Unlocking the Keys to Your Kingdom
Your Bridge to Being Unstoppable
It took me four months to track down Dave Asprey and secure an interview with him on his farm in an undisclosed location in Canada. I was willing to do anything to find answers even if that involved international travel. I wanted to feel better, have more energy, and most importantly, have the mental clarity I needed to reach my goals. This was my last-ditch attempt to succeed where I had constantly failed before.
To get to him, my partner and I took two flights and a ferry in the height of winter at the end of 2017. The ferry ride across the inlet was picturesque yet freezing! The fresh Canadian air was a welcome relief from hot and humid Florida.
I stood shivering on the ferry as the questions I wanted to ask him rattled around in my head, such as What do you know about unlocking our human potential that others don’t? And What do I need to do to become an unstoppable version of myself?
I knew Dave, one of the world’s top biohackers, would have the answers. No one else had gone to such extreme lengths to optimize human performance through biohacking. Dave is also a New York Times bestselling author of The Bulletproof Diet and the creator of Bulletproof Coffee and a supplement range. He is followed by more than 1 million loyal fans globally and has even launched Bulletproof Labs, based in Santa Monica, California. While it looks like a gym, it isn’t. They take a scientific approach to training your mind and body by using the most cutting-edge, science-backed technologies to achieve the highest state of physical and cognitive performance. I was heading to Dave’s own personal lab to get an insider’s look at how he thinks and operates.
I first heard of Dave when I was at my lowest point. Listening to his audiobook gave me a sense of relief that my fatigue and illness wasn’t all in my head. I wasn’t unwell because I was weak-minded. There was something biochemically wrong with me that was influencing my mindset and ability to succeed.
The problem was no matter how many doctors I went to, none of them saw things from the perspective of a biohacker. A biohacker seeks to understand illnesses at the source and create a plan of attack. The interactions left me unsatisfied.
I soon realized that if I was going to change my life, I had to seek out others who had taken unconventional approaches to solving their problems. Dave fit the bill. He’d spent more than $1 million hacking his own biology over the past two decades. His objective was to help people succeed at levels far beyond what they would typically expect.
The Snapback Effect and the Identity Gap
To do this required an identity shift, not just at the psychological level but at the biochemical one as well. I realized I would always default back to my original psychological settings if my biological settings weren’t brought up to speed with the new requirements placed on them.
I call this default setting the snapback effect. You cannot outperform your current concept of “self” or your existing biochemistry. I will go into more detail about the snapback effect a bit later, but first, I want to explain to you why we have an identity gap between who we are and who we want to become. Then I will show you the steps to create a biohacking and psychological model for successful, long-lasting change.
Change can be phenomenally hard unless all the factors are taken into consideration, especially when we need to identify anything that is holding us back from success. The objective is to escape our self-imposed echo chamber: those negative thoughts that reinforce and echo back our beliefs, ideas, and values in a way that reinforces and amplifies them through repetition.
There are myriad ways our echo chamber sets us up to fail. For example, in order to keep you coming back, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to show you what you want to see based on your online behavior and biases. This acts to reinforce all the existing beliefs you have about yourself and the world, as do your physical environment, relationships, and biochemistry.1
Your biochemistry, when in mild to severe disarray, can lead to negative thoughts that are difficult to suppress or eliminate.
A change in attitude will only hold for as long as your biochemistry supports it.
Think of the last time you tried to reach one of your goals. Maybe it was one that had you really excited at first, but as time progressed, you fell back into your old routine until you forgot about it. This is what I call the snapback effect.
Anytime we try to evolve from who we are to who we want to become to reach our goals, we create tension between our old and new selves, both psychologically and biochemically. This is what I call the identity gap. Each “self” is fighting for residence within your mind. The one that wins is the one that avoids triggering your “fight or flight” response. Therefore, you are creating a “gap” between who you are and who you want to become.
The greater the distance between the biological resources you have available and the psychological needs required to reach your goal, the greater the likelihood is that you’ll snap back, give up, and default to your old self.
Why?
The new psychological needs deplete your biochemical resources. When you cross the threshold, your brain switches modes and seeks to preserve the limited energy supply left for critical biological functions. This can manifest behaviorally via excuses, brain fog, lethargy, and avoidance. And you thought you were just lazy!
Thinking of adding another goal to your already full task list is like a power station lighting a city at maximum capacity and then suddenly adding another city to the grid without additional capacity being added. The new city will max out the entire system and a safety switch will flip, defaulting back to its original settings to protect itself from damage, much like our brain.
Our primordial brain is that safety switch. When it comes on, it reduces our available output in areas we’re not even aware of, thereby changing our behavior.
In this state, our brain seeks to preserve the status quo. To do otherwise would jeopardize our life. Our brain must guard its resources and defend against further attacks, such as attempting to leave our comfort zone and seeking a new identity.
The first signs of this snapback will be mild symptoms, such as brain fog, slight headaches, and sleeping more than usual. You might simply brush them off. As you adapt to them, the symptoms will eventually escalate and become more extreme, manifesting as anxiety, stress, and possibly depression. Your body and brain will not stop reacting to the stimuli to reject change until you do something about it.
Attempting to leave your comfort zone and evolve into your new identity is like putting a stake in the ground, throwing a rubber band around it, stepping into the open loop, and trying to sprint as far away from the stake as you can, without building up your muscles first.
But if you don’t have enough energy to push against the tension (the change created based on these new needs), you’ll snap back into your old self hard and fast. This old self is drenched in behaviors the primal brain considers safe, since it doesn’t exert your energy levels further.
The shock from the snapback can dramatically impact the way we see the world and ourselves, making us cautious about future attempts at change. The key is to evolve into our new self without flipping the switch that makes us snap back and resume our former status quo.
Turn Off Decision Fatigue to Reach Your Goals Faster
No matter how stable and rational we are, we cannot make decision after decision or maintain high levels of focus and output without paying a biological price. This is one reason why ordinary, sensible people lash out, make irrational decisions, buy junk food, make excuses, and ultimately quit before they experience a breakthrough.
As the day goes on, your mental capacity gets used up and slows down to a crawl, and it becomes less likely that you’ll be able to sustain that newfound positive attitude. The more decisions you make, the harder each consecutive decision becomes, resulting in the brain seeking one of two shortcuts. One shortcut is to act impulsively without taking time to assess the consequences. The second is to do nothing.
In a 2011 study by the National Academy of Sciences, scientists demonstrated the impact of decision fatigue. Researchers Jonathan Levav formerly of Columbia Business School and Shai Danziger formerly of Ben-Gurion University analyzed more than 1,100 decisions from a parole board in an Israeli prison over a ten-month period. They discovered that prisoners who appeared early in the morning or just after a food break received parole approximately 70 percent of the time. Those who appeared before the board at the end of the day or just before a break received parole less than 10 percent of the time.2
These researchers found that the judges’ decisions exhibited no ill intent toward the prisoners. The likelihood of receiving parole was purely linked to the countless decisions they had to make. This research demonstrates that there is a finite amount of mental energy for applying self-control, and it wanes as more decisions are made. The mental state can become further compromised by stress, nutritional deficiencies, and other environmental factors. You thought it was something innate about you that was keeping you from achieving your dreams, that perhaps you were meant to fail. But now there is a glimmer of hope that there is truly a way out of this rabbit hole.
It raises the question: Are you working with or against the tide? When we’re in the zone, everything flows, it’s easy, we remember names, stay on task, and tune out distractions. When we’re going against the tide, our attention is easily stolen, misused, and spent on activities that take you further out to sea.
Anytime you feel yourself overexerting, it is an indication that something in your physical, emotional, or biochemical makeup is out of alignment. This misalignment causes a change in attitude and a switch in identity from confident, self-assured, and focused to unfocused and lacking in confidence and clarity. Everything becomes more difficult. You start making excuses and sit there glued to your phone, desperate for a hit of dopamine.
You’re fueling your goals with one energy source instead of two, and because it’s depleting, your brain has switched on “self-preservation mode” to save you from yourself.
Based on countless discussions with psychiatrists, doctors, neuroscientists, and biohackers and the numerous experiments I conducted during this 90-day period, my understanding of what fuels success reaches well beyond mere habits of peak performers. Habits are critical, but not as significant as the entire system working as one toward a goal that lights up your soul.
Wouldn’t you love it if you could take the weight of the world from your shoulders and place it lightly on your fingertips? Now you can! This new model brought an awareness that I hadn’t been able to glean from one single source. It came from an entwined understanding of many individual connections. It empowered me to continue improving and allowed me to relax and reboot when something was out of alignment with my awareness. Something was out of alignment and not just in my head.
The problem will always be when we switch into self-preservation mode. We go from conscious thought and deliberate creation to unconscious thought and unintentional creation with our impulse controls turned OFF.
Try solving a problem when you’re not even aware you have a problem in the first place. That’s 90 percent of the population at any given moment.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to burn that light bulb bright. To do that and get on your way to being unstoppable, you first need to close your identity gap (see Figure 2.1).
The Identity Gap Formula for Success
The first step in closing the identity gap is to choose your goal, defining who you are by the achievement of the goal. The light bulb represents your purpose, your goals (an expression of your purpose), and the person you wish to become.
Your mission is to light the bulb and keep it lit without flickering. Any flickering can result in a loss of momentum. If your battery runs flat, the light bulb will go out, any progress made will be halted, and even more effort will be required to relight it. The entire system may even need to be rebooted.
The second step is working with your identity, which is the battery that powers this light bulb. And, just like any battery, it can run flat at any point during the day, week, month, or lifetime. Also like any battery, it will begin to hold less charge over time.
This battery is broken into four levels, each representing a different identity. As we’ve seen, our identities fluctuate throughout the course of a day, not just a lifetime, and depend on our energy levels, mental clarity, biochemistry, and decision fatigue. When we’re fully charged, we’re unstoppable, but when we lack energy, we’re as useless as a cell phone with a dead battery.
The four identities that make up your battery are the Catalyst, the Synergist, the Guardian, and the Defender. When an identity is running the show, it takes control of everything, consciously or unconsciously. Both the Catalyst and Synergist sit above the 50 percent line—these are the most effective mental states for you to reach your goals.
Fifty percent is the threshold mark that indicates the difference between conscious and effective behavior and unconscious and ineffective behavior. Dipping below 50 percent, our brain switches into self-preservation mode to save our energy for more critical tasks. At this point your light bulb begins to flicker, and your likelihood of giving up significantly increases.
Your Power Supply
As you can see in Figure 2.1 on page 23, the battery is the fuel that drives your vision and shapes your identity. It is recharged by two specific energy sources:
Psychological/Spiritual energy incorporates your beliefs, values, outlook on life, willpower, focus, and attitude. This energy is nourished via ongoing education, spirituality (for some), and life experiences that lead to heightened levels of self-awareness and emotional IQ.
Biochemical energy encompasses various factors, including nutrition, genetics, environment, allergies, overactive/underactive immune system, oxygen supply, neurofeedback, stress, movement, and electricity. All these factors must work in unison to be effective. When one factor is missing or inactive, it can cause disequilibrium to all the others, to the detriment/destabilization of your mental and physical well-being.
However, psychological and biochemical energy do not necessarily play equal roles in creating your identity. As it turns out, psychological energy is more reliant on biochemical energy.
In effect, your biochemistry, when lacking in energy, can become the thief of your psychological energy. It can steal your drive, willpower, motivation, clarity of thought, and focus. Your willpower can override it for only so long before your brain is forced into self-preservation mode and your battery drops below the 50-percent threshold. While positive thoughts and expectations can boost your serotonin levels, it may only do so temporarily, resulting in a short-term identity shift that fails to stick.
You can’t simply will more vitamin D into existence. Consider your attempts at materializing a bag of money from thin air: How’s that working out for you?
You can’t outthink bad biochemistry by medicating it with self-help. You may get better, but will you get well?
Stress, prescription pills, and poor nutrition can hijack our thoughts. If some prescription medications can trigger suicidal thoughts through altering our biochemistry, then could we also generate positive thoughts by hacking our own biology?
Closing this gap is one of the first and most crucial steps to setting yourself up for success.
Rethinking Your Body/Mind Connection
When we understand that our identity, mood, and behavior can fluctuate throughout the day, it highlights just how flawed traditional personality models are. This is why we experience a disconnect when we look at these models. When our body and mind are in alignment, we can demonstrate the personality traits assigned to us by such models (extrovert/introvert, sensitive/cautious, etc.). However, if things shift a few millimeters the other way, perhaps due to a change in their biochemistry, even a peak-performing extrovert can become an unproductive introvert. Personality is only as fixed as the biochemistry that supports it. An individual who is dedicated to their beliefs, behaviors, and patterns can suddenly throw caution to the wind and fail to assess the consequences of their actions if they are depleted of energy.
This also explains why personality test results can vary greatly depending on the time of day or the mood you are in when you take them. This demonstrates the need for a test that incorporates all elements that are key to your success, including the underlying factors that drive an individual to succeed.
Trying to hold on to a specific identity 100 percent of the time is futile. No matter what you do, change is inevitable. We will forever encounter setbacks that will force us to embrace multiple identities at varying times of our lives. It’s normal—and more important, it’s life!
By breaking down the four identities I mentioned earlier, we kick off our quest to lift our awareness, achieve our goals, and let that light bulb shine. Once again, the identities are the Catalyst, the Synergist, the Guardian, and the Defender. In the sections below, I’ve broken each down into their vital functions and characteristics, including their strengths, emotional characteristics, cognitive functions, physiological characteristics, and energy sources. Once you read through all four, you’ll understand which level you’ve been operating at and why. Soon you will discover why all your efforts to succeed have been trapped in a vicious cycle, like a psychological and biological tug of war. Let’s dig into the specifics of each identity.
The Catalyst (75–100 percent)
The Catalyst feels they’ve bypassed the battery and plugged directly into the power grid, making them unstoppable.
This is your natural state. When it is eluding you, you feel a deep internal disconnect between who you are and who you know you can be. This leaves you feeling restless and anxious.
The Catalyst identity paves the way for your success and provides the fuel for the journey. Catalysts have an abundance of mental energy, focus, clarity, and drive. They are the key driver for change in society, both globally and locally. They endure even in the face of monumental setbacks. They light the way for others.
While their path may not always be easy, they are biochemically and psychologically wired to believe that it is. Catalysts are proactive and go with the tide, and when they feel themselves beginning to struggle, they take action to correct their course and continue. They are not afraid of seeking help; that’s the reason they’ve made it where they are. (See Figure 2.2 on page 28.)
There’s only one way to become a Catalyst, and that’s by recovering from major setbacks that force them to be consciously aware of how they got there in the first place.
To do this, the biochemistry of a Catalyst must be healthy enough that they can still cognitively process this awareness and take corrective action. We can see this play out in rags-to-riches-to-rags stories. Many times, the person becomes hugely successful without fully understanding that it was a mix of psychology and biochemistry that helped them succeed. New success brings new challenges. For example, in celebrities, these often manifest as problems with alcohol and drug dependency.
If their psychology or biochemistry is compromised, their lack of awareness can turn them into a Defender, in which they become depleted of both types of energy. As a result, their body and brain enter self-preservation mode just to get through the day. Unless major intervention and help from others is available, they may remain stuck in this state. But when they recover, oh boy, do they make a comeback! Robert Downey Jr. is one of Hollywood’s biggest career rebound stories. It wasn’t that long ago that no one wanted to hire him, due to his drinking and the drug abuse that landed him in prison; now he’s paid hundreds of millions to star in blockbuster films like The Avengers and Iron Man.
Synergists, although in a state of conscious awareness and deliberate creation, are still learning to balance willpower with sustainable energy that keeps them moving forward.
They’re in the process of becoming more and more aware of how their psychology and biochemistry affect their motivation, their self-esteem, and their view of the world. They are future Catalysts who require some simple fine-tuning to make the next leap successfully and sustainably.
Synergists can benefit from ongoing education that teaches them how to coordinate and optimize their biochemical and psychological performance. They will have some off days, but they won’t beat themselves up about it. They realize that rest and rejuvenation are required for long-term, sustainable success.
The Guardian (50 percent and below)
Guardians are protecting their current resources, but not defending themselves from an attack. The Guardian’s body has switched to self-preservation mode, which triggers them to preserve their energy for critical functions. Keeping that light bulb lit isn’t one of them. They can keep it going briefly through sheer force of willpower, but even that has its expiration date if it doesn’t get biochemically replenished.
They still have their goals in sight, but for the life of them, they can’t work out why they’re unattainable. Self-doubt starts to creep in, and excuses amplify. They’re not where they want to be, but they don’t know why. They have a win from time to time, but they don’t have the energy to sustain it.
Numerous factors got them here, including chronic stress and nutritional deficiencies. In this state, troubleshooting their way out requires external intervention or relying on willpower to research a solution. If they don’t find one fast, their willpower will become so depleted that their body will defend the few resources they have left, turning them into the Defender.
The Defender (25 percent and below)
Defenders are simply focused on guarding what’s left over and defending themselves from further attacks.
Defender mode can be triggered by a number of changes, including a change in the stomach’s microbiome, a course of antibiotics, chronic stress, a traumatic event, or a severe nutritional deficiency that crept up so slowly you weren’t even aware of it until it trapped you in your own toxic echo chamber. Remember the poor boiling frog?
Any attempts to escape using only one fuel source, such as willpower or biochemistry, will only result in your battery becoming even more depleted. At this point, people may tell you that depression is a choice. But when your biochemistry is pointing you in an entirely different direction, you will continue to default to this mode until the underlying cause is addressed by the right professionals—specifically, experts in functional medicine.
In this state, you are fighting the current, fighting your thoughts, and fighting change. This takes even more energy, depleting you psychologically because you’re unsure what is going on. This added stress can also trigger further physiological symptoms. Some may pinpoint these symptoms as the cause, but they most likely are not, as you’ll discover later in this book.
Before you start freaking out because you recognize yourself as a Defender, this is precisely where my journey began. These are the symptoms I exhibited when I was at my worst. At best, I would only sit in “Defender Mode” for a few hours and then self-medicate with caffeine to turn myself into a Catalyst so I could get some work done. This never lasted, and I ended up bouncing between these two extremes.
The great news is that it’s not all in your head: It’s in your biochemistry, and once your biochemistry becomes balanced, your head will clear. At that point, you’ll really get to ramp up and focus on what you want because you’ll finally have the energy to do so.
It is crucial to remember that if you recognize yourself as a Defender (remember, we can fluctuate throughout the day, week, month, or year), it’s because of a few simple issues you can begin to rectify, such as:
You are nutritionally deficient in key areas.
You have been relying on unstable fuel sources, such as sugar, refined carbohydrates, or fatty foods, resulting in the more extreme ups and downs.
You have been relying too heavily on one of two fuel sources, i.e. biochemical or psychological, and they’re burning smoke, making you choke on your own internal environment.
You are experiencing inflammation in your body. (There’ll be more on that in Chapter 3.)
If this is you, your internal environment has become toxic. Your body is doing everything it can to preserve your existence, which reduces your available energy, causing you to further isolate yourself. This isn’t weak-mindedness; it’s an inbuilt strategy designed to support us when our needs intensify. At this point, it’s key to go easy on yourself. Don’t beat yourself up because you’re not driven or motivated. Instead, methodically work toward a solution, doing what you can when you can.
What’s your identity gap? Visit www.areyouunstoppable.com to take the free online quiz now.
So why don’t people change? Based on this new way of thinking about identity, it’s clear why self-help intervention alone doesn’t always result in people changing their behaviors—especially if they are already guarding their current resources from further depletion or fending off attacks such as inflammation or stress. There is no energy left to spark or maintain that change.
With this in mind, we can have greater empathy for ourselves or those people in our lives who are struggling. It’s not that we’re incapable; it’s that we can’t become who we want to become while we’re applying the same old self-help, medical, and psychiatric models in isolation to our problems.
All is not lost. In fact, this new awareness may have just lit up your light bulb, if only momentarily, with the hope that there is a way forward.
It is from here that we revolutionize the game plan.
CHALLENGE TWO
Muse: the Brain Sensing Headband: The first tool in the world to provide accurate feedback on what happens in the brain during meditation.
Who was I kidding? I was still fluctuating between Defender and Guardian. Meditating in that state is about as useful as trying to vacuum your house with the power turned off. Nonetheless, I persisted.
The Muse looked promising. It promised to provide real-time tracking of what was going on in my brain while I meditated and audio feedback by the sound of waves crashing when my thoughts became overactive or birds chirping when I entered a state of calm.
My goal was to use the device every night before I went to bed for a minimum of 30 days.
I put on the headset, connected it to the app, and began meditating, something I’d never really done before. I’ve always used visualization to imagine my day unfolding the way I wanted. I’d view this video in my mind’s eye and rewind, fast-forward, and rewind it multiple times to trick my subconscious into thinking I’d already completed the tasks I needed to. Hence, there was no need to be anxious about a large workload. Having used this practice for more than ten years, sitting there just observing my thoughts was challenging.
The Muse app gave me a score at the end of each session. After my first session, I scored 48 percent calm. It took me more than two weeks to score higher than 70 percent. During this time, I made some interesting observations. I felt a lot calmer, although I was still exhausted, and I was having random flashes of beautiful memories I hadn’t thought about in years.
As a result, my mood started to improve, and it was easier for me to relax. Little things that would have triggered my anger before no longer had the same sting to them. Instead, I would acknowledge them and then let them go. I even noticed that I would slip into a peak meditative state while working out at the gym during my CrossFit challenge. Combined with Halo Sport, my workouts became far more effective. It was still a struggle to meditate at times due to the meager power supply available to my brain, but I felt the meditative process was still beginning to rewire my brain for the changes yet to come.
