(upbeat music)
Hey, everyone.
Welcome to the Resilience Course.
Look, we all have to deal with pain, hardship loss
and just, you know,
day-to-day bullshit throughout our lives.
And while our first impulse
is to avoid all the bullshit,
to get away from our problems.
The fact of the matter is,
there is no such thing
as a life without problems.
There is no such thing as just being happy
and go lucky,
and everything working out for the best,
all the fucking time.
If you're going to make it through this life,
you have to deal with problems.
In fact, I would say,
life itself is a process
of dealing with problems
or upgrading our problems
from really bad problems
to slightly better problems.
Therefore, you could say that
the quality of our lives,
very much hinges on our ability to manage problems.
This course is all about,
teaching you strategies, techniques, ideas, concepts
that will help you deal with,
various amounts of pain in your life,
how to get through problems,
how to deal with grief and loss.
Basically, how to be a more resilient person.
Now, I would like to start the course off
by teaching you two different metaphors
that I think are gonna be useful,
and that we're going to return to again and again,
throughout the course.
The first metaphor comes from Buddhism
and I talk about it in my book,
Everything Is Fucked.
A book about hope.
Now the Buddha had this beautiful metaphor about pain.
He said that pain is like being struck by an arrow.
It actually strikes you twice.
The first strike, is the actual physical strike,
the pain of the arrow,
piercing your skin
and causing you to bleed and everything.
But the second pain,
is the meaning that we create
around the arrow strike.
It's the person who got hit by the arrow saying,
"why me,
Why did I deserve this? I'm a good person."
That guy's an asshole.
Fuck him.
I shouldn't have to be dealing with this.
It's the psychological pain
that comes along with being struck
by the physical pain.
Now throughout the course,
I'd like to refer to these types of pain
as Type 1 pain,
the physical pain.
And Type 2 pain,
the psychological pain.
For example,
let's say a family member gets cancer and passes away.
Obviously the loss of that family member,
it's just fundamentally painful.
That is a Type 1-type of pain.
If your mother dies of cancer,
that is excrutiatingly painful,
no matter who you are or what you do,
Type 1 pain.
But what tends to happen with most of us,
is we sit there and say,
"Oh my God, what could I have done differently,
Why does she deserve this?
I could have been a better son.
I could have done this.
This isn't fair.
The doctors are terrible.
I bet they fucked something up.
That's the Type 2 pain.
It's the narratives and the meaning
that we construct around
that initial inherently painful event.
Now what's interesting about human psychology
is that the more intense the Type 1 pain,
the more crazy our mind goes with narratives,
creating Type 2 pains.
It's very proportional.
If you stub your toe against the a table,
you don't sit there and be like, oh, why me,
Why do I stub my toe,
what did I do to deserve this God?
You don't do that.
You're just like, fuck you table.
And you like move on with your life.
But if like an earthquake happens
and you lose your home
and thousands of your neighbors die
and your dog gets lost.
Then you start coming up
with all these different narratives of meaning
of where you are in the world,
and what is the cosmic significance?
And fuck, my dog didn't deserve this.
He deserved better come back Phyto.
I miss you.
It's this constant running of the brain
that often causes us to suffer more.
And this was ultimately the Buddhist point.
Often long after the physical pain of the arrow is passed.
We still suffer from the Type 2 pain.
We hold on to the Type 2 pain
for years and years and years.
We create these narratives of injustice
and suffering and victimhood
and all these horrible things,
that often come to define ourselves
or define our identity for a long time.
So this course is going to deal with both types of pain.
We're going to be talking about
how you can better bear Type 1 pain.
But this is not going to surprise you,
most of the course is gonna be dedicated to Type 2 pain.
Because ultimately
that is the more significant amount
of pain that we feel in our lives.
And it's also the thing that we have more control of.
You can never prevent yourself
from ever stubbing your toe again.
But you can sure as shit,
permit yourself from creating stupid narratives
that make you suffer more.
Now, the second metaphor
I wanna use throughout this course is
just to help us kind of understand
the nature of pain in our lives.
I'm gonna use the metaphor of a muscle,
which is essentially that
a certain amount of pain is actually good for us,
the same way, like,
if you never exercise your muscles,
if you never stress your muscles,
if you never like get out and run
or pick up something heavy,
your body deteriorates, and it begins to fall apart.
But at the same time,
if you like go try to pick up 500 pounds,
on your first day in the gym,
you are gonna completely destroyed yourself.
There's kind of like a Goldilocks zone
of pain that is actually healthy for us.
If we're just a couch potato
and everything's always comfortable,
we actually deteriorate.
We become lazy and compulsive
and demanding and delusional
and all these horrible things.
It's a certain amount of stress in our lives
actually keeps us grounded in reality
and improves mental health outcomes.
But, if you kind of go along that curve of pain,
there eventually comes a tipping point,
where adding more pain or stress starts to harm our health.
And it harms our ability to function well,
both physically and mentally.
And so ultimately our goal here,
in our life is not to get rid of pain.
It's simply to maintain
a manageable level of stress
and pain in our lives.
We wanna be challenged regularly.
We wanna have invigorating problems
that we're working on.
It's that sense of sacrifice
or that sense of overcoming
that grants us a sense of meaning
and purpose in our lives.
If you have nothing to overcome,
if you have no challenges,
if you nothing pushing up against you,
your mind starts freaking out
and looking for tiny little things
to become neurotic and compulsive about.
Now, if you go overboard and you go too far,
your body starts to break down.
Again, it's like,
if you go into the gym
and you're picking up moderate amount of weights
and gradually pushing yourself each time you go,
you're going to get stronger.
You're going to get healthier.
You're going to be able to
do more and more each time you go.
But if you go to the gym,
and you'd try to like squat 500 pounds,
you're gonna break your back.
And that breaking of your back,
is essentially what trauma is.
There's a certain breaking point,
with pain and stress,
where your mind just kind of gives out
and like loses it and is like checks out.
And it's like, fuck this shit.
I'm going off the reservation .
To extend the metaphor even further,
let's say you go to the gym
and you have a good workout
and you feel sore the next day.
Well, there are ways
to treat that soreness, you know,
you get a little bit of extra rest,
maybe you put an ice pack on,
do a sauna, drink a protein shake.
Like these things will all help your body recover,
but a protein shake and a sauna
is not gonnahelp a broken back.
A broken back needs, a whole another level
of treatment and therapy, you know,
you need to go to the hospital basically.
And spend months and months and months,
going through intense recuperation
and physical therapy.
And so the same is true with trauma, right?
If I'm just having a very stressful year in my career,
that's like hitting the gym like five times a week
and being sore and exhausted all the time.
Like you can handle it,
you can recover from it,
at some point you're gonna need to rest a lot,
to recover from that amount of stress and strain,
but you're gonna be okay.
And actually you're gonna come out
the other side, much much stronger for it.
But let's say you get in a car accident.
You're in like a van
with a bunch of like five of your coworkers
and you were driving
and it kills everybody, but you,
yeah, you're going to need a long time
to get over that.
Like that's a whole another process.
And so, I wanna bring this metaphor up
for a couple of reasons.
The first one is,
is that this course is less about handling trauma.
Trauma is a whole topic unto itself,
and there are many aspects of it that honestly,
me or pretty much anybody else
on the internet that you would buy a course from
is not really qualified to deal with.
Like if you're experiencing trauma or symptoms of PTSD,
yes, a lot of these concepts can help
and they can be useful as tools,
but you need to be working
with a professional one-on-one in person regularly.
The other reason I bring this up, though,
I'm gonna mix my metaphors here a little bit,
most pain we experience is psychological.
And so a lot of what determines
whether we're trying to squat 500 pounds or not,
is also mental.
It's the Type 2 pain.
We've started to see this
a lot more often lately,
where, if you define for yourself
something that's traumatic,
like if you decide that Amazon losing
your iPhone delivery is a traumatic experience,
your brain will actually believe that.
Your brain will actually be like,
yeah, that's trauma.
Let's have a traumatic reaction to that.
And so, you'll need to be very careful,
in terms of the definitions of pain
and the significance that you subscribe to,
in terms of the different pain
that you're experiencing,
because an event in your life can happen.
That is, in reality, it's like a 30 pound dumbbell,
but in your mind, it's a 500 pound squat.
You're gonna fucking break your back.
Still, It's important to be careful
with the narratives that you construct
around your experiences,
the significance you ascribed
to the two different events that happen.
Ultimately, a lot of this stuff
is very personal too, right?
Like something that could feel
like a 30 pound dumbbell to me,
could feel like a 500 pound squat to you
and vice versa.
Just to use an example from my own life,
as I wrote my,
in subtle art,
my first girlfriend cheated on me and left me.
And obviously that's a horrible experience.
It fucking sucked.
But, millions and millions and millions
of people have had that experience.
Like that is not a particularly unusual experience
in the human condition.
But because I had come from a background
of like such an emotionally dysfunctional family.
And I'd come from an environment,
where I'd largely been deprived
of intimacy and trust
throughout most of my young life,
I was particularly sensitive to that event.
So, you know, it might not have broken
most people's backs,
certainly would hurt,
but it really fucked mine up pretty good.
And it took me years and years
to kind of work through that
and overcome that,
you know, obviously different pain
throughout our lives.
It can compound on one another.
Like you can,
to keep this fucking gym metaphor
going on even further.
You can hurt your back,
squatting too much weight
when you're like nine years old, you know,
'cause your let's say your dad
did something really fucked up.
And then when you're 25,
a very similar thing happens
and it breaks your back.
And you have a traumatic response to it.
There's a lot of complexity involved
with what is actually experienced.
That's just kind of running the mill pain or loss or grief
and what is actually experienced this trauma.
But the point of all this is,
this course is focused on Type 2 pain,
because that's the type of pain
that we have the most control over.
Although we will talk about,
sustaining Type 1 pain as well.
And this course is very much focused
on that process of lifting weights
to get stronger mentally.
Dealing with regular life challenges
that should improve our resilience,
improve our sense of self,
improve our ability to manage ourselves
in the face of adversity.
And we're going to be focusing less on trauma.
And again, a lot of the tools
and concepts in this course
can be helpful for people experiencing PTSD
or traumatic reactions,
but that is not what this course is designed for.
So that's just a disclaimer.
You might get something from it.
A lot of people with PTSD and stuff,
they read my work and they say it was very helpful,
but it's not designed for that.
So I just wanna make that clear
and just get very very particular about
what we're going to work on here.
So I often joke that I'm an expert
in dealing with like first world problems.
If you have like a degenerative condition
and you're never going to walk again,
I don't know how good I am for that.
But like if your fucking boyfriend left you
and you dropped out of school
and don't know what to do with your life,
like I'm your guy.
Those life challenges
that we all have to deal with
from time to time
or even just kind of the day-to-day stresses,
of, you know, being overworked
or having a shitty boss
or being stuck in a toxic relationship
or having a parent that treats you like shit.
Like these are the things that,
that we're here for
and the tools and techniques
in this course are designed to help.
So with that,
let's start off with our first exercise.
There's a workbook available to download.
You can print it out if you like,
you can also just create a word document
and write this stuff yourself.
To start off.
I want you to write down a particular struggle
or problem or source of pain
in your life at the moment.
You feel like you need a little bit of help
dealing with, you know,
this course is gonna work a lot better.
If you come into it with a specific problem in mind
that you would like to improve upon.
To begin with,
simply write down that problem
or that source of struggle
that you're experiencing.
And then after that,
I want you to ask yourself two things.
One, is this a Type 1-type pain,
or Type 2-type pain
or chances are it's probably both.
But write down what aspects of it
are Type 1, you know,
I have a boss that is a total Dick.
Obviously that sucks.
There's nothing you can do to control that,
that's a Type 1-type pain.
But I've decided that, you know,
this is a horrible workplace
and I'm never going to make it in this career.
And, fuck I'm gonna have to like lose my job
or be miserable for the rest of my life.
These are all Type 2 types of pains.
So write out like what aspects
of the problem you're experiencing are a Type 1 pain.
And then what aspects of the problem
you're experiencing are Type 2.
And then finally,
just write down how manageable
does this problem feel to you, at the moment?
Does it feel like a 22 pound dumbbell
that is just gonna get you
a nice little bicep pump to the gun show?
Or does it feel like a 500 pound squat
That's gonna break your back.
Write that down now,
because, hopefully over the course of this course,
we're gonna revisit that assessment.
And hopefully by the end of it,
it feels quite a bit lighter to you.
So write those things down,
take your time with it.
Be completely honest and open with yourself.
And I'll see you in the next lesson.
(upbeat music)