Transforming Human Suffering: Facing What You’ve Been Running From

 

On this episode of the I Love Being Sober podcast, recorded live in front of a client audience at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Scottsdale, Arizona, host Tim Westbrook sits down with Marine combat veteran, speaker, and mental performance coach Akshay Nanavati, author of Fearvana, a book endorsed by the Dalai Lama.

Akshay came home from Iraq carrying PTSD, depression, and an alcoholism that escalated to a bottle of vodka a day and, one morning, a knife in his own kitchen. He walks the room through that rock bottom moment and the slow, non-linear climb out of it. This is not a story about a single decision that fixed everything. He broke his sobriety many times before the change held.

The conversation digs into why he believes the mainstream approach to mental health gets it wrong, how he reframed his diagnosis from post-traumatic stress disorder to simply post-traumatic stress, and why inner peace is the acceptance of chaos rather than its absence. He explains Fearvana, the idea that fear is not the enemy but the doorway to a meaningful life, and how the same principle that carried him across Antarctica applies to anyone in early recovery: the only way out is through.

Along the way he shares the science and spirituality behind his darkness retreats, his world-first 60-day solo expedition dragging a 420-pound sled across Antarctica, and practical tools anyone can use today, from choosing your future self first to sitting with hard feelings instead of numbing them. For anyone in Phoenix, Scottsdale, or beyond who is navigating addiction recovery, sobriety, trauma, or mental health, this episode offers a hard-won, practical roadmap for turning suffering into fuel.

Camelback Recovery is a leading residential inpatient and outpatient addiction and mental health treatment provider serving Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona.

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Transforming Human Suffering: Facing What You’ve Been Running From

My guest is a Marine War veteran, a speaker, a mental health performance coach, and the author of a book called Fearvana, which happens to carry an endorsement from the Dalai Lama himself. Here’s where his story really starts. Akshay Nanavati came home from Iraq and found himself in a very dark place. PTSD, depression, alcoholism. It got so bad that he ended up standing in his own kitchen holding a knife, ready to end his life. He did not end it on that day. What he did with the years that followed is honestly hard to believe.

He built a global business, he ran ultramarathons, he spent 24 hours straight on a stair climber, he sat in complete darkness for seventeen days, and then he went to Antarctica alone for 60 days and became the first person to complete that particular expedition, dragging a 420-pound sled 500 miles across the ice by himself. He knows something about suffering. The kind that gets handed to you and the kind you choose. He’s spent his life figuring out how to turn all of it into fuel for a life of joy, meaning, and purpose. That is exactly the conversation I want to have today. Please help me welcome Akshay Nanavati.

Thank you. I’m honored to be here.

Grateful that we got you here. I’ve known you for a few years. I’m just grateful to have you here on the show.

Thank you. Privilege to be here.

The Moment In The Kitchen

Melissa was here a couple of weeks ago. She seeded it a little bit and told us about you running around your cul-de-sac for 24 hours straight and walking on your treadmill for 24 hours straight. All that stuff. You came home from Iraq and eventually reached a point where you were standing in your kitchen with a knife, ready to end your life. Take us into that moment. What was happening inside you and what actually pulled you back from the edge?

What hit that rock bottom moment was, so after I came back from the war, I was struggling with PTSD, with alcoholism, and I would go on these binges where I would drink for, first it started with 2 days and then 3 days and then 4 days and 5 days. I would be like, something’s wrong. I need to fix my life. I would sober up maybe for weeks on end. Eventually I would crash down in the pit. Again, just go on another five-day binge. One morning after five days, I was at a point literally drinking like a 750 milliliter bottle of vodka a day, just downing it. I would wake up and then drive straight to the liquor store, get more, and then wake up one morning, stumble over to the kitchen, picked up a knife.

That’s when I was ready to take my own life because of that pattern. I felt like I couldn’t keep going down that pattern. It shocked me that I had hit a point where I actually even considered it. This didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow descent that I hit. I went to this rock bottom moment. Just the fact that it even entered my head was jarring enough to wake me out of this stupor that I was in. It didn’t magically change my life overnight. I was not one of those who made a decision and sobered up instantly. I broke my sobriety many times.

That was the rock bottom moment that began my journey out of the abyss. I started delving deep into neuroscience, into psychology, into spirituality, starting confronting my own demons within to face myself and to learn a little bit more about how not only addiction, but how we navigate suffering in the human experience and confronting my own experiences from the war that had led me to seeking an escape from those experiences and ultimately facing them, which is what eventually got me to the point that I am now and happy to go deeper into some of those things. That was what led to the moment and ultimately began my trajectory out of that darkness.

Do you want to tell me a little bit about your background and maybe even a little bit before you went to Iraq and what happened in Iraq? What led you to that moment of being at that state where you what led to alcoholism? What led to all of that suffering and that life?

I struggled when I was in high school. I struggled with drugs and with alcohol, and I lost two friends to addiction. I was going down that path myself until I saw the movie Black Hawk Down. Has anybody seen that movie? That movie changed my life. Watching that movie and the courage of these men sacrificing their lives for another human being, it made me question the life I was living at the time. At that point, almost overnight, stopped doing drugs, decided to join the military, going to the Marines. It took me a year and a half to get in because I have flat feet, scoliosis, and a blood disorder that two doctors told me would kill me in boot camp.

This was post 9/11. Here’s a young kid who wants to go to the front lines. They found a way, and I got in. I’m very grateful I did. That changed the trajectory of my life. I went into Marine Corps infantry, and then three years later I was deployed to Iraq. Now at this point I had completely stopped drugs and never went back to drugs. Alcohol was much more prevalent, much more and easier to get. In hindsight, I’ve been drinking for sure, but I never, it never came in the way of my life, so to speak. After the war, when I went to Iraq, I was an infantry Marine. One of my jobs out there was to walk in front of our vehicle convoys looking for bombs before they could be used to kill me and my fellow Marines.

The only way out is through. You have to face it. You got to do the hard thing first to make your life easy in the long run. Share on X

A dangerous job to say the least. Somebody’s going to get blown up first. It would be me. I learned to navigate fear and adversity, especially being in the infantry front lines. I found out later that when I was in Iraq, one of my vehicles drove over an active bomb that for some reason didn’t explode. My friend’s vehicle drove over an active bomb and exploded. He died. I struggled a lot after the war. I didn’t get shot, I didn’t lose any limbs, I didn’t get killed. Why do I get to live? At first, when I came out of the war, I wanted to go back to war. I couldn’t handle life in this world. I kept trying to go back. Wars were ending.

I went to get my master’s in journalism so I could go back to war as a combat journalist. That plan didn’t pan out. I got a corporate job. I went and did a one-month crossing of Greenland, dragging a 190-pound sled for 350 miles across the ice cap. Back then, I was doing these things just to escape. I was seeking the intensity to return to a place that I felt most comfortable, which was the intensity of war, of these expeditions in the most hostile environments on the planet. I still do them today, but I’m doing them from a very different level of consciousness. I’m no longer seeking it as an escape. Back then, I was.

When I came back from Greenland, and now I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have war, I didn’t have expeditions, I had nothing external to silence the demons. With nothing external to consume my consciousness, what happens out of mind, as they say, is the devil’s playground. That’s when the drinking would go from, I was building a business at the time, but my drinking, it would be one day, and then eventually it would escalate to the point that I hit the rock bottom moment. It was a few years after coming back from the war, like four years after the war that it sort of, things were okay, but then really crashed many years later.

You mentioned going back to suffering, and it’s what I think is the path of least resistance is to go back to what you know, whether it’s a toxic relationship or any kind of suffering or anything that produces adrenaline or whatever is the solution. That’s the path of least resistance. That’s the road that is etched out for you.

We all have our own flavor of what we prefer, and sometimes even the hard thing, like skiing across Greenland, was hard. It was far from easy. Even within hard things, we have a flavor of difficulty that we prefer. As you said, some people will stay in a toxic relationship. It’s not easy, but it’s the flavor of hard they prefer. That’s why I always say, in fact, the whole next book I’m just working on is about there’s a difference between the hard thing and the right hard thing. Not all hard things make your life better. Doing the right hard thing will.

At the time, for me, instead of Greenland, now today, I have no regrets. It was a beautiful life experience. Back then, the right hard thing would have been confronting myself within. Going deeper within myself, stillness is one of the most challenging things in the human experience. There’s a great quote from a French philosopher, Blaise Pascal. He said, “I firmly believe all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

The inability to face ourselves, to face our own thoughts. There was a study that was done that men would rather shock themselves than sit just fifteen minutes quietly alone with their own thoughts. That’s what eventually led me into the darkness retreat, where I spent those 7 days and then 10 days completely sitting alone in darkness. That’s what I needed to do at the time. Finally, when I hit that rock bottom moment, that’s what I started to do to be with my thoughts, to confront myself with them.

Ultimately, the only way out of anything is through. You have to face it. The initial moment of facing it is not easy. We retreat to what feels easier in the moment. As I think everybody can gather, what feels easier in the moment is not what’s always the right thing for us long term. You’ve got to do the hard thing first to make your life easy in the long run. That’s what I eventually had to do.

What was that?

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The author of that quote was Blaise Pascal, a French philosopher.

We’ll have time for questions at the end as well. How did you realize that sitting quietly and learning how to sit quietly was the answer?

When I hit that rock bottom moment, I realized something clearly was not working. I had such a moment. I started reading. At first, it was a lot of research, just researching, understanding a different perspective on how we relate to our own suffering and the nature of trauma, the nature of the human experience of struggle. That’s what initially started it, which opened my eyes to new ways of thinking. For example, when I came back from the war, I was diagnosed with PTSD. I could not be in crowded rooms. I struggled with hypervigilance. Loud noises freaked me out. I had survivor’s guilt from losing my friend in the war.

 

Now I was told these were all symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. As I started doing a lot of research, I learned that I spent seven months in a place where loud noises meant death. Being hypervigilant of that was not a disorder. It was a normal human response to war. By ascribing that label of disorder, that something is wrong with me, I now attach that label to my identity. Now what happens when you think something’s wrong with you? I will beat myself up further. I will do anything to escape that. I will not value myself enough.

You retreat further and further into that downward spiral of that pattern. What I did was reframe my relationship to these experiences. Instead of calling it post-traumatic stress disorder, I called it post-traumatic stress. I was hypervigilant because I spent seven months in a place where crowds could mean death. They were literally people trying to kill me. Instead of trying to demonize that, to try to resist that feeling, I accepted it as it is. For example, with my guilt, what I did was, “Everybody told me you should not feel guilty.”

I was like, “I get it. In war, you cannot control what happens where bullets fly, where bombs explode. You cannot control it.” Everybody’s like, “You should not feel guilty.” Rationally, I can understand that. Emotionally, my guilt was just an expression of love for my brother, and so I reframed it. For a long time, especially when I sobered up before writing this book, I put a picture of my friend up on my wall, and it said, “This should have been you, earn this life.” It’s an intense thing to look at, but it reminded me that I’ve been blessed with a life. It’s my responsibility to earn it, to honor not just life, but to honor my friend that I’ve lost. That’s what actually drove me to finish writing this book.

Even struggling with crowds, as I lived in Jersey at the time, so I had to go to New York City. I struggled with the crowds in New York City. I just realized, “The struggle is not the problem. The problem is what I do with it once it arises.” I would sit there and acknowledge it. I would reframe where I focus my attention. At any point in life, there are only two things we control. Our actions and our attention. You cannot control the thoughts that initially arise in your mind. They happen as a result of past experiences that have shaped us. As for my hypervigilance, I can control what I do with it once it arises. Instead of trying to make it fight it, resist it, make it go away, I would pause. Here’s why it’s there.

It’s because of this experience that my brain is equated to danger. Instead, I would redirect my attention, and I would look at all the things in New York that I could be grateful for. The amount of people that had to come together to make this building in front of me a reality. The sidewalk that I’m walking on just for this moment in my life to come together, thousands of people made it possible. Even if we look at this room right now, the amount of people that made that chair, that made this, that made the ceiling.

There were thousands of people who came together to make this moment possible. Now we do not think about that. We can pause and direct our attention to that. We direct our attention, and where we direct our attention creates our reality. I always like to say, “Where your focus goes, your reality flows.” That’s a little mantra I use often. Where your focus goes, your reality flows. I would change my focus. In time, I stopped the initial pattern of that resistance. That fear of crowds dissipated because you cannot control the first thought, but you can control what you do with it.

Where your focus goes, your reality flows. You cannot control the first thought that arises in your mind, but you can control what you do with it once it appears. Share on X

By controlling what you do with it, you, over time, change the initial patterns that even arise. That’s how I started to reframe my relationship to my suffering and got more comfortable with being with the experience of anxiety, of fear, whatever it may be. Eventually, many years later, it led me into the darkness retreat because what happened was I went through a very challenging divorce where, without going into the weeds of it, my ex-wife got caught up in a cult.

I broke my sobriety. I did not like that about myself. I realized I had not gone deeper than I believed I needed to, given the fact that that happened. That’s what drove me into the seven days of darkness retreat, where I really went into stillness. That was an extreme experience of stillness at a different level, but it was profoundly beautiful and healing.

I want to hear more about that. One thing that comes to me is was there a period of time where you felt anger and pain after, like before you got to the other side, anger, pain? Did you ever find yourself being a victim? I’m hearing you talk about gratitude, which is being responsible, and I’m grateful for all the things. The cup is half full. The cup is half full, not half empty. Tell me about that experience, and how did you get to the other side of that?

I was very much to your point, victim mindset. Angry at the world, angry at what happened, angry that I didn’t get to go back to war. Feeling sorry for myself, all those things until it hits a breaking point. You do not want to have to hit such a rock bottom moment, but rock bottom is relative. Rock bottom can be consciously generated, as in you can choose to recognize this is the moment I do not want to be in anymore and really feel that pain fully. Even now when I work with athletes, for example, some people say, “After you lose a game or feel the pain, just dust yourself off and get back up.”

I’m like, “Not at all. I feel the pain. Sit with it.” Once you acknowledge that pain, you’re like, “I do not want to be here anymore, and then I’m going to do something differently to change that.” I definitely felt all those things in this sort of lead-up between the war and that rock bottom moment of feeling sorry for myself and all those things until we can. It’s a beautiful thing to have support. That’s why we’re in a room like this where you get external support from people. I had a lot of people who loved me, but ultimately you have to want to change. You have to generate that within yourself to do something differently. Generating that within finally was like, “I got to take ownership of my life.”

You cannot control most of what happens in life. One of the biggest causes of unnecessary human suffering is trying to control what you cannot control. We cannot control most of what happens in the human condition, including what initially arises in our mind, in our thoughts, our feelings, and response. What we can control are the two things. What you do with your actions and what you do where you direct your attention in response to the circumstances of life. The moment you fully acknowledge that, you can seize control of your agency over your own experience of reality.

What I learned over time, especially now, as I go deeper and deeper into spirituality and some of these experiences, spending time alone in darkness and Antarctica, like all unnecessary suffering of the mind is caused by resisting or clinging. Resisting what is or clinging to what is not. I wish I were in this version of reality, or you’re resisting. Resisting does not just mean resisting external conditions, like I wish the weather was not this way.

 

I wish the conditions in the country were not this way, whatever it may be. We resist our own emotions. I worked with somebody who had immense fear traveling to Iceland on his own, and he looked at all the crazy shit I do, and he was like, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I feeling scared? You do all this. I should not be scared.” The problem was not his fear. He felt fear because he had never traveled on his own. The brain has no mechanism to say, “This is safe.” A novel experience will generate an experience of fear.

His problem was not that. His problem was judging himself wrong for feeling the fear, resisting the fear. I should not feel this way. Something is wrong with me. Instead of saying, “God, the fear is there. I understand why it’s there.” Literally talk to your brain. I do this all the time to this day. I’ll talk to my brain as if it’s a different entity from myself and then say, “It’s there because I do not have an experience that this is normal. Nothing wrong with it. I understand it. I accept it.” The freedom from all unnecessary suffering of the mind is acceptance.

It’s like David Hawkins says in Letting Go. Like, “If you want things to be different than they are, that’s the path to pain and suffering.” You want to be happy, joyous, and free. You want a life of fulfillment. You’ve got to be in acceptance of what is. I cannot make things different. I cannot make people different. I cannot make my emotions different. If I’m in acceptance, then that’s the path to love, happiness, and fulfillment. Which leads me to the darkness retreat. Tell me about that and tell me what you got out of it.

The first time I went in was for seven days. This was after that divorce, and I broke my sobriety. Seven days, you’re completely alone in a dark room. It’s so dark you cannot see your hand in front of you. Twenty-four hours a day, and you start seeing lights in the darkness because they say your brain releases DMT. You experience very hallucinogenic-type experiences. The lights are as bright as this light. In fact, the brightest light I’ve ever seen was sitting in that dark room. It was blinding. I was going like this, trying to cover my eyes, but obviously the light was not external.

It was a surreal experience. To confront yourself that deeply, when you sit in stillness with yourself, you get to open doors within yourself that have not been opened before, because we do everything we can to distract ourselves from ourselves. Sometimes it’s not just the “negative things” of the drugs, alcohol, even people I work with who are very successful entrepreneurs. They’ll use work or working out purely as an escape. You can do the “positive things” to escape as well. It’s just something to escape. When you sit with yourself, you open the doors within.

What comes outside those doors is not just the sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. It’s your demons. It’s your darkness. It’s your pain. Only by facing that pain can you move through it. Carl Jung put it beautifully. He said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” If you do not make the unconscious conscious, you’re living as a slave to past patterns that you did not choose. By going into the darkness, I got to face everything. Actually, even journaled in the darkness. I would have a ruler and just kind of a journal in there. You read it after my handwriting is terrible, even in the light. It was legible enough. Thankfully, not legible enough. It just allowed me to face a lot of aspects of myself.

I had, at this point, written my book. I had confronted some of my demons from the war. There’s always stuff. The deeper you go, the greater you’re going to open access to that stuff. The second time I went into the darkness, that was purely training for Antarctica. The second time I went in was not to sort of heal the past. It was more training for the future. By that point, I was in the best place I’ve ever been mentally, spiritually, physically. It was more as a training for the solitude of Antarctica. The first time was really, let me figure out some new answers with them. That’s why I went in, and it was profoundly beautiful. I could not recommend the experience enough.

When you’re in the dark, how long were you in the dark for?

Seven days the first time, ten days the second time.

Did you eat? Did you go to the bathroom? Did you sleep?

Other than when you’re sleeping, it was meditation, journaling, and sometimes just sitting there being like, “I got a long time left in the dark,” confronting that boredom of it. That’s all part of the experience. I chose to do two juices a day. I wanted to add hunger to the experience. Twice a day, they would bring, they had a little double-sided box where somebody would bring a juice, put it in this little box, close the door, and then you grab the juice from inside. Twice a day I would get a juice given to me, and that was my only caloric intake.

You have zero exposure to light because even the slightest exposure to light will prevent whatever you want to call it, the hallucinogenic light shows because both times, after about two days, the lights are consistent. You’re seeing red lights, green lights, blue lights. You can call it what you want, depending on your own belief system, but sometimes the lights will take shape. Can like God speaking to you, whatever you want to call it, the universe, God, consciousness speaking to you through the lights. It was really beautiful to access that.

Now, was there an integration period after you did the darkness retreat, or was it right away?

Informal, in the sense of me just doing it myself. Reading my own journals, going deeper within, looking for what to do next that I had not done before. As we know, you can do something if you do not integrate it into you. It’s a great question. It’s not going to change your life. Go do ayahuasca, whatever it may be. You have to then look at what’s the thing that I learned that I’m going to do differently and then do it differently. There was. I cannot remember what it was the first time. That was a lifetime ago. Now, the second time, it was very much oriented towards training for Antarctica.

It was just a further refinement of the person. I went into the darkness the second time to create the character of who I needed to be to ski across Antarctica. Through all these realizations, I realized that every aspect of who we think we are is not inherent to the truth of who we are. It’s a constructed mechanism. Even our name was given to us by our parents. It’s not inherent to our aspect of identity. Every aspect of our identity is not objective reality. It’s constructed reality. What that means is it’s not so much about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself.

Every aspect of our identity is a constructed reality. It's not so much about finding yourself; it's about creating yourself. Share on X

You get to create whoever you want to be. That’s what I did in the darkness. Literally, I studied method acting, actors who, like, become their characters. I studied this, and I went into the darkness to become the character that I wanted to be for Antarctica. Which was a really powerful experience. I literally would pace back and forth on this yoga mat and just speak things that I had never spoken before by surrendering to the character essentially. I had started building the character outside the darkness. I went into the darkness to refine it.

Once you stepped out of the darkness, were you a different person?

I’d say I had opened new doors, and it required consistent action to make that a part of me. It’s not like you get new awakenings, but if you retreat back into the same patterns, those awakenings do not do much. You can open a door to a new reality, which you are going to have to walk through and then stay in it and do the work. In that sense, it definitely opened new doors about times I had to do the work to keep that realization a part of my being.

Eventually, what a new pattern of behavior integrated over time becomes you. They’ve done tons of research on this, even in the Vietnam War. They found a lot of people who were doing, I think it was opium or heroin out there. When they came back, many of them thought that everybody’s going to return. Many of them did not. What they realized was how much of a role the environment plays in our patterns.

If you come out of something like a darkness retreat and you go back to the exact same environment, you do not do anything different. You’re going to go back to the exact same way of being. Two sides to that are, one, change your environment. That’s not always practical. The stranger side of that is you do your best to change that environment does not always mean you can move states or something like that. The stranger side of that is just consistently maintaining the consciousness and awareness and intention to redirect your mind at will until it becomes you.

Choosing The Hard Path: Going Solo Across Antarctica

Let’s talk about Antarctica. Why did you decide to do that? Let’s talk about that.

By this point, I had gone through the seven-day darkness tree. It was in a really good space, business going well, life going well. I love pushing myself physically and mentally, especially in these isolations. To me, what draws me is the exploration of the mind. Antarctica was just a stage. The true terrain I was exploring was the mind. What I love about long endurance, like 24 hours on a stair climber or long runs or Antarctica, you have a lot of time to be alone with your mind. That’s both the challenge, as well as the opportunity. That’s the realm I like to play in. I was drawn to polar travel specifically for that.

You’re literally walking in flat white nothingness. Imagine staring at that white wall for 10 to 12 hours a day, moving absurdly slow with a 420-pound sled behind you, and every day looks the exact same. There’s not even, I mean, for the first 30 days in Antarctica, I didn’t see a mountain. First mountain in the distance at day 31. Every single day was flat white ice nothingness. Unlike mountain climbing. It often gets compared to Everest, for example. Unlike a mountain, when you’re going up and down the mountain, every day is different. You can actually fall off the mountain.

When you’re on a thin ridge line and have done mountain climbing as well, a thousand-foot drop on each side, your mind’s not wandering because there are consequences. The consequences are keeping your mind locked in. In Antarctica, it’s flat. Your mind wanders. The environment that does not lock you into flow. Your mind starts going places. It can start taking you into places you’ve never confronted before. It can make one minute feel like an hour when you’re suffering that much physically. That’s what I love to explore. That’s why I chose Expedition Antarctica.

What I was attempting to do was complete the world’s first coast-to-coast crossing of the entire continent, 1,750 miles over 115 days completely alone. An expedition so hard it had never even been attempted before, let alone completed. To this day, most adventurers think it’s impossible. Of course I wanted to complete it. I knew that it was very much on the verge of impossible. Even the company that organizes logistics told me that anyone who attempts this will probably fail. I was looking for an edge that had not been explored to go further than I’ve ever been before.

While I did want to complete it, I knew the odds were very low. I still attempted, it was the world’s first attempt ever at this feat, dragging the heaviest sled anyone’s ever dragged. I ended up making it for 500 miles over 60 days. I got diverticulitis at the end, which was a very severe infection in the colon that, if left untreated, can burst and kill you. Tragically, that’s what happened to an adventurer nine years ago in Antarctica.

I knew that I was flirting with life and death here, and that’s what ultimately ended the expedition. Even before that ended, I was nowhere near completing the crossing. It was unforgiving. There were days when I had two sleds, 400 pounds of gear, 420 pounds initially. They would get stuck in the soft snow. They would get stuck in there, and then every three steps, I’d fight them out, and then three steps later, they’d get stuck again, and this would just go on and on for hours upon hours every day.

Do an Ironman. My training sessions were 2, 4, 6, 8 hours. I’m so grateful for that because of all the time that I got to myself in my own head. I can only imagine what you got to go through.

It was also, as hard as it was, it was a privilege. I was probably geographically the most isolated human being on the entire planet for parts of that journey. In Antarctica, there are only penguins in one corner. Most of Antarctica has no life forms. Forget about isolated humans. I was like the most isolated life form on the planet. To experience that level of solitude, it was a privilege. There were days when I’d be standing out there looking out at this huge landscape. No one around me for hundreds of miles. You touched the hand of God. It was absolutely.

I can only imagine you must have figured a lot of things out.

You really get to go. You get the biggest realization is you see how much of your own experience of reality you generate through the stories in your head. Our entire reality. There are two different realities we live in at any moment in time. There is objective reality, the isness of things before we put labels onto it, and then as I was starting to talk about our constructed reality. Even in the simplest way, like for example, how do I know this is a pink water bottle? I was taught at a young age that this thing I’m holding is a water bottle. Even color is not actually inherent to the object.

It’s just light reflecting off the object that my brain sees as that color. It’s not inherent to the object. This object, I create a construct of how I relate to it. That construct does not just shape this. It shapes the entirety of our life. There are belief systems, our paradigm on what is possible, our view of how we relate to the world. We have been taught this from a young age by our parents, by the environment around us, by the world around us, everything. Those constructs shape our entire experience of reality. They do not have to. They’re just stories we make up in our head. The problem is most of us get attached to those stories as real. When you believe the story is real, you will operate as if it is real, and then you become a slave to that story.

 

It’s like thinking about it this way, a practical way to think about this. Imagine you’re wearing red sunglasses. If you’re wearing red glasses, everything’s going to look red. The blue sky, the green trees, everything looks red. When you recognize you’re wearing red glasses, then you realize that the redness is not inherent to the object. It’s how you see the world. We all have our own flavor of these red glasses, our beliefs and everything. Even attempting something as impossible. I met and married my wife, Melissa, who you all met while I was training for this expedition.

Now, I had a belief that, “There’s no way I can train for this expedition while being married.” That’s just a story in my head. Other people might say, validate it’s true, who gives a shit? I’m going to make up my own story. A simple way to change the story is if you notice yourself saying either “I can do this or this,” or “I cannot do this,” turn it into a forward-focused question. When you ask a question, you will start looking for answers. I would ask the question, how do we have both? We would look. We got creative and found answers. I still had to train 20 to 25 hours a week.

I wanted to spend time with my wife. We were just starting to get together. We bought a stair climber and put it in the living room. I would do these 10 to 12 hours on the stair climber while hanging out with Melissa. Our date nights were unique. We made it work. You find your own flavor of reality you want to create, and then you choose that reality, and you work backwards from there. This is another core foundation for self-mastery is choosing from the future first, not from the past.

You decide what your future you want to be and then you work backwards from that to engineer your reality. Most of us, we live our lives enslaved by the past. Who we are today is completely defined by the past. If you’re choosing your future based on this version of you, all we’re really doing is repeating the past. Look, we are shaped by our past because that’s what shapes our brain patterns. We do not have to be defined by it. By choosing a future so expansive, like crossing Antarctica, it does not have to be crossing Antarctica to be clear, not by any means. It’s certainly not the only mechanism for an awakening.

Whatever the thing is, you choose a future that this version of you cannot fathom achieving yet. That’s the only way you’re going to become someone you’ve never been before. If you choose a future that no version of you knows how to reach, you’re just going to keep repeating the same version. When I chose to ski across Antarctica, I didn’t know all the steps to getting there. One step at a time, you figure it out. You’re driving through fog. You cannot see a mile down the road. You see a few feet, and then it becomes clear and becomes clear. You in the process of choosing a future so expansive, you become someone you’ve never been before. That’s what fundamentally changes your experience of reality.

It reminds me of Joe Dispenza. That’s aligned with his teachings, and what he talks about is that you decide who you want to be. You decide your identity, and then the reality follows. It’s making decisions based upon who you want to be. You have to start acting like the person you want to be, the business you want to own, everything about you, your behaviors, your actions. All the stuff is going to change based upon who you see yourself as.

 

I like that you talk about if you continue making the same decisions that you made from, if the person that’s sitting here today is the person that’s making the decisions for my future, my future is going to look the same as my past. I am who I am today because of the decisions I’ve made. How can I expect that person to make different decisions? That’s what they say when you get into the rooms of AA.

Forgive me. I do not know either.

It’s basically my best thinking that got me where I am.

We do the best we can with our knowledge and awareness.

My best thinking got me where I am. That’s true. When I just got sober, my best thinking got me there. Where I’m at today, my best thinking got me where I am today. I still need people that are smarter than me, people that are more successful, people that are living the life that I want to live, whether it’s emotionally, spiritually, mentally, physically, I got to listen to somebody else besides Tim.

You surround yourself with different lenses of reality, and that gets you exposed to seeing a new way of the world. You choose from what that version of me looks like? What are they doing? What patterns of behavior do they have that this version of me does not? I’m going to start implementing those patterns now.

What We Get Wrong About Mental Health

Similar to you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. If I want my life to look different, I look at who I’m spending my time with. You’ve thought about mental health from a very different angle than most people. What do you think the mainstream approach gets wrong?

The biggest flaw with our collective paradigm on mental health is that it is a state without tension. We have this belief that mental health and mental well-being should be internal. Everything is good, no anxiety. Even the top self-help gurus, they demonize anxiety. They think of fear as bad, stress as bad, anxiety as bad. That’s the biggest flaw with our approach to mental health. You can experience a state of inner chaos, inner turmoil, and still be at peace within it. As I always like to say, inner peace is not the absence of chaos or conflict. It’s the acceptance of them. Viktor Frankl even says, “Man does not need a tensionless state.

What we need is something worthy to strive for and the tension is part of that journey.” The belief that we should not have anxiety or sadness, that causes us more suffering as opposed to simply accepting. I even teach clients that happiness is not the elimination of sadness. Happiness is the ability to accept sadness, to find a gift in sadness. You cannot have a summit without a valley. You cannot have pain without pleasure. You cannot have light without dark. When you accept and be with the entire spectrum of the human condition, the human experience, look, it’s not easy.

Happiness is not the elimination of sadness; happiness is the ability to accept sadness and find the gift in it. You cannot have a summit without a valley. Share on X

Some emotions are more challenging than others. That does not make them bad. Sadness, yes, is inherently more challenging to feel than happiness. That does not make it bad. It just is. We demonize it, and that’s what causes us all our unnecessary suffering, which creates more mental health issues, the problems that we find. Instead, got it. I’m feeling sad. I’ll give you an example. I went to a personal development seminar. Somebody lost his father recently, and he was grieving. The person at the seminar, I do not want to name names, was trying to help him get rid of his grief.

I’m like, “What are you doing? He lost his father. Obviously, you’re going to be grieving.” It’s not easy. That’s life. You feel it. Before going to Antarctica. Another one of my closest Marine brothers was killed in combat. That’s not easy to deal with. I was crying. I felt the pain of that. You feel it. You be with it, and then you channel it. Coming back to, like, the problem with our mental health is one, we believe that we should not feel these negative things. The other is kind of like just wallowing in it without channeling it.

This is why, coming back to what I said earlier, the fundamental rule of self-mastery is to choose from the future first. The reason why now, when I feel something painful, it does not destroy me is that I have something to channel it to. If you just sit and wallow in it, the mind’s going to spiral. That’s why there’s a saying, idle mind is the devil’s playground for a reason. I feel the pain, and then I channel it.

When I lost friends to war in Antarctica, I would literally sometimes access that state. Got it. I get to live. My friends didn’t. A lot of my brothers did not. I get to honor this life. I have to keep moving forward. You find a story because again, we’re making up stories in our head all the time. You create a story that serves the vehicle you’re aiming towards. If you do not have something you’re striving toward, you’re going to wallow in the pit, and that’s going to get you nowhere.

Being in sobriety, what I’ve learned is that I get to experience all of my emotions, not just the good ones. I think about the Yin and the Yang. You have to have the sadness and the loneliness and the pain. That’s the joy and the laughter and the love feels a lot better as opposed to just being in the middle all the time. We want to experience all of the emotion.

You feel it fully. It does make the challenging ones harder. When you feel fully, it dials up the volume of life. Everything becomes amplified. Once you start freeing your mind from the realization that I’m not my thoughts, I’m not my feelings, I’m not my experiences, I’m the thinker of my thoughts, I’m the feeler of my feelings, and I’m the experiencer of my experiences. Once you start, like detaching yourself from it, you can feel it without being enslaved by it. It dials up the volume. I feel more joy because I’m able to feel more pain. Everything, you want to feel more lifefully. You’re not.

 

I know people who have gotten, who think the spiritual path is a detachment from everything. You become like a walking dead zombie. That’s no way to live. I’ve seen it in some of the closest people to me in my past, in another life. That’s not a way to live. The spiritual path, the meaningful path, is to feel everything fully. You’re just not attached to it as the essence of who you are. Everything is impermanent. The waves will flow like the ebb and flow of life. I know that now if I feel sadness, I know it’s not permanent. Not going to define the entirety of my experience on this planet. I’ll feel it. It’s part of the experience. I want to feel it. I’ll use it for the thing I’m in service of, the life that I’m here to live.

A lot of people in this room have been told just to manage their symptoms or wait to feel better. What would you say to that?

I would say coming back to what we’ve shared before is starting by looking at, especially, there’s a great book, Marshall Goldsmith’s Road Call, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, to remember a tool works until it does not. When I was at the deepest, darkest point, coming out of the verge of suicide, at that point, it’s hard to envision a possible future. You’re just getting out of pain. At that point, when you’re in the depths, “Let me just focus on a day. What’s the one day you’re getting out of pain, you slowly move from there to there.”

As you start moving out of it and one thing starts stabilizing, then you start looking toward the future. Coming back to everything we’ve shared is not just managing the symptoms, but who do you want to create? Who do you want to be? Start practicing those behaviors now. Start becoming that person now. Start stepping into that identity, start choosing it, start creating that reality. Be with whatever the pain, like learning to get comfortable with pain is the most important skill to master. This is not just me saying it. There’s a great researcher who wrote this book called Flow.

He said, “Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival and more likely to improve the quality of our lives than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.” Based on decades of research on happiness, no trait is more useful than the ability to transform adversity into a joyful challenge. How do you do that? The nature of adversity is that it’s hard. One, you train in it. I love doing hard things, and I’ve gotten comfortable with being hard, with the pain. You put yourself in that arena consciously, and now you become used to it, and you become comfortable with the flavor of it, and you’re no longer enslaved by it.

No trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of our lives than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. Share on X

One of the most useful tools is curiosity. Where is this going to take me? When I go into the darkness, when I do 24 hours on a stair climber, I’m driven by curiosity. Same thing in Antarctica. The curiosity to see what’s going to happen. This moment’s hard, but I’m curious to see what’s going to come from it. Instead of beating myself up, judging, coming back to that acceptance of business. Learning to get comfortable with what we all know. When we’re struggling with addiction, it’s you’re escaping something. Whatever that thing you’re escaping, it’s going to be very hard to face it. If you face it and you go through hardship temporarily, your life will become easier.

I do a cold plunge often. Quite a few people in this room have done cold plunges. I have cold plunges at our residential facility and at the outpatient home. That’s starting the day off. I like doing it in the morning and starting the day off doing something hard. Adversity. It makes it so that the next thing, the rest of the day, is a lot easier.

Now, having the things that I do when I’m sitting there working on my next book or whatever writing, I’m like, “I’m not dragging a 420-pound sled through Antarctica, so no complaints.” Gives you a lot of perspective.

Fearvana: Turning Fear Into Fuel

The word Fearvana is your own creation. What does it mean and how did you land on that idea? The idea that fear itself could be the doorway to a better life.

What it means is this idea of fear and nirvana, two seemingly contradictory ideas that are in fact complementary. I define Fearvana as the bliss that results from engaging our fears to pursue our own worthy struggle. That means we all have our own flavor of what a meaningful life looks like. Obviously, Antarctica is not the only one. It could be whatever. Building a recovery clinic. It could be anything. Raising a child, your something meaningful, everything meaningful is going to be hard.

Finding the bliss that results from pursuing that and giving your soul to it. Fearvana is the idea that fear is not the antithesis of nirvana. It’s an access point to it. I was talking about how we judge things. I’ll give you a meta level, the high level of what Fearvana is and how it translates to the human experience. In the entire human experience, we have these series of opposing forces, as we talked about a summit and a valley, pain and pleasure, ego and humility, darkness and light, contentment and discontentment. We often demonize one side as bad.

We judge the fear as bad, the stress as bad, pain as bad, darkness as bad. The reality in the human condition is the Yin Yang. Neither side is bad or good. True inner mastery is the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory forces as true at the same time. Neither is bad or good. Even if you look at life itself as a creation of opposing forces coming together, inhalation, exhalation, that creates life. A heartbeat is contraction and expansion. That creates life. Two opposing forces create life itself. When you start accepting this, and that’s what the book is about, is that nothing is bad, nothing is good.

I also want to be clear, like I’m not talking about it in the context of morality and like the human doing good. This is more about how you relate to your experience of life. That’s a completely different conversation about morality. In the context of how you relate to things, nothing is bad or good. It just is. Fear is not bad. Nothing is bad. That’s what this book is about fundamentally. The core ethos of everything is that the non-dualistic approach is what Buddhism teaches. The essence of it is that the Yin Yang is where light and dark coexist.

You can feel both together. It’s like a cold plunge. It sucks. There’s beauty in that pain, whatever it may be. I mean, even in Antarctica, there was a moment where I was looking down. I had just climbed this big hill, and I could see my tent at the bottom there like a tiny dot. I felt so humble about how small I was in this magnificent epic world. I also felt like a God being in that world. You get to see ego.

Ego is deemed as something bad. Ego is not bad. To do great things, you have to believe you’re great. Everything, every strength, can be a shadow. Every shadow can be a strength. Ego, fear, even joy, the search for joy can lead to some dark places, as I think we all know. Everything is not inherently bad or good. Too much of it can be bad and destructive, but you embrace both sides, and you play on both sides, and through it all, you find a greater peace with them.

Going back to Antarctica, did somebody come and save you? Did you go deeper?

I had a satellite phone and a GPS. There was a main base camp in Antarctica called Union Glacier where there’s logistics and support. I would check in with the team. The company’s called ALE, Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions. I would check in with them for my satellite phone every night, telling them, “I’ve moved 15 miles. I’m at this position,” and read out the coordinates on my GPS. When I finally had to get evacuated, I called them, and they sent a plane to pick me up.

How long was it when you said, “Man, I do not think this is going to, I think I’m going to need to call for help.” How many days?

It was one day.

You’re like the same.

It depends. Antarctica weather is pretty unforgiving, and it’s all weather dependent. They couldn’t come get me. I called them on day 60. They came and got me on day 61 because the weather was too bad for day 60 for them to come and get me. They had to wait the next day.

So much of addiction is about running from a feeling. What does it look like to turn toward the hard feeling instead of numbing it?

The answer is it’s simple but not easy. Again, it’s not a sexy answer, but it’s literally just sitting with it. I hate it. It does not sound complicated. It’s not like a fancy answer, but that’s really what it is. There are many ways to express it. You can sit with it. You can journal. You can go for a walk with that music. You can find some way you can talk to a therapist. You can talk to somebody, but just face it head-on. It’s not more complicated than that. Again, simple is not easy. It’s far from easy to face this.

You can go, so like I had one kid who was so inspired by my darkness retreat, a 21-year-old kid, locked himself in a dark closet for an hour. He was battling a lot of stuff from some rough things he went through as a child. Just locked himself in a dark closet for an hour and sat with it. Hard as hell to do. On the other side of it is a piece you have not achieved before. That’s really what it boils down to. It’s just confronting it, being fully with it. Again, the expression can look different, whether it’s talking to somebody, journaling, meditation, a walk without, no. Allow yourself to feel it fully. I gave you an extreme example, if you’d like now.

I’m going to give you a caveat here before the story. This person was ready to go to this place that I’m about to say. I didn’t just ask her this question on day one. We had been doing work together. As you know, like again, what got you here will not get you there. Some people are not ready to go to a certain space in their pain cave yet, but this person was. We’ve been doing a lot of work together, and she’d gone through a pretty horrific sexual trauma as a child. At a certain point, I finally asked her, “What if you deserved what you went through?” She goes, “Whoa.” I said, “Does some part of you feel like you deserved it?”

She goes, “Yes.” I knew this at this point. Some part of me felt like her. I was like, “Does some part of you feel guilty for it?” She said, “Yes.” Now, everybody would tell her, “You do not deserve it,” because obviously in a moral sense, no, she does not, right? Some part of her felt it. I said, “Go there. Confront that part.” That night she sent me a text saying, “Fuck you, Akshay,” because it sent her to a dark place. On the other side of it, the next day she shared with her husband for the first time what happened after 25 years. There was a part of her that felt it. Now, I’m not saying you have to feel it. If you do not feel it, do not go there.

If you feel that, allow yourself to go into that darkness. It’s fucking hard to face it. It’s really hard. On the other side is freedom. That’s why I asked her that question. Again, she was ready to go to this place because it’s a dark place to confront. When she was ready to go there, I asked her that question because I knew she did. I said, “Allow yourself to feel it. Stop. The world’s stories tell you you should not, you do not deserve it, you should not feel guilty.” “Got it.” The same thing people told me. “You should not feel guilty.” I did. Telling me I should not feel it does not do anything. Instead, I allowed myself to feel it and go into those spaces.

I want to open it up to questions now.

Thank you very much for sharing your story. First and foremost, thank you for your service. I’m curious about how you’ve challenged yourself to do extremely hard, strenuous activities, enlisting in the military, being deployed, and then obviously finding different flavors of that now that you’ve been back. I’m curious, how do you view the world now? First of all, how do you just view the world and like everyday life, and how do you deal with the mundane?

I view everyday life in the world as an opportunity. Everything is an opportunity. Problems, I always like to say, progress is not the elimination of problems. Progress is the creation of new problems. I always look at it from the cut like a meta-level lens, the duality. Selfishness and selflessness can coexist. I’m always offering from both those ends. What is the goal that I want to achieve for me and might make my life better? How does that goal translate into those whom I want to serve in the world? Tie that together and move. I have it. I’m always aiming for a certain mission that I’m striving for. The daily tasks are oriented towards that future.

Whatever happens, because most of life is beyond our control, is an opportunity. Confront that. I like my flavor of what I love the most is the long endurance stuff. Someone was finding ways to squeeze that in. That to me is like I’m driven by a curiosity to explore the mind. That’s like the high-level thing of everything I do is exploring that both within myself and with the people I work with as a mental performance coach. That’s what drives me and helps other people navigate the experience of human suffering. The fundamental two questions I guess I seek to answer are the human questions.

The One Practice To Start Today

How do we navigate suffering? How do we create a life of meaning, joy, and fulfillment at some flavor? That’s like the human experience that we’re all seeking. We all have our own expression of what that path looks like. Guiding people on that path through some of the things I’ve been blessed to learn on my journey is the life mission. One thing I see, well, actually one more thing to that. An exercise I highly recommend people do is write down your own obituary. Think about your death. I actually have the words I want written on my tombstone is, “He brought light into darkness.”

If you have your tombstone and your obituary as your North Star, that becomes your compass to guide you. Most of us do not ever think about death, but when you’re forced to confront your own mortality, it changes how you live your life. It’s a powerful mechanism. In a lot of spiritual cultures, including in Bhutan and Buddhism, they meditate on death regularly. They, like, have a friend who leads death meditations. It’s a very powerful experience. She’s actually, believe it or not, that’s a thing, a certified death meditation practitioner. She leads these death meditations. When you confront your immortality, it changes how you live life. Look at what’s your North Star and work backwards from there.

A follow-up question. What is your Everest? What is the thing that you want to accomplish within your lifetime, like an extremely hard thing?

Antarctica was pretty.

Antarctica was up there.

Something that you would really prepare for, obviously, but then like no matter the challenges, you are going to do this thing.

Maybe in the back of my mind I will return to Antarctica at some point. We’ll see. It’s a great question. I have many different challenges that I work through, life experiences I want to gain, and just taking it there. What I’ve learned to do over time is detach from the outcome of things because, like one of the big ones in psychology as a term for this, what is it called? Forgive me, I cannot remember the term. The belief that I’ll be happy when I get there.

There’s an actual term for this in psychology that I cannot remember what it is. That’s one of the biggest causes of human suffering. Over time, I’ve released the attachment from, like, I need to accomplish that thing. It’s like, this is the thing I’m aiming for, and I’m going to love the process of getting there. If I do not hit that specific result, cool. I’ll become someone I’ve never been by aiming for that result. I’m writing my next book. My goal is to sell a million books. The amount of authors who have sold a million books is extremely small.

Now let’s say I massively fail at that goal and sell half a million. I’ll become someone new in the pursuit. It’s more striving for that next experience and the work. You tie it to a practical element of life. Like, “Now I’m not just spending a stupid amount of money to do these crazy things. I actually have to make some money for my business and life.” You find a way to manage the practical with, like, the cool life experiences.

I appreciate that. We do talk about that a lot here that success is irrelevant to anything if you’re not happy. You’re not going to be happy if you achieve something. You have to find happiness first. I do appreciate what you just said.

We see that all the time. People who seemingly have everything we think we want, success, money, fame. They’re miserable. The target, once you aim for it, just lives in the back of your mind. All the summit does is dictate what the path looks like. Once you have the summit that guides the path, your focus is on the path, on the process. That’s why my next book is called The Work Is the Win. That’s the whole idea. The work is where the win happens. The outcome is a complete side effect. It may happen and may not. You can never control it, but you can control the amount of action and effort you put in to make that outcome far more likely.

The work is where the win happens. The outcome is a complete side effect. You can never control the outcome, but you can control the amount of action and effort you put in. Share on X

Thank you so much.

It’s like, on that note, it’s like Ironman. People, I want to do an Ironman. It’s really not the Ironman. It’s the journey of who you become along the way. It’s running when you do not want to run. It’s swimming when you do not want to swim. Biking when you do not want to swim. It’s the relationships, the communities, the suffering, all of that along the way. When Ironman is here, when the actual event is here, it’s just here. It’s just the race.

It’s one temporal moment in time.

It’s all of the other things along the way.

My name is Devin. Thank you for your service as well. Thank you for your story. It’s really inspiring, just like really just letting us know that anything is possible that we want to accomplish. It’s just up to us to put in the footwork, and I heard Bruce Lee somebody asked him, not a saying but somebody asked him “How do you find inner peace?” He said, “You do not find it, you choose inner peace.” I  was like, “How much are you talking about facing those fears in the friend, the freedom you’ll get from just facing them head-on, experiencing that temporary pain, and then you’ll be released from it?”

That’s something that I’m barely learning since I’ve been on this journey that I’ve really been working on. It’s like all those things that I’ve been running from my whole life and buried so much that I do not even really remember it. I do not know if I was choosing to not remember it or if I just was in the situation. The last thing that I’ve been facing in my therapy and stuff is like the sexual abuse as a kid. Once I finally spoke about it and like not just dwelling in it, I just felt like such a big weight lifted off me. Just like realizing we do not have to live in all that past trauma. It’s a choice. At the end of the day, like everything he said, I wrote a lot of stuff down, and he said, so I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Absolutely an honor. I just want to honor you all, man. I know the journey that you’re going through. We all have our own flavor of it, of course, and it’s not an easy journey, but I honor you all for doing the work and being here. So much respect, really. It’s awesome.

You said you had PTSD. How did you handle your flashbacks?

I didn’t have too many of those specifically. I would have some at night, but the way to think about it is, as I mentioned, our past shapes how our brain works today. Now the brain is actually a predictive brain. Every experience in every moment is shaped by two forces. What your brain has learned about the past and the incoming sensory information in the present. Your brain takes, does a flashback happen? The brain says, “This thing could kill me. Now I’m activating it to keep me alive.” The brain’s number one focus is keeping me alive. The way to change that is to change your brain’s prediction in the moment.

That’s what I would do when I, for example, had the loud noises or the crowds in New York. My brain activates a prediction that this is danger. That’s your brain’s number one mechanism, right? Danger equals kill you. I’m going to keep you on alert. I can change the prediction in the moment by redirecting my attention. That’s the simplistic way of saying it is you change past trauma by changing the prediction in the moment. For example, if I was in the woods, and then a lion attacks me in the tall grass. My brain creates a meaning that tall grass equals danger. I’m going to say, “Fuck away from tall grass,” and I’m going to be very scared of tall grass.

Now, if I want to change that mechanism, because let’s say I live in a world where there’s going to be a lot of tall grass, I’m going to put myself in tall grass. I’m going to feel the fear that arises. Acknowledge it. “There’s no danger here. I’ve got it. Next time I come in, maybe this will slightly lower the volume dial, slightly lower, slightly lower,” until that volume is no longer there. It’s really what it boils down to ultimately is changing the prediction of your brain that is created in the moment. That’s why you view it almost as a separate entity from you. In the darkness actually created different names for the voices in my head. I would call them like Bane and Thanos, like superhero entities.

I would literally label the different voices in my head. You talk to your brain as if it’s not you. That’s at the core of what it boils down to. If I had that moment of thinking about the war or something, “I arrived, got it. Let me sit with this.” It’s hard. I spoke to one woman who was navigating PTSD from the Boston bombing, and she was saying how she was going through the anxiety and the fear every time a loud noise hit.

I said, “Next time a loud noise hits, I want you to just sit with it and just kind of do not do anything.” She goes, “That’s really hard.” I go, “I know, but that’s the only way out.” The challenges and it’s human. We want to get to the other side of it without doing the hard thing in the middle. I’m not faulting anybody for wanting that. I did the same thing, but that’s not going to, you’re not going to get there. You’re going to suffer more. Does that answer your question?

Yes, that’s great. Thank you.

I just thought about that until another question, like cannot stress this enough. You’ve gone through some stuff in the past. Your brain has meaning. It’s created by it. There’s actually a lot of research that shows even our memories can be, there’s a researcher who implanted fake memories into a person to show that our memories are fabricated. We can create all kinds of stories in our head. Got it. What’s the story I want to change? Then you practice it. You embody it. You embody it. Your brain creates new mechanisms and predictions to change how you move through the world.

Closing Questions (Always Asked)

Is there a question I should have asked you that I didn’t ask you?

I cannot think of anything off the top of my head now. Hopefully, this was valuable. Obviously, if there are any more questions, I’m happy to stay. I cannot think of anything off the top of my head.

Where can people find you? How can they connect? This is your first book. Your second book. What’s the name of your second book?

The first book, Fearvana. You can find me on Instagram at Fearvana.com. Feel free to reach out if I can be of service. The book is on Amazon, Kindle, paperback, Audible, all that good stuff. The next book is called The Work Is the Win: How to Achieve More, Master Yourself and Love the Process. What we’re talking about it’s about striving for more but loving the journey. That one will not be out till May. I literally just finished it like three days ago. I’ve been in a different endurance feed, locked into a windowless room, eighteen hours a day, staring at a computer writing. I just finished it like 3, or 4 days ago.

You left me a voice memo the other day. I think you must have been running on your treadmill.

Stair climber usually, yeah. That’s my usual.

Twenty-four hours on a stair climbing. Are you talking like nonstop 24 hours straight on the stairs?

Outside of getting off to go to the bathroom, then I would like to add the time, 24 hours straight.

I’m really curious about your ultra marathon experience. I’d like to do one in my life. Can I ask how long was your longest one?

In terms of running, so not the stair climber?

No.

A 24-hour run. I’ve done a 24-hour run as well.

How do you fight sleep? How do you train for that?

You build up to it slowly, I would say. Wherever we all start is a different place, obviously. I didn’t do my first 24-hour ever like start with the 5-hour, then a 6, and do 12. Practice, even like doing a little bit, maybe 18 or something like that practice sleep deprivation part of it is it’s going to suck. There’s no way around that. You build a comfort zone with the suck. You use caffeine. Caffeine definitely, even on the 24-hour stair climber, definitely some caffeine. You cannot avoid the sleepiness and the pain. It’s just going to happen. You build up to getting acclimatized to it. I’ve done many ultra marathons, from a 50-miler to the one around the cul-de-sac. It was 50 miles around, 55 miles around a cul-de-sac, 80 miles, 100 miles, and then the 24-hour was the longest run I did.

It’s either for that.

You sleep like a baby. It’s great. It’s awesome that you want to do it. I’d say just build up slowly. Build your resistance wherever you’re starting now. Push a little harder, face the inevitable pain that arises from it. You teach your brain that “Pain is not going to kill me.” You start developing a more positive relationship with it. You can push further and further and further out. I actually have a 40-hour stair climber session planned next. That’s going to be coming up next month. Forty hours on stair climbers. That’ll be a fun day.

It’s similar to doing a cold plunge. I always say, you’re not going to die. You’re going to be okay.

It’s going to suck, but you’ll be fine.

It’s really inspirational to just show people that we can do anything we put our mind to.

Thank you. I absolutely wholeheartedly believe that about the human spirit. It’s certainly not like I’m special or anything. I have flat feet, have scoliosis, I have a blood disorder. The two doctors told me it would kill me in boot camp. I’m far from genetically gifted. I’m not even the fastest runner in the world. I do not care. I enjoy the process of it. We all have that ability. It’s just channeling and building up the ladder of challenge and risk one step at a time, and you’ll start to see how capable you really are.

You said, like, feel that pain, be with that pain, and then channel it. Channel what you want from that pain. That’s very important because so many people experience pain. They just like, even for me myself, like for instance, my father’s suicide four years ago. Until recently, I just dwelled in it. For me and just reasons to use over. Now I’m using it as a positive in my life. First, I do not want to do that. I do not want that to be me. As well as the addiction, he purposely overdosed himself. My little brother just died of an overdose in February. Just using those as a positive now in my life. Of course, they hurt and are sad. Now I see the bigger picture. I get the opportunity that they do not have, so I get to choose life because they cannot anymore.

I’m so sorry you went through that, man. One of the most powerful quotes I’ve heard about navigating people you’ve lost. I lost a few Marine brothers of mine to suicide as well. Harold Kushner wrote this book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and he says, “The dead depend on us for their redemption and their immortality.” What really hit home for me is that that’s what helped me write this is that I’m not honoring my friend if I keep drinking.

I’m to honor my friend’s life by making my life meaningful. Whatever I’ve done in this life is not just mine. If somebody’s been impacted by my work here, you’re connected to my friend who died because he’s connected to me. We are in this chain of interconnected beings, and whoever you touch now is connected to your dad and your brother, and we’re all connected through that.

You said the dead depend on our redemption?

The dead depend on us for their redemption and their immortality. That one really, as I remember it, really hit home for me.

Anything else? We good? Let’s give it up for Akshay Nanavati.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for your time. I appreciate you. I appreciate you taking time out of your day.

It’s my privilege, man.

It was awesome. You guys like that? Thanks, brother.

This was awesome, man. A real pleasure.

 

Important Links

• Akshay Nanavati
• Akshay Nanavati on Instagram
• Fearvana
• What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
• Flow
• Harold Kushner wrote this book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

 

About Akshay Nanavati

Akshay Nanavati is a Marine Corps combat veteran, speaker, mental performance coach, and author of Fearvana, endorsed by the Dalai Lama. In Iraq he walked ahead of vehicle convoys searching for roadside bombs.

He came home battling PTSD, depression, and alcoholism that brought him to the edge of suicide. He rebuilt his life by facing his pain instead of running from it, and went on to build a global business, run ultramarathons, spend up to ten days alone in complete darkness, and complete a world-first 60-day solo expedition in Antarctica, dragging a 420-pound sled roughly 500 miles across the ice.

Today he helps people navigate suffering and create lives of meaning, joy, and fulfillment. His second book, The Work Is the Win, arrives in May.