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Welcome back to Well Beyond 40. Last year, I sat down with Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof, and someone who spent decades pushing the boundaries of what we think meditation should be. His new book, Heavily Meditated, challenges the whole sit quietly and clear your mind approach. Dave argues that meditation, like everything else, needs to be matched to what you're actually trying to solve.
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diving into his reset process, a five-minute protocol that traces emotional triggers back to their source and rewires them. We connect this directly to perimenopause and menopause. This episode is for anyone dealing with anxiety, emotional overwhelm, or that sense that something shifted in your body and nobody's giving you the full picture of why.
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Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive.
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I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part. When you send me your review, I'll reply you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right. My team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom so I can personally connect with you. Here's how you do it. Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review.
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Text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. My virtual JJ will reply directly. And trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together.
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Hello, my friend. I'm super excited, Dave, to have you back on the show. I think it's your 100th time. What is it?
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Yeah, we go way back, JJ. And thanks for having me on. I love getting to talk about the stuff that we're both doing to make the whole world a lot healthier and happier and all that stuff. Well, we're both doing this specifically only because you strong-armed me into doing it. And that's what I want to talk about today. We're going to talk about your new book, Heavily Meditated. And I think it's fun because I know just when you initially started to talk to me about meditation, and I was very, very...
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very reticent. I was like, not going to do it. You basically bullied me as you're known to do. But you really had this great story. And what you did when I went to 40 Years of Zen was take like ancient, the ancient techniques and the modern tech and bring them all together. And so what I would love to start with is kind of a backup because I know your stories of you and your own personal meditation journey and how it all began. Yeah.
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I used to weigh 300 pounds in my 20s, and I had really serious brain fog. And then I realized I'm miserable all the time. And I tried making a bunch of money and sadly lost it. Tried getting married for a brief period of time. Tried being in magazines and getting to be well-known in my industry, and nothing made me happy.
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or even resolve the stress that I was unaware of because I was always stressed. So I decided I had to do something about it. And I traveled the world. And I've been to remote parts of Nepal and Tibet, the Andes, and started saying, what's it going to take? Study with gurus. And I started hooking computers up to my head because I thought all the ancient knowledge was probably stupid.
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That is called ego. So over time, as I started the biohacking movement, I said, well, let's just measure it. If it works, we're going to know that it works because we'll see it in the data. And I wrote heavily meditated because after 10 years of working with more than 1,000 entrepreneurs who come in,
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like you did to 40 years of Zen, plug your brain into a computer and show you how to run a specific process and look at the results, I can tell you straight up what can help people go in to remove things that trigger you, permanently and forever remove a trigger so it doesn't bother you anymore. And that is one of the two biggest things that's made all the difference in my life. The other one is how do you have more energy? And the other one is how do you waste less of it on being triggered by other people?
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If you can get that down, wow, you might like your life. Well, let's go. I still would love to talk about some of these crazy things because you did do some crazy things, which I mean, you still do crazy things. Let's be honest. But like, you know, the early meditation experiences of Dave, what were some of the craziest ones?
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Well, I decided that I was going to go down to South America and I was going to try ayahuasca. And this is before anyone could spell it. It was not something that you would hear about at a cocktail party. So I went down to Peru and I'm walking around at this little guest house, mid-20s, and I'm asking, I want to try ayahuasca. And they looked at me and they said, you're white.
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I said, oh, no. I noticed. It's only for locals. You won't like it. And I explained, no, I've done my research. And they introduced me to a shaman. I went to his little mud hut in a small town, and he showed me all the herbs. And I had an ayahuasca experience.
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And in Heavily Meditated, I write about the appropriate use of psychedelics. If that's how you want to enter these altered states, it's a way to do it, but it's probably not the first psychedelic you should start with.
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The reality is healing is an altered state and focus is an altered state and flow is an altered state. And there are many different ways that don't require drugs that can put you there. So heavily meditated is the complete list of all the different ways that you can get the benefits of meditating with or without meditating or the benefits of psychedelics with or without psychedelics. The idea is how do you control your state all of the time with the least possible effort? That's what I want.
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And that was one of them was being the weird white guy asking for ayahuasca. I also traveled to a remote part of Tibet where it's considered the holiest mountain in the world. Problem is it takes five days in a four-wheel drive to get there.
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I went to Lhasa on a bus, which is in Eastern Tibet, and went to a little guest house, coffee house place and put up a sign and said, I wanna go to this remote place, they don't wanna join me, and hooked up with four other totally random people in the back of a Land Cruiser. And the government requires that they have a translator who doesn't actually speak much English, but is kind of the government observer to make sure that you behave yourself.
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And our driver proceeds to get drunk while driving over the edges of cliffs and around. Wow. And I'm like, this is really scary. But everybody made it. And the idea for what became Bulletproof Coffee came to me on the side of that mountain, which if you're Hindu or Buddhist, is the holiest mountain in the world. So it was a remarkable time in my life. And I just got a chance to literally ask the masters and to sit there.
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in these monasteries and to say, what's really going on in there? And it turns out there's a lot of wisdom from shamanic paths and from ancient breathwork and meditation. And so much of this, we think it's been lost, but it hasn't been lost. We just haven't seen it. So my path has been, let's find it, let's try it, let's test it, and let's talk about what works.
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Well, and what's cool, like what initially attracted me to all of this was, I think, for a lot of people, their vision of meditating is the guy with their arms and, you know, their fingers up, their legs crossed over in a position I can't get into anymore, sitting there for hours.
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you were like, no, you can go and do this in this shorter amount of time. And I just wonder, like, you know, you went and saw those people who sat there and they always talk about emptying their mind. I can't empty my mind. I've seen you at one time, JJ. So you talk about in the book that traditional meditations outdated for the modern brain. So what would be the way we'd approach this now?
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You're at least as busy as I am and you're helping a lot of people. So you wake up in the morning and you like to do like 500 flights of stairs before you wake up and things like that. We're all exercising as much as we're supposed to. Then we're supposed to prepare a healthy meal, make our smoothie, make sure we get all the right supplements, toss some creatine, HCL, that new stuff you came out with in there so our brains work better. And then,
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Oh, we're supposed to also take care of our families and then call our friends and then go to work and commute. And no one has time to meditate for two hours a day and go to the gym and do all the other stuff it takes to be healthy. It's actually not possible. And even worse, 98% of people have been involved in agriculture for the last few thousand years. So...
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What if some people's brains are not farmer brains? If you do a meditation that was designed for a farmer and you're a hunter, what's gonna happen to you? It's not gonna work and you'll just be tired. So a lot of the meditation that I tried when I was younger did not do anything for me. In fact, some of it just made me tired and not good. But eventually you realize, saying that you should meditate is like saying you should cook. Maybe you should know what you're cooking
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You choose the meditation based on your brain and based on your state, or you say, you know what? I could cook that, but I could also have it delivered. I could also hire a chef. There are different ways. I could just do intermittent fasting. There are different ways to get the results you want, and assuming you have to meditate isn't a very good assumption. If you do meditate, there are accelerators you could do, and you may find that breath work,
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on top of meditation cuts the time dramatically. And in heavily meditated, I talk about three different buckets of breath work that you might consider, but it depends on what do you wanna do? Do you wanna launch off into outer space? You can do that. Do you wanna turn off a stress response you're feeling from your mother-in-law or something right now? You can do that.
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And do you want to just become calm and focused and get some work done without stressing? You can do that. They're just different animals. So you got to pick the medication, pick the supplement for the condition. You should pick the meditation or the altered states technique as well. And that's why I heavily meditated. It isn't that much about meditation. It's about the states you get for meditation and how to get there faster.
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That is so cool. I never thought of it like that. I mean, this is so obvious when you say it, like you think of vegan, carnivore, paleo, all that. And then you think of exercise, hit and resistance. I never like meditations, meditations, the bucket.
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Right. French fries are not ribeye, are not garbanzo beans, right? They're all totally different. Totally, and garbanzo beans I know are your favorite. So, inside joke everybody. So these altered states, like what, someone walking in, like what are the different states they might be walking in with and want to, how am I gonna ask this? Let's say someone's coming in because you might come in stressed, you might come in because you wanna manifest something, you might come in because you wanna go to sleep.
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You know, you might come in because you want to face the day in a better way. How do you know what to pick? Well...
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usually you have a problem you're trying to solve. And you say, all right, what's the problem I'm trying to solve? And one of the biggest ones is that if you're over 40 and you're still reacting like you're 14, it's actually not your fault, it's that your nervous system is on autopilot and there's a good reason for it. So you might say, all right, I wanna choose a meditation that is going to allow me to go into the little system settings like I do on my phone. I'm gonna turn off all the alerts from TikTok and Instagram and all this other stuff, I'm just gonna stop them from happening.
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But you want to do that inside your own brain. That's an altered state. That meditation is called the reset process. That's the core from 40 years of Zen. But you might also say, you know, I'd like to really gain more bodily awareness so I'm more embodied, I'm more grounded.
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And that's going to be a visualization technique. So got to know what you want to do. For me though, the most precious that I've done is the one that we did together when you came to 40 Years of Zen, which has even evolved since then. It's the recent process where it's a structured technique to turn off any trigger. And everyone knows you're going along and maybe someone has a different political party or someone does something and you're just, and you get so mad.
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If you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun and that someone else has their finger on the trigger. And nobody wants to do that. And a lot of people feel shame or guilt. Like, I can't believe I said that to my kids. You know, there must be something wrong with me. No, there's nothing wrong with you. It's that there is a system inside of you called the operating system inside your body. And its job is to keep your meat alive as if your conscious brain isn't even in there.
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And it makes decisions in order, JJ. And it does this before you or I have a chance to think. Because if you have an adult brain, it takes a third of a second after something happens for your brain to even get a signal that it happened. And it takes another three quarters of a second for your brain to think about it and figure out what just happened.
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So if I say boo, well, I heard him say boo and I decided not to be startled. But in reality, that whole second, you couldn't see it and I couldn't see it because we're all running on this delay, kind of like used to watch the Super Bowl, there's an eight second delay in case there's a wardrobe malfunction. But we have that and our body is running it. So how's our body deciding what we get to see and not see? Well, it's all F words. And the first one, fear. If something is scary,
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It means you immediately need to run away from, kill or hide.
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And this is true whether you're a dog, a tadpole, a blade of grass. They can't run away, so they make sharp edges. Everything on earth that is alive always handles immediate threats first. And since your brain is too slow to handle immediate threats, your body does it for you. Sadly, when Ms. Johnson in third grade criticized you, that felt unsafe at the time. And so your dumb operating system is still firing off an alert when you're criticized going,
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Well, that must not be safe. So then you feel angry and then you blame the other person. That's not you doing it. It's your system telling you that. So what if you could turn off that alert? And if it's not fear, the next F word that all life will do before you can think, food. Let's eat everything. And you are a master of getting people off the craving cycle. Well, every time you have a craving...
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It's taking you away from being present. And the research that I've gone through says that one third of the average person's thoughts every day are about tacos.
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Really? Well, not necessarily tacos. Not tacos, but yes. It's like, what's lunch? What's for dinner? Wow. And literally, this is your meat operating system, your body going food, food, food. Okay, we can solve that. That's why these GOP-1s are blowing up everywhere. Amen. Jeez, okay. What do you think the third F word is that keeps life alive that you think about a lot? I know what the third F word is. You're thinking fertility, aren't you?
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It's amazing how many people just drop an F-bomb there, but it's fertility or the fornication version of it. Or the F-bomb. Exactly. So, JJ, what that means is when you walked into your studio this morning, your body automatically looked at the shelf behind you and said, is it scary? No. Can I eat it? No. Should I hump its leg? No. And then it allowed you to sit down at that desk. Isn't that dark? Yeah.
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Well, all of us, our bodies are doing this all of the time and it's okay. Some are doing it more than others. Well, that's exactly the problem. But have you ever done something you're ashamed of that isn't from one of those three things?
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Not really, no, you're right. Those are the big ones. And if you look at the seven deadly sins, oh, there are those three things. And you look at the hindrances in Buddhism, oh, there are those three things. Wow. Always. It's not us, it's our bodies trying to keep us alive. So imagine your body is a Labrador retriever. I know you have cute little dogs, but I'm talking- I haven't even seen the latest one. I've heard about the latest one. Oh my God, the palm chi.
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Can't wait. Fluff bomb. Okay. We are. I love dogs too, man. We're on the same wavelength. But the Labrador Retriever, the puppy, it comes in, it eats your shoes, it pees on the couch, it humps your leg, and it eats everything.
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Okay. Great. That is the same operating system that you and I are running. And that time I saw you eat all the Ben and Jerry's. Uh-huh. Right. Okay. I've never seen that for the record, but I did, you know. So all the times we've all done these things, it's your body trying to stay alive. So our job to be functioning adults is turn fear into peace. And that's the most important part of this book. And then it's to turn...
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hunger and cravings into nourishment. And you've done so much there. I mean, we're so aligned on that, except for garbanzo beans. But hey, that's a small difference.
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And then we want to turn loneliness and lust into what I call sacred intimacy. This is something that is a path to healing altered states and is incredibly nourishing and necessary for adults, as important as food or air. And it's probably gotten, that is probably what's been screwed up the most when I think about like what's happened with all the online stuff, right? You are totally correct.
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And if we can make those shifts, it frees up a lot of energy for the next F word. So we have fear,
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Food, fertility, friend. And all life on earth will form an ecosystem. We interact and cooperate with our species and with the world around us to make it better. This is why we help the little lady across the street. This is why we take care of kids who aren't ours. We're wired to be good inside our bones. And we don't get to do that sometimes because we get trapped in fear and hunger and lust.
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So if we can just learn how to train that Labrador that's running our body to be a service dog, you don't think about food anymore because you're nourished. You're not angry at people all the time because you ran the reset process from the book because you learned how to let it go. What most of us do most of the time is we get really triggered but because we're functioning adults, we smile anyway, go, I'm really pissed off here, but I'm just gonna pretend like I'm okay. And the problem is,
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You don't have congruence when you do that. Everyone knows when your inner state and your outer state don't match. Everyone listening to this show, we've all met people like that. We know they're faking. Well, your job is to make your inner state match your outer state. And one way to do that is to walk around screaming every time someone offends you, at least you match, but now no one wants to be around you. So the other thing to do would be to, let's work on the inner state so that you don't get triggered in the first place. And for me,
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That has been by far the biggest lesson. And Heavily Meditated is my most important book of all the ones I've written. It's my ninth book. And the knowledge in here, people spend $20,000, spend five days with my neuroscience team, CEOs and celebrities and people. I'm giving away the process and it has been tested and evolved and developed even since you did 40 years of Zen with me. And it's like my highest and best work.
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What happens if you increase your energy by learning how to eat, by hydrating your brain, by doing all the biohacking and health and nutrition and longevity practices, you have more energy.
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To be more triggered if you don't fix it. It's true. Like if you're a reactive asshole, you'll be a bigger, more powerful reactive asshole, right? Well, that's what they always say. Like if someone, if a jerk gets more money, they're just a bigger jerk. It would absolutely follow that if you don't fix this piece, you know, it will get amplified.
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It is true. And your prefrontal cortex, the part of you that catches your negative impulses and makes you act like an adult, is one of the most energy-dense parts of the brain. So there is some hope that at least if you're well-fed, you might act less like a jerk, but you'll still have the strong feelings that make you want to act like a jerk. But what would happen if you had enough money and then you had less fear? So you kind of poured into that bucket.
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And then, okay, I didn't get triggered and I had a ton of energy, so it goes into food. Oh, I wasn't hungry because I know how to eat. So it goes into, oh my gosh, the bedroom. Now you focus on your relationships and they become a source of nourishment. And then it pours into your community. And now you actually have friends and you spend time with them and you nourish your community and it nourishes you. And now you still have all your energy. And then the final F word is forgiveness. And this is how you say, well...
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What am I holding a grudge about and how do I stop holding that grudge? It's about disentangling yourself from someone or something else, not about saying, oh, I forgive you. It's not about saying something that someone did is okay. Being able to just not be engaged with just the stuff that breaks a lot of people. So instead of feeling the anger and beating your pillow and gritting your teeth and doing the work,
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Well, you got to do the work, but you want to do the work in the fastest and most peaceful way you can so you can stop being reactive. Instead of writing down your angry feelings every single day for the rest of your life, we got to go to the source. And the good news is it takes about five minutes when you do it right.
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And if it's a really big thing, it might take a little bit more time, but this is a tried and true structured process for finding a single feeling or situation that triggers you and just turning it off. And I had to do it in a major way. And it took a lot of learning to get here.
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I mean, I write about this. You've had some triggers. Yeah. I write about this stuff. We all have, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a fact of life. You just got a couple more than usual. The question is, how do you own them, right? Yeah. I write about them all in the future, Jay.
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It's the, what's your 50%? Like, what can you control? Like, you can't control other people doing jerky things, but you can control your reaction to it. So here's a couple questions around this. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking, because it feels like once you learn the process, and I know I learned the process in 40 years of Zen, and what was cool about doing it that way was you could actually hear if you were doing it, you were hitting it or correctly.
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However, you don't have to go and do that just to be able to pull it off, which is cool. You put the technique in the book, and the technique really surrounds itself around forgiveness. But it strikes me that this is like peeling an onion because you really need to understand. Well, here's the question. How much do you need to be able to identify what the trigger actually is?
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Oh, this is the most common question, JJ. And you don't need to. So let's say you're driving home and someone cuts you off. Most people are going to get angry about that. So now your trigger is someone cut me off. So you're going to sit down, you're going to run the reset process. And part of it is you ask yourself this question. What's the first time I ever felt that way? So you're not saying, what's the first time I was cut off in traffic? What was the feeling in my body?
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And does it feel like anything else I can think of? And weird stuff will flash into your head that sometimes makes no sense. Whatever that is, you just write it down. And then you run the reset process on whatever that thing is. And then all of a sudden, you're rewriting history somewhere in your past. And then the car cutting off doesn't matter. And the example I use in Heavily Meditated is a relatively well-known one where I was on Joe Rogan's show three times.
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And Joe Rogan had a financial interest in a competitor. And when that competitor launched a copycat product, suddenly he came out there and said, Dave's a liar.
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And really kind of came after my reputation in a way that didn't make any sense. And it really, it really dysregulated me. I bought, you know, I hired a crisis PR firm, like, what do I do? You know, I have a successful business. It was successful before Joe, you know, he bumped the numbers a bit, but like, all I did was come on his show and help his people. Like I did nothing wrong.
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I sat down to do the reset process and I thought, when's the first time I felt this way? And it was this weird, like, you know, something's wrong. And this situation from first grade popped into my head to JJ. I'm a grown ass adult. Right. And I'm like, what is this? I didn't even remember that, but it is this. Oh, wow. And the situation was some other kid did something wrong. I told the teacher. Yeah, it was a tattletale. And then,
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The teacher says, little Johnny, did you do it? He goes, I didn't do it. Dave did it. And I got sent to the principal's office for what the other kid did. And it turns out for entrepreneurs and for adults, one of the biggest triggers and traumas that we deal with is injustice. I did the right thing and I got punished for it. Right. I didn't know that this happened at first grade. I forgot about that 30, 40 years ago. But it popped into my head the second I asked myself the question. So I said, all right, I'll run the reset process against that.
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And when I did that, reality became clear. Every time Joe Rogan says Dave Asprey's a bad man, I just sell more coffee. Who cares what a comedian thinks about me? And to be clear, I think Joe did awesome stuff during the pandemic. I'm not mad at Joe about this because I ran the reset process. But at the time I was pissed and I was, I was pretty reactive about it, but I couldn't see reality because it was a trigger. And the trigger's job is to make you reactive and not let you think.
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Because if something's dangerous, you don't have time to think, you have to react. So pulling yourself out of that would be true. If you can't identify that trigger, like you, like somehow that first grade thing popped up, but if the first grade thing hadn't popped up. Yep, I would have run it right on Joe. So you would just run it on Joe, and then, but then similar situations would have continued to trigger you because you hadn't really gotten to the root cause, or no? They would have triggered me less or possibly not triggered me.
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What's cool is if you go back in time to the earliest one you can remember, everything after that gets fixed. So if I handled it with Joe going forward, I would have had less triggers. But the Joe situation kind of looked like the first grade injustice, but there would have been other instances of injustice that felt different enough to be triggered. So the further back you go, the better it works. Got it. Okay. And here's the weird thing, JJ.
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When I'm working with these high powered CEOs and all, everyone has childhood trauma with their parents. If you have a meat body and you are alive, there was a time when you were little and your parents did something that really made you angry. And they don't even know it made you angry. You can have the best parents on earth. It doesn't matter.
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It left a mark. And we've all had bullying situations and teachers that said something. It's just a fact of growing up. Your body is trying to figure out how to keep you alive. So these CEOs sometimes they'll break down in tears going, God, I never thought about that. But they're letting it go permanently instead of being reactive. And the larger your family, the larger your team is.
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the more important is that you own your own shit. Because if you don't, you will pass it on and then your kids will pass it on or your team will pass it on and it ruins your company culture, it ruins your family dynamics. So you can be the one who stops it and it means you do the work and the fastest way I've seen after going around the world is the reset process.
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So if someone grabs the book and they do the reset process, I mean, how quickly can this start to make an impact? If you have a situation, say, with a family member, maybe, you know, one of your adult kids is doing something and you really don't like it, you really want them to do what you want them to do and it's triggering you. Okay. Okay.
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Run the reset process there. And that night, when you text with your kid or when they call you, you're not going to get angry the way you did before. It hits you that day. And it's remarkable. And it's...
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It's kind of sad because if your energy is off, you have less energy to do this and less energy to control your state. So a lot of my friends are going through perimenopause or they're in menopause and it doesn't break your brain. It breaks your energy productive system and then unprocessed trauma sucks the energy you have left. So you wanna fix your hormones, fix your food so that you get the energy back
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And you want to turn off the trauma that's sucking energy. So all of a sudden you have this amazing thing, it's called wisdom. So now you have the energy of being young and you have the wisdom of having suffered and done something about it. And then you become something that's missing in the world today. You become an elder, not elderly, because you don't look or feel elderly, but you're an elder because people go, wow, that person knows everything and they own their own shit.
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And they can hear things that are uncomfortable and they just show up and they're helping and they're nice and they're kind. And this is what we need. We don't need a bunch of people who are reactive and triggered and full of Alzheimer's in retirement homes, not remembering their own names. All of that's optional. I mean, you know that better than anyone because you've been working on this for 20 years and helping people fix their brains and their hormones and all that stuff, JJ. Just let's do that and deal with the trauma. And wow, who knows what kind of world we could live in.
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Yeah, I was just with Chip Conley. I was just with Chip. And, you know, they're trying to figure out what to do with modern elder academy as a name because people don't think they want to be an elder. I'm like, and he says, you know, the definition of an elder is wisdom plus curiosity, which is fantastic. And as I think about women heading into perimenopause and menopause, if they've got that trauma, the reaction, all that, because ultimately what you're talking about is stored trauma, right?
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They just don't have the margin for error. Their hormones start to go down and it's like, blah. That's what I just thought. It's like you just, if you haven't dealt with it before, this will force you to deal with it because you're like, uh-oh, what just happened? You know, I let out the person that I've kind of buried trying to be a nice girl for so long when I can't.
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I mean, we've both been with so many friends where they're doing everything they can to try and keep the walls up. And then there's just too much. And then there's a breakdown. And when that happens, it can break families. It can break companies. It's really rough. So your job is as important as learning how to cook is to learn how to go into the control panel in your mind and turn off the alerts from all the different apps.
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Your phone, every app was allowed to just blow up in your face whenever you wanted to. And then you go to the therapist. They're like, well, every time an alert comes, just take a deep breath. Notice the alert. Swipe to the side and continue working. That's what meditation and therapy is. And it's so dumb, JJ. No, go in and turn that shit off unless it's a meditation you want. Yeah.
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Oh, my God. The world is so much better. And then you have more energy to say, oh, I'm not going to eat the cupcake. And you just make better choices. And then when a kid who's in a reactive state comes to you –
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You can be the one who's not reacting, so they will co-regulate with you. Your nervous system teaches them how you're supposed to be. But if they get triggered and then you get triggered, which triggers them, you just enter a spiral and it sucks your own energy. So no one's perfect, but understanding all of the things you do that you're ashamed of are from your mitochondria. They're just trying to keep your meat alive and it has nothing to do with how good or moral you are.
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And for me, that was a big thing. Hey, I make mistakes, but it's really just my meat making a mistake. I'm going to make it right if I allow that to happen. And then I'm going to find out why I did that and I'm going to hunt down the cause and I'm going to get rid of it. Yeah. Sometimes the most obvious ways to make shifts are the things you just talked about, too. It's like get rid of some of these apps. I have to share this. I was laughing as you were saying this because I was with Shippy in Nashville and, um,
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One of the big things that came out of my time there was get X off your phone. I was like, I have never felt like an addicted person to anything. And there I was with X, refresh, refresh, refresh. And it was like lighting me up. And I'm like, I just took it off. I'm great.
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Like back to that. I was missing my morning meditation. Everything. Cause I had to like check out. It was ridiculous. Which app did you take off your phone? That was most important. It's, it was X. Wow. X. I cannot have X on my phone. Sorry, Elon.
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Wow. Yeah, I have X on my phone. Don't care about any of the – I'm not one of those scrolly people. Like X lost my mind, totally lost my mind. Tim has to fill me in on if there's anything I really need, which has always been my approach with any news or anything. It was like I'm sure – my mom used to get so upset. She'd go, you have to know what's going on. I go, someone will tell me if it's really important, I'm sure. JJ, that may be one of the reasons that we're such good friends is –
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Same approach. In fact, when Facebook many years ago, Facebook used to be a place where your friends could share interesting stuff. Wow. What happened? I don't know. But I used to know everything I needed to know just because my friends would talk about it. And I never watched the news. And then one day, all I saw was cat pictures. And I'm like, screw this. I don't use that platform. I have a lot of content there, but I don't log in.
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And, you know, and consume that way. So it's getting harder and harder. And what that means is having a better community is so important. And we're not spending time with our friends because we have less energy because our lifestyle isn't very good.
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And then maybe you do some things to fix that, but then the apps all trigger fear. They make you think about things. Oh, there's a troll. They said something bad about me and all that. And I have no right. Or inadequacy. It's fear or inadequacy. Fear, inadequacy. And if that's not it, there's gonna be someone shaking their butt, right? These are hooks that are there in your nervous system, not in you. And I'm,
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I have found, for instance, through this process, criticism really doesn't bother me anymore. And trolls will come online and they'll say things. And I realize they're just stuck as 12-year-olds. They're just doing the mean girls bullying thing. So I'm like, well, if we're going to do that, let's play because 12-year-olds play. So I usually just say, they'll say, Dave, you look old. And I'm like, that's not what your mom said.
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And I'll just put it right there on social media. And then of course they get enraged. How dare you, that's not very mature. And I go, hold on, I thought that was the bullying game we were playing, like I'm rubber, you're glue, you go next. And then all of a sudden, like, oh my God, they really are doing that. And you'll get hundreds of likes from, you know, people who know you going, oh my gosh, that troll didn't win. And it's, I don't know, it's about like, it doesn't affect you anymore. Like how do we be curious and have fun with everything? And when you have a different vibe,
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It changes things. And you can still do the right thing. You can still have boundaries. You're just not triggered. Like, oh, that person, they are a taker. Even that person is a narcissistic abuser or something. So I'm not going to have them in my life, but I'm no longer reactive to them. And what happens if you're not reactive to a narcissist?
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They don't want to stick to you and they go stick to someone else. They'll go narcissist all over someone else. Yeah. It's fabulous. We love it. Now, you have your new book, which, by the way, I love the cover. The cover is fabulous. Thank you. And it's also got the vintage vibe of your brand. So I just loved it all the way around. Heavily meditated. Really fun title.
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Um, so we're going to put in the show notes, we'll put your other episodes in the show notes and your books and all your good stuff. But I know that you have some cool stuff when people buy the book, which we'll put in the show notes as well. What are some of the fun things? I think it's like over $750 worth of good stuff. What are some of the cool things they get? You're getting a bunch of discounts, but the biggest one, when you pre-order heavily meditated, go to DaveAsprey.com and you can get $199 commune course, the one on biohacking to teach you how to have more energy. Love it. Yeah.
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Love me some commune. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're fantastic. Cool. All right. Well, we'll put all of that at jjvirgin.com forward slash heavily meditated. Easy to find. And I appreciate you. I'll see you in a couple weeks. See you in a couple weeks. Two weeks. All right.
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All right, so I just want to give you some things to do as takeaways. And one of the things I love is Mary Morrissey talks about noticing what you're noticing. And sometimes that's the first thing is quite often we stuff it down. Stuff those feelings down. I think what happens when you're in perimenopause and menopause is you do.
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can't stuff it any longer so you stop stuffing and you're like wow I'm really being reactive but it was there all the time you just didn't uh you just you just were stuffing it a bit so notice what you're noticing and that's where you can then do that reset process and I always check in do I have energy around this that I can't seem to get rid of this person just continuing to come up in my
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with this situation and that's what I will do this process around and I also wanted to just shout out one of the things we talked about in there about you know look at meditation I never thought of it before like this but look at meditation like you would look at you know choosing the right diet tool for the what you want to accomplish you're choosing the right exercise tool for what you want to accomplish
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I have a lot of tools in my toolkit with meditation, everything from I love my Dr. Joe meditations, but different ones of those to breath work to tapping. So figure out which thing is the right thing for what you're trying to accomplish. And of course, to the reset that Dave talks about. And again, reminder, JJVirgin.com forward slash heavily meditated for all of what we talked about in the episode. All right. Happy meditating.
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Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review.
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And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly.
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You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode.
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Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional and ask you to do it.
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Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.
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Welcome back to Well Beyond 40. Last year, I sat down with Dave Asprey, founder of Bulletproof, and someone who spent decades pushing the boundaries of what we think meditation should be. His new book, Heavily Meditated, challenges the whole sit quietly and clear your mind approach. Dave argues that meditation, like everything else, needs to be matched to what you're actually trying to solve.
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diving into his reset process, a five-minute protocol that traces emotional triggers back to their source and rewires them. We connect this directly to perimenopause and menopause. This episode is for anyone dealing with anxiety, emotional overwhelm, or that sense that something shifted in your body and nobody's giving you the full picture of why.
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Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout, sorry mom, turned four-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive.
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I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part. When you send me your review, I'll reply you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right. My team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom so I can personally connect with you. Here's how you do it. Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review.
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Text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. My virtual JJ will reply directly. And trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together.
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Hello, my friend. I'm super excited, Dave, to have you back on the show. I think it's your 100th time. What is it?
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Yeah, we go way back, JJ. And thanks for having me on. I love getting to talk about the stuff that we're both doing to make the whole world a lot healthier and happier and all that stuff. Well, we're both doing this specifically only because you strong-armed me into doing it. And that's what I want to talk about today. We're going to talk about your new book, Heavily Meditated. And I think it's fun because I know just when you initially started to talk to me about meditation, and I was very, very...
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very reticent. I was like, not going to do it. You basically bullied me as you're known to do. But you really had this great story. And what you did when I went to 40 Years of Zen was take like ancient, the ancient techniques and the modern tech and bring them all together. And so what I would love to start with is kind of a backup because I know your stories of you and your own personal meditation journey and how it all began. Yeah.
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I used to weigh 300 pounds in my 20s, and I had really serious brain fog. And then I realized I'm miserable all the time. And I tried making a bunch of money and sadly lost it. Tried getting married for a brief period of time. Tried being in magazines and getting to be well-known in my industry, and nothing made me happy.
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or even resolve the stress that I was unaware of because I was always stressed. So I decided I had to do something about it. And I traveled the world. And I've been to remote parts of Nepal and Tibet, the Andes, and started saying, what's it going to take? Study with gurus. And I started hooking computers up to my head because I thought all the ancient knowledge was probably stupid.
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That is called ego. So over time, as I started the biohacking movement, I said, well, let's just measure it. If it works, we're going to know that it works because we'll see it in the data. And I wrote heavily meditated because after 10 years of working with more than 1,000 entrepreneurs who come in,
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like you did to 40 years of Zen, plug your brain into a computer and show you how to run a specific process and look at the results, I can tell you straight up what can help people go in to remove things that trigger you, permanently and forever remove a trigger so it doesn't bother you anymore. And that is one of the two biggest things that's made all the difference in my life. The other one is how do you have more energy? And the other one is how do you waste less of it on being triggered by other people?
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If you can get that down, wow, you might like your life. Well, let's go. I still would love to talk about some of these crazy things because you did do some crazy things, which I mean, you still do crazy things. Let's be honest. But like, you know, the early meditation experiences of Dave, what were some of the craziest ones?
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Well, I decided that I was going to go down to South America and I was going to try ayahuasca. And this is before anyone could spell it. It was not something that you would hear about at a cocktail party. So I went down to Peru and I'm walking around at this little guest house, mid-20s, and I'm asking, I want to try ayahuasca. And they looked at me and they said, you're white.
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I said, oh, no. I noticed. It's only for locals. You won't like it. And I explained, no, I've done my research. And they introduced me to a shaman. I went to his little mud hut in a small town, and he showed me all the herbs. And I had an ayahuasca experience.
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And in Heavily Meditated, I write about the appropriate use of psychedelics. If that's how you want to enter these altered states, it's a way to do it, but it's probably not the first psychedelic you should start with.
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The reality is healing is an altered state and focus is an altered state and flow is an altered state. And there are many different ways that don't require drugs that can put you there. So heavily meditated is the complete list of all the different ways that you can get the benefits of meditating with or without meditating or the benefits of psychedelics with or without psychedelics. The idea is how do you control your state all of the time with the least possible effort? That's what I want.
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And that was one of them was being the weird white guy asking for ayahuasca. I also traveled to a remote part of Tibet where it's considered the holiest mountain in the world. Problem is it takes five days in a four-wheel drive to get there.
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I went to Lhasa on a bus, which is in Eastern Tibet, and went to a little guest house, coffee house place and put up a sign and said, I wanna go to this remote place, they don't wanna join me, and hooked up with four other totally random people in the back of a Land Cruiser. And the government requires that they have a translator who doesn't actually speak much English, but is kind of the government observer to make sure that you behave yourself.
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And our driver proceeds to get drunk while driving over the edges of cliffs and around. Wow. And I'm like, this is really scary. But everybody made it. And the idea for what became Bulletproof Coffee came to me on the side of that mountain, which if you're Hindu or Buddhist, is the holiest mountain in the world. So it was a remarkable time in my life. And I just got a chance to literally ask the masters and to sit there.
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in these monasteries and to say, what's really going on in there? And it turns out there's a lot of wisdom from shamanic paths and from ancient breathwork and meditation. And so much of this, we think it's been lost, but it hasn't been lost. We just haven't seen it. So my path has been, let's find it, let's try it, let's test it, and let's talk about what works.
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Well, and what's cool, like what initially attracted me to all of this was, I think, for a lot of people, their vision of meditating is the guy with their arms and, you know, their fingers up, their legs crossed over in a position I can't get into anymore, sitting there for hours.
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you were like, no, you can go and do this in this shorter amount of time. And I just wonder, like, you know, you went and saw those people who sat there and they always talk about emptying their mind. I can't empty my mind. I've seen you at one time, JJ. So you talk about in the book that traditional meditations outdated for the modern brain. So what would be the way we'd approach this now?
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You're at least as busy as I am and you're helping a lot of people. So you wake up in the morning and you like to do like 500 flights of stairs before you wake up and things like that. We're all exercising as much as we're supposed to. Then we're supposed to prepare a healthy meal, make our smoothie, make sure we get all the right supplements, toss some creatine, HCL, that new stuff you came out with in there so our brains work better. And then,
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Oh, we're supposed to also take care of our families and then call our friends and then go to work and commute. And no one has time to meditate for two hours a day and go to the gym and do all the other stuff it takes to be healthy. It's actually not possible. And even worse, 98% of people have been involved in agriculture for the last few thousand years. So...
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What if some people's brains are not farmer brains? If you do a meditation that was designed for a farmer and you're a hunter, what's gonna happen to you? It's not gonna work and you'll just be tired. So a lot of the meditation that I tried when I was younger did not do anything for me. In fact, some of it just made me tired and not good. But eventually you realize, saying that you should meditate is like saying you should cook. Maybe you should know what you're cooking
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You choose the meditation based on your brain and based on your state, or you say, you know what? I could cook that, but I could also have it delivered. I could also hire a chef. There are different ways. I could just do intermittent fasting. There are different ways to get the results you want, and assuming you have to meditate isn't a very good assumption. If you do meditate, there are accelerators you could do, and you may find that breath work,
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on top of meditation cuts the time dramatically. And in heavily meditated, I talk about three different buckets of breath work that you might consider, but it depends on what do you wanna do? Do you wanna launch off into outer space? You can do that. Do you wanna turn off a stress response you're feeling from your mother-in-law or something right now? You can do that.
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And do you want to just become calm and focused and get some work done without stressing? You can do that. They're just different animals. So you got to pick the medication, pick the supplement for the condition. You should pick the meditation or the altered states technique as well. And that's why I heavily meditated. It isn't that much about meditation. It's about the states you get for meditation and how to get there faster.
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That is so cool. I never thought of it like that. I mean, this is so obvious when you say it, like you think of vegan, carnivore, paleo, all that. And then you think of exercise, hit and resistance. I never like meditations, meditations, the bucket.
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Right. French fries are not ribeye, are not garbanzo beans, right? They're all totally different. Totally, and garbanzo beans I know are your favorite. So, inside joke everybody. So these altered states, like what, someone walking in, like what are the different states they might be walking in with and want to, how am I gonna ask this? Let's say someone's coming in because you might come in stressed, you might come in because you wanna manifest something, you might come in because you wanna go to sleep.
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You know, you might come in because you want to face the day in a better way. How do you know what to pick? Well...
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usually you have a problem you're trying to solve. And you say, all right, what's the problem I'm trying to solve? And one of the biggest ones is that if you're over 40 and you're still reacting like you're 14, it's actually not your fault, it's that your nervous system is on autopilot and there's a good reason for it. So you might say, all right, I wanna choose a meditation that is going to allow me to go into the little system settings like I do on my phone. I'm gonna turn off all the alerts from TikTok and Instagram and all this other stuff, I'm just gonna stop them from happening.
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But you want to do that inside your own brain. That's an altered state. That meditation is called the reset process. That's the core from 40 years of Zen. But you might also say, you know, I'd like to really gain more bodily awareness so I'm more embodied, I'm more grounded.
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And that's going to be a visualization technique. So got to know what you want to do. For me though, the most precious that I've done is the one that we did together when you came to 40 Years of Zen, which has even evolved since then. It's the recent process where it's a structured technique to turn off any trigger. And everyone knows you're going along and maybe someone has a different political party or someone does something and you're just, and you get so mad.
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If you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun and that someone else has their finger on the trigger. And nobody wants to do that. And a lot of people feel shame or guilt. Like, I can't believe I said that to my kids. You know, there must be something wrong with me. No, there's nothing wrong with you. It's that there is a system inside of you called the operating system inside your body. And its job is to keep your meat alive as if your conscious brain isn't even in there.
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And it makes decisions in order, JJ. And it does this before you or I have a chance to think. Because if you have an adult brain, it takes a third of a second after something happens for your brain to even get a signal that it happened. And it takes another three quarters of a second for your brain to think about it and figure out what just happened.
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So if I say boo, well, I heard him say boo and I decided not to be startled. But in reality, that whole second, you couldn't see it and I couldn't see it because we're all running on this delay, kind of like used to watch the Super Bowl, there's an eight second delay in case there's a wardrobe malfunction. But we have that and our body is running it. So how's our body deciding what we get to see and not see? Well, it's all F words. And the first one, fear. If something is scary,
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It means you immediately need to run away from, kill or hide.
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And this is true whether you're a dog, a tadpole, a blade of grass. They can't run away, so they make sharp edges. Everything on earth that is alive always handles immediate threats first. And since your brain is too slow to handle immediate threats, your body does it for you. Sadly, when Ms. Johnson in third grade criticized you, that felt unsafe at the time. And so your dumb operating system is still firing off an alert when you're criticized going,
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Well, that must not be safe. So then you feel angry and then you blame the other person. That's not you doing it. It's your system telling you that. So what if you could turn off that alert? And if it's not fear, the next F word that all life will do before you can think, food. Let's eat everything. And you are a master of getting people off the craving cycle. Well, every time you have a craving...
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It's taking you away from being present. And the research that I've gone through says that one third of the average person's thoughts every day are about tacos.
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Really? Well, not necessarily tacos. Not tacos, but yes. It's like, what's lunch? What's for dinner? Wow. And literally, this is your meat operating system, your body going food, food, food. Okay, we can solve that. That's why these GOP-1s are blowing up everywhere. Amen. Jeez, okay. What do you think the third F word is that keeps life alive that you think about a lot? I know what the third F word is. You're thinking fertility, aren't you?
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It's amazing how many people just drop an F-bomb there, but it's fertility or the fornication version of it. Or the F-bomb. Exactly. So, JJ, what that means is when you walked into your studio this morning, your body automatically looked at the shelf behind you and said, is it scary? No. Can I eat it? No. Should I hump its leg? No. And then it allowed you to sit down at that desk. Isn't that dark? Yeah.
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Well, all of us, our bodies are doing this all of the time and it's okay. Some are doing it more than others. Well, that's exactly the problem. But have you ever done something you're ashamed of that isn't from one of those three things?
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Not really, no, you're right. Those are the big ones. And if you look at the seven deadly sins, oh, there are those three things. And you look at the hindrances in Buddhism, oh, there are those three things. Wow. Always. It's not us, it's our bodies trying to keep us alive. So imagine your body is a Labrador retriever. I know you have cute little dogs, but I'm talking- I haven't even seen the latest one. I've heard about the latest one. Oh my God, the palm chi.
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Can't wait. Fluff bomb. Okay. We are. I love dogs too, man. We're on the same wavelength. But the Labrador Retriever, the puppy, it comes in, it eats your shoes, it pees on the couch, it humps your leg, and it eats everything.
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Okay. Great. That is the same operating system that you and I are running. And that time I saw you eat all the Ben and Jerry's. Uh-huh. Right. Okay. I've never seen that for the record, but I did, you know. So all the times we've all done these things, it's your body trying to stay alive. So our job to be functioning adults is turn fear into peace. And that's the most important part of this book. And then it's to turn...
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hunger and cravings into nourishment. And you've done so much there. I mean, we're so aligned on that, except for garbanzo beans. But hey, that's a small difference.
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And then we want to turn loneliness and lust into what I call sacred intimacy. This is something that is a path to healing altered states and is incredibly nourishing and necessary for adults, as important as food or air. And it's probably gotten, that is probably what's been screwed up the most when I think about like what's happened with all the online stuff, right? You are totally correct.
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And if we can make those shifts, it frees up a lot of energy for the next F word. So we have fear,
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Food, fertility, friend. And all life on earth will form an ecosystem. We interact and cooperate with our species and with the world around us to make it better. This is why we help the little lady across the street. This is why we take care of kids who aren't ours. We're wired to be good inside our bones. And we don't get to do that sometimes because we get trapped in fear and hunger and lust.
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So if we can just learn how to train that Labrador that's running our body to be a service dog, you don't think about food anymore because you're nourished. You're not angry at people all the time because you ran the reset process from the book because you learned how to let it go. What most of us do most of the time is we get really triggered but because we're functioning adults, we smile anyway, go, I'm really pissed off here, but I'm just gonna pretend like I'm okay. And the problem is,
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You don't have congruence when you do that. Everyone knows when your inner state and your outer state don't match. Everyone listening to this show, we've all met people like that. We know they're faking. Well, your job is to make your inner state match your outer state. And one way to do that is to walk around screaming every time someone offends you, at least you match, but now no one wants to be around you. So the other thing to do would be to, let's work on the inner state so that you don't get triggered in the first place. And for me,
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That has been by far the biggest lesson. And Heavily Meditated is my most important book of all the ones I've written. It's my ninth book. And the knowledge in here, people spend $20,000, spend five days with my neuroscience team, CEOs and celebrities and people. I'm giving away the process and it has been tested and evolved and developed even since you did 40 years of Zen with me. And it's like my highest and best work.
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What happens if you increase your energy by learning how to eat, by hydrating your brain, by doing all the biohacking and health and nutrition and longevity practices, you have more energy.
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To be more triggered if you don't fix it. It's true. Like if you're a reactive asshole, you'll be a bigger, more powerful reactive asshole, right? Well, that's what they always say. Like if someone, if a jerk gets more money, they're just a bigger jerk. It would absolutely follow that if you don't fix this piece, you know, it will get amplified.
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It is true. And your prefrontal cortex, the part of you that catches your negative impulses and makes you act like an adult, is one of the most energy-dense parts of the brain. So there is some hope that at least if you're well-fed, you might act less like a jerk, but you'll still have the strong feelings that make you want to act like a jerk. But what would happen if you had enough money and then you had less fear? So you kind of poured into that bucket.
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And then, okay, I didn't get triggered and I had a ton of energy, so it goes into food. Oh, I wasn't hungry because I know how to eat. So it goes into, oh my gosh, the bedroom. Now you focus on your relationships and they become a source of nourishment. And then it pours into your community. And now you actually have friends and you spend time with them and you nourish your community and it nourishes you. And now you still have all your energy. And then the final F word is forgiveness. And this is how you say, well...
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What am I holding a grudge about and how do I stop holding that grudge? It's about disentangling yourself from someone or something else, not about saying, oh, I forgive you. It's not about saying something that someone did is okay. Being able to just not be engaged with just the stuff that breaks a lot of people. So instead of feeling the anger and beating your pillow and gritting your teeth and doing the work,
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Well, you got to do the work, but you want to do the work in the fastest and most peaceful way you can so you can stop being reactive. Instead of writing down your angry feelings every single day for the rest of your life, we got to go to the source. And the good news is it takes about five minutes when you do it right.
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And if it's a really big thing, it might take a little bit more time, but this is a tried and true structured process for finding a single feeling or situation that triggers you and just turning it off. And I had to do it in a major way. And it took a lot of learning to get here.
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I mean, I write about this. You've had some triggers. Yeah. I write about this stuff. We all have, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a fact of life. You just got a couple more than usual. The question is, how do you own them, right? Yeah. I write about them all in the future, Jay.
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It's the, what's your 50%? Like, what can you control? Like, you can't control other people doing jerky things, but you can control your reaction to it. So here's a couple questions around this. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking, because it feels like once you learn the process, and I know I learned the process in 40 years of Zen, and what was cool about doing it that way was you could actually hear if you were doing it, you were hitting it or correctly.
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However, you don't have to go and do that just to be able to pull it off, which is cool. You put the technique in the book, and the technique really surrounds itself around forgiveness. But it strikes me that this is like peeling an onion because you really need to understand. Well, here's the question. How much do you need to be able to identify what the trigger actually is?
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Oh, this is the most common question, JJ. And you don't need to. So let's say you're driving home and someone cuts you off. Most people are going to get angry about that. So now your trigger is someone cut me off. So you're going to sit down, you're going to run the reset process. And part of it is you ask yourself this question. What's the first time I ever felt that way? So you're not saying, what's the first time I was cut off in traffic? What was the feeling in my body?
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And does it feel like anything else I can think of? And weird stuff will flash into your head that sometimes makes no sense. Whatever that is, you just write it down. And then you run the reset process on whatever that thing is. And then all of a sudden, you're rewriting history somewhere in your past. And then the car cutting off doesn't matter. And the example I use in Heavily Meditated is a relatively well-known one where I was on Joe Rogan's show three times.
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And Joe Rogan had a financial interest in a competitor. And when that competitor launched a copycat product, suddenly he came out there and said, Dave's a liar.
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And really kind of came after my reputation in a way that didn't make any sense. And it really, it really dysregulated me. I bought, you know, I hired a crisis PR firm, like, what do I do? You know, I have a successful business. It was successful before Joe, you know, he bumped the numbers a bit, but like, all I did was come on his show and help his people. Like I did nothing wrong.
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I sat down to do the reset process and I thought, when's the first time I felt this way? And it was this weird, like, you know, something's wrong. And this situation from first grade popped into my head to JJ. I'm a grown ass adult. Right. And I'm like, what is this? I didn't even remember that, but it is this. Oh, wow. And the situation was some other kid did something wrong. I told the teacher. Yeah, it was a tattletale. And then,
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The teacher says, little Johnny, did you do it? He goes, I didn't do it. Dave did it. And I got sent to the principal's office for what the other kid did. And it turns out for entrepreneurs and for adults, one of the biggest triggers and traumas that we deal with is injustice. I did the right thing and I got punished for it. Right. I didn't know that this happened at first grade. I forgot about that 30, 40 years ago. But it popped into my head the second I asked myself the question. So I said, all right, I'll run the reset process against that.
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And when I did that, reality became clear. Every time Joe Rogan says Dave Asprey's a bad man, I just sell more coffee. Who cares what a comedian thinks about me? And to be clear, I think Joe did awesome stuff during the pandemic. I'm not mad at Joe about this because I ran the reset process. But at the time I was pissed and I was, I was pretty reactive about it, but I couldn't see reality because it was a trigger. And the trigger's job is to make you reactive and not let you think.
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Because if something's dangerous, you don't have time to think, you have to react. So pulling yourself out of that would be true. If you can't identify that trigger, like you, like somehow that first grade thing popped up, but if the first grade thing hadn't popped up. Yep, I would have run it right on Joe. So you would just run it on Joe, and then, but then similar situations would have continued to trigger you because you hadn't really gotten to the root cause, or no? They would have triggered me less or possibly not triggered me.
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What's cool is if you go back in time to the earliest one you can remember, everything after that gets fixed. So if I handled it with Joe going forward, I would have had less triggers. But the Joe situation kind of looked like the first grade injustice, but there would have been other instances of injustice that felt different enough to be triggered. So the further back you go, the better it works. Got it. Okay. And here's the weird thing, JJ.
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When I'm working with these high powered CEOs and all, everyone has childhood trauma with their parents. If you have a meat body and you are alive, there was a time when you were little and your parents did something that really made you angry. And they don't even know it made you angry. You can have the best parents on earth. It doesn't matter.
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It left a mark. And we've all had bullying situations and teachers that said something. It's just a fact of growing up. Your body is trying to figure out how to keep you alive. So these CEOs sometimes they'll break down in tears going, God, I never thought about that. But they're letting it go permanently instead of being reactive. And the larger your family, the larger your team is.
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the more important is that you own your own shit. Because if you don't, you will pass it on and then your kids will pass it on or your team will pass it on and it ruins your company culture, it ruins your family dynamics. So you can be the one who stops it and it means you do the work and the fastest way I've seen after going around the world is the reset process.
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So if someone grabs the book and they do the reset process, I mean, how quickly can this start to make an impact? If you have a situation, say, with a family member, maybe, you know, one of your adult kids is doing something and you really don't like it, you really want them to do what you want them to do and it's triggering you. Okay. Okay.
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Run the reset process there. And that night, when you text with your kid or when they call you, you're not going to get angry the way you did before. It hits you that day. And it's remarkable. And it's...
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It's kind of sad because if your energy is off, you have less energy to do this and less energy to control your state. So a lot of my friends are going through perimenopause or they're in menopause and it doesn't break your brain. It breaks your energy productive system and then unprocessed trauma sucks the energy you have left. So you wanna fix your hormones, fix your food so that you get the energy back
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And you want to turn off the trauma that's sucking energy. So all of a sudden you have this amazing thing, it's called wisdom. So now you have the energy of being young and you have the wisdom of having suffered and done something about it. And then you become something that's missing in the world today. You become an elder, not elderly, because you don't look or feel elderly, but you're an elder because people go, wow, that person knows everything and they own their own shit.
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And they can hear things that are uncomfortable and they just show up and they're helping and they're nice and they're kind. And this is what we need. We don't need a bunch of people who are reactive and triggered and full of Alzheimer's in retirement homes, not remembering their own names. All of that's optional. I mean, you know that better than anyone because you've been working on this for 20 years and helping people fix their brains and their hormones and all that stuff, JJ. Just let's do that and deal with the trauma. And wow, who knows what kind of world we could live in.
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Yeah, I was just with Chip Conley. I was just with Chip. And, you know, they're trying to figure out what to do with modern elder academy as a name because people don't think they want to be an elder. I'm like, and he says, you know, the definition of an elder is wisdom plus curiosity, which is fantastic. And as I think about women heading into perimenopause and menopause, if they've got that trauma, the reaction, all that, because ultimately what you're talking about is stored trauma, right?
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They just don't have the margin for error. Their hormones start to go down and it's like, blah. That's what I just thought. It's like you just, if you haven't dealt with it before, this will force you to deal with it because you're like, uh-oh, what just happened? You know, I let out the person that I've kind of buried trying to be a nice girl for so long when I can't.
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I mean, we've both been with so many friends where they're doing everything they can to try and keep the walls up. And then there's just too much. And then there's a breakdown. And when that happens, it can break families. It can break companies. It's really rough. So your job is as important as learning how to cook is to learn how to go into the control panel in your mind and turn off the alerts from all the different apps.
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Your phone, every app was allowed to just blow up in your face whenever you wanted to. And then you go to the therapist. They're like, well, every time an alert comes, just take a deep breath. Notice the alert. Swipe to the side and continue working. That's what meditation and therapy is. And it's so dumb, JJ. No, go in and turn that shit off unless it's a meditation you want. Yeah.
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Oh, my God. The world is so much better. And then you have more energy to say, oh, I'm not going to eat the cupcake. And you just make better choices. And then when a kid who's in a reactive state comes to you –
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You can be the one who's not reacting, so they will co-regulate with you. Your nervous system teaches them how you're supposed to be. But if they get triggered and then you get triggered, which triggers them, you just enter a spiral and it sucks your own energy. So no one's perfect, but understanding all of the things you do that you're ashamed of are from your mitochondria. They're just trying to keep your meat alive and it has nothing to do with how good or moral you are.
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And for me, that was a big thing. Hey, I make mistakes, but it's really just my meat making a mistake. I'm going to make it right if I allow that to happen. And then I'm going to find out why I did that and I'm going to hunt down the cause and I'm going to get rid of it. Yeah. Sometimes the most obvious ways to make shifts are the things you just talked about, too. It's like get rid of some of these apps. I have to share this. I was laughing as you were saying this because I was with Shippy in Nashville and, um,
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One of the big things that came out of my time there was get X off your phone. I was like, I have never felt like an addicted person to anything. And there I was with X, refresh, refresh, refresh. And it was like lighting me up. And I'm like, I just took it off. I'm great.
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Like back to that. I was missing my morning meditation. Everything. Cause I had to like check out. It was ridiculous. Which app did you take off your phone? That was most important. It's, it was X. Wow. X. I cannot have X on my phone. Sorry, Elon.
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Wow. Yeah, I have X on my phone. Don't care about any of the – I'm not one of those scrolly people. Like X lost my mind, totally lost my mind. Tim has to fill me in on if there's anything I really need, which has always been my approach with any news or anything. It was like I'm sure – my mom used to get so upset. She'd go, you have to know what's going on. I go, someone will tell me if it's really important, I'm sure. JJ, that may be one of the reasons that we're such good friends is –
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Same approach. In fact, when Facebook many years ago, Facebook used to be a place where your friends could share interesting stuff. Wow. What happened? I don't know. But I used to know everything I needed to know just because my friends would talk about it. And I never watched the news. And then one day, all I saw was cat pictures. And I'm like, screw this. I don't use that platform. I have a lot of content there, but I don't log in.
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And, you know, and consume that way. So it's getting harder and harder. And what that means is having a better community is so important. And we're not spending time with our friends because we have less energy because our lifestyle isn't very good.
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And then maybe you do some things to fix that, but then the apps all trigger fear. They make you think about things. Oh, there's a troll. They said something bad about me and all that. And I have no right. Or inadequacy. It's fear or inadequacy. Fear, inadequacy. And if that's not it, there's gonna be someone shaking their butt, right? These are hooks that are there in your nervous system, not in you. And I'm,
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I have found, for instance, through this process, criticism really doesn't bother me anymore. And trolls will come online and they'll say things. And I realize they're just stuck as 12-year-olds. They're just doing the mean girls bullying thing. So I'm like, well, if we're going to do that, let's play because 12-year-olds play. So I usually just say, they'll say, Dave, you look old. And I'm like, that's not what your mom said.
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And I'll just put it right there on social media. And then of course they get enraged. How dare you, that's not very mature. And I go, hold on, I thought that was the bullying game we were playing, like I'm rubber, you're glue, you go next. And then all of a sudden, like, oh my God, they really are doing that. And you'll get hundreds of likes from, you know, people who know you going, oh my gosh, that troll didn't win. And it's, I don't know, it's about like, it doesn't affect you anymore. Like how do we be curious and have fun with everything? And when you have a different vibe,
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It changes things. And you can still do the right thing. You can still have boundaries. You're just not triggered. Like, oh, that person, they are a taker. Even that person is a narcissistic abuser or something. So I'm not going to have them in my life, but I'm no longer reactive to them. And what happens if you're not reactive to a narcissist?
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They don't want to stick to you and they go stick to someone else. They'll go narcissist all over someone else. Yeah. It's fabulous. We love it. Now, you have your new book, which, by the way, I love the cover. The cover is fabulous. Thank you. And it's also got the vintage vibe of your brand. So I just loved it all the way around. Heavily meditated. Really fun title.
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Um, so we're going to put in the show notes, we'll put your other episodes in the show notes and your books and all your good stuff. But I know that you have some cool stuff when people buy the book, which we'll put in the show notes as well. What are some of the fun things? I think it's like over $750 worth of good stuff. What are some of the cool things they get? You're getting a bunch of discounts, but the biggest one, when you pre-order heavily meditated, go to DaveAsprey.com and you can get $199 commune course, the one on biohacking to teach you how to have more energy. Love it. Yeah.
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Love me some commune. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're fantastic. Cool. All right. Well, we'll put all of that at jjvirgin.com forward slash heavily meditated. Easy to find. And I appreciate you. I'll see you in a couple weeks. See you in a couple weeks. Two weeks. All right.
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All right, so I just want to give you some things to do as takeaways. And one of the things I love is Mary Morrissey talks about noticing what you're noticing. And sometimes that's the first thing is quite often we stuff it down. Stuff those feelings down. I think what happens when you're in perimenopause and menopause is you do.
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can't stuff it any longer so you stop stuffing and you're like wow I'm really being reactive but it was there all the time you just didn't uh you just you just were stuffing it a bit so notice what you're noticing and that's where you can then do that reset process and I always check in do I have energy around this that I can't seem to get rid of this person just continuing to come up in my
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with this situation and that's what I will do this process around and I also wanted to just shout out one of the things we talked about in there about you know look at meditation I never thought of it before like this but look at meditation like you would look at you know choosing the right diet tool for the what you want to accomplish you're choosing the right exercise tool for what you want to accomplish
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I have a lot of tools in my toolkit with meditation, everything from I love my Dr. Joe meditations, but different ones of those to breath work to tapping. So figure out which thing is the right thing for what you're trying to accomplish. And of course, to the reset that Dave talks about. And again, reminder, JJVirgin.com forward slash heavily meditated for all of what we talked about in the episode. All right. Happy meditating.
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Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review.
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And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly.
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You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode.
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Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional and ask you to do it.
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Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.
