Dr. Kevin J. Payne

I am at 5,000 feet, headed to the earth at 120 miles an hour, the instant that shot is taken. That means I have 27 seconds left to live, less than a TV commercial, unless I deploy my parachute. And so what I’m doing, I’ve got my hands up here just like this, and I’m about to sweep them out in a broad gesture, and that’s called the wave-off. It’s a universal skydiving gesture. And what it means is I am warning everyone in my airspace that I am about to take action to save myself.

And self-help is what we’ve got when the system fails us. And most of us can agree that the system kind of sucks. So this is about, in no uncertain terms, when that shot is taken, I would have died in 27 seconds. But my wonky body with the MS, I still figured out a way to trust it and trust myself to save myself in that extreme position every day. That means tripping the acute stress response, learning to deal with it, learning to function effectively through it, and then allow myself to rest and recover and recharge and do it again the next day, every day, time after time after time.

A chronic illness or chronic distress is always going to push us to the edge and keep us there. And one, we have to learn how to function better at the edge. But we also have to learn that we can’t always fight and we can’t always be up and we can’t always be on the edge. It’s a cycle. We have to take ourselves from what I call the edge back to our home. And at home, we’ve got to allow ourselves to rest and recover and recuperate and consolidate and sleep and nourish and all those things, because growth doesn’t happen on the edge. Stress happens on the edge. Stress can be good stress. We’ve got good stress, eustress. But after those experiences, we have to come back home to allow ourselves to grow and recover.

Rowena: How do you know it’s time to go home?

There’s actually a really practical answer to this. You’ll notice one of two things in your behaviors. One, either you start becoming inconsistent: succeed, fail, succeed, fail. Because at the edge, on one side of the edge, you succeed. On the other side, you fail. And so being inconsistent is an issue of being at an edge, period, full stop. The second thing is your edge is starting to drop. So in other words, the thing that you could do an hour ago or three hours ago, now you cannot. So if your edge is dropping or if you are becoming inconsistent, those are your behavioral cues that it is time for you to pull back and go home.

And when you get diagnosed with MS, one of the things that they tend to tell you is avoid stress. Well, I want to choke the living snot out of every medical professional that ever advises that, because life is stressful. Every day. And what we have to learn to do is to better frame stress. And so for me, jumping out of an airplane every day was about triggering my acute stress response every single day and then using my wonky body literally to save myself every time.

So what I’m saying here is, medically, there is a difference between awake, tired, fatigued and exhausted. These are medically, qualitatively different stages. And fatigued is not just really, really tired. Because what happens is, if you’re awake, you’re spending your energy and it’s not a big deal. When you’re tired, as you start spending your energy, you can feel yourself winding down, in something that feels proportionate to the level of activity you have in front of you. When you pass that threshold into fatigue, that suddenly accelerates. There’s like a force multiplier that comes in, and you will start losing your resources, your abilities, faster than what it feels like you should be doing.

And because you can’t just sleep 20 hours and erase sleep debt, you get into a really bad set of physical and cognitive and emotional systems in your body. Humans were designed to recover from acute and emergent challenges. There’s this one challenge, we identify what the problem is, we engage our primal brain, that effort response, we handle it, and then we go back to our normal lives. But when you have a chronic challenge, like chronic illness, caregiving, soul-crushing poverty, you name it, these kinds of things that don’t go away, you never get a chance to go through that cycle in that healthy way. And your edges are getting pulled further in, so you’re easily overwhelmed. And that adds up, and you end up traumatized.

Now, I will tell you there is a downside to this as well, and one that I had to learn. So about seven years ago or so, I had gotten myself to the point where I didn’t care about the pain so much. And I go into my GP for an annual checkup, and I’ve got my shirt off and he’s inspecting me, and he kind of looks at my torso and he gives me this puzzled look. And he leans in and he’s poking at my torso a little. And I’m looking at him like, what is this? And then he did more of an exam. And then he looked at me with a puzzled look and he said, “How are you even walking?” And I said, “I don’t understand.” And he said, “You have a massive triple hernia: both inguinals and the epigastric. You should be doubled over in pain. You shouldn’t even be walking around right now.”

And I was like, oops. So I went in and had triple hernia surgery. But my point was, I had so turned down my pain, which was good, but I hadn’t yet learned to discriminate which signals I should turn down and which I shouldn’t.

I just want people to take the science and use the science and understand the science, because inspiration lasts for about this long. You can listen to this podcast and think, wow, that’s a really inspiring story. And then, you know, it’s like a bath. You’ve got to do it every day or you’re going to stink. And if you’re not continually inspired, you’re going to be depressed about the whole thing. So it lasts about this long.

What I’m concerned with is what we do after the inspiration fades. Sure, be inspired. Cool. But inspiration affects our primal brain, and it’s only about this long. So now use that little bit of inspiration, that little bit of motivation, to take the first step: humbly, carefully, consistently, even with all the failures, start interrogating your edges and building your new habits. Because those will last you forever.