Figure 7.1 Road Map to Break the Pattern of Negative Behaviors
The Switch
Obliterate Fear and Overcome Failure by Leveraging the Latest Wearable Technology
“Hurricane Irma is heading straight for us!” I stood in shock as I watched the latest news report come in, advising that Tampa and St. Petersburg were now in the direct path of one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes in history. We had been living in suspense for a week as we watched the supermarket shelves empty of water and the state of Florida go into a panic. More than 6 million Floridians had been ordered to evacuate, including low-level areas a walking distance from where we lived.1 It was as if everyone in the bottom half of the state had evacuated to the top half, thinking they’d be safe, only to find out they were now in the line of fire with the rest of us, and emergency supplies were growing scarce.
Having experienced Hurricane Sandy firsthand in New York in October 2012, I wasn’t taking any chances. I was having flashbacks to the flooded New York City subway, cabs precariously dropping off passengers in the days that followed, as half of Manhattan sat in darkness from power outages. These thoughts only added to my ever-increasing anxiety. Sandy moved in swiftly and caused devastating damage New York is still recovering from.
Irma, however, took its time. We bounced back and forth between “We’re going to be fine” to “Oh, shit! We should leave NOW!” The slow buildup was emotionally draining.
Going through two hurricanes was such a bizarre experience for an Australian, who never grew up knowing this type of threat. I used to believe Americans overreact to everything. Not this time! Now I understood.
We watched for an agonizing week as Irma grew into a powerful and deadly Category 5 hurricane and inflicted damage across the Caribbean. Some of our neighbors evacuated, despite our living in a safe zone and (supposedly) in a hurricane-proof building.
Despite all our precautions, I was struggling to remain calm. I paced around my kitchen as I looked at the map showing Irma was going to plow straight through our town. We need to leave, I thought, but it was too late. I quickly called some friends back home in Australia to break the cycle of repetitive thoughts running through my head.
On September 11, Irma shifted course. It was still unknown how bad it was going to be, but the new update showed that we were back on the “safe” side of the hurricane, if there is such a thing! It was still going to carve a path not far from us, and we’d still be in the eye of the storm, if the weather report held true. But no matter the outcome of the storm, fear was the result inside my body.
Real Danger vs. Perceived Fear: What’s Ruling Your Life?
There is a genuine difference between perceived fear and real danger. Unfortunately, our behavior is shaped by perceived fear more than we care to admit or realize. Real danger rarely occurs, and yet perceived threats can flip a switch and turn on the fight or flight part of your brain. This is otherwise known as the sympathetic nervous system taking over from the logical and rational part of your mind, the parasympathetic nervous system. The logical/rational mind slows our heart rate and lowers our blood pressure after our fight or flight response has been engaged. This system is the best state of mind to be in when working on your goals. Here, you can make rational decisions and assess future consequences in a state of calm, rather than a state of fear that may cause you to make rash decisions you later regret. The more time we spend in this state, the easier life becomes, the faster we find focus, and the less we procrastinate. We can talk through problems without getting overly emotional about them.
Stress caused by perceived threats can take us from being a Catalyst or Synergist (logical/rational mind) into a Guardian or Defender (fight/flight/survival mode) within seconds, regardless of how well-fueled your body and brain are. Anxiety and stress can override even the healthiest individual’s psychology and send them into a state of panic. When this occurs, we go from conscious creation to unconscious behavior within seconds that can either save our life or sabotage our success. If the threat is merely perceived and repeatedly triggered by a particular stimulus (financial, work, relationship, business pressures, or exercise), it can eventually play havoc on your emotional state and your adrenal glands. Each time fight/flight is engaged, we receive a rush of adrenaline that can make us sick, our digestion shuts down, and our focus narrows to the threat at hand. If it gets stuck in this “on” position, it can result in chronic stress, severe exhaustion, and even adrenal fatigue.
Today, we’re under constant stress, and our sympathetic nervous system is stuck in on more than it should be. It is unnecessarily firing off multiple times per day, giving our bodies little downtime to recover from the physiological and psychological effects.
The annual stress survey commissioned by the American Psychological Association found that 77 percent of Americans routinely experience physical symptoms triggered by stress, while 48 percent said it had a negative impact on their professional and personal lives.2 If we allow certain stimuli to trigger our fight/flight and stress response repeatedly, we end up forming strong neurological pathways to that response. This creates a negative feedback loop that becomes harder to break because it becomes habitual over time, even if the stimulus is removed in some cases.
Imagine driving a different way to work. You take a road you have never been down before and need a GPS to navigate. Due to the unknown factors, you need more mental resources to find your way. Hence, more often than not, you default to the tried and true route because it requires less mental processing and energy. The old route, built through the fight/flight response, even though it is detrimental to our success, is the easier option for our brain, especially when resources are low and decision fatigue has kicked in. It’s the pizza for dinner when you can’t figure out what to eat. You know it’s bad for you, but damn, it’s easy and tastes so good. The only problem is you often regret it later.
Some people, even after years of therapy, understand their fears aren’t real, but still react negatively. Their old neurological pathways haven’t developed a new response system. Some therapy may even further solidify the fear response they’re desperately trying to avoid. The act of simply discussing it can trigger the fight/flight response. The therapist MUST break these neurological pathways and form new beneficial ones. This can be achieved via neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) or a combination of strategies that we will uncover in the coming pages.
Habits and Highways: How We Form New Behaviors and Break Old Patterns (The Real Secret to Your Success)
To form new habits, we must lay the foundation for new neurological highways to be built, ensuring they are well-established and well-maintained. These new highways help you close the gap from who you are to who you need to become to reach your goals. The more you frequent these new paths, the easier they are to travel, until they unconsciously lead you to success. Once they are embedded in your memory and experiences, your need for willpower to force change diminishes. Change becomes easy. Attempting to use willpower to force yourself to change can result in negative neural pathways being built, to the point your brain views your goals as a threat because it requires too much energy to process the unknown factors surrounding it. This could trigger your fight/flight response because the goal is located outside your comfort zone, and you end up “snapping back” into your old self.
Our conscious mind rationalizes the difficulty and frames the goal as “too hard,” while your subconscious mind is screaming, “It’s going to kill you! Danger, danger, Will Robinson!” Hence, we come up with an excuse that has nothing to do with the real underlying cause.
As you can see in Figure 7.1, the response “most traveled” will eventually become the default response, regardless of whether it positively or negatively impacts your real-world outcomes. Because it’s triggered while the mind is in fight/flight mode, this behavior becomes unconscious and can sabotage your success beneath the surface.
To change our behavior and ensure we reach our goals, we must make a conscious choice. This choice should occur while we are in the logical/rational mindset. After we have traversed this road repeatedly, it then becomes a “positive unconscious behavior” that naturally leads to success.
When we first attempt to travel down a new highway, it can feel incredibly uncomfortable. The unknown requires copious amounts of mental energy to process. Although going back to the old pattern could negatively impact your ability to reach your goal, it’s still easier for your brain than learning something new. Furthermore, our tendency to repeat negative behaviors amplifies when we hit decision fatigue and our brain puts us into self-preservation mode.
Our objective is to demolish these old highways and build new ones using a strategic and long-lasting approach that works without turning on fight/flight. In my 90-day mission to become unstoppable, I used the latest wearable technology to reprogram my mind for success. Years of exhaustion, depression, and anxiety had me living in self-preservation mode. It took real effort to turn it off, and even then, it would only switch off for a short time before coming back on again. My identity devolved into a person who didn’t believe I could reach my goals. I made decisions out of fear that painfully delayed my progress by years.
So let’s look at how traumatic life experiences can shape our behavior decades after the events have been forgotten. While these events may not seem traumatic to others, perception is personal, and your response to a situation deserves respect. Fear isn’t always rational—unless you’re staring down the face of a Category 5 hurricane.
1. When you experience a traumatic event, your fight/flight response is triggered. This creates new neurological pathways that apply meaning to this event: fear, sadness, anxiety, grief, or anger. Your emotions are amplified in this primal state as your system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, increasing the likelihood of it being committed to your long-term memory, both consciously and subconsciously. This reaction is meant to keep you safe and on high alert to future life/death situations despite the real/perceived danger having passed.
2. If similar events occur in the future that remind you of this experience (through sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch), your brain defaults to those old neurological pathways and responds based on your previous experiences. The past event is its reference point for future ones. Because this highway has been traveled repeatedly before, it’s easy for your brain to default to it. In essence, you may be reacting to the old event out of habit, not the current one out of fear.
This physiological programming shapes the way we behave in every aspect of our lives, even if we attempt to convince ourselves it doesn’t. It’s like playing the same old album on repeat. It becomes comfortable. It reinforces who we believe ourselves to be, despite being in conflict with who we need to become to reach our goals. Hence, an internal battle for one’s self continues until we select a new soundtrack for our life. When we short-circuit these neurological pathways and form new ones, we can quickly dismantle our fears and phobias. Change becomes easy, freeing us from our self-imposed limitations and allowing us to transform into the person we know we can become.
It is often only in hindsight that we are aware of how our behavior has been impacted by this change. When you’re in a mental state of fight/flight, you see everything through an emotional, fear-filled lens. Your emotions become amplified, and sometimes uncontrollable. In this state, others may tell you to “calm down and breathe deeply.” This can be completely ineffectual because your logical mind is not in control. You may sometimes be able to talk yourself out of it, or a pleasant distraction may interrupt the pattern.
But other times, your pattern may need to run until the adrenaline is released. The more often we allow stress to activate our fight/flight response, the harder it can be to rationalize fears we may have about stepping out of our comfort zones. If your goal engages your fight/flight response because it makes you feel too uncomfortable, your brain may come to view it as a real life-or-death situation. If this happens, you will forever be caught in a tug of war between who you are and who you want to become. Your identity gap will be harder to close, and you will feel out of alignment.
There’s a constant battle between your primal brain’s need to keep you safe and your spiritual side’s need for you to shine. I haven’t met anyone who hasn’t faced this struggle at some point in their lives. There’s no more painful way to live than fighting against your own primal instincts. And, as we’ve discovered, nutritional deficiencies, inflammation, medications, and more can amplify and even trigger your fight/flight response. When you address these problems first, managing the psychological side becomes much easier because you spend less time in fight/flight mode. Repeatedly experiencing fight/flight can manifest all types of unusual behavior that can sabotage your success, including:
Avoidance behavior: Putting off what you need to get done, including overworking, so you don’t have to deal with a particular situation. Spending countless hours scrolling through social media or watching TV.
Changes in mood: Becoming angry or moody without realizing why and lashing out at others in an uncharacteristic way.
Increased anxiety: This includes everything from racing heartbeat, fidgeting, and pacing to withdrawing from others and an inability to focus, all to keep yourself distracted from what’s truly at play.
Identity shift: You switch into Guardian and Defender mode and can begin to think you’re the kind of person who just doesn’t reach their goals or ever get what they want. This is the most detrimental one of all, but thankfully, through nutrition and brain training, there is a way forward.
Hurricane Irma posed a very real threat at the time, although it ultimately missed our area, and still impacted us psychologically in the weeks afterward because adrenaline had flooded our systems for an extended period before the storm. Daily stressors work similarly, although the threats are typically perceived rather than real; they can be everything from fear of failure, success, criticism, and feeling overwhelmed. And, like nutritional deficiencies, they also result in real physiological responses, including:
Increased heart rate
High blood pressure
Adrenaline release
Scattered thinking
Chronic stress
Depression
Anxiety
Fatigue
Reprogram Your Mind and Take Back Your Life
At the beginning of my 90-day mission, I felt like I was starting from scratch. Any semblance of my old driven self had disappeared. I had to remind myself who I used to be and what I was capable of, and imagine who I could become. Like everybody else, I tackled the problem backward by focusing on psychology first and nutrition second. But it was only after my nutritional deficiencies began to normalize that I could stay in my logical/rational mind most of the time. From there, I could begin to work on my psychology because my cognitive functions were slowly returning, and I could finally think problems through.
Now, though, I was going to step up my game. I was going to try out the latest in neuroscience and wearable technology being used by the Pentagon, Olympic gold medalists, PTSD sufferers, and peak performers. The wearable technology had to meet specific criteria, including being affordable to the wider population, practical, and cost less than the latest smartphone.
Not only did I want it to resolve any fears of failure or success that had plagued me, but I also needed it to do the following:
Provide a drug-free solution
Create new neural highways
Reduce stress within minutes
Tame my fight/flight response
Break through physical limitations
Speed up change and make it stick
Provide a mental and emotional recharge
Improve my duration and ability to focus
Create spontaneous, positive behavior change
Provide data that would give me insight into my mind/body
Reduce my need to apply willpower when implementing change
Create physiological change that would influence my emotional state
Reprogram negative patterns I had failed to reprogram previously
And, most importantly, it would need to help me train my brain to switch tasks more efficiently and help me get into the elusive “zone” faster, so I could achieve more in less time and recover from disruptions swiftly. One study by the University of California, Irvine, revealed that distractions severely threaten your work output, disrupt your mental flow, increase stress and frustration, add time pressure, and compound the effort required to complete the task at hand. We all knew this already, but did you know it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to refocus on a task after you have been interrupted?3 Their results also showed interruptions lead people to change not only work rhythms but also mental states. This further drains your mental resources.
Wearables to Upgrade Your Body, Mind, and Soul
I spent several months before my 90-day mission began examining these objectives to determine which wearables lived up to their claims and which ones did nothing. What I found was fascinating. All the following devices work to calm the fight/flight response by building new neural pathways to the preferred behavior. Some devices also provide another benefit: They instigate what is known as a pattern interrupt. Derived from neuro-linguistic programming, a pattern interrupt disrupts a certain behavior from continuing while that pattern is being played out in real time. This is by far one of the most effective ways to short-circuit a negative behavioral response because the brain isn’t expecting it to happen. The pattern interrupt has the ability to switch you back into your logical/rational mind instantly and drive awareness that can only occur in this part of the brain. It becomes even more effective when this pattern interrupt occurs without the brain expecting it. With this in mind, let’s look at the four wearables I experimented with:
1. TouchPoints™
2. Muse™
3. Spire Stone
4. Halo Sport
TouchPoints: Used in the Treatment of ADHD, PTSD, Autism, Anxiety, and Phobias—The Ultimate Pattern Interrupt
He had blood streaming down his face! Rick, our close friend on his way back home from visiting his wife at work on St. Patrick’s Day in St. Petersburg, came across an argument between a man and his girlfriend. He heard screaming and yelling from across the street and saw the man attempting to drag his much smaller girlfriend away by her jacket. Not one to walk past someone in distress, Rick grabbed the man’s wrist and got between them in an attempt to calm the guy, who was absurdly drunk. Rick, a six-foot gentle giant with a bodybuilder physique, had previously worked in security. He said, “Listen, you need to calm down, the police are coming. You’re way too drunk.”
But while Rick was talking to him, two other men tried to attack the guy. In the scuffle, they all fell back, and Rick hit his head on a metal pipe. The paramedics sent him home to get cleaned up.
When I saw Rick, I winced as I looked at the cuts and the blood running from his hairline. He was pacing and appeared highly agitated as he described what had happened. His adrenaline was still high. Within minutes, our friend Ashley, a nurse, advised us he needed to go to the emergency room. The right side of his face had started swelling. His next-door neighbor went to get her car and told us to meet her downstairs. As we were waiting, I put my TouchPoints on Rick.
TouchPoints are two watch-type wearable devices that you wear on each wrist. They use what is called “bilateral alternating stimulation tactile” (BLAST) technology, which provides gentle haptic microvibrations that interfere with your body’s stress response. Invented by neuropsychologist Dr. Amy Serin and brought to market by CEO and cofounder Vicki Mayo, the process can be explained in three steps:
1. An event or thought triggers our stress and fight/flight response. We experience sensations in our body—racing heartbeat, tightness in the chest, tension in our neck, and butterflies in our stomach.
2. When turned on, the alternating stimulation from the TouchPoints shifts you back into the logical, rational part of your brain. It feels like the gentle vibration from your phone shifting between your wrists.
3. If we think of something stressful without experiencing the physical sensations and while in the rational part of our brains, we create new neural pathways that neutralize the negative response. A stressful event or thought can become completely neutralized or even positive because you’re seeing it through the lens of your rational mind, not the primal mind revving you up to fight or flee.
This has a lasting effect in your brain, reducing stress over time, and is why TouchPoints were derived from one of the few successful treatments for PTSD. User data confirms TouchPoints reduce stress by 74 percent in 30 seconds.4
I reached out to Vicki and asked her how she had come up with the idea.
She said, “About three years ago my daughter, who was four at the time, was having terrible night terrors. I happened to tell one of my wonderful friends, who is a mom, but also a neuropsychologist, Dr. Amy Serin. I put what would later become TouchPoints in my daughter’s hands in the middle of a heinous night terror. She went straight to sleep and woke up happy the next day. I said, this is incredible. How can we bring this to the market and make this technology accessible to everyone?” Vicki’s story had inspired me to put them on Rick.
By the time we got Rick to the emergency room, only a couple of minutes away, his persona had completely changed. He was relaxed and jovial as he checked in to get treated. He stopped biting the inside of his cheek and bouncing his legs up and down from agitation. His focus, scattered a few minutes earlier, softened, and he relaxed to the point he was joking around with others in the waiting room. Anyone who has ever been in a fight can attest to just how long it takes to calm down afterward. It can take many hours. Instead, this happened within minutes. This wasn’t even the most surprising result I saw while I experimented with these wearables.
A 40-Year Phobia Gone in Less Than 40 Minutes
A week prior, I had sat down with Rick and Trish, his wife. Trish has thalassophobia, a fear of being in or near large bodies of water. When she was 16, Trish fell off a yacht off the coast of Florida. Her phobia was so severe that she couldn’t even look at pictures of scuba divers or walk near the ocean unless Rick was holding her hand. It had affected her life for more than 40 years.
I sat her down and explained how TouchPoints work. For the next 40 minutes, I showed her deep-water pictures and had her rate her fear from a scale of 0 to 10 while they vibrated on her wrists.
The first few images were the toughest. She was visibly getting upset and had to turn away repeatedly. But within a couple of minutes, her level of fear dropped from 10 to 7. Then it went back up to 10, only to drop to 5. It continued to fluctuate as we exposed her to various images. Then she saw one of the images that used to send her into a panic: the Jaws movie poster. She picked up the computer, looked at it closely, and pointed out details of the girl’s swimsuit. She was touching the screen and laughing in amazement.
Later that night, I received a message from Trish. She had sent me deep water ocean pictures with the message, “Look what I can do!”
“I Want to Go to the Docks! I’m Ready to Be Done with this Fear Once and for All!”
Trish was ready to confront her fear head on and visit the shipping docks in Tampa Bay, so we drove there one sunny Sunday morning. Being overly cautious, I had her put on the TouchPoints, despite her wanting to do it without them. As we walked to the docks, she began to get nervous as she saw the ships in the distance. I turned the TouchPoints on to calm her down before we went any further. As we were trying to work out how to get a closer look and get around all the security fencing, she walked straight up to a security guard and asked if we could get a closer look at the ship. He advised us to go to the terminal just meters away and head up the stairs. From there, she could get a great view of the ships.
At the top of the platform, Trish began to get nervous as the stern of the ship came into view. She took a few steps back and her knees went weak, unsure if she could go through with it. I asked her to recall the funniest thing Rick had ever done, but she couldn’t—she was far too deep in survival mode. I had her turn and face the other direction and close her eyes. She laughed and started humming a song Rick would sing to make her laugh. (We wanted to interrupt her pattern in multiple ways, not just with the TouchPoints.) She calmed down and took a few more steps. We repeated this at least four more times before she got to the edge of the platform and peered over.
She couldn’t believe she was face to face with a gigantic luxury cruise ship. We stood there for several minutes before she turned to the ship in front of it. She could see its massive propeller jutting out of the water, something that would typically send her into a panic, and wanted to get close to it. We took the steps down and began walking toward it cautiously. Having realized her phobia was irrational, with confidence and only slight hesitation, she walked up to the hull of the ship, leaned over, and touched it!
She jumped up with excited disbelief. This was the same shipping port she had previously refused to work at, something that had cost her income.
Trish messaged me a day later: “By the way, I watched a documentary on shark attacks. First few minutes was the habitual reaction, but then that passed quickly. Rick and I were totally shocked.”
This is just one example of how fear can rule our lives. Trish could have gone to therapy for years to attempt to desensitize herself from the ocean. This may have resulted in her being able to rationalize the fear, but not being able to rid herself of it. Fear isn’t a rational response. The TouchPoints had short-circuited the neural pathway that led to her reaction and completely neutralized it. In my 15 years of working in the personal development field, I can say with complete confidence that I have never, ever seen behavior change happen more quickly.
Side Effects and Results
Many of us try for years to overcome a fear of criticism, success, failure, or financial worries, to no avail. We know they aren’t rational fears, and yet they can drown out any positive thoughts and lead us to behave in ways that are counter to our desired outcomes.
I asked Vicki if there were any side effects. “There is one significant side effect,” she said. “Over time, you’ll be calmer. We are creating new neural pathways in your brain, which over time you’re learning not to handle situations in the same way. There’s a certain spontaneous behavior change that just comes from using TouchPoints.”
From my own experiences using the TouchPoints on a daily basis, I observed I could sit still for longer periods of time without becoming agitated. This was particularly useful when I was writing. Whenever I would get agitated because I wasn’t getting enough done or got stuck, I would turn them on. This rewired the way I perceived the task in front of me, significantly reducing my stress levels and allowing me to regain my focus. This pattern interrupt was more effective than I had expected. What’s more, I had noted spontaneous behavior changes before I talked to Vicki. I found myself speaking up and dealing with certain situations more calmly than before. This was particularly handy when searching for a new apartment in New York City without a credit history in the U.S.
I also used them in conjunction with a daily mental rehearsal to prepare myself for the day ahead. Tracking the results with the Muse meditation device, which records brain-wave activity in real time, I could see I was calmer by up to 20 percent in some instances. I’ve used them to reprogram stress around finances, topics of conversation that would normally get heated between my partner and me, and other activities that would typically stress me out.
One particular spontaneous behavior change I experienced was profound: I felt more confident when interacting with others. Any fears of what others thought of me suddenly diminished, and I was free to be myself. This was something I hadn’t felt for years, nor did I consciously work on it while using the device.
While TouchPoints have been used to help ADHD, autism, Parkinson’s, Tourette syndrome, and PTSD, Vicki makes no claims that they treat any of these conditions. She clarified, “What we do know … if you think about your body and all these, the verticals, ADHD, autism, Parkinson’s, is that they’re all conditions. Overarching above it all is this condition of stress. We know that stress exacerbates all of them, whether it’s PTSD, fear of heights, anything that we experience in our daily life. Stress makes it worse. The way that your stress response works is it is initiated by your fight or flight. When you turn your fight or flight mechanism off, you automatically get this huge release.”
This device can be used to reprogram anything, particularly when it comes to stepping out of our comfort zone, that may engage your fight/flight and lead you to give up on your dreams. It also has one other major benefit: You can turn it on in seconds. You don’t have to wait to see a therapist, which comes too late, after the stimulus has passed. When we can short-circuit stress at the moment we sense it coming on, we can stop it from taking hold. Future versions of this device will have sensors that automatically turn them on without user intervention. This will make them even more effective than they already are at disrupting negative patterns from occurring in the moment.
Meditate with Muse: Reduce Stress, Improve Mood, and Relax
We’ve all heard of the countless benefits meditation can bring us. The problem for many of us, when it comes to sitting down and calming our mind, is that we can’t tell whether we’re doing it right. Thankfully this can be quickly overcome. First we must understand how deep the benefits of meditation run, and how much impact they can have on our ability to succeed in life and shape our identity. The benefits of meditation include:
Increased immune health5
Decreased inflammation at the cellular level6
Increased positive emotions7
Decreased depression8
Decreased anxiety9
Decreased stress10
Improved ability to regulate your emotions11
All these benefits can help shape the way we perceive and respond to the world, how we present ourselves, and how we feel about ourselves. Most important, meditation has been shown to produce the opposite reaction of what occurs during the fight/flight response.
In a study published in the open-access journal PLOS One, researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital found that practicing a relaxation response a couple of times a day for 10 to 20 minutes improved its efficacy.12
Muse takes the guesswork out of meditation. Muse is a brain-sensing headband that walks you through a guided meditation and provides audio feedback in real time on how you’re doing. A soundscape of your choice, like the ocean or rainforest, plays in the background. The seven sensors in the headband, which fits around the back of your ears and across the middle of your forehead, detect your brain activity. When you reach a deep sense of calm, birds start chirping. When your mind becomes overactive, the birds stop, and the soundscape becomes loud and chaotic, your cue to calm your mind. Through the “gamification” of the app, you receive calm points and awards. You also receive a percentage-based score of how calm you are, from 0 to 100 percent, so you can attempt to do better each time.
I found this style of meditation easy. The gamification supplied a real sense of purpose, and because it was guided, it was idiot proof. It provided a structure that many of us lack when we try to meditate on our own. My initial “calm scores” came in at under 50 percent. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks into my daily practice with the device that I began to make significant improvements and score around 90 percent. My results also indicated my meditation practice was far more effective in the morning than nighttime, even though I needed it at night to wind down after a busy day.
I was able to achieve higher results after having 1 milligram of nicotine and wearing the TouchPoints in conjunction with the Muse. This was a huge step toward becoming the person I was meant to be and reaching my hefty goals.
Typically, it’s suggested that when you meditate, you allow your thoughts to flow to whatever thought pops into your mind, which I did at first. However, after a while, I chose to recall a stunning beach on Koh Phi Phi Don, an island in Thailand where I took a holiday years ago.
Koh Phi Phi Don sits opposite Koh Phi Phi Leh, the beautiful island where they filmed the movie The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio. I would visualize sitting in the sand, looking out over the crystal-clear turquoise ocean and listening to the waves hit the shoreline. After several days, I started developing the urge to meditate more. It felt like a holiday because I had hit a high level of calm during these meditations. Whenever I needed a quick recharge, I would slip on the Muse and be transported back to the island and the sense of calm I felt when I visited there more than ten years ago.
An unexpected outcome from using the Muse was that during the day I would have flashbacks to pleasant memories, many of which made me smile. I took this as my brain reprogramming itself with more positive neural pathways. I found this device useful for training my brain to focus on one task at a time, instead of flipping between internet browsers or social media sites.
After 30 days, I experienced a sense of calm I hadn’t felt in years. It was as if I could finally breathe again. It is important to recognize if you have nutritional deficiencies, inflammation, or medications that are causing depression and anxiety, the Muse will be less effective in an environment with deficits. The real results didn’t appear until I had corrected these problems.
Spire Stone: Interrupt the Stress Response Through Breathing
That day at the train station when my fight/flight response fired up tenfold, when the man came bursting in accusing the smaller guy of murdering his sister, was a wake-up call. Within minutes of observing what I believed was soon to be a murder, my Spire Stone, a wearable device hooked to the belt of my pants, vibrated and snapped me back into my logical/rational mind.
The Spire Stone tracks everything from steps, respiration, and sleep to how tense you are based on your breathing patterns. It measures these through the expansion and contraction of your torso. When it vibrates, it’s providing a cue to take a deep breath. We often forget just how much our rate of breathing is affected by stress. When we become stressed, our breathing becomes shallow and tense. When we disrupt this pattern, we can bring ourselves back into our logical/rational mind and calm down.
The Spire Stone proved to be an effective pattern interrupt. It would occasionally vibrate when I was having a disagreement with my partner, at which point we would crack up laughing. The only problem I had with the device was that it wouldn’t always connect or record the data. It is supposed to track how many minutes you are calm, focused, tense, active, and sedentary throughout the day and while you’re asleep. Like the Muse, it has a real gamification element to it that kept me engaged. Since I tried out the Spire Stone, they have released a new device called the Spire Health Tag. This device is attached to your clothes and is even machine washable, making it even more user-friendly. Even though the data on the Spire Stone isn’t hugely accurate, I would still recommend it as an entry-level wearable that can provide real pattern interrupts to beneficially influence behavior, turn off the fight/flight response, and reduce stress.
Halo Sport: Obliterate Limitations in the Gym Through Electrical Stimulation to Your Motor Cortex
I felt a strong tingling sensation across the top of my head. I had just put on Halo Sport: an expensive-looking pair of headphones with softly pointed foam pads under the top band that touch your head above the part of your brain called the motor cortex. Based on 15 years of scientific research, Halo Sport provides electrical stimulation during movement-based training, helping build stronger, more optimized connections between your brain and muscles. The function of Halo Sport is to place the brain in a state of hyperplasticity that refines the brain’s ability to adapt to training. I had reached out to the company and secured a four-week trial of the device, during which I would undertake an intense CrossFit workout designed by a friend of mine, Dean Haynes, a CrossFitter from Adelaide, Australia. I had completed the four-week program multiple times over the past four years and had recorded all my statistics into an Excel spreadsheet. I knew what my average numbers were, and I wanted to improve them, as well as increase the intensity of my sessions and shorten their duration. I would compare what I used to lift with what I could lift with Halo Sport. This experiment had two core objectives: increase my workout intensity and break old neural pathways and my belief that I could only lift a certain amount without getting injured. This was a fight/flight response that had held me back from great performance in the gym. To feel unstoppable, I had to challenge my body and brain in a myriad of ways.
Different physical exercises can bring specific mental gains: dealing with cravings, reducing stress, improving memory—everything required to close our identity gap. An article included in The Scientific Guide to an Even Better You published these findings:
Lifting weights: Assists the prefrontal cortex of the brain, complex thinking, reasoning, multitasking, problem solving
Yoga: Helps the frontal lobe and helps integrate thoughts and emotions
High intensity interval training: Focuses on the hypothalamus and appetite regulation, cravings, and addiction
Everyone from Olympic medalists to MLB, the NBA, the NFL, CrossFitters, and endurance athletes have praised Halo Sport. It’s even been used to train special ops forces in the U.S.
During my first workout, something surprising happened. On my first exercise, a squat clean, a relatively complex movement that uses multiple muscles and requires perfect form to prevent injury, I lifted 936 pounds (424 kilograms), heavier across the set than when I had lifted previously. This is a movement I had not done in more than three months, as I rotate my programs regularly. I noticed something else interesting as well: I was sweating profusely. My personal trainers have always pushed me harder because I just don’t sweat much. I thought this might be the placebo effect in full swing. But this type of gain continued daily for the entire four weeks I worked out with Halo Sport.
Remember Rick, the former bodybuilder and full-blown skeptic? I had him try the device while doing triceps presses. Rick had never been able to press the entire weight stack until the day he put this on his head. To say he was surprised was an understatement. He also noticed he sweated more than usual.
To find out more, I hopped on a plane to San Francisco and sat down with Brett Wingeier, the CTO and cofounder of Halo Neuroscience. He shared with me how they had worked with a comprehensive team of doctors, neuroscientists, athletes, designers, and engineers to develop Halo Sport. Before creating Halo Sport, the founding team had spent more than a decade developing the world’s first closed-loop neurostimulation device for epilepsy patients. It received unanimous FDA approval after changing the lives of thousands of epilepsy patients. Here’s what Brett said when I asked him more about it:
The roots of the company started when my cofounder and I spent most of our career in implantable medical devices. And we met at a company called NeuroPace, where we made an implantable responsive simulator for epilepsy. And what that means is it’s an implant that sits in your head, lives there for the rest of your life, watches for seizures about to start, and then stimulates to stop them before they start.
Unsure of how much he could tell me about their work with the military, he did say, “One of our first contracts was with the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), and they brought Halo Sports to numerous installations—special ops and other installations—and they’ve been getting great results with it. The basic science, also sometimes working with laboratory units, sometimes working with products like Halo, they’ve found results like this visualance where transcranial stimulation can accelerate sniper training. It can accelerate vigilance.”
The military has also conducted placebo sham controlled randomized double-blinded clinical trials. “We’ve duplicated some of those studies,” Brett said. “We’ve got our own data, and then the next step is we’ve gone out to athletes, and we’ve done randomized doubleblind sham-controlled studies with the U.S. national ski team.” They even have a stroke study going on at the Medical University of South Carolina with Halo Sport.
Each day I used Halo Sport, I made notes of my experience. Here’s what I observed:
The complex movements in my program became easier.
After I lifted the first weight, without thinking, I added more weights to the bar. I just felt I could lift heavier weights naturally. Any fear that I couldn’t had disappeared without consciously having to work through it.
The extreme sweating only occurred the first two times I used the device.
The biggest change of all was that I didn’t have the same level of muscle soreness. Typically, when doing this program, I ended up having issues with my right shoulder due to tight chest muscles; this time I didn’t.
So where does Halo Sport fit in with obliterating fear and overcoming failure? It’s simple. It showed my brain what my body was capable of. It broke the old neural connections that said, “I can’t lift heavier or train harder than this!” And it rewired neural pathways that helped me lift heavier in the gym even after I had stopped using the device. Admittedly, my workouts did feel harder without it in the following weeks, but my brain knew I was capable of more. I could push through the discomfort. Sometimes we need a little extra help to reprogram our minds and open the door to greater success, in the gym and in life.
To track my progress, I not only recorded the weight I was lifting each day, I took a photo of myself in the mirror daily for the duration of the experiment. I will show them to you in Chapter 10. I was still nutritionally deficient in the first photo, as I had only just discovered what I needed to correct. Despite this, I lifted heavier than I ever have before.
This was one of the toughest experiments I conducted on my mission to becoming unstoppable. As it was one of my earliest experiments, I needed to use extreme levels of willpower to overcome nutritional deficiencies. While the workouts were easy and fun, they still put incredible amounts of stress on my body. The physical changes that occurred despite this, I believe, are a testament to what the body is truly capable of when we use devices that help us unlock our capacity. I look forward to conducting this experiment again now that my body has found a state of nutritional equilibrium. And, most critically, this transformation provided me with a real identity. As the shape of my body changed, so did my confidence in myself—not just in how I felt about the way I looked, but how I felt about myself. I had broken personal bests each day for an entire month. That has had a lasting impact on my psychology even to this day.
Applying the Latest Wearable Technology to Short-Circuit Behaviors That Stop You From Becoming Unstoppable
With today’s technological advances, we possess tools that can unlock our capacity for great and lasting change. And as we’ve discovered, when our fight/flight response is frequently turned on, we become exhausted and overwhelmed and can convince ourselves we’re not capable of reaching our goals. By leveraging the latest wearable devices, we can find new ways to transform ourselves into a Catalyst by interrupting the patterns that have held us back for years. They drive awareness in a way we can’t when we’re in self-preservation mode. By using these devices in real life-threatening situations as well as situations where the threat is only perceived, I’ve developed an ability to bounce back from setbacks within minutes, instead of hours, days, or even months. And now that we know how to short-circuit these disruptive, life-draining patterns, it’s time to prime your brain for success and delve into one more life-changing wearable that tracks a key component to becoming a Catalyst, as well as a powerful technique for priming your brain for success.