The Art of Manliness - #603： The Physical Keys to Human Resilience

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Psychiatrist

00:00:11.760 Viktor Frankl said that between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space

00:00:15.560 is our power to choose our response. Frankl was talking about our ability to choose our

00:00:18.980 mental responses to what we encounter in life. But what if we could also choose how

00:00:22.140 our physiology responds to our environment so that we can perform and thrive on a higher

00:00:25.800 level? My guest today explores that question in his latest book. His name is Scott Carney

00:00:29.640 and he's the author of The Wedge, Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human

00:00:33.500 Resilience. We begin our conversation discussing how Scott's investigation into the breathing

00:00:37.260 methods of Wim Hof, an extreme athlete, turned him from a skeptic into an intrigued believer

00:00:41.380 who wanted to learn more about our ability to exercise control over our physiology. Scott

00:00:45.240 then explains his idea of the wedge as the ability to consciously put a gap between an external

00:00:49.400 stimulus and the otherwise automatic physiological response it elicits. Scott and I then discuss

00:00:54.260 his trip around the world to talk to people who have found ways to create wedges in their

00:00:57.760 lives in order to elevate their physical and mental states. We discuss how throwing kettlebells

00:01:01.700 around can be used to overcome fear and experience flow, how lying in a float tank may recalibrate

00:01:06.480 PTSD, how building up tolerance to CO2 can increase your physical performance, how saunas can boost

00:01:11.360 resilience, and why the power of the placebo effect is greatly underrated. After the show's

00:01:15.480 over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash wedge. Scott joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:28.360 All right, Scott Carney, welcome back to the show.

00:01:31.240 Oh man, it's so exciting to be here.

00:01:33.800 So we had you on the show a few years ago to talk about your book, What Doesn't Kill Us,

00:01:37.400 and it was about your exploration, your journey with Wim Hof, the famous breath guy who can warm

00:01:43.660 up his body and change his immunity system with his breath. We'll let people check that

00:01:48.480 out. We'll put a link to the show on that one. You got a new book out that's sort of in a similar

00:01:51.800 vein. It's called The Wedge, Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human Resilience.

00:01:57.280 So how did your experience and your work with Wim Hof lead to this book, The Wedge?

00:02:03.080 Yeah, so when I met Wim, I had been writing this book about how meditation can kill you. And I read

00:02:11.320 this article about this crazy Dutch dude in Holland, and this was in 2011 when Wim Hof was sort of an

00:02:17.200 unknown. And it said that he could like sit in ice water for like crazy amounts of time and control

00:02:23.780 his immune system and perform these superhuman feats of endurance through his like quirky meditation

00:02:29.540 method that was like a breath protocol and like sitting in ice for a long time. And when I heard

00:02:35.880 about him, I was like, this guy's crazy and he's going to get people killed. And so I went out with 0.99

00:02:41.860 this commission from Playboy magazine to go essentially debunk him as this false guru character

00:02:48.700 who was probably just in it for the money. And the shocking thing about my experience with Wim is that

00:02:56.160 I get to his dilapidated training center in Poland and I sit down with him and he teaches me his

00:03:02.280 breathing method and like almost instantaneously, I am getting the sort of effects out of it that

00:03:08.340 he does. Like it's, you know, one of the things that happens is when you breathe, his breathing

00:03:12.620 method is basically hyperventilation and then holding your breath and hyperventilating and holding your

00:03:17.120 breath. And all of a sudden I was in like just an hour of doing this. I was holding my breath for

00:03:22.540 three minutes at a time. And then he said, go do some pushups. And I do some pushups while holding my 1.00

00:03:27.420 breath. And I do twice the number that I'd ever done before in my life at a go. And I was again,

00:03:33.440 holding my breath. And so this was this eyeopening experience where I was like, well, I have to,

00:03:39.260 instead of debunking this dude, write something that was about the science behind what he does.

00:03:44.520 And I ended up repeating the same sort of crazy cold endurance stuff that he does. Like I run this

00:03:49.800 obstacle course race in Northern England and basically just a bathing suit. I climb up Mount Kilimanjaro

00:03:55.860 in a bathing suit and I do it really, really fast. I mean, it was this sort of like total

00:04:00.620 transformative experience. And that book, What Doesn't Kill Us is, you know, a really,

00:04:06.700 it's a fascinating read and it has gotten, you know, I get emails every day about how my journey

00:04:12.640 and like has changed their life because, you know, people are now learning how to interact with harsh

00:04:19.460 environments in a way that, that sort of changes their fundamental biology. And I think one of the,

00:04:28.180 the things that we have to realize, like, it's not like I'm sucking down spiritual energy from heaven,

00:04:36.320 right? And I'm using this to like power my body, but there's actually evolutionary reasons why these

00:04:42.080 things work. If you think about where our ancestors came from 300,000 years ago, you know,

00:04:47.180 Homo erectus was like running around the plains of Northern Africa, exposed to crazy amounts of,

00:04:53.440 of physical stress, right? Things like, you know, temperatures going up and down, wild animals,

00:04:58.980 they were, had to run, they had to intermittent starvation, and we just don't get those stresses

00:05:04.520 anymore. So what the power of the Wim Hof method was, it was like, Hey, we're going to give your body

00:05:09.840 some, some stress and, and, and, and some cold stress that you really, I mean, when was the last

00:05:15.740 time you took a ice bath, right? When was the last time you, you, you jumped into water that had little

00:05:20.760 ice cubes floating on it? Probably not recently, unless you're sort of into this, this stuff. And

00:05:26.580 what happens, what we find out is that when we start exposing ourselves to these extreme environments,

00:05:32.900 we find a way to channel anxiety and even autoimmune illnesses and sort of reverse them. I mean, if you

00:05:42.820 think about it, if, if our archaic ancestors were always combating, you know, lions, tigers, bears,

00:05:49.900 and starvation and all that stuff, every one of those things required a physical response, right? It

00:05:55.900 required you to respond with like adrenaline, with cortisol, with these energy boosting things.

00:06:00.900 And we don't have that anymore. Now I sit at my house and I think COVID-19 is coming to get me.

00:06:07.980 I think about how I'm going to be in like quarantine and all of these things that are,

00:06:11.420 that are, you know, running around the world, you know, I think of your political environment and

00:06:14.820 the economy and none of these things require a physical response, right? These things require

00:06:20.640 creative thinking and, and, and other stuff, but by not having a physical response, we've dumped this

00:06:26.480 adrenaline, we've dumped this cortisol into our bloodstream and it turns against

00:06:30.780 us. And the magic of what doesn't kill us. And the Wim Hof method was that I learned that by

00:06:35.600 exposing myself to cold water and his specific type of breathing protocols is that I was able to

00:06:42.740 find an outlet for those responses and become a much more resilient person overall.

00:06:49.060 And so after that experience, it led you down this trail of exploring other tactics that you've

00:06:53.720 found people using where they're taking advantage of these, these evolutionary adaptations we have

00:06:58.620 of adapting to physical stress and then just exploring this even more. And that's what this

00:07:03.680 book, the wedge is all about. Yeah, absolutely. Like I was up at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro with

00:07:08.600 Wim, right? We just sprinted up this mountain. It took us 28 hours to get to the top. And it usually

00:07:13.920 takes about five days. So we were doing this in like sort of this blistering sort of even dangerous

00:07:18.520 pace. And I realized at the top of the mountain that, that I was about to have the cheesiest thought

00:07:26.320 that any human had ever had, which was, I had gotten to the top of this mountain because I am not

00:07:30.540 on the mountain. I thought to myself, I am the mountain, right? This is like, should the six,

00:07:37.260 like sort of that spiritual quote that should show up on like a yoga poster somewhere. But it was also

00:07:41.480 this very profound moment because I realized that I didn't get there just by fighting my way up as like

00:07:46.000 this sort of individual, but I was actually cooperating with the sensations from the

00:07:50.900 environment. And through that cooperation, through that connection is why I was able to have this

00:07:57.260 endurance. It wasn't fighting. It was getting into something like a flow state. So what do you mean by

00:08:02.360 this? The book's called The Wedge. What do you mean by The Wedge? So there are two basic ideas,

00:08:08.120 right? So I call, I, the book is called The Wedge and think about that as like a capital T and a capital

00:08:13.160 W. And then there's like a lower case version, which is A Wedge. On a conceptual level, The Wedge

00:08:20.500 with the capitals is, is that choice that we have to intercede between stimulus and response in the

00:08:29.740 body. It's like a big picture idea is that when you feel something coming in through your sensory

00:08:36.500 pathways, you, your body can react without you thinking, or you can be like, I'm going to take

00:08:42.040 some time and put some space in between that stimulus and response. So it's like a, it's like

00:08:46.560 this big picture idea and it applies to like everything. A Wedge, the lower case version is

00:08:53.580 when I'm talking about specific techniques, like little things you can do to, to provide yourself

00:09:00.040 that space. And let's just take the case of like a nice bath in, in cold exposure. The ice bath is

00:09:07.740 a wedge, right? It's that technique to, to get in there. But the wedge, the capital wedge is that

00:09:13.620 mental trick we use for that. When we go into the ice bath, that we are suppressing our urge to clench

00:09:21.220 up and shiver. And you're trying to create space so that as that tension comes up in you, you will it

00:09:27.960 to relax. And that's what the wedge is in that moment. All right. So the wedge is your, it's basically

00:09:33.660 you're, you are taking what most people think are just automatic, reflexive, physiological responses

00:09:39.440 and, and not making them automatic and reflexive and, and having a bit of control over that.

00:09:46.220 Yeah, exactly. Like that is like the heart of it. And, and, you know, you probably should have

00:09:51.020 written the subtitle to my book because that was beautiful.

00:09:53.540 All right. So to understand what allows us to do this, like what allows you to not clench up

00:09:57.720 whenever you submerge yourself in cold or what allows you not to have that reflexive fear response,

00:10:02.860 which we'll talk about, we need to understand some, some neurology, some psychology, what goes

00:10:08.120 on when we experience things. And you talk about, we're able to, you're able to insert a wedge into

00:10:14.000 your existence or to your experience, because there are three parts of an experience. There's stress,

00:10:19.820 sensation, and mindset. So walk us through this concept and how those things interact with one

00:10:23.880 another. All right. So there's three basic ways that your body or that your mind experiences the

00:10:30.960 world. Like to get information from that sort of brain tissue inside your skull, from the outside,

00:10:37.760 the information has to first travel from your sensory organs through the neural pathways in your body,

00:10:45.880 and then into your brain where the experience actually happens. And stress, sensation, or mindset

00:10:51.480 are the three places where you can insert a wedge. But what this, by this, what I mean is stress.

00:10:58.420 So you get to choose the type of stress that you have. If you never have gone into, say, ice water,

00:11:04.040 you've never experienced that stress. So you sort of factored that out of your life, but you're always

00:11:09.100 experiencing something because your nerves are always transferring information into your body.

00:11:15.080 Sensation is the actual thing. After that stress, you know, occurs, let's say ice water, right? You jump

00:11:20.300 into the ice water and between your fingertips that are first experiencing it and your brain,

00:11:26.180 we have all these neural pathways that happen. And there's a certain flavor, I guess you could say,

00:11:32.580 that your neural pathways imbue to any sort of experience. And if you're able to alter

00:11:38.540 what information that sensation is going to transfer to your brain, you have the ability to change

00:11:46.000 your experience of that thing. And usually this is like a chemical intervention or like a certain

00:11:52.340 breathwork protocol that changes the actual transmission rate of information in your nerves.

00:11:58.320 And then there's the third place where you can sort of wedge, which is the mindset you have.

00:12:02.280 For instance, if you jump into ice water and you're thinking to yourself, this is the worst experience I'm

00:12:07.220 ever going to have in my entire life, it's going to be the worst experience you've ever had in your

00:12:12.120 entire life. If you go into it and say, I am so excited to be here, you have a lot better shot

00:12:18.240 of feeling great about that experience. And so that's why I'm talking about three different places

00:12:23.980 where you can use this lowercase wedge. And I want to dig down a little bit here because

00:12:30.860 there's a really fundamental concept in this book that's going to help explain everything that we're

00:12:38.040 going to talk about later in this interview, which is what I call neural symbols. And it's how

00:12:43.900 your brain encodes information about the world. And, you know, we have those three places, right?

00:12:50.840 Stress, sensation in your nerves and mindset. Well, how does your brain initially, the very first time

00:12:57.980 it senses something, how does it get that information? Well, go from your peripheral nerves. And again,

00:13:06.420 let's use the example of ice water. You jump in and what happens is your nerves send a really loud

00:13:12.160 signal through your arms and into your spinal column and up into the very base of your brain,

00:13:17.480 which is where consciousness starts. When it's there, it goes into the limbic system. And I think

00:13:23.920 of the limbic system as something of a library. You know, think about this. There's a library and

00:13:29.360 there's lots of books on it. And this librarian gets this signal and looks at this signal and says,

00:13:35.060 huh, I've never felt ice water before. Let's say you're a child or is your first time in

00:13:41.520 any sort of sensation. This signal comes in and she looks at it and says, well, have I felt the

00:13:47.280 signal before? She looks at all of her books and she's never felt anything like this before.

00:13:52.640 So she says, huh, I don't know what to make of this. So she kicks that sensation up to another

00:13:59.060 part of the brain called the paralimbic system. It's only about a centimeter away. And here there is

00:14:05.660 essentially a book binder who gets this new signal. It's like, hmm, what is this signal?

00:14:11.000 He looks at it and says, well, it doesn't have any meaning. It's just data. So I will apply your

00:14:16.880 current emotional state. So whatever you're feeling emotionally at that moment, he binds it and connects

00:14:24.060 it so that it can't be disjoined and kicks it back down to the librarian who looks at it and says,

00:14:30.160 great, ice water means unmitigated terror and horror because that's what you're feeling when you

00:14:35.480 get into the ice water and files that book away. Now here's the very, very important thing about

00:14:41.420 neural symbols is to remember, which is the next time you jump into ice water, it comes in a straight

00:14:47.560 data and the librarian realizes she's seen this book before and she pulls off the old neural symbol

00:14:54.220 off the shelf and you re-experience the old emotional state. You re-experience that unmitigated

00:15:02.620 terror and she never kicks it back up to the paralimbic system. It just goes on and that's 0.87

00:15:07.820 what forms your experience. Now neural symbols are the bits and bites of all human experience.

00:15:15.480 Since your brain is locked away in your skull, the only way it's ever gotten information at any time

00:15:21.640 in its entire history is through your sensory pathways. And every one of those sensory pathways

00:15:26.740 goes through the limbic library into the guy who makes the books and kicks it back down. And that

00:15:34.760 forms all lower cognition and higher cognition. Like I couldn't be talking to you right now on this

00:15:40.740 podcast without using billions of neural symbols. You just cannot think without them. So emotion,

00:15:48.160 especially past emotion, is locked into your brain.

00:15:52.320 So yeah, so it sounds like emotions, like every sensation we have is tied up with an emotion.

00:15:56.900 Yes, everything. Every, you know, ennui and hate and love and the texture of light and you waking up

00:16:04.280 in the morning under your covers. Every one of those sensations is bonded to an emotion and we experience

00:16:11.300 the world through an emotional lens. And this idea of symbols can help explain anxiety or fears. And

00:16:18.740 you actually went to a guy, this is what he studies, is phobias and extreme anxiety. Basically, there's

00:16:23.400 an encoding problem there. Like they've encoded just a regular everyday experience with a super negative

00:16:29.440 emotion. Totally. Like, so I went to Stanford University where I met Andrew Huberman, who's this

00:16:35.420 really amazing neuroscientist there, who really wants to understand the basis of what fear is. And, you know,

00:16:43.020 if you think about it, fear isn't about being in the moment. Like, you know, if you think about that lion,

00:16:49.380 who's going to be chasing us throughout this entire podcast, right? This lion's like, you know, a hundred feet

00:16:55.460 away or half a mile away. And you look at that lion and it's looking at you. And fear is the anticipation

00:17:00.920 of that lion charging you and eating you. And you sort of like race your mind forward to the lion

00:17:05.480 eating you, but it's not eating you. It's just like that prediction of the future. Now, if we go back

00:17:11.100 to neural symbols, sometimes this sort of propensity to anticipate really, really bad events is actually

00:17:18.800 hardwired into your brain. And people who get phobias, for instance, may have had an experience that

00:17:26.560 somehow wired a really, really intense neural symbol for say lions on the savannah or stakes or whatever

00:17:33.320 it is that scares you. And merely the appearance of a lion in the distance or appearance of that

00:17:39.620 stimulus at a distance is enough to trigger that old neural symbol and make you super anxious right

00:17:46.200 away. And what, so what Huberman does is he throws you into this, a virtual reality simulator where he

00:17:53.140 has been hanging out. He wanted like a standard stimulus to study the fear response. And when you

00:17:58.820 have fear, you have all these automatic reactions, right? You, you release adrenaline, you release

00:18:02.800 cortisol, your eyes open up or shut closed. And so he puts you these VR goggles on you that are measuring

00:18:09.340 the, the, the dilation and contraction of your, of your irises and your eye movements to see how you

00:18:15.580 respond to the stimulus. So he put me into this virtual shark dive where I'm, I'm swimming with these

00:18:20.360 great whites in order to trigger fear. And I figured that if I was in the stimulus of the fear, I could 0.94

00:18:26.360 try to insert a wedge to create space between that stimulus of the shark and then my response, which

00:18:33.380 that I would be able to choose response. So I thought this would be a great way to train my fear response,

00:18:37.640 but I get into the, the shark dive and it turns out I'm not afraid of a virtual sharks, even if they're

00:18:45.160 really realistically depicted. So in a way, what the, his, his setup is really good for is people who have

00:18:52.940 like predisposed to anxiety, but I actually didn't find a way to insert my own wedge in his protocols.

00:19:00.300 Well, how would you insert a wedge with that? Would it just be a matter of, you know, exposure therapy

00:19:04.140 where you're just exposed to it over and over again, then you are rewiring a new emotion to that sensation?

00:19:09.060 Yeah. That's that. I mean, so that's like the, the, the trick in general is like, if you want to,

00:19:14.080 if you wanted to create a fear, for instance, you would, you would bond an event or a stress to a

00:19:20.380 really, really bad emotional response. And if, if the event was really, really loud, you like,

00:19:26.120 let's say you're a soldier in Afghanistan, you have a roadside bomb go off after you that that's

00:19:30.920 going to wire all of the previous sensations you were having before that roadside bond into this like

00:19:35.440 trauma and create this horrible anxiety of even generalized things that might, that are similar,

00:19:41.660 like a, like a garbage truck or something similar like that. But alternately, you can try to minimize

00:19:49.160 those fear responses by trying to create new associations with certain sounds and with certain

00:19:55.280 stimuli to sort of like drown out and file new neural symbols that are sort of similar with different

00:20:00.660 emotional valiances to them. So this experience here led you to another guy, I think it was in the,

00:20:06.680 it was in the San, it was in the San Francisco area who was throwing kettlebells around, like tossing

00:20:11.920 them around, dancing at the same time. And you found this, I mean, at first I feel like this is weird,

00:20:16.800 but then you also discovered like this was a wedge you could do to use to basically affect, you know,

00:20:22.100 hack what we, what people call flow. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the funny thing was,

00:20:27.280 is that I was actually walking out of Andrew Huberman's lab being sort of like bummed out that

00:20:33.160 I wasn't having a great fear experience there. When I got this text from a friend of mine, which said,

00:20:38.920 dude, Scott, you got to go throw kettlebells with my friend, Michael Castro Giovanni. He has a way to

00:20:44.960 make you experience flow instantaneously with kettlebells. And when I saw this text, of course I'm

00:20:49.300 using like sort of a voice with it. I thought it like, that sounds so lame. Cause I'm not a gym guy.

00:20:54.700 Like I don't, kettlebells to me just sound like just weird, I guess. And, but I was in the mood to

00:21:01.140 like, you know, try something. And I thought the word flow sounded sort of cool. So I met Michael

00:21:06.120 up on this hill in San Francisco. I drove up from Palo Alto to meet him. And, you know, Michael is this

00:21:13.280 just gorilla of a dude. Like if you, if you see him, like he sort of like hunched over these giant

00:21:18.940 shoulders and these biceps that are as big as my legs, you know, like just a real big guy.

00:21:23.300 Okay. And picture this, you're standing, I'm standing right across from him and he's got this

00:21:28.700 freaking iron ball in his hand and he's going to throw it at me. And he says, I want you to catch

00:21:35.400 it. And in just about any instance where two men are facing off against each other and they're going

00:21:41.820 to throw essentially a weapon at each other, this is an adversarial position. And honestly, it's scary.

00:21:48.360 Like probably everyone who just heard that there's going to be, you're going to be throwing

00:21:53.180 kettlebells like, well, you're going to land, that's going to land on your foot. And that's

00:21:55.720 really bad. But what is amazing is that he throws it and you're supposed to do this like, like ritual

00:22:02.360 in the beginning where you're looking at each other's eyes as he swings the bell. And then you

00:22:06.320 look at the bell. And as you transferred your attention to the bell, he releases it and then you

00:22:10.960 catch it. And when you do this, the really fascinating thing is that instead of being adversaries,

00:22:17.700 you realize that you have to cooperate in order to bother, to, to, to get anything out of this

00:22:23.600 thing, you're going to hurt each other. So the real presence of the danger in the kettlebell is what

00:22:29.960 forces both people to, to coordinate their movements. And, and instead of being sort of like a,

00:22:35.660 like a bro-y workout on this mountain, we are suddenly dancing and our movements are totally

00:22:43.000 coordinated because of the danger of throwing this. And, and so I found my wedge instead of the

00:22:49.720 sharks, which were virtual and didn't do anything to me, just the thought of possibly breaking my foot

00:22:54.980 becomes this thing where I can move so easily. And, and, and what kettlebell throwing is about at its

00:23:02.220 heart is about connection and developing trust with another person. And I did it almost instantaneously

00:23:09.000 with this guy named Michael, just by sort of giving into this experience and, and, and flowing with

00:23:14.920 it. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

00:23:21.420 Well, that section really stood out to me because, you know, I've read the books about flow and how you

00:23:25.300 can access flow. But in my experience, when I, when I read that, I started thinking all the experience

00:23:31.100 where I, where I can remember experiencing that flow state, there was always that element of danger.

00:23:34.980 Like there's some sort of risk involved. I mean, I, it's hard to get flow when you're,

00:23:39.120 when I'm writing or doing some sort of, you know, pedestrian sedentary thing, but whenever I'm doing

00:23:44.300 something, whether it's like working construction where you're, you're using tools that are, you know, 0.79

00:23:49.020 could kill you or maim you. It's, I can, it's more, it's easier to get in that flow state when you're

00:23:54.620 doing that. Yeah. I mean, like, isn't that so fascinating that in order to connect to that thing,

00:24:00.600 because it, because flow feels amazing, right? Flow feels like everything's just working out

00:24:05.120 so perfectly, but in order to get to that, there have to be stakes, right? You have to,

00:24:10.660 you have to have actually something to push up against, even if it's something as minor as

00:24:16.740 possibly getting your foot slammed with a kettlebell and breaking your foot. I guess that's not that

00:24:21.200 minor, is it? But, but it's, it's more minor than a great white shark. And, but you need something

00:24:27.020 to push against or else you cannot get there. Yeah. How have you, have you been able to like,

00:24:33.700 you know, transfer this idea to other aspects of your life of like adding an element of danger

00:24:37.720 to enter the flow state with your other activities you do? That's a really, really good question.

00:24:43.560 Ultimately, what usually happens sort of the opposite is where you start to engage in things

00:24:49.100 that are dangerous or stressful as what I talk about in, in, in the wedge. And you find that you can

00:24:54.480 actually function in more areas than you could before. You find that you can gain mastery of

00:25:01.840 things that are dangerous. And it's just like, you know, we just talked about construction,

00:25:04.600 you're, you're hanging with these dangerous tools. And the first time you use a chainsaw or a,

00:25:08.960 you know, any sort of thing that could cut your hand off, it's, it's, it's terrifying, right? But then

00:25:14.960 you get over it because you realize how the tool works and how it uses, and you become a more

00:25:20.640 capable and overall competent person. And that's really what I see more, I guess though,

00:25:27.600 once you start doing some dangerous stuff, you realize that you can gain competence in other

00:25:32.560 areas too. So there is that element. It's like, it's like you can find that you can take on more

00:25:38.460 difficult challenges because you're not going to be overruled by your anxiety.

00:25:43.120 So as you discovered in your book, what doesn't kill us, breath is a very powerful tool

00:25:48.480 to access the wedge or to put a wedge. So we talked about Wim Hof and his method,

00:25:52.820 but then you found a guy who, who had used Wim Hof's method with his athletes, trains runners,

00:25:58.160 but then he discovered if you follow that method exactly, it actually gives you like the results

00:26:04.380 you're not looking for. So he, he modified it a bit. So talk about how this guy used breath

00:26:08.660 to insert a wedge with his athletes.

00:26:11.160 Yeah. So this is Brian McKenzie and, and I wrote about it. He has a whole chapter in what doesn't kill us

00:26:16.160 where he was using the Wim Hof method. Now, remember how I said,

00:26:20.040 I did Wim's hyperventilation technique where you're breathing really, really fast and holding your

00:26:24.780 breath. And then you do a bunch of pushups and I blew out my pushup record. That's sort of a well

00:26:29.940 known anaerobic boost that happens when you're doing the Wim Hof method. And what McKenzie was

00:26:35.800 thinking, because he trains athletes, he trains Olympians. He was like, well, I, what if I could use that on the

00:26:40.980 field? Like if you get this boost, if I have these hyperventilating athletes, maybe I'm going to see

00:26:46.720 like, and I, and I use their hyperventilation and training, maybe I'm going to see a huge boost in

00:26:51.200 their athletic performance in general. Well, at that point he was in what doesn't kill us. He was

00:26:57.240 sort of experimenting with this idea. And I, and I wrote in that book, I was like, isn't this great?

00:27:02.440 Aren't we going to see, see these great results in a few years? Well, fast forward a few years and I

00:27:06.780 meet McKenzie again. He's like, yeah, that didn't really work out. It turns out that that fast

00:27:12.640 breathing where you blow off all this carbon dioxide gives you a really, really strong boost

00:27:17.780 in a moment, but it doesn't translate to training benefits. So if you were going to sprint,

00:27:24.520 if you hyperventilate in your sprint, you're actually sprint really much better than you do

00:27:28.640 normally. But if you're trying to look for long lasting changes, it doesn't work. And, and so what

00:27:34.440 McKenzie did is flipped the script instead of hyperventilating, he tries to make, get people to

00:27:40.620 build up the CO2 in their lungs. Now, when you breathe air, air comes in as mostly oxygen, that

00:27:48.240 oxygen goes around your body and it releases as carbon dioxide or CO2. And CO2 is the waste product

00:27:54.280 of respiration. And, and for whatever weird biological reason, our body cannot detect oxygen.

00:28:02.040 It only detects the, the, the poisonous by-product of respiration, which is CO2. And in the Wim Hof 0.95

00:28:10.040 method, when you blow off all your CO2, you're able to hold your breath for a really long period of

00:28:13.900 time because you have to rebuild back that level. And what McKenzie says is this is like blowing off

00:28:19.440 the roof of your athletic training. But what he wants to do instead is instead of blowing off the roof,

00:28:25.120 he wants to build up your tolerance to CO2 so that you can breathe really slowly instead of really

00:28:32.860 deeply and fast so that you build up more CO2. And over time, you expose yourself to enough CO2

00:28:38.720 that you're able to function in a high CO2 environment. And this is what he calls blowing

00:28:43.040 off the floor. And what is remarkable about this is that over time, and the way he does it is you can

00:28:49.140 use like oxygen restriction. He, the other thing he says is just so useful and so hard is to do a

00:28:55.680 workout, but instead of breathing through your mouth, like we all do all the time, breathe just 1.00

00:29:00.800 through your nose and it kicks your ass. But at the end of it, you start learning that you're training 1.00

00:29:07.760 your body to develop really high CO2 so that when you do switch to mouth breathing, you are like a

00:29:13.640 rocket. And this is where he has seen this huge performance boost to his athletes. It also has

00:29:20.120 this really interesting anxiety connection is that with CO2, as you build up more CO2 in your body,

00:29:28.040 you feel more panicked and anxious. And actually you'll see cognitive behavioral therapists give people

00:29:35.280 masks that dose them with like 30% CO2, which is a high, high dosage of CO2. And when you do that,

00:29:41.840 you'll have a panic attack. You'll start breathing really heavily. You'll feel claustrophobic. It'll

00:29:45.800 feel horrible. And the CBT therapists use this to give you a panic attack in a clinical setting where

00:29:53.080 you are safe so that you get used to the sensations and you can be then less anxious of panic attacks in

00:29:59.320 the future. Well, the amazing thing here is that as you build CO2 tolerance, your anxiety levels drop and

00:30:08.040 go, and I mean, they don't go away entirely, but you have much more control over your sensations

00:30:13.720 with anxiety. And that's the other thing that Brian McKenzie found that was so amazing.

00:30:17.980 And he has this protocol that he calls apnea breathing. And like, this is what deep sea

00:30:21.420 divers, like those guys who are crazy and they use no oxygen, they actually do this too. Like they

00:30:26.780 have to develop their tolerance to CO2 and they do this breathing method where they just build up CO2

00:30:32.760 progressively in their system. So their body gets used to having that much CO2 in it.

00:30:38.520 Totally. And like when, when I was meeting Brian, he actually gave me, he said, download this app.

00:30:42.980 It's called like apnea trainer, which is the free divers app to build up CO2 tolerance. I mean,

00:30:48.920 they are, they are basically the same exact technique.

00:30:51.780 And it's interesting that, that CO2 buildup is connected to anxiety. Cause like whenever you have

00:30:57.560 like, you know, tactical guys, like army guys, police officers, like one of the things they talk

00:31:02.900 about whenever you are in that stressful situations is to breathe. And that's probably just to calm you

00:31:08.060 down, to get that CO2 out of your, or yeah, I mean, is it getting the CO2 out of your system or are you,

00:31:13.320 what are you doing when you're breathing that causes you to have less like anxiety or stress?

00:31:18.720 Oh man, you are doing like breathing does a lot. Um, and to say it's just one thing would be really,

00:31:23.980 really, um, um, mean to breathing. But one of the things you do, like if you're about,

00:31:30.120 let's say you're in a stressful situation, you're a cop with a gun facing down a potentially dangerous,

00:31:36.140 but you're not totally sure how dangerous criminal, right? That, that, that deep breath,

00:31:41.500 taking a deep breath in will fill your lungs with oxygen. And then more importantly, when you exhale,

00:31:46.480 you exhale the CO2, which gives you at least a little bit more space, a little bit more of,

00:31:53.520 a wedge, um, into taking control and separating that stimulus from response. But breathing is one

00:32:02.520 of these things that just alt it's like, it's this automatic process in your body. Like you're

00:32:08.040 just breathing right now and you're not thinking about it. And then you think about it and then you

00:32:11.820 can do, you can hold your breath, you can exhale, you can do anything. And it's this really interesting

00:32:16.540 liminal point between your autonomic physical processes and where your consciousness comes in.

00:32:22.360 And you find that if you can alter your breathing in multiple ways, breathing fast, breathing slow,

00:32:28.020 holding your breath and using your breath with your movement and lots of things like that,

00:32:32.060 you find that you're able to control the automatic things in your body. So you could, you could slow

00:32:37.880 your adrenal release, or you could ramp up your adrenal release depending on the situation.

00:32:44.300 All right. So another tool, another wedge tool that you found that you can access the wedge

00:32:49.660 are float tanks. Now these have gotten a lot of press, Joe Rogan, Navy SEALs, like they've made them

00:32:55.880 popular. I didn't know this until you emailed me that, but like some of the best research about

00:33:00.800 float tanks is happening here in my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma. So tell us about that. How does that,

00:33:05.540 how can float tanks insert a wedge into our experience?

00:33:08.020 Tulsa, there's the Laureate Institute for Brain Research where this guy named Justin Feinstein is

00:33:15.260 the only neuroscientist in America who is really doing clinical studies on floatation. And what

00:33:23.320 he's doing is he's taking people with PTSD, major depression and anxiety, and putting them into float

00:33:31.080 tanks as a treatment protocol. The thing that I've been studying so far in this conversation is like,

00:33:36.560 what do you do in the presence of a really, really intense stress? And then how can you control

00:33:41.720 yourself in the stress? But the float tank is the opposite of that, right? The float tank is, let's say

00:33:47.520 we take out all of the external world. We remove that external sensory stimulus of those three parts

00:33:53.840 that I was talking about earlier. What happens now? What is just your body? What Justin Feinstein

00:34:01.040 at the, at the, at the Lord Institute discovered is that our sensations of our body also carry with them

00:34:09.300 all sorts of neural symbols that reinforce every sensation that we, that we have. And what is so

00:34:16.300 amazing about flotation tanks is that they can actually really, really help with anxiety and

00:34:21.720 depression. To explain this, let's go back to that proverbial soldier, right? Who's in Afghanistan,

00:34:27.940 who just had this, like, he was walking down the street. He, there was a certain quality of sunlight

00:34:33.140 on him. There were some children playing, a tea cellar, some flowers around him. And then boom,

00:34:38.800 all of a sudden there's an explosion and it's really traumatic and horrible. And maybe some people die.

00:34:43.760 And it wires that entire event into his head as in the language of neural symbols. So that,

00:34:52.100 that when he's on the ground, his heart is pounding. He's feeling that like full body sensation

00:34:57.600 of adrenaline, cortisol, and also the damage on his body. And it's all gets wired up and connected

00:35:03.020 when he comes back home, you know, this apocryphal soldier gets PTSD when he's walking around and that

00:35:09.280 certain quality of light happens, or he smells flowers, or there's a, you know, the children's

00:35:14.240 voices in some way. And these can actually all trigger post-traumatic stress. And even more

00:35:20.940 interestingly, the first time a lot of people really, really become aware of their heartbeat

00:35:26.900 and their blood pressure is in a very traumatic event because that stuff goes haywire because

00:35:31.920 you've dumped all this adrenaline into your body and that wires neural symbols too. What happens

00:35:36.820 with Feinstein is he says that when you put your yourself into a flotation tank, you've drowned out

00:35:43.880 all of the external symbols so that you become aware of your body again. And when you're aware of your

00:35:50.420 body, it's so quiet that you can hear your heartbeat and you're able to form a new neural symbol with

00:35:57.340 your heartbeat so that when you experience it again, even sub-perceptually, because we're always

00:36:02.680 sub-perceptually experiencing our heartbeat, you don't have that constant reinforcement and you're able

00:36:08.240 to break those loops that cause PTSD. Now, his study that he did was amazing because he found that,

00:36:17.400 I think he's tested about 25 people in float tanks, he made them, he had them float for an hour

00:36:22.000 sensing their heartbeat. And he did questionnaires before and after to sort of sense their protocols

00:36:28.080 and then a month after. And he found that 100% of people who floated for just one hour had

00:36:34.720 significant decreases in their anxiety symptoms and depression symptoms that lasted and persisted for

00:36:42.200 over a month. That's crazy. And for those who aren't familiar with what floating is, it's like

00:36:46.620 you're basically in this warm bathtub. It's about the same temperature as your body. It's filled with

00:36:52.580 salt, so you float. It's completely dark usually, and there's no sound. So it feels like you're literally

00:36:59.460 floating on air sometimes. Yeah. It is as close as you can get to isolating your body and your mind from

00:37:07.700 the west of the world as is possible right now. Did you have a good experience floating?

00:37:12.860 I generally did. So I floated quite a few times, maybe about 10 or 15 times in total. And I would

00:37:20.540 say all but one of them was a great experience. But there was this one experience that was pretty bad.

00:37:27.200 And I can tell you about it, where my wife and I, and my wife is like actually the hero of this book.

00:37:33.600 It's not really me. She has accompanied me on almost all of these things that I get up to.

00:37:38.780 And I say, hey, why don't we go and float at this float center that's right near my house? And as we

00:37:43.880 were getting there to the float center, we got in this like argument, just like a marital argument that

00:37:50.040 you maybe had before that like happened up until we got to the door of the float center. And it wasn't

00:37:56.840 a very important argument. But then we get into the float tank. And almost immediately after having

00:38:02.920 that sort of negative experience, we jumped into the float tank. And all we did in this sort of like

00:38:08.540 echo chamber was roll on that horrible thought. And it rolled and rolled in our mind. So that was

00:38:15.440 like a mean experience. And we got out, our fight erupted again. And we were sort of grumpy with each

00:38:20.540 other for like a week afterwards. And I think this is a very, very important thing to note is that all

00:38:26.620 of these things with the wedge, your intentions and your mindset as you get in there is super important

00:38:32.580 to the results that you're going to get as you come out. So we brought our argument into the float, and

00:38:37.420 then we just amplified it.

00:38:39.700 I was telling you before the show, I floated, I floated twice. Both times, I just had to pee really bad

00:38:44.080 while I was floating. That's all I thought about. So it wasn't, I didn't, I didn't.

00:38:49.680 Did you?

00:38:50.380 Well, no, I didn't want to see, I, it stressed me out because I didn't want to be the guy that peed in the

00:38:54.400 float tanks. You know, if someone else is going to use it afterwards, you can't do that. So

00:38:58.560 I'm glad it was out of altruism that you're thinking, like, think about the next man.

00:39:02.700 And you weren't thinking about yourself.

00:39:04.960 I wouldn't mind that. It's my, okay, whatever. It's like peeing in the pool. It's just me,

00:39:09.700 but I didn't want to, I didn't want to have, I didn't want to be that guy. All right.

00:39:13.320 Do you have a pool?

00:39:14.800 I do. And I, I, I don't pee in the pool. Remind you not to come to my house and pee. All right.

00:39:22.780 Or swim. So another wedge tool you discovered were saunas. So how can exposing ourself to heat

00:39:31.360 help us access the wedge?

00:39:33.460 Right. So heat is the opposite of the cold, obviously. When we think, talk about the cold,

00:39:38.120 you're, you're controlling your sympathetic responses, which is basically you jump in the

00:39:43.100 cold and then you are, it's like your fight or flight just comes on immediately. You release

00:39:47.860 adrenaline, you release cortisol. And what you're doing, the technique in cold water is to

00:39:52.000 relax in that cold water. And then you are, you start to learn the tools and the sensations to

00:39:57.860 focus on, to control your stress responses. The heat is the opposite. It's the parasympathetic

00:40:02.820 responses where your natural reaction is to, to calm down and cool and cool yourself off. And you're,

00:40:11.260 what we're doing in the heat is trying to train. Well, we can actually train two things. One,

00:40:16.280 you could get into the heat and then like have a really intense workout. This is the idea between hot

00:40:20.660 yoga, for instance, and that is super beneficial. But what we're doing in a sauna is we're trying

00:40:26.420 to relax and feel those sensations and control ourselves against the sensation of claustrophobia,

00:40:35.600 because the, the, the sign of your overheating is the sense of the world closing in. And it's,

00:40:41.240 it's this, it's this feeling that you have to just go run and get out of there.

00:40:44.820 And so I flew to Latvia to a traditional sauna called a pierce with my wife. And we did a five

00:40:54.960 hour sauna with two shamans. They call them pierfniks, but it's basically, think about these

00:41:00.820 people as like druids. They show up and they are in green felt hats. There is like all of these ritual

00:41:07.580 brews and teas that they're giving us. And they, they put us in the sauna for five hours. And it's

00:41:15.080 about 180 to 220 degrees in that sauna at various points. And what they're doing and what a shaman,

00:41:22.100 this type of shaman really is, is somebody who can sense your sensations. And I don't mean that in some

00:41:31.320 sort of like telepathic way. I mean, like a sort of a more mechanical way. You're, we're lying on these

00:41:36.460 benches. We're nude and, and they're, they're standing over us. And as we're getting to the

00:41:42.160 point where we can't take it anymore, where we're like, you know, getting that, that really hard

00:41:47.860 place, they take a sprig of cold water and douse it in our feet and give us and keep us just below

00:41:54.920 the red line. And in this way, we're able to spend five hours in this crazy hot sauna. And they're,

00:42:01.560 you know, they're, they're sensing us by like literally putting their hand on our, on various parts of

00:42:05.820 our body, like our feet or our head or whatever. And if we feel hot to their touch, they know that,

00:42:12.460 that we must be having a more intense experience than they're having. So they're able to sort of

00:42:16.580 use these, their sensations to sense our sensations. It was fascinating. But the weirdest thing that

00:42:23.180 happened in the sauna was as we're lying on these benches, they also have this ritual where they feed us

00:42:29.360 weird things that are oddly familiar. Like at the beginning of the ritual, we're eat bread that is

00:42:35.420 like pine needles into it. And we drink tea that has wormwood into it. And these are like familiar

00:42:41.640 scents, but they're sort of in weird contexts, contexts. And then we go into the sauna and we're

00:42:47.820 in this really stressful area. And we experienced those things again, they start hitting us with pine

00:42:53.320 needles and rubbing wormwood on our skin. And we're in this like super stressful place. And as they do that,

00:42:59.780 for some reason, my brain starts connecting senses, like a synesthetics, I have synesthesia,

00:43:08.760 which when, and what that means is that I start hearing pressure on my skin, I start smelling sounds

00:43:15.220 and, and, and tasting noise. It is this totally bizarre experience because they're, they're using

00:43:22.880 the, the same stimulus, which was the bread or whatever, in a totally new context. My brain gets

00:43:29.000 super confused. And at the end of this whole ritual, I feel so refreshed, so renewed. It's like,

00:43:37.140 it's like you're, you're, you're tasting things new again for the same time, but that taste is like

00:43:41.680 the world around you. It was amazing. So I mean, what do you think the benefit of that is, except,

00:43:46.380 you know, besides experiencing weird taste or whatever?

00:43:49.620 I mean, the, the saunas are like really traditional medicine. Like they are a, a,

00:43:58.480 every circumpolar, um, indigenous group around the world uses sweat lodges. They use saunas. They use 1.00

00:44:05.400 these things as ways of forming community as forming bonds with each other. They use it to fight

00:44:11.920 depression. And there was this really interesting guy that I met named Charles Rezon, who shows that

00:44:18.280 by exposing people to heat therapy, they actually severely reduce anxiety symptoms. They severely

00:44:24.960 reduce major depression. And I have noticed this over and over again when I, cause like literally

00:44:30.300 right after I went back from Latvia, I bought a sauna and I sauna all the time. And it is, it is more

00:44:36.620 effective clinically in Charles Rezon's research than taking a SSRI, taking like Prozac or Valium or any of

00:44:45.620 these, I guess Valium's of Benzo, but it's better than those, these antidepressants at relieving

00:44:50.800 depression. It's amazing.

00:44:52.080 Yeah. We had Charles on the podcast a couple weeks ago. He was saying that what the sauna does,

00:44:58.400 it increases. So like his interesting theory about depression is that it's more, it's also an

00:45:03.640 inflammatory condition. It's not neurochemical. Your body is basically inflamed and your mind is

00:45:10.080 inflamed. And what the sauna does is it helps, it increases inflammation. And in the process of doing

00:45:16.340 that, you decrease systematic inflammation. And then you have this whole chapter about that,

00:45:21.600 about inflammation and macrophages and, and how a lot of things that we do for treatment,

00:45:28.340 medical treatment is often can be let up, can be attributed to placebo. And this was an interesting

00:45:33.560 chapter. Can you walk us through this?

00:45:35.160 Sure. So the placebo effect is like the most derided thing in medicine, right? Like how often

00:45:42.560 have you heard someone takes, does any sort of alternative medicine thing and they, and they say,

00:45:48.600 oh, that's just the placebo effect that made them better. And the question is, is if, if someone is

00:45:56.560 getting better, is that not medicine? And one of the things I look at, and I look at many things in

00:46:01.580 this chapter, but is if you see a standard clinical trial of just about any drug they do,

00:46:09.360 they test the chemical against a group of people who are not taking the chemical,

00:46:14.360 but they're getting sort of like a treatment. And they say that if the chemical performs better than

00:46:19.120 the, than the placebo, then the chemical must be good. And then, and then that is in medicine and

00:46:24.120 that gets approved by the FDA. But if you actually start looking at these trials,

00:46:28.040 many medicines and not all, there are certain classes of medicines such as antibiotics where

00:46:34.280 you, the placebo is, is radically not useful compared to the active drug. But in many,

00:46:42.520 many drug trials, you'll have approved drugs that are like one or 2% better than the placebo,

00:46:48.200 where a drug is like 30% effective, but the placebo is like 28% effective. And, you know,

00:46:55.540 one of these that I like to write about a lot, because I think it's absurd is Rogaine, the hair

00:47:01.040 club for men thing that grows hair on your head is like 28% effective. If you take this topical

00:47:07.040 solution and put on your head, but if you just put any solution and think it should get good vibes,

00:47:12.680 that will also regrow hair at like a 25 or 21% rate. So one of the questions is like, why are we

00:47:18.840 just looking at medicine from this sort of very myopic perspective of a chemical intervention?

00:47:25.540 When that placebo effect is actually incredibly powerful and we can manipulate it in various

00:47:33.100 ways. And so in this chapter, I'm looking at a number of ways to sort of communicate with various

00:47:39.260 parts of your body. And again, I don't mean telepathically, I mean like physically to try

00:47:44.160 to make them better and try to make them more effective. And honestly, a lot of it comes through

00:47:50.280 emotions. Like I was talking to this cardiologist the other day who said he will always try to use

00:47:58.220 the placebo effect when he's healing patients. And he does it very consciously. So let's think

00:48:04.140 about a person who's about to go through open heart surgery. He will show them a picture of the clogged

00:48:09.940 thing that he's about to fix with plaque around the walls. And we say, look, this is how bad your heart

00:48:16.060 is or your atria or whatever. And he shows them the scan and says, I'm going to clean all that out.

00:48:22.240 And then he goes through the surgery and shows them an after photo and say, look, I cleaned all

00:48:27.580 that out. Think of how much more blood we're pumping through your system. Now showing the picture is not

00:48:32.580 like a physical intervention, but he sees really, really significant improvements in the people he

00:48:38.480 showed the picture to before and after versus the people who didn't get the before and after photo.

00:48:43.200 It wasn't just the physical thing that he did in heart, which was probably essential,

00:48:47.700 but it was also that all the things that go into thinking about getting yourself better.

00:48:53.480 Well, they've done that with surgeries too. They found that back surgery to alleviate back pain or

00:48:57.500 even surgery on your shoulder. They found that if you could just cut the person open and then stitch

00:49:03.100 them back up and said, yeah, we fixed your back, they report their back feels better.

00:49:07.460 So many people. Honestly, you see this again and again and again in medicine where if you think

00:49:15.140 about it, and I'm not against the medical industry, people can oftentimes listen to me and think that

00:49:20.860 I'm like, screw Western medicine. That is not my position whatsoever. But there is a lot of money

00:49:27.140 to creating drugs that you can sell over and over again to treat chronic conditions. And there is not

00:49:32.720 a lot of money in giving people placebos. And we've created sort of evidence paradigms around

00:49:39.080 chemicals and things that we can sell that costs a billion dollars to get a drug onto the market

00:49:44.800 at the end of the day. There's no clinical setting where you can sell someone ice water or positive

00:49:52.660 juju that would generate a similar amount of vibes. And I think it's very, very important not to throw

00:49:59.440 away the benefits of Western medicine, not to throw away antibiotics, not to ignore clinical

00:50:04.780 interventions that work, but also accentuate what is available out there in the healing through

00:50:09.940 sensation, through all of the things that I'm looking at at the wedge. A lot of these things

00:50:14.140 work probably along the same pathways as placebos. And that shouldn't mean that they're bad. It means 0.57

00:50:20.500 it's another way to access the healing power of your body.

00:50:24.380 It's another tool. Well, Scott, there's a lot more we can talk about. You delve into psychedelics,

00:50:28.980 you went on two psychedelic journeys and we'll let people check that out, but where can people go

00:50:33.120 to learn more about the book and your work? So you can get a free chapter of the wedge right now

00:50:37.860 at my website, scottcarney.com and just go there and you subscribe to the mailing list and then you

00:50:44.280 can read the first chapter, but it'll also be like everywhere. It'll be on audible. If you like the

00:50:49.520 sounds of my voice, you can, I will read it to you. EBooks, absolutely everywhere. I'm also on all

00:50:54.700 the social media platforms, but I would love you to go to my website and read the chapter first. So

00:50:59.480 sign up for the mailing list and let's get going. Well, Scott Carney, thanks for your time. It's

00:51:04.060 been a pleasure. This has been awesome. Thank you so much. My guest today was Scott Carney. He's the

00:51:09.480 author of the book, The Wedge. It's available on amazon.com. You can also find out more information

00:51:13.280 about his work at his website, scottcarney.com. Also check out our show notes at

00:51:17.360 aom.is slash wedge. We're going to find links to resources. We're going to delve deeper into this

00:51:21.180 topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at

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00:52:04.260 Remind you not only to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - April 20, 2020

#603： The Physical Keys to Human Resilience

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