On (building) resilience
And a reflection on my substack
An observation before delving into this subject, part of my personal history is in this The Neuroprotective uses of Piracetam, reading the section in which I share parts of my personal history will help you understand the context here.
The SARS-CoV-2 piece I am writing got slightly longer and more complicated than I thought so I decided to postpone it, but today is a “special” day, and I am writing this piece because today marks my Substack “1-year” anniversary. Later addendum, something came up, and perhaps tomorrow will be a day without publishing something.
One of the easiest methods to begin building mental resilience, and what one could argue is the easiest and shortest step to take, is setting up goals, this is precisely how I lost all that weight, how I “learn” most subjects that interest me at a rather fast pace, the first step to creating positive feedback loops that become second nature and not merely habit (akin to hacking/rewiring your own brain) is goal setting, and sticking to it).
Depending on your own psychology and behavioral traits, you either need to start low, with borderline literal baby steps, or go beyond what (your) common sense stipulates as a realistic goal at the moment. When I first started Substack I set the goal of 1000 subscribers until October 2022, a goal very unrealistic at the time, which enabled me to hyperfocus on writing and researching, similar goals from other walks of my life were made, and I blew through most of them in half the time.
Given both the generosity and I would deduce the value my reader get from this Substack, it enabled me to do this full-time and positively change my life, this is one of the reasons I refuse to engage in the tactics that would be so easy for me to exploit to grow aggressively, also the reason I refuse to paywall any and everything, except a few pieces I promised my very first few subscribers I would leave paywalled.
This is where it gets personal. Given my life history (part of it you can read in the substack referred to at the start of this text) by 2018, I was severely weak, not as much physically, but my gut was severely damaged and above all else, my brain could not work properly, reaching such a degraded state I was in line to get a diagnose for Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, and I started developing intermittent muscle weakness.
At some point between mid-2018 and early-2019, I had a severe autoimmune reaction in my Central Nervous System, and the literal medical description of half a dozen specialists was “Your nervous system fried itself”. The prognosis given to me at the time was the final nail in the coffin of my hatred towards (most) doctors, and I refuse to accept the fate they described. Probably barely walking the rest of my life, high likelihood of using a wheelchair for years, and most likely not being able to draw ever again, among many other changes ending in a substantial drop in quality of life.
This is the moment when I found BPC-157 because my entire body was literally half-dead. I have a very faint memory of the time I treated myself with copious amounts of peptides and some supplements, but this isn’t how you build resilience, because the intervention was merely a starting point for possible recovery. For comparison, I lost dozens of pounds of lean mass (I was fairly big and muscular, I looked like Bane from the Batman trilogy), so I was in a very weak physical state, this will be an important point later.
After a few months and a “miraculous recovery” (I did not tell any of the morons treating me what I did to fix myself), a close relative invited me to visit a place he liked, a middle-of-nowhere/nature kinda place. This place.
At the time walking 200 yards was a massive hurdle, with very little effort most of my nerves, yes the entire nerves not merely the nerve ending started burning up, and soon to follow, muscle weakness, my feet and muscles hurt so much sometimes I legitimately thought dying was a better choice, but this is the moment I found David Goggins. I will not go in-depth on him, but if you want to be mentally resilient or surpass any and all limits, go read about him, his books, and watch his videos.
I reminded myself of one of his rules that I decided to engrave in my subconscious, the 40% rule, in which he states that when you are tired, close to exhausted, you are merely 40% “tired”, and the second aspect I decided to engrave deep in my subconscious was what I learned during military training, from now what is one of my closest friends, a common military trait in fact. Embracing being miserable, getting comfortable being miserable, in pain.
So at this point, I decided to go “hike”, but in this property (you can rent small little houses to stay for a certain amount of days) there weren’t effectively proper trails, and this is a very hilly area, with steep hills everywhere, you can partially see the hills in the pictures above. This is what I decided to “hike” in.
These are parts of what you find up those hills, that average a very steep, uneven 700 yards upwards. The first time I did this hike, I barely reached the end of the trail, still far away from the places in these pictures, I had muscle pain, nerve pain, and energy crashes for weeks afterward, but I consciously chose to persist. 3 months after this, I went to this place again, I was a little bit better, but my nerve endings burned non-stop, especially my feet.
This time I made the decision to go as far as one can, the first hike was merely 3 miles in, excruciating miles, but 3 nonetheless, this time, I went far. I hiked roughly 15 miles, this second hike brought me many insights into the human mind, what we perceive we can do, and the adage as old as Western civilization itself, mind over body. If I could take only one lesson from all my ordeals in life is that your mind has the ability to mold not only you but everything around you.
You must not only consciously choose to not let whatever your current situation is, but to effectively test yourself whenever you feel down, or “like shit”, your mental effort, the physical and mental stress by testing your limits you inflict upon yourself will affect how you perceive most situations, how you analyze everything, and especially how your body responds to life.
Up until very recently (earlier this year) I still had all these symptoms to varying degrees, from severe to mild, there were moments when I crashed in my bed for weeks because my nerves could not send the proper signals to my muscles, and even then I would walk 1, 2, 2.5 miles around my neighborhood.
Recently I had to move, and move an entire house by myself, expecting that I would crash hard, and experience severe muscle pain, weakness, and “no energy” for a while, even though every time I got one of these, these “flare-ups” were getting shorter, to my surprise, I had 0 symptoms after strenuous amounts of physical effort.
A pleasant surprise, and unexpected recovery, of course not merely mental, the last 2 years served to break one of my biases, in which I was a “minimum dosage” type of person, always minimum dosing everything, but some people will effectively need high dosages of multiple supplements for months, perhaps a few years for complete recovery (my very peculiar case). But without the mental resilience, I built over the years, I would have never reached this point, or would be writing any of my substack pieces.
In the end, building resilience is a choice, a hard choice but one anyone can make, and any person has the ability to build to this “resilient” state, by making the conscious choice of testing themselves, choosing the harder path, by slowly pushing your limits and being sincere to yourself, trusting your gut instinct if you are really giving your maximum if that current level of discomfort or distress is your actual limit.
As David Goggins said in one of its most well-known interviews to date (Joe Rogan):
“I am not special, I am not gifted. I am just driven.”
And being driven is hard-coded in our genes, it is human nature. So the choice is yours. There are other ways to achieve mental resilience, and being effectively “propoganda/psy ops” proof, I will cover them at a later date, in my primer for cognitive warfare, I also have a bunch of other pictures from this place on other years, and I will share them soon, with more writing about what I learned in each time I went to this place.
You can change and transform yourself into someone new, or an enhanced version of yourself, if you push yourself hard enough, and keep fueling that drive, whatever it takes, in any area of life. In 3 days I will be 37 years old, and I have changed myself, “evolving” almost completely multiple times. Anyone can do it if I can. Take chances, I started this Substack merely because 3 people asked me to, and here we are.
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We are all going to make it, frens !
I welcome and appreciate the support of those who choose a paid subscription, or who decide to buy me a coffee whenever they feel like it, and everyone who shares my Substack. Without all of you, this wouldn’t be possible.
Beautiful and inspiring. Just exactly what I needed to hear today. Thank you.
Really appreciate this post John Paul. Two thumbs up.