The 21st-Century Survivalist
The New Paradigm for Transforming
Discomfort into Power
Have you ever stopped to marvel at how clever your body really is?
In just the past second, trillions of cellular transactions took place within you—but you didn’t have to direct even one percent of them. And at the same time, each of those cells was given the proper nourishment to replenish its activity. You didn’t need to consciously do one thing. Yes, the mind and body are unbelievably capable of sustaining our lives and the status quo. But what happens when the status quo is no longer supporting our health and our behavior in a productive way?
Take, for example, the sixty-year-old man with intractable hiccups who was admitted at the hospital where I was working early in my career as a psychologist. Despite my specialization in hypnosis and my understanding how valuable it could be to some medical conditions at the time, my work was relegated to traditional psychology—treating patients who were depressed, suicidal, schizophrenic, or had multiple personalities. I was not supposed to roam the medical units of the hospital. But on this particular day, unbeknownst to me, a battle had commenced related to this patient. His name was Mikael and he had been suffering from hiccups for more than two years. The hiccups had gotten so bad that they were now causing seizures. After the doctors had tried everything at their disposal, they now wanted to perform a craniotomy (open up his brain) and sever a nerve to interrupt the hiccup reflex. As you can imagine, the family was not happy about this idea, and desperately searched for other solutions.
One of the man’s children knew that hypnosis had been documented in the past to resolve this condition, and through his research also had learned that I was the only staff member at the hospital who could conduct hypnosis. The family then pursued this option through the primary physician involved with the case, asking that I be allowed to have a consultation with their father. Their request was flatly rejected, and the family followed up by raising the issue to the medical staff and hospital administration. Again, they were turned down on the grounds that hypnosis was unscientific, not medically necessary, and unproven. Not until relentless pleas from the family did the hospital finally acquiesce and permit my involvement.
At just twenty-nine years old, and one of the youngest members on staff, I was thrilled to finally have an opportunity to apply my skills to medical conditions beyond those saved for psychiatry. I had no idea that so much conflict and resistance had preceded my invitation to visit this patient, but when I stepped into Mikael’s private room, I was shocked to see the walls lined with physicians, hospital administrators, and family members. Clearly, my work and I were on trial as I faced a very unsupportive and unfriendly group that misunderstood my methods and probably thought I was about to conduct some quasi-magical procedure that reeked of quackery. The tension in the room was palpable, and I hoped that just this once performance anxiety would not be paying me a visit.
I approached the patient and initiated a conversation. He was hiccupping nearly every fifteen to twenty seconds. But to make matters worse, he spoke only broken English. I remember thinking, “Just great. I finally get my big break, but it’s with someone who may not even be able to communicate or understand me. With a room full of people looking for me to fail, couldn’t my first test be something a little less challenging?” I proceeded, and began to engage in a broken conversation with Mikael, quickly learning that he came from the northern reaches of Finland. His hand was cold when I shook it, and I joked with him that this hospital room probably felt familiar since he had experience living in a cold climate. He smiled slightly, and then I noticed that his hiccups halted briefly as I alluded to the coolness. I wondered if there was a connection, so I decided to develop this interaction further.
I began to talk much more in-depth about coolness, while bringing in my hypnotic skills and slowing my voice somewhat. His hiccups became less and less frequent. I thought that if I could help him experience another physical sensation in his body, this new sensation could compete with and block the hiccup reflex. Emboldened, I continued to talk to him about snow, and how sometimes we can get so cold that it’s hard to feel anything else. Even our chest gets cold—so cold, in fact, that we just want to stop, rest, and do nothing else. Within ten minutes, Mikael’s hiccups had vanished. They never returned. When I left the room, everyone (including me) was stunned that a chronic condition scheduled for brain surgery was resolved in just ten minutes of talking. The year was 1983, just as mind-body medicine was beginning to gain recognition, slowly and sporadically, throughout the traditional medical community.
It sometimes takes a dramatic event like this to change dated assumptions about biology and open oneself up to a new perspective on how we function and how the body can, with the help of simple mind-body techniques, snap itself out of a cycle that perpetuates disease or dysfunction. Although I tapped my hypnosis skills to create an enduring shift in this particular patient, the principles behind the change had application in a much broader way. My work with Mikael made it very evident to me how the body becomes imprisoned within a groove and cannot break free from its grip. It becomes habituated to repeatedly react a certain way, like a broken record. By teaching the body to experience new sensations, it can forge new and more productive neural networks so that it may find a path to wellness.
Although we didn’t have the technology then, we know now from current research that these new experiences create new road maps in the brain. It’s like changing a recipe: With the altering of an ingredient, a different result emerges. Although I used hypnosis to elicit the change in Mikael, in the thirty years since, I have learned there are simpler and more practical means of accomplishing the same goal. The secret, of course, is determining the best method to encourage the brain and body to accept and embrace new knowledge.
Eradicating Mikael’s hiccups at this state-of-the-art hospital marked a turning point in my career. No longer would I—or any of my psychologist colleagues—be discouraged from entering the medical unit with our “nontraditional” methods of treatment. I began performing mind-body techniques on patients, and was able to go as far as to conduct hypnosis throughout the hospital. In fact, soon thereafter I founded and became the director of the hospital’s Psychoimmune Program, one of the first of its kind in the country, and started educating residents and fellows from all areas of medicine about the psychodynamics of sickness, or how the mind influences health.
So what was it that led to Mikael’s endless loop of hiccups? Many persistent symptoms, in fact, can start innocently enough but go on relentlessly—a cold that leads to a lingering cough; a stomach bug that leaves you with a long-term aversion to the food you ate just before getting sick; or a sports injury in which the pain continues after it’s allegedly healed, and there’s no pathology to support it. But once the initial cause of these symptoms passes, there is a new spark that fuels them. And for many people, the spark is a rising level of what I am going to label as “discomfort”—a discomfort that creates a new network in the brain and body that continually feeds the symptoms. Amazingly, this level of discomfort flies below their mental radar until a symptom crescendos and takes root.
This was precisely the case with Mikael, who, after several years of poorly managed discomfort, found himself saddled with near-constant hiccups and an impending craniotomy. I later learned that prior to his bout with hiccups, he had experienced significant losses in his life. For some individuals, hiccups can be a reaction to being upset or fearful. And for almost everyone, they resolve relatively quickly. But in Mikael’s case they didn’t, and his level of angst continued to feed them, pressing them into a brain pattern and eventually turning them into a cyclical spiral of misery capable of inducing seizures.
I’ve worked with thousands of people whose health, happiness, and decision making have been compromised by discomfort and fear, which has enslaved them in behavioral patterns that are unproductive and unfulfilling. I’ve helped chronic migraine and headache sufferers who are struck with pain when exposed to fluorescent lights, air conditioning, or a deadline by teaching them how to stop being physically affected by these triggers. I’ve helped numerous people break the cycle of suffering attacks whenever they encounter certain situations, such as a freeway overpass, an elevator, or a stuffy room full of people. One of the universal experiences I routinely see is what I call the Let Down Effect, which transpires when a person always gets sick over the holidays, while on vacation, or after a big deadline has been met. I’ve also assisted the time-crunched and harassed CEO who functions well most of the time but becomes seriously unraveled when making decisions under pressure. None of these simple cause-and-effect relationships are arbitrary. They are dynamic manifestations of the body’s neurobiological wiring that science can now explain, and they have far-reaching ramifications for how we stay healthy and even how we age.
Misbehaving Instincts
Most people wrongly assume that a clinical psychologist like me would deal with purely emotional issues and mental illness. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Today the majority of my work entails teaching people how to change their mind and body’s reactions to internal and external influences that can perpetuate chronic health conditions and other annoying and lingering symptoms. A bad case of the hiccups pales in comparison to other health problems that can result from a similar chain of reactions in a body whose cellular transmissions have veered wildly off track. In fact, the hiccup scenario serves as a great example for understanding myriad conditions that besiege millions today, including insomnia, poor decision-making skills under pressure, obesity, chronic pain, arthritis, panic and anxiety disorders, depression, headaches, chronic fatigue, allergies, irritable bowel and other gastrointestinal problems, and skin disorders such as acne and eczema. So yes, my practice may be different from that of medical doctors, but one thing we all witness is the growing number of patients suffering from these and other chronic conditions.
Such problems may seem vastly different, but they often have a single common denominator that has gone virtually unnoticed: a misbehaving survival instinct. In many cases, disease processes and compromised behavioral patterns are not solely rooted in the body, but they are also stitched deep within the most primitive area of our brain—the limbic system, the place where many of our ancient physical and behavioral reactions are encoded, setting the course of our behavior, health, and wellness. It is also the place where, working with my patients, I attempt to stimulate the production of new neuronal pathways that ultimately redirect the body’s biological path away from illness and misfiring to one that fosters health and productive behavioral patterns.
MEET THE SURVIVAL INSTINCT
I’m going to show you how this very fundamental part of us—our survival instinct—either underlies and exacerbates many conditions or contributes to their chronic nature. By learning how to control this critical mechanism with my approach, people can manage and in some cases totally eradicate these maladies in a relatively short time period—often without drugs. Just as I snapped Mikael’s body out of a dangerous hiccup loop, you, too, can learn how to extricate yourself from old instinctual patterns that are paralyzing and undermining the quality of your life. I’ll teach you how, with methods I honed helping thousands of patients.
In essence, this book, which describes these practical methods, is an exploration of our survival instinct’s extraordinary powers and the ways in which you, too, can benefit from my approach and optimize your own well-being. Even if you don’t live with a chronic condition, this book will help you to create a healthy response to the world. Indeed, you can now stop feeling trapped on a treadmill in which your physical health and body are managing you, and can instead take hold of the controls and find new and healthy outcomes. With this book you’re also going to learn how you can liberate yourself from fears and frustrations that keep you from functioning at your very best both at work and at home. Imagine, if you will, that you can achieve more peace and less struggle in your life than you have ever known. That is my wish for you, and it’s closer than you might think.
My guess is you’ve never experienced a bout with hiccups as bad as Mikael’s, but by virtue of being human, you’ve certainly had your fair share of unwanted behaviors and symptoms. Perhaps you’re the insomniac who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. Or you’re a time-pressed executive who is looking to enhance your ability to make successful business decisions under pressure. Maybe you’ve battled with your weight because you cannot stop overeating. Or perhaps you’re simply sick and tired of being sick and tired, constantly struggling to find more authentic energy and a sense of peaceful well-being.
At the heart of this book is the connection between our tolerance for discomfort and its link to our inborn survival instincts, which play a huge role in our neurobiological wiring. Recent advances in science show that these instantaneous survivalist reactions have far-reaching ramifications for how we stay healthy, how we behave and perform, how we handle adversity, how we make decisions, and how we weather the passage of time. Much of our body—all the way down to our cells and their biochemistry—can fall into patterns dictated by our survival instinct that are potentially destructive to our long-term health.
Your survival instinct is working inside you right now. It’s that programmed part of you that controls what to do intuitively to save yourself when necessary, such as get up and run out of a burning building. Rarely do you need to recruit this part of you today, because you seldom find yourself in situations that are truly life threatening. Yet I witness this instinct in action daily among patients whose chronic conditions have come to define their lives. It’s the culprit acting up in the person who cannot stop overeating, the insomniac who can’t find sleep, the executive who cannot gain control of his panic attacks when he prepares for a big meeting, and the individual who cannot open herself up to love because of past heartache. In all of these cases, their hair-trigger survival instinct is being unnecessarily pressed into action at the slightest hint of discomfort, manifesting itself in these injurious and destructive behaviors. Once the survival instinct seizes control of the body, it gains the power to perpetuate illness and disease and undermine decisions and focus, without people even knowing it.
I’m compelled to write this book because I work in a mainstream medical system in which the region of the mind where our survival instinct hides is only partially understood. Even today, our instincts don’t receive the total respect that they warrant. All too often, scientific data that clearly links our survival instinct with ill health, chronic disease, and accelerated aging is grossly overlooked. Over the past thirty years, I’ve been working in the trenches of demystifying how the mind influences physical health—gaining an enormous body of knowledge from the one-on-one work I do with individuals. I was among the first scientists to introduce to the medical community how mind-body tools such as hypnosis could be used to influence physical reactions such as inflammation in the body, and I started training medical students, interns, residents, and fellows from all areas of medicine in the mind’s role in influencing illness and health more than twenty-five years ago.
Today, I continue to study and teach mind-body medicine as well as design programs for my patients to remedy a wide spectrum of health challenges and disorders. I help hundreds of patients, from pro athletes to stay-at-home parents, manage (and in many cases totally eliminate) unrelenting stress, daily headaches, serial colds, embarrassing skin disorders, food obsessions, life-disrupting panic attacks, chronic pain, arthritis, and more. But I know that my reach is limited to my practice and local community. My hope and wish is that this book allows me to reach a larger segment of the population that does not have these resources immediately available, and to provide a means of creating lasting change. So if you’re among the millions who suffer from chronic symptoms or health challenges that haven’t been eradicated by traditional medicine, my hope is that this book will help you to find relief at last. The time has come for you to examine how you cope with discomfort in your life, how it affects your inborn survival instinct, and how you can make slight shifts in your lifestyle to support optimal health and well-being.
The Sinking Threshold
Paradoxically, as the comfort in our lives has expanded thanks to technology, the presence of our survival instinct in action is at an all-time high in our lives and culture. Rather than lessening, our intolerance for discomfort is on an upswing, instilling within us an increasingly lower “discomfort threshold” and setting us up to be more and more at the mercy of our primitive instincts and reactions that can perpetuate disease and dysfunction.
The good news is that there is much we can do to reset this threshold. Although our ancestral instincts direct us to flee even the anticipation of discomfort, it is now possible to transform these instincts to accept a greater tolerance for discomfort while embracing a far greater level of safety. There is little chance that we can ever fully avoid being uncomfortable, for it will always be part of our experience as humans. You will learn in this book that your overall level of comfort is often predicated on your tolerance of discomfort, and that you can build up your “instinctual muscles” for successfully managing discomfort while turning down your overly reactive survival instinct.
The topics covered in this book are wide ranging; whether you suffer from chronic pain, unraveling under pressure, or a chronic addiction to the cookie jar late at night, you will find relevant information and strategies pertinent to you. Along the way, I will push you to embrace a new perspective on health and abandon a few conventional wisdoms. I’ll also be answering an array of questions you likely never thought to ask, such as:
The answer to all of these questions is a resounding yes, as I will show. Many of my patients come to me after they’ve become entrapped within a pattern of avoidance and fear, medication regimens, and a powerlessness to control their health, and are at the mercy of their condition. Working with me, however, they can acquire the tools to manage and prevent future episodes. They learn how to tame their survival instinct so it doesn’t get in the way of living to their fullest potential. My hope is that you will recover, too, using the methods described in this book.
Contrary to some other books, which target a specific problem such as weight or sleep, I’m dealing here with an array of possible issues that all share one common characteristic: an overly sensitive survival instinct. The focus in this book is on that shared element rather than the myriad resulting conditions. Thus, this book will unfold chapter by chapter, starting with a broad discussion about discomfort and its roots, and its relationship to the survival instinct. Then you’re going to learn what living up to the rigors of modern life could be doing to you from a behavioral and biochemical standpoint.
This is hardly an arbitrary discussion: To satisfy the skeptics and scientifically minded readers, I will discuss and review the accumulating evidence that shows how features of contemporary culture are progressively altering our physiology right down to the most primitive regions of our brains, where our survival instinct holds the keys to the kingdom of our health and happiness. This discussion examines a spectrum of forces, such as a sizable increase in the importance we place on our external world, our growing reliance on powerful technologies that compels us to stay plugged in, and our escalating need to be instantly gratified. When you add those trends together, you have an exponential outcome that can incite the survivalist in anyone. The world neither looks nor feels safe anymore. And your instincts know it.
For readers who don’t care to understand the science behind all this, you’ll find plenty of embedded stories and practical strategies to apply to your own life and keep you learning even when you don’t realize it. Just having a general understanding of how your survival instinct works inside you every day will be enough to make an enduring and profound positive impact on your life. (I also invite you to check out my website at www.marcschoen.com to access additional material that complements this book’s lessons. There, you’ll be able to download files to further personalize the techniques described in this book, as well as benefit from using supplemental exercises that only the Internet’s technology can provide.)
After taking you on a tour of exactly what happens inside the body when your survival instinct turns on and remains on, I’ll show you how to retrain this instinct. Don’t panic: This won’t entail any crazy recommendations to see a neurosurgeon or just chant “things will be okay” to yourself the next time you feel anxious and edgy. The practical tools and techniques I’ll be giving you are easier to master than you think, and anyone can do it. And they can be applied to virtually any type of behavior, whether you wrestle with a phobia, stress, or a health condition, or you just can’t find a way to relax on weekends and avoid work or responding to e-mail. I wonder if you’ll find glimpses of your own personal struggles as you explore the numerous case studies and anecdotes, and as you discover novel solutions and tools to create meaningful changes in your life.
Obviously, we cannot cease the march of time and the progression of society, but we can learn how to adapt healthfully to most circumstances and keep our survival instinct in check. Indeed, adaptation is the hallmark of our human existence. The upcoming century very well could be all about learning to thrive with less comfort as our society undergoes inevitable transitions in all facets of our livelihood. Those individuals who can master this new survival skill will most likely have the greatest opportunity to create abundance in all areas of their life: social, work, and health. Put simply, you’re going to learn how to transform discomfort into power. By learning how to harness discomfort, you can improve your life right down to the decisions you make every day and that have a lasting impact. Let this book guide you through developing new, required skills so that a secure, healthy, and successful future is within your reach. This book is, at its heart, a modern guide to survival.