Driven: Understanding and Harnessing the Genetic Gifts Shared by Entrepreneurs, Navy SEALs, Pro Athletes (& Maybe You).

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, we're nuts.

We're pathologized. We are made to feel like there's really something wrong with us. Let that go. And then immediately feel the opportunity coming next. So that self fulfilling prophecy, keyword of that is self, is never ending. And it's completely unfillable. You can't believe you can hit it. And yet, if you just trust the process and be present, you can't miss.

Help, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield.

Welcome to the show. Hey. So this is super weird, kind of embarrassing. I recorded what I consider to be a podcast I was very excited about several months ago. I recorded it actually a couple of months ago and then I lost. Lost it. And I'm overjoyed because I have recovered it, found it. I'm going to release it to you. Probably one of the better books I've read in the past few months. I got the author on the show. If you are a hard charging high achiever who has a hard time turning your brain off, this episode is for you. And if you're not one of those people, I don't know, go listen to NPR's Planet Money or Freakonomics or something. Hey, folks. So I first met Today's podcast guest, Dr. Doug Brackman, at a private conference conference that I attended. It was kind of a gathering of entrepreneurs. And he, along with one of his buddies who I think was a Navy seal, they were teaching long range rifle shooting combined with meditation, which I thought was kind of weird and simultaneously intriguing. I am kind of kicking myself because I never got a chance to actually jump in and try that. I think I went like hot air ballooning or skydiving or something like that and skipped out on the, on the long range rifle shooting. And everybody who went to it came back and they had their minds blown and were like, dude, that was like the most amazing form of meditation I've ever experienced. And I kind of forgot about it for a while. And then it turns out that Doug wrote a book. He wrote this book called Driven and I got my hands on it and it was really good. I related to it big time. It's called understanding and harnessing the genetic gifts shared by entrepreneurs, Navy SEALs, pro athletes, and maybe you. And this is what Doug does. Like he studies and works with entrepreneurs and pro athletes, inventors, adventurers, Navy SEALs and military personnel. And he's kind of found that certain people are born with this inherent so called drive, like deep in their DNA. And their genes, we're going to talk about that. But then the book, he tells you, if you are one of these fricking driven people who just go, go, go, always has to be doing, doing, doing, always is looking for danger, always is, is just, you know, in this constant state of having the brain turned on and always seeking new thrills, new adventures, never seeming to have the craving for all of that. Go away, man. This book is going to resonate with you. Hopefully our podcast does as well. So Doug is a 20 plus year meditation practitioner. He's a constant student of the science. Every time I talk to him, he's got some really interesting information. He's a functional MRI geek. He's a student of a variety of different spiritual practices and religions. Lives down near Nashville, Tennessee. And we're going to have fun on today's show. For the show Notes, by the way, for those of you listening in. If you want the book, if you want to learn more about Doug, if you want to tap into anything that we talk about during this show, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Driven by Doug. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com drivenbydog Doug, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you, Ben. Quite the introduction.

Yeah, well, I practice. I practice for the mirror for hours this morning. So one thing I wanted to ask you before we dive in, Doug, is what are you actually a doctor of? I don't actually know. I've always called you Dr. Doug, but I actually don't know what you're a doctor of.

Here goes my self disclosure of my own insecurity. So I actually have two PhDs. Oh, wow. Yeah, it says a lot more about having insecure and believing that education will make me feel something that I'm not. But it's a PhD in Organizational Psychology, Industrial Organizational Psychology, and a PhD in Clinical Psychology.

Okay, so where'd you get those?

So it was a dual program through in San Diego, UC San Diego and a small, private, amazing college. And it was. There was eight people in my class and it took me seven and a half years to do it. And I did them simultaneously. It was absolutely brutal.

Okay. And I kind of wanted to ask you this question towards the end of our show because I thought maybe it would give people a little bit more context, but I kind of feel like asking it right now. And that is, how did you go from the dual PhD to teaching people how to meditate with a rifle in their hands?

So, as you will discover, if you ever talk to a bunch of psychologists, we all get into psychology to figure out our own stuff. And we're all selfish narcissists at heart. So I am driven and seeking constantly for something better, something more thrilling. And so my early high school dropout, lived in a car, blew my life up really early on, thank goodness, thank God, literally. And just figured that if I was going to become something, education was my path. But behind the scenes of that, it's all about the effectiveness of actually personal change. So I've always been looking for tools that work and, and I stumbled into it. I'm a long time competitive shooter and shooting is something that requires you to be present and still. And the farther the bullet is or the target is away from the gun, the more still you have to be. And so I shot competitively at 600 yards and 1,000 yards and at the same time was meditating. And so they naturally go together and we'll get into that later. The biology of it is incredible. And it, so I backed into it and then Randy Kelly and I, Navy Seal, he was a sniper in Ramadi. I mean he had, he's the real deal. We just started messing with this six, seven years ago and it, we stumbled in, we backed into something and said, holy smokes, this, this is something special. And we were taking first time shooters and women and they were out shooting Navy SEALs, 20 year veterans of Navy Seals on their first day making the Navy Seals crazy. And Randy was saying like, whoa, we got something here that is really different. But the psychology and the self psychology behind it is what lit my candle rather than the actual performance of it. So the insights are gained around it are just incredible and it's disruptive. Most psychologists are not gun advocates, let's say, let's say it that way.

It probably would have blown up in your face like if you called this like Zen and the art of sniping. Although that seems like it could have also been an appropriate title for the book.

Yeah, so it's been a very, very, very productive journey for me because it's brought people into my life normally that would never talk to a psychologist. And so it's given me access to a teaching tool that opened my brand up a little bit and really let me help people that normally wouldn't be helped.

Well, speaking of people who would normally never talk to a psychologist and we've already thrown this term around a couple of times, so we might as well define it. And it's the title of the book, Driven. Who are the driven? What does it mean to be a driven person?

We are different and so it goes back to this guy, Tom Hartman. Tom Hartman wrote a book in 1991 called the Edison Gene and his kid had ADD, profound. ADD and ADHD. And he was looking at. In 1991, I was just getting into my undergrad and this article came out in Time magazine that they discovered the alcoholism gene. And it was the dopamine receptor number 2, DRD2, A1 allele gene. And so this is it. And this was back before they cracked the human genome and they really understood epigenetics, where they believed genes were much more predictive of behavior than actually the environment and gene interaction. Right. But Hartman said that this gene, DRD2, is very correlated, highly correlated with ADD, ADHD, impulsivity addiction, gambling addiction, eating disorders, along with alcoholism and along with everything else. Hartman came up with this very simple theory that it was a genetic adaptation for survival and, you know, trying to de pathologize his kid, saying, you know, add, oh my God, it's a, you know, disorder and there's something wrong with you. We got to med you. He proposed that it was actually the hunters and farmers. And in the subsequent 30 years since he wrote the book, a lot of follow up in my own research. You know, 4,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution kicked in and about 90% of the population thereabouts. Daniel Amen is a little bit the brain researcher at Irvine, says it's actually about 4% of people, I generalize it to about 10 did not adapt to the agricultural revolution. We retained our original hunting genetics. And if you think about what a farmer can tolerate and you think about what 90% of the population is really good at is sitting in a cubicle and basically doing assembly line work. You know, they're very tolerant of boredom. They love to have very predictable routines. They're risk adverse. What worked last year is going to work this year. They're good at saving money. They're good at basically functioning in a world that's very, very safe.

Everything that absolutely drives me nuts. And I've never in my life been able to hold down a 9 to 5 longer than I think. The longest I lasted was about six months. And that was my first job out of college as a hip and knee surgical salesman. Standing in surgical wards all day long shining laser pointers at overpriced hip and knee implants.

Exactly. And I am unemployable too. I'm truly unemployable. And as long as I am being directed by someone else and told what to do, and I have no option for creativity I will last 15 minutes. It drives me insane. I can think of a better, faster, stronger way to do something. And if you don't let me do it, I get frustrated and get pissed.

So we're talking about people with addictive personalities such as you might find in Alcoholics Anonymous or risk takers or perfectionists or people who are constantly on a quest for something new like a new job or a new home or a new spouse or some new technique or biohack or workout or diet to improve our world somehow.

Right. And you know, following that initial study, you know, coming out of basic alcoholism and addiction research, it led to this entire field of study around these genetics of chronic discontent. And they branded us as reward deficiency syndrome. So no matter. Yeah. No matter what we do, we never quite feel it was good enough. And if you think about, you know, a farmer, if they felt that they would wander away from their crops, they would constantly be screwing with how they're growing crops and never come up with a set plan routine for survival. Right.

So you could have also called the.

Book Shitty farmer unfarmable. It is because we can't do that. But if you put a hunter, you know, in atmosphere where he is thriving, where we have to come up with creative things, we have to come up with new ways to survive because of the. Is constantly adapting to a new environment, we thrive. But you know, the byproduct of that, you know, and I could have called the book the shame based personality type and I wouldn't have sold any of them. But it's really this underlying feeling, you know what boredom is and dopamine receptor number two is boredom. Boredom is very simply just a central nervous system embodied feeling that there's something missing or wrong right now. And my work, the last since writing the book, really getting down to the, you know, what is the most effective way to deal with us is really looking at our identity. And you think about, you think about what a farmer's, you know, they are designed to live in these massive collective societies where their job descriptions are very specific. They're butcher baker, candlestick makers. And you know, where hunters on the other hand, the drivens on the other hand were Da Vinci's.

Right. And I think society needs like both people because my wife is not driven.

Right.

And it really. You had this line in the book or this paragraph where you're talking about driven people and you said you must be broken if you prefer to endure a root canal rather than sit for hours at a quiet dinner with the in laws. And you also said it can't be normal to be able to have the TV on and have your eyes on your iPhone while your wife is talking to you. But when she goes into a huff, you can recite word for word what she said. And I wish that I could get my wife to read this book. I told her, if you read this book, you would understand me so much more. I haven't gotten her to do it yet just because she doesn't like to read books. I might be able to get her to listen to the audible version, but it's the same thing. She'll invite me out on the porch to sip a glass of wine and star off into the sunset. And it's pure torture for me, and I'm pretending to enjoy it, but the whole time I want to go learn a new guitar song or work on an article or do anything but just sit there. As, you know, every last little second of opportunity passes by.

That is the. You know. And I say it's a gift, but it really is. We are hunters in a farmer's world. The world is designed by them, created by them. And what's normal in their world is, you know, we're. We're nuts. We're pathologized. We are made to feel like there's really something wrong with us. And, you know, it's the same thing in school. You know, I'm a high school dropout because it was stupid. Like, why am I wasting my time learning a bunch of stuff that I'm never gonna learn, never use in my life? Like, what is going on here? And I couldn't believe the rest of the class didn't get it.

Yeah, well, I got. I got lucky in that I was homeschooled. And so I. I kind of bypassed a lot of that because when I got bored with something, I just go outside and find something new to do, you know, and that's. I don't know if my kids kind of have that same driven personality based on the. For example, the Enneagram profiles they've done th. They have profiles almost identical to their mother, actually. Very kind of type B. Oh. We just want everybody to be happy and they're content doing just about anything. So I don't. I don't know yet if they'll kind of follow in my path from that genetic standpoint. But, yeah, it's. It. It's so crazy how in the society that we live in nowadays, we feel as though we are broken. Although technically, from an evolutionary or an ancestral standpoint, we fit in to a certain Lock in society, you know, the key that is us fits into a certain lock. But it's just, it's one of those deals where we don't, we don't live in a culture that, that seems to allow for the driven to do a whole lot in my opinion, aside from being like a, whatever a pro athlete or a military personnel or something like.

That, or an entrepreneur or you know, these kind of niches that we fall into. But we are marginalized and we are made to feel like we are broken and different, you know, and the entire, you know, western medicine model, if it doesn't fit into the box, let's give a med or a pill or something to make you fit in. Which more importantly my doctoral dissertation, which really led to what I'm doing now is self sabotage and self fulfilling prophecy. And it is this inner world of the drivens that, you know, it feels like there's something missing or wrong in my outer world confirmed by the outer world. And then that gets folded into this weird amorphous identity that drivens have, you know, because we'll get into the brain structure of it. But the, you know, we really do have a different brain structure.

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the brain structure too. And also this pancreatic polypeptide, the neuropeptide Y that we produce. But before I even do that, like back to the genes, you talked about the DRD2A1 allele gene. Obviously I would imagine that a lot of people just in the first little bit of this conversation we're having are thinking, yeah, I'm driven. But what if somebody thinks, well, I want to test, I want to, I want to get a genetic test to check. Can you actually using something like 23andMe results or something like that, identify the gene, identify the SNP that might predispose you to something like this.

You can. And I've got tons of clients that have. And you know, the problem with those genetic testing is, you know, an epigenetics is it even if you do have the genes, doesn't mean it's going to be expressed in your normal behavior. So it's just kind of a neat. So what, you know, if I have them or don't have them, it's more important that you really do identify the behaviors of this impulsivity and that, you know, you describe it perfectly well. It's feeling, you know, when we relax, we feel guilty. When we relax, we are feeling like there's something better to do with my time. And that is the expression of that dopamine receptor saying, hey, feed me, feed me, feed me, right?

It's like, it's like the bank accountant who probably has a DRD2A1 allele gene sitting at their job. And in the back of their head it's like something playing out of a Disney cartoon as the princess is singing. There must be something more to life. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

The other gene that Dr. Yeah, the dopamine receptor number four is the one that I really, I relate to much more and that it is the FOMO gene. The fear of missing out gene. Yeah. National Geographic does a phenomenal expose and they call it the wandering gene. It's actually a much older gene. It goes back about 50, 60,000 years. And it's the wandering gene. It is the feeling that hunters have that there's more woolly mammoths or more game over the next hill. It's a feeling like, you know, this is okay, but over there is better shiny object syndrome. And you know, farmers had that. They would be constantly looking for a better place to grow crops and they'd never settle down. If hunters didn't have that, we would kill everything in this valley and starve to death. And so genetics kick in and we wander from, you know, the middle of Africa, 10,000 of us in the middle of Africa and spread the globe. And you know, it is a. That gene expression in me is, is creates so much difficulty in my life because I'm constantly looking for something better. And it's the greatest thing ever to happen to me because I'm constantly looking for something better.

Yeah, I know that. I think it was. ABC News did a story on this because I found it while I was, I was doing some research for this interview and they identified DRD2 for. I think that National Geographic called it, as you alluded to, the wandering gene and also the restless gene. And then this ABC article called it the thrill seeking gene, which is also responsible for alcohol and gambling addiction. And they also found that people who have this gene have a pretty extensive history of uncommitted sex, one night stands and acts of infidelity.

There's always something better.

Yeah.

And it is. The key to all of this is these are all feelings and it never feels good enough. And you know, it's good enough is not a feeling. Good enough is a statement based upon performance and outcomes. But you know, it's me crossing the finish line of an Ironman. It's like, oh man, that is an amazing experience. And then you turn around and look over your shoulder at the Time. And immediately here comes the fomo and here comes the discontent about next time how much better I'm going to be.

Look, I've commented on that before. It's a great business model for Ironman because I experienced the same thing. I crossed the finish line, I think. No, wait, my. My tire was inflated to 10 less psi than it should have been. So I missed two minutes on the bike. I missed one aid station. And so my split on mile 23 and 24 were way crappier than what I expect. I had to turn around, write another one thousand dollar check to Ironman and sign up for the next race asap. Because this race totally did not satisfy me. And those would be thoughts going through my head like an Ironman world championship sitting on the beach in Hawaii, dehydrated, you know, back there behind the finish line and I was already thinking next year I gotta adjust this and this and this. And I'm not happy.

Right. And we miss. And we're not happy is the key of that. And you miss this, you miss life. Yeah. Constantly chasing something in front of you and you know, all of my work in the, you know, last 20 years and working with guys like us, it is. We can have both. We can have an amazingly content, incredible life in the present moment and not be satisfied one iota about how to make a better future.

We're going to talk about that later on. But a few other questions about this driven brain. I mentioned a little while ago that polypeptide neuropeptide Y, also known as npy. You talk about that in the book. What does that exactly have to do with driven people?

So it is neuropeptide Y is not. We really don't know a whole lot about it. We know it's really cool. And it is a neuropeptide particularly associated with risk takers and inventors and those kinds of things. But I make the parallel to hunters and it is higher in Navy seals. It's one of the best predictors of actually making it through. Buds is your really post.

Yeah, it's seriously, they've actually studied this?

Yeah, yeah, it's. And how to hack it and how to actually get more of it. And it's what I do with all my pro golfers. Because what it is, very simply, it is this ability to let go of immediate and past failures and move on to the next opportunity almost immediately. So we're chasing a rabbit and the rabbit gets away and it's like damn, oh, another rabbit. And so it's this immediate, it's just what you did at the Ironman, it's like rather than, you know, taking on, oh man, I didn't break 10 hours or didn't break nine out, whatever it is. It's like, well, maybe next time I can. And so you let go of the real dissatisfaction and you immediately focus on the next opportunity. And golfers are one of the best. I mean, I work with some, you know, some of the top 10 golfers in the world. I mean, I've had opportunities to work with these guys. Shank one into the frickin trees, man, and they can take a breath. And this is where I work with them is really how to hack that neuropeptide, why? And let that go and then immediately feel the opportunity coming next.

So, so neuropeptide Y would be. It almost be like a, like a neurochemical associated with resilience. Being able to experience a failure, bounce back and apply yourself straight back into the next task without letting that failure kind of derail you.

9999 Ways to Not Make a light bulb. That is what we do. And we are, you know, my wife thinks I'm nuts. Why are you continuing. It's Einstein. Why are you continuing to do the same thing over and over and over and over again, hoping for a different result? And it's. Well, I'm not doing it quite the same. I'm doing this a little different. I'm doing this. And we're doing these micro adjustments constantly. You know, it's a curse. And this is where the curse comes in. You mentioned infidelity and you know, the ability to compartmentalize and wipe away, you know, Well, I really, you know, to forget about past things that you've done very quickly, you know, well, I cheated on my wife bad. It's no big deal. I can let it go. And you know, it can be, you know, can make us look like sociopaths, unfortunately. And you know, the Navy SEALs are, you know, they can go into a room and clear the room, so to speak, and then, you know, 15 minutes later we, you know, just fine on the helicopter and not even feeling it. Wow. And so it's a gift if you're in those circumstances. But you cheat on your wife and you let it go and you don't even think about it. It's obviously a problem.

Yeah. And so this neuropeptide Y, from what I understand, it binds to synapses in the frontal cortex and that actually changes how you respond to another neurotransmitter called noradrenaline. So normally a lot of people aren't driven. They'd get kind of like fuzzy headed and checked out during stress. But the surge in noradrenaline that a driven brain gets, it causes you to become more focused in response to stress.

And we, yeah, we thrive. And this was Hartman's original research around it. You know, his P proposed that we are the ones waiting for the, you know, the meteorite to hit or the, you know, the world to go into the next ice age. Because as driven, we will figure it out where the farmers that have adapted to this very sedentary, simple life that isn't changing very much, you know, they're toast. Yeah. And so it's just an adaptation and it doesn't make us good and them bad. You know, it is a farmer's world. And as I teach all my entrepreneurs, you know, they have to get embrace. You know, farmers aren't stupid, slow and lazy. They're, they're, they're wired for routine and they're wired to actually do things in a very structured way. And you need that if you're building a business. And so they, they serve their, you know, I don't do my own taxes. I don't, because I lose my mind. I have a farmer for that. They need us too, just as much as we need them.

You know, we talked about neuropeptide Y and we talked about the DRD2A1 allele gene. But what about the structure of the brain itself? Like, is there a different way that driven people use the actual brain in terms of which lobe they're tapping into or something like that?

So this was my research and I did, really most of the research is coming out of ADD and adhd, widely studied because there's buckets of money to be made with, you know, the stimulants. So they've researched it tons. And what it appears, what it really looks like is that the brain has reversed itself in what part is dominant over the last 4,000 years. And so you put a normal farmer in a functional mri, they have this real nice bright, shiny activation in the left prefrontal. And that's the logical, linear, rational part of the brain. They very simply see the, their survival or see the world as a series of sequential steps. And you know, you put your finger in the ground, you put some water, you know, put a piece of corn in there, you cover it up, you water it, you wait patiently, you wait for it to grow and then it grows, you pick it, and that leads to Our survival. You put a hunter, you put a ADD person in a functional mri. Couple interesting things are. Are seen very, very clearly. Number one is that the back of our heads light up. And you know, we have occipital lobe, so we are visually dominant. We use our eyesight to actually navigate the world. And you know, our spidey sense, because of that, you know, we are intuitive sense. We can walk into a room and just. We sense something's off. And we can use our eyesight to really look and confirm that. And you know, that's why oftentimes driven people. We love driving, we love any activity. Skiing, surfing, you know, bow hunting, whatever. Any activity that really pulls us into this visually dominant field. And that triggers the neuropeptide. Why it triggers all of these wonderful things where we can hyper focus. Like we can really get into something.

Yeah.

And anything like that that pulls us into the present, we get a great. I mean we are, we can master it and we love it. It feels really, really good to us. It feels like we're in the zone and we're in our element. The problem with that, and this is the defining feature of add, and it drives my wife nuts, is that when you look at our frontal lobes, we have something called hypofrontality or just they. They perceive it as an underactive frontal lobe because we don't have this night nice bright, shiny, you know, ball of activity.

You said hypo frontality.

Hypo frontality. So underactive frontal lobe. And it is, you know, we have these activation, but it's both left and right hemisphere. And so what that allows us to do is do something I call multi thinking. And we have a big picture focus. Very simply, we carry, you know, the normal carry three, maybe four thoughts in their head at the same time. Where a driven carries seven to nine thoughts in their head at the same time. We literally have a different way of going through the world. And you know, the big picture, you know, we get it on a big picture level. And that is where a lot of the learning disabilities come from. You know, where the school system is very linear in the way it teaches us. It doesn't focus on the big picture. And so but once we understand the big picture, once I kind of get my brain wrapped around something, give me any new piece of information and I will see how it fits into the grand scheme of things. You're just driven. You know, I'm coming from cultural anthropology, psychology, self psychology, spirituality, genetics, biology, neurology, all of these different fields coming in to really just understand this bigger context of what I'm trying to get at?

Yeah. Do you, do you find by the way that when it comes to the manifestation of the driven personality that it does vary from person to person? Like for example, for me, I totally get the hyper focus, I totally get the. There is never enough, the grass is always greener, I'm always exploring, always looking out for danger. But at the same time I'm not a huge physical risk taker. I was never the kid doing backflips on the trampoline or jumping off the 60 foot cliff versus the 20 foot cliff into the ocean, or engaging in a lot of the so called X game sports like snowboarding or bmx, bike racing or skateboarding. Physically I was always kind of, I kind of erred a little bit more towards safety and predictable environments. But yet from an entrepreneurial standpoint or a personal achievement standpoint, extreme risk taker, is that pretty common that you don't necessarily see a physical manifestation of risk taking?

You put needles in your dick, right?

Well, yeah, but I mean even that there was a certain amount of research and predictability that. Thanks for bringing that up, Doug. Appreciate that man.

That's my point is that what you perceive to be as risky is well thought out, well planned. But trying to explain that to 90% of the population, they still think you're nuts. Yeah, you know, I'm the same way, broke my leg in 2001, body whomping, you know, doing this big crazy beach break body surfing thing I used to do. And ever since then I have been profoundly risk adverse. You know, why try to kill yourself when there's so many wonderful things to kill? But it's, you know, I just don't like being injured. It is this, you know. So I would perceive your risk taking above average, if not off the frickin charts. It's just the style of risk you take is different than others.

Yeah, and I should back up until about 13 years old I did a ton of mountain biking and my favorite thing to do was actually high speed dirt biking around my property. And I suffered multiple concussions and finally a testicular contusion in which I almost lost my balls flying over the handlebars.

Of.

A motorcycle and laying in a field for three hours while my testicles swelled to the size of a softball. And it was after that point that I kind quit a lot of the two willing adventures. So I suppose maybe some of it was nature or I'm rather, I should say nurture that kind of perhaps got a little bit of that risk taking out of my system early. So. Yeah, that's a good point. The other part of this though is the never enough, like never ever feeling satisfied. Is that more of a dopamine thing? Is that more the neuropeptide? Why or why is it that that just from a pure chemical standpoint you just never feel satisfied?

It is literally never feeling satisfied. And both those genes, epigenetically, it's hard to really say, is it nature versus nurture? The answer is yes. I experience the world, the way I go through the world with my dopamine is that when I get something that triggers my dopamine, it is very short lived for me. And that's the research around this, is that, you know, people who get a 99 on a spelling test really feel good about it for days on end. I feel good about it for milliseconds and then I beat the shit out of myself about why did I miss the one?

Yeah, join the club.

And it is toxic perfectionism. It's not that I don't get a dopamine hit, it's just the dopamine carriers that carry the dopamine in my system, my reuptake of dopamine and the, it's very high and very quick. So I get a flash of dopamine but then it's gone, which makes it very addictive.

Yeah.

And so I really have to watch that. And this, you know, believe me, anything that triggers my dopamine I can become addicted to. And I've got a garage full of, you know, every hobby down that you can imagine to prove it. More importantly, it's my personality, it's the really my sense of self, it's my identity that takes on this driven nature. And is it my nature, is it my nurture? Is it my genetics or my environment? The answer is yes. And that insight to it, the ability to look in and really see that I'm different. I am driven like you. My wife is not driven. We getting ready to launch this entire driven institute thing. And as a precursor to that, we just wanted to make sure we weren't talking out of our rears. So we did a national normed assessment. I finally, I spent a bunch of time getting together this national normed assessment. 50 questions puts you in 10 different driven traits. And we did it right. Principal components, all statistically sound and amazing national norm. You know, it's a zero to 50 scale. The national norm is 23 on it. My wife is a 23. Oh wow. It's like, yeah, I'm a 48. I am 2.99 standard deviations from my wife. And so, literally, I am a different human being. I'm just different. I'm just different.

Yeah.

And so it is very helpful to understand that I'm different, you know, from her perspective, it really is. Expecting her to understand me and me to understand her and really get each other isn't the point. It's really appreciating the differences.

Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to ask you because something wasn't quite clear to me, so it might not be clear to other people as well. So back to this dopamine piece. What you're saying is that you get a dopamine surge when you say, let's say, cross the finish line of an ironman or get a 99% on your spelling test, but the dopamine is cleared more quickly. The reason I ask that is I know a lot of these ADD and ADHD medications, they act on dopamine pathways, and from what I understand, they act kind of like a serotonin, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, where they would keep dopamine hanging around in the synaptic cleft for a longer period of time. So you feel that happiness or satisfaction from something you're engaged in, like schoolwork, more readily and thus don't stray from it if you have ADD or adhd. Is that kind of the idea in terms of why some of those medications work? They're just maintaining dopamine for a longer.

Period of time, Maintaining dopamine, acting on the norepinephrine affects. But. And the combination of classic, you know, Dexatrine, Wellbutrin, or bupropion, where that is a dopamine reuptake inhibitor. And so that combination actually slows us down, doesn't necessarily make us feel more rewarded, but it doesn't. We don't have that drop of dopamine where we get the flash of dopamine and then the absence or the decline of dopamine is what. What makes us feel like there it wasn't good enough. So I felt good, and then it was gone. And it's that drop of dopamine that a lot of the, you know, the stimulants do really, you know, much better at.

Yeah.

So. And if they. If you can tolerate them, you know, the reason I don't do Adderall is because I'd be chopping it up and snorting it. I would. Or smoking it, even better. It's just I'm so addictive to it. If one is good. Maybe two is better, you know, and I wind up taking 40 milligrams of this stuff every day and it's diminishing returns. Right, and you don't, you don't necessarily need it once you really develop a lot of the tools and tricks that I've developed over the years.

Well, that's actually what I want to talk to you about because I think we've, we've done a good job establishing so far in the podcast what a driven person is. I think at least we've given people a little bit of a taste of what it means to be driven. Of course, the book gets into even more detail and it sounds like you're developing some questionnaires and other helpful tools for people. And I'll link to a lot of this stuff@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Driven by Doug as well as to the book. But let's turn now to some solutions because, I mean, we've talked about meditation. I want to get a little bit more into what this form of meditation, this flavor of meditation that you've created for driven people actually is. But you also made kind of an interesting comment a while back about how you help driven people find actual satisfaction and happiness. And I'm happy to start wherever you would like, but I'd love to hear some of your go to solutions for what you have found to be able to work for. Helping driven people still contribute to society in the unique way that they can as a driven person, but also be able to feel satisfied to be able to, you know, have a glass of wine with their wife on the porch while watching the sunset and not feel like their head's going to explode. Like, what are some of the solutions here?

Well, so it all begins with this understanding of identity. Butcher, baker, candlestick maker, the farmer's identity are very simple and they're very concrete. And you know, our hypo frontality, we don't have that linear, concrete thinking. And so as a byproduct of that, we often, as driven people, use our emotions as a foundation of our identity. How do you know there's something wrong with you? Well, I feel that way. And no matter what I do, it still feels like it wasn't good enough. Therefore I'm not good enough. And it's that jump from, you know, my feelings into a definition of who I am. And, you know, the Zen point about killing oneself and the Christian metaphor is even better. You must take yourself to the cross. But that sense of self is really the jumping off point that I Start everybody at. And you know, as driven people, we kind of get it already that there really is no sense of self. There really isn't, you know, and very simply what I do in the book is make a very simple argument that, you know, rather than worrying about or trying to define who you are in this world, I simply answer it with what you are. And what you are is a monkey. What you are is a homo sapien. What you are as an animal. And that's very clear. You can't argue that. You can't get away from that. You are not your thoughts, you are not your feelings, but you are as an animal. You're a loving child from a loving God. However you want to slice the piece, but that's what you are. Then you make the jump that I'm a driven animal. I am different. And these differences are not good or bad, but they're different. And I need to create a different routine and a different world for myself if I want to be able to actually function in their world, in the farmer's world. And so once you kind of make those two basic premises, then it just comes down to practice. And you know, I pose it in the book that, you know, driven's we are wired for a life of mastery. Mastery meaning that there. There is no finish line, better has no finish line. That we're in a constant state of trying to really make our worlds better. And driven people are famous. We are just masters at becoming out of balance. To, you know, I feeling out of shape and I'm not in, you know, I want to get in better shape. So I'm going to sign up for an ironman. You know, we go to extremes with it. And so the first real tool that I teach is just insight. And you know, rather than who am I and who do I think I need to be? It's what am I and what am I doing?

Self examination, basically.

You got it.

Yeah. Which has actually been incredibly helpful for me. I. Every single night, my entire family, we sit down and engage in the practice of examine and we go through our entire day and ask ourselves, what good have I done this day? What could I have done better this day? And what is one way that I fulfilled my life's purpose today? And for me it's just incredible. I feel like I'm more connected to who I am and what I was doing all day. And it really has helped me to stay more connected to my true self and what really gives me satisfaction and fulfillment. But I got to tell you, Doug, you also mentioned religion and probably the biggest thing for me that has helped the most in terms of this whole never have enough phenomenon was just the idea of the God shaped hole. I just think the God shaped hole is a fricking huge abyss in driven people. I think everybody has it, that void in their soul, their spirit, their life that ultimately is a longing for something outside yourself or something transcendent or something other. I think it's Ecclesiastes in the Bible talks about eternity in man's heart and how God can only fulfill that desire for eternity. But for me, returning to my spiritual roots, which I strayed from for a long time starting in college and all the way up until my early 30s, but returning to God and returning to spiritual disciplines, prayer, meditation, gratefulness, family relationships, worship, and basically taking all of the ironman triathlons, pursuing fitness, diet supplements, money, business success, et cetera, et cetera, and really fully realizing that that wasn't fulfilling and that that wasn't ultimately making me happy and that my driven personality was making the pursuit of those even worse and more magnified and then filling that God shaped hole with what actually fits in that hole like a lock and key, specifically God, that, that helped me out a ton.

It is and I will be very direct with this. It's the only thing that will help. Driven, to tell you the truth. I mean this is the niche that I have chosen because I'm in that niche. I am, you know, of that niche. But we are wired and you go into aa, you go into these, you know, pseudo spiritual programs or you know, spiritual programs, whatever you want to call them, where you are in a process of self examination. And broken feeling is what driven people are. We just feel broken. And the imposter syndrome is our plight. You know, that's walking out of a dual PhD shook my hand. Dr. Jim Spira, my dissertation chair. Congratulations Dr. Brackman. You know, first guy to shake my hand, my monkey mind immediately said, ha ha. They bought it. And because it still didn't feel like I did good enough and my multi thinking brain kicked in and I could imagine every little corner I cut and some little thing I didn't quite answer right. And, and so that self fulfilling prophecy, keyword of that is self, you know, based upon the premise that I'm broken is never ending and it's unfillable, completely unfillable. And so killing of oneself and I say that in the book and you know, I've had multiple, many people here relatively recently, you know, I kill myself. And my response is yes. Yeah, finally because you know, I will show you how and where is the self. Is it in your head? Is it your thinking, is it your feeling? Is it your body? Is it your, is it your income? What is this self that you're trying to get rid of? And it is that God shaped hole that is, you know, infinite. But it's really an acceptance that, you know, I'm made exactly the way I am. And this is the real tool that I apply to everybody. And this is the last 10 years of my life, 15 years of my life is trauma healing. And I've been trained by the best. Just by chance fell into it with Peter Levine and you know, in San Diego, back 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and you know, the forefront of that of actually being able to change our wiring within our body and heal a lot of these recordings, fear based recordings that are stuck in our flesh. Our body is a machine built for fear. And you know, that ability to really feel that, you know, grace, for lack of a better word, it's unearned, undeserved, unwarranted, you didn't do anything to earn it. Relaxation, expansion of the body into the present moment where you feel safe. And that is the, you know, the real tool of this is that, you know, meditation is based upon the premise, the reality that the present moment is safe and only the present moment is safe. Yeah. But you know, it's always going to be better. Yeah, Better is not safer. Ten minutes from now, meteorite can come, kill us all and there's nothing we can do about that. But in this present moment, in this present instant, you are safe.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is harder, correct me if I'm wrong for driven people. And I even came across a research study about reduced, what's called interoceptive sensitivity among high thrill and adventure seeking people to where for us to meditate, for us to engage in a mindful breathwork pattern or for us to learn how to connect to some of these non exteroceptive sensations or triggers, but to instead go inside and that is, is it not harder for a driven person?

It is. I love, I taught a free meditation class 20 years ago for eight, 10 years, had 1500, 2000 people go through it. And you know, how many people in here have ever tried to meditate? And you know, everybody tries to, everybody raises their hand. How many people in here hate it? And about a third of the room would raise their hand and it was the drivens every single time because, because 90% of the population is developing meditations for themselves and they're non driven, they're farmers. You close your eyes, you relax, you imagine a peaceful, serene green field. You tell me to do that, I want to punch you in the throat. I mean, it is like, because it triggers all of my. Everything that I'm wired to do, it triggers me in a way that is just like, like no.

Yeah. And I know you weren't intending a pun, but a peaceful and serene green field is something very hard for me personally to tap into.

It's like. But you know, and thankfully, you know, the Japanese, Japanese are very trippy, interesting people, but they're very efficient people. And you know, I stumbled into this years and years and years ago. Of, you know, most 90% interestingly of Japan is something called Soto Zen. S O T o Zen. And it was, it came out of the rice farmers. It was developed by the rice farmers. And interestingly, this other branch of Zen in Japan called Rinzai is developed for the warrior class, for the rin, for the ninjas and the samurai and for the drivens. And so it is just by chance and I've stolen a lot of it from them. Everything I've done is taken from somebody else. But, but eyes open is the biggest difference between what I teach, my drivens, versus the non driven styles of meditations.

Yeah, I thought that was interesting. By the way, that this Rinzai that you talk about in the form of meditation you teach in the book, I actually was wondering about that. I was going to ask you about it. Why is it kind of an eyes open or eyes kind of half open type of meditation?

Well, number one, it suits our brain. And hopefully everything that you're seeing in the present moment is in reality. And so the eyes are the primary tool that the drivens use to keep their world safe. And if, unless you're floridly psychotic or under, you know, pretty interesting hallucinogens, everything you're seeing is solid and real. And so combined with the present moment is safe. And you look around and you see the room, then you can very simply question is, what's happening in my central nervous system? Is what's happening in my body an accurate reflection of reality? And for drivens, you know, the very simple thing that I teach is that reality or safety is not inside the body. Safety is in reality. Safety is not a feeling, it is a statement. And combined with those two things, with the style of breathing, you know, diaphragmatic deep breathing, where you're triggering the vagal nerve to send signals of safety into the brain, combined with your eyes open, orienting to the present, you will, as a byproduct of that practice, the body will start to relax. Where many meditations, you know, farmer styles of meditations are much more styled or I would even call them relaxation training. They're not attempting to actually become present.

Yeah.

And so resenting styles of meditation for the drivens. And I've taught thousands of drivens to meditate. Now it's like, oh crap, I get it. Like I finally understand why people want to meditate. And it is a very simple, incredibly simple, hardest thing you'll ever do. It's simple but not easy.

So you're sitting on the floor, your eyes are just a little bit open, kind of staring in front of you. And the breath work that you talk about that you recommend for your specific flavor of driven meditation is a little different too. You even say that a lot of people get chattering of the teeth when they're breathing. The way that you teach in your driven form of meditation, why is that?

The trauma healing component of it is really the last five years, I mean that's been my hyper focus for the last five years of allowing the bandwidth of the human body to actually learn to tolerate safety. Fairly interesting statement. But very simply, post traumatic stress trauma comes up in the body when we are safe. And it's not until the guys come back from Afghanistan that the body actually starts to dysregulate and tries to re regulate itself, reset its bandwidth with the thermostat for the new environment it's in. And so when you are logically, and I say this in the book, as I call it the logical container, it's just a logical way of actually experiencing the present moment when your body starts to dysregulate because it will, you will start to resist becoming safe because the trauma will start to come up. The body will start to try to get rid of these old patterns, these old central nervous systems, you know, kind of remn of transgenerational trauma, believe it or not, it's been there for 140,000 years. The body will start to release this trauma and the jaw and the hip structures and the, you know, the, the way the body does that is chatters, it vibrates, it literally tremors. And you know, the advent of medicine, work and advent, but the repopularizing of that and watching people really try to surrender into the is we resist it. The body starts to go through these patterns of just, you know, I don't like what's happening in my body, but as long as you can logically meet those sensations with this is happening because my body's trying to get rid of old patterns, trying to feel becoming more an accurate reflection of actually my reality. You can get out of the way of the body, kill the self, kill the thing that normally is in the way of the body. And the body can start to become more and more regular, regulated in a sense of, you know, for lack of a better word, love. That's one of the things that I kind of get on a grandstand about about, you know, becoming born again in the classic Christian sense is actually a physical change of the body and where your normal fear based reaction normally recorded in the flesh are actually wired out and on a, it's on a DNA level. I mean it is so wild this, it is such a cool time to be alive. Watching, you know, both the DNA and the in the functional MRIs demonstrate that meditation is actually not only changing the mind, but it's changing our physical reactions to fear.

Interesting. And how long are the folks who you're working with who are driven personalities, how long are they typically meditating on a daily basis using this style of meditation that you teach?

In the book I start everybody and point of a meditation practice is to keep it. Meaning that everybody on the planet would love to have a meditation practice and everybody starts one at some point in their life. Most people do, but they never keep it. And it's that resistance to the present moment, largely because of our trauma, we resist feeling uncomfortable, even if that uncomfortability is safety. And that was my doctoral research, is that, you know, the human animal is designed for a familiar environment. And if you were unfamiliar, you know, coming on my dissertation lottery winners are some of the best examples of it. My last stats, my last, you know, PowerPoint slide on that was 78% of people that win the lottery within two years absolutely blow their life up. They're bankrupt, family hates them. Just the worst thing in the world to happen to you because you physically can't handle that much security and safety. And so you return to baseline. Yeah. And so where I start everybody on meditation is two minutes a day, just two minutes.

Wow.

And you start the timer and you, you literally it's, that's like five or eight breaths at the most. And there's no logical reason, none whatsoever, not to do it.

No, not at all.

And yet you will physically feel the resistance to doing it. That's where my clients always mf me. They, you know, like what the. Why am I resisting doing this? And you know, it's your sense of Self, your embodied ego. The ego lives in the body, not in the brain. And your ego is going to resist something good. And as you, you know, becoming my dissertation too. It's why January sucks at the gym. Because everybody's monkey mind is telling their body, hey, this time's different. This time's going to be great. But then, you know, by the research on it, by February 14, 80 something percent of people don't even remember their New Year's resolutions. We, you know, have this body that just wants to go back to normal and go back to the status quo.

Yeah. I have a few other questions to ask you. Although, although I know you detail the meditation in a lot more detail in the book, but you talked about ego. I know that it seems from what I understand the book, and correct me if I'm wrong, driven people do tend to be a little bit more attached to ego or more egotistical. At least that seems to be what I found from personal experience, a lot of so called plant medicines, they're often turned to as something that can be used to help dissolve the ego or merge left and right brain hemispheric activity or allow for greater connection to true self. Do you think that those type of protocols can be useful for driven people?

Blanketly, yes, with a lot of caution, Tremendous amount of caution. I'm a trauma healer and understanding that what a lot of those medicines do is allow the default neural network, basically the standard operating system in the brain to really go offline and it will bring up a lot of your trauma. And it's the old snow globe metaphor that I use. You know, we all have these eons, literally multi generations of trauma stuck in your DNA, in your body and hey, let's go shake the snow globe. Let's get all this stuff out of your body and get it moving around. It's, you know, and that's my state, you know, medicine work is not work. The work is something different than the medicine. And this is where the meditations come in. This is where the logical understanding that I can get out of the way of my body and let my body. One of my teachers always said it's a hundred million years of organic intelligence in my body. And our body's a healing machine, as you know better than I do, that we can assist the body in its healing process. This. But the best thing you can do is really get out of the way of it. That is true with trauma too. And you know, here's medicine protocols, some of them, some people are really good at creating some protocols that Allow the ego to go offline temporarily. And here comes this amazing experience. Here comes a lot of healing potential in the body. But if you continue on the practice, you will see very quickly that you will resist, you know, actually surrendering into the body during meditation or during medicine work. And so I think the work, pre work of a meditation practice, then if you want, you know, to really clear the snow globe, so to speak, to already get rid of the kind of the grosser defects of our fears, and then if you want to go deeper and shake the snow globe a little bit so you can do further work to get rid of it, and that's the integration components of it of really becoming less and less fear based ego and more and more love based ego, for lack of a better word.

Yeah. I can tell you from personal experience that probably the hardest thing for me about plant medicine, and this is probably due to my heavily driven personality, is feeling of trust or safety. I mean, it takes multiple times working with a practitioner in the same place for me to even get to the point where I can relax and let go. Because I'm constantly looking for and analyzing my environment for danger, even when I am in a setting where plant medicine is being administered. And that's been the biggest thing that I've had to overcome, is falling into trust. It's incredibly difficult for me. And I would imagine that's something that a lot of driven people have to overcome.

And yet we're up for the challenge. Yeah, that's, you know, it's just, and that's been the last few years of my life of really helping guys very much like you to understand that trust is not a feeling, safety is not a feeling. It is a statement of being. And it's my belief that I need to control the feelings in my body that get in the way of that. And the practice of meditation, particularly the style of meditation that I do, is directly related to surrendering into the safety of the present. No matter how I feel, even though I feel like shit and my jaws clenched and I'm chattering and everything else, you know, I can take a breath in and actually surrender into the reality that I am safe. Easy, easy. Easy to say.

Now for people who want to try out this whole shooting a rifle or doing kind of like sniper based protocols associated with meditation. Do you teach classes around the country? Is there a way that if someone's listening in, they could actually, you know, and they're intrigued by this. Is there a place they could go to take part in something like that?

Yeah, that's all it's driveninstitute.com driveninstitute.com okay, cool.

I'll link to that as well. Dude, I still have to get in and do it with you sometime.

That is something I am looking exceedingly forward to is having you behind a gun. Yeah, yeah. Nothing like a.300. Yeah, it's, it's, there's no. This is the greatest takeaway. You know, there is no recoil in the present and anticipation of recoil. And I've got a 300 Norma Mag. I've got some guns that are unbelievably loud and powerful and we shoot, you know, we shoot out to 2500 yards. I got tiles, I got 1760 yards, I got mile long targets. And you know, your, your logical mind, your brain can't even see the target. There's just, just you can't believe you can hit it. And yet if you just trust the process and be present throughout, you can't miss. That gun is the greatest teaching tool I've ever accidentally stumbled into.

Obviously I've done a lot of these end in the art of archery type of stuff and shot the bow a lot. But I think it'll be cool to practice on the gun. So we'll connect at some point and do it it. And in the meantime, for those of you listening in, we really have kind of only scratched the surface of all the solutions for driven people that Doug presents in his book as well as a really, really complete analysis of what it means to be driven. So if this resonated with you at all, I think the book would be a really good read for you. Again, if anyone has any tactics for getting my wife to read it. Or maybe I'll just have her. Maybe I'll just have her listen to this podcast. That might be good enough. Hi babe, if you're listening in. Thank you you. Anyways, I'm going to link to all this@BenGreenfieldFitness.com DrivenByDoug where you can leave your questions, your comments and your thoughts for Doug or myself. Where you can grab the book where I'll link to a bunch of the different research articles that I mentioned. Other books that were mentioned, like the Edison Gene, for example. And Doug, thank you so much for working on this book and for the good that you're doing in the world for all of us crazy driven people who can't sit still and are never satisfied.

And if you're driven, there's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken, you're supposed to be this way.

That, or you just have a whole bunch of other neighborly freaks walking around the face of the planet who at least know the way you feel.

We are not alone.

All right, man, well, I look forward to seeing you and. And sitting with you going crazy, trying to sip a glass of wine while looking at a sunset. We'll try to make that happen sometime. Or we can just go off on some crazy adventure. But. But anyways, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Dr. Doug Brackman signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single day week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.