The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Behavioral Stack | Frankly #52

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Recorded December 18 2023   Description   In this Frankly, Nate offers a personal reflection on his learnings about 'awareness' vs 'focus' and how this knowledge could be used as a guide toward more thoughtful behaviors. The human body's system has evolved through time and the layers were built sequentially, each interacting and reacting to the systems below it. By becoming aware of this and attempting to balance them from the bottom up, we could move away from the reactionary tendencies that many in our culture are now pulled towards. How does an overstimulating, dopamine driven modern environment affect our brains ability to cope? How do our behaviors change when our systems are in a constant state of fear or dissatisfaction? What would the world look like if we spent more time reflecting and realigning rather than in perpetual fight, flight, or freeze mode?  For Show Notes and to learn more: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/52-the-behavioral-stack To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QynYlsW35Sw&list=PLdc087VsWiC5im7eWkCD0t907MbOAftb3

Greetings. When you see this video, I will be in the middle of a five-week technology fast retreat and what my coach refers to as a limbic reset. And for the next 20 minutes or so, I'm going to explain how I've arrived at this point. First of all, I'm an educator. I'm a synthesizer, I am not a guru, and I will never be anyone's guru. I am an explainer of the great simplification, but I'm also a participant. So a lot of the things dealing with somatic brain behavior, I'm learning and experiencing just the same as all of you are. So I have had the privileged to have numerous coaches in my life, and I cycle through them. I think coaches and therapists are like lifting weights or working out. You keep at it, and they're helpful. Earlier this

year, I met an amazing man who I'm going to keep confidential for now, though I'm hoping he and some of his acolytes and young students will come on a roundtable in 2024. This is the first coach I've ever met that every single thing he said hit me at a core level that I knew it to be true. And everything I threw at him, he had answers for. When I met him in San Diego in February, I felt amazing after three days of just being in his presence. We cooked together. We sang together. We told stories. We went on hikes. And I just felt like normal and refreshed.

And he told me then that the goal was to get me and other people working on the metacrisis together for a six week retreat. I'm like six weeks. No freaking way, dude. I just can't do it. I have too much to do. And here we are. I'm going to go for five weeks. And I've got 10, 10 or 11 podcasts already recorded. I'm touching base with my staff once or twice a week, but the rest of the time I will be in a limbic reset, which I'm about to explain. So apparently the wisdom traditions long ago, you know, in the Bible, they talked about 40 days and 40 nights, but there are many other ancient traditions that talk about this six-week, 40, 42-day sort of time. Apparently, back in the day, there used to be a month of silence in many ancient wisdom traditions.

And for teachers, there were three months, three months of retreat. And a lot of these integral yoga and some of these things were designed as coping mechanisms to face the fact that humans get fragmented. We are not integral in the various aspects of our life. And so educators would take three months off of silence to regain their voice. Because our culture and our daily routines fragment us, the implications of that are number one, we end up leaning on consumption of energy, of food, of dopamine, of activities. Number two is we steer towards the left brain dominance, which is breaking down the world into

parts instead of looking at it holistically. And three, that we have growing progressive dis-ease, which results in eventually in chronic illness. So at the end of this five weeks, I'm going to spend one week with a guy named Dick Schwartz, who's famous for the parts work. He runs something called Internal Family Systems, which looks at the different parts of our mind that are competing for attention. In my case, I have the Golden Retriever,

I have the control freak, I have the clown jester, fun lever, I have the teacher, and all these parts are clamoring to get what they need simultaneously. But none of these parts is me. So all this is going on in my mind. And so his work is how to integrate all this.

And by the way, I will never make any podcast or frankly about me. I just happen to think that using me as an example here will allow me to unpack what I've learned. And plus when I get back in six weeks, if I haven't changed at all, then most of of what I'm about to tell you is bullshit. So here's what I learned about this. Dick Schwartz had horizontal parts in the brain, but now I'm going to talk about the vertical parts in the body. So there's an evolutionary stack of how we were evolved.

There's the microbiome, which isn't even to us. It's in our guts. It's the different microorganisms, bacteria, viruses that comprise us. That's a whole other story. Above that are the cells. Then there's the organs. Then there's the enteric system, which is kind of running how the organs work and digestion and things like that. Above that is the reptilian system. Above that is the limbic system in the brain. And above that is our cognition. And so these are seven layers that work in tandem. I'm only going to talk about the top four, which is the enteric, reptilian, limbic, and cognition.

So the interic system has to do with stability. It has to do with the homeostasis of our daily routines. In kind of a yes or no sort of switch, we're either stable or we're unstable. That's the enteric system. And above that is the reptilian system, which is the parasympathetic, and the sympathetic nervous system. The reptilian system has to do with fight or flight or freeze. And when we are accessing our parasympathetic system, we're in a state of ease.

When we are constantly in the sympathetic nervous system, we are in dis-ease. Further up in the brain, than that is our limbic system, our mammalian emotional system. This is centered, a reference by the hippocamp. and the amygdala. And this system is either satisfied or dissatisfied. And if it's dissatisfied, we're seeking. We're seeking stimulation or consumption or status or other things. Above that, finally, is the cognition, which is where most of us reside in our belief and

stories and facts and data about the world. This is where we talk about goals and the future and oil depletion and CO2 and all that. Cognition, the binary switch there is we're either serene or calm or peaceful or we're confused and agitated. So at each one of these levels, there's kind of a binary switch that's on or off. Now, this is the evolutionary stack. Now, let's see. Now, let's let's use these same things to represent a behavioral stack. So this graphic represents what we think is going on. We think that cognition is the elephant that's in control of everything else, and the limbic reptilian and Terek system are underneath it, but subservient and secondary.

The reality is exactly the opposite. The cognition is the tiny little, rider on the elephant where the limbic reptilian and enteric system, each in turn has more and more power over our behaviors. So if we are not stable, if we are not at ease and we are not satisfied, we can only end up cognition about knowing about things as opposed to knowing them. because our cognition is already captured by other things going on in our body. So what ends up happening is in our culture, we have four poles of neurotransmitters. There's dopamine endorphin trajectory, and then there's serotonin and oxytocin.

The dopamine endorphin line is about doing. We do things. We have a goal-seeking behavior. We go out and make another podcast or raise more money or run a marathon or develop a new product or write a blog post or whatever. The serotonin oxytocin poll is about being. And what's ended up in our society is almost all of the behavioral things that our culture has access to has created dopamine as a proxy for these other things. even those things that eventually originally were healthy for us doing yoga or singing a song or doing social things or whatever have been hijacked by dopamine because we wear the cool

yoga outfit and want to flex in front of the attractive people in our yoga class or we do social media in order to share things with others but we high grade our experience because we don't want people to see how we really are so our entire culture has in a positive feedback back sort of way, become more and more dopamine hijacked. What is the situation? What does all this mean that I'm telling you? The vast majority of people in our culture have trauma. And because of that, they are stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode. And that means that all the facts and everything are being captured in a way that they can't really respond to because something deeper and bigger is happening in their bodies. The majority of people in our culture have a me versus we in their

limbic system and are looking out for number one instead of more of a holistic other humans, other species, other generations, we're all connected. And this results in a constant state of seeking pleasure in a true rat race sort of treadmill sort of way. For people who are not in balance with this vertical behavioral stack. Facts, more and more facts, lead either to confusion or more dopamine as opposed to not awareness that leads to behavioral change. Like I said before, facts then lead to knowing about something rather than deeply knowing it. So the implications for my work, for our work, is that groups of humans, even if they're not huge groups that are become vertically stacked who are stable, satisfied, and have

we, over me calling could have outsize impact on our culture in the world in the years ahead. Another implication, and my coach does this repeatedly with 20-year-olds, is training young humans in a six-week setting to reset their limbic system could be a pillar for social change. The advice that my coach gave me is one of the ways to offset this seeking and dopamine is to constantly have a quiver full of arrows of alternative activities that aren't checking your phone or playing fantasy football or flexing on social media or whatever, but are walking in nature, cooking with your friends, singing, chanting, sitting with your ducks. Well, not many of you have ducks, but in my case, sitting with my ducks, to build a portfolio of other options that you can go to when you're in that seeking mode. So one of the conclusions I've had is thinking about this. I've long said that we don't so much have an environmental problem or an economic problem or an energy depletion problem as much as we have a human brain mismatch with our ancestral environment. I really do think that healing of our emotional states is as or more important than educating

humans about more facts. And again, I ain't no guru here. I'm learning this myself. But of course, homo-economicus is not compatible with homo-biospirus. And so I believe some sort of cultural change of consciousness is going to be required. So for me, the recommendations that my coach gave me is I'm constantly stressed given this job. I haven't had a vacation in four years. And so I'm relishing taking the next five weeks to just reflect silently with others and cook and chant and other things.

But one of the things he said was to split my day into two. and the easiest way to do that is to have a meal at those two times. So I'm eating and drinking at all times of the day and night. And so my enteric system doesn't know what the hell is going on. And it's constantly unstable. So his advice to me was eat at 11 in the morning and at 5.30 at night every single day. And I've done that to a certain degree. Another bit of advice he said is anytime that something stressful happens,

I get a scary email or I read something about the ocean temps or a funder says, I'm not going to fund you anymore or anything that I'm like, oh, no, to stop and pause and take three deep breaths. And if I do that 10 or 20 times a day, what I'm doing is training my reptilian system to know that my body did not just encounter a saber-toothed tiger and I'm about to die. because what ends up happening, maybe with my own temperament and maybe with certainly with this work where I'm exposed to lots of bad things happening in the planet, is my body thinks that I'm constantly in a fight or flight mode and that I need to change that. He also said that I need to train my reaction to when something happens, that whenever I expect a certain reaction to try and, conjure up a reaction of gratitude or humor or whatever else because we are neither what has

happened to us nor our reaction to it. But we can train how we respond to events and that is in our control. And then the last bit of advice he had was to shift from focus to awareness. And too many people in our culture are so focused on getting things done and productivity and we should spend more time being aware of our surroundings and our condition. And in this case, this is the origin of silent Saturdays, which I've had marginal success with. I've certainly done more than nothing, but I haven't really made it through a whole Saturday not talking or not checking my email and such. But silent Saturdays once a week are meant for reflection and awareness.

So again, I'm sharing this all with a little bit of an insight into my own life and how I'm thinking, but I'm mostly sharing this because I think this or something like this is at the core of our path forward. I want to learn about it. I want to learn how our wide human phenotype might adapt to a different energetic material. cultural setup. And as I've said before, I think we need more humans acting as rocks in the river, as anchors towards this cultural change as things happen. So I will be back.

Everything that you see from me in January will be pre-recorded. I will be back in February with lots to report. Hopefully some changes in my own vertical behavior stack. And I look forward to show. sharing what I learned with all of you. Happy New Year. I'll talk to you soon.