right. Right? So why do I tell you this whole story? I tell you this whole story because there's some other things that happened after that. But as a result, I developed PTSD. Oh, no doubt. For 20 years. Right? Yeah. And going back to the vulnerability, I'm so good at talking about vulnerability and talking about its importance because I've been so bad at it.

37:33Gary Brecka:Right? Like I hid that PTSD. I didn't want anyone to know about, you know, this hypervigilance that I had, these noises that I heard that weren't there. Right? Like all of these things. Oh, yeah. And so for a long time, I didn't get the resources and the help, you know, that I needed. um so going back to your initial question gradiosity yeah right is i can now look at that experience and say i'm grateful that happened yeah i wouldn't want to do it again and i wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy how do you reframe that into being grateful for it yeah i reframe that there's some other things that happened that sort of make the story a bit more horrific and traumatic but we'll skip over those.

38:20Gary Brecka:It continued. It does. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But here's the way I look at it. That was a seminal challenge, right? Or like a, like a core experience or a core memory that actually set me on the track to say, I need to understand how to deal with challenge because this is way too overwhelming for me as a 14, 15, 16, 17 year old. Oh, for sure. kid, right? If that wouldn't have happened, I wouldn't have written that book. If that wouldn't have happened, maybe you and I wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation today, you know? And so I live a life that I love. I have children that I love.

39:05I have a partner that I love. And I think so often when we experience hard things, we want to decouple those hard things from the good things in our lives. And I just don't think that we can do that.

39:18Gary Brecka:Right. Right? So I look at that experience and I say, I wouldn't want to do it again. Right. Right? I wouldn't want someone else to have to go through it. But I'm grateful that I did. And I'm grateful that I can now tell the story generously. Right? That's the other part of gradiosity is the generosity of sharing our experiences. The generosity of sharing our experiences is leaning into vulnerability because I also can't tell you how many people have reached out to me and said, thank you for sharing your story. To know what you've accomplished after what happened to you gives me hope for my own situation, for my daughter's situation, for my son's situation, for my family member, for my friend.

40:05And so that gratitude comes from the sense of like, that also took me on this journey to doing this great work that's so meaningful to me that may not have otherwise happened.

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40:53Gary Brecka:And this is, is this why you say that this perseverance, this possibility is, as you call it, bouncing forward, not bouncing back from something. Yeah. And, you know, it's really interesting. As I think about the way that you're describing that story and how you're drawing it into some of your successes in life, it probably is very helpful to people to go back to these experiences that they have. And that's a pretty grave one. And I imagine the story gets much darker. But to, you know, like my friend, Dr. Rewire, you know, to reframe that so that it doesn't wash that experience away. It doesn't just say, I'm going to pretend like this never happened.

41:42Gary Brecka:But what it does is it allows you to move forward because now you have a reframing of this experience. I'd love to just zoom out for a minute and just kind of land all of this, right? Because you've got an amazing granular explanation of why vulnerability is important. Connection is important. What does this look like in a practical person's life? What are some practices that they could do to draw their awareness to this? Aside from read the book, and I'm sure a lot of people are going to read the book and I will put links to it in the show notes. But what is it? What is a practice of somebody who's living this kind of life?

42:22Gary Brecka:Because every single one of us has junk. That's right. It's in the trunk. Yeah. And not the backyard. Not the good kind. Just baggage. Yeah. So what are some practical things that we can do? What are some practices that you think people can engage in? I'll give you some evidence-based practices, and then I'll also give you some other things that I think I have found anecdotally to be really helpful, but I don't know how much evidence is behind them. Let's start with evidence-based. I'm a big believer in simple is powerful. And so let's go back to for a moment, if you're grappling with some element of anxiety or depression, whether you're meeting some diagnostic criteria or not, or PTSD, all of us get in a moment where we have this kind of overwhelming sense of, I'll call it diffuse emotion.

43:19I know I'm feeling bad. There's so much evidence actually behind taking a step back and naming that emotion or those emotions. Just getting out of the sort of amorphous, I feel bad, and thinking about what am I feeling? Am I feeling disappointed? Am I feeling anxious? Am I feeling scared? Am I feeling unsafe? Am I feeling a sense of being on edge, like something bad's gonna happen, right? Like just being able to label those emotions actually reduces the sort of power of that emotional valence in a really significant way psychologically. There's tons of research on this. Yeah.

44:12Gary Brecka:Naming it. Naming it, right? Just naming the emotion, right? And what does that allow you to do? It allows you to kind of diffuse it a little bit and say, yeah, I'm feeling guilt. I noticed, for example, my wife, when she has, you're a mother of five in a blended family. I'm a father of four in a blended family, which comes with its own complexities. And I won't say challenges because I love every single day of it. I have three children of my own. I have another from my most recent marriage to Sage, just as much of a daughter as my own kids or sons and daughters. Yeah. But I notice that sometimes when my wife and her daughter interact and she has to be a disciplinarian, then she feels this massive load of guilt and it makes her sad.

45:03Gary Brecka:And I wonder if reframing that to identify those emotions would really help her deal with that. Yes. Yes. I love where you're going with this. Yeah. So the first step, so reframing, I would say, is a second step that we can take. the first step is, what am I feeling? Right? And I think so many people are really afraid to ask themselves that question. Why? Because I think we've been taught that our emotions are dangerous. Yeah. You know? Oh, yeah. That's what can cause harm is my emotions, not the issue. That's right. My reaction to the issue. Yeah. Like, what if I reach in there and find that I'm angry?

45:44Gary Brecka:Yeah. What am I going to do with that? Right? And so recognizing that our emotions are just information. They can't hurt us, you know, but what happens is emotions are like one faucet, you know, it's either on or off. So if we blunt all of our emotions, we can't feel the good emotions, the happiness, the joy, right? And we also protect ourselves from sadness and anger. So finding a way to kind of turn that Fossen back on starts with being able to name what is the experience that I'm having in this moment. Okay, so then we'll use Sage as an example. Thank you, Sage, for generously. Oh, yeah, I throw Sage under the bus all the time.

46:29Gary Brecka:I mean, her stuff is on the street. you know, hormones or emotions, like poor wife of a biohacker, you know? Right. And, and, you know, I'll just say like, I've felt that exact same feeling, right? Like my son didn't do all of his laundry one time and I'd gotten him these new clothes and he wanted to wear the new clothes. And I just sit down with him and be like, look, you said you were going to do all of your laundry and put it away at the end of the weekend. That was the end of the weekend. You haven't done it. So I can't let you wear the new clothes because you haven't taken care of what you have.

46:55And, and it was like, there were tears, right? And there were his tears and my tears.

46:59Gary Brecka:Because now you feel bad because he feels bad. Exactly. And it's like, oh, did I go too hard? And as a parent, did I do the right thing? And I'm not, you know, it's the uncertainty of all of it, right? And so if we say in that moment, okay, I'm feeling guilt. I'm feeling fear that maybe I didn't do the right thing. Maybe I came down too hard. Maybe I've irreparably damaged the relationship, you know, that we have. Like all those things that we feel as parents, right? And then I think we can go to kind of like the restorative practices, right? So one of the restorative practices that you mentioned is reframing, right?

47:39And to say, how could I reframe that experience from guilt to something else? What are the other ways that I could think about this? Well, I could think that I'm being assertive. I could think that I'm being kind because I'm creating clarity. and not allowing the child to just get away with something.

48:02Gary Brecka:Right. You know, that actually because we had that tough conversation and we were very honest about the issue, that that's ultimately going to bring us closer, not drive us farther apart, right? So there's lots of ways that we can then say, okay, reframing as one tool to be a restorative practice to say, how can I think about this differently? I love that. I think what you're doing in a sense is returning power back to us. Because I think, especially with trauma, people feel powerless. Because once something has happened, you can't make it unhappen. That's right. So your choices are cope with it, get stronger, bury it, avoid it, or lean into it.

48:48Yeah.

48:49Gary Brecka:Embrace it, reframe it, so it has less power over you. Is that kind of a good, because I think experiences in trauma has too much power over us. That's right. Right? Yeah. And yet we don't have the tools to reduce its grip on us. And I think someone with your background, I want to go back to your original work where, you know, the spark that lit this whole flame for you. these people that were recovering from these brain injuries. Did some of what you are preaching now, some of what is in the book, did you realize you were applying it back then? Or did you realize people that were missing these back then were not doing as well in the recovery phase?

49:34Yes, absolutely. What we did, you know, sort of kind of, I love this bookend, right? Is we actually used that study that we did. And again, I don't think we use the word resilience, but it was very much about like, what are the things that add resilience or detract?

49:49Gary Brecka:Is this published? Is this something I could link? Okay, great. I'll do that. I'll find it for you. Okay, great. And so, oh, I lost my train of thought. Okay, so we did this study, right? And so then we were like, okay, in academics, let's make a program. Let's make a program to give people the tools, right, that are going to make an appreciable difference in their recovery as the person who sustained the injury, but also for the identified caregiver or caregivers, right? And so what we actually did was create a 10-week program. And we sat down with families for two hours for five sessions. And there was a week or so between each session.

50:32So over the course of 10 weeks, you've got five two-hour sessions. They've got homework. And we're actually teaching skills. One of the things that we talk about in psychology is psychoeducation. So psychoeducation means if you're experiencing depression, I'm going to teach you about depression. If you're experiencing anxiety, I'm going to teach you about anxiety, right? So you are kind of armed with this information to know what you're dealing with. If you have a brain injury, I'm going to teach you about your brain injury, right? And if you have an injury, say, in your left temporal lobe, that is most likely to affect your speech and language center, right?

51:07So we're going to teach you about why are you having trouble speaking, forming words, remembering words, communicating, right? Whereas if you have a brain injury here in your prefrontal cortex, that's our executive functioning, as you know, right? You're going to have trouble planning, organizing, managing time. You might do things that are abrupt or spontaneous. So we're going to teach people about their brain injury. But then we also took specific skills around communication, managing anxiety and depression, which are two common things that people experience, both the person that had the injury and the caregivers.

51:43And so we also gave them the tools to be able to navigate those things. And the outcomes were incredible, by the way.

51:50Gary Brecka:What were some of those tools? Because I think, you know, for example, I'm a big fan of breathwork, of grounding, of walking, you know, getting out into sunlight. You know, there are whole Eastern philosophies of medicine that have been using forest bathing and things for centuries. I find that a good brisk walk outside will solve just about anything. You know, just when you're in a really tense moment or you're just really tired after lunch or you just feel like you're completely overwhelmed. And when you're overwhelmed, your normal response is to bury yourself more in the task, to get these emails out of my inbox, return all these phone calls.

52:32Gary Brecka:But sometimes, you know, I just give people the grace to say, it's okay to take a break and grab a bottle of water and just go out for a 10 minute walk to nowhere and come back. What were some of those tools that you gave to these families? Yeah, absolutely. And that you would recommend today? Yeah. So a couple of things that I think about that, you know, would have like a sort of a broader applicability. One is we worked with caregivers a lot on how they could make themselves a priority, you know? And I think that, like I said, has broader applicability, right? Beyond just, you know, sort of pure caregiving.

53:12One of the things that I talk about in the book, specifically for women, is we're sort of given two choices. You can either be selfish or you can be selfless. Neither are very good, right? Like, no one wants to be identified as a selfish person, right? A lot of times we give women compliments that like, you're so selfless, right? What does that really mean when we think about that, Gary? It means that I've sort of disappeared into my environment. I don't have needs. I don't have wants. I don't have an identity. I'm just giving it all away. And over time, what that means is I'm not attending to the connection and the relationship that I have with myself.

53:59And so what we attempted to give caregivers, and I think what's important for all of us, is to think about a third way. You know, I love the third way. And it's, what if we could be self-full? What if - Are you making up a second word?

54:15Gary Brecka:Because I already gave you one word. That's true. Yeah. Did I meet my word makeup quota for this show? I might have to come back next time. Yeah. So, so we have self-ful, right? And I talk about this in the book. So when we think about how rampant burnout is, exhaustion, overwhelm, there's not a single person, and this is so important, that has experienced burnout, exhaustion, or overwhelm that hasn't first lost the connection to themselves, right? The definition of burnout, exhaustion, and overwhelm is like we've pushed beyond the boundaries of what is mentally or physically possible for us. And so when we maintain that connection, when we become self-full, it's like how do I fill my cup up so that I can then go on to be the best version of myself, not only for me, but also for the other people in my life.

55:15Gary Brecka:Yeah, that is so empowering, I think is the word. I think, you know, first of all, I would recommend that everybody read the book. I love that there are practical steps in there to walk people out of these things. I think, you know, it's back to that old adage that, you know, I mean, you put your own oxygen mask on before you even assist your own child, like maybe going inward and getting back to the relationship you have with yourself. And, you know, I'd love to just touch on that point for a moment because I think it brings all of this together. What are some ways that people can get back in touch with who they are, right?

55:58Gary Brecka:Because, you know, we know that connection is important and we call it a sense of purpose, you know, which leads people to be very passionate. What are some exercises? Are they quiet breathing? Is it mindful meditation? Journaling? What are some ways that they can actually get back in touch with themselves and build that connection with themselves? Yeah, I love this question. And I also love how you talked about the oxygen mask. I think that's still so powerful for people today. I want to add an additional metaphor to that before I talk about some of the strategies, which I think you're going to like.

56:32Gary Brecka:Okay, I love them already. Yeah. So we talked about earlier before the show sort of the heart, right, and that it only like kind of pumps like 30 % of blood through the body. And so when the blood comes into the four chambers of the heart, right, and the heart like reoxygenates that blood, where does it pump the blood first? Pop quiz. You want that medical question? It goes first to the lung. It goes right oracle, ventricle, lung, left oracle, ventricle, body. Yeah. So I've had a lot of physicians tell me that the heart gives itself the oxygenated blood first. Yes. Right? That is absolutely true.

57:11Gary Brecka:It goes first to the heart. What about that metaphor? The heart that supports our entire body? I mean, isn't this a beautiful physiological metaphor? It really is. That's a great point. Right? Oxygenated blood coming back from the lung first to the heart. Right. You're right. Because if the heart doesn't work, nothing works. Wow. Right? So the heart gives itself the oxygenated blood first. So then we can think about in our lives, how do I give myself that oxygen first to make myself sustainable? Okay, so how do we do that? How do we get sort of in touch with ourselves, back in touch with ourselves, right?

57:48I think what we get to do each day is we get to ask ourselves three questions, right? The first question is, what brings me joy? It could be a different answer every day. It doesn't have to be something big. It could be I saw these beautiful puffy clouds on the horizon. I saw the sun glinting off the water. What's bringing me joy today? Right? Question number one. Question number two, what am I most looking forward to? Right? This is really powerful because anyone who has anxiety or depression or has experienced trauma is oftentimes either stuck in the present, you know, feeling like a catastrophe may happen at any moment or is looking back in the past.

58:36So when we ask ourselves, what am I most looking forward to? It takes us into that future valence and allows us to imagine what's that positive thing that I'm going to do next.

58:47Gary Brecka:Wow. Yeah? I love that. Thank you. And then the third question that we get to ask ourselves is, what would it look like for me to be the best version of myself today? Oh, I like that too. Yeah. because that also helps to set your priorities. And I think a lot of times we set goals and then goal kind of sits out there in the not so distant future, but it's not in our face. So we don't do something for it every single day. Yeah. But say that last one again. What would it look like for me to show up as the best version of myself today? That would be awesome. I mean, I almost think I can see myself writing these three questions in a journal and just hitting those each morning.

59:38Gary Brecka:I have a short little practice of gratitude that I do in the mornings. I used to think that was just complete voodoo nonsense. I used to also think grounding and breathwork was nonsense. But, and I would say that - But here we are. Yeah, but here we are. You know, I built an empire in breathwork and grounding. But it really has, you know, for me, the fact that it's portable, but I don't actually ever go in and sort of reframe my thoughts or set that intention for my day. I'm going to do it and let you know how it goes. I would love that. And maybe we'll make up a third word on our own. I like that.

1:00:14I like that. It's high time you and I developed some more vocabulary words. Yes. I see this partnership very clearly. Yeah.

1:00:23Gary Brecka:If you know me, you know, I don't recommend anything I haven't personally tested. That's not a marketing line. That's just how I operate. I've been on the road my entire career, different time zones, brutal schedules, no margin for days off. And so I'm constantly testing what actually works in my own body. NAD was something I keep coming back to. It's the molecule your cells use to produce energy and repair, and it declines faster than most people realize. When I found Symbiotica's liposomal NAD, the absorption technology is what got my attention. I tested it. I felt it. And it's been in my bag ever since.

1:00:54Gary Brecka:I'm always evolving what I put in my body, and this one has stayed on the list. I'm genuinely excited for you to experience it. This is the standard we hold every product to before it even reaches you. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. No, but I think these are so helpful. They're so practical. And every guest I've had on, I get little pieces of life advice. My Navy SEAL just told me to prepare my socks, my shorts, and my workout shirt with my shoes before I go to bed. Let me tell you what, that has saved me 20 minutes, six days a week, every day since he's been on this podcast.

1:01:32Gary Brecka:And thank you, DJ Shipley. But this is something that's easy, practical, can be done in the quiet of, this is just you with yourself. That's right. Where you don't, I mean, you probably have less of a tendency to put on that facade because I'm not trying to give the answer to you and hope that you like it. It's just, this is me with myself. I really do like that. Thank you. And what I'll just add on to that briefly is these are not invasive questions. You know, a lot of people say, I don't want to journal because I don't want to ask myself hard questions, you know, or I'm not good at journaling.

1:02:09I ask people like, how can you not be good at journaling? They're like, well, I don't do it every day. Well, you don't have to do it every day. Do what you feel like doing it, you know? So these are all questions that I think inform, like get us back in connection with who we are. but it's not like what gnarly thing happened in childhood that i've got to unpack right now

1:02:27Gary Brecka:yeah every day going into the pain joe dispensa talks about that yeah the vast majority of us wake up and we're not even present we think about the last like traumatic event that happened argument we had with our spouse yesterday a business deal that went sideways so we wake up in the past and we're already framing our day based on what's behind us i've got to tell you something and I want you to just kind of track the conversations that you're in and just see what you notice. We are so primed to think about what could go wrong or the horrible thing. So I've noticed this in like dinner parties and our family conversations, right?

1:03:05You say anything like pizza delivery guy, right? And I can almost set my watch to it. Somebody will be like, oh, I knew a pizza delivery guy in my hometown and he went to this house and things went terribly wrong and it was like a horrible like double homicide or whatever you know and it's like wow we just went from like pizza delivery guy to double homicide in like 10 seconds you know so we're so primed to like think about the worst thing and having that awareness of like how can I pull myself out of that and really be a good steward of my own mindset and that connection that I have with myself I think

1:03:44Gary Brecka:we're just primed to it's threat avoidance you know um uh there's there's even some evidence around horizon gazing and and scanning your horizon to really calm the nervous system and feel like you're not stressed that actually comes from emdr do you know that i did not know that yeah so emdr do you know that practice we'll unpack it another time uh but essentially it It has a ton of evidence behind it in terms of treating trauma. And it's about engaging both sides of the cerebral hemisphere to process trauma. So it's often done with either the eye movement going back and forth, so scanning the horizon, or it can be done with tapping to engage the alternating sides of the cerebral hemisphere.

1:04:33but what you do is you have talk therapy and you do emdr at the same time and that actually helps people reintegrate their traumatic uh experiences by engaging both halves of the brain and the traumatic memories don't get caught somewhere in processing ah and they're also not so prevalent

1:04:50Gary Brecka:exactly okay that makes that makes a lot of sense to me i do when i do my breath work when i do my breath holds i gaze out on you know i'm on the 21st floor of a condo and and so the horizon i look out over the water horizon, I just pick a point as far out as I can see. And while I'm holding my breath, I just look out there and then I'll just gaze left and right. And it does seem to very much be a calming exercise. There is a tremendous amount of research evidence behind this. I am happy to hear that. Yeah. I'm onto something. You really are. Yeah. I thought I was just scanning around the place.

1:05:25Gary Brecka:Add this to your protocols. Yeah. You know, Wim Hof was the one that told me about that, but I've been doing it for years. And if I miss my breathwork session in the morning, I can feel it. It's almost like missing a cold plunge. Like I can feel it almost the rest of the day. Sometimes I'll just go out later and do it. Wow. This has been really, really helpful and amazing. And I'm sure my audience is going to be very engaged with this book. If my audience wants to find you, where do they find you? Yeah. How do they find out more about your work? Absolutely. So I think a lot of people show up in our lives on Instagram and in our LinkedIn accounts.

1:06:05My Instagram is Dr. Taryn Marie. Taryn Marie.

1:06:10Gary Brecka:See, you don't have to deal with this day's goal. No, no, we keep that off to the side as much as we can. That's pesky silent J and all that stuff, right? You know, we've got the book, we've got the Resilience Leadership Institute, which are all really exciting. And I think, you know, this is really a great conversation for, you know, the two of us and for those people in our communities that want to think about the integration of both the physiology and the mindset element to be able to, say, amplify resilience. You know, I think that's the really exciting integration with where we are in the forefront of all of this.

1:06:56It's like we're optimizing our physiology, you know, with all the things we talked about, peptides and cold plunge and all that stuff. How do we also optimize our mindset along with that, right, and to really amplify our resilience? So that's the conversation that I think is really exciting that we're having here today. And for people that want to continue in that vein, finding me on Instagram or LinkedIn or the Resilience Leadership Institute is a great place to do that.

1:07:24Gary Brecka:Perfect. I'll put all of that in the show notes. And I wind down all my podcasts by asking all my guests the same question. I can't wait for your answer. Oh, my gosh. There's no right or wrong answer to this question. Aerosmith. Aerosmith was my first concert. Yeah. Yeah. It's not going to be your favorite band. It's deeper than that. All right. What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? You know, there's a writer that I love, Maria Rainer Rilke. Do you know his things?

1:08:02and one of my favorite quotes from him he talks about that life the purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things wow purpose of life is to be defeated

1:08:19Gary Brecka:by greater and greater things that's right and so what does that mean it means we're up-leveling a bit, you know, each day, each week, each month. So for me to be an ultimate human, I think it's connected with what Rilke said, which is to be defeated by greater and greater things, you know, to find greater and greater opponents, whether that's health, whether that's fear, whether that's pushing ourselves into our potential or our possibility and really living at that growth edge of like, we might fail. We might be defeated, right? But that's how we know that we're really working at the top of our capacity.

1:09:08Gary Brecka:Yeah. And you feel alive in those moments. Yeah. Yeah. I even think about going back to the grind when we first started building our business. And sometimes I kind of miss the grind. Oh, everybody misses the grind. Like the real grind. Yes. I mean, I'm still on the grind, but like four people in a hotel room, middle seats on Frontier Airlines, red-eye flights, like, you know, trying to just build your business and get your word out there. And it's like, you're the most alive because it was survival. You had to pay the bills and this had to work out. And I think there's just a certain sense of like really feeling connected and alive in those times.

1:09:47It's all of the passion and all of the vision without the evidence that what you think can be will actually exist. And it's very courageous to be in that moment, to be creating something and believing in something before we have evidence right in this moment that that can actually exist. And so therefore, when we look back on those times, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's awful. It's, it's exhausting. It's, you know, we, we maxed out our

1:10:25Gary Brecka:cortisol levels, you know, on the regular, but then we go back and we say like, how courageous was it? Like that was the grind. That was the hope. That was the like wish and a prayer before I knew any of this could be. Yeah. Well, Dr. Stasekow, this has been absolutely amazing. I hope you'll come back on the Ultimate Human podcast. My VIPs have some great questions for you. They've been waiting for you. I can't wait to get into those questions. If you're interested in becoming a VIP, you can go over to theultimatehuman.com forward slash VIP and you can join our private podcast. I hope that you enjoyed today's podcast with Dr.

1:11:03Gary Brecka:Stasekow. I will put all of what you discussed linked into the show notes. And until next time, that's just science.