The Truth About Fear & Why You’ve Got It All Wrong with Akshay Nanavati
In this episode, we show you how to turn your fear into health, wealth, and happiness. If you want something you’ve never had before, you have to do something you’ve never done before. That means suffering and taking risks. Building a positive relationship with suffering is one of the most important life skills you can master. Suffering is the true training ground of self-transcendence. With our guest Akshay Nanavati we show you how to choose your struggle and build meaningful suffering into your life.
Akshay Nanavati is a Marine Corps Veteran, speaker, adventurer, entrepreneur and author of "Fearvana: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear into Health, Wealth and Happiness." He is also the founder of the nonprofit, the Fearvana Foundation. His work has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, entrepreneur.com, CNN, Huffington Post, Military Times, FOX 5 NY, ABC, NBC and other media outlets around the globe.
From drug addiction to marine corps Bootcamp - to hunting for bombs in Iraq - how Akshay learned to deal with fear
The toughest battle Akshay had to fight was coming home - dealing with PTSD and suicidal thoughts
We live in a world that demonizes stress, anxiety, fear, pain and suffering - and yet in the psychology and neuroscience research shows us that our emotions are normal and inevitable
We don’t live in a world of life-threatening risks anymore, and so our brain creates these risks
There are no bad or good emotions, there are only emotions
Fear is not the problem, its the fear of fear
No emotions are good or bad - we assign and create the meaning via our beliefs
Humans are meaning-making machines - we naturally create meaning out of everything
Your problem is that you are waiting for the fear to go away.
What you are labeling yourself can powerfully shape your experiences. Typical behaviors like “depression” “PTSD” etc are just brain patterns, and they can be re-written using “Top-Down Neuroplasticity”
Don’t wait for the fear to go away, act despite the fear.. or once you learn to train yourself.. BECAUSE of the fear
The best things in life come from struggle.
The struggle is neurologically required for growth.
Building a positive relationship to suffering is the single most important skill to master.
“Hebbs Law” - neurons that fire together, wire together
London taxi drivers have a physically larger brain memory structure in their brain because of their need to know the complex back streets of London
There is a war in your brain for neuronal real estate - use it or lose it.
Should you try to SEEK Suffering instead of AVOID suffering?
"There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” - Dr. Carl Jung
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Dr. Carl Jung
You are not weak when you feel fear.
Visualize yourself in the process of going through the struggle, the suffering, the tough part of your goals - not the easy parts at the end.
You have to “put yourself into the suck."
There is tremendous beauty in pushing through and into your fears.
Adversity and struggle are both inevitable and desirable
Don’t wait for the fear, seek it out, train in it.
Everything worthwhile is hard, and you have to train yourself to fall in love with suffering. Fall in love with the process.
Be with what is, but don’t be what is.
“Suffering is a training ground for self-transcendence”
You cannot get better at something without doing it.
Train yourself “in suffering”
Exercise is a “miracle grow for your brain.” If you could put all the benefits of exercise into a pill, it would be the best selling pill of all time.
There is bliss in pain. There is tremendous bliss in pain.
If you want something you’ve never had before, you have to do something you’ve never done before. That means suffering and taking a risk.
If you don’t proactively search out a proactive worthy challenge - something to struggle and suffer for in your life - then suffering will find you anyway.
Don’t follow your passion, find your "worthy struggle."
Stop looking for quick gratification, push yourself into a worthy struggle and commit entirely to it.
“I like the pain that is necessary to be a champion.” - Arnold Schwartz
You don’t discover a passion you develop a passion.
You have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations to develop your passion.
Train yourself in the journey, love the journey - but it’s not a journey its the STRUGGLE that really matters.
You only evolve when you suffer. That’s why lottery winners typically lose their winnings. When you struggle for it, you become a different person.
“There is no finish line"
Progress is not the elimination of problems, the problem is the creation of new problems. Learn to fall in love with problems.
The greater the struggle, the greater the evolution. Call forth more suffering.
Once you push into fear, you will find your nirvana on the other side.
Bliss is on the other side of fear.
Stillness is so important in today’s distracted world.
Homework: Find one little thing to test yourself. Do a little thing to push yourself outside your comfort zone. Don’t just do it, come back and reflect on it. Journal about it.
“The Action-Awareness Cycle” - Take action, and then come back and reflect on it.
Thank you so much for listening!
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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research
General
Media
Fearvana Media Directory
Mark Pattison - “Finding Nirvana by Embracing Fear, with Akshay Nanavati” By Mark P
Bloomberg (Travel Genius) - “How Many Push-ups Should You Do on a Plane?” By Mark Ellwood and Nikki Ekstein
Thrive Global - “Why Failure Is Necessary To Evolution” By Apoorva Mittal
Entrepreneur - “6 Lessons This Marine Veteran Learned Overcoming PTSD, Alcoholism and Suicidal Thoughts to Build a Successful Business” by Akshay Nanavati
Forbes - “Fearvana: How Millennials Are Using Fear As A Gateway To Bliss” by Jules Schroeder
Your First 10k Readers - “HOW TO CONNECT WITH INFLUENCERS, GET FEATURED ON MAJOR MEDIA, AND REACH MILLIONS ACROSS THE GLOBE” by Nick Stephenson
Chris Guillebeau Interview - “FROM PTSD TO “FEARVANA”: AKSHAY NANAVATI’S QUEST TO RUN ACROSS EVERY COUNTRY”
Inc - “The Marine, the Dalai Lama, Overcoming PTSD, and Overcoming Fear” By Joshua Spodek
[Podcast] Mindfulness Mode - 359 Turn Fear into Health, Wealth and Happiness; Fearvana Author Akshay Nanavati
[Podcast] Jordan Harbinger - 289: Akshay Nanavati | Fearvana: Finding Bliss from Suffering
[Podcast] Finding Mastery - AKSHAY NANAVATI, MARINE CORPS VETERAN - FINDING MASTERY 176
[Podcast] Superhuman Academy - THE NEUROSCIENCE OF FEAR & HOW TO CHANNEL IT FOR GOOD W/ AKSHAY NANAVATI
Videos
Fearvana YouTube Channel
INKtalks - Akshay Nanavati: Find strength in fear
Abel James - Akshay Nanavati: Fearvana, One Trick To Break Any Habit & Why He’s Running Across the World
Knowledge for Men - Akshay Nanavati: Existing to Living
Thai Nguyen - Meet Akshay Nanavati | Marine Corps Veteran Conquering Every Country...On Foot.
The New Man - How to Fall in Love with Fear | Akshay Nanavati Fearvana | Interviewed by Tripp Lanier
Wysa - Live Q&A: Akshay Nanavati and Chaitali talk about PTSD
Hustle Island - How To Deal With Fear as an Entrepreneur with Fearvana's Akshay Nanavati
Books
FEARVANA: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear into Health, Wealth and Happiness by Akshay Nanavati
Misc
[SoS Episode] The Hidden Brain Science That Will Unlock Your True Potential with Daniel Coyle
[Book] Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.
[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than four million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.
In this episode, we show you how to turn your fear into health, wealth and happiness. If you want something you've never had before, you have to do something you've never done before. That means suffering and taking risk. Building a positive relationship to suffering is one of the most important life skills that you can master. Suffering is the true training ground for self-transcendence. With our guest, Akshay Nanavati, we show you how to choose your own struggle and build meaningful suffering into your life.
Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.
In our previous episode, we discussed how to get started building your network and traffic online. We learn exactly how to build an audience from scratch, shared insider lessons from the best content marketing approaches, talked about how to get your content to go viral and uncover a mind-blowing Facebook advertising strategy and showed you why e-mail is one of the most important marketing channels with our previous guest, Joe Fier. If you want to build an audience from scratch, check out our previous episode.
Now, for our interview with Akshay.
[0:02:08.6] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Akshay Nanavati. Akshay is a Marine Corps veteran, speaker, adventurer, entrepreneur and author of Fearvana: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear Into Health, Wealth and Happpiness. He's also the founder of the non-profit, the Fearvana Foundation. His work has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, CNN and many, many more media outlets. Akshay, welcome to the Science of Success.
[0:02:34.5] AN: Thank you so much for having me here, Matt. It's a real pleasure and honor.
[0:02:37.9] MB: Well, we're so excited to have you on the show today. I love your work and all this stuff you talk about. I also really like that you have the word adventurer in your bio. That's just a really cool line. I think everybody wants to be an adventurer, or at least in my – I definitely want to be an adventurer.
[0:02:52.1] AN: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing for sure.
[0:02:54.2] MB: That's great. I'd love to start out with before we dig into a lot of the science and the research and the strategies around how to turn fear into health, wealth and happiness, I want to start with your personal story and how you got on this journey.
[0:03:10.9] AN: Yeah. It's been a long road to get to this point now with all the work that I do with Fearvana. The journey to Fearvana began when I moved to the US at about the age of 13. I moved from India and Singapore. Soon after moving here, I got very heavily into drugs. I lost two friends to drug addiction.
I was in a pretty dark space. I used to cut my own arm. I still have scars on my arm from cutting myself and burning myself. I did many things that sometimes I wonder how I made it out alive and thankfully, I did. I was heading down that path with just my two friends that I lost. Thankfully, my life changed after watching the movie Black Hawk Down. I don't know. Have you ever seen that movie, Matt?
[0:03:48.7] MB: Yeah, definitely. It's an awesome movie.
[0:03:50.4] AN: Yeah, very powerful movie, right? Watching that movie was a trigger that changed my life almost overnight. Stop doing drugs, join the Marines, despite two doctors telling me that boot camp would kill me, because of a blood disorder I was born with.
Obviously, I survived. Through the Marines, I started to find the beauty in adversity, the beauty in challenging myself and exploring really the limitlessness of the human potential. I started doing other things, like mountain climbing, cave diving, skydiving, ice climbing, I mean, you name it. Nature became my playground to push myself and test myself.
Then in 2007, I was deployed to Iraq as an infantry marine, where one of my jobs out there was to walk in front of vehicles looking for bombs before they could be used to kill me and my fellow Marines. Pretty dangerous job as you might imagine, but it taught me a lot, once again on navigating the experience of fear and having to deal with it. I then ultimately thrived in the experience of war.
My toughest battle really was after coming home. I struggled with PTSD, depression, alcoholism. I was on the brink of suicide. I was at a point in my life that I just binged drink just liters of vodka a day, until one morning I actually pictured myself walking over the kitchen picking up a knife and slitting my own wrists. That was a very dark moment in my life. That was the trigger to changing everything.
After that is when I started researching neuroscience, psychology, spirituality. Initially, it was just to heal myself, but it led me on this far more meaningful quest to figure out how do we collectively navigate human suffering, because obviously I'm not the only person who suffered, right? I spent years researching, reading books and just really delving deep into the subject. Then eventually, led me to Fearvana and everything that I do now with the book and the whole line of work and everything I do around this concept and this ethos of Fearvana.
[0:05:28.5] MB: Such a powerful story. I'm so thankful. I know the listeners will be thankful too that you made it through that tough struggle. Now you're on this mission to help people and help people understand fear and what it really is and the power that can come with fear. Tell me more about that.
[0:05:53.1] AN: Yeah. As I started researching and started learning to heal myself, I realized one thing just a real life experience that everything worthwhile I had done, had been absolutely terrifying and extremely hard. Yet, we live in a world that demonizes things like fear, stress, anxiety, pain, suffering, adversity. When people hear these words, nobody thinks of them as positive words, right? We don't frame them as positive emotions, positive experiences. We demonize them.
Yet in all my research – my life experience validated this. As I started researching, I came to learn that neuroscience and psychology, even in spirituality, all validate that we don't control what first shows up in our brain. They've done really, really fascinating studies with neuroscience that will show that they can actually register – they can find in someone's brain and that they've done – they can register in their subconscious, they've done an action before they actually consciously do that action.
If I pick up a glass of water next to me, it's registered in my brain before I physically do it. Spirituality is showing the same thing. Even if you think about it just logically, I mean, if I'm sitting in a room right now, right? Somebody walks in here with a gun, I'm not choosing to feel fear. Fear just shows up as an automated response, as a reaction to this external stimuli, because that's a normal reaction to a life-threatening risk. The reality is we don't live in a world of life-threatening risks anymore. We create these risks. Our brain is not designed for this world.
As I was researching this, I realized that the problem was not this fear, this stress, this anxiety, it was the demonization of this. Even post-traumatic stress disorder, for example. When I was diagnosed, they told me that I have PTSD, because I struggled with things like survivor's guilt. I lost a friend in the war and I always felt it should have been me that died instead of him. I was jumpy with loud noises. I didn't like crowds. They told me that these were symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
As I was doing all this research, I realized that being jumpy when there's loud noises is just a normal human response to war. My brain learned to say that loud noises equals death, so inevitably after the war, I was just a little bit more hyper vigilant than everybody else who hadn't had that life experience and that experience at being in war. I stopped labeling a disorder and I came to realize that the symptoms of post-traumatic stress are not indicative of a disorder. By separating myself from that self-identity, that label of disorder, I could ultimately create a new one.
That's how I stopped demonizing any of these emotions and came to realize that there are no bad or good emotions, there are only emotions, and it's up to us to decide what we do with them. So much research has even shown this. They've done studies, for example with students taking a math test. They showed that people had equally high – a bunch of groups of students had equally high levels of cortisol, which is the stress hormone, but the students who performed well were those who believed that they weren't anxious as a result of math. The other students who performed poorly said that they were – “I get anxious at math.”
It wasn't the cortisol and the stress levels that was a problem, it was their belief about stress. That's the real thing. Fear is not the problem. It's the fear of fear. It's the same thing with stress. Stress is not the problem, it's the stressing out over stress. That's how I learned to find value in all these emotions. Even my post-traumatic stress, so just as a practical example, what I did was I found meaning in my survivor's guilt. I put a poster up of my friend that I lost in the war and it said, “This should have been you. Earn this life.” The guilt never went away. I just learned how to use it, as I did with all these “negative emotions.”
[0:09:08.7] MB: Wow. That literally gave me goosebumps. Such a powerful message. The point that you made that there's no good or bad emotions, we assign and create the meaning of our emotions largely through the filter of our beliefs. Explain that to me more.
[0:09:28.7] AN: Sure. Yeah, we create a meanings to everything. We're meaning seeking creatures. There's a great researcher named Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, something like – I forget how to say his last name, but Gazzaniga, something like that. Amazing research he's done to show how we're all meaning seeking creatures. Even if there's parts of our brain missing that we're actually not able to create meaning, we'll find meaning anyway. We'll create meanings. We're doing that to external stimuli and we do that to the internal stimuli off our emotions as well.
As a tangible example of this, when I went rock climbing with somebody, she felt really scared. She felt terrified of the climb. Climbed anyway. We got to the top. Came back down. The problem was not her fear. After coming back from the climb, she said to herself things like, “Why was I scared and you weren't?” I wasn't scared on this particular climb. For me, it was easy. Now not because I was braver than her, but because my brain had created a relationship to these experiences that said these things aren't scary, these things aren't a risk, so that doesn't warrant the experience of fear anymore.
She created a meaning saying, “I'm scared, means I'm weak. If I'm scared of this and you weren't, then how will I write my book? How will I be successful? How will I build a business, because I'm scared of everything, right?”
I worked with another student of mine who said, “I'm just waiting for the fear to go away, so I can quit my job and start my business.” I said to him, “That’s your problem. You're waiting for the fear to go away,” but he believed he should be fearless, because we hear those things all the time. We assign meanings to our emotions and that is the real problem. In spirituality, Buddha said that we're all stabbed by the two darts of suffering. I call the second dart, syndrome. The first start is the one we don't control. It's if I stub my toe against a door, the first dart is the pain. Or if I'm sitting in this room and somebody comes in here with a gun, the first dart is the fear. I'm not choosing that. It happens as a neurological and psychological response to external stimuli.
The second dart is when I start saying things like, “I'm scared, because I'm weak, or my toe hurts. This door is stupid. Bad things only happened to me. Why does God hate me?” The self-dialog, we go into as a response to the emotions. I've seen this with people from all walks of life, people from struggling with depression, anxiety, PTSD.
I had one person I worked with who is labeled with the depression by a therapist. She started saying things to herself like, “I am depressed. I have depression.” It became her self-identity. Instead of saying things like, “My brain goes to a state of depression from time to time, but I'm not my brain and my brain is not me.” We are not our brain patterns, right? We are not those neurological patterns that we don't even control. They're wired into us as a result of everything that's happened in our lives. That's why I never even labeled myself alcoholic. I was refusing to assign myself that label of alcoholic. Instead, choose whoever I want to be and not be defined by these emotional stimuli.
Alcoholism had just become a pattern in my brain, right? It's neurological wiring that my brain had learned to say stress equals drinking. That's not me. It's just a pattern and I can rise above that pattern. Through conscious effort, you can actually change patterns in your brain. I mean, that's how building habits work. It's called top-down neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is basically the science of the – the brain's ability to change itself. You can literally change the physical and neuronal structure of your brain. Top-down neuroplasticity is when you consciously make efforts to change your brain. You consciously notice a pattern, rise above that pattern and decide who you want to be outside of that pattern. One of the most important things I ever share and just has been a game-changer for me is we are not our thoughts, our emotions, our experiences. We are the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings and the experiencer of our experiences. Recognizing that space is everything. That space will shape your destiny; what you do in that space between what shows up and who you choose to be outside of that.
[0:13:00.1] MB: So many powerful points. I want to come back and dig more into top-down neuroplasticity and this idea of rewriting the brain. Before we do, you said something a minute ago that is one of the most important lessons that transforms your life once you realize it and yet, so few people do, which is this notion that it's not about waiting until the fear goes away. It's about acting despite the fear. Or if you can get really good and train yourself, it's acting because of the fear.
[0:13:31.1] AN: Yes. Absolutely, because it's not going to go away. It's a standard part of life. We respond with fear; fear, sadness, stress, anxiety, these are all normal human emotions. They're just part of the journey. By seeking to avoid them, you actually do yourself more harm. You would retreat to the easiest course of action. Neurologically, that's what we're going to do. Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize-winning psychologist wrote this amazing book, Thinking Fast and Slow. He said that we are naturally lazy creatures. The brain is naturally lazy and it will retreat to the laziest course of action.
You have to notice that. Paradoxically at the same time, we are wired to seek novelty. When we do things that excite us, we release dopamine, that’s your hormone in the brain. It releases another chemical called Anandamide. The word ‘anan’ comes from the Sanskrit word ‘bliss’. This neurological wiring is paradoxical in a way that with the same time, we will retreat to the laziest course of action, because we seek comfort. Yet, we thrive on novelty, right?
We have to become aware of that and realize that it's not going to go away. The best things in life come from struggle. Even neurologically, struggle is required. You have to in order to build new brain patterns, you have to navigate your way to making those mistakes. Neurologically, you make these mistakes and your brain learns what to do and then it rewires itself. Even on a neurological level, Daniel Coyle writes this beautifully. He says, “Struggle is not optional. It's neurologically required.” You got to suffer. I like to say, to suffer well.
To build a positive relationship to suffering is the single most important skill to master. If you can learn how to suffer well, you can do anything. Because not only will you be able to thrive when life punches you in the face, which we all know it does from time to time, but you'll also be able to smile in the face of the inevitable challenges that stand between you and anywhere you want to go, because everything worthwhile in life will be hard. Embracing the suffering and the struggle of the experience will give you the means to keep pushing forward, no matter what comes in your way.
[0:15:20.5] MB: Incredible insight. I want to dig more into this notion that the importance of building a positive relationship with suffering and this idea that suffering is neurologically required in our lives, tell me about that.
[0:15:36.4] AN: Yeah. Dr. Daniel Coyle wrote about this beautifully in one of his books. I was researching plenty of this in writing my own about how struggle is neurologically required. Because if you think about how brain patterns work, right? Hebb’s law, it's this neurological – the science of neuroplasticity is called one of these rules, called Hebb’s law, which essentially states that neurons that fire together wire together.
If you think about a practical level with my drinking, right? Stress equals drinking. At that level, it's these neurons that fire together at this is how you respond to the world. In order to change that, you have to cultivate new neuronal wiring. Even if you just think as you're walking on a road, A to B, these pathways become stronger and stronger. The analogy I use in Fearvana is if you think about a sled going down a hill, when you put the sled down like a track on in the snow and you go down the same track over and over and over again, the snow gets deeper and deeper. As you go on the same track, the sled is trapped in this path, right? In order to change it, you have to fight your way into new snow, right? You have to consciously pick up the sled and go onto a new track.
Initially, that's hard as you build a track. Once you do, then it becomes easier and easier, easier. You have to go through that little struggle initially to change your pattern, to rewire the brain. Now I don't have any neurological data to prove this, because I didn't measure my brain science – I mean, take the brain scans at a time. I can say with 100% certainty, that my brain is going to look different now than it did when I was battling these demons.
They've done plenty of studies to show this. They've shown that for example, London taxi drivers, they have a bigger hippocampus, which is the part of the brain associated with memory, they have a bigger hippocampus than others, because they are forced to memorize the streets of London. The London taxi drivers have this huge ability to memorize these backroads of London, which is apparently very complicated. As a result, their brain has physically changed and they have a larger hippocampus. You're changing your brain as you – whatever you pursue, that will help you change your brain.
There's another principle of neuroplasticity called use it or lose it. What you're not pursuing, it will die out. This myth if we use only 10% of our brain is very flawed. We use a 100% of our brain and whatever part is not being used, it's going to be taken over by another part of the brain. You can almost think of it like a war. There's this war happening in your brain for neuronal real estate. If a part is not being used, that part will then be overtaken by other parts.
They’ve done something one quick really interesting study and outside of the morality of doing this on a animal testing level, these researchers took the hand of a monkey and they measured every part of the monkey’s hand to see what part of the brain would trigger. The right pinky and the top of the right pinky, what part of their brain would fire when they touch that right pinky? They did this to every – I mean, it was an amazing study. They did this to every single part of the monkey's hand.
Then eventually, what they did was again, outside of the morality of this, but what they did was they cut off two of the monkey's fingers. What happened was eventually, they found that when they touched another part of the monkey's hand, it actually was firing in the part that used to be previously associated with these two fingers that were cut off. Our brain is always fighting for neuronal real estate and you really want to be conscious about what you are putting in your brain and what is actually going to fire, because one way or the other, it's going to be used.
[0:18:50.3] MB: That's a great point to just touch on briefly, this idea that you have to be super conscious of all the little inputs in your brain, because there's so many subconscious influences. I just want to ping that point, because it's so important. I want to circle back and talk more about suffering, because we have such a fraught, confused relationship with suffering in our society. Tell me about how is it possible to have a positive relationship with suffering? Isn't suffering something that we should try to avoid?
[0:19:20.0] AN: That's the idea, right? That we should avoid suffering and because it's hard. The nature of anything challenging, like these fear, stress, anxiety, suffering, these are not negative, but they are more challenging than let's say joy, or calm, or happiness, right? They are more challenging emotions. That's why we run away from them. One of my favorite quotes of all time from a psychologist, Carl Jung, he says, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything no matter how absurd to avoid confronting their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
You have to go into those dark spaces. You have to suffer and bring that into the conscious self, so you can do something with it. He also says, again one of my favorite quotes, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Like you touched on earlier, we are all operating from the unconscious. We operate on autopilot most of our lives and even, just again, studies have shown we operate at a very high percentage unconsciously. We live our lives on complete autopilot based on everything that shaped us into who we are today.
In order to change those patterns, we have to go into the uncomfortable spaces. We have to suffer to train ourselves to build a positive relationship to that. You do that – I mean, there's many ways. Fundamentally, you stop labeling fear, stress, anxiety as negative. You stop demonizing these emotions. You stop demonizing the experiences and recognizing that there are only emotions and only experiences and it's up to us to decide what we do with them.
Fundamentally, this is just the mindset shift of not demonizing fear, stress and anxiety is huge. Because the world will tell you, “Be fearless. Don't be scared. Eliminate fear. I mean, eliminate stress.” We attach words like disorder to anxiety and that's nonsense. That sends us down the second dart syndrome of this conversation that, “I'm weak, because I feel fear.” When you feel fear, no matter how it shows up, no matter how it shows up, I mean, sometimes I feel afraid sitting in my house alone and I live in a very safe neighborhood in New Jersey, which is crazy considering the things I've done in my life, right?
I've walked in front of vehicles looking for bombs. I've jumped out of planes. I've done a lot of crazy dangerous things and here I am feeling scared sitting alone in my house. The thing is it doesn't matter how fear shows up. What matters is that it's there and I acknowledge this presence. It's just okay, fear is here. What am I going to do with it? Stop demonizing it is the fundamental starting point.
The next thing you can do, there's all kinds of tools that have been proven to be helpful, like visualizing yourself moving through the fear and not just on the other side, like law of attraction will say visualize yourself all happy with the million dollars walking down the beach. Research has actually shown, it's more valuable to visualize yourself in the process of overcoming the obstacles you face. Whenever I go for long runs, because I'm an ultra-runner now, so I do a lot of things, like recently, I ran 80 miles around a point two mile loop for 20-plus hours. It was a brutal psychological torture.
What I will do when I do these things is I'll visualize myself in the suffering, in the pain, which I know I will experience and rising above it. Visualizing yourself moving through the struggle. What is the value, the reward on the other side of that struggle, having clarity of purpose, of intention, of mission, knowing why you are embarking on this journey. When I joined the Marines, two doctors told me would kill me, right? Boot camp would kill me. I didn't care. I knew what I wanted to do and I was going to do it no matter what. Having clarity of purpose.
Then fundamentally, you can listen to every podcast, listen to me talk, read a book, this, that and the other thing, but you have to put yourself in the suck. You have to experience the suffering and push yourself one step, one step further, one step further. I mean, today I ran 80 miles, right? Recently, I spent seven days in darkness. I do very intense things. This didn't happen overnight. I used to be terrified of Ferris wheels. I used to be terrified of everything.
Whatever your limit is, push it one step, push it two steps, keep going, keep going and you'll actually start to find that there's tremendous beauty in this. I mean, even on a neurological level, there’s really a fascinating set of chemicals, this chemical cocktail of Fearvana that I call it, that releases when you push yourself into these experiences. You'll find that it's actually the most valuable thing you could possibly do.
Psychologist, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, he's this author of this book Flow. He said, “Contrary to what we usually believe, the best moments in our lives are not the passive receptive relaxing times. The best moments usually occur when we push our bodies and minds to their limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” This is a direct quote from one of the largest studies on happiness. That's what he found that. The keyword there is a voluntary effort. I call it a worthy struggle.
Find that struggle worthy of who you are and who you want to be. It doesn't have to be running ultra-marathons, it doesn't have to be skiing across polar icecaps like I do. What's your worthy struggle? I have friends who are about to be a grand master in chess, right? Writing movie scripts, writing a book, whatever it may be. Find that struggle worthy of who you are and who you want to be and the journey becomes more enjoyable, even through the pain, and there will be pain. It's inevitable. Pain is beautiful.
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[0:25:09.7] MB: I want to dig in to a number of different things you said. Let's start with this idea that adversity, or struggle is both inevitable and desirable.
[0:25:21.4] AN: Yeah. I mean, we all know it's inevitable, right? You're going to suffer in life. People who have seemingly everything, right? People with all the money, the success, fame in the world, we see that in Hollywood all the time, right? They're struggling with mental health issues, with addiction. You can try to go through life without it, but it's going to hit you. It's going to hit. It hits everybody.
I've worked with nine-figure entrepreneurs who are battling their own demons, right? It's going to show up no matter where you are in life, which is why I say don't wait for it, seek it out, train in it. Any emotion you are struggling with, any experience you are struggling with, the only way to get better at it, deliberate practice, right? Putting yourself in situations of struggle and that's how you train to get better at it. Even in emotion, you can actually train yourself emotionally as well.
For example, one of things I do today is I will consciously watch scenes from war movies knowing they will make me cry, knowing they will make me cry and they always do. They tear me up. I do this, because instead of letting my guilt, letting these emotions that I struggle with, letting my darkness and my demons consume me and take control of me, I put myself in those situations consciously and I train in them. I do this through ultra-running and I do this to writing a book was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I'm building a business. Everything worthwhile is hard. You have to train yourself to fall in love with that suffering, to suffer well.
It's fundamental and it's actually – like I said, it's enjoyable. I mean, I know when I go on long runs, I will go through moments, like just recently a couple weeks ago, I ran 72 miles and I hit this soul-crushing low at Mile 48, like soul-crushing. I was in such a dark space. I just sat there being in pure victim mode, complaining about life, how much everything sucks, I don't want to be here, I wanted to call an Uber to quit and go back home. I said, “All right, just pause. Let's take one more step.” The pain was overwhelming.
The beautiful thing about pain is that it's all-consuming. There's a purity to pain that when you're in pain, when you're in suffering, there's nowhere else to be but in the consumption of that pain. Then you get to decide what you do with that pain. I like to say that suffering is a training ground for self-transcendence. You know how we talked about that top-down neuroplasticity, right? Being conscious about changing your subconscious. That's what your self-transcendence is.
You rise above your feelings, you rise above your experience, you rise above your thoughts and choose who you want to be outside of them. Suffering trains you to transcend the self. It's the best training ground you can possibly get for self-transcendence and it will show you how to keep moving forward through the suck, through the pain, through whatever you're feeling. A mantra that I often use to guide me is be with what is, but do not become what is. This is how I move through pain when I'm in it and I'm in it a lot.
[0:27:47.7] MB: Incredible quote. Suffering is a training ground for self-transcendence. The point that you bring up in relation to that, this idea that we shouldn't wait for the fear, but we should actually seek it out. We should train in it. I love that phrase, “Train in the conditions that you're afraid of.”
[0:28:04.8] AN: Yeah. I mean, it's the only way to get better at it, right? I mean, it's the only way. That's why the Marine Corps boot camp, they push you through struggle. It's very, very hard. You cannot get better at something without doing it. The misconception of flow that I often see is there's these two states of deliberate practice and flow, right? People say in flow that there's this paradigm has been set, which I think is highly destructive, that when you're in a flow state, life is easy and everything is grand and beautiful and sunshine and rainbows and it's not.
Just as Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the father of flow, Dr. Anders Ericsson, he's the father of deliberate practice. I call Fearvana the middle ground between deliberate practice and flow. You have to struggle. Then you will find yourself in moments of flow state, where you're just in the zone and you're no longer in the struggle, but you're going to go on this back and forth journey. Everything worthwhile, we'll have this dance between the two.
When I've climbed mountains, when I'm in ultra-running, the beautiful – why I love ultra-running is you get to experience everything; intense highs, intense lows, moments when you're in flow, there is no time, and moments where you just get to ponder everything about life. You get to experience the entire spectrum of the human condition in one moment, which is why I love it.
Train in whatever you want to do. I mean, and when you suffer well, when you train an – exercise is one of the best way, best ways to do it, to train in suffering. Because barring serious physical issues, almost anybody can do it. One neuroscientist, he calls exercise “miracle growth for the brain,” because on a neurological level, it dramatically improves the way your synaptic connections and how your brain functions.
Another neuroscientist said that if you could put all the effects of exercise into a pill, it'd be the best-selling pill of all time. Plenty of research has shown exercise is one of the best things you can do for beating depression and any mental health issues. On a spiritual level and even a psychological level, exercise trains you how to suffer well. You can apply those lessons in other areas of your life as well. That's why you got to train in it. I recommend exercise, no matter what your path, no matter what you're seeking, build some exercise routine, because it'll not only improve how your brain functions to pursue whatever task you want to pursue, it'll teach you to suffer, which will help you handle the inevitable adversity of life.
[0:30:04.5] MB: It bears repeating one more time, this notion that you should train yourself in the act, in the art, if you will, of suffering. It's important to seek out proactively suffering in your life, so that you can build that skill set, so that you can build that muscle, and so that you can grow, thrive and ultimately, transcend.
[0:30:24.5] AN: Yeah. You'll obviously hate it at first. It sucks. There's moments where it's horrible, but that's the best thing – as you do it more, you will start to develop a love for it. That's really counterintuitive, but there is bliss in pain. There is tremendous bliss in pain. You just have to go into those spaces to find it.
Again, you can't evolve without suffering, even whether it be neurologically, spiritually, psychologically. I mean, if you want something you've never had before, you're going to have to do something you've never done before. That means taking a risk, that means stretching your comfort zone, it means ultimately suffering. Put yourself in those spaces and you'll find an ability to transcend yourself.
[0:30:57.0] MB: A minute ago, you touched on a related piece of this, which is finding a worthy struggle, or a worthy challenge in your life and how if you don't proactively seek out a struggle for yourself that you think is worthy, struggle and suffering will find you.
[0:31:14.5] AN: Yeah. I like to say if you don't seek out a worthy struggle, struggle will find you anyway. It will. We all know that, right? Anybody listening to this, anybody in life has gone through some pain in life that's inevitable. A worthy struggle gives you the means to handle that pain and handle whatever pain you face. Now as I mentioned, right? I have this picture of my friend that I lost in the war up on my wall and says, “This should have been you. Earn this life.” My demons, my darkness, my pain, it became fuel to do the work that I do now with Fearvana, to help others through this work.
That worthy struggle is everything. Viktor Frankl, one of the best books of all time in my opinion, he wrote this book Man's Search for Meaning. He was a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz. He talks about how we could find meaning even in suffering and that's the ultimate quest. That's what we are here is we are meaning seeking creatures on a neurological level, but finding meaning to our lives, finding that path, that purpose, that is your worthy struggle. I call it a worthy struggle, not passion, because – Passion is a good thing.
To have passion for your pursuit is great, but the idea of following your passion in today's world often conveys this notion that if I do, then life will be rainbows and unicorns, right? If I love what I do, I'll never have to work a day in my life. That garbage.
It's going to be hard. I love what I do, but there are days where it sucks. It's really, really hard. Everything I do, building a business, writing a book, running ultra-marathons, right? I'm planning to ski across – ski to the North Pole in a few months. All these things are brutal. They're absolutely challenging. I have passion for them, but that doesn't mean it's easy. I call it your worthy struggle. That struggle worthy of who you are and who you want to be. You’ll find it by looking around the world, seeking references in your own world, look at references in your life, like what makes you come alive? Look at people who are doing things out there.
The ways to grow are basically surrounding yourself with people who are more advanced than you and then you'll learn, you'll grow, you'll be forced to adapt and to transcend yourself to evolve and to adapt into this environment of people who are more advanced than you. The other way is to suffer. Put yourself in those spaces and you'll find out, is this really for me? Then you'll challenge yourself and you'll discover what you're capable of.
Start looking for references of things around you and things in your own life that will show you okay, what could potentially be my worthy struggle? Then pursue that path. It might not be the right, but my path has changed, right? I joined the Marines and initially wanted to go career, but I changed that path and now I do what I do with Fearvana, but no regrets for that life experience.
Stop looking for that instant gratification, that okay, if I do this, then I'll immediately will be – it'll find the answers, right? Push yourself into a worthy struggle and commit yourself entirely to it. This myth of work-life balance I think is very flawed. Forget about the idea of balance, consume yourself. Obsession is a beautiful thing. Let your dream consume the entirety of your soul. Let it consume your dreams, let it consume your being and obsess yourself onto that path.
I talk about my personal life in my work just like I'm doing now. I talk about my work and my personal life. It is me. It is entirely me. Fearvana is my ethos, it's my world, I live, breathe, sleep and I will die Fearvana. Let it consume the entirety of your being and ultimately, you'll find joy and beauty in that pain. Arnold Schwarzenegger put it beautifully, one of the greatest bodybuilder of all time. He said, “I like the pain that is necessary to be the champion. I don't like sticking needles in my arm,” but he enjoys the pain that was necessary to be the champion. His version of being a champion was to be a bodybuilder.
We all have different meanings of what it means to be a champion. Find that. It's not just about software the sake of suffering. I used to cut myself, burn myself, there was no virtue to that pain, right? Find the pain that is worthy of who you are and what it means for you to be a champion.
[0:34:37.3] MB: You bring up another great point, which is this notion of not seeking out quick gratification, not looking for the easy path, “not finding your passion,” which we talked about so much in today's blogosphere and all the content online. Instead of finding your passion, find something to struggle with, find something to suffer for that's really meaningful and important in your life.
[0:35:01.7] AN: Yeah. I mean, and that's – and passion is developed. Passion, you don't discover your passion, you develop passion. As an example, Michael Phelps used to be terrified of swimming, terrified of swimming. He became Michael Phelps, one of the most – he won more Olympic medals than anybody in history, the greatest swimmer of all time. He struggled and through struggle, you would develop passion.
Find, pursue struggle, pursue a worthy struggle, pursue a meaningful struggle and passion will develop as a result of that. Not the other way around. You got to put yourself in those uncomfortable situations to figure out your passion. I mean, I used to hate long-distance running and now here I am doing crazy things, right? Running 80 miles, or I ran 167 miles across Liberia last year to help build a first sustainable school out there. Various things like that as a result of testing and putting myself out there and finding that worthy struggle.
[0:35:50.1] MB: This is very interrelated with what we've been talking about, but this notion of actively putting yourself in uncomfortable situations is such a cornerstone. You've talked at length about it. If you look at performance psychology, if you look at some of the world's top chess players, the world's top martial artists, the world's top competitors across any field, you see the same themes again and again and it all begins with embracing discomfort and pushing into it, instead of recoiling from it, or trying to avoid it.
[0:36:20.3] AN: Yeah. Like you said earlier, right? We live in a world that does that. I mean, like I was saying, Carl Jung says, we will do anything to avoid confronting our souls. We live in this world of instant gratification. We're taught we can get – I mean, these bones; social media, watching Netflix, little dopamine machines that's teaching us to get instant jolts of dopamine into our brain. That is so destructive, so destructive.
It is highly addictive and we see that all the time, right? It is teaching us that we can get joy from instantly – instant results. You can’t. Anything worthwhile in life is going to take significant effort in which you need to do is train yourself to fall in love with the journey, that the journey itself is a destination. The pursuit is where the passion lies, right? Falling in love with the pursuit, not just the result.
Again, the world will tell us that we'll be happy when we get six-pack abs, when we get the million dollars, when we get the car. We're always looking for the easiest way to do that. You see this nonsense all the time, right? I've seen this ad on TV, walk 14 minutes a day and you'll get six-pack abs. I train like a beast and I know it's so incredibly hard, incredibly hard to get that.
The whole point is it's missing the point anyway. You see even with diet, right? We'll say those things like, you don't need exercise to lose weight. I get it. Yes, that's true. I get it. Diet is more important in terms of losing weight than exercise. What all these mentalities miss, miss the point is that it's not about the result of losing 20 pounds, or the six-pack abs, or the million dollars, it's about the person you become on the journey. You will only evolve when you suffer.
This is why we see people who are lottery winners, they win millions of dollars, but not only do they lose it very, very fast, it doesn't improve the quality of their lives, because they haven't become someone different by earning that money. When you win it in a lottery, you haven't changed who you are. When you suffer for it, when you struggle for it, you become a different person. The value of the results you get is not the results you get, but the person you become on the journey to getting those results. That is everything.
[0:38:13.7] MB: Incredible point. Even the notion that I really like replacing – you hear all the time the cliché, it's about the journey, it's not the destination, right? I really like replacing the word journey with struggle, because that contextualizes it in a way that makes so much more sense. It's about the struggle, it's about who you become through that struggle. It's not about getting to the end-point. Lottery winners is such a perfect example of that.
[0:38:43.5] AN: Yeah. The thing is when you get to one end point, there'll be another one waiting for you, right? One of my other mantras that I use is there's no finish line. I always repeat to myself, there is no finish line. The only real finish line is death. Reminding yourself that until then, there will be another struggle. Progress is not the elimination of problems, progress is the creation of new problems. No matter what happens, no matter what result you get to, there will be a new problem that will show up. Learn to fall in love with those problem, because they're going to be there anyway. That's not a bad thing. You just want to keep having new problems.
I still struggle with all kinds of anxiety on a regular basis at the things I do in my life, on a regular basis. I still hit some very, very low moments, but I've learned and I still – I sometimes forget my own advice. Don't get me wrong. I'm a human after all, right? I've learned to say okay, great. Embrace this anxiety. This is it. In fact, I do this counterintuitive thing when I go for runs, I'll actually wish for it to be harder, because I know that I cannot evolve without suffering. I say thanks to myself like, “All right, I'm going to pray for the devil himself to rise out of hell and attempt to crush my own soul, so I can stare at him in the eyes and bury him in his own blood.”
I know that's a very dark intense thing, but the point is that I am hoping for the devil to commit his entirety of his being to the destruction of my soul, because I know the more suffering, the more pain, the more suck I go through, the greater the evolution, the greater the struggle, the greater the evolution. It's very counterintuitive, but by seeking out more suffering, by actually calling forth more suffering, it makes it that much easier to embrace the suffering of the journey. I've seen this show up all the time on runs, in building my business.
Recently, I spent seven days in pitch darkness isolation and silence to confront a fear of stillness that I had. Extremely challenging. I said, “Bring it. Bring out the darkness. Let the devil himself show himself to me and I'll face it.” I wished for it to be as hard as possible. It was pretty challenging as you might imagine.
[0:40:35.3] MB: Incredible. Once again, I love the way you phrase that. Very Marines of you, very military perspective, but very cool. This notion of calling forth suffering and the idea that the bigger the struggle, the bigger the evolution, that's another key point. It's not just that you have to suffer to evolve, to grow, to improve, it's that the more you suffer, the bigger the growth. If you want to improve your life, if you want to make a big change, if you want a big result, if you want to achieve something truly great, the path to doing that is to seek out as much suffering as you can on that journey.
[0:41:14.5] AN: Yeah, absolutely. Seek it out in whatever way you can find. Again, it doesn't have to be ultra-running, or what I choose, right? Find your own Fearvana. Find what Fearvana looks like to you, your path of Fearvana, as I like to call it. Once you push in the fears, you'll find the Nirvana on the other side. That's what the ethos of Fearvana is. It’s these two seemingly contradictory ideas that are in fact very complementary, and that fear is an access point to bliss and enlightenment.
[0:41:40.9] MB: I want to dig into making that more concrete. You obviously have pursued all kinds of extreme activities and adventures as we talked about earlier. What would be a simple example of a worthy struggle, or maybe a couple simple examples of worthy struggles, or some starting points to discover a struggle for somebody who wants to walk that path?
[0:42:06.8] AN: It could be anything. Could be raising a child. I mean, God knows I was a nightmare of a child to my parents, so that's probably the greatest worthy struggle. I always joke with my mom and dad that I bless them with the diversity in Fearvana by being a terrible kid. Raising a child is a worthy struggle, writing books, building a business, whatever you want to do, work in a job, everything is going to be hard, right?
Asking yourself what is my path. You've got to take some time to be still on this journey, because when you – We touched on this earlier, right? That we are constantly being affected by our environment. Everything we take in the environment is going into our subconscious. They've done some interesting studies where they call it the Jennifer Aniston neuron, where they put people into a brain scan. When a picture of Jennifer Aniston would show up on a screen, it would light up a particular part of their brain. If the person had watched a lot of Friends, it would light up even stronger, right? If a person watched Simpsons, their brain would light up when Homer Simpson would show up, or different things like that. These little things are constantly affecting our brain.
What happens is it becomes very hard to separate ourselves from what the world tells us we think we need to be happy in a program path to follow, versus what we really need and what we – what is like. It's going to be a combination. No matter how self-aware you are, no matter how much time you spend within yourself, inevitably, you are affected by the external influences of the world. They are shaping – I mean, from the day you're born, your parents have shaped belief systems in you, mental models in you, they've taught you about how the world works, you've learned how the world works as you go through life, right? Inevitably, your external environment and your world will shape who you are internally.
To separate yourself and create a distinction, take some time for stillness. Stillness is so important and another thing that rarely happens in today's world, because we're filled with distractions, right? I mean, phones, watching TV, drinking, drugs, anything, but sometimes even the positive things. For a long time, I realized that skiing across an ice cap, or climbing mountains was just really distracting me from myself, because I was running away from my demons.
Today I still do those things, but I do it from a very different level of consciousness. Taking time for stillness to be within, to go into those spaces of pain and just to figure out what is – who do I want to be on this path? I mean, I engaged stillness in a very extreme way of obviously spending time, seven days in darkness. You can sit still, meditate, sit still in a room, just being with your own thoughts. Shutting off everything. Obviously, no distractions, no TV, no phone.
Be with your thoughts and see where they go. Allow them to go places. It's very, very challenging, like very challenging, but it's important, it's necessary to go into those spaces of stillness to really figure out who you are and who do you want to be for yourself and for the world around you. Stillness will help you tap into those spaces to find your own worthy struggle and the pursuit that will ultimately bring you more meaning to your life, whatever that means for you.
[0:44:51.4] MB: Taking the time to listen, to journal and reflect, to think about what's going on in your life and what the research often calls those kinds of activities, our contemplative routines are such a critical component of performance, of self-awareness, of all of these results.
For somebody who's listening to this conversation, what would you say would be a starting point, or one piece of homework that you would give them to begin their journey? What would be one action item to say this is the first step on the path to having more suffering in your life?
[0:45:29.5] AN: First step is just find one little thing to test yourself. It could be skydiving, train for a 5K, go to a bar and talk to a member of the opposite sex, that's really scary. I recently went on a date and I was absolutely terrified. First time I went on a date in a long time. Do a little thing, just a little thing to push yourself outside your comfort zone. That's why I suggested exercise, because almost everybody can do that. Again, barring something severe and something, serious physical issues. Do a little thing to challenge yourself.
When you do, don't just do it, but come back and reflect on it. You mentioned this contemplative experiences, right? Like journal on it. I call it the action awareness cycle. Take an action and then get the awareness from it, reflect, journal. What did you gain from it? What insights did you find the value in it? I mean, our memory is doing this anyway. It's called memory reconsolidation. Do it consciously as well. That's how you'll start to find lessons and then ultimately, use those lessons to take the next action and the next action and the next action.
[0:46:24.2] MB: Akshay, for listeners who want to find out more about you, about your work, about the book, etc., what is the best place for them to find you online?
[0:46:34.5] AN: You can find me at fearvana.com. It’s F-E-A-R-V-A-N-A. The book is on Amazon and Kindle, paperback and Audible as well. 100% of the profits from the book go to charity and to some worthy causes we support as well. Just to let you know that yeah, the book is doing some good out there in terms of the funds we raise as well. That's how you can find me.
[0:46:55.8] MB: Well, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I love all the points about embracing suffering in our life, seeking out discomfort, training under struggle and suffering. Akshay, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom and all this knowledge with our listeners.
[0:47:13.6] AN: Thank you so much for having me, my friend. It was a real pleasure. Enjoyed our conversation.
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