A couple months ago, I read a NY Times piece about an AI deepfake expert who seemed to be nearing the the end of his rope.

Alarmed by the fact that even a pro like him could no longer reliably tell fiction from reality, he also expressed concern that his literal vision was becoming corrupted by too-constant focus on digital screens.

I ask you: Who among us has not experienced this?

For years now, I’ve had this feeling that my eyes were failing me. On a typical screen-intensive day, somewhere between 3:00 and 4:30 PM, I would experience a sort of eyeball-witching hour. Suddenly, my vision would start to fade or swim or just feel not worth the effort.

Initially, I felt alarmed. My workdays were getting cut short. My productivity was suffering. Was I going blind? Just getting old?

I went to the optometrist, got my eyes checked, my prescription updated. Nothing much to report, just the usual progression of age-related near-sightedness. No big deal.

I got a stronger pair of readers. I turned up my laptop’s light setting. I adjusted my screen view (“zoom in, zoom in, zoom in …”). It helped — a little, maybe?

I began preemptively resting my eyes more often during the day. I opened my laptop later in the morning, closed it earlier in the evening. Whenever I could, I’d leave my phone behind on dog walks, keeping my eyes on the path, the horizon, the real world.

And then at some point, it struck me: I was relieved to be spending less time looking at screens. Because frankly, a lot of what I’d been doing on all those screens had mostly been making my life (and presumably, my vision) worse.

These days, I’m zooming out more than in. Prioritizing distance-gazing over screen squinting. And I’m finding that trade to be a glorious one.

While this shift might have been triggered by my eyesight, I’ve recognized that my body-mind’s appetite — not just my optical capacity — for screen-based information and experiences is a lot less than it used to be.

As the complexity of technology and the quantity of online garbage keep increasing, the effort it takes to sort the useful from the oppressive keeps growing, too. The burden of making meaning from so many different, fast-blurting sources of information increasingly feels like … just too much.

Could I get some AI agents to condense it all into a more streamlined dashboard, bulletized list, or optimized decision matrix? I bet I could. But for me, right now, that holds about as much appeal as a pre-masticated, portion-controlled bolus for dinner.

What I want, I now realize, is to feel not just more fully informed or more fully optimized, but more fully alive.

I want to feel more attuned to my own inner workings and to the tangible world around me. I want to electively employ my digital tools without feeling employed — or enslaved —by them.

Like almost everyone I know, I still spend more time than I’d like on my laptop and phone. But these days, my screen-facing hours are spent less on surfing or scrolling, and more on writing, researching, and relating.

I’m more aggressively calculating the true cost of anything that demands more than 15 minutes of uninterrupted screen time. And as often as not, I’m finding that perceived cost — to my eyes, my energy, my attention, my mood, my life force — is too high.

I’ve gone back to listening to the news headlines on public radio rather than delving into online news feeds (I gave up on TV news long ago). One by one, I’ve been deleting apps off my phone and turning off notifications.

Yes, I’ve been pitched on all the ways AI-powered technology could help me know more, earn more, work smarter, save time. While I like the sound of some of those ideas, and I’ve even employed a few, I don’t like the feeling I get each time I begin to delve deeper into AI rabbit holes.

It always involves me relating more with screens, striving to make decisions for which I’ve no relevant background, relying on technologies I neither understand nor trust. It has me sitting more, staring more.

A chiropractor friend (Mark McCarthy) once told me that our bodies are engineered for looking up and out a great deal more than the modern world invites us to. I remember him demonstrating this posture, eyes gazing upward, chest open, arms outstretched in a receiving, almost reverent gesture. And I remember feeling I might cry.

I hadn’t seen a human body — or felt my own body — make that shape in such a long time.

I think back to the years I spent editing Experience Life magazine (which just celebrated its 25th year of publication), and I recall how more than once when I was working past midnight, the office lights all turned off. Not because it was late, but because I had been hunched there, immobile, staring at a screen for so long that the lighting sensors assumed I wasn’t there at all.

And maybe I wasn’t, really. All there, I mean.

In so many of the hours I spent glued to screens, I was something less than my full human self. I was present, operating at certain levels, but inert in others. I was keyboard-connected brain with synapses trained exclusively on what the screen presented to and demanded of me.

I do not regret those screen-tethered years, because I am proud of what they produced — and what they taught me. They shaped me and my life in ways that I still value. But today, that level of physical and psychological attachment feels wrong to me. Not just fatiguing or de-energizing, but a deeper sort of “meh, not worth it” hard pass.

While I track the worlds of technology and AI in the same way I track the rest of our Unhealthy Default Reality — with a mixture of curiosity and concern — I do not feel inclined to invest myself in them too heavily. I do not feel enticed to wrap too much of my life in their sycophantic, overpromising embrace.

Today, when I contrast the time I spend looking at screens with the time I spend looking out at the natural world, or into the eyes of another real person, there is no question in my mind as to which view nourishes and which depletes, which enlivens and which numbs.

Perhaps it’s just a phase I am going through — a seasonal allergy I’ve developed to bits and bytes. Perhaps it’s what Molière referred to in his 1664 play Tartuffe as (I paraphrase) “quitting a world that is fast quitting me.” But I’m going with it.

A couple decades ago, my sisters and I tried to get our then 70-something father to accept the use of a desktop Mac as a means of accessing the New York Times, which at the time, he could not reliably get delivered to his small-town home address.

On his first big day of computing, Dad began reading the Times online, and it was a gee-whiz novelty to him. “Fantastic!” he said.

I think he read one book review. Maybe an opinion column. And that was it. From then on, the Mac collected dust.

A few months later, Dad celebrated cheerily as we removed “that f-ing computer” from his space. My sisters and I sighed and rolled our eyes at his luddite tendencies. But we could also understood why being rid of that technology came as such a relief.

Today, I understand it better. It’s not that I want to reject all technology, or that I hold out hope I can somehow wriggle through the coming years without getting some AI on me. I can’t. Most likely none of us can.

What I can do, though, is notice this feeling — a mixture of annoyance, presentiment, overwhelm, and resignation. A feeling that if I stand any ongoing chance of experiencing the best glories of being alive, I need to create regular distance between myself and the machines.

Will I be disavowing all digital experiences? Hardly. My business and personal lives both rely upon them.

Rather, I am heeding my own instincts, proceeding with discernment about what I actually need and desire.

Yesterday, I had lunch with a couple friends at cute little place in Minneapolis. At the table next to us, two friends (perhaps sisters?) spent their lunch hour facing each other, nibbling at the food on their plates while their eyes remained glued to respective phone screens. I never once saw them look up or speak to each other.

Who am I to judge, though? The other day, on a walk past our farm garden, I nearly missed seeing four hummingbirds collecting nectar from brightly colored blooms because I was too busy clicking through some breaking-news alert, the topic of which I can no longer recall.

I do remember the hummingbirds, though.

So what’s my point here? I guess it’s a working theory … that perhaps if we more often noticed our real appetites and desires instead of complying with the defaults we’re urged to accept, we might experience more of the real glories of living.

We might notice not just more of the hummingbirds that exist “out there,” but also the gentle hummings that exist in here, in these body-minds that are part of the natural world and its systems and cannot be divided from it without peril.

Our eyes delight in gazing upon real glories. Our bodies, too.

We can be nourished and sustained and comforted by all the tangible wonders in our midst, or we can miss them entirely because we are too busy looking at screens.

I will end with this poem from Wendell Berry, who passed away just a couple days ago, and who will be long missed, along with Dolly Parton, as one of the wisest and best among us.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

Wishing you much grace and glory on this beautiful day. And more hummingbirds.

P.S. If you want to spend a full day (or more) steeping entirely within beautiful natural environments, connecting with good people, and enjoying extraordinary homegrown foods, please take note: There are just two spaces remaining for Healthy Deviant Day Camp (a real-life event I hold each year at my family’s farm) and I’m closing registration at end of day today.

P.P.S. Meanwhile, you might conduct this fun little experiment: Put away all your tech for an hour or so — your computers, phones, smart watches, biotrackers —  and see what happens.

See who you are without them. See what you can see and feel that is different from “normal.” I can’t promise it will be entirely glorious, but I can promise you it will be well worth noticing.

On many occasions over the past few years, when I’d tell people I was writing a book about “Healthy Deviance,” they’d look at me with raised eyebrows. Then they’d kind of chuckle or grin at me in that way that says, “Ha HA, so it sounds like you’re up to something fun, eh? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.”²

I didn’t have the heart to tell most of those people that I was writing this book for one important (and not wonderfully fun or racy) reason:

Currently, we live in a culture that produces more unhealthy, unhappy people than healthy, happy ones.

In fact, right now, the unhealthy-to-healthy ratio is arguably running about a hundred to one. I lay out my rationale for that statistic in chapter one of my book, but here’s one thing I can tell you for sure …

I know, that is way less sexy than all the winkers and nudgers might have hoped. And if you bought this book thinking it was about, um, something else, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

In my mind, though, these facts do raise a rather captivating question: What kind of society makes being healthy and happy so difficult that only a tiny, single-digit percentage of its population can hope to pull it off?

The answer is self-evident: A sick society. And within a sick society—one where chronic illness, obesity, drug dependence, anxiety, and depression are rapidly becoming the prevailing norms—what does it mean to be one of the few who bucks those unhealthy odds?

It means that you have to be prepared to successfully resist your society’s standard way of doing business. You have to oppose its rules and defy its conventions. You have to make all kinds of inconvenient and unpopular choices.

You have to become a sort of renegade freak—or at least be willing to think and act like one some of the time.

The great news is that this does not require superhuman willpower, single-digit body-fat percentages, buns of steel, or an endless parade of boneless, skinless chicken breasts.

What it does require: a willingness to toss some official-looking rule books out the window, to suspend some self-torpedoing beliefs and assumptions, and to begin doing some things … differently.

That starts with understanding one basic, disturbing fact: If you aren’t breaking the rules, you’re probably breaking yourself.

Over the past fifty years or so, breaking ourselves is exactly what most of us have been doing.

We’ve either been following our culture’s paths of least resistance (processed foods, sedentary screen time, reliance on symptom-suppressing drugs), or we’ve been getting dragged along by its punishing health-improvement prescriptions (unachievable perfect-body ideals, fussy diets, overwhelming exercise routines).

Or, worse, we’ve been staggering around, exhausted and inflamed, doing all of the above.

In the process, we have been inadvertently playing into the hands of the very systems that are breaking us down. Clearly, we have to stop doing that—but rescinding our complicity with the unhealthy dominant culture is easier said than done.

Moving away from our society’s preprogrammed defaults requires busting out of well-worn ruts, swimming against powerful tides. All of which requires energy, attention, and resilience that most busy, exhausted, chronically overwhelmed people simply do not have to spare.

All forms of social deviance—even the healthy, positive kind—carry unspoken costs and risks. And that’s one big, wildly underappreciated reason why, despite their best efforts, the vast majority of people who chase health and happiness in our culture don’t ever attain them.

Yet somehow, against all odds, a few healthy oddballs manage to pull it off. Some of them even make it look easy. The question is: How?

My book, The Healthy Deviant, represents my best attempt to answer that question.

Drawing on what I’ve learned over the course of more than two decades as a health journalist, as well as my own experience as a lifelong health seeker, I share the unlikely means by which a small but growing number of bright-spot outliers are managing to pull off the seemingly impossible—and how you can, too.

The way of the Healthy Deviant starts with taking a step back, dusting yourself off, and seeing through fresh eyes the true nature of the health-seeking quest in front of you.

That means letting go of pointless self-recrimination, recognizing that your genes and current environment are an evolutionary mismatch of almost unfathomable proportions, and that your bodily systems were simply never wired to work the way you are asking them to work today.

Next, you’ll learn to rise to that challenge and to navigate that quest more skillfully, growing stronger, clearer, and more confident as you go.

This involves reclaiming and reframing your own Healthy Deviant story, and (if you choose) embarking on your own 14-Day Healthy Deviant Adventure (the program at the center of my book — which I recorded as an on-demand course at the start of COVID lockdown in 2020. (Paid subscribers, if you want to access that course for free, just message me and I’ll hook you up!)

During the course of that adventure, you’ll develop some essential Nonconformist Competencies, practice some delightful Renegade Rituals, and build some game-changing Healthy Deviant Survival Skills.

The final step is forging your own Healthy Deviant identity—one that’s largely impervious to dominant-culture ills and illusions.

Embracing Healthy Deviance at this level requires acknowledging your present circumstances while simultaneously redefining yourself as a sovereign individual. It means choosing to be animated rather than oppressed by the predominantly unhealthy default choices that surround you.

That’s the Healthy Deviant Way. And while not an instant fix, it actually works a whole lot faster and more reliably than most health-improvement strategies that promise instant results. It’s also a whole lot more fun.

Is there science behind this?

I’m so glad you asked. Yes. Plenty. While I have not littered the text with end-ess notes, I have tried to serve up enough of a science-based bread-crumb trail that anyone interested in going deeper can do so.

When applicable, I’ve referenced the researchers and scientists whose work has most informed my own. In some cases, I’ve referenced specific studies, books, articles, or websites. In others, I’ve simply noted larger bodies of knowledge and schools of thought, figuring you can Google your way to more data, if you wish.

When all of that science and research is synthesized, though, the Healthy Deviant approach rests on one very basic, solid, science-supported thesis …

Research experiments have repeatedly demonstrated that under conditions requiring us to exert a great deal of self-control or endure a significant level of stress, humans experience a rapid depletion of attention, cognitive capacity, and what we think of as “willpower.”

Translation: No matter how healthy your intentions, confronted with a long-enough stream of pressures, frustrations, and temptations, eventually you will cave and take the path of least resistance.

This is a phenomenon, sometimes called “ego depletion,” (a topic I address in chapter two of my book), that virtually all of us have experienced firsthand.

And no wonder! For most of us, “conditions that require us to exert a great deal of self-control or endure a significant level of stress” pretty much describes the bulk of our everyday lives.

Because escape from that set of circumstances has seemed largely impossible, most people have become habituated to some form of chronic, low-grade misery. They willingly endure ongoing discomfort, coping as best they can.

This sets them up for another psychological phenomenon known as “learned helplessness” (which I cover in chapter 3). Clearly, this is not a state that predisposes one toward conscious, empowered choice.

Okay, so that’s the bad news. But here’s the good news …

Research shows that recognizing you’re the subject of an experiment tends to alter that experiment’s outcomes—typically in your favor.

Once you’re aware of the experiment’s conditions and your role within it, you become more cognizant both of your own initial instincts and behaviors and of the full range of options available to you.

That means that instead of going along with the research agenda, you’re inclined to make choices that serve your own best interests. In other words, rather than being an unwitting participant in the experiment, you become an active shaper (or, more to the point, disruptor) of it.

This is why researchers generally endeavor not to let subjects know the parameters and purpose of the experiments they are running. They know that it would totally skew the results.

Avoiding that sort of interference is all well and good in the lab, but when it comes to the life-and-death circumstances we’re all facing now, I think we can agree this experiment could use some skewing in our favor.

Right, so here’s the deal:

It helps to instill the practices and perspectives that give you the best possible advantage in dealing with our crazy-culture dynamics. It helps to acquire the skills that empower you to operate successfully within them.

That, in essence, is the strategy behind the Healthy Deviant approach.

Many of its tactics amount to jujitsu moves—the use of artful, subtle, low-effort shifts that achieve major leverage and some surprisingly big results. Its larger promise lies in making the whole process of getting healthier more fun, easeful, and rewarding than whatever you’ve been doing (or dreading doing) for ages.

So, just for now, let’s set aside all the struggle and self-denial. Let’s ease up on the self-blame and the “shoulds” and the impossible ideals. Instead, let’s take a closer look at what is really going on in this weird, constraining experiment we find ourselves living daily. And let’s reframe the act of being healthy in an unhealthy world as a creative, heroic, and profoundly exciting act of social rebellion.

Because, as all Healthy Deviants know (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), that’s precisely what it is.

² “Wink, Wink, Nudge, Nudge” is a reference to a popular Monty Python sketch of the same title. You kinda have watch the skit to understand …

This post is adapted from the introduction to my book, The Healthy Deviant: A Rule Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World (North Atlantic Books, 2020)

Available in print, audiobook, and e-book formats wherever good books are sold (so why not get it from an independent bookseller?).

We’ve all seen hardworking friends disappear off the social radar while in hot pursuit of career success. Many of us have risked becoming strangers to our own families as the result of professional demands that made no space for weekends and evenings at home.

What many of us haven’t realized, however, is that work-related stress can also cost us our cell tissue.

Left unmanaged, overwork and its resultant stresses can dramatically affect our biochemistry, putting our cells, our bodies, our very lives at real risk.

Over the past couple decades, a variety of studies have confirmed what many holistic-health and indigenous-medicine experts have been saying for centuries …

There’s a fundamental and very immediate connection between our life experience and our bodily state.

• Our blood sugar, blood pressure, heart rate, brainwaves, neurotransmitters, hormones, and immune functions all respond to mental and emotional inputs.

• Our biochemical responses to chronic frustration, worry, shame, and helplessness all put pressure on our bodies’ essential systems, aging us and reducing our general immunity.

• The biochemical profiles associated with various types of stress culminate in a general lowering of physical resilience, right down to the organ, tissue, and cellular level.

This is important to keep in mind as employers keep demanding more and more of their people, and as the margins between work and the rest of our lives keep thinning. Because the trade-offs are real. And the bodily costs often turn out to be way high.

The connections between work stress and heart disease, in particular, are so well founded, it’s getting tough to find anybody who isn’t aware of them.

For example, more than a decade ago, a large-scale prospective study produced by the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University College London revealed that that people who experience high levels of chronic job stress over a period of several years have double the risk of developing metabolic syndrome.

That means more weight problems, more blood pressure and cholesterol problems, more Type 2 diabetes, and more heart disease, among other things.

More recently, a meta-analysis of six prospective cohort studies (nearly 120,000 people) found high perceived stress (compared with low perceived stress) carried a 27% higher risk of coronary heart disease.

But this is not just about heart disease. It’s also about digestive and autoimmune disorders, negative shifts in brain function, chronic conditions and illnesses of all kinds.

Our bodies are constantly reacting to their mental and emotional environments. And our bodies eventually come to reflect the sum of our experiences — for better or for worse.

We tend to focus on the “for worse” aspects of that mechanism. Sleep disorders, digestive distress, rashes, anxiety attacks, autoimmune disorders — they may all tell different parts of the same stress-related stories.

But the “for better” mechanisms have important biological narratives, too.

Laughter, for example, has been proven to release a variety of immune-enhancing chemicals. And oxytocin, a peptide released during times of emotional bonding, relaxation, and comforting touch, has a variety of protective, anti-stress functions.

Oxytocin lowers blood pressure and cortisol levels, increases tolerance to pain, and reduces anxiety. In times of stress, it encourages pro-social “tend and befriend” behaviors, as opposed to “fight or flight” reactions.

That means having an adequate supply of oxytocin in your system makes it less likely you’re going to react to stress by heaping it on someone else.

Having less oxytocin — as the result of too much stress, not enough pleasurable, connective, stress-relieving experiences — can impact your cell tissue in a big way. And it’s probably a two-way street.

My brilliant friend Deanna Minich, PhD, recently shared a LinkedIn post highlighting research that shows “oxytocin as an emerging regulator of skeletal muscle plasticity and metabolic function.”

She writes:

Oxytocin receptors are present in muscle cells, and experimental studies suggest oxytocin may support myogenesis, regeneration, glucose uptake, and the preservation of muscle protein.

Oxytocin and oxytocin receptor expression also decline with aging, alongside reduced muscle regenerative capacity. Skeletal muscle may produce and release oxytocin itself, allowing it to function as a myokine through local and systemic signaling.

The clinical science is still early, and this does not diminish the importance of nutrition or strength training. But it does expand the model.

All of which to say ... what if muscle mass is shaped not only by what we eat and how we train, but also by the neuroendocrine biology of connection, stress, and repair?

Maybe at a deeper level, muscle says something about our relational capacity, our need for bonding, safety, and social connection. As we know, "everything is connected".

Oxytocin is one of those chemicals we’re far more likely to produce during our time away from work.

Like, you know, on breaks. During evenings, weekends, vacations. Those little “stolen” moments of pleasure and idleness. Which, to be clear, none of us should have to steal.

Unfortunately, the more we work, the more oxytocin and other biochemical ointments we’re likely to need for repair — and the less our bodies will be inclined to produce.

So if you’ve been drawing down your body-mind reserves in response to work demands, it might be time to give your cell tissue some consideration — in the interest of your health, your relationships, and your career success.

For paid subscribers, I’ve included a related video (“Break the Machine, Not Yourself”) from Lesson 4 of my Healthy Deviant U experience. You’ll find it below the paywall.

If you want more on this topic, take a peek at these past posts (the archives are still open to all for the next couple weeks):

Meanwhile, please take care of your cells. Defend them with informed and inspired determination.

Our world can be such a vitality-depleting place, and we all need every healthy one.

P.P.S. If you happen to be deeply (and/or urgently) focused on rebuilding your own body-mind reserves at this time, and would like my help with that, I now offer VIP Days informed by Healthy Deviant principles.

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I was talking with one of my Healthy Deviant coaching clients this morning (let’s call him Dan) about what probably sounds like a good problem to have. Namely, the problem of being one of the healthier, happier people in one’s own midst.

That might mean you are healthier in body and mind than most of people in your immediate community — your family, say, or your workplace. But it could also mean you are one of the healthier people within your society.

Either way, that blessing can come with its own challenges.

Because in all of those contexts, when a whole lot of of the people around you are struggling, it’s inevitable that a certain amount of that struggle and strife is going to rub off on you.

It’s going to become part the water you swim in. And the more unhealthy, unhappy, struggling people are flailing about in the water, the murkier it gets for everybody.

Traditional hunter-gatherer cultures understood this because they were, by their very nature, based on interdependence.

When you are living in a group of 50 or so people, all collaboratively focused on sustainably meeting that group’s daily needs, the problems of any one person tend to be quickly noticed, felt, and shared by the others.

If you have a problem, they have a problem — and they want to help you solve it.

That’s because all 50 of those others have likely know and cared about you since birth, but also because the whole group’s wellbeing and quality of life now depend, at least in part, on your healthy, high-capacity presence.

In our individualist, mass-market, postmodern society, we’re dealing with a rather different situation. Or at least it can seem that way.

In reality, though, when the majority of people around us are struggling and suffering, it still affects all of us in powerful ways — ways that most of us are only beginning to understand.

This was the point of my conversation with Dan. He had become aware, during recent exchanges with certain members of his team that their performance seemed increasingly … iffy.

Their ideas and proposals appeared lacking in logic, poorly communicated, a bit untethered from the organization’s broader goals and system limitations.

The individuals in the group, he noted, just didn’t seem to be functioning all that well. And of course, this was presenting a variety of stresses and challenges for him.

“I’ve tended to assume,” Dan observed, “that most people are operating at a reasonably high level of capacity and clarity most of the time. I no longer think that is a safe assumption to make.”

I wholeheartedly agree. And I bet you can relate.

Our country’s health statistics, as represented by my chart below, are not just reflections of individuals suffering individual consequences. They are reflections of a society that is failing in its most basic purpose — to serve the wellbeing of its people.

Translation: As a culture, we’ve made being healthy so difficult that at present, only a single digit percentage of people can reliably pull it off.

While we might first experience this as a personal “you” or “me” problem — my rash, my headache, my brain fog — it has now become much more a structural problem than an individual one.

The structures of our Unhealthy Default Reality keep funneling us all into health-depleting choices and experiences and states of being.

We struggle. We suffer. And before long, our poor health and vitality start to contribute to the collective muddy-water vortex that’s sucking other people in.

• Maybe we notice it at home, where we have a hard time getting out of bed to do what needs doing, or we snap at our loved ones.

• Maybe we notice it at work, where we can’t form a cogent thought or face another status-update meeting.

• Maybe we notice it in some aspect of communal life, where we can’t summon the energy to show up for a protest or say a kind word to a stranger.

Maybe we notice it, as Dan did, when the people around us suddenly aren’t capable of contributing at the level they used to — or when several of our colleagues are simultaneously out on extended leave due to undisclosed physical or mental health problems.

The answer here is not just to keep expecting and demanding more from each other.

It’s recognizing that we have all been caught up in a devil’s bargain where the “more” being demanded from us can only be met at a shared existential cost.

And then we must begin solving that problem. How? By seeing and deviating from the norms that are gnawing away at our collective life force.

In the chapter of my book titled “The Crazy That Passes for Normal,” I explain it this way…

To counteract these challenges, we must keep reminding ourselves and each other that the primary problem is not that we are inadequate, flawed, or inherently weak willed. The problem is that we are too oppressed by the Unhealthy Default Reality to break free from it.

A lot of this, of course, we can chalk up to the effects of a wealth-obsessed capitalist society in decline.

The push for profit and economic growth at any cost, and on the backs of so many people’s rights and wellbeing, produces intersecting forces that bleed the vitality of the many for the benefit of a few.

Pay cuts, layoffs, bank fees, second and third jobs, denied health insurance claims, worry about aging parents and kids in daycare — these things mess with people.

And then there’s the stress of living in a world that is chronically chaotic, worrisome, and literally on fire a lot of the time.

One set of assaults creates the injury and depletes our capacity. The next shreds our coping and recovery abilities.

This happens in macro-assaults (polluted air and water; messed-up food supply; undermined justice system) as well as micro-injuries (fewer daily steps because of the dangerously smokey air; fewer hours of sleep because of the scorching heat).

You know how it feels some days: If the screw worm and tainted lettuce don’t get you, isolation and social media addiction will.

But I digress.

The real question plaguing a lot of us right now is one of survival: How do I get through this madness? How do I pull my energy out of this destructive system?

Well, the very wise Joni Mitchell has some thoughts on that. Check out her beautiful song “Shine”, as sung by her and Brandi Carlile live at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022.

Give those lyrics a close listen, friend. Wipe a few tears if you need to. Then commit to letting your beautiful light shine right in the face of all the world’s madness and messiness.

It is going to take a change of viewpoint, a change of sensibilities and priorities. I’m not talking about burning more calories than you eat. I’m not talking about tracking your REM sleep or worrying about your testosterone.

I’m talking about radically reorienting yourself to the survival challenge at hand.

It’s a challenge of keeping your lights on. It’s a challenge of seeing your light as mattering.

Increasingly, I see all my work as focused on helping myself and others do just that. Because if enough of us can pull our energy out of the machines that are messing with us, I sincerely believe there will be enough of us to re-engineer those machines and return our world to something that no longer feels machine-like.

The reclamation of our individual mojo — our vitality, our energy, our clarity, our hope — this is where it begins. But recognizing that this is, in fact, not just an individual problem is key to doing that.

Facing the fact that, yeah, pretty much everybody’s a mess can either make you feel hopeless, or it can spur you to extract yourself from the unhealthy ooze so you can begin helping others to extract themselves.

We do this by building Nonconformist Competencies (especially Preemptive Repair) and by practicing Renegade Rituals, and by learning the Survival Skills of the new era.

If you want more on that, you are in the right place.

Starting today, I’m making my entire Substack archive free for the next month. And going forward, I’m lowering the price of a paid subscription to $5 a month, $50 a year.

If you can’t afford a paid subscription, just get a free one for now and tell me if there’s a paid resource you want access to.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to take stock — at home, at work, in your other communities and contexts — of all the ways you observe the degrading health of others affecting you and everyone around you.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. But until you do, you won’t really understand the health problems so many of us are trying to solve.

More on that in my next post.

For now, hang in there friend. And let your light shine, even if it might sometimes feel like just a flicker.

P.S. Looking for an IRL immersive healthy experience at a beautiful farm in Wisconsin? I’ve got just seven spaces left for Healthy Deviant Day Camp, happening September 12-13th. You can learn more and apply here.

Canvass that rare breed of individuals who have maintained both their health and their happiness over a long period of time, and you’ll find they have some interesting things in common: Not some inborn gift of willpower or moral superiority, but a characteristic set of healthy-person skills.

I think of them as new-era survival skills.

These skills make it vastly easier to make conscious, self-preserving choices, to maintain healthy mindsets, and to ward off the siren songs of the Unhealthy Default Reality (UDR).

Such skills are not widely taught in our culture, but they can be learned by anyone with enough moxie and desire to develop them.

In my book, The Healthy Deviant, I dedicate a full chapter to these skills, and for paid subscribers, I have attached the full chapter and a related video from my Healthy Deviant U experience below.

Learn … or die sooner.

You can go about acquiring your new-era survival skills at whatever pace (and in whatever order) you choose. But if you opt out of developing them entirely, you will suffer unnecessarily. And you will likely die years before your time.

The specific skills you need (around food, movement, stress management, and more) will depend on your current circumstances, including your health status, stage of life, socioeconomic status, and the goals or desires you are pursuing now.

Key for all, though, are the base skills I call the “Nonconformist Competencies”:

• Amplified Awareness

• Preemptive Repair

• Continuous Growth and Learning

Each plays a key role in the Virtuous Cycle of Healthy Deviance:

The current focus within each of these competencies — built through intention, study, and experience — will naturally shift based on the challenges and opportunities of the moment.

To identify the skills you might currently most benefit from developing in each area, consider these questions:

• In the realm of Amplified Awareness: What are you becoming aware of in the domain of yourself, your circumstances, tendencies, and triggers? What is capturing your attention, your longing, your angst, and why?

• In the realm of Preemptive Repair: In what ways are you seeking to strengthen and repair yourself, to become less reactive and more resilient? What aspects of your body, mind, and heart have been sending you distress signals or signs of depletion?

• In the realm of Continuous Growth and Learning: What knowledge, skills, or capacities are you feeling most in need of or curious about right now? What abilities, if you had them, would make the biggest difference in your life?

In answering those questions, you will naturally zero in on some implied Healthy Deviant skills—things that, if you knew how to do or pursue them, would make you stronger, more gratified, and more resilient to the Unhealthy Default Reality (UDR).

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There’s solid science behind this counsel.

The scientific literature spells out some clear advice on what you can do to avoid getting worn down and dangerously vulnerable to the UDR. For example: Keep your blood sugar stable; stay on a regular sleep schedule; don’t take on too many difficult things at once.

The research also offers plenty of obvious counsel on how to rebuild your stores once they are depleted (e.g., eat healthy food, move, rest; connect; spend time in nature).

But it doesn’t often (or at least often enough, in my opinion) address how you can go about doing any of those things in the context of the UDR.

Over the years, having delved deep into both a lot of scientific studies and a vast trove of self-help literature, and having tried a lot of that advice out myself, I offer you this amalgamation of the advice I’ve found most useful:

Don’t push your luck.

Whenever possible, restrict the UDR’s access to you.

• Don’t spend time randomly browsing around on the internet or in shopping centers “for fun.”

• Steer clear of fast-food strips and food courts where engineered-to-be-irresistible smells grab you.

• Avoid letting always-on conventional media play in the background of your life.

• Turn off video screens and turn down audio volume whenever and wherever you can (not just in your own home, but in taxi cabs, on planes, in waiting rooms, and so on).

• Avoid conventional magazine racks at bookstores and supermarkets.

• Don’t browse social feeds that nurse your self-doubt or trigger unhealthy obsessions.

Don’t count on the Unhealthy Default Reality (UDR) to solve problems for you.

Keep solutions low on the consumer index, and within your current means. Do not buy from the UDR (or become dependent on) things you could easily produce yourself simply by learning some basic healthy-living skills.

• Buying into expensive meal-replacement shakes, subscription peptides, food-delivery programs, and studio-based workouts, for example, is probably not a great solution if they are not something you can afford for the long haul.

• No diet, fitness device, or fat-melting contraption you order off the internet is going to resolve the deeper challenges of choosing to be a healthy person in an unhealthy world.

• Learning to produce what you need (healthy meals, gratifying movement experiences, solid sleep, happy relationships) will serve you better than buying replacements for those things.

Build momentum through easy wins.

Build your mojo and willpower muscles with small-scale self-regulation exercises before you take on huge or scary ones. Practice on easier things first.

• Experiment with self-regulation in situations that are not your kryptonite scenarios (which, for most people, include diet and exercise).

• Do some of the things you can do before trying to do one or more things you think you can’t.

• If you can’t give up your morning donut, but you can make your bed before you leave the house, do that.

• If you can start meditating more easily than you can start swinging kettlebells, do that. Keep the power of what is known as “positive spillover” on your side.

To learn more, you might want to dig into the complete “Healthy Deviant Survival Skills” chapter of my book — available with a related video for paid subscribers below. Or you can grab the book (paperback, Kindle, or audiobook) and read/listen to whatever chapters you like right here.

Thanks for being part of my weird little world, and here’s to us all building our skills together. Which reminds me …

My fourth annual Healthy Deviant Day Camp — held on my family’s beautiful farm in Wisconsin — is coming up on September 12-13th. People travel from all over the country to experience this life-changing immersion and eat insanely good food. You can learn more about it right here.

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CONFORMITY SUCKS. I mean it sucks the the freedom, joy, and wonder right out of most of us, right? And yet, to some extent, our conditioning is the price we pay for survival.

We all come into this world essentially who and how we are—small animals equipped to navigate toward adulthood. We are formed by all we observe, all we experience, all we ingest.

And that’s how we become who we are today. We build the skills and aptitudes necessary to survive in the world that presents itself to us. And we learn to present ourselves to it in the ways we believe will help us succeed.

Most of us get pretty messed up along the way. It starts early, and it can happen fast.

In our early childhood, our brains are so plastic and so fast-expanding that our pace of learning is almost impossible to conceive. A lot of that learning is dedicated to understanding our physical world and where we fit into it.

Little by little, first at home and then at school …

• We are taught where we begin and end.

• We are taught how things work and what we need to do to get by.

• We learn what is ours and not ours.

• We learn to sit in chairs and color inside of lines.

• We learn what is considered “good,” “attractive,” and “normal.” We learn to compare ourselves with others.

• We learn to watch television, to operate electronic devices, to make and spend money.

• We learn who is in control, whose opinions and decisions count most, and who has a right to boss other people around.

• We learn what we’re supposed to want, what we’re supposed to dread, and what we’re supposed to be ashamed of.

Day by day, we go through the process of becoming civilized and indoctrinated into modern society.

Bit by bit, we become enmeshed with the Unhealthy Default Reality.

We go from being a small animal equipped to make sense of the natural world, to being an adult whose priorities are largely determined by mass media, complex social hierarchies, and large institutions.

We spend the rest of our lives trying to balance our basic human needs with the agendas set for us by the outside world. Our natural appetites, energy patterns, and priorities all shift accordingly.

Somewhere, beneath the conditioning and programming that the Unhealthy Default Reality imposes on us, the DNA of that original small animal still exists.

The essential operating instructions and central nervous system remain much as they were when we came into the world.

👉 The good news: Our natural state is still accessible to us if we choose to access it. 😇

👉 The bad news: This is not something the Unhealthy Default Reality teaches us. 😵‍💫

It’s something we must discover for ourselves.

We discover it through what I call the Healthy Deviant Hero’s Journey (inspired, of course, by Joseph Campbell’s classic model.)

In last week’s post, I shared this image of how I see that journey …

This week, I’m going to give you a quick overview and introduce you to Act 1 of that journey. In future posts, we’ll be exploring this and subsequent phases.

The Great Unlearning: A Drama in 7 Acts

While each person’s journey is different, one thing most Healthy Deviant Hero’s Journeys have something in common is the unlearning of at least some of what the Unhealthy Default Reality has taught us.

Because some of the Unhealthy Default Reality first lessons are focused on convincing us that we are inadequate failures and that we should expend all our energy and resources striving to become something other than who and how we are.

That experience plays out differently for each of us, but with some surprisingly similar results: stress, anxiety, insecurity, and struggle.

Fortunately, if you stay the course, the voyage takes a turn — and for most of us, it winds up imparting some important gifts. Things like insight, skill, authenticity, compassion, and a sense of purpose.

But wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s return now to our story of formation …

Act 1: Natural State

Our Natural State is our entry point into the world, and into ourselves. Barring birth traumas or congenital challenges, we typically arrive in a reasonably healthy condition, comfortable in our own skin, unashamed, curious, and open to the world around us, eager to discover all that is within our reach.

In this state, we feel like part of a larger whole, with nothing to prove and no need to earn outside approval. We take pleasure in simply being and in feeling connected to all that surrounds us.

Act 2. Compliance

Here we begin registering and conforming to social expectations and norms. Adopting and internalizing our society’s preferences, we invest increasing amounts of energy in trying to “fit in” or perform the roles we are told that we must.

We strive to live up to the ideals and images that are presented to us as “normal” and desirable. We start to notice the ways that we don’t measure up. We fear judgment and exclusion on the basis of our points of difference or perceived inadequacy.

The goal of “good enough” seems forever beyond reach. We try to purchase, practice, and attain our society’s markers of success. Or, in some cases, we simply try to survive.

Act 3. Descent

Here we experience the building sense of stress, anxiety, insecurity, and impending failure that comes up from struggling to comply with unachievable standards or to endure intolerable pain.

Our health and happiness degrade as the result of stress, strain, self-denial, and counterproductive interventions. Our energy, vitality, self-confidence, and self-regard are all depleted through our efforts at self-improvement, self-correction, or self-soothing.

In our increasing urgency to fix whatever we see as “wrong with us” and to achieve what we are told will make us happy, we may become increasingly dependent on outside agents and experts to tell us what to do, or at least to find us acceptable.

Act 4. Darkness

Struggling and suffering with a growing assortment of unconscious behaviors and compulsive coping mechanisms, we feel a deepening sense of helplessness, hopelessness, and desperation.

We may experience a severe dissatisfaction with our appearance, achievements, and place in the world, and we may be increasingly alienated from our own body.

Feeling out of control, victimized, and emotionally reactive, we may be frequently anxious, depressed, tearful, rageful, reactive, critical, or withdrawn.

We may be inclined to seeking oblivion or anesthesia through drugs, alcohol, food, sex, gambling, digital distraction, risk-taking, or other self-numbing, self-distracting, or self-soothing dependencies.

Act 5. Divergence

Approaching or arriving at an unsustainable, rock-bottom state, we decide that we don’t want to (or can’t) keep living the way we have been. Moving away from conventional improvement prescriptions and interventions, we may seek other forms of professional help or spiritual guidance, and new sources of social support.

As we begin breaking away from the status quo, we may pursue more progressive forms of health care (such as alternative, integrative, and functional medicine) and more progressive forms of personal exploration. We may experiment with new ways of eating, moving, or living.

Discovering that a lot of what works for us is not at all what we’ve been told to do, and also not what most other people are doing, we start to care less whether other people understand or approve of our choices. We decide that the rewards of our difference are greater than the costs.

Act 6. Rebellion

Striking out on our own path toward health, we may look to other Healthy Deviants for counsel and perspective. In this stage, we may feel relieved to have discovered approaches that are actually working, but also angry, resentful, or mortified about all that we’ve been put through (or put ourselves through) on the way to this better place.

We may be outraged or dumbfounded that nobody has told us there are easier, better, more effective ways to approach health and happiness. We may regret having wasted so much time, money, and energy on things that don’t work.

Feeling that we’ve suffered unjustly, we may be given to railing against the oppressive, conspiratorial forces of the Unhealthy Default Reality, including mass media, mass health care, big food, big oil, big pharma, the government, the patriarchy, the military industrial complex, colonialism, and more. Uncertain whom to blame, we may find ourselves waving our fists in the air at all the powers that be.

Act 7. Healthy Deviance

Realizing that while rebellion can be a useful and necessary state, it can also be exhausting and negative-minded, we begin seeking a more sustainable and enjoyable position to play from.

In this stage, we begin to recognize that through all our trials and tribulations, we have become stronger, wiser, better versions of ourselves. Feeling grateful for our own hard-won knowledge and experience, and relieved that life no longer seems as hard, we feel a growing desire to give back.

Knowing that we carry insights and gifts that others can benefit from, we long to share them with anyone who wants to learn. We get comfortable with the fact that even though we’ve arrived in a better place, we will inevitably step back and forth between all the positions on the Healthy Deviant Hero’s Journey. Sometimes we will inhabit more than one spot—or hold the viewpoints of more than one station—simultaneously.

Act 8. The Return

Consistent with a classic hero’s journey, the final stage of the Healthy Deviant Hero’s Journey represents a “return” phase. Because at this point, all of the stages of our journey live within us, we now have the opportunity to reinhabit the easy, authentic, Natural State that is our birthright.

We no longer feel we have something to fix or prove, but rather, that we are here to witness and observe with empathy, to do some good, to relieve unnecessary waste and suffering. We now carry wisdom, resources, and inspiration—the bounty gathered on all the previous stages of our voyage—and feel compelled to share them with others.

This can manifest as a “pay it forward” instinct focused on helping individuals struggling with our former challenges or as a generalized passion for making positive change in the wider world.

Any of this sounding familiar?

Most of the time, when I describe this journey to folks, I see a glimmer of recognition. And often, vigorous head-nodding. Sometimes tears.

We’ve all moved through at least some of these states in various moments and in various stages of our lives. But too often, we forget how far we’ve come. We forget that we can choose where we will head next.

So starting next week, I’ll be sharing some tiny bits of my own story — just by way of example — and I’m going to be asking you some questions about your own.

For right now, here’s what I’d invite you to consider …

🤔 Reflecting back as far as you can, can you recall a memory from any part of your childhood (or later life) in which you felt completely at peace and okay in your body?

🤔 Can you recall even one moment when you felt unselfconscious but aware, connected with the world around you, but also clear on your own individuality?

See if you can find even a tiny memory like that, and describe it in careful detail.

• It does not need to be an outwardly significant moment, but it will probably be a moment in which you can describe with some precision the sensory experience of being in your body.

• If you can’t recall a particular moment, just picture yourself as an infant, coming fresh into the world, emerging directly from nature’s most basic processes, without any sense that you should be anything other than what you are.

• Sit with that feeling a moment, and see if you can tap back into the experience of being in the right time at the right place without anything to prove or produce.

• See if you can access the feeling of being some whole, simple, unadulterated version of yourself.

• Reflect for a moment on these areas of inquiry, and if you like, note your answers in a journal. Or hit the comment button and share your thoughts here.

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What I’m hoping you’ll recognize is that you still have access to that part of yourself — even if that access is tenuous and fleeting.

In next week’s post we’ll be looking at how it got that way — in Act 2 of the Healthy Deviant Hero’s Journey: Compliance. 😬

Happy 4th — and hope to connect with you next week when I’ll be back at the keyboard with some fresh Healthy Deviant goodies!

P.S. Interested in rediscovering your Natural State over the course of one beautiful Saturday (plus an optional half-day Sunday brunch experience) — and experiencing some huge “aha!” moments in the process? Consider coming to Healthy Deviant Day Camp at my family’s 400-acre organic farm in Wisconsin on Sept. 12-13th 2026. Only a few spots left!

In my post last week, I shared the story of how I resolved my supposedly incurable chronic condition by rather unconventional means. And I explained how my recovery somewhat haphazardly wound up integrating several key principles of a well-established, science-based healing approach known as the 5-R protocol.

This week, I want to share a few excerpts of the white paper I mentioned in that post. It’s a document I originally drafted back in 2019 — and then mothballed for a while because the circumstances for its broader circulation just didn’t seem right.

Seven years later, I’m not sure the circumstances for this proposed shift of perspective will ever be right.

But I’m also not sure they’re going to get better in my lifetime, so … let’s get into it.

My original paper — titled Chronic Disease Reversal 101: Transforming Health and Reversing Chronic Conditions Through Self-Directed Content and Functional Lifestyle-Medicine Therapeutics — was aimed at building support for an interdisciplinary health-improvement project that I felt had both urgency and potential.

That document, directed primarily at healthcare innovators and adjacent audiences, opened this way …

New science is revealing that most chronic illnesses and conditions — especially those associated with inflammation — are not merely preventable, but reversible.

For example, in just the past few years, we’ve seen clinical evidence and study results supporting reversal strategies for potentially life-threatening digestive and autoimmune conditions, as well as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, migraines, and Alzheimer’s.

Unfortunately, very few people (including most health professionals) are aware such reversals are possible (in part because many popular health web sites still plainly declare they are not).

Even fewer people are aware of the means by which such chronic conditions can be reliably reversed, or at least significantly ameliorated, often using relatively basic and affordable lifestyle-medicine interventions. These include:

• nutrient-dense, anti-inflammatory elimination diets

• intermittent fasting and nutrient timing

• gut-healing and microbiome rebalancing protocols

• basic nutrition supplementation strategies

• augmented rest and recovery

• moderate exercise and/or interval training

• mindfulness-based stress management, mindset, and emotional resilience training

• resetting of daily rhythms (e.g., circadian, ultradian, HRV)

Many of these interventions are currently being delivered, on a patient-by-patient basis, through integrative and functional medicine using systems-based approaches that identify and address the root causes of disease.

In many cases, integrative and functional medicine treatment plans are guided by highly trained practitioners who have high costs and very long waiting lists. Their treatment approaches leverage deep, individualized health histories and long consultations, and often rely on specialty lab tests and expensive supplementation regimens.

Typically, the associated costs are not covered by insurance, putting these approaches out of reach of lower-income disease sufferers.

However, many of these practitioners acknowledge that the majority of their patients get better on an elimination diet alone.

Most of the functionally trained physicians I’ve spoken with put the number between 50 and 75 percent. And some physicians — especially those with long waiting lists — are now asking new patients to undertake such basic protocols before coming in for their first appointments.

These doctors are anticipating, based on past experience, that by the time many of these patients’ appointment dates arrive, they will no longer need to come in. Or that if they do, they will by then have eliminated a significant number of their base-level, lifestyle-related complaints, freeing their healthcare team to focus on the finer points of a personalized care plan.

Many functional medicine and integrative practitioners are also now experimenting with group visits, in which five to 25 patients with common health concerns are gathered together for basic education and lifestyle training, health coaching, and Q&A sessions.

This cost-lowering, access-improving practice shows enormous promise.

Research (just one example below) suggests that group visits may actually be more effective than one-on-one appointments for chronic disease, in part because they build in peer-to-peer social support, a factor considered by many to be essential to lasting lifestyle change.

At this point in my paper, I transitioned to a description of a proposed project — a phased strategy by which basic education and awareness regarding these disease-reversing protocols could be delivered at scale.

I also envisioned how, with cost-effective group support, many (though certainly not all) chronic-disease sufferers might be inspired and empowered to begin improving their own conditions, with or without direct medical intervention.

In future posts, I’ll be picking up where this one leaves off, and also offering some context for why our current moment of healthcare chaos might be the right moment for this project to find its legs.

As part of my series on chronic-disease reversal, I’ll also be sharing insights gathered during related expert interviews I conducted with faculty from the Institute for Functional Medicine.

In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy listening to one my earlier conversations with Terry Wahls, MD, one of those faculty members, and also one of the world’s best respected pioneers in the field of chronic-disease reversal.

Here, she describes her journey with progressive multiple sclerosis, and what successfully reversing her own autoimmune illness taught her about the reversibility of much wider range of conditions suffered by millions.

For now, if you are one of the great many struggling with one or more chronic conditions, I encourage you to begin imagining what even moderate, sustainable improvement might feel like. And to what extent you might be willing to experiment with positive, targeted life changes that could bring that sort of relief.

As I noted in my previous post:

“Most chronic conditions (health problems) are the result of chronic conditions (life circumstances) — and their interaction with our unique vulnerabilities.”

Here’s to our improving those conditions — all of them — together.

P.S. I want to note that my most recent work in evolving this project for a lay audience has been funded, in part, through the generosity of the George Family Foundation. It has also directly benefitted from the personal insights and encouragements of my friend and fellow change-agent Penny George, founder of the Penny George Institute for Health and Healing. For all the Georges’ support in these Healthy Deviant endeavors, I am profoundly grateful.

Several years ago, after a protracted period of intense stress, I developed a case of geographic tongue — also known as glossitis — accompanied by an equally nasty condition known as fissured tongue.

I experienced that latter condition more as cratered tongue (see pics below if you dare), but in any case, the combined effect was most unpleasant. It was also stubborn, persisting for more than a year.

I was otherwise reasonably healthy. So why the heck was my tongue self-destructing?!

I suspected that part of it was genetic. My father had a fissured tongue, and my sisters and I used to delight in making him show it to us — at which point we’d all run away screaming “grossss!” Poor dad.

My father told us his condition first emerged in his early 20s while he was serving the Army during the Korean war. Some combination of stress and poor nutrition, he guessed. And I think he guessed right.

I already knew my dad and I shared a problematic Celiac gene (among others). As a health journalist, I was also aware that:

1. many single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) can be triggered by stress; and

2. the tongue is essentially the starting point of the digestive system.

That meant that whatever was messing with my tongue was probably also messing with my gut (and vice versa). The question was: What?

Over the course of several months, I consulted several doctors, all of whom told me what I’d already read on the internet. They informed me that my condition:

• was benign and harmless

• had no known cause (but plenty of potential triggers)

• would probably go away on its own

• would likely come back

• was considered incurable

None of this was helpful. And in my case, a lot of it turned out to be untrue.

Additionally, the interventions these docs suggested — from using a harsh chlorhexidine mouthwash to “just not worrying about it” — were potentially counterproductive.

Chlorhexidine kills off the good bacteria essential to oral health (among other side effects); and “not worrying about” (i.e. ignoring) my condition was almost certain to lead to worsening effects over time.

So I decided to embark on my own experimental healing adventure.

As part of some research I was doing for a forthcoming article on the history and contemporary healing potential of water fasting, I was already planning to try a medically supervised water fast. So I figured I’d see how my tongue responded to that.

And boy, did it respond. You can see the results below …

• By Day 4, my tongue looked and felt better than it had in a year.

• By Day 6, I was pain free, and both the patches and fissures were drastically improved.

• By Day 9 there was almost no evidence of fissuring, no patchy appearance.

In the final picture, you’ll note that my papillae (taste buds) had essentially disappeared, giving way to fresh pink tissue. They returned within a day or two post-fast, and I immediately noticed my sense of taste was dramatically improved (just one of several positive effects confirmed by water-fasting research).

Please note: This is NOT MEDICAL ADVICE, not a safe strategy for anyone with a history of disordered eating, and not an approach I would recommend for anyone without personalized professional guidance and observation.

In fact, prior to my medically supervised fast, even the integrative physician who oversaw my case said he doubted it would make much difference in my tongue.

That said, my personal healing experience taught me a lot about the reliability of such predictions — and the importance of treating our own bodies as the unique, bio-individual systems they are.

With that in mind, the key thing I want to share about the reversal of my own chronic condition is what I believe all of us deserve to know …

Most chronic conditions (health problems) are the result of chronic conditions (life circumstances) — and their interaction with our unique vulnerabilities.

My tongue provides just one useful, personal example of how awareness and acknowledgment of this reality can inform potential disease-reversal strategies.

And while a water fast proved fruitful in my case, that is certainly not the only (or necessarily best) intervention for reversing or halting the advance of this and other chronic illnesses and conditions.

I believe that the rapidity of my recovery is likely due to a variety of intersecting factors:

1. the complete elimination of inflammatory food triggers and digestive stress

2. accelerated repair processes throughout my body as the result of autophagy (the body’s self-consumption of damaged cells followed by the re-creation of healthy new ones)

3. positive shifts in my microbiome

4. enhanced hydration and elimination

5. augmented rest and sleep

6. a near-complete break from daily stress

Essentially, during the course of my water fast, I underwent a rather extreme, but abbreviated version of the 5-R protocol.

Originally advanced as a protocol for healing digestive and gut-based conditions, some version of the 5-R protocol is now recommended by many functional medicine physicians as a way of reversing a wide variety of chronic conditions.

It describes a multi-pronged strategy designed to support the body’s natural ability, given the right conditions, to repair itself. Those conditions typically require the following steps:

1. Remove: Identify and eliminate factors that are irritating, inflaming, or straining the body’s systems. This might include food sensitivities, infections, toxins, or sources of chronic stress. Required changes might involve dietary changes, such as removing gluten or dairy, fasting, chelation, addressing underlying infections, or mitigating recurring stress triggers.

2. Replace: Replenish deficient resources within the body (such as digestive enzymes, stomach acid, bile acids) that may be limiting proper digestion and nutrient absorption or interfering with healthy elimination and detoxification.

3. Reinoculate: Introduce beneficial bacteria through probiotics and prebiotics — synergetic microorganisms whose supportive role in digestion, nutritional assimilation, detoxification, metabolism, and hormonal balance are essential to proper biological function.

4. Repair: Provide nutrients to heal bodily tissues and organs, including the gut lining, which may be damaged by inflammation and other factors. This can involve whole-food nutrition and supplementation (with vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, medicinal herbs, peptides, exosomes, etc.) — or in the case of my fast, my body’s consumption of its own fat and other stored tissue reserves.

5. Rebalance: Address intersecting lifestyle factors that affect body-mind health (such as stress, sleep, daily rhythms, nutrition, hydration, exercise, and mindset) in ways that promote sustainable, whole-person well-being and optimal vitality.

In a medical setting, the 5-R protocol is often used in conjunction with lab testing to identify the root causes of health issues and to personalize treatment plans.

It’s a dynamic, experimental process that may require ongoing assessments, adjustments, and collaboration with a healthcare professional.

But it’s worth noting that the basics of the 5-R approach are also broadly accessible to individuals interested in reversing their own chronic conditions. And sometimes, the basics are all it takes.

That certainly proved to be the case with my condition.

Of course, for a lot of folks, identifying and undertaking the lifestyle changes required to accomplish sustained healing proves intimidating to downright impossible.

And unfortunately, most people (and a great many physicians) will never even become aware that this sort of intervention exists.

I’d like to see that change. It’s why we began covering these topics in Experience Life magazine more than two decades ago, and it’s why I continue to write, podcast, and give talks on related topics to this day.

For the past several years, the topic of chronic-disease reversal has been a point of great interest for me.

Back in 2019 I researched and wrote a white paper titled “Chronic Disease Reversal 101.” It focused on the 5-R protocol leveraged by a number of different disease-reversal programs, and it got enthusiastic feedback from a number of functional medicine physicians known for their successful work designing and prescribing such protocols for their patients.

A few years later, I began drafting a related article for a lay audience in hopes it might spark broader interest. But in 2023, the MAHA movement began trumpeting chronic-disease reversal as a theme (great!) — and mixing it with a number of scientifically-iffy positions (less great?) that concerned me. So I set the project aside for a time.

Suddenly, the whole topic just felt too fraught, too entangled with controversial personalities and polarizing political debates, too likely to descend into rabbit holes I preferred not to travel.

My tongue, though? That was personal. Not benign, not harmless, and while perhaps not officially “curable,” certainly not unresolvable, either.

So in this article, I’ve chosen to focus on what I know with the most confidence: me.

Today, seven years after I completed that water fast, I know well the triggers that cause my condition to return. And if I avoid them, my condition remains at bay.

Accordingly, I continue to safeguard my gut health, and to minimize and manage inflammatory stress. I design my eating around the nutrients I know I need more of — and the elimination of foods I know I must avoid.

As a result, my mouth remains happy and healthy. As does the rest of me.

My tongue, I now understand, was a sort of biological canary in a coal mine, an early indicator of what I call “Pissed-Off Body Syndrome.” And I respect that.

I wish the physicians I had consulted early in my geographic tongue journey had guided me to regard it in this way. I wish they had offered me options for investigating and managing the factors involved in my condition rather than labelling it as “benign” and giving me little hope of lasting recovery.

I’ve heard the term benign described in different ways by different medical resources, from “non-cancerous and non-spreading” to “of a mild type or character that does not threaten health or life.”

But knowing something is going wrong within your own body — sensing and observing that something is off — and being told by a supposed expert that it is nothing to worry about is profoundly disempowering. Particularly when, as the person suffering, you can see clear evidence that a very important part of your body is breaking down.

A quick Google search or AI inquiry can tell anybody with geographic tongue about the wide variety of acidic and spicy foods known to make the condition worse.

Similarly, associations with B-vitamin and other nutrient deficiencies, genetic factors, celiac disease, psoriasis, and gut-related issues are well documented in the scientific literature.

Yet very few conventionally trained physicians seem capable of guiding their patients toward proactive treatment strategies that might take any of this into consideration.

To me, this is like seeing a hot tip called into a crime hotline, watching the on-duty detective jot the tip down on an index card — and then begin using the card as a coffee-cup coaster.

Why do such tips so often lead nowhere? Where is the professional investigation, followup, and experimentation? And what can a chronic-condition sufferer hope to safely accomplish with or without expert help?

In my next post, I’ll be sharing the key strategies that some health pros (and laypeople) are using to effectively investigate and address the root causes of chronic conditions — from subclinical quirks to diagnosed disease states — of all kinds.

In the meantime, if you want to dig a bit deeper, I recommend listening to this episode of The Living Experiment podcast, which my co-host Dallas Hartwig and I recorded back in 2019 as I was working on my related white paper.

You might also take a moment to consider what (if any) chronic conditions have been bothering you.

• My Weird-Symptom Checklist is a quick and easy place to start.

• This more detailed Multi-Symptom Questionnaire from the School of Applied Functional Medicine is another.

Of course, deciding what to do about your own chronic conditions is the next step.

Stay tuned for more on that. For now, you might just keep in mind my observation about chronic health conditions typically being caused by chronic life conditions.

To change your health will generally require you to change your life in some way. It will require developing Nonconformist Competencies, practicing Renegade Rituals, and building Healthy Deviant Skills.

Doing that in the face of a culture that actively encourages you to keep on living the “normal” way you have been requires up-leveling your clarity, courage, and determination.

Happily, that’s precisely what we Healthy Deviant types are doing here together.

P.S. Paid subscribers, below the paywall you’ll find a link to a video from my Healthy Deviant U experience where I share additional stories and perspectives on chronic-disease reversal.

I’d love to hear from you about the chronic conditions you’ve faced — or are facing — and whether any of the approaches I’ve shared here hold interest for you. Hit the comment button to let me know!

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Interested in joining Healthy Deviant U? I’ve opened enrollment so you can start right now, if you like. Videos like the one above unlock at the pace you choose. We’ve got a Live Session happening this afternoon at 12PM Central, and pretty much every other Sunday on an ongoing basis. I’d love to see you there!

Sigh. I don’t know what else to say sometimes. It feels like we are all on this crazy ride, blindfolded, with no idea where we are headed. Not particularly keen on our trajectory, and also not sure if there is any survivable way off.

Welcome to a life in our post-modern age — where evolutionary mismatch meets late-stage capitalism and we must all perennially wonder what happens next.

About a year after my book, The Healthy Deviant, came out — on January 6th, 2021 — I began recording the audiobook version in my backyard studio. You might recall that particular Jan. 6 was rather a big news day.

Because I had spent the entire day in a makeshift recording booth, I didn’t hear of the insurrectionist goings-on at our nation’s Capitol until early evening. When I did hear the news, my first thought was: Wow, our young democracy is facing a real test here.

By the time I went to bed, my reflection had turned a bit darker: Man, our society’s wheels are really starting to rattle.

Two years later, that rattling has only gotten louder. A LOT louder.

We are increasingly tolerating (and some of us are pardoning or explaining away) all sorts of things we would not previously have found tolerable. Or we are striving to make sense of the craziness and chaos we witness on a daily basis — and we simply cannot.

This leaves us in a distressing place.

I’ve heard a lot of folks saying that they feel overwhelmed, confused, unable to digest or process everything their senses are taking in. A lot of the time, I feel that way too.

It’s like we are simultaneously watching a horror movie and wanting to make it go away. And then being told we have to do both at double speed. Look! Don’t look!

There’s a pill and a powder for the fear. There’s an injection for the pain, an app for the anxiety, a tropical retreat for the overwhelm. And another thing, and another thing, and another thing.

All of those things cost. And somehow, none of them does the trick for long.

It’s easy to forget that the way we are living now is essentially an unprecedented experiment — one never before attempted in 2.5 million years of human history.

As the first generation in human history to be living this way, we are facing all sorts of disruptive and discombobulating challenges. From the advent of AI and other advanced technologies to elements of our societal and natural worlds we once naively assumed to be stable.

Because things are changing so quickly, there’s no prior generation from which we can directly glean new-era coping and survival skills. As a result, our body-minds, institutions, environments, and communities are all pretty much flipping out.

Right now, too many people are operating with dysregulated systems on running on inflammatory fumes. This is not doing good things for anybody’s health.

But here’s where I think we need to start “seeing the unseeable.” We need to start seeing that our fundamental problem is not that we are all too slow, weak-willed, and stupid to cope.

The problem is not that we all need to be drinking more raw milk, monitoring more biometrics, taking more GLP-1s, or generously slathering on more peptides.

The fundamental problem is that …

And that is, at least to some extent, by design. Because a lot of us not having our most basic needs met allows a few people to amass a whole lot of money and power. But a lot of those people are now suffering, too — hoisted, as my mother likes to say, on their own petard.

To reclaim our power, and to regenerate our personal and collective vitality, we have to cease simultaneously absorbing and resisting our world’s toxic horror show. We need to begin seeing the defaults — and states of so-called normal reality— that got us herded into that nasty theater in the first place.

This requires extracting ourselves from what I call the “Vicious Cycle of the Unhealthy Default Reality.” That’s the downward spiral that has so many of us feeling increasingly desperate and unprepared to face our current conditions.

The best way to exit that destructive cycle is to consciously enter a healing-and recovery oriented cycle, like the one I call the “Virtuous Cycle of Healthy Deviance.”

But here’s the thing: Nobody in the conventional movie theater of life is going to help you shift your perspective and daily practice in these ways.

So here’s a little video from Lesson 15 (and an excerpt of the vido transcript) to get you moving in the right direction (toward the exits) … 👇

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT TIDBIT:

In wilderness survival, they emphasize doing things in a particular order that will help you not panic and not die before help arrives.

Most survival manuals suggest you first find or make a shelter (to avoid exposure, the factor that kills most quickly). Then you can work on finding water. Then on making a fire. Only after you’ve done those things should you begin worrying about food.

In Healthy Deviant survival, I think it helps to follow a similar set of priorities, but priorities designed for our post-modern, late-stage capitalist age.

The three Non-Conformist Competencies of Amplified Awareness, Preemptive Repair, and Continuous Growth and Learning are — in my mind — the shelter-water-fire priorities of a healthy life.

From there, we’ll get to all that other diet-and-exercise stuff as a matter of course.

The truth is, you don’t really need to know how many calories and what precise combination of macronutrients to eat on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

You don’t necessarily need to know how to do sets and reps and sprints and intervals and heart-rate training.

You don’t need to precisely measure your ketones or track every step you take.

Certainly, amassing and tracking that kind of information can be fun and motivating for some people. But for some it can be overwhelming, distracting, an exercise in futility.

And one of the biggest problems with focusing on all the “must-know” minutia we’re pressured to learn is that it completely distracts and discourages us from learning the skills that matter more.

Okay, that’s enough for this week. Even if you don’t feel capable of making any significant changes right now, you might consider reviewing the video I’ve shared above as a way of priming yourself for future Healthy Deviant action.

Still too much? Looking for one super quick (three minute) and easy place to begin regaining your sanity starting tomorrow? Here you go …

Hang in there, everybody. Let’s take care of ourselves and each other as best we can, and hang tight with this big ol’ beautiful world we all love.

P.S. In addition to the free goodies above, below the paywall, paid subscribers will find the complete print AND audiobook Chapter 2 of The Healthy Deviant: “Seeing The Unseeable.” 👇

P.P.S. Looking for the complete audiobook? You can find that here.

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In my post yesterday, I mentioned that tomorrow evening, I’ll be holding a live Movie Night event with my Healthy Deviant community. We’ll be watching an award-winning, cult favorite film — Strictly Ballroom — and if you’re interested, I’d love for you to join us.

The event is free and you can join us from the comfort of your own home via Zoom (although you’ll need to access the movie on your own — see below for details).

All you have to do is reserve your place.

Strictly Ballroom is a celebration of what it means to deviate from prescribed formulas — and to resist the forces that would put you back in that default box.

The film follows the story of Scott, a young, talented dancer who infuriates the ballroom dancing establishment when he improvises his own steps.

He and his brave but unlikely, seemingly awkward partner set out to win the Pan Pacific Championships by proving the naysayers wrong. In the process, they spin through a variety of Healthy Deviant themes (e.g., autonomy, defying norms, courageous self-expression). Plus, the actual dancing is FAB!

You might think movie-watching is a sedentary entertainment, but you’d be wrong. In fact, if you watch the right sorts of movies, it’s both activating entertainment and a transformative experience. Which is why I hold a Healthy Deviant Movie night at least once a year.

The films we watch during these live events rarely have anything to do with what you might consider “health and fitness.” At least, not in the conventional sense. But that doesn’t mean they won’t change your life for the healthier.

Can a popular, feel-good movie like this change your life? Signs point to yes.

My dad was a sociology professor, and in his classes, he often showed movie-theater films because he found them the best way to help his students perceive the otherwise invisible, “nothing to see here” social and cultural dynamics at play in their lives — and in all our lives.

In my own health journalism career, I’ve often felt that films do a better job than conventional media of revealing the real challenges of being healthy in an unhealthy world. And to me, they are often both more motivating and instructive in terms of meaningful behavior change.

Here’s why I think you might be interested in watching this film with some other Healthy Deviant types …

• The film is such a timeless and popular crowd pleaser that it was recently remastered and re-released — thirty years after its original premier at the Cannes Film Festival (and that premier had viewers cheering and dancing in the aisles!)

• This is a participatory experience! We’re going to be unpacking the film’s Healthy Deviant themes, and looking at how social compliance, peer pressure, judgment, shame, and isolation can be transformed through social connection, courageous self-expression, and creative flow.

• We’re also going to be exploring where each of us can see ourselves, our social circles, and our own family dynamics in the film’s characters and narratives.

• You’ll have an opportunity to share your reflections, raise questions, and bask in the feel-good vibes of a group that values the power of learning, discovery, courage, and connection.

Hearing different folks’ responses to the film in real time is always fascinating — and it’s a meaningful way to connect with others.

Watching this film together can help us better understand the compliance-oriented pressures of our own Unhealthy Default Reality entrapments — and the options we have for moving beyond them.

Want more information before you decide to watch? You can find a summary here and a trailer here.

The logistics …

• At 6:30 PM Central, I will gather us together on Zoom and offer up a quick welcome and intro, plus a few things to watch for as the film rolls.

• Then from 6:40 to 8:15 PM or so, we will all watch the film — on our own devices in our own homes. You can also watch the film on your own time, if you prefer, and then join us for the discussion elements before and after.

• I can’t screen the film directly for copyright reasons, but you can rent or buy it just about anywhere good films are distributed (see P.S. section for a few options).

• We’ll keep the Zoom chat open during the film-watching in case anybody wants jot notes as we go, but mostly we’ll have our eyes on our own movie screens.

• Then, when the movie ends, we all come back together in the Zoom to hang out, process, and chat about it a bit. You can peel off whenever you like, and I’ll wrap things up by 8:45PM or so.

As noted, you can certainly watch the film in advance on your own whenever you like. But I think you’ll get even more out of it by joining us for tomorrow’s Healthy Deviant Movie Night.

Think of it as something akin to a book club, but with no advance reading. And you get to choose your own snacks!

Movie Night: “Strictly Ballroom”
Tuesday, March 24, 6:30-8:45 PM Central
🍿 RESERVE YOUR SPOT HERE! 🍿

So, if you’re feeling the urge, sign yourself up. Rent, buy, or borrow Strictly Ballroom (original or remastered) so you can have it all queued up for tomorrow night.

Then step away from our society’s step-by-step instructions, and step boldly onto the dance floor of your own life …

Hope to see you tomorrow!

P.S. Make sure you know where you’ll stream or rent the film Strictly Ballroom well ahead of show time. A few options …

• Apple TV

• YouTube

• Pluto TV

• Google Play

• Amazon Prime

P.P.S. Be sure to check your time zone! I’ll kick things off with a quick intro at 6:30 PM Central; 4:30 Pacific; 5:30 Mountain; 7:30 Eastern.

Healthy Deviance is not defined by a particular diet, exercise program, or healing protocol. Rather, it is a renegade, experimental, and inherently rewarding way of being in the world.

It involves a series of revolutionary shifts — both in perspective and in daily practice — that empower you to thrive in a society where, sadly, most people are either stuck in a downward spiral or just barely getting by.

If “normal” life is messing so badly with so many of us, isn’t that reason enough to deviate?

In my book, The Healthy Deviant, I lay out detailed statistics and explanations for the chart above, but just glancing at that little snapshot one thing is clear: If you are currently a healthy, happy person in today’s United States, you represent a small, fast-shrinking minority.

>> You are, statistically speaking, an endangered species.

So what kind of society makes being health and happy so difficult that only a single-digit percentage of its population can hope to pull it off? A sick society.

And within a sick society, what does it mean to be one of the few who bucks the odds? It means that you have to be prepared to resist your society’s standard way of doing business.

You have to defy a lot of its rules and conventions. You have to make a lot of inconvenient and unpopular choices. This is not always easy, and not always fun. But it sure as hell beats the alternative.

Being a healthy person in an unhealthy world requires outwitting the crazy that passes for normal.

It requires evading the vitality-sapping grip of a culture run amok, a society defined by dysfunction — or what I call our Unhealthy Default Reality.

The Unhealthy Default Reality is that combination of automatic choices and dominant social norms that make unhealthy choices vastly easier to make than healthy ones.

It’s also the counterproductive, crazy-making influence of the conventional weight-loss industry and bloated sick-care system that our unhealthy culture has spawned.

Outsmarting the Unhealthy Default Reality is easier said than done, but it is also wildly worth doing. In my book, The Healthy Deviant, I explain how. And here in this Substack, I spool out a lot of that same information in bite size pieces.

The goal of all my work is showing how a small but growing number of bright-spot outliers are managing to beat the unhealthy odds — and how you can, too.

Embracing Healthy Deviance requires coming to terms with your present circumstances while simultaneously defining yourself as a sovereign individual.

It means choosing to be animated rather than oppressed by the unhealthy default choices that surround you.

That’s the Healthy Deviant Way. And while not an instant fix, it actually works a whole lot faster and more reliably than most health-improvement strategies that promise instant results. It’s also a whole lot more fun.

Want to know more about Healthy Deviance?

Check out my book, join my Healthy Deviant U learning community, or stick around and subscribe to get Healthy Deviant Digest delivered direct to your inbox.

Subscribe now

For paid subscribers, just below the paywall, I’m including a link to a 15-minute video from Phase 3 of my Healthy Deviant U experience. It offers a nice overview of Healthy Deviant Priorities (including the Nonconformist Competencies), and guides you toward “raising your game” in health improvement — without overwhelming yourself.

Whether you are new to my Healthy Deviant universe or have been following my work since my early days at Experience Life magazine, I am so glad to have you in my weird little world.

Speaking of which, this coming Tuesday, I’m hosting an Healthy Deviant Movie Night, and all my HDU members and Substack subscribers are invited.

If you want to join us (we’re watching the 1992 classic “Strictly Ballroom” and discussing its Healthy Deviant themes), watch for an email and post from me tomorrow.

During last year’s Healthy Deviant Movie Night, we watched Bagdad Cafe, and it was a BLAST.

Stay tuned for more — and in the meantime, steer clear of the Unhealthy Default Reality’s slimy grip!

P.S. If you’re digging Healthy Deviant Digest, please recommend it to others!

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Watch this 15-minute video from Lesson 15 of Healthy Deviant U right here!

Tap tap. Is this thing working? Oh, good.

Welcome to my Healthy Deviant Digest — a weekly compendium of feel-good wisdom to help you master the art of being healthy in an unhealthy world. 😇

I launched this Substack almost two years ago, so I thought it might be a good time to reintroduce it, and myself, and to remind you what we are doing here. Together.

Fair warning: What you are about to watch, hear, and read will change you.

Once you’ve seen some of this stuff, you will not be able to to unsee it. You’ll likely start to think and act in ways that feel … different.

People close to you may notice you changing. It is possible that not everyone will like that. No worries, we’ll handle it. And I promise, it’ll be fun!

Delivered once a week (the day varies), this free newsletter delivers perspective-shifting ideas and actionable suggestions informed by my 25-year career as an award-winning journalist (Experience Life), author (The Healthy Deviant), podcaster (The Living Experiment, speaker (profile and reel here), and all-around disruptor of the Unhealthy Default Reality (you’ll be learning ALL about that from this newsletter).

Healthy Deviant Digest will also include a regular drip of original multimedia content from my book, podcast, online programs, 101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy series, and other realms of my sprawling and sometimes disruptive content archive.

Please note: These will not be robotically generated airdrops of AI-crunched drivel.

They will be hand-selected tidbits of my ever-so-personal work — things that feel just right for this moment and (I hope) wildly helpful to you.

You can upgrade to a paid subscription (just $10 a month or $100 a year) to receive all that PLUS:

• Extra installments poured up hot for you every other Sunday, featuring video and workbook excerpts from my Healthy Deviant U membership experience.

• Insider bonuses, discounts, random gifts, and invitations to special events (including my Healthy Deviant Day Camp, Healthy Deviant Movie Nights, and more)

If you’ve been wanting to get healthier and happier, are feeling fed up with conventional health-and-fitness media, and are ready for something … different, you’ve come to the right place. Thanks for showing up. And welcome to my weird little world.

Subscribe now

PS: If you’d like to read, watch, and listen to your Healthy Deviant Digest content on the Substack app, get it here! 👇

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There’s a strange, buzzy, pinch-y sort of fatigue that comes from living in the Unhealthy Default Reality. Many of us don’t notice it until way too late because we’ve become inured to feeling drained, frantic, or otherwise seriously sub-par.

When our sympathetic nervous systems are chronically jacked up on cortisol and adrenaline, our engines can get stuck in “go” mode even as our gears are grinding. We may barely register the bone-tired sensations that live just beneath the array of fight/flee/freeze/fawn mechanisms we rely on for emergency survival.

In times like the present, where five-alarm fires are being reported on multiple fronts, this dynamic is pervasive.

So what happens when an entire society of already-stressed and depleted people are asked to rise to the challenge of defending not just themselves, their families, and their communities, but also the democratic principles, laws, and institutions on which all those intersecting domains depend?

I guess we are finding out.

In the short term, many of us will dig deeper, push harder, drawing from organ reserves and reservoirs of hope, grit, and determination built up through years of good mental and physical health habits.

Others will bottom out, sinking into despair or apathy — even as others attempt to insulate themselves with denial-based arguments for why some people are disposable and why ultimately, none of this will negatively affect them.

Some of us will locate new Big Why reasons to eat well, prioritize sleep, and manage the other basics of health preservation.

Others will mainline sugar, caffeine, and newsfeed outrage as a way to keep going — and then resort to alcohol or drugs as a way to manage the resultant stress.

Many of us will do a little bit of all of these things.

In the long term, though, if we don’t take some preemptive-repair measures, a lot of us will risk falling prey to exhaustion and overwhelm. And that will not be good for anybody.

Drastic times call for drastic measures, but long-running emergencies call for a level of ongoing restoration and resilience that few Americans are prepared to manage.

With that in mind, I’m offering up a tool from my Healthy Deviant U (HDU) experience that I call the Declaration of Inherent Worth and Willingness. It’s a small but mighty document I ask all HDU members to read and sign as they enter their HDU experience, and I feel like it has some relevance to our situation now.

This is a time when we can rise to our circumstances, day by day, or gradually sink to their level, losing vitality, capacity, and hope as we go.

That’s not a fate I would wish on anyone. (Okay, maybe I would wish it on a few people, but I’m working on that …)

So attached below, for all, is that Declaration. I hope it proves helpful to you and yours …

It begins:

I, ______________, being of sound body and mind (or at least the most sound body and mind I can be expected to possess in the context of my predominantly unhealthy culture) do solemnly declare my inherent worth as a human being — one who is striving to survive and thrive at this unprecedented and unpredictable point in human history. (Grab the full document below.👇)

HDU Declaration of Inherent Worth and Willingness

44.5KB ∙ PDF file

Download

An affirmation of self-worth and an invocation of capacity — intended for times of depletion, doubt, and overwhelm.

Download

For paid subscribers (below paywall), I’m also providing a video from Lesson 24 of Healthy Deviant U — the penultimate segment in our curriculum— where I share this same Declaration along with a bit more context.

Imagine you’ve been through a full year’s worth of Healthy Deviant tutelage and practice. This is where you would end up — right back at the beginning, yet now in a very different place, renewing and recommitting to the declarations with which you began your journey.

Because in real life, this is a voyage that forever expands, a journey that continues to both invite and ask more of us as we become more capable.

Sometimes, life demands more of us than feels bearable. At times, it can break us.

And that is when we need each other most of all. If we can help and hold and witness each other through those times, we can all get stronger together.

On that note, I wanted to offer one more thing. Another extraordinary essay from my friend Dara, who continues to do the difficult work on living and reporting from the streets and front-line sidewalks of her Minneapolis neighborhood.

Dara’s work, and the work of my fellow local journalists like Jana Shortal (recently violently shoved and pepper sprayed) and Georgia Fort (one of several journalists recently arrested for doing their jobs) continues to inspire me.

May we all find the courage to stand up to the forces intent on making us smaller and meeker than we need to be.

P.S. My posting capacity has been a bit disrupted these past few weeks — for so many reasons. Multiple loved ones with serious medical emergencies, both my urban and rural communities disrupted by ICE activity, my own experiences of dread while assisting at-risk neighbors. Watching the greedy and powerful enrich themselves as our civic lives and basic rights are dismantled. And then, the maddeningly and errantly redacted Epstein files — so many familiar names and faces, and the ugly ghosts of so many patriarchal entitlements lurking around every corner. Oof.

I have not been able to post about all these things, but they are working on me at a deep level and will eventually work their way out onto the page. In the meantime, thank you for embracing what I have to offer. Thank you for contributing what you can to the causes that make things better for folks struggling mightily at this time.

Finally, a very special standing ovation of appreciation to all the artists and creatives — writers, musicians, comics, poets, painters, sculptors, spoken word geniuses and Gay Plant Store purveyors — who are somehow rising to the challenge and giving us their best gifts at this difficult time. Bless you for doing what you do.

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This is a post about rot. What happens when things begin to decompose. Peanut butter pretzels. Constitutional democracies. Things like that.

Let’s start with the peanut butter pretzels. A couple weeks ago, I bought myself a little pouch of the gluten-free ones, and on opening them, smelled the tell-tale aroma of rancid oil. Yeesh.

I checked the best-by date. All good there: still six months out.

No longer trusting my sniffer, I taste-tested one — and immediately spit it out. Blech! Rancid indeed.

I returned the package to my local co-op and got a new one, only to have the experience repeated.

Hmmm. I wondered: Maybe they used old peanut butter in a whole production run of fresh pretzels? Ooh, that must have been a mistake. Thinking of my fellow pretzel lovers, I wrote to the company to let them know. No response.

The following week, the same thing happened with some grain-free granola. The nuts and coconut seemed okay, but the sunflower seeds were definitely rancid. Wrote to complain. No response.

I’m curious, have you recently opened what seems like an okay package only to find nasty, spoiled product inside? Reported what you’ve experienced only to have that log of your lived reality denied or ignored?

As comedian Tom Papa would say: I have.

These days, I’m seeing a bigger meaning in all this — about our culture, our moment, and our choices on the horizon.

Perhaps you’ve seen scenes of law-abiding U.S. citizens and immigrants being abused, assaulted, detained, disappeared, or shot dead on the streets of Minneapolis (and elsewhere).

Perhaps you’ve witnessed official government bodies denying verifiable facts or delivering wacky doublespeak from official podiums and asked yourself: Can this be happening for real, right here in the United States?

Yes. The answer is yes.

The peanut butter in this societal pretzel has turned rancid, my friends. Packaged up like a functional democracy on the outside, but not looking or smelling so good on the inside.

As of this afternoon, it hasn’t seemed like “writing to complain” — or in this case, contacting our elected officials to demand the upholding of our basic constitutional rights — was having any effect.

When you’ve got racist, poorly trained paramilitary forces roving neighborhoods, demanding to see people’s papers, busting down doors, snatching children, and emptying clips of ammo into poet-moms and ICU nurses who get in the way, something is definitely rotten.

That rotten-ness needs reporting. And that makes watching my fellow journalists get pepper-sprayed and pushed just for doing their jobs these past few days feel even more stomach-turning.

Remember my friend Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, whose essay I shared in my last post? Last week, that essay got picked up by The New Republic.

Two days after that, just hours after ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, Dara walked two blocks to the scene and got tear-gassed by ICE — for no other reason than, well, she was there.

Dara showed up to observe the protest against Pretti’s death at the hands of ICE agents — just one of many spontaneous protests that have broken out across our metro area these past few weeks. Protests that have gotten tens of thousands of regular Twin Cities folks showing up in sub-zero temperatures.

If you think it is somehow wrong that friends, families, customers, and coworkers would openly object to what they see happening in their own neighborhoods, I encourage you to consider how you might react if this was happening in yours.

Consider for a moment all the people you greet and interact with in your regular everyday life.

I’m talking here about your barista, your UPS delivery person, your kid’s teacher, your hairdresser, your handy-person, your Uber driver, your bartender, the nice nurse who takes care of your aging parent.

I’m talking about the people you exchange pleasantries with and do business with daily, people whom you recognize and rely on to make your world work and make sense.

Now imagine if you witnessed those same friendly, familiar people being physically assaulted right in front of you — at their home, place of work, or just walking down the street — by armed, unidentified, masked agents.

Imagine them being thrown to the ground, beaten, handcuffed, pepper-sprayed, marched off to unknown locations — or straight up shot in the head, execution style, right there on the street.

Imagine those same people being tossed out of unmarked vans — with no ID, phone, money, or outerwear — injured, in freezing weather, and left to find their way back home on foot.

Imagine those people — people who live and work in your neighborhood — denied phone calls and legal representation. Imagine them being loaded onto planes in shackles. Imagine if this was a member of your family or your circle of friends and you had no way to help them, or even find out where they were.

Imagine nearly everybody in your city — including you — being traumatized by these scenes and feeling helpless to stop them from occurring over and over again.

Imagine your federal government says all of this is okay. They deny factually-verified, evident realities. They insist the people observing, protecting, and protesting are the terrorists, even as the observable evidence directly contradicts this.

Then they send more masked men, more heavily armed soldiers of fortune into your neighborhood to “keep order.” They are angry you are not more grateful and compliant.

The tear gas is your friend, they say. We’re removing these “problems” for your safety and the benefit of our country, they say. All of this is — the closed businesses, the missing neighbors and frightened friends — it’s for your own good. You just need to obey orders.

This my friends, is the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt warned us of.

When you taste rancid peanut butter pretzels, you know they are rancid, no matter what the “best by date” says. And if you can’t perceive that rancidity — if you swallow them by the handful because somebody official pointed to the small print on the package and told you, “look, they’re fine” — then my best guess is that you, too, might be unwell.

Maybe there is something numb or asleep within you. Maybe you are infected by fear on denial. That’s understandable. These times are scary. These scenes are not easy to watch.

It doesn’t matter if you are liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between. If you are getting your news exclusively from channels that insist all of this is fine, challenge yourself to look elsewhere for a while. Look to European or other global coverage, if that feels safer.

Even there, you will see at least a little of what needs seeing. You will taste in your mouth something bitter, and perhaps for the first time in a while, you will trust your own senses.

That is a good sign. From there, you can find your way back to better health.

There’s a reason food companies use spoiled ingredients and pass them off as acceptable: It’s cheaper, more expedient, and in the short term, it might seem like an “efficient” way of achieving their profitability goals.

But the cost to anybody consuming those rancid foods is nauseating. And the damage done to those companies’ brands — or in this case, our nation’s reputation — is not easily repaired.

What’s happening in Minneapolis does not pass the sniff test of justice. It doesn’t pass the taste test of a healthy constitutional democracy. And the cost to our nation, and to our allies, is staggering.

I promised you some hope, though, so here it is …

Here in the Midwest, our local communities are responding with healthy vigor, creativity, connection, and love. Even people who “don’t do politics” are coming out and doing what now seems clearly the right thing to do. And they are finding that feels … good.

In my last post, I wrote:

The inflammatory cultural ooze of this moment might be messy, disruptive — but it’s essential. It’s evidence of life, of recovery in action. This is how healing happens, folks. It is better to get involved than to look away.

It doesn’t matter what the package says, folks. If it looks, smells, and tastes rotten, it probably is.

So if what you see happening to your fellow humans — tiny children abducted, senior citizens marched through snow in their underwear, moms and ICU nurses gunned down in the street — is making you feel sick to your stomach, I suggest you believe that feeling. And then do something about it.

Call your reps. Donate funds. Put your feet in the street. Offer rides, grocery delivery, or laundry support for folks afraid to leave home. Stand witness and shoot video for folks brave enough to put their bodies in harm’s way. Use whatever skills, resources, or influence you have.

Above all, understand that things in this beautiful but troubled country of ours are not soon (or likely ever) going back to what formerly passed for “normal.” We don’t have to go back to tolerating the intolerable. And we mustn’t.

Everything in nature has a life cycle, and that goes for our socioeconomic and political lives, too. What we are witnessing here is the seemingly sudden decay of systems that have been unhealthy and unsustainable for a long while.

When something dies and decays, from its decomposition comes new life.

So that’s the real hope here: that new ways of living, operating, and relating can and must emerge from this rotten mess.

Instead of sinking into hopelessness and despair — or looking to despots and self-serving bureaucrats to solve our perceived problems for us — we can find meaning in rising to the real challenges of our moment.

Instead of munching down rancid pretzels and pretending they are okay, we can recognize we are hungry for something better.

We can ask: How can I help? What can I make, build, share, or do to make things better here?

From intelligently decomposing milk comes yogurt. From intelligently decomposing flour comes sourdough. From intelligently decomposing poop, pulp, and ash comes fertile soil.

Nature is unstoppably regenerative and experimental. We can be, too.

P.S. Thanks for hanging in there during this disconcerting times. This past week, I’ve been taking care of a loved one who suffered a life-altering injury and supporting my local Minnesota and Wisconsin communities in the ways that I can. Whatever is going on in your world, thank you for caring about the worlds that intersect with and support it. Thanks for being part of a fresh-hope future that is now ours for the making.

Perhaps you have noticed: The healing process isn’t always pretty. It often involves swelling, redness, pain, as well as a certain amount of crusting, scabbing, and nasty discharge.

Protest and other forms of rebellion against injustice have some similar qualities — and some similar reasons for being.

Let us consider the value of pus for a moment. I know, yuck. But stay with me here.

When the body is responding to a wound or infection, the immune system produces this strange fluid — a mix of white blood cells (neutrophils) and the dead bacteria they’ve neutralized — as a means of expelling pathogens and supporting the production of fresh, healthy tissue.

To me, the protests happening in Minneapolis (which I consider my home town) look a lot like a healthy, intelligent immune system responding to ragged wounds, assaults, and an infection in desperate need of healing.

This past Friday — just two days after Renee Nicole Good’s murder at the hands of an ICE agent — I was at a client’s Minneapolis-area home when their 20-something daughter (a first-generation American) returned from running errands. She looked pale, shaken.

“It’s nuts out there,” she reported. “All the restaurants are empty and the only people at the grocery store are teenagers shopping for their [black, brown, or presumed-immigrant] parents.”

Area kids and teens weren’t in school, of course — because Minneapolis schools had all been closed, classes cancelled.

According to a report by Minnesota Public Radio:

“The move came after officials at Roosevelt High School said armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.”

To see one’s neighbors, friends, students, and teachers shoved, pepper sprayed, disappeared, shot in the face — these are grave wounds.

To see a local pastor detained, threatened with a gun — and asked (by people who ostensibly came to defend law and order), “Are you scared yet?” — feels like an infection of the highest order.

To see one’s city go from a thriving collection of intersecting communities to an inflamed, fear-infested battleground hurts. Particularly in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the recent murder of Melissa and Mark Hortman, and so many other unnecessary and avoidable assaults on human life and dignity.

These feel like injuries that need to be irrigated, balmed, bandaged, allowed to heal. But they won’t heal while the lacerations are being widened and ignored (or publicly lied about), and the infections deepened, day by day.

Witnessing any open or tunneling wound — whether on a human body or in a human society — is never fun. It can be disturbing, sickening even.

But having no response at all to that ugliness is hardly an indicator of health. On the contrary, it’s a sign of soul-deadness.

Anne Frank was still very much alive in January 1943 when she observed …

“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes … Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone.”

Some terrible things are happening here right now, and in other cities around our country where the powers-that-be are running roughshod over human rights and liberties. And a lot of healthy-minded people — of all political stripes — are responding with outrage and spontaneous acts of protection and healing kindness.

Thank goodness for that. Because we’ve seen what happens when people don’t respond. Or wait too long to respond.

The civic disruptions occurring here at this moment are necessary, inevitable reactions to some longstanding, non-healing wounds in our culture. Wounds caused by racism, sexism, colonialism, greed, and depraved cravings for power and control.

Protests and expressions of outrage are healthy immune-system reactions to those assaults.

Mounting a robust immune response takes energy and can feel exhausting. The healing wound might look worse — scarier —before it looks better. But heal, we must. The alternative is sepsis and necrosis, a continued rotting from the inside out.

The warning signs of our collective disease state have been present — here in the U.S. and in many other places around the world — for a long while. Let us hope our collective immune systems can develop the courage, discernment, and capacity to respond rather than complacently submit and shut down.

The last section of my book, The Healthy Deviant, is titled “Taking It to the Streets.”

While it doesn’t directly address the conditions erupting around our country in this moment, it does draw a connection between our individual welfare and the welfare of the society we live in.

Here’s an excerpt that feels relevant to me in this moment:

In September 1967, just seven months before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered a lecture to the American Psychological Association titled “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement.” In it, he addressed the important role social scientists had to play in fostering what he called “creative maladjustment”—the willingness to challenge destructive social norms and institutional constructs in favor of a more just, ethical, and promising reality.

In his talk, Dr. King asserted that “there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will.”

King then called for the creation of a new organization, an “International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment,” arguing that the prophet Amos, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson were good examples of admirably “maladjusted” individuals and that we might all benefit from following their example in questioning the troubling conventions of our time.

“Through such creative maladjustment,” Dr. King wrote, “we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”

We could use more of that glittering daybreak right now.

Our bodies’ autonomic immune responses are operating in the background all the time. We only notice them when they rise to disruptive levels — when they depart from the body’s business-as-usual.

The angry looking swelling and oozing we see at the surface represents a “creative maladjustment” of sorts — a signaling that business-as-usual is no longer the priority. Healing is.

The inflammatory cultural ooze of this moment might be messy, disruptive — but it’s essential. It’s evidence of life, of recovery in action. This is how healing happens, folks. It is better to get involved than to look away.

With that in mind, I wanted to share a very personal essay from my fellow-journalist and novelist friend, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, who lives in Minneapolis and has been in the thick of the city’s immune response for quite some time. She sent it out in her email this morning, and I was deeply moved by what she wrote.

You can read the whole thing here, if you like:

Clearly, none of this is my usual Substack fare — because we are not living in “normal” times. But I see it as directly connected to the topic of Healthy Deviance, the art of being healthy in an unhealthy world.

That art is not something we practice or master alone. It’s something we co-learn and co-create, across communities and generations and political divides. It might be a messy process, but the alternative is so much worse.

Wishing us all health and healing in every way possible,

P.S. Want to subscribe to Dara’s newsletter? She is not on Substack — yet! — but you can get on her list right here.

Last weekend, I ran my Refine Your Life Mini-Workshop and it was a smash hit. If you attended, thank you! You’ve already got the replay.

And if you didn’t, but you’re a paid subscriber (or want to become one), great news: I’m giving you the replay!

You’ll find the link to that video just below the paywall. Plus, you’ll find a 20 percent discount on the full 6-week workshop series, if you wanna get in on that.

One of the best parts about being a paid subscriber to this Substack is the regular flow of extra goodies.

One of the best parts of my Refine Your Life (RYL) process is that it spares you some of the biggest stumbles I endured during my first decade of conscious life-change efforts.

That included getting some key steps out of order, leaning way too hard on willpower and instant fixes, and then repeatedly beating myself up for doing it all wrong.

Rookie moves, I know — but they are rookie moves that a lot of smart, motivated folks still wind up making every darn time they decide they embark on significant life changes. And they are rookie moves that can be avoided.

In the little mini-workshop excerpt (6 min.) I’ve shared below, I shift from talking about the Stages of Change (via James O. Prochaska’s model) to a big-picture overview of my own RYL process — a process that begins not with goals, but with values and vision.

This move alone — a rearranging of focus and action that centers you and your essence rather than the external targets you’ve been encouraged to embrace — can be a game-changer.

Too often, in conventional goal-setting, it all gets tangled, murky, conflated.

And as a result, we get so many of our New Year plans off to crappy starts. Confusion, competing commitments, and lack of clarity about where to begin — this is not how you want to approach your life-shifting activities.

There’s a better way, I swear.

In the full-length RYL mini-workshop replay video (below the paywall), I go into much greater detail on all that, and also invite you to participate in the process with me in real time — by doing snack-size versions of some of the exercises we do in the six-week Refine Your Life workshop series.

The full RYL series kicks off next Saturday, January 10th, and if you are a paid subscriber, you get 20% off on tuition. You code appears below the paywall with the video.

For everybody else interested in coming along for the full RYL ride, head over here to learn more and sign yourself up!

There’s a reason I’ve been teaching this same interactive workshop series for more than two decades now.

I find every single part of it thought-provoking, rewarding, energizing. And when I say this interactive series is life-changing, that’s not mere marketing hype. It’s not just wishful thinking on my part.

I mean that’s how folks who’ve been through the experience regularly describe it.

Back in 2021, a woman named Val went through Refine Your Life. Just a few days ago — five years later — I got a holiday card from her that said:

“Thank you for all of your wisdom and passion — every day in my life is better because of you!”

Sniff. I’ve gotten dozens of these handwritten cards over the years (even though almost nobody sends actual cards in the actual mail anymore).

Anyway, I can’t think of more meaningful feedback, or better encouragement for anybody who wants to engage in a conscious life-change process proven to have powerful, lasting impact.

Again, if all you want is a mini-treatment, hit the replay below the paywall (you can use your free-trial preview for that purpose if you haven’t used it already).

If you want to go deeper, or just want more information on this experience, go here.

IMPORTANT: I only offer this full RYL workshop series once or twice a year, depending on my schedule and capacity. At present, I’m not intending to offer a summer series, so if you’re on the fence, I’d say get in on this round.

Okay, I’ll be getting back to my regular posting schedule starting tomorrow. In the meantime, thanks for being part of my Substack community, and thanks for being interested in doing the work of living life as a healthier, happier-than-average person. We need more of us in this wacky world!

Wishing you all the best in 2026,

P.S. Wanna become a paid subscriber to get more extra goodies — or just to be a pal and support my work? Go for it!

Subscribe now

Here’s the free replay of my 90-min. Refine Your Life Mini-Workshop …

For my paid Substack subscribers only: If you want to enroll in my 6-week RYL workshop series, head over here to learn more and register, then enter coupon code SS20 at checkout for 20% off the one-time payment (this takes tuition from $597 to $477.60). You’re welcome!

Perhaps you’ve noticed that the first day of the year has a nasty habit of landing right at the end of a very long, over-scheduled, overspent holiday season.

In the world of business, it also lands at the close of Q4. Which always seems to arrive hot on the heels of Q3.

Given this, is it really any surprise that so many of us greet the New Year with exhaustion, self-doubt, and more than one kind of hangover?

No, I say. And yet, for some weird reason, we feel obliged to comply with our culture’s crazy New Year’s tradition of using this day to relentlessly critique ourselves and our lives.

By the millions, we wake on Jan. 1, pour a coffee, pop an aspirin, and promptly begin taking stock of all the ways we’re still not good enough.

Understandably turned off by this grim endeavor, we’re then inclined to go straight back to bed. Or worse, to start scrolling through post-holiday sales offers, seeking solace from our self-doubt and self-recrimination.

Not the best way to start the year. But if this is a pattern you recognize in yourself, I want you to know you are not alone. And you could choose to do things differently.

A few reasons you might opt for a less grueling entry point to 2026…

1. DISTRACTION. The final weeks of 2025 have likely seen you scrambling to complete end-of-year projects, while also navigating online shopping carts, hosting events, negotiating family dynamics, and/or partying. Thus, hangover or no hangover, you are likely not going to be in the best mental shape for doing intense reflective or planning activities.

2. RESISTANCE. Assuming you have New Year’s Day off (but have to be back at work soon) you might feel heavy resistance about cramming anything challenging into your last precious hours of vacation, particularly if it involves evaluating your past performance and writing up a bunch of new personal KPIs. That can feel like robbing your current self in order pay some hoped-for version of yourself an unearned bonus. Fighting this sort of resistance is energy-consuming, demoralizing — and optional.

3. EXISTENTIAL DREAD. Let’s face it: Most of us have been doing the best we can under difficult circumstances. Coping with reality is hard work, and this past year has demanded a LOT of coping. We’ve been progressively depleted by the wide variety of disrupted, uncertain, nerve-frying situations we’ve witnessed and endured for the last 12 months (to say nothing of the last 12 years). And when coming from a place of “ugh” about the wider world, it follows that your sense of personal capacity and hope might not be at an all time high.

Pushing ourselves to “finish the year strong” and “start the year right” without acknowledging all of this only compounds our sense of being not remotely up to the task.

I want to be clear that none of this is an individual “you” or “me” problem. It’s very much an “us” problem.

Most of the things we are inclined to find wrong with ourselves and our lives are really just symptoms of a much larger set of societal problems — automatic defaults that drive our behaviors, things none of us can hope to change all on our own.

But that doesn’t mean we won’t be encouraged to try. And try. And try.

As I wrote in my book, The Healthy Deviant, “What looks like a problem of willpower is often a problem of chronic depletion.” And we live in a society that is, arguably by design, chronically depleting.

It’s a society that saps our resources, fractures our focus, and hollows out our self-regard. And then endlessly demands that we do better.

That, my friends, is a setup for failure.

So rather than staggering across the New Year’s Day starting line in automatic-default mode, here’s what I suggest:

• Decide right now that you are going to give yourself some grace on New Year’s Day, whether that means sleeping in, allowing for low-key time with friends and loved ones, re-thinking that restrictive-diet kickoff; or declining to jam yourself into a too-crowded gym.

• Schedule a late morning or early afternoon two-hour block of time to do a little free-form personal “work.” Maybe just being still and unplugged-quiet for a bit, then capturing a few of your most lucid longings in a journal. Maybe doing a brain dump on a giant piece of paper. Maybe vision boarding or participating in a guided process that doesn’t ask too much of you (like my fun, 90-minute Refine Your Life Mini-Workshop, happening LIVE on Jan. 1 at 3PM).

• Work with the (likely low) energy of the moment. Run yourself a menu of “for consideration” options without immediately committing to any of them. Plan that you won’t embark on any big, hairy, aggressive elements of your desired New Year’s shifts until the middle of the month — or even February or March, if that feels better.

Meanwhile, use the coming days to actively observe, paying closer-than-usual attention to your own life experiences. Take stock of the signals your body-mind is sending you.

In particular, notice which things you’d prefer to do less of and which things you want to stop doing entirely.

Plan your New Year’s Day in this kinder, gentler way and you will win on three levels …

1. You can look forward to easing into your New Year with confidence and calm, rather than feeling assaulted by angst and the obligation to “hurry up and do something” about the state of your life.

2. You will benefit (if you start now) from gathering at least one full week’s worth of real-life data about what patterns are serving or messing with you on a daily basis (e.g., when and around whom you are energized or fatigued; which automatic negative thought visit you most often; what triggers desire, envy, resentment, regret).

3. You will create a realistic, self-honoring architecture around your New Year’s Day process, empowering you to begin your next year on a more positive, intentional, autonomy-building foot.

Of course, if you love doing conventional resolutions-focused work on New Year’s Day, and you adore diving directly into action around your goals, by all means go for it.

And again, if you’d like to take a middle path — getting some positive guidance and support for your New Year’s planning effort without stressing yourself out — I’d love to have you join me for my Refine Your Life Mini-Workshop, which I’m running live at 3PM Jan. 1 and also at 11AM on Saturday, Jan 3.

One participant from last year loved it so much that he just asked me for this year’s sign-up link so he could do it again AND share it with five friends.

Speaking of which, doing this sort of New Year’s Day work with friends can be a blast.

It can ward off the sense of loneliness that can sometimes accompany personal work. And it can help you find awareness-and-support (AKA “accountability”) buddies for future check-ins.

Either way — whether you decide to join me, work with a pal or two, or go it alone — please make a plan for this coming New Year’s Day that feels like something you can look forward to rather than resist.

Then, when somebody asks if you have plans for the first of the year, you can say “Yes! I’ve got the whole day planned out just the way I want it.”

For my paid subscribers, I’m embedding a special little gifty below the paywall: It’s a PDF of my Manifesto for Thriving in a Mixed Up World (signed, printed copies available for sale here). I hope you’ll enjoy it — and let it inform your New Year’s Day.

Plan or no plan, I trust you will make it your own, and it will be perfect.

Warm and healthy wishes,

P.S. The easiest way to make a solid New Year’s Day plan with zero stress or logistical quandary? Sign up for my live, 90-minute Refine Your Life Mini-Workshop (just $24). Consider everything leading up to that “preparation” and everything following it “integration.” Day planned, problem solved! 👇

P.P.S. If you are one of my wonderful paid subscribers, you may have noticed that I’ve taken to adding special extras for paid subscribers to the bottom of my posts — below the paywall — rather than sending separate +DepthCharge posts every other Sunday. This improves the reach of my posts while still getting you all your extra goodies. And it is just technically less confusing. If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please hit reply and let me know. And again, thank you for supporting my work!

P.P.S. Want to subscribe or upgrade your subscription? Go for it …

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Recently, I asked a friend about a little pink area on her shoulder. It looked like a rash.

“Oh, yuck,” she said, pulling at her shirt to cover the spot. “That’s my psoriasis. It’s awful. And it’s spreading.”

“Do you know what’s causing it?” I asked.

“No,” she said dejectedly. “They don’t know. But they say I’ll have it for the rest of my life, and it will probably just get worse. Eventually it could cover my whole body.”

“Yikes,” I said. “Can I see that spot again?”

She consented. After peering at it a minute, I said, “You know, that looks a lot like the weird spots I had on my torso when I had an overgrowth of candida. Has anybody checked you for anything like that yet?”

As it turned out, nobody had really checked her for anything.

No labs had been run. There’d been no investigation of her other health complaints like her itchy ears and throat, or her flaky scalp — all classic signs of yeast overgrowth. No evaluation of her health history, diet, or lifestyle.

Her doctors (she’d seen two) had just looked at the spot, diagnosed it as psoriasis, and proclaimed it incurable.

Then they had sent her home with a prescription for some cream to help soothe the symptoms. Other than that, they just couldn’t offer her much in the way of help, or hope.

Now my friend had a half dozen of these little spots scattered across her upper body, and some itchy, raised flaky patches behind her ears. As her doctor had predicted, the problem seemed to be getting worse.

Her last doctor had told her that when it got bad enough, there were other drugs he could prescribe — immune-system suppressants like Humira and methotrexate. But because they carry life-threatening risks and serious side effects, he thought it would be better to wait.

Um, yeah.

I thought it might be better for her to go see a doctor who had more familiarity with how rashes often express underlying inflammation and immune-system irritation in the body, and with how eliminating the root cause of that inflammation and irritation generally gets rid of the rash, too.

So that’s what she did.

Her new doc did an in-depth investigation of her various health complaints and ran some labs to find out what else might be going on in her body.

Those labs revealed she did, indeed, have an overgrowth of candida, among other imbalances in her microflora. She also had food intolerances and nutritional deficiencies.

Her doctor prescribed a round of anti-fungal medication, some dietary and lifestyle adjustments, supplemental essential fatty acids, and a probiotic to get her microbiome back in balance.

Within days, the rash was receding. Within two weeks, it was gone. No more “incurable lifelong psoriasis.”

Bonus: She felt better than she had in years.

Now, it’s important to point out that my friend’s rash could have been caused by all sorts of things. My lucky guess was less the result of my knowing “the answer” than my willingness to pursue a question — What might be causing this? — and believing that there was an answer.

I am not a doctor. I am not qualified to offer “medical” advice of any kind.

But I am qualified to ask questions, to be both curious and knowledgeable about what is going on in my body, and to go in search of information that might help me better understand the dynamics behind my health concerns.

So are you.

My suggestion to “practice medicine without a license” is NOT a suggestion to avoid seeking — and heeding — professional medical help.

It’s not an invitation to practice reckless acts of self-medication.

It’s certainly not an expression of disrespect for the education, experience, and judgment of licensed healthcare professionals.

Rather, it’s an invitation into a mindset of root-cause inquiry. It’s an encouragement to advocate for your own health and well-being.

Here are some ways you can do that:

• Regard any problematic symptoms you are experiencing as your body’s call for help and healthy change (my Weird Symptom Checklist might a good place to start).

• Make a list of all the symptoms you experience, noting when they came on and when they tend to get better and worse. Look for patterns and connections.

• Consider a whole-food elimination diet (removing and methodically reintroducing common food irritants like gluten and dairy) to identify potential food intolerances.

• Recognize that most physicians, while highly trained in dealing with infectious diseases and trauma, receive only limited training in nutrition and lifestyle-related medicine, or in reversing the lifestyle-driven conditions that most frequently send us into their offices.

• Be prepared to seek out second or third opinions from health professionals who have received additional integrative, naturopathic, or functional-medicine training.

• Know that diverse medical complaints — headaches, skin conditions, digestive distress — can all stem from a single root cause. A leaky or inflamed gut, for example, can provoke rashes, fatigue, asthma, mood imbalances, and more.

• Explore the biological dynamics and interconnected systems that drive inflammation, imbalance, and disease. I like Dr. Jeffrey Bland’s book The Disease Delusion, and Dr. Thomas Sult’s book, Just Be Well. Also see my previous posts on related topics.

• Be open to using AI and other online resources to research potential causes for your symptoms (AI is actually pretty good at helping with diagnostics). But consider that only a starting place, and use a healthy dose of discernment.

• Avoid websites that push a lot of products rather than offering thoughtful information and referencing scientific research.

• Ask your doctor about lab testing (e.g., blood, urine, stool, saliva) for any unresolved conditions. Many more advanced labs — including “functional” assessments — are also now available on a direct-to-consumer basis.

• Ask a qualified health professional to help guide you in interpreting your results, and ask questions about anything you don’t understand.

• If you get overwhelmed or confused, refocus your efforts on the essential foundations of health: Eat a whole-foods diet with a balance of proteins, healthy fats, and brightly colored vegetables; drink a lot of pure water; minimize your intake of sugar, flour, alcohol, caffeine, and artificial sweeteners; avoid fast food, junk food, and ultra-processed foods as much as possible; create space for movement, sleep, rest breaks, and relaxation.

These steps alone will increase your body’s resilience and help you feel more empowered to take additional steps when you are ready.

Above all, remember that the most powerful tools for healing most chronic health problems lie not in magic-bullet treatments, but in the kinds of ongoing daily lifestyle “treatments” that only we, as individuals, can administer.

Knowledgeable health pros realize this.

They are there to help us access the support we need — not just to quell current symptoms, but also to get and stay healthy for the long haul.

That’s the kind of medicine we’d all do well to practice more often.

P.S. Find this line of thinking interesting, encouraging, worth sharing? Drop a like, or better yet, restack this post for others to discover!

P.S. Dear paid subscribers, see below the paywall for a video — a reading from my book — where I share a deeper dive on what most of us (including most physicians) are missing when it comes to understanding the underlying causes of our chronic health complaints.

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NOTE: This post was originally published on Medium on Nov. 26th, 2020—11 months after my book was born into the COVID-19 pandemic, my life plans changed abruptly, and the whole world went entirely bonkers.

Today, five years later, the world is still bonkers, perhaps even more bonkers — albeit for a host of different (and not so different) reasons.

With that in mind, I thought today might be a good time to give this essay some fresh air, to reflect on the mixed blessings we’ve all been through since 2020, and to gather our grit and gratitude for whatever lies ahead …

Happy Thanksgiving. And if, in the wake of this past year, you aren’t feeling abundantly happy and grateful today, I understand.

I am writing to honor that feeling, and also to bring some balm to it, if I can.

I wrote this for everyone who is feeling a bit tired, bruised, or bereft today.

In thinking about how hard this past year has been on so many, I’ve been trying to put my finger on a particular type of gratitude that one feels when one has gotten through something really rough, and comes through — not exactly unscathed, but perhaps less scathed than one might have been.

That brought to mind an incident from my youth. An accident, actually.

I was about 10, riding my bicycle fast on a blacktop road near our house. Going into a curve, I wiped out on some sand, and went down hard.

I got up with the wind a bit knocked out of me, some smarting pains, and that wincing feeling of “Oh, crap. I don’t want to look.”

I knew that what I was about to see might be ugly. But when I did look, I found I was basically intact.

I had some sand-encrusted road rash on one palm, a nasty cut on my ankle where the spikes of the bike pedal had swung around and gouged out some flesh, and couple of banged up spots. But no broken bones, no head wounds, and nothing that needed stitches.

This is not to say that I was 100 percent fine.

In fact, my body-mind was never quite the same. That cut on my ankle left a scar that remains to this day. I’ve not really enjoyed bike riding since. And in general, I don’t like going fast in any situation where I could easily end up on the ground.

I still have a vivid memory of that wipeout, and an eerie, out-of-body perspective on it — both hallmarks of post-traumatic experience.

That’s the way I feel about 2020. Some serious $#!@ went down. A lot of us are still in the process of getting up.

We’ll retain some painful memories and images we might rather forget. But we’ve gotten through. At least, if you’re reading this, you have.

Of course, a lot of people didn’t make it through.

We lost a quarter of a million humans to COVID-19, and many more to violence, poverty, chronic diseases, cancers, accidents, stress, suicides, and all the other things that kill with abandon.

Many people who lost loved ones (as well as jobs, homes, life savings, and semesters of school) are grieving their losses so heavily, it’s hard for them to feel anything at all.

If you are one of those people, I want to tell you it is okay to feel sad today. It is okay to not be overflowing with joy, mirth, and gratitude.

I just lost a cousin to cancer. She was my age, an inspired artist, energetic, and evidently healthy — until she wasn’t. I knew that she had been sick these past few months, but I didn’t know how sick.

I heard last week that she’d put herself into hospice. I heard yesterday that she was gone.

I couldn’t help but think: That could have been me.

I realize this isn’t the cheeriest Thanksgiving post, and if it feels like a lead-weighted downer amidst an effervescent burst of holiday cheer, I apologize. But the fact is, any of us might not have lived to see the end of 2020. Some of us still might not.

So, if you feel grateful about nothing else, I hope you are feeling glad to be alive, to be here and doing whatever is necessary for you to move forward and keep giving the best gifts you have to give in this lifetime.

Forward we go. Maybe with road rash. Maybe with a limp and some scars. But forward, with relief that our wounds haven’t been worse and that most of them can heal, or at least evolve over time.

Please know that I count you — my friends, readers, listeners, collaborators, co-conspirators, and fellow Healthy Deviants — among my greatest blessings. Because whether you know it or not, you give me good reasons to get up again and again, road rash and all.

Wishing you a real, beautiful Thanksgiving holiday.

P.S. To my dear free and paid subscribers: I’ve been working hard on some longer-form pieces that have delayed my regular publishing schedule these past few weeks. Thanks for bearing with me, and stay tuned for extra goodies, coming soon.

P.P.S. I recorded the audio version of this post as a little token of my appreciation for all my subscribers. If you like it, please let me know and I’ll do more.

And of course, please restack or share this post with others whom you think might like it, too!

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Part of my ongoing “Healthy Deviant Friends” series, this conversation was a exploration of how we can all create more meaningful connections in what often feels like an alienating, lonely, downright scary world.

In addition to investigating the intersections of energy, attention, vulnerability, and sensory perception, we discussed how simple social containers and “gamification” strategies can help make non-romantic intimacy-building feel less risky — and way more fun.

I shared my enthusiasm for Sharlene’s beautiful illustrated deck of Intimacy Cards, her incredible mushroom-inspired art (wait until you hear about her forthcoming mushroom museum!), her “Beyond the Surface” live events, her fast-growing intimacy movement, and more.

If you can’t imagine the connection between mushrooms and intimacy, you really gotta check out the video of our chat. It’s both inspiring and thought-provoking.

To learn more about Sharlene and her work, visit at these sites and feeds:

• Intimacy Cards site and Instagram feed

• Mushroom art site and Instagram feed

Oh, and here’s the Substack post of mine that originally connected Sharlene with my work and inspired her to reach out. It was previously in my paid-subscriber archive, but I’ve made it available free for all for now …

Want more of this good stuff, more conversations with fascinating folks like Sharlene Durfey? I’d love to have you subscribe (and if you can manage a paid subscription, I’d be extra grateful).

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, thanks for being part of my weird little world, and having the courage to do things a bit differently.

P.S. If you enjoyed this post and video, please like, comment, and restack your little heart out. Those of us who persist in doing real-human creative work in an AI-dominated world can use all the support we can get.

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