Heavily Meditated: Transforming Your Emotional Landscape with Dave Asprey

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout— sorry, Mom— turned 4-time New York Times bestselling author. I'm a certified nutrition specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven most of all by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's where you come in. That's why I created the Well Beyond 40 Podcast, to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to powerful aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. Don't miss an episode. Subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. Want to listen to the show ad-free? Head over to subscribe2jj.com and start your ad-free experience today.

All right, well, this The next person coming on is one of my longtime oldest friends in health, and gosh, he's been on the show a gazillion times. It's Dave Asprey, the father of biohacking, and an entrepreneur, 4 times New York Times bestselling author, founder of Bulletproof Coffee, Upgrade Labs, and a bunch of different wellness ventures, and a big meditator, and actually the person who got me into meditating, but not meditating in the way that you probably think about it. So he's got a book coming out, Heavily Meditated, it's probably out as you're listening to this, that talks about the science of energy, resilience, and mindfulness for high performance and longevity. And we are going to be unpacking that today. And I just, before we get in, I'm going to share that years ago, trying to think of how long ago it was, It was at least 10 years ago. He basically strong-armed me into going to 40 Years of Zen because he saw what I did not see, which was I was getting triggered, had trauma, and it was his selling point to me was like, you can do 40 years of meditation in a week. I'm like, okay, I'll do that. Anyhow, it taught me a very powerful process. We'll talk about that today, the reset process that once you have it can help you remove your reactivity, remove those triggers, and just be happier in life.

So we're going to go through that today.

We are talking about his book. I'm putting a lot of the information, past episodes, all the cool book bonuses that he has when you buy the book at jjvirgin.com/heavilymeditated. So make sure you check that out and check out the bonuses because there's like over $750 worth of amazing bonuses here, and I will be right back with Dave. Stay with me.

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Hello, my friend. I'm super excited, Dave, to have you back on the show. I think it's your 100th time.

Yeah, we go way back, JJ, and thanks for having me on. I love getting to talk about the stuff that we're both, we're both doing to make the whole world a lot healthier and happier and all that stuff.

Well, we're both doing this specifically only because you strong-armed me into doing it, and that's what I want to talk about today. We're going to talk about your new book, Heavily Meditated, and I think it's fun because I know just when you initially started to talk to me about meditation, and I was very very reticent. I was like, not gonna do it, and you basically bullied me, as you're known to do. But you really had this great story, and what you did when I went to 40 Years of Zen was take like ancient— the ancient techniques and the modern tech and bring them all together. And so what I would love to start with is kind of a backup, because I know your stories of you and your own personal meditation journey and how it all began. Mm.

I used to weigh 300 pounds in my 20s and I had really serious brain fog. And then I realized I'm miserable all the time. And I tried making a bunch of money and sadly lost it. Tried getting married for a brief period of time. Tried being in magazines and getting to be well known in my industry and nothing made me happy or even resolved the stress that I was unaware of 'cause I was always stressed. So, I decided I had to do something about it. And I traveled the world and I've been to remote parts of Nepal and Tibet, the Andes. And so, I'm saying, what's it gonna take? Study with gurus. And I started hooking computers up to my head because I thought all the ancient knowledge was probably stupid. That is called ego. So, over time as I started the biohacking movement and said, well, let's just measure it. If it works, we're gonna know that it works because we'll see it in the data. And I wrote "Heavily Meditated" because after 10 years of working with more than 1,000 entrepreneurs who come in like you did to 40 Years of Zen, plug your brain into a computer and show you how to run a specific process and look at the results, I can tell you straight up what can help people go in to remove things things that trigger you. Permanently and forever remove a trigger so it doesn't bother you anymore. And that is one of the two biggest things that's made all the difference in my life. The other one is how do you have more energy? And the other one is how do you waste less of it on being triggered by other people? If you can get that down, wow, you might like your life.

Well, let's go—

I still would love to talk about some of these crazy things, because you did do some crazy things, which, I mean, you still do crazy things, let's be honest. But like, you know, the early meditation experiences of Dave, what were What are some of the craziest ones?

Mm, well, I decided that I was going to go down to South America and I was going to try ayahuasca. And this is before anyone could spell it. It was not something that you would hear about at a cocktail party. So I went down to Peru and I'm walking around at this little guest house, mid-20s, and I'm asking, I want to try ayahuasca. And they looked at me and they said, "you're white." And I said, "Oh no." "I notice." And they said, "It's only for locals, you won't like it." And I explained, "No, I've done my research." And they introduced me to a shaman. I went to his little mud hut in a small town and he showed me all the herbs. And I had an ayahuasca experience. And in "Heavily Meditated," I write about the appropriate use of psychedelics. If that's how you wanna enter these altered states, It's a way to do it, but it's probably not the first psychedelic you should start with. And the reality is healing is an altered state, and focus is an altered state, and flow is an altered state. And there are many different ways that don't require drugs that can put you there. So Heavily Meditated is the complete list of all the different ways that you can get the benefits of meditating with or without meditating. Or the benefits of psychedelics with or without psychedelics. The idea is how do you control your state all of the time with the least possible effort? That's what I want. And that was one of them, was being the weird white guy asking for ayahuasca. I also traveled to a remote part of Tibet where it's considered the holiest mountain in the world. Problem is it takes 5 days in a 4-wheel drive to get there. So, I went to Lhasa on a bus, which is in eastern Tibet, and went to a little guest house, coffee house place and put up a sign said, "I want to go to this remote place. Anyone want to join me?" And hooked up with 4 other totally random people in the back of a Land Cruiser. And the government requires that they have a translator who doesn't actually speak much English, but is kind of the government observer to make sure that you behave yourself. And our driver proceeds to get drunk while driving over like the edges of cliffs and around things. Wow. And I'm like, this is really scary, but everybody made it. And the idea for what became Bulletproof Coffee came to me on the side of that mountain, which if you're Hindu or Buddhist is the holiest mountain in the world. So it was a remarkable time in my life. And I just got a chance to, literally ask the masters and to sit in these monasteries and to say, what's really going on in there? And it turns out there's a lot of wisdom from shamanic paths and from ancient breathwork and meditation. And so much of this, we think it's been lost, but it hasn't been lost. We just haven't seen it. So my path has been, let's find it, let's try it, let's test it, and let's talk about what works.

Well, and what's cool, like what initially attracted me to all of this was I think for a lot of people, their vision of meditating is the guy with their arms and, you know, their fingers up, their legs crossed over in a position I can't get into anymore, sitting there for hours. And you were like, no, you can go and do this in this shorter amount of time. And I just wonder, like, you know, you went and saw those people who sat there and they always talk about emptying their mind. I can't empty my mind.

I've seen you at one time, JJ.

So you talk about in the book that traditional meditation is outdated for the modern brain. So what would be the way we'd approach this now?

You're at least as busy as I am, and you're helping a lot of people. So you wake up in the morning and you like to do like 500 flights of stairs before you wake up. And things like that. We're all exercising as much as we're supposed to. Then we're supposed to prepare a healthy meal, make our smoothie, make sure we get all the right supplements, toss some creatine HCL, that new stuff you came out with, in there so our brains work better. And then, oh, we're supposed to also take care of our families and then call our friends and then go to work and commute. And no one has time to meditate for 2 hours a day and go to the gym and do all the other stuff it takes to be healthy. It, it's actually not possible. And even worse, 98% of people have been involved in agriculture for the last few thousand years. So what if some people's brains are not farmer brains? If you do a meditation that was designed for a farmer and you're a hunter, what's going to happen to you? It's not going to work, and you'll just be tired. So a lot of the meditation that I tried when I was younger did not do anything for me. In fact, some of it just made me tired and not good. But eventually you realize there is— saying that you should meditate is like saying you should cook. Maybe you should know what you're cooking, right? You choose the meditation based on your brain and based on your state, or you say, you know what, I could cook that, but I could also have it delivered. I could also hire a chef. There are different ways. I could just do intermittent fasting, right? There are different ways to get the results you want. And assuming you have to meditate isn't a very good assumption. If you do meditate, there are accelerators you could do, and you may find that breathwork on top of meditation cuts the time dramatically. And in Heavily Meditated, I talk about 3 different buckets of breathwork that you might consider, but it depends on what do you want to do? Do you want to launch off into outer space? You can do that. Do you want to turn off a stress response you're feeling from your mother-in-law or something right now? You can do that. And do you want to just become calm and focused and get some work done without stressing? You can do that. They're just different animals. So you got to pick, you know, pick the medication, pick the supplement for the condition. You should pick the meditation or the altered states technique as well. And that's why Heavily Meditated— it isn't that much about meditation. It's about the states you get from meditation and how to get there faster.

That is so cool. I never thought of it like that. I mean, this is so obvious when you say it. Like, you think of vegan, carnivore, paleo, all that. And then you think of exercise, HIIT, and resistance. I never— like, meditation's meditation's a bucket, right?

You know, french fries are not ribeye are not garbanzo beans, right? Like, they're all totally different.

Totally.

You know, and garbanzo beans, I know, are your favorite. So, inside joke, everybody. So these altered states, like, what— someone walking in, like, what are the different states they might be walking in with and come and want to— how am I going to ask this? Let's say someone's coming in because you might come in stressed, you might come in because you want to manifest something, you might come in because you want to go to sleep, you know, you might come in because you want to face the day in a better way. Um, how do you, how do you know what to pick?

Well, usually you have a problem you're trying to solve, and you say, what's the problem I'm trying to solve? And one of the biggest ones is that if you're over 40 and you're still reacting like you're 14, it's actually not your fault. It's that your nervous system is on autopilot, and there's a good reason for it. So you might say, all right, I want to choose a meditation that is going to allow me to go into the little system settings like I do on my phone. I'm going to turn off all the alerts from TikTok and Instagram and all this other stuff. I'm just going to stop them from happening, right? But you want to do that inside your own brain. That's an altered state. That meditation is called the reset process. That's the core from 40 Years of Zen. But you might also say, you know, I'd like to really gain more bodily awareness. So I really, I'm more embodied, I'm more grounded. And that's going to be a visualization technique. So got to know what you want to do. For me, though, the most precious that I've done is the one that we did together when you came to 40 Years of Zen, which has even evolved since then. It's the reset process where it's a structured technique to turn off any trigger, And everyone knows you're going along and maybe someone who's in a different political party or someone does something and you're just, "Argh!" And you get so mad. Look, if you can be triggered, it means you're carrying a loaded gun and that someone else has their finger on the trigger. And nobody wants to do that. And a lot of people feel shame or guilt. Like, "I can't believe I said that to my kids. There must be something wrong with me." No, there's nothing wrong with you. It's that there is a system inside of you called the operating system inside your body, and its job is to keep your meat alive as if your conscious brain isn't even in there. And it makes decisions in order, JJ, and it does this before you or I have a chance to think. Because if you have an adult brain, it takes a third of a second after something happens for your brain to even get a signal that it happened, and it takes another 3/4 of a second for your brain to think about it and figure out what just happened. So if I say boo, you— well, I heard him say boo and I decided not to be startled. But in reality, that whole second you couldn't see it and I couldn't see it because we're all running on this delay. Kind of like used to watch the Super Bowl, there's an 8-second delay in case there's a wardrobe malfunction. But we have that and our body is running it. So how's our body deciding what we get to see and not see? Well, it's all F-words, and the first one: fear. If something is scary, it means you immediately need to run away from, kill, or hide, right? And this is true whether you're a dog, a tadpole, a blade of grass— they can't run away, so they make sharp edges. Everything on Earth that is alive always handles immediate threats first, and since your brain is too slow to handle immediate threats, your body does it for you. Sadly, when Miss Johnson in third grade criticized you, that felt unsafe at the time. And so your dumb operating system is still firing off an alert when you're criticized going, well, that must not be safe. So then you feel angry and then you blame the other person. That's not you doing it. It's your system telling you that. So what if you could turn off that alert? And if it's not fear, the next F-word that all life will do before you can think Food. Let's eat everything. And you are a master of getting people off the craving cycle. Well, every time you have a craving, it's taking you away from being present. And the research that I've gone through says that 1/3 of the average person's thoughts every day are about tacos.

Really?

Well, not necessarily tacos, but—

Not tacos, but yes.

It's like, what's lunch? What's for dinner? And literally, our brain— This is your meat operating system, your body going, "Food, food, food." Okay, we can solve that.

That's why these GLP-1s are blowing up everywhere.

Amen.

Jeez, okay.

What do you think the third F-word is that keeps life alive that you think about a lot?

I know what the third F-word is.

You're thinking fertility, aren't you? It's amazing how many people will just drop an F-bomb there. But it's fertility or the fornication version of it. Or the F-bomb. Exactly. So, JJ, what that means is when you walked into your studio this morning, your body automatically looked at the shelf behind you and said, "Is it scary? No. Can I eat it? No. Should I hump its leg? No." And then it allowed you to sit down at that desk. Isn't that dark? Well, all of us Our bodies are doing this all of the time. And it's okay.

Some are doing it more than others.

Well, that's exactly the problem. But have you ever done something you're ashamed of that isn't from one of those three things?

Hmm. Not really. No, you're right. Those are the big ones.

And if you look at the Seven Deadly Sins, oh, there are those three things. And you look at the hindrances in Buddhism, oh, there are those three things. Wow. Always. It's not us. It's our bodies trying to keep us alive.

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So imagine your body is a Labrador Retriever. I know you have cute little dogs, but I'm talking—

You haven't even seen the latest one.

I've heard about the latest one.

Oh my God, the Pomchi.

Ah, can't wait.

Fluff bomb. Okay. We are—

I love dogs too, man. We're on the same wavelength. But the Labrador Retriever, the puppy, it comes in, it eats your shoes, it pees on the couch, It humps your leg and it eats everything. Okay, great. That is the same operating system that you and I are running. And that time I saw you eat all the Ben Jerry's.

Uh-huh, right.

Okay, I've never seen that, for the record, but I did, you know. So all the times we've all done these things, it's your body trying to stay alive. So our job to be functioning adults is turn fear into peace. And that's the most important part of this book. And then it's to turn hunger and cravings into nourishment. And you've done so much there. I mean, we're so aligned on that, except for garbanzo beans, but hey, that's a small difference. And then we want to turn loneliness and lust into what I call sacred intimacy. This is something that is a path to healing altered states and is incredibly nourishing and necessary for adults, as important as food or air.

And it's probably gotten, that is probably what's been screwed up the most when I think about like what's happened with all the online stuff, right?

You are totally correct. And if we can make those shifts, it frees up a lot of energy for the next F word. So we have fear, food, fertility, friend. And all life on Earth will form an ecosystem. We interact and cooperate with our species and with the world around us to make it better. This is why we help the little old lady across the street. This is why we take care of kids who aren't ours. We're wired to be good inside our bones. And we don't get to do that sometimes because we get trapped in fear and hunger and lust. So if we can just learn how to train that Labrador that's running our body to be a service dog, you don't think about food anymore because you're nourished. You're not angry at people all the time because you ran the reset process from the book, because you learned how to let it go. What most of us do most of the time is we get really triggered, but because we're functioning adults, we smile anyway and go, "I'm really pissed off here, but I'm just gonna pretend like I'm okay." And the problem is you don't have congruence when you do that. Everyone knows when your inner state and your outer state don't match. Everyone listening to the show, we've all met people like that. We know they're faking. Well, your job is to make your inner state match your outer state. And one way to do that is to walk around screaming every time someone offends you. At least you match, but now no one wants to be around you. So the other thing to do would be to, let's work on the inner state so that you don't get triggered in the first place. And for me, that has been by far the biggest lesson. And Heavily Meditated is my most important book of all the ones I've written. It's my 9th book. And the knowledge in here, people spend $20,000 to spend 5 days with my neuroscience team, CEOs and celebrities and people. I'm giving away the process and it has been tested and evolved and developed even since you did 40 Years of Zen with me. And it's like my highest and best work. And what happens if you increase your energy by learning how to eat, by hydrating your brain, by doing all the biohacking and health and nutrition longevity practices, you have more energy. And then you're gonna—

You're gonna be more triggered if you don't fix it.

It's true. Like if you're a reactive asshole, you'll be a bigger, more powerful reactive asshole, right?

That's what they always say. Like if someone, if a jerk gets more money, they're just a bigger jerk. It would absolutely follow that if you don't fix this piece, you know, it will get amplified.

It is true. And your prefrontal cortex, the part of you that catches your negative impulses and makes you act like an adult, is one of the most energy-dense parts of the brain. So there is some hope that at least if you're well-fed, you might act less like a jerk, but you'll still have the strong feelings that make you want to act like a jerk. But what would happen if you had enough money and then you had less fear? So you kind of poured into that bucket and then, okay, I didn't get triggered and I had a ton of energy, so it goes into food. Oh, I wasn't hungry because I know how to eat. So it goes into— oh my gosh, the bedroom. Now you focus on your relationships, and they become a source of nourishment, and then it pours into your community. And now you actually have friends and you spend time with them, and you nourish your community and it nourishes you. And now you still have all your energy. And then the final F word is forgiveness. And this is how you say, well, what am I holding a grudge about? And how do I stop holding that grudge? It's about disentangling yourself from someone or something else. Not about saying, "Oh, I forgive you." It's not about saying something that someone did is okay. And being able to just not be engaged with just the stuff that breaks a lot of people. So instead of feeling the anger and beating your pillow and gritting your teeth and doing the work— well, you got to do the work, but you want to do the work in the fastest and most peaceful way you can so you can stop being reactive. Instead of writing down your angry feelings every single day for the rest of your life, we got to go to the source. And the good news is it takes about 5 minutes when you do it right. And if it's a really big thing, it might take a little bit more time. But this is a tried and true structured process for finding a single feeling or situation that triggers you and just turning it off. And I had to do it in a major way. And it's— it took a lot of learning to get here. Um, I mean, I, I write about this.

You've had some triggers.

Yeah. Oh, I, I write about this.

We all have, right?

Oh yeah.

I mean, it's, it's a fact of life. You just got, you just got a couple more than usual.

The question is, how do you own them, right?

Yeah. It's the, what's your 50%? Like, what can you control? Like, you can't control other people doing jerky things, but you can control your reaction to it. So here's a couple questions around this. Like, as you're talking about this, I'm thinking, because it feels like once you learn the process— and I know I learned the process in 40 Years of Zen, and what was cool about doing it that way was you could actually hear if you were doing it, you were hitting it correctly. However, you don't have to go and do that just to be able to pull it off, which is, which is cool. You put the technique in the book, and the technique really surrounds itself around forgiveness. But it strikes me that this is like peeling an onion, because you really need to understand— like, well, here's the question: how much do you need to be able to identify what the trigger actually is?

Oh, this is the most common question, JJ, and you don't need to. So let's say you're, you're driving home and someone cuts you off. Okay, most people are going to get angry about that. So now your trigger is someone cut me off. So you're going to sit down, you're going to run the reset process, and part of it is you ask yourself this question: What's the first time I ever felt that way? So you're not saying, what's the first time I was cut off in traffic? What was the feeling in my body? And does it feel like anything else I can think of? And weird stuff will flash into your head that sometimes makes no sense. Whatever that is, you just write it down, and then you run the reset process on whatever that thing is. And then all of a sudden, you're rewriting history somewhere in your, in your past. And then the car cutting off doesn't matter. And the example I use in Heavily Meditated is a relatively well-known one where I was on Joe Rogan's show 3 times. And Joe Rogan had a financial interest in a competitor. And when that competitor launched a copycat product, suddenly he came out there and said, "Dave's a liar." And really kind of came after my reputation in a way that didn't make any sense And it really dysregulated me. I bought, you know, I hired a crisis PR firm. Like, what do I do? You know, I have a successful business. It was successful before Joe. You know, he bumped the numbers a bit, but like, all I did was come on his show and help his people. Like, I did nothing wrong. And I sat down to do the reset process. And I thought, when's the first time I felt this way? And it was this weird, like, you know, something's wrong. And this situation from first grade popped into my head, JJ. I'm a grown-ass adult. Right? And I'm like, what is this? I didn't even remember that. But this, oh, wow. And the situation was, some other kid did something wrong. I told the teacher. Yeah, I was a tattletale. And then the teacher says, "Little Johnny, did you do it?" He goes, "I didn't do it. Dave did it." And I got sent to the principal's office for what the other kid did. And it turns out for entrepreneurs and for adults, one of the biggest triggers and traumas that we deal with is injustice. I did the right thing and I got punished for it, right? I didn't know that this happened in first grade. I forgot about that 30, 40 years ago, but it popped into my head the second I asked myself the question. So I said, "All right, I'll run the reset process against that." And when I did that, reality became clear. Every time Joe Rogan says Dave Asprey's a bad man, I just sell more coffee. Who cares what a comedian thinks about me? And to be clear, I think Joe did awesome stuff during the pandemic. I'm not mad at Joe about this because I ran the reset process. But at the time, I was pissed. And I was pretty reactive about it. But I couldn't see reality because it was a trigger. And the trigger's job is to make you reactive and not let you think. Because if something's dangerous, you don't have time to think, you have to react.

So if you can't identify, if you can't identify that trigger, like you, like somehow that first grade thing popped up, but if the first grade thing hadn't popped up, yep, I would have run it right on Joe. So you would just run it on Joe and then, but then similar situations would have continued to trigger you because you hadn't really gotten to the root cause, or no, they would have triggered me less or possibly not triggered me.

What's cool is if you go back in time to the earliest one you can remember, everything after that gets fixed. So if I handled it with Joe, going forward, I would have had less triggers. But the Joe situation kind of looked like the first great injustice, but there would have been other instances of injustice that felt different enough to be triggered. So the further back you go, the better it works.

Got it.

Okay. And here's the weird thing, JJ Virgin. When I'm working with these high-powered CEOs and all, everyone has childhood trauma with their parents. If you have a meat body and you are alive, there was a time when you were little and your parents did something that really made you angry and they don't even know it made you angry. You can have the best parents on earth, it doesn't matter. It left a mark. And we've all had bullying situations and teachers that said something and just, it's just a fact of growing up. Your body's trying to figure out how to keep you alive. So these CEOs, sometimes they'll break down in tears going, "God, I never thought about that." but they're letting it go permanently instead of being reactive. And the more, the larger your family, the larger your team, the more important it is that you own your own shit. Because if you don't, you will pass it on and then your kids will pass it on or your team will pass it on and it ruins your company culture, it ruins your family dynamics. So you can be the one who stops it. And it means you do the work. And the fastest way I've seen after going around the world is the reset process.

So someone grabs the book and they do the reset process. I mean, how quickly can this start to make an impact?

If you have a situation, say, with a family member, maybe, you know, one of your adult kids is doing something and you really don't like it, you really want them to do what you want them to do, and it's triggering you. Okay, run the reset process there. And that night, when you text with your kid or when they call you, you're not going to get angry the way you did before. It hits you that day. And it's remarkable. And it's kind of sad because if your energy is off, you have less energy to do this and less energy to control your state. So a lot of my friends are going through perimenopause or they're in menopause. And it doesn't break your brain. It breaks your energy productive system. And then unprocessed trauma sucks the energy you have left. So you want to fix your hormones, fix your food so that you get the energy back, and you want to turn off the trauma that's sucking energy. So all of a sudden you have this amazing thing. It's called wisdom. So now you have the energy of being young and you have the wisdom of having suffered and done something about it. And then you become something that's missing in the world today. You become an elder, not elderly, because you don't look or feel elderly, but you're an elder because people go, wow, That person knows everything and they own their own shit. And they can hear things that are uncomfortable and they just show up and they're helping and they're nice and they're kind. And this is what we need. We don't need a bunch of people who are reactive and triggered and full of Alzheimer's in retirement homes, not remembering their own names. All of that's optional. I mean, you know that better than anyone because you've been working on this for 20 years and helping people fix their brains and their hormones and all that stuff, JJ Virgin. Just let's do that and deal with the trauma And wow, who knows what kind of world we could live in?

Yeah, I was just with Chip Conley. Oh, yay. I was just with Chip. And, you know, they're trying to figure out what to do with Modern Elder Academy as a name because people don't think they want to be an elder. I'm like, and he says, you know, the definition of an elder is wisdom plus curiosity, which is fantastic. And as I think about women heading into perimenopause and menopause, you know, if they've got that trauma, the reaction, all that, because ultimately what you're talking about is stored trauma, right? They, uh, you know, they just don't have the margin for error. Their hormones start to go down and it's like, blah, you know, that's what I just thought. It's like, you just— if you haven't dealt with it before, this will force you to deal with it because you're like, uh-oh, what just happened? You know, I let out, I let out the person that I've kind of buried trying to be a nice girl for so long when I can't anymore.

I mean, we've both been with, with so many friends where they're doing everything they can to try and keep the walls up, and then there's just too much, and then there's a breakdown, right? And when that happens, it can break families, it can break companies. It's really rough. So, your job is— it's as important as learning how to cook— is to learn how to go into the control panel in your mind and turn off the alerts from all the different apps. So, if we had a world where your phone, every app was allowed to just, you know, just blow up in your face whenever you wanted to. And then you go to the therapist, they're like, well, every time an alert comes, just take a deep breath, notice the alert, swipe to the side and continue working. Like, that's what meditation and therapy is. And it's so dumb, JJ. No, go in and turn that shit off unless it's a notification you want. Oh my God, world is so much better. Right? And then you have more energy to say, oh, I'm not gonna eat the cupcake. Right? And you just make better choices. And then, you know, when, when a kid who's, who's in a reactive state comes to you, you can be the one who's not reacting, so they will co-regulate with you. Your nervous system teaches them how you're supposed to be. But if they get triggered and then you get triggered, which triggers them, you just enter a spiral and it sucks your own energy. So I— no one's perfect, but understanding all of the things you do that you're ashamed of are from your mitochondria they're just trying to keep your meat alive and has nothing to do with how good or moral you are. And for me, that was a big thing. Hey, I make mistakes, but it's really just my meat making a mistake. I'm gonna make it right if I allow that to happen. And then I'm gonna find out why I did that and I'm gonna hunt down the cause and I'm gonna get rid of it.

Yeah, sometimes the most obvious ways to make shifts are the things you just talked about too. It's like, get rid of some of these apps. I just have to share this. I was laughing as you were saying this because I was with Shippy in Nashville and— One of the big things that came out of my time there was get X off your phone.

I was like, I have never felt like an addicted person to anything.

And there I was with X, refresh, refresh, refresh. And it was like lighting me up. And I'm like, I just took it off. I'm great. I'm like, back to, I was missing my morning meditation, everything. 'Cause I had to like check out, it was ridiculous.

Which app did you take off your phone that was most important?

X.

It was X. Wow. X. I cannot have X on my phone. Sorry, Elon.

Wow.

Can't have X on my phone.

Yeah, I have X on my phone.

Don't care about any of the rest. Could care less. I'm not one of those scrolly people. Like, X lost my mind. Totally lost my mind. Tim has to fill me in on if there's anything I really need to know, which has always been my approach with any news or anything was like, I'm sure. My mom used to get so upset. She'd go, you have to know what's going on. I go, someone will tell me if it's really important, I'm sure. You know?

You know, JJ, that may be one of the reasons that we're such good friends is same approach. In fact, when Facebook, many years ago, Facebook used to be a place where your friends could share interesting stuff.

Wow, what happened?

I don't know. But I used to know everything I needed to know just because my friends would talk about it. And I never watched the news. And then one day, all I saw was cat pictures. And I'm like, screw this. I don't use that platform. I have a lot of content there, but I don't log in. And, you know, and consume that way. So it's getting harder and harder. And what that means is having a better community is so important. And we're not spending time with our friends because we have less energy because our lifestyle isn't very good. And then maybe you do some things to fix that. But then the apps all trigger fear. They make you think bad things. Oh, there's a troll. They said something bad about me and all that. And I have no real—

Or inadequacy. It's fear or inadequacy.

Fear, inadequacy. And if that's not it, there's going to be someone shaking their butt. These are hooks that are there in your nervous system, not in you. And I have found, for instance, through this process, criticism really doesn't bother me anymore. And trolls will come online. And they'll say things. And I realize they're just stuck as 12-year-olds. They're just doing the Mean Girls bullying thing. So I'm like, well, if we're going to do that, let's play. Because 12-year-olds play. So I usually just say, they'll say, Dave, you look old. And I'm like, that's not what your mom said. And I'll just put it right there on social media. And then of course, they get enraged. How dare you? That's not very mature. And I go, hold on. I thought that was the bullying game we were playing. Like, I'm rubber, you're glue. You go next. And then all of a sudden, like, oh my God, they really are doing that. And you'll get hundreds of likes from people who know you going, oh my gosh, that troll didn't win. And it's like, no, it's about like, it doesn't affect you anymore. Like, how do we be curious and have fun with everything? And when you have a different vibe, it changes things. And you can still do the right thing. You can still have boundaries. You're just not triggered. Like, oh, that person, they are a taker. That even that person is a narcissistic abuser or something. So I'm not going to have them in my life, but I'm no longer reactive to them. And what happens if you're not reactive to a narcissist? They don't want to stick to you, and they go stick to someone else.

They'll go narcissist all over someone else. Yeah, which is fabulous. We love it. Now you have your new book, which, by the way, I love the COVID The COVID is fabulous.

Thank you.

It's got— and it's also got the vintage vibe of your brand, so I loved it all the way around. Heavily Meditated, really fun title. So we're gonna put in the show notes, we'll put your other episodes in the show notes and your books and all your good stuff. But I know that you have some cool stuff when people buy the book, which we'll put in the show notes as well. What are some of the fun things? I think it's like over $750 worth of good stuff. What are some of the cool things they get?

You're getting a bunch of discounts, but the biggest one when you preorder Heavily Meditated, go to daveasprey.com, and you can get a $199 Commune course, the one on biohacking to teach you how to have more energy.

Love it. Love me some Commune.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, they're fantastic. Cool. All right, well, we'll put all of that at jjvirgin.com/heavilymeditated. Easy to find. And I appreciate you. I'll see you in a couple weeks.

See you in a couple weeks.

Two weeks. All right. All right, so I just want to give you some things to do as takeaways. And one of the things I love is Mary Morrissey talks about noticing what you're noticing. And sometimes that's the first thing is quite often we stuff, stuff it down, stuff those feelings down. I think what happens when you're in perimenopause and menopause is you can't stuff it any longer. So you stop stuffing and you're like, wow, I'm really being reactive. But it was there all the time. You just didn't, uh, You just were stuffing it a bit. So notice what you're noticing, and that's where you can then do that reset process. And I always check in, and do I have energy around this that I can't seem to get rid of? Is this person just continuing to come up in my thoughts and come up in my thoughts, and I'm irritated with this situation? And that's what I will do this process around. And I also wanted to just shout out one of the things we talked about in there about, you know, look at meditation. I never thought of it before like this, but look at meditation like you would look at You know, choosing the right diet tool for the, what you wanna accomplish, or choosing the right exercise tool for what you wanna accomplish. I have a lot of tools in my toolkit with meditation, everything from, I love my Dr. Joe meditations, but different ones of those, to breathwork, to tapping. So figure out which thing is the right thing for what you're trying to accomplish. And of course, to the reset that Dave talks about. And again, reminder, jjvirgin.com/heavilymeditated for all of what we talked about. In the episode. All right. Happy meditating.

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