Identity Shift #3: I Am An Athlete

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence first in myself second, and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're gonna learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Hey, welcome. Today we're gonna be talking more about identity shifts. It's been a theme these last couple weeks. You know, two weeks ago we were talking about this core identity shift I had from I'm not attractive to I am attractive. Last week it was I'm not capable of love and being in a loving relationship to I am capable of love. And as I'm sharing these, I saved the best for last and the most current for last. Actually, I'm going to share with you today a core shift in my identity that's perhaps been more liberating than any of the others, even though each of them has been life transforming. But as I'm sharing these, I'm hoping you're thinking about past identity shifts in your own life and reflecting on those and maybe even looking to what new identity shift you want to make. Maybe it opens up the door for you to just change how you show up in the world, change who you think you are in the world, so you can do what you've never done before. You can do what your mind says is not possible for you, whether that's creating an extraordinary relationship that's loving and lasts, or friendships where you can be fully authentic in yourself, being more bold and direct and assertive in your work and being acknowledged for it, or creating your own company, whatever it is that you want to do. It's gonna require probably an identity shift, if you haven't done it already. And as I share about this identity shift, I really wanna highlight some of the mechanisms of an identity shift. And this is what I'm all about. Everyone that I work with, that's my core focus, is how do we get this person to have a major identity shift? Not just a breakthrough, not just like, oh, yeah, I can do something new, that's cool, but we want. This is who I am now. That's really what we want. And so to that end, as I share this particular story, I'M also going to be highlighting some of the mechanisms of an identity shift, so I'll bring those out along the way so you can even more apply this to your own life. This identity shift, as I said, has been the most liberating thing. And I am just so ecstatically grateful and happy to have discovered what I've discovered and to be able to be free in the way that I am now. And it involves physical health and physical confidence. And this is something that I had very little of for 20 years of my life before that. So at the age of 15, I had a lot of physical confidence. When I was a young kid, I was active, played soccer, ran, climbed trees, did whatever. When I got into freshman year of high school, ran cross country, was able to do any sport that I wanted. I was pretty athletic, pretty active. That all changed one morning when I was 15 years old and I got out of bed and I had this stabbing, shooting pain going down. You know, it was like in my left butt cheek, really deep in there, and then went down my leg. And I literally, like the first step I took out of bed one morning, I crumpled to the floor. It's like this stabbing, shooting pain. And I had no idea what was going. I wasn't injured. Nothing bad had happened the day or week before. Just a normal, whatever, last couple of days. And then this shooting pain. And so I was kind of like, well, that's weird. I think it'll go away. You know, told my mom. I was like, something's going on. And she's like, well, you know, maybe we should rest. And I was like, yeah, I did have a cold, you know, last week. Maybe it's like muscle stiffness or something. And I just kind of thought it would go away, but it didn't and it persisted. So a couple weeks go by and it's like, this is intense. You know, I was playing soccer at the time, and I had to stop playing soccer. I can't run, I can barely walk. And so then it became like, we got to figure this out. So thus began my journey of going to dozens of doctors of all different specialties to try to figure out what's going on. And we went to orthopedics, chiropractors, general practitioners, probably other specialties as well. I don't quite remember at this point. And trying to get a diagnosis, trying to figure out what was going on. And we got different diagnoses, but no one really seemed to have clarity. It was like, eh, it's probably this, could be this. That's strange. You know, and you know, of course they did all the diagnostic tests, X ray, mri and everything came back looking pretty normal. So they're like, well, maybe it's this, maybe it's piriformis syndrome. And chiropractor said, well, your one hip's higher than the other, so it's making one leg longer than the other. And we're just going to pop your back three times a week. And we were just open to whatever. So I wouldn't drive for like 30 minutes with my mom to this nearby town called Salinas in California. We used to live right near there in traffic, 30 minutes each way to get my back popped by the chiropractor. Did that for weeks, for months, probably no change started to do. We did physical therapy. That didn't help. One of the doctors suggested a cortisone injection, did that. That didn't help. And it just kept going like this. Weeks turned into months, months turned into years. And it was just, I had to stop all activity. It was intense. I didn't really think of myself as an athlete back then, but I liked to be active. And all of a sudden, during the rec period, the activity period at the end of the day in high school, instead of being able to play soccer or run or do all this active stuff, I had to go hang out with the chess kids. Or horseshoes was one activity I did. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, those people tended to enjoy that, but that wasn't me. I didn't enjoy that. I was like, I don't want to be doing horseshoes, I want to be running. And I was frustrated and I felt limited and held back. And then. And if you've ever had chronic pain, and by the way, if you have, stay tuned for these the next couple months or so, I'm going to be doing a few episodes. In one episode I'm going to talk about the connection between emotions and physical pain, which is going to just blow open your world. For some of you, it's going to be maybe the best thing you ever get from me in your life. I reference a little bit of it in my book Not Nice and how excessive niceness and people pleasing can actually lead to physical pain and problems. But I go a lot deeper in that upcoming episode. And then after that we're going to be doing an interview with a guy named Steve Ozanich, who's written a couple of phenomenal books that just have helped people, myself included, radically eliminate rapidly physical pain, chronic pain, back pain, foot pain, neck pain, jaw pain, Wrist pain, ankle pain, knee pain, stomach pain, on and on and on. So kind of the nuts and bolts of how this works. I'm gonna share some of the secrets that I've learned in the next couple weeks, maybe a month or two. So stay tuned for that. This episode is a lot about my own personal journey with it. So if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, shit, I have a lot of pain stuff too, you're in the right place. You'll hear more, but I'll reveal the secrets soon. This one's about my story and my identity shift. So there I was, limited in my life, stuck, frustrated, unhappy, and in a lot of pain. And when you're in a lot of pain, your mind starts to obsess on how to be in less pain. So I start to look at, you know, how am I lying on my bed and what kind of pillow do I need? And then, okay, I can't sit on soft couches. Soft couches seem to make it worse. So I got to sit on hard things upright, and I can't run and I can't do this activity, and I can't sit in that way. And I just start to be obsessing and thinking about it all the time, you know, and I'm not revealing that obsession to my friends and other people in high school because I don't want. I don't want to be made fun of. I don't want to be thought of as different or weird. So I don't tell them that, you know, while they're thinking about whatever they're thinking about. I'm spending a good chunk of my day planning how to keep my body in less pain and feeling more and more and more inferior to my good friend Chris, who is extremely athletic. I mean, that guy's at the other end of the spectrum now as adults. He runs ultra marathons, like hundred mile races, you know, the. Called the Leadville 100, where they run 100 miles through, like, the mountains of Colorado, deemed one of the hardest races in the world or something like that. So he runs that shit in, like, fast times. He. He's an incredible athlete. And so, you know, he's doing whatever sports and cross country and all this stuff, and I just feeling more and more and more limited in my life. And that continued for years. And then there was a curse that seemed like a blessing, and maybe it was a blessing and a curse. And that is at the age of 19, four years after the pain started, I was able to. I went to another doctor who was a rheumatologist who said, aha, I know what you have. I was like, really? He said, yes, you have an autoimmune condition. It's called ankylosing spondylitis. And I have a medicine that I think can really help you. Now I'd gotten a lot of diagnosis before, so I was like, okay. But the fact that he's like, I am very confident this medicine can help you was intriguing and was relieving. So it was the perfect setup as I'll share in just a minute for a placebo. But basically he said, insurance is not going to pay for this fancy expensive medication. So you need to take these other ones for a month each. A month of this one, a month of that one. I don't think they're going to work. You don't think they're going to work? You've taken stuff like this before. But the insurance needs to see that you're doing it under my career. And then at month three we'll start this medication, it's called Enbrel and that's a self injectable. I was like, whoa, okay, sounds good. So sure enough, did the first two months, nothing helped. Get on the Enbrel and all of a sudden the pain disappears. Now not entirely. I mean it just goes down from like a daily pain ranging from 6 to 9 on a scale of 1 to 10, or 6 to 10, maybe even I never on the pain rating, I would never give myself a 10. Cause I'm like, what about some dude who's like being tortured? I'm sure that's a. And I've never experienced that. So the worst I would ever give myself was a nine. But it's all relative, I suppose. In any case, the pain went down from a 6 to a 9 on a daily basis to 1, 2, a 3. All of a sudden I was able to move, I was able to jog, I was able to do all this kind of stuff. And I was like, this is incredible. And I was hooked. And I said, this is the best thing in the world. I must have ankylosing spondylitis. And the Enbrel is my medication that saved my life. And I went on to experience a lot more freedom. It was pretty awesome. Short lived, as you'll see in a minute, but pretty awesome. So we're take a quick break and when we get back, I'm going to share more about my story and how it might seem like it was taking a turn for the better, but it actually is about to get worse. Stay tuned. I want to take one moment to acknowledge a listener who left me a message through the website Shrink for the Shy Guy. It was really touching, really compelling, and he just shared how much he's grown, and it's awesome to hear about his progress. So let's jump into that right now. Hi, Dr. Aziz. My name is Will, and I am enrolled in both your programs, confidence unleashed and 30 days to dating Mastery. And I just want to thank you for offering these two programs online. I've been really sticking to them a lot, and I found that I'm able to do a lot more. I'm not as shy as I used to. I am definitely a lot more confident. And the most important thing, I think, is that I feel that I love myself. I love myself a lot more. I'm not beating myself up as much as I'm used to. So I want to thank you for your time listening to this, and thank you for the amazing. I have pod the streams that you do on Shrink for the Shy Guy. And I hope you have a great weekend. Thank you. Welcome back. So how's it gonna get worse? I mean, I got this medication. I got a diagnosis. It's helping me. What could possibly go wrong? Well, it turns out this is going to be a. This story is going to be a little bit Quentin Tarantino ish in that I'm going to tell things out of order. Flash forward many, many years. Guess what I discovered. I don't have ankylosing spondylitis. I don't have an autoimmune condition. There's nothing wrong with me. Wha. So what happens is what's called the symptom imperative. You know, if you're curious, what I really have have had is what people call tms, Tension myositis syndrome, or sometimes called tension myoneural syndrome, now pioneered by Dr. John Sarno. Other people call it psychophysiologic disorder. Other people call it psychosomatic pain. Those are all different terms pointing to the same thing. Mind body medicine. It is pain that is very real, very intense, limiting burning, spasming, shooting pain. But the origin of that pain is not structural problem or an autoimmune problem or whatever else is diagnosed as the source of that problem is repressed emotion that your body is trying to deal with. It's taxing your autonomic nervous system and causing it to restrict blood flow and causing problems in your body. I didn't know that at the time. So what happens, though? And what they found with this Mind body medicine is what they call the symptom imperative. The symptom imperative, which means that there's a reason why all these symptoms are coming to you. There's a reason why I had pain at the age of 15, and that's because there's a lot of repressed emotion. Now, in my case, there was years growing up in a family where we didn't talk about emotion. Emotion wasn't really allowed. You couldn't be expressing it, you couldn't be talking about it. You couldn't even be acknowledging it. You just had to kind of seem like everything was okay. So stuffing emotion for whatever, more than a decade, and it finally caught up to me. And I have all these feelings that I've suppressed feelings of, especially hurt, loneliness, sadness, anger. And the pain begins because those feelings that are building up might start to break into your conscious awareness. The reservoir is full, and it's gonna start sloshing over. And your conscious mind or some part of you is like, we can't acknowledge that. That's too threatening. That's too dangerous. That's gonna mess with our sense of self. That's gonna be threatening to our relationships and our lives. So we need to block that pain out. And the way that we're gonna do that is we're gonna create some really gnarly physical symptoms that's gonna just absorb your focus. And that's the nature of psychosomatic pain or psychophysiological disorder or tms. And so I got this back pain. Now with the medication enbrel, the symptom is removed, right? Huzzah. But guess what happened? Symptom imperative, baby. So there was a period of time where I had nothing going on, but then the symptoms started to emerge, one after another like clockwork for years. So I don't remember the exact order of them, but soon I started to have intense stomach pain, irritable bowel syndrome, spasms. Going to the bathroom like, 12, 15 times a day. Burning in my stomach in between, just hours of burning. Trying to change my diet in all kinds of wacky ways. Just trying to figure it out. And having not much success with that. Trying to do, you know, first saw a gastroenteronologist, then trying, you know, they didn't really. The pills they gave me didn't help at all. Did a sigmoidoscopy where they stick a tube up your butt, and then went to Eastern medicine. Like, maybe I'll take some Chinese herbs. Acupuncture. I'll just do whatever it takes. Working on that, working on that, working on that. And then that symptom sort of subsides on its own somehow. But then there's something else. Then there is pain in my wrist, intense pain in my wrist that stops me from playing the guitar. So it's still very limiting. Stops me from lifting weights. Then there is pain in my bottom of my foot. Go to a doctor, and it's diagnosed as plantar fasciitis. Every time I had one of these pains, I would go see a doctor, right? That's what you do. Something hurts, you go see the doctor and they give you a diagnosis. So I got diagnosed with repetitive strain injury RSI in my wrist. They even did a surgery which was unhelpful. I was diagnosed with plantar fasciitis in my foot. I was diagnosed with temporomandibular joint disorder because I had problems with my jaw. I was diagnosed with ibs, irritable bowel syndrome. One after another, after another, and they start to accumulate and accumulate, and I have all these symptoms. My body is like, fucked up, and I'm like, what is going on? I'm like 24, 25 years old, and I feel like I'm 90, I'm breaking. And so we're talking about identity, right? My identity is that I am fragile, I am weak, I am broken. If I stress my body, if I try to do something with it, it's going to break, and that part will just hurt forever. It'll never recover. And so I just had more and more and more, smaller and smaller sphere of influence, sphere of activity where I just could do less and less. And, you know, the drive for growth and liberation is strong in us. So occasionally I would try stuff, but I'd, you know, it's like, ah, I want to run. And then I'd go run for a couple weeks or maybe even a month. And then all of a sudden, foot pain is real intense. I can barely walk again. So it just. What would lead to is like, a lot of attempts and limitation and years and years of like, I want to play the guitar. I play for a couple days or maybe a couple weeks, and then the pain would come back, always limiting me, hurting me. And then eventually I was like, well, I can't lift weights, I can't run, I can't swim. I can't do that. I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do that. I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't. Why? Because I'm fragile, weak and broken. Why? Well, I guess because of the Autoimmune problem, I guess because of ankylosing spondylitis. I mean, all these other symptoms are not technically part of it, but I guess it's just because I'm fucking broken. That was my story. That was my identity. That was my reality. Phew. Sucky, huh? Well, fortunately, it wasn't permanent. And thank God none of it is true. This is the biggest mind fuck of all. None of it is true. So all these diagnoses are false crazy. Maybe you got some too. I know a lot of people. As I started to talk about this stuff more openly, lots of people have gotten a lot of wacky diagnoses. And so what really happened? What's really going on? Well, I told you, his mind, body. How did I discover that? Well, a good friend of mine who is a massage therapist, I was seeing him all the time. You know, I was going to chiropractors. I was doing all kinds of shit, but I was seeing him like, hey, you know, this is gonna help me feel better, right? That's what you see a massage therapist for. And, you know, we were good friends over time. And one day he's like, you know, there's a book I think you might be interested in. It's called the divided mind by Dr. John Sarno. And he actually gave me a copy. Cause he's awesome. And I flipped through it and kind of looked at it. He's introducing this idea of like, hey, your pain might be due not to a structural abnormality, not to a physical problem, but due to repressed emotion. And the principal, repressed emotion is probably anger. And I looked at it and I've been studying psychology. I'd already gone through clinical. I think at that point I was doing my residency at PSU in clinical psychology. So I was not. I was open to that kind of stuff. Obviously flipped through it, I was like, yeah, I don't know. And that's often the case, you know, it's like our programming to think that we're physically broken is so strong in this culture. It starts at the age of zero, when you're taught your body's kind of messed up and you're always going to need a doctor to help fix it because you're broken. That's pretty endemic in our culture. And so for whatever reason, you know, and also there's a level of not wanting to go there, not wanting to. There's a reason why I'm repressing those emotions, man. Shit's uncomfortable. But I don't know, all this, it's sort of unconscious. It's sort of like flipped through it, eh? It's neat. Maybe I'll read it one day and I put it down and I don't think I pick it up for two years. Damn, Maybe longer, man. I don't even know. Insane, huh? Sat on my bookshelf. I moved once or twice, you know, packed it up with my box of books and put that shit out on the next bookshelf. Never even read it. What the hell, huh? And then all of a sudden, I don't even know what, maybe Providence, right? There's just this moment where somehow I thought of it again. And at this point, I'm married to Candace and. And she's pregnant, and it's summertime and my first son is going to be born in four months. And I think some part of me is really scared. I was like, man, I'm going to be a dad. I'm going to be like a crippled dad. I can't, like, pick my kid up or I can. I'm going to be in pain, you know, Somewhere in the back of my mind, it was just a lot of fear around it. And so somehow I became open and I picked up that book. And then I looked online and saw there's an audio version of another one of his called the Mind Body Prescription. John Sarno is his name. S A R N O if you're curious about him. Howard Stern. Huge fan of his. But so I said, okay, I'm going to listen to this. And I remember at the time, I was driving out to a nearby town near Portland called Hillsborough. I was supervising some graduate students in psychology who were doing their first therapy with people. And I was supervising them and helping them learn how to do therapy. And I was driving out about 45 minutes each way to this place, and I started listening to the book on my drive out there. And, you know, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I'm sure you've heard that. And I was just like, holy shit, this makes sense. I think this is me. And I was so intrigued. I remember during my lunch hour, I listened to that audiobook the whole lunch. And then on the drive home, I was like, I don't want to go home. Like, I gotta keep listening to this. So I pulled over at this park, and out in Hillsborough, it's kind of like this farming town near Portland. And there's like this little space, open space preserve with a creek and trees and stuff and trails. And I walked around and listened to that book for like three hours. Just kept walking and Walking and listening and walking. I got home and listened. I probably listened to the whole thing. And maybe that day and the next, I was like, this is crazy. This is so. This pain that I'm experiencing is this. And at the time, I was having intense neck pain and pain in my traps. At the top of your neck and down my back and in my jaw and down my hands and my forearms. And just every time I'd sit at the computer, it would just fuck me up. And I started listening. I was like, wait a minute, maybe this is that. And I was open. And so I read multiple other books. One of them was by Steve Ozanich, who I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. It's called the Great Pain. How Faulty Medical Advice Is Keeping Us Sick or Making Us Sick. And I read that cover to cover, huge book, 500 pages, and just highlighted everything, was studying, started to do, journaling, just really to do everything they're describing to do, which is basically, you have to become aware of what's going on. You have to look at these repressed emotions, and you have to ultimately convince yourself that you're healthy, which can be the hardest thing to do, right? Because my identity of, you know, 12, 13 years at that time or longer was, I'm broken. Maybe that was like 15, 16 years at that point. I'm broken, right. But I was committed and I was ready, and I made massive strides. And in a matter of months, my plantar fasciitis, which hurt, pain on the bottom of my foot, which had been off and on there for years, was. Was completely gone. Completely gone. And I was able to start running again, and that felt incredible. And then I was able to heal the neck pain and the upper back pain and the wrist pain, completely gone. The jaw pain started to go away significantly. Stomach pain reduced dramatically. Now, all these things weren't hurting always at the same time, but they were always coming and going and started to make massive shift. And over the course of, I'd say, eight months, radical healing, incredible. And then I was like, well, maybe this pain in my back and butt and down my leg, maybe that's the same stuff, right? But my mind said, no, no, no, no, that's a different thing. All this other stuff. Yeah, that's the mind, body stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the pain in your back and everything, that's an autoimmune condition. That's ankylosing spondylitis. Besides, you take Enbrel for that. And the Enbrel is obviously very effective. Why would it be effective if you didn't have this condition. So doubt remained and I kind of pushed against it a little bit, tried to bring my attention to there and just got overwhelmed, got anxious, kind of almost couldn't handle it. You know, my son had just been born and I just couldn't go there. So I kind of tabled it because I'd made so much progress already. And then a couple years later though, I was just like, I got my resolve and I was like, you know what, motherfucker? This is tms. This is mind body stuff. How is it not? Why would it. All of a sudden all this other stuff is. But this isn't. This is. And if I start, you know, that's why I started reading all these books again. And I read so many books, I read them all again. The Mind Body Prescription by Dr. John Sarno. Healing Back Pain by Dr. John Sarno. Pain Free for Life by Scott Brady, I think his name is. I always mix him up with a football player. Scott Brady or. Yeah, not Tom Brady. The Great Pain Deception. Just, you know, more books like that started really digging into it and really realized that the source of this particular pain came from repressed emotion from childhood, which I'd never taken a very serious look at. And so, you know, level five commitment, man. Really ready to do whatever it takes. So I started to face that. And as I faced that and felt all kinds of really unpleasant emotion, like deep, deep loneliness, deep anger at my dad, my mom, my brother, but particularly my dad, like all the stuff that I'd repressed from being a kid and just really went into it, went into some counseling and talked about it in depth in a way that I never had, with a level of honesty I'd never done, and faced A big piece of overcoming this mind body stuff is facing the fear of activity, facing the fear that you're broken. And so over the summer, I got off the medication bit by bit. And then I had no medicine in me. And as I was getting off medication, I was getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And I was like, haha, I'm winning. But then as soon as I got off of it, it was like the reality of there's nothing wrong with me. I stumbled and a lot of doubt crept in. I was like, no, no, no, you're broken, you're broken. But I kept on saying like, no, I am strong, I am healthy. There's nothing wrong with me. My pain is due to tms, not due to an autoimmune condition. And basically programmed myself, reprogrammed myself to challenge the Notion that I was broken. And it's scary. If you've ever confronted anything like this, it's scary. The fear of pain, the fear of being broken, the fear that you're going to injure yourself to me was even greater than the fear of like approaching someone or attractive woman or something. When I was young and working on social anxiety that felt at the time overwhelming. That was nothing compared to the fear of I'm going to break my body. But I persisted. I did not give up. I am unstoppable. I am relentless. I'll keep going. And one thing I said to myself is like, okay, I'm gonna use my body and if I can't run, then I'll walk. And if it hurts too much to walk, then I'll sit there and I'll journal and I'll work on the underlying emotional pain stuff until I can walk again. And then I'll keep working on stuff until I can run again and then I'll fucking sprint. No matter what, I am unstoppable. I'm gonna keep at this. So I took that attitude into it and kept at it. And bit by bit, the pain receded. And then all of a sudden I was not only pain free, but pain free not on any medicine. And earlier I already knew over the summer how this could be so, because the end roll for me was a placebo crazy. And in a lot of these mind body books, you'll read all kinds of fascinating stories about the research around the placebo or the belief effect, and interesting tidbits such as, if you give someone a compressed pill versus a capsule and both are inert, both are potato starch or sugar or whatever, the people that take the capsule will repeat report a larger effect than the people who are given the compressed pill. If the pill is a different color, it has a different effect. Red tends to have more of an effect when people take it. If the medicine is. People are told the medicine is expensive, then it has a greater effect. They've done this with ointments. They'll give people an inert ointment or the same ointment. Maybe it does do something, but it's the same. And one of them, they'll say, this is 30 cents a tube and this one is $300 a tube. And the one that people perceive as more expensive will change their physiology more. It'll have more of an effect on their body, on the rash or whatever it is. And then also if something is an injectable, it's perceived as more potent. And people report a greater placebo effect from it. So all those things were what happened to me. I met a caring doctor who said, yeah, I really do. I'm listening to you, I hear this and I have this name for this thing and it's Latin sounding, so it's impressive. And I'm wearing a white lab coat and I know a lot. And this medicine is very, very expensive as ease. It's so expensive, insurance won't even pay for it until you've done these other ones which are not going to work anyway. But this one, this one will work for you. You know, it's setting the expectation it's gonna work. And by the way, you gotta inject it yourself. You gotta learn how to do that from a nurse. Cause it's a very serious thing. But this medicine is very powerful and it's healed many people just like you. And all that got into my subconscious and all of a sudden it was like, ah, placebo. And you know, that was a theory over the summer. But then when I really challenged it and finally got off of it and continued to work out, continue to run, continued to do everything, it went from theory to, to reality. And now I have deep down complete certainty that there's nothing wrong with me and I am an athlete and fucking athlete indeed. In the time that I've challenged all this stuff, I've been weightlifting for the last almost year and a half now. Doing stuff like deadlifts and squats and stuff that I used to think would just destroy my back and my body, but actually make me stronger and sprinting and running long distances, running 10Ks, doing 10 mile runs. Eventually I want to do a half marathon just free. And whenever pain arises, instead of being like, oh my God, I'm injured, I'm screwed. I say what's going on? Let me journal. So every morning right now I journal and meditate. Journal and meditate, Journal, meditate. That's my emotional processing. That's what keeps me from building up repressed gunk that for me manifests physically. And so now I am an athlete and I'm not gonna get injured. You know, sure, I can get injured from like, I don't know, a car hits me or something like that. Right. I'm not Iron man, but I mean, you know, in the sense that from using your body and this is one of the biggest myths that we're kind of injected with in our culture is that we're weak, that we're broken. Oh yeah, your back's not meant to lift anything. Oh yeah, you're not Meant to run, it's gonna break your body. And there are a million and one medical professionals that will reinforce that identity, which is extremely limiting, extremely toxic, and ultimately not true. And so I am, man, I get fired up about this just because I see how many people are suffering and in pain and getting unnecessary needless surgeries. And I could go on and on with statistics from a lot of these books about research that's been done on all kinds of procedures, whether it's knee, knee operations, arthroscopic surgery for certain knee problems where they do sham surgeries. And the difference between the placebo group and the surgery group is non existent, or in many cases the placebo group will perform better. Same thing for back surgeries. I mean, on and on. I don't want to get into a black or white thing where all or nothing, where it's like no one should ever have surgery. I'm just saying that a large percentage of physical pain is mind body related, but most people don't know it and it's rejected by the medical community. And I go more into depth than this in an episode where I talk all about the psychology of mind body pain and my interview with Steve. So those are coming up. Check those out. For now, I really wanted to keep it to my own identity shift. So thank you for being with me on this journey. I sincerely hope that this helps you whether you have physical pain. I mean, if you have physical pain, check out some of those books that I mentioned because they can transform your life. Start with anything by Dr. John Sarno, s A R N O. And also the TMS Wiki Wiki, an incredible online community of people doing this work. But even if you do not have physical pain, that's not an issue for you. I hope that this identity shift story helps you realize what's something you can face. What are the components of the identity shift? It's being willing to do what it takes. It's being willing to do the work and put the work in. Consistently challenge something, a belief, a story, an edge, your fear. And then over time, your identity shifts. It doesn't happen in one night. It's over time. You'll have big aha moments. But that's in the context of doing daily work, practice, effort over time. And as I was doing that, as I was journaling, I was challenging the edge of my physical limitations. Like, look, I can run, I am safe. And some of the early runs I would do, man, the whole time my body would be so tense, I'd be having all this fear and Tightness and pain. And I'd just be jogging really slow and just saying, like, I am safe. I am strong. I am healthy. I am safe. I am strong. I am healthy. Like, soothing my freaked out, scared nervous system and journaling and looking at uncomfortable emotions and feeling stuff that I could almost never even acknowledge before, let alone feel or journal about or talk about. And in the context of that work, that effort, then those big ahas come. And I remember one of the biggest ones was I was laying there, which is. It was one night where I just really got, oh, my God, I don't have ankylosing spondylitis. Enbrel is a placebo. Like, I just. I got it. I'd read enough stuff, I explored enough, I thought about enough. It just simmered in my consciousness enough to pop. And it blew my mind. I mean, it was like one of those things where you're like, wow, I thought reality was this way. I thought everything was this way. And everything I thought about that was wrong. What does that mean? You have to come to terms with that. It's a disorienting experience. Does that mean that everything I learned about this condition, about myself, was false? How much of the medical industry is spouting false information about this stuff? Like, this is crazy. Kind of felt like I took the red pill in the Matrix or something and I just woke up like four or five times that night, just in the middle of the night, randomly, just like, what? Whoa. Just like another Matrix reference, like, Neo from the Matrix. Whoa. Whoa. This isn't real. This is crazy. And then I go back to sleep. That happened multiple times that night. And I know something like that is possible for you, whether it's that you know the story that you've had for five years, 10 years, 20 years, that there's something wrong with you socially, that you can't have a relationship, that you can't be smooth or comfortable around people, that you can't speak up in a group. Whatever your identity is, you can't earn a certain amount of money, you're not smart enough to do a certain job or career. You know, if you do the work, you do the effort, you confront the fear, you challenge the belief and the story enough, and all of a sudden you'll have one of those moments, those breakthrough moments, and then the doorway opens to a new identity. And I want that for you. So thank you so much for being with me on this journey, in this episode, and in life. Until we speak again. May you have the courage to be who you are. And to know on a deep level that you're awesome. Talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziz. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free vlogs, ebooks and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com. It.