The unconscious is the repository of all of our feelings, regardless of their social or personal acceptability. To know about the unconscious is extremely important, for what goes on down there may be responsible for those personality characteristics that drive us to behave as we do.
—Dr. John E. Sarno
In the summer of 1996, Jane Christiansen went waterskiing for her first and only time. Although incredibly healthy and fit, the thirty-six-year-old Jane was also inexperienced. When another boat came too close, creating waves under Jane’s skis, she didn’t think to let go.
Before she knew it, she was airborne with her right leg thrown awkwardly over the back of her head. When she hit the water, the pain was unbearable. She couldn’t move and needed help getting out of the water. The pain was paralyzing.
When she went to the doctor, she learned that her hamstring was 90 percent disconnected from her glutes, almost completely torn off. The doctor told her she’d never be able to run again. This was incredibly devastating, given that Jane led an active lifestyle and had run a marathon just a few months earlier. Although it was a bitter pill to swallow, she took the doctor’s words as gospel and resigned herself to never running again. A premature cognitive commitment was rooted.
Still, in the aftermath of the accident, Jane recovered quickly and resumed her normal, healthy, and active lifestyle—albeit without running. She avoided facing the trauma, and her fixed mindset regarding her ability to run solidified.
Fast forward to 2011: Jane’s husband surprisingly lost what they thought to be a secure job. Instead of looking for new employment, he decided to take an early retirement. This was a shock to Jane, and infuriating. She worked hard running a business and didn’t like seeing her husband spending his day on the golf course. But she kept this to herself as she didn’t want to hurt his feelings or be viewed by others as a complainer.
So she bottled up her growing rage.
Then something happened that didn’t make immediate sense. The pain in her right hamstring came back, and it was just as excruciating as when the waterskiing accident occurred fifteen years prior. Not only that, but her left foot also began to throb. The pain was out of nowhere, unexplainable, and intense.
How did this happen?
Jane went to see a doctor. His explanation was that she was now over fifty years old and her leg pain was part of the natural process of aging. He diagnosed her with tendonitis and arthritis. It didn’t make sense to Jane, but just as she had done fifteen years earlier, she accepted the doctor’s diagnosis.
I guess I’m just getting older, was the narrative that formulated in Jane’s mind, born out of a cognitive commitment she had accepted, which eventually turned into her biological reality.
Subsequently, the pain only got worse. Her fitness became increasingly limited. During the hiking season of 2011, she didn’t hike a single time despite it being her favorite pastime. Her pain affected her work as well.
Meanwhile, her rage and frustration toward her husband festered quietly. Sometimes she was so angry she couldn’t even walk. All the while, she never told anyone about the pain she was experiencing. Being the owner of a health business, and someone whom others saw as a beacon of health and positivity, she wanted to maintain her appearance.
She was a perfectionist, and had been one since she was a little girl. She didn’t want anyone to think she was struggling.
Fast forward to 2014: Jane attended a business and marketing event. At that event, she was introduced to Joe Polish, the founder of Genius Network and Genius Recovery. When Joe saw Jane walk up with a limp, he asked her about it.
“What’s going on with you?” he said, motioning to her leg.
Jane brushed it off. “Oh, nothing, just some leg pain.”
“What do you mean ‘leg pain’? Did you have an injury or something?”
“Yeah, I was in a waterskiing accident and I’m over fifty now.”
“Was this accident recent?”
“No, it was almost twenty years ago.”
“Wait, you’re experiencing pain from something twenty years ago?”
“I guess so, I don’t really know,” Jane replied.
Joe then connected Jane to a friend, Steven Ozanich, who is an expert on the connection between suppressed emotions and physical pain.
A few days later, Jane was on the phone with Steven. He didn’t ask her anything about her physical symptoms, or if she was seeing any doctors, or doing any kind of physical therapy to fix the problem. Instead, he just asked her a bunch of questions about her life.
“Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“What does your husband do for work?”
“Well, he’s not employed. He lost his job three years ago.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“It’s actually really hard to deal with.”
“No, I asked you how does this make you feel?” Steven pushed.
Jane continued to fumble about her emotions. “It’s difficult.”
“No. Seriously. How does your husband being unemployed make you feel?”
“It makes me feel upset.”
“Just upset?”
“To be completely honest with you, it really pisses me off.”
“It sounds like you’re really angry about this.”
“I am. Sometimes I feel a lot of anger.”
“When did the pain in your legs start?”
“About three years ago, right around when my husband lost his job.”
“All right, here’s what’s happening,” Steven said. “Your pain has absolutely nothing to do with your waterskiing injury. Your pain is stemming from the emotions you have toward your husband. You need to find a way to express your emotions.”
That’s basically where their first conversation ended. He told her to read his book The Great Pain Deception, and after she did so, they could have another conversation.
After the phone call, Jane immediately bought the book, but when it arrived in the mail, she didn’t read it. Although the conversation with Steven had been interesting, it didn’t resonate with her. She couldn’t accept the idea that her suppressed emotions were the real cause of her problems.
Several months later, in February 2015, Jane got an email from Steven:
“Hey, Jane, how are you doing?”
“I’m good, but I’m still in pain. I haven’t read your book yet but I promise I will.”
Immediately after sending the email, she grabbed Steven’s book off her bookshelf and read the whole thing that week. By the time she finished it, the pain in both of her legs felt 90 percent gone. She emailed Steven back excitedly and scheduled another call. He explained that her pain was gone because of “knowledge therapy,” which made her aware of the true cause of her pain and problems.
During a second call, Steven asked what Jane had been doing about the pain over the past several years, and what she was currently doing.
She had done all sorts of expensive therapies and treatments, even flying across the country to try experimental therapies. Steven told her to stop everything she was doing to treat the pain. No more acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, and so on.
“Stop all of that stuff,” he told her. “It fuels the belief that this is a physical problem. Carry on with life as if everything was normal. If you’re working out and you start to feel the pain, just keep exercising. Push through as though the pain wasn’t happening. In addition to stopping all of the physical treatments, you need to start expressing your emotions.”
From that moment forward, Jane made four shifts:
She immediately stopped all of the physical therapies she was doing, which she was spending tens of thousands of dollars on.
She also started what she calls her “Rage Journal,” where she expresses all of her frustration and anger.
She started talking to her husband about how she was feeling.
She also started running again.
With these four behavioral shifts, Jane’s entire life changed. She realized that to stay pain-free, she needed to express her emotions as they occurred. She couldn’t bottle up and suppress them anymore. Being able to run again also built her confidence.
Fast forward to 2019: Jane is fifty-eight years old and more active and healthier than she’s ever been since the accident. She hasn’t had pain in her legs for over four years. People around her are shocked as she seems to look younger every year. She continues to push people to the limit in the fitness classes she teaches. Her radiance glows in brightness.
Jane is a lot more understanding about her past. She isn’t as judgmental toward her husband, and sees how she’s created stress in the marriage over the years as well. She sees herself dying very old and completely healthy, fit, and pain-free. She also sees herself happily married to her husband for the remainder of their lives, something she hadn’t been sure of over her last several years of frustration.
Jane’s perfectionism and emotional rigidity have been replaced with increased psychological flexibility. She used to get frustrated and angry about any messes or disorganization in their home. She is now more flexible in her personal relationships.
“Some things just really don’t matter, like if the bed isn’t made.”
And while she maintains her high standards at work, she’s even noticed herself becoming more open too, allowing her employees to execute their own ideas without having to do things her way.
Jane is in far greater touch with her emotions now. When she notices herself being triggered, or when she feels stressed or anxious due to work demands or something going on in her relationships, she immediately gives herself space and pulls out her journal to process her thoughts. She never goes anywhere without her Rage Journal.
Before expressing her thoughts and feelings with others, she processes and organizes them first in her journal. This makes communication clearer and based more on her chosen secondary emotions rather than her initial reaction or state. Journaling and connecting with herself helps her avoid making premature cognitive commitments during emotionally difficult situations. It allows her to reconnect with her future self and the life she wants to create.
She’s learned to communicate her needs. She sets better boundaries for herself and her relationships. She’s less of a people pleaser. Her emotional development and flexibility as a person have evolved, and thus her personality has changed. She’s less rigid and stuck in the past. She’s more in touch with the present, more connected to others, and pulled forward by her future self.
Jane’s story is her own, and is one of many. People experience pain for different reasons, and while I am not qualified nor is it my intention to give medical advice, it is alarming how many people experience chronic physical pain for reasons that stem from an underlying psychological trauma.
For the remainder of this chapter, I’m going to break down a great deal of science exploring the connection between our emotions, our subconscious, and our physical body. It’s important to keep in mind that while the science describes general trends in the population, each person’s situation is unique, and so none of this should be taken as medical advice.
Although we tend to think of our memories as abstract and mental, they are physical and physiological. Your physical body is the evidence of your past—the embodied memory of everything that has come before. Or as Bessel van der Kolk, MD, put it in the very title of his book: The Body Keeps the Score.
The experiences in our lives become our biology. Those experiences are memories stored in specific areas of our body. In the case of Jane, her waterskiing trauma created a memory that was stored in her leg. As Dr. Steven Cole, the director of the UCLA Social Genomics Core Laboratory, has said, “A cell is a machine for turning experience into biology.”
Jane’s story highlights the fundamental connection between our emotions and our physical body. Although rarely connected by any medical professional, in reality, they are one in the same.
The glue that holds our body, memories, and identity together is our emotions.
Like memory, we tend to think of emotions as abstract, residing only in our minds. They are not. Emotions are physical.
That bears repeating. Emotions and memories have physical markers in your body. According to the molecular biologist and neuroscientist Dr. Candice Pert, the surfaces of every cell throughout our body are lined with “receptors” that receive messages through neuropeptides, which are small protein molecules that relay information throughout our body and brain. Dr. Pert calls these peptides the “molecules of emotion,” explaining that the information relayed and stored throughout our brain and body is emotions.
In other words, the information relayed throughout the brain and body are emotional in nature. That information—the emotional content—then becomes the body.
The experiences we have transform not only our perspectives and identity but become our very biology.
Why does this matter? Because we need to reframe how we see our body, and look at it as an emotional system. Emotions are chemical, and our body becomes accustomed or habituated to these chemicals. Take dopamine, for example. Your body becomes habituated to a certain dosage of dopamine, and when the chemical levels are low, the body literally needs more. As a result, and without conscious thought, your hand reaches for your smartphone, and you go through a subconscious loop you’ve played out repeatedly in the past.
We catch ourselves doing this all the time.
We do various things out of habit or addiction. The reason we subconsciously engage in repetitious behaviors is because our body has become addicted to the emotions that our behaviors create. The emotion is a chemical relayed and released throughout the body, recreating the homeostasis that is the physical body.
This is why overcoming an addiction is so difficult. Addiction isn’t merely a mental disorder. It is physical. In order to change your addiction, you literally need to change your biology. You need a future self with a new identity, a new story, new environment, and new body.
What chemicals are you addicted to?
What emotions does your body thrive on and continuously reproduce?
Many people are addicted to the chemical cortisol, which is stress. If they aren’t feeling stressed, they get uneasy and do things to create more stress in their lives.
In his book The Big Leap, Dr. Gay Hendricks explains that when people begin a journey of personal transformation, they will subconsciously sabotage themselves in order to get back to their accustomed level: “Each of us has an inner thermostat setting that determines how much love, success, and creativity we allow ourselves to enjoy. When we exceed our inner thermostat setting, we will often do something to sabotage ourselves, causing us to drop back into the old, familiar zone where we feel secure.”
Dr. Hendricks calls this the “Upper Limit Problem.” When you begin making improvements in your life, you’re going to subconsciously try to get back to where you feel comfortable. This is emotional.
If you’re not used to feeling amazing all the time, then when you start allowing yourself to feel good, your subconscious will grow uneasy. It wants negative emotions because negative chemicals are what literally make up your body.
I’ve seen this happen in my own life. In fact, it happened big-time while I was writing this book. Over the past few years, I’ve made huge leaps in terms of my education, finances, network, family, and overall happiness. However, over the past year, I almost threw everything away.
I noticed myself trying to subconsciously sabotage everything amazing in my life. I got addicted to caffeine, travel, and confusion. I couldn’t get myself to write. I wasted huge amounts of time watching YouTube videos. I had a hard time getting motivated.
As I watched myself beginning to struggle, I could see what was happening. Once I noticed that I was damaging myself, I realized that I needed to seek help. I started by expressing to my wife and others that I was on a downward spiral. We began therapy, set new goals, and made important adjustments to our family and routines.
I re-created my future self. I got my vision going again. Without a clear vision pulling us forward, life becomes about how much willpower you are able to summon every day. What I needed was a goal to direct my identity and behavior. I needed a target.
I used my future self as the filter for setting firmer boundaries in my life. This involved having hard conversations with people I deeply cared about, telling them I needed to readjust our relationship and put my priorities—like my faith, family, and health—back at the forefront. I was humbled as most of these people were respectful and supportive, even if slightly frustrated, such as when business plans were required to change or when I canceled scheduled speaking engagements.
All of these conversations, adjustments in purpose, and behaviors were subconscious-enhancing—moving me at the fundamental level closer to my future self, not just conceptually. This was deep work, and deep work is emotional.
If you don’t change your subconscious, then altering your personality will be difficult. If you change your subconscious, then altering your personality happens automatically.
To make powerful change in our lives, we need to change at the subconscious level. Otherwise, the change will not be permanent. You could try to force yourself to be positive, for example, but if your subconscious, or physical body, is habituated to negative emotional states, it will default to behaviors that reproduce those emotions. Willpower doesn’t work for overcoming addictions, at least not in an effective or predictable way.
Your body seeks homeostasis by leading you to behaviors and experiences that reproduce the emotional climate it is used to—not necessarily the behaviors that are best for you.
You are an emotional being. Your physical body is your “subconscious mind,” and the only way to alter your subconscious is by shifting the emotional framework that makes you who you are.
For a time, Jane had become accustomed to anger and rage. Those were the emotions she became addicted to. Her life became a pattern to re-create those emotions, even if consciously she was doing her best to be positive. As a result, those emotions became her biology, manifested through her leg pain.
Dr. John E. Sarno, a former professor of rehabilitation medicine and attending physician at New York University, argues that physical pain, such as back pain, “exists only to distract [the person’s] attention away from the emotions. . . . There’s nothing like a little physical pain to keep your mind off your emotional problems.” Dr. Sarno explains that this is a survival mechanism of the body because it’s easier for us to live with physical pain than emotional pain.
In many cases, the cause of physical pain is not “physical” at all but emotional. Once a person accepts the fact that they have suppressed emotions, and learns to express and reframe them, they will stop misdiagnosing their pain as a physical condition. Of this, Steven Ozanich wrote in The Great Pain Deception, “Pain and other chronic symptoms are physical manifestations of unresolved internal conflict. Symptoms surface as the instinctual mechanism for self-survival. They are messages from the inner self wanting to be heard, but ego takes center stage, and hides the truth within the shadows of the unconscious mind: which is the body.”
When you change your subconscious, your personality will change as well. Your personality is merely a by-product or reflection of where you are emotionally. If you maintain suppressed emotions, you’ll develop a personality to either cope with or avoid them.
The untransformed trauma (and the fixed mindset it creates) stunts your imagination. Your future self and purpose are then either nonexistent or extremely limited. As a result, you become a version of yourself that is far less than you could have been. You engage in behaviors and situations to produce emotions that numb the pain you’re suppressing.
This isn’t what you want to do. This isn’t who you want to be. Think about yourself for a moment:
The best of all medicines are rest and fasting.
— Benjamin Franklin
Fasting from food for eighteen-plus hours is one of the most powerful ways to enhance your subconscious. Given that your physical body is your subconscious, when you purposefully deprive yourself from food, you are literally resetting the body, allowing it to rest and recover rather than digest.
Fasting has been found to rapidly dissipate the craving for nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and other drugs. It also increases levels of catecholamines—such as dopamine—which elevates your happiness and confidence while reducing your anxiety. Fasting actually increases your number of brain cells.
Fasting can increase your longevity and lifespan. Research has found that age-related declines in cognitive and motor abilities (such as physical balance) can be reduced by fasting. It also reduces cognitive stressors that bring about aging, cognitive decline, and chronic diseases.
Other research has found that fasting can improve the overall quality of your sleep. It also improves focus, learning, memory, and ability to comprehend information. Research at Yale has found that being on an empty stomach helps you think and focus better. Hence, many people, such as Malcolm Gladwell, purposefully skip breakfast so they can better focus on their creative work.
Many books have been written about the benefits of fasting. However, as it relates to enhancing your subconscious, the point is that fasting can improve confidence, emotional flexibility, and self-control. Fasting is a form of physical and emotional practice that enables you to connect to your deeper side.
Personally, I’ve been practicing fasting consistently for nearly fifteen years. Generally, I’ll fast from all foods and liquids for twenty-four hours once or twice per month. Or anytime I feel so inspired. This practice has not only enhanced my spirituality and decision-making ability but my mental clarity and focus as well.
Having a regular fasting practice, if physically able, is a powerful aid to clarifying and becoming your future self. While in a fasted state, you can have greater clarity and intuitive connection. You can visualize and decide who you want to be. If you’re trying to make any major or important decisions, consider fasting to get clarity about that decision. From a more spiritual perspective, fasting and prayer go hand in hand. They are powerful at helping you get clear on what you’re trying to do, in addition to moving past what has been keeping you stuck.
There are many ways to go about fasting. Fasting from food and caloric beverages for sixteen to twenty-four hours is a great practice for healing and connecting mentally and physically. Also, fasting from technology, particularly the internet, for twenty-four-hour periods of time or more is also incredibly powerful for connecting with yourself and getting clarity.
Once per week, you could take a break from food and the internet. If you did this, you’d be shocked at the clarity and confidence you’d get. Fasting with a specific purpose and intent makes the experience more powerful. Doing anything intentionally makes the activity better and opens the possibility of having peak experiences. I can attest that many times while fasting, I’ve gotten the very insights I needed to make key decisions or changes in my life. Had I not given myself the space from food and the internet, I wouldn’t have gotten that clarity. My life wouldn’t be where it’s at.
You have to feel that you deserve good things or else your subconscious might very well sabotage all your best efforts. If you don’t truly feel that you deserve great financial success, then you are battling an almost insurmountable obstacle: your subconscious. Giving regular gifts from your income to charity is one excellent way of once and for all, persuading your subconscious that you deserve what lies ahead. In this way, it will not only end its sabotage, it will begin actively to assist in your quest.
—Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that charitable giving was linked with feelings of happiness. Other research supports the idea that altruistic financial behaviors such as gift giving or providing charitable donations are linked to happiness. Research has found that happiness is related to successful outcomes. Thus, engaging in behaviors that make you feel happy is obviously worthwhile.
Although happiness is all well and good, giving money away can and does have a tangible and powerful impact on your subconscious. It sends a powerful signal to yourself that you are the type of person who gives to others. Giving money away is a subconscious-enhancing behavior. You can and should use it as a tool for expanding your identity. For instance, although a religious example, the story of George Cannon highlights how making charitable donations can transform your identity and capacity for love.
George Cannon was a Christian. As part of his faith, he was encouraged to tithe 10 percent of his income, a notion that is repeated throughout the Bible. However, despite being a young and impoverished man, George approached tithing in a very nontraditional, and far more transformative, way.
Rather than paying retroactively, wherein he paid 10 percent of what he earned, he decided to pay 10 percent of what he intended to earn in his future. Discussing this story in a talk, mental health scholar and therapist Dr. Wendy Watson Nelson explained, “When his bishop commented on the large amount of tithing poor young George was paying, George said something like, ‘Oh bishop, I’m not paying tithing on what I make. I’m paying tithing on what I want to make.’ And the very next year George earned exactly the amount of money he had paid tithing on the year before!”
George was not transactional in his approach to tithing. He was transformational. He didn’t see tithing as a cost, but an investment in his future self and his relationship with God.
George’s behavior was subconscious-enhancing. He was seeing, and acting as, his future self, not his present or former self. He was operating from his future circumstances—as though they were already real—rather than operating from his current circumstances.
His financial investment became a forcing function. He put himself, financially and psychologically—even spiritually—in a position where he felt not only inspired but compelled to act in faith. He paid 10 percent of what he wanted to make. When he made that investment, he prayed and acted from the vantage point of someone earning ten times what he had invested.
As a result, George quickly became that person.
I first heard this story in January of 2017. Since then, I’ve applied charitable giving in a more proactive way. My income has increased dramatically. But more than just an increase in income, my identity and confidence has changed. I believe I have a greater capacity to learn and grow. I’m far more flexible. I have greater trust and faith that things will work out my way. I’m more willing to take courageous leaps.
I also take opportunities to help people in need, when it makes sense. Recently, I was in an Uber and my driver was a single mom of four in her early fifties. She was working sixty-plus hours per week trying to get her kids through college. She wanted to finish her own degree, but was chipping away at various bills that were keeping her stuck. I decided to pay one of the bills, which was a few hundred bucks. To her, this meant she could get back to her schooling a year before she anticipated.
Tears came to her eyes. She was in disbelief. The impact my gift had on her was surprising to me. It humbled me and made me want to increase my financial situation so I could help more people. Thus, this experience expanded my subconscious and my future self.
You too should apply the concept of charitable giving as a technique for enhancing your subconscious. The more you give, the greater will become your capacity to give. As Mark Victor Hansen and Robert Allen explain: “Giving taps into the spiritual dimension that multiplies us, our thinking, and our results. . . . There is an ocean of abundance and one can tap into it with a teaspoon, a bucket, or a tractor trailer. The ocean doesn’t care.”
In order to become your future self, you must transform yourself at the core and subconscious level. Wishful thinking and rare moments of visualization are not enough. You must engage in behaviors and have peak experiences that shift your identity and create a new sense of “normal” for you. Fasting and charitable giving are just two of many subconscious-enhancing behaviors.
Rather than being defined by your former behaviors, you can and should be defined by your future behaviors. Rather than being defined by experiences from your past, you can and should be defined by the peak experiences you’ll create in the future—those experiences that will transform you from who you are into who you plan to be.