Tag: Gabor Mate

  • When The Body Says No

    Gabor Maté

    At the outset, let’s just say that I am a believer when it comes to Gabor Maté’s philosophy. That’s because I first had the lived experience, then started connecting the dots, and finally came across ‘When the Body Says No’ which gave the whole thing a logical framing and rationale. I’ve had stress sequentially give me migraines, a heart attack, back pain, IBS and I suspect, even a (yet to be connected) BPPV. Most doctors I went to tried to cure the symptoms, only a couple of them pointed to stress. After I systematically began reading more (Robert Sapolsky, Lisa Feldman Barrett etc) and knocking off stress points, I reached a place where stress was my only stress! And I wondered why I have that stress in the first place. Enter Maté, with a systems thinking approach that I wish doctors would really look at! It is strange that they don’t because even a Roman physician in the second century, Galen, had pointed out that “any part of the body can affect any other part through neural connections.“

    “No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified such as biological heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer-these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease: one does not get cancer simply from repressing anger or ALS just from being too nice. A systems model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine. According to the biopsychosocial view, individual biology reflects the history of a human organism in lifelong interaction with an environment, a perpetual inter-change of energy in which psychological and social factors are as vital as physical ones.”

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  • Marshmellowing

    “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” That played out well in this context. I remember seeing this (image below) in a Farnam Street newsletter a while back and it validated something I had been doing for a while. In any situation, can I place myself such that circumstance/environment doesn’t cause a decision I’ll regret? Because, to quote from Ozark, “People make choices. Choices have consequences.”

    Optionality

    Optimising for this is the reason behind almost everything I had built as a muscle – planning, granular detailing, specific scenario planning, constantly aiming for predictability (or at least optionality), the people I let in and how much, and deliberation on what I do. And that mindset, I told D recently, is probably coming in the way of the life I want to lead.

    A little more of context setting before we address that. This is where the master appears – in the form of this post. If we go by the image below (from the post), I am successful and on that line dividing miserable and happy. Just to clarify, there is no ‘reaching the top’ in my case. I define (my) success as being able to say ‘I have enough’ on wealth, health and relationships, and can still retain my curiosity.

    Successful-Happy

    At this point, I have the Marshmallow mind (context), and the post accurately describes my conundrum.

    So you do the work. You sacrifice. And because you’re sacrificing while others are out having fun, success becomes more and more important to your identity. You slowly forge the chains that can keep you up there, in that top left quadrant, in which you thought only other people could get stuck. But that pivot to living a fulfilled life doesn’t happen. Marshmallow Mind has become too powerful. And Marshmallow Mind lives in the future...Marshmallow Mind tricks us into believing that the rewards for delayed gratification compound forever. They don’t. Eventually, they turn into a trap whose escape requires a radical break with our old identity. As Buffett put it, “the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

    The Marshmallow mindset affects the way I react to things, because the muscles are a habit now. And layered on that is a self image. It’s time for some mellowing. As Tim Ferriss says in this phenomenally good conversation with Gabor Mate, sometimes, you need life to save you from what you want to give you what you need. I think life has done its bit in terms of multiple kinds of losses, gains, and lessons.

    But the challenge is that my system will resist the learning! More about that in another post, citing another fantastic podcast. For now, the plan is something that I heard in that podcast, where the guest’s daughter’s karate teacher says, “Get your butterflies in flying formation”, because what I seek is “the rapture of being alive“.

    P.S. Seems I caught this a couple of years ago, I now need to take some concrete actions 🙂