Conquering Amygdala Hijack: Transform Stress into Strength

Mental Health

Conquering Amygdala Hijack: Transform Stress into Strength

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10 September, 2024

Understanding Amygdala Hijack: A Comprehensive Exploration

Understanding the brain’s basic anatomy is crucial to decipher amygdala hijack. The amygdala is the small part of a larger network in the brain called the limbic system. The limbic system is the part of the brain that controls emotional and behavioural responses, especially when dealing with survival behaviours, such as fight-or-flight reactions. The limbic system contains clusters of almond-shaped cells called amygdala. Simply put, the amygdala is a neural network that mediates many aspects of emotion and memory. It stores memories, controls emotions, and links memories to particular feelings.

As Resh Joseph, Clinical Director at Highlands Recovery, describes in his book “A beginner’s guide to trauma“: Based on the external situation, the amygdala initiates the fight-or-flight reaction independently, without a person’s conscious choice. For example, in case of any potential danger detected by the brain, the amygdala sends emergency signals to the body to fight for survival or run for safety. In this situation, the brain sends stress hormones in response to that signal.

Understanding the “amygdala hijack” concept highlights how the brain responds to perceived threats. American Psychologist Daniel Goleman theorised that sometimes the amygdala takes control, leading to an immediate and intense emotional reaction that can be disproportionate to the actual threat. This phenomenon is proposed as an amygdala hijack. This article looks into the mechanisms of amygdala hijack, its implications for mental health, and practical strategies for managing its effects.

What is an Amygdala Hijack?

When the brain perceives any threat, it triggers the amygdala to control the rational parts of the brain, such as the neocortex. The neocortex is a part of the cerebral cortex (outermost layer of nerve cell tissue) concerned with sight and hearing).

The brain sends signals to the body and allows quick reactions without analytical thinking. Such a mechanism is called the body’s reaction for survival. However, it can lead to inappropriate responses when the threat is misperceived. When the perceived threat is accurate, the body’s fight or flight response is favourable for survival. However, when the threat is not very high or real, and the body still responds to it without analytically judging it, the person might be experiencing Amygdala Hijack.

The Anatomy of the Amygdala

The amygdala is part of the limbic system, which is involved in emotional processing. This network of the brain plays a significant role in the formation of memories associated with emotional events. The amygdala detects threats and sends emergency signals to the body to activate its survival mechanisms. When the amygdala perceives danger or any threat, it activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis that floods the body with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.

Adrenaline hormones are released by adrenal glands that prepare the body for stressful situations and activate the fight or flight response. Likewise, Cortisol hormones deal with stress and inflammatory responses. Realising these stress hormones prepares the body for a “fight or flight” response and alerts the body to use all possible resources to address the perceived threat.

How Does Amygdala Hijack Affect the body?

The process of amygdala hijack can be understood by looking at the given below mechanism:

Perception of Threat: The amygdala receives sensory information and evaluates it for potential threats. This evaluation can happen within milliseconds.
Activation of the Amygdala: If a threat is perceived, the amygdala activates, leading to a cascade of physiological responses. For example, if a person hears a loud, dangerous sound, the amygdala may cause a startle reflex.
Suppression of Rational Thought: The amygdala suppresses the neocortex, which is the brain’s rational area. This suppression of the brain’s rational area prevents overthinking and ensures rapid action. It is why individuals often react impulsively during an amygdala hijack.
Activation of the HPA Axis: During the Amygdala Hijack, the HPA axis is triggered, and this axis stress hormones, I.e., cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones cause increased heart rate and blood pressure, faster breathing and energy redirection from non-essential functions to muscles.
Behavioural Response: The individual experiencing amygdala hijack and the rush of stress hormones further experiences a range of emotional responses, including fear, anger, or panic. In such a situation, the body unknowingly leads to actions that may not be appropriate for the situation. It happens because the perceived threat may not be rightly perceived and judged.

Threats to Brain

In our daily life, the amygdala detects many threatening situations. Amygdala reaction to the threat and body’s fight or flight response is crucial to the survival mechanism. The problem arises when the amygdala cannot differentiate between actual and perceived threats. When the amygdala remains on high alert even in non-threatening situations, the body can lead to an overactive response. This perpetual state of alertness can cause significant stress and anxiety as the body is continuously prepared for danger that isn’t present.

In some instances, even in ordinary interactions, a person may get into the state of an overactive response. For example, during a social interaction, a person may misinterpret another person’s neutral facial expression as hostile, triggering, and defensive. Likewise, sudden loud noises, such as a car horn, can provoke an exaggerated startle response, even if the noise source poses no real danger.

Consequences of Amygdala Hijack

As mentioned in the previous examples, when the amygdala hijacks the brain, the person may experience heightened fear and anxiety over trivial stimuli. The consequences of frequent amygdala hijacks can be deep-rooted and affect a person in many ways.

Prolonged activation of the amygdala can lead to chronic stress. Chronic stress has numerous negative health implications. For instance, it further causes cardiovascular issues, weakened immune response, and mental health disorders.
Individuals may find it challenging to regulate their emotions, which leads to outbursts of anger, anxiety, or sadness in response to minor provocations.
As a result of amygdala hijack, the suppression of rational thought can result in poor decision-making, as individuals may act impulsively without considering the consequences.
Heightened emotional responses can strain relationships, leading to social withdrawal and isolation.

The Conflict between Neocortex and Amygdala During Amygdala Hijack

The neocortex comprises the largest part of the cerebral cortex and makes up approximately half the volume of the human brain. It is responsible for rational thought and higher-order cognitive functions. During an amygdala hijack, the amygdala rules over the fight-or-flight response in a split second without giving any chance to the neocortex to rationalise the threat. Considering this, in the phase of an amygdala hijack, the neocortex struggles to function appropriately, often leaving individuals unable to rationalise their reactions until after the event. This can lead to confusion and the need to justify emotional responses with logical explanations.

The occurrence of cognitive dissonance as a consequence

Following an amygdala hijack, individuals may have cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance refers to the psychological phenomenon that occurs when a person experiences a conflict between their emotional reaction and their logical comprehension of a given scenario. This can result in an overpowering sense of guilt or shame, which in turn exacerbates stress and anxiety.

Body’s Normal Functioning Restoration and Recovery

After the perceived threat subsides, the amygdala ceases its activity, and only then does the HPA axis deactivate. Once the danger is resolved, blood circulation is restored to sections of the body that are not crucial to survival signals, allowing the body to relax and restore normal functioning.

Techniques for Recovery

Deep breathing exercises can stimulate the body’s relaxation response and counteract the physiological impacts of an amygdala hijack. Methods such as diaphragmatic breathing or the 4-7-8 technique can be especially beneficial. The 4-7-8 breathing technique involves the act of closing one’s lips and inhaling through the nose for four seconds. Subsequently, one should retain one’s breath for a duration of seven. Completely release air from the mouth, producing a whoosh sound for a duration of eight counts. This technique facilitates the relaxation of the body.

Engaging in mindfulness enables individuals to identify instances when they are undergoing an amygdala hijack—grounding strategies aid in calming the mind and increasing awareness of genuine emotions. Grounding strategies encompass utilising sensory engagement and maintaining a state of mindfulness in the current moment. These approaches can assist in stabilising the body’s response during an amygdala hijack.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) can assist individuals in recognising and confronting faulty cognitive processes that contribute to amygdala hijacks. One might enhance one’s ability to react more logically to apparent dangers by reevaluating pessimistic beliefs.

Engaging in regular physical exercise can effectively diminish stress and anxiety levels, hence fostering holistic mental well-being.

Common Triggers for Amygdala Hijack

Recognising common triggers can help individuals manage their emotional responses more effectively. Common triggers could be any environmental cues, social situations and interaction outcomes, past traumas and their effects, stressful life events and bad experiences. For example, sudden loud noises, unexpected movements, or chaotic environments can provoke an amygdala hijack and are fine examples of environmental cues. Secondly, conflicts or confrontations in personal or professional settings may provoke an emotional response, such as feeling attacked during a discussion.

Memories associated with past traumatic events can activate the amygdala, leading to heightened emotional responses even in safe environments. Stressful Life Events Situations like job loss, relationship issues, or financial difficulties can create a constant state of stress, making the amygdala more reactive.

When individuals experience amygdala hijack, consciously recognising and understanding the situation might help them manage their reactions and improve emotional regulation. During an Amygdala hijack, it becomes extremely challenging to engage in rational thinking. However, practising mindfulness can maintain stability and discern between genuine and fake threats.

Conclusion

The amygdala functions as a potent survival mechanism. Nevertheless, when the amygdala misfires as a response to false threats improperly, it results in unnecessary stress and anxiety. When experiencing amygdala hijack, consciously acknowledging and comprehending the circumstance might assist individuals in controlling their responses and enhancing emotional regulation. Even though it becomes nearly impossible to work on rationality at the time of the Amygdala hijack, one can maintain stability and differentiate between the actual and false threat by practising mindfulness. By acquiring the ability to distinguish genuine threats from ones that are merely perceived, one can effectively regulate physiological reactions and sustain a level of emotional equilibrium.

The concept is highlighted in “A Beginner’s Guide To Trauma: Understanding the Toxic Effects of the Disorders of Extreme Stress” by Reshie Joseph, which highlights the significance of acknowledging and controlling the effects of trauma on emotional reactions. By employing effective tactics and cultivating mindfulness of our emotional stimuli, we can successfully navigate the intricacies of our emotional terrain and enhance our mental health.

Amidst the current period of difficulties and unpredictability, comprehending the inner workings of amygdala hijack enables us to regain authority over our emotional reactions, promoting resilience and improving our general well-being.

FAQ

What is an amygdala hijack, and how does it affect the brain?
Amygdala hijack is a situation wherein the amygdala, or the emotional part of the brain, outpaces the neocortex, or the so-called “thinking” part. This causes the emergence of a rash emotional response, disproportionate to the incident or real danger. Such a response gives rise to rash decisions and increased stress responses, affecting overall emotional regulation and decision-making.

How do CBT and mindfulness help in controlling amygdala hijack?
CBT empowers the individuals to recognise and question faulty thought patterns that lead to the amygdala hijack. The mindfulness techniques, like deep breathing and grounding strategies, make a person aware of their emotional states and keep them calm during an amygdala hijack to stabilise responses and enhance emotional regulation.

How does Highlands Recovery address the issues of amygdala hijack in their therapeutic approach?
Highlands Recovery addresses how one can manage his or her amygdala hijack by enacting the key elements into the treatment, which is holistic in nature. The therapeutic approaches for dealing with one’s issues regarding amygdala hijack incorporate holistic treatment that includes CBT to manage faulty cognitions, mindfulness to enhance emotional regulation, and other approaches that help an individual seek and handle his or her emotional reactions in a skillful manner. By integrating such techniques, Highlands Recovery supports clients in their struggle to find a better balance with their emotions and other aspects of well-being.

References

Drake, K. (2022, August 16). How the brain’s “central alarm system” gathers threats and turns them into fear.

Fernandes, O., Portugal, L. C. L., De Cássia S Alves, R., Arruda-Sanchez, T., Volchan, E., Pereira, M. G., Mourão-Miranda, J., & Oliveira, L. (2019). How do you perceive threat? It’s all in your pattern of brain activity. Brain Imaging and Behavior, 14(6), 2251–2266.

Holland, K. (2023, March 16). Amygdala Hijack: When Emotion Takes Over. Healthline.

Joseph, R. (2022). A Beginners Guide to Trauma.

Professional, C. C. M. (2024, May 1). Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) Axis. Cleveland Clinic.

Torrico, T. J., & Abdijadid, S. (2023, July 17). Neuroanatomy, Limbic System. StatPearls – NCBI Bookshelf.

What is the Neocortex? (2023, March 13). News-Medical.

Cuncic, A. (2024, March 25). Amygdala Hijack and the Fight or Flight Response. Verywell Mind.

Do you have any questions?

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Motivational Interviewing is a key therapeutic approach we use to empower clients in their journey toward recovery. This evidence-based technique focuses on enhancing an individual’s motivation to change by exploring and resolving ambivalence. Through collaborative and non-judgmental conversations, our highly experienced psychotherapists help clients identify their own reasons for change, fostering a sense of autonomy and commitment to their recovery goals. Motivational Interviewing is particularly effective in addressing substance use disorders and other behavioural challenges, providing a strong foundation for lasting transformation and personal growth.

Motivational interviewing is a therapy approach in which clinicians use a patient-centred stance paired with eliciting techniques to help patients explore and resolve their ambivalence about changing behaviours that are not healthy or optimal. It has a collaborative, autonomy-supporting, and evocative style (known as “motivational interviewing spirit”) in which clinicians seek to understand patients’ perspectives on substance use, while guiding them toward considering changing one or more behaviours. Sometimes this may involve building awareness of a discrepancy between the patient’s current and hoped-for self. The clinician avoids confrontation and supports patients’ optimism about the possibility and value of change.

People with unhealthy substance use often have mixed feelings and thoughts about their smoking, drug, and alcohol use. While they may be aware of negative consequences associated with substance use, they also get pleasure from it (e.g., intoxication, disinhibition, and socialisation). They often remain conflicted or ambivalent about changing their behaviour until their perception of the risks and benefits of substance use shifts. Understanding and resolving this ambivalence is central in motivational interviewing.

Key processes in motivational interviewing include engagement, focusing, evoking, and planning. Clinicians using motivational interviewing build rapport and engage the patient with a warm, non-judgmental attitude. They elicit the patient’s ideas and feelings about a range of current behaviours, how these fit with the patient’s hopes and values, and whether the patient can imagine better options than the current behaviours. During this process, they focus on changes that the patient wants to make and match the agenda to the patient’s priorities. The clinician elicits the patient’s own reasons and rationale for possible changes, referred to as “change talk.” Simultaneously, the clinician manages “sustain talk,” or arguments for staying the same, by attending to it only as much as needed before pivoting back to strengthening change talk. A key skill for the clinician is to pay more attention to change talk than sustain talk by evoking, reflecting, and strengthening it. Once people are resolved to change, they can often do it on their own. Thus, while not essential, motivational interviewing can include processes of planning for and activating changes. The motivational interviewing clinician may continue to assist the person as they make changes, especially as motivational interviewing is focused more on discussing the “whether” and “why” to change than the “how.”

Two active components have been proposed as leading to the efficacy of motivational interviewing.

Developed by Dr. Peter Levine, Somatic Experiencing® is a trauma resolution method that is grounded in an understanding of how mammals respond to and recover from stressful and life-threatening situations. Originally created as an approach to healing trauma in humans, the science underlying the method has broader applicability in understanding equines and other mammals as well.

Somatic Experiencing® provides a gentle way of working with sensations, arousal and activation in the autonomic nervous system, and thwarted survival responses (procedural or implicit body memory) by building capacity to bear witness to what is happening inside in small, incremental amounts (titration). This process isn’t just about sensations, but also allows us to work with the over- and under-coupled emotions, thoughts, beliefs, images, sensory details, behaviours (including impulses, movements, and actions), and dynamics that are associated with different life experiences.

Building slowly, Somatic Experiencing® supports the ability to experience progressively larger thresholds of activation and embodiment to both respect and grow the window of tolerance. As we grow our resiliency, inner resources, and capacity to be with our internal experience and challenging external stimuli, the need for defensive or management strategies decreases (such as shame, dissociation, fragmentation/switching ego states, avoidance, resistance, intellectualisation, pleasing, complying, addictions, disordered eating, stereotypies, overriding through willpower, projecting and blaming, and so on). This is very different from tolerating, putting up with, or muscling through. Our capacity to be more present to the fullness and goodness that life has to offer – relationships, pleasure, play, creativity, calm, excitement, joy, authenticity – can also increase as well.

One of the goals of trauma recovery is that of somatic renegotiation – having a different outcome to a familiar situation or experiencing oneself differently in a familiar situation. One example is completing in the present what did not have a chance to complete in the past, such as safely releasing and processing what is stored in the body, restoring the natural ability of the system to regulate, and experiencing a felt sense of aliveness or triumph (“I can!”). Experiences of triumph offer a counter-resource to past experiences of defeat and “I can’t”, which help shift our internal experience of ourselves. As Deb Dana says, “story follows state” – when our state changes, so too does the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and others (such as our loved ones, pets, horses, and so on). Although horses don’t tell stories in the same way we do, their felt sense of themselves also changes depending on whether they are attuned and responded to, whether they feel triumph or chronic defeat, and so on.

Allowing time for the nervous system to pendulate through and integrate each small shift in this process is important, so that a different felt sense of self in the moment can emerge. We work at the edges of the window of tolerance, so that there is something to work with but not so much that the nervous system goes too far beyond threshold. There are other forms of renegotiation as well, such as renegotiating relationship dynamics, or internal dynamics between parts of ourselves, and so on.

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I’m Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world’s most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks.

From spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional organized crime figure, cold case, homicide, investigator, hacker or astronaut. And if you’re new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show and hey, I appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs.

These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiations, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, cyber warfare, crime, and cults, and more. That’ll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app To get started today on the show, Resh Joseph, a leading psychotherapist specializing in treating trauma and something called Sudden Wealth syndrome.

Yes. You heard that correctly in high net worth individuals providing luxury rehab again. Yes. You heard that correctly, providing luxury rehab again. Yes. You heard that right? Honestly, I’d never heard of this. I was initially pretty skeptical, but here we are and I’m curious what y’all think. Once you give this one listen as well.

This episode is brought to you ad free and is sponsored by Highlands Recovery. ssh. Joseph is the leading psychotherapist in residence.

Tell us a little bit about what you do. It’s safe to say I have questions ’cause I’ve never heard of a lot of this stuff.

[00:01:29] Resh Joseph: Well, I’m a therapist by training. I’m the clinical director here at a residential facility for former PTSD addictions and other disorders of. Extreme stress. I’m a therapist by training and my principal job here is to work with people who have trauma and all of the, the disorders associated with trauma.

I’m from Singapore and I moved here to Australia to take up this job to construct a clinical program to help people with former and stress related disorders of which addiction and alcoholism is a principle. Feature.

[00:02:08] Jordan Harbinger: So people are gonna say, wait, Jordan said he hadn’t heard of this. Surely you’ve heard of alcoholism and PTSD.

Yes, I have. But I know you also treat symptoms associated with something called Sudden Wealth Syndrome and I, I’ve never heard of that. So can you break that down for us a little bit? ’cause that’s, that’s completely new to me.

[00:02:27] Resh Joseph: Okay, so sudden wealth syndrome, um, as such as it is, is not really a clinical diagnosis, right?

So if you looked in the DSM five, you wouldn’t find it. So it’s not an actual clinical syndrome. It’s a term that has become very catchy. It’s a term that is used to refer to people who acquire a great deal of wealth suddenly, or come into a great deal of wealth suddenly, and for, and all of the. Issues that people have.

That may be associated with this acquiring of wealth. So people such as the Novo people who grow up the children, the very rich people, you know, so they don’t do anything to acquire that wealth. So what sudden wealth syndrome is such as it is, it looks at people who. Have acquired wealth very rapidly or through non-traditional means, and how the acquiring of that wealth can cause really quite serious problems for the, for those individuals.

[00:03:28] Jordan Harbinger: I had no idea. So we’re talking about maybe people who won the lottery or inherited a bunch of money suddenly, or, or, or like you said, grew up very wealthy. That can actually, cause I don’t know if my, if I’m using the right word, but that it sounds like that can actually cause trauma of some kind, or is, is that not the right word?

Well,

[00:03:48] Resh Joseph: the best way to think of this is if you’ve got someone who, you know, grew up in an ordinary family say, and they became an overnight sensation as a result of, say, a pop career or they became a movie star. Right. And we, and we see. Snippets of these stories in the media all the time. What happens when someone transitions from being an ordinary person to being an incredibly wealthy person is that certain things can happen where they just are not able to cope.

Now, that’s not a trauma in the strict definition of a word, but it’s certainly a stressor. It’s certainly a stress on the individual, and the interesting thing is that individuals adapt to stressor in all kinds of interesting ways, and that for some people, those adaptations become maladaptive. They stop working and they start doing harm.

And what this sudden wealth syndrome thing, as I understand it is, is there a way to try and understand the challenges that face the individual who goes from an ordinary situation? To an extraordinary one. Is there a way in which to understand how people react in these situations and what that tells us about how people adapt, if you like?

[00:05:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that does make some sense. And, and I’m wondering, given the name is Sudden Wealth Syndrome, of course it seems like the answer is yes, but I wonder what if it’s not only sudden wealth? What if you become. Famous and you’re not that wealthy. You just happen to be like a, a YouTube sensation or a TikTok sensation and sure, maybe you’re making like a few hundred grand off of this, but you, you know, you have expenses and you have your production co.

So you’re not necessarily loaded beyond all your wildest dreams, but maybe millions of people know who you are. Is that gonna be a similar kind of thing? ’cause it seems like that the changes you’re talking about or the adaptations you’re talking about. Aren’t necessarily pinned only to finances or are they, uh,

[00:05:50] Resh Joseph: well, that’s a very astute observations, uh, because first of all, where does one draw the line in terms of wealth?

For some, for some of us it may be 10 million. For others it may be a hundred. And for others it could be, as you say, you know, 500 grand. That could be the difference. And, uh, the other part of the question, as I understand it, is. Why do some people adapt in certain ways whilst others don’t? That’s another very, very interesting questions.

Are there things that perhaps happened earlier that would predispose certain people to mal adapt where others do not? That’s a fantastically interesting question. Yeah. The answer is yes.

[00:06:31] Jordan Harbinger: Can. Can we talk about what some of those early experiences might actually be like? Is it. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say, if you grew up with a really strong, tight loving family, maybe you’re less likely to go off the rails.

If somebody who I dunno, was emancipated at 15 and then went off on their own and suddenly became a professional athlete or, or a pop star and just has no kind of grounding relationships around them, for example.

[00:06:56] Resh Joseph: Some of why certain people adapt whilst others mal adapt can definitely be found in the genetic material.

Some people are just predisposed, right? And, and I can certainly say a little bit about those particular genes, but it’s a very technical topic and I’m not sure how interesting. Yeah. Might it would be, might

[00:07:13] Jordan Harbinger: not make sense. Yeah. For the, for our audience here.

[00:07:15] Resh Joseph: Yeah. But suffice to say, there is certainly enough evidence to say that, that some of us are genetically predisposed and whilst others are not.

The second, of course, is the childhood environment. The childhood environment is fantastically important in how the brain is sculpted as the person grows up and the connections that are made, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, inside the brain. And certainly if you grew up in an environment. For example, prized things like healthy boundaries, prized the importance of communication, prized the importance of trust and a autonomic nervous system.

You know, all of the things that we think of as as being critical to relationships. Then that becomes adapted to the person when they. Become an adult and face a challenge such as this. However, if you have someone who grew up, say, in a family where there were no boundaries, people could do and say as they please, if trust was not prized, if all of those healthy components of a, of a loving family are not there, then when they go into adulthood, those coping strategies are simply not there for them.

Then the chances of mal adapting are that much greater, I would say.

[00:08:27] Jordan Harbinger: Gotcha. Okay. By way of background, I’d love to hear about your history of treating prisoners and addicts and things like that. I’m curious how you got started with all this.

[00:08:36] Resh Joseph: Well, I started, as most of us do, you know, we don’t start at the top end of the.

Private sector, most of us start in the government sector. That’s just the trajectory most people take. Right? We work in hospitals, we work in nursing homes, we work in prisons where you, the phrase that I would use is you earn your chops. You know, you earn your stripes, you have to do the hours, as it were.

And so, yes. You know, like most of my colleagues, I started in the public sector, which in my case was prison service, where I worked in the chief of prison psychiatry, and I was. Basically the person who ran around and did, as I was told. Yeah, sure. How much therapy I actually did. I would unashamedly say zero because it’s in that situation there you have a specific job to do.

It’s a very important one. Uh, and I was there to support, you know, the, the people doing very important work. You know, the psychiatrists, the prison. Psychological services, et cetera, et cetera. However, what I would say is that it was an extremely valuable experience for me in terms of learning, because I saw how men put in very, very stressful situations, reacted, take away the fact that these men were, you know, criminals or.

Uh, gang members or drug addicts, you know, take all of that stuff away and simply look at them humanistically as human beings, they were put in extraordinarily stressful situation, right? Things like incarceration, having your rights taken away, uh, solitary punishment, you know, bars and all that, that sort of thing.

It’s an extreme stressor. And just looking at how some men were able to adapt and become really quiet. Amazing individuals where others just couldn’t, they could not adapt. They maladapted or they didn’t adapt at all. They just collapsed. And I left that period of time asking myself, why was it that some people were able to cope, if I can use that word.

While others just completely collapsed. The great gift that the prison service gave me was that I started asking those questions, and as I transitioned from public sector and slowly and gingerly over to the private sector, those questions, the questions that started then still persist. Jordan, I still ask those questions.

Why is it, and I ask, I get asked it all the time, why is it that someone who is say, born into privilege. And this is part of what Sudden Wealth Syndrome is as well. Why is it that someone who is born into privilege and they have everything, appearances, tell us that they have everything that they need.

They don’t seem to cope with the challenges that life throws at them, whilst other people have every handicap. You can imagine that, and I know some of these people, I mean, I’ve done work with a Afghani women, you know, who have every disadvantage you can imagine. Yet these women are able to forge ahead in life and adapt to incredible circumstances.

The question, Jordan, is why is that? It’s a question that, that, that drives me defines women based,

[00:11:45] Jordan Harbinger: I’m sure. Yeah, I’m sure it’s, it’s, it’s fascinating. I mean, you cracked the code on that one. And, uh, you’ve changed humanity, right? Essentially. So, but what led you then to specialize in trauma and sudden well syndrome now, particularly among high net worth individuals?

’cause that is quite the departure in terms of clientele, right? To go from the incarcerated. And unfortunately, you know, this is a callous way to phrase it, but kind of like the bottom rung of society in many ways, right? The people that have been locked away forever in some cases, and now it’s, Hey, you know, let’s, let’s work with high net worth individuals.

I mean, it’s again, like quite the departure in terms of clientele. It’s an interesting shift.

[00:12:21] Resh Joseph: Wow, that’s a very broad question. Yeah, I mean, my own personal journey speaks to that as well. But if I had to articulate one question that I get asked more than any other question, that question would be why me?

And that question essentially says I come from a particular background. You know, very often the people I work with these days are very privileged. So what they mean is I come from. Uh, decent family, privileged background, went to a good school, good education opportunities presented to me, and yet things have gone so badly wrong for me because I’m sitting here, right?

This indeed this may be a very, very nice facility and you can see the oak paneling on the wall behind me sometimes. I think I’ve landed in, uh, in the Ho Hogwarts school for magic, uh, being in this. Beautiful place. But even so, the people who are here are all asking that question are all articulating that question.

I don’t understand why me. And there’s almost implicit in that question, a denial of permission. It’s almost as though they say to themselves, I’m not really allowed to have trauma. I’m not really even allowed to suffer because I had such a good life. I have this terrific house that I live in, and I have these wonderful people that help me, and I have these brilliant doctors that treat every illness I have, and I have a business that sends me on vacation twice a year.

So I’m not really allowed to suffer. Not really, I. That’s the point that is implicit in the question of why me? And it’s in trying to answer that question that this work is in service of why you, let me tell you why you, here’s why. And for many people answering that question is if therapy can be described as a structured exploration of personal suffering, then it’s really the ability to answer that question.

I know. Why me? I know why, and that is the door to whatever solution lies on the other side.

[00:14:29] Jordan Harbinger: But I’m curious, what are some of the most common challenges that your clients face? I mean, you mentioned addiction. I. Is it common for people to sort of lose their way with this stuff and then self-medicate? Is that what we’re looking at?

You mentioned also PTSD, but I’m trying to figure out how that happens. I guess if you come from a privileged life, it’s not, you know, you’re not in a war zone. Where does the PTSD come from? I, I’m, I obviously don’t fully understand PTSD in asking that question.

[00:14:54] Resh Joseph: Well, I have some earth shattering news for you if you’re ready for it.

I am ready. Rich people can suffer pain too.

[00:15:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. I, I’m sure, I’m sure bad things happen to, to people at in all levels. Yeah. But I wonder, you know, is it the wealth that causes it or is it they’re wealthy but then their family splits apart because everyone’s fighting over the money and that’s what causes the PTSD or you know, for example,

[00:15:19] Resh Joseph: very interesting question.

If we’re looking purely at it from a wealth angle, the wealth itself can very often become the locus of suffering. And what I mean by that is simply by its existence, it can cause relationships to fracture, it can cause division that where there perhaps. Wasn’t any. It can, uh, you know, cause a great deal of, um, suffering to the people who have to manage it.

It can cause relational dysfunction, social dysfunction, occupational dysfunction, even personal dysfunction, and all of these things can happen purely because the wealth is there. It has an effect from the people around them, and it’s the way that people negotiate those dysfunctionalities that decide whether they come end up in a place like this or not.

In the case of some people where the wealth has caused enough dysfunctionality in the close relationships where people no longer speak to siblings. Or children where the wealth is enough of an obstacle to prevent close family members from talking to each other, where the wealth by its mere existence can cause such a social fracture that the ordinary support upon whom the person relies and no longer accessible or available to them because everyone is now suspect, I heard, is in group just this morning.

Everybody just wants my money. If I’m thinking that it doesn’t make me a very good friend. It makes other people very suspect, and that’s just because the wealth happens to be there. The wealth is benign, but the effect it has on people is quite extraordinary. And then of course. And this refers to, I really don’t like this phrase, I’ve heard it so I’ll use it, but what are have become to be called nepo babies.

I dunno if you’ve heard this. Yeah,

[00:17:19] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, exactly. Yeah, I’ve heard of this.

[00:17:21] Resh Joseph: I, I dislike that very much, but I’ll use it because I think most people have heard of that. In other words, children who have grown up in very wealthy families who really can’t seem to get going. You know, people like me have variously called it.

Other things. Some people call it Nero baby. I prefer to call it failure to launch.

[00:17:39] Jordan Harbinger: I was gonna say failure to launch is another way to say it. That’s maybe, maybe not as horrible. Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah.

[00:17:44] Resh Joseph: Nipple Baby just has a horrible rate to it, doesn’t it?

[00:17:47] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it, it sort of implies that if you did do something, it wasn’t because of anything you’ve accomplished in your own life, somebody put you somewhere, failure to launch means you haven’t done anything.

So I don’t know. They actually, no, no, no. I’m not sure which one is worse now that you mention it.

[00:18:02] Resh Joseph: Yeah, so I’d prefer to say sort of failure is a launch, and this comes under the area of, you know, occupational dysfunctionality. We as human beings are built to climb up a hill, to lift a load and carry it up the hill.

That really where we find meaning in life is in the struggle that we wake up every day that we’re. We enter the struggle for something meaningful, whether that’s this place or your job or it doesn’t matter, but it has to be meaningful to the person. If on the other hand, you wake up and you don’t have that, because through no fault of your own, every pressure in life, occupational pressure in life has been taken care of for you.

You don’t have to go out there and struggle. You can if you wish, but you don’t have to. Then it brings a certain challenge, an occupational challenge, because if you don’t have to work, would you really, and could you blame, say the son of a billionaire, if he was to possibly unconsciously feel, you know, what really is the point of me going out there and struggling hard and honestly and diligently to earn?

Decent wage, you know, 250,000 a year when my father spends that on his, you know, Gulf Stream every weekend for a perspective that I think that would be difficult for anyone. I’m not in that situation. I’ve never been in that situation. I very much doubt it unless I’m very rich. Hes looks upon me in a kindly way.

That’s very unlikely. Very unlikely. Unlikely to happen to me.

[00:19:38] Jordan Harbinger: You’re in a good position to make that happen. I’m just saying.

[00:19:42] Resh Joseph: I wasn’t suggesting anything, but Aris is out there, the application. No. Um, but um, yeah, I, I, I, I work with people who are now in that position and the struggle is real and I’m asked by these very nice young men and women, you know, rush.

What is the point of me going out there is struggling? It’s hard to, to do x when my father plays at the weekend and he spends more.

[00:20:09] Jordan Harbinger: Right? It, it would be very demotivating to, to go, okay, I’m gonna study hard. Get into a good college, study hard, get into a good law school, work really hard, go work on Wall Street.

In five years, I’ll be making Gulfstream gas fuel, you know, weekend money in a year. And then if I make partner and sacrifice most of my prime life getting there, I will make what my dad makes or what our family fortune generates an interest every couple of days or whatever, you know, or every week. And then I’ll have more money than I can spend in my entire life, or I do nothing.

And I have more money than I can spend in my entire life and 20 or 30 extra years to enjoy it.

[00:20:50] Resh Joseph: I’m reminded of a young man I worked with and he doesn’t mind me sharing this because he’s shared this very openly himself. So I know I’m liberty to say this, but we were speaking once and he was, you know, telling me about some enterprise that he’s a failure to launch kid.

Very, very nice young man, and he was telling me about some enterprise that he was on and he was building some. Innovat new media company. I don’t understand any of this stuff, but he was telling me about it. It seemed very good, and I said to him, well, the potential for that is extraordinary. You know, and I hope you go on and build this, and blah, blah, blah.

And he just looked at me very casually, and not in a, in an unpleasant or rude way. He says, well, the amount of money we, if I look at the turnover we had last year, I made more in interest whilst I was asleep on my trust fund whilst I was asleep last night. And that stayed with me because it really, for the first time, I think really showed, gave me a, a window into the challenges that these very nice young men and women face.

Where if you have that in your mind, I’m struggling every single day to go out there. And the annual revenue of the company I’ve built with, you know, help and guidance and recovery and all the rest of it. I’m now, I’m acutely aware of the fact that I made more in interest on my trust fund whilst I was asleep, right?

Someone like me, I am continuously talking about the importance of motivation and how to achieve it. People like me, you know, we are just. Continuously preoccupied this, how to get people motivated and how to keep them motivated, because as the research tells us, that’s one of the keys to any kind of successful change.

So, you know, a great deal of my time is spent thinking about that, but in that moment, I really had to ask myself, how does this young man stay motivated? And I honestly cannot tell you. Couldn’t tell you.

[00:22:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yikes. Yeah, that would be really demotivating. I mean, you, you just look at the best case scenario.

You’d have to rewire your reward system to not prioritize the money, but to prioritize whatever bringing a, a result in your community with the thing you’re putting out there to help people or. To, I don’t even know. You’d have to just sort of reprogram what the reward is, right? Because it can’t be financial.

Because unless you are printing money, you’re printing money sleeping like that guy and you know, his trust fund’s printing money, so he, he’s gotta find some other reward. But that’s hard to do, right? If you grow up your whole life measuring things with finance like we all do, you have to suddenly figure out a way to do a different thing.

That’s gotta be challenging.

[00:23:30] Resh Joseph: Well, you’ve just hit the $50 million cash prize. They’re already, maybe I should say 50 billion given the data of our conversation. That’s right. That’s right. You’ve hit a bit of, a bit of a jackpot there when you say that. Would it not mean that we would have to help rewire.

The reward system. I think you’re exactly right. I think part of the problem comes from a misunderstanding of what reward actually is because we have a tendency to associate reward with either feelings of euphoria, the hedonic response pleasure. You know, if I eat, it’s pleasurable. I eat. That’s really a mis, a mistaken interpretation of what brain reward is.

The first clue that that’s a mistake comes from research that I first saw about 10 years ago, eight years ago, that very clearly show that the chemical associated with reward dopamine. We all know that dopamine is released in the brain, that they showed in the brains of addicts that very often the dopamine hit would come before.

The consumption, it was anticipatory. So even the anticipation of the reward or anticipation of, as they call it, the stimulus, that the anticipation of the stimulus is what produced the reward, not the stimulus itself. So it wasn’t the cocaine or the heroin or the alcohol or the drug or the gambling. It wasn’t that.

In the case of addicts, it was the anticipation of the reward. That gave the dopamine spike in the brain and that really set off the research on my part. Investigations on my part, and I’ll cut the story short. I’ve broken reward here in rewiring people. I’ve broken it into what I call the four ms. That brain reward actually is a combination of these four things.

It’s a combination of memory. Motivation, movement and meaning. Anything that is rewarding to us as human beings, I say, has to have some hook in the memory. In other words, it has the ability to really activate. So if you smell a food you like and you start salivating, and it’s rewarding for you to eat that it hooks into your memory in some way.

I say that it has to have the ability to really motivate you to go out there and get it. You don’t simply sit on your couch, it makes you want to go out there and pursue it. It has to have that. It has to have the ability to move. And by the way, movement in the brain is initiated also by dopamine, just in the different circuits, but most importantly.

For something to be rewarding, it has to be meaningful to the individual. You and I may not know what that meaning is, but it must be meaningful to that person. If we took someone like an alcoholic or an addict, the meaning of the drug use, very often, not always, but very often, that is meaningful to that person because it represents relief from pain.

If I’m in a person in terrible emotional pain or terrible physical pain, if I’ve found something that can give me relief from that can make me feel at peace, well that will become particularly meaningful to me. And so the challenge for someone like me in a place like this is how do we rewire the brain in such a way that the person finds something?

That can activate the memory, can activate the motivation, can activate the movement, and is deeply meaningful to that person. If we can fulfill those four ms, I submit that whatever that person doing, even if they can’t explain it to me, their therapies, it matters. Not like the young man who is out there building his wonderful media company.

He can’t explain to me. What it is that hooks into his memory. Can’t tell me why it motivates him, why it gets him moving every morning in the way that it does, or why it’s so meaningful to him. But he doesn’t, he needs to know it. And that’s all that really matters. And so I think part of what is ultimately, uh, a panacea or solve for certain wealth syndrome, such as it may be called, is that people can rewire their brains to.

The plants, the four s with four different ones, then they have the beginnings of a solution.

[00:28:02] Jordan Harbinger: That must be kind of a complex process. ’cause I’m imagining these guys, guys and gals coming in and saying everything is meaningless. There’s no point in anything. Right. I, I mean, not, maybe not everybody, but certainly some of them.

And it’s like, where do you even begin with somebody who doesn’t know what would bring them pleasure, which is maybe one of the reasons why they’re using drugs, for example, right? They’re not interested in cooking, they don’t care about building a company because there’s no point and they can’t do it.

You know? Where do, where do you sort of like start the introspection that’s required to find that meaning?

[00:28:35] Resh Joseph: I mean, I’ve worked in places like this for a number of years now, so I’ve had the opportunity to see what doesn’t work as well as what I think does. Here’s what doesn’t work look like. What doesn’t work is people in a facility like this where they’re very well looked after, they have chefs and Mac pursuers and chauffeurs and et cetera, et cetera, but all they do is they sit around all day, they do nothing.

They drink coffee, they smoke cigarettes. They are bored and listless and in my book Unrewarded, it’s just the boredom and the restlessness and the listlessness and the irritability that one associates with being chronically under rewarded, which is what people mean when they say, God doing this is so meaningless.

That is a sure ticket to going back to the thing that was rewarding in the first place because. Well, that’s what you know. That’s what you’ll do. And therefore what I think works is whatever a place like this does, has to address that. It has to provide people with those four s and I look at it from.

Three perspectives, a biological, a psychological, and a social. This relates to George Engel’s 1977 paper on the biopsychosocial model. So what angle and what we all pretty much say these days is if you want to be, well, then you have to have a biological component, a psychological component, and a social component.

The biological component in a place like this is about enhancing dopamine functioning. And there are certain things that we now know definitely enhance dopamine functioning. The people who’ve written very brilliantly on this are actually the people who lead the field are Americans. So I’m thinking of, uh, professor Anna Leke at Stanford who wrote a brilliant book on this.

And others who, from the Stanford group as well, will become very well known in their own way, but doing all of the biological stuff through diet, through exercise, through cold plunging, through, you know, all of those things to try to enhance dopamine functioning. As much as possible, or as Anna Leke says, try and rid oneself of the gremlins.

She talks about the seesaw and the gremlins on one side, you know, so it’s a great analogy. You should read the book. That would be one part of it. The second part of it is the psychological, where we basically work with people to examine the environment and how they’ve constructed it. Behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology, somatic psychology, all of those components.

Number two. And number three, of course is the social component because we are social animals whether we like it or not. And if you put people in socially cohesive groups, that will in itself become rewarding. I’m sure you’ve noticed this of yourself. If you are in a group of people where you feel there’s a real group cohesiveness where you feel understood and you feel aligned with people, it just motivates you to do stuff.

You know, I remember as a young boy going in a football match and standing on the stands of a team I’d never heard of. By the end of that match, I was cheering for the team. I didn’t know who the hell they were, but I was cheering for them because everybody around me was having such a great time. But that’s how I would describe a place like this.

A place like this, if it’s going to work, has to have all three. You’ve gotta have the good biology. You’ve gotta have the good psychology and you’ve gotta have the good sociology. And if we get those three things right, then what you don’t get are people sitting around, bored out of their skulls, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, moaning about the world and its dog.

And generally listeners bored and unhappy. That’s in theory. I mean, I’m making it sound very, very easy, but Sure, sure. It’s a challenge.

[00:32:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean, of course it is. And I know generally something like 40 to 60% of, let’s say addicts for example, they relapse after rehab. And Highlands, your facility I know has a bunch of aftercare that extends.

Is it one or two years after the resident leaves the facility? And I assume that’s sort of mandatory to make sure that you accomplish the mission at hand.

[00:32:58] Resh Joseph: The length of the aftercare is a client, depending on their clinical need, depending on their journey, depending on, yeah. So if I had my way right and there’s no reason to suspect that I will because I’m a bit of a bully and I.

Tend to get my way and the people here, very nice said they let me get away with stuff, but no, not really. But when I get my way, eventually that aftercare will never end because one of the things that we’re doing where we’re harnessing new technology, although this is not new, is we’re building an an app for our alumni, and that app will basically form the basis of a Highlands alumni around the world that the client here will have access.

In, they will never, they can choose not to use it, but if they choose to be a part of the aftercare community, they can do so for two years, three years, five years, for as, as long as I’m in charge for as long as they wish. So in that way, the goal is to have aftercare that is perpetual, that never actually ends.

[00:34:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That act, I mean, that makes a ton of sense to me. I think a lot of people are wondering how much it costs to go to a facility like Highlands, for example. I. That deals with the ultra wealthy, I assume it’s quite pricey because it’s gotta be nice in order to accommodate what those people are used to.

Right? They don’t wanna be miserable, they’re already doing something challenging. They wanna be in, you know, safe and familiar and it surroundings that are up to their standards. I, I’m, or, or am I putting words in, in your mouth here? ’cause it seems like that would be important.

[00:34:34] Resh Joseph: Well, you are correct to say that we are not cheap, but interestingly enough, we are also, we would not be considered expensive.

So if I’m looking at a comparative chart, which is. Really what this is us in comparison to say, competitors in Australia and competitors globally. There are definitely people out there who are doing it cheaper and, and certainly you could have a less, you could get rid of the oak paneling and that would be, you know, a cheaper of doing this.

So certainly there are places doing this, uh, more cheaply than us, but there are also a lot of places who are doing this much, much more expensively. Very interestingly, and we are kind of in the middle. I see somewhere.

[00:35:15] Jordan Harbinger: Can I ask what the price range is?

[00:35:18] Resh Joseph: Obviously the rooms and the facilities are priced differently depending on which part of the facility you are in, but the top, absolute top price for the.

Most luxurious facility that we have here. That would be the price. Yeah. $25,000 a week, and I think that’s 25,000 Australian dollars, which makes it a hundred thousand a month, which makes it, I think about 65,000 us.

[00:35:42] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. I’m gonna do a little currency calculation here. Uh uh, on the weekly amount. So 25,000.

Yeah, so it’s about 16, 17,000 US dollars per week. Yeah. 66,000 US dollars. A month. I mean, that’s, you know, that’s the average annual salary in the United States. So that ends up being, it ends up being quite pricey. But for the people that are attending your facility, of course it’s, you know, it’s not, it’s not as significant investment as it would be for, for others.

So what does that include? Because that’s, people are gonna go, what do I get for that? I, I’m also curious.

[00:36:18] Resh Joseph: So what they get when they come here is, I mean, there is the obvious part of it, which is the facility itself, you know. All of the stuff that they get access to, you know, the Great Shep and all that stuff.

But I think what people are really paying for when they come to a place like this is they are paying for access to top class professionals at a top tier clinical program. Something that’s bespoke, that’s been handcrafted, that’s been written from scratch, that’s not. Secondhand or bought from another institution, or cut, cook, uh, cookie cutter in any way or downloaded or bought off the internet.

You know, they’re paying for something that has been constructed specifically by me for this place. And I think the real value of this place is in the quality of the professionals that work here, the therapeutic star. As well as some of the associated staff. Everyone here is an expert in their field, handpicked by myself and the CEO, and I’d like to think that we’ve as assembled an incredible team.

I think that a lot of the price has to do with, I. Those professionals and the fact that they don’t come cheap.

[00:37:32] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. No, that makes complete sense. I know there’s also for the program six days a week. Correct. So it’s, it’s also quite intense. It’s not exactly, you know, punching out on Thursday. There’s a lot going on and you’ve gotta include food and I, I assume people are, do people work out when they’re there?

That seems like a thing you would do, uh, when you’re trying to get back on the rails.

[00:37:51] Resh Joseph: Well, I, you know, if we’re going to say biological health is a critical part of their recovery. Then yes, working out is part of the program that they pay for. They spend 14 hours a week in various different kinds of therapy.

So therapeutically, there’s a, there’s 14 hours a week, just slightly less than that in terms of physical sessions. So yoga and I. PT and all of the physical dopamine building activity that we talked about and an equal amount of time set aside for the social health aspect, the community components that bring the community together, which is so important.

I wanted 15, 15, 15. I’ve got 14, 12, and 11, which is pretty close, but. What was said to me, which I happen to think is a good point, is it has to be balanced against enough rest and recovery because the program as it is, keeps people engaged between 7:00 AM and 7:00 PM every single day, Monday to Friday, and then Saturday mornings they’re engaged in group and PT and stuff, and then in the afternoons it’s family.

They really only have one day a week off. And that it was important for people to have a day where they could just breathe and think. And reflect and work on the exercises in the manual, that that’s also a pretty important part of it.

[00:39:17] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. How do you kind of ensure that the luxury part doesn’t overshadow the therapeutic part?

Does that, is that ever a problem? I, I can imagine. Sometimes people come in, in their, you know, they’re the boss of their own realm. And they come in, and this is a very similar standard and a very similar type of thing that there used to in terms, in terms of the environment, right? It’s a high standard. It seems like maybe there’s a potentially slight danger of that getting in the way of like, okay, but we now we have to buckle down and talk about your real stuff here.

[00:39:45] Resh Joseph: Yeah. What we try to do is we try to anticipate the needs of a person from that socioeconomic group coming, right? The people who work here. All of our experience of working in that particular sector, you know, for. For some time, for some for some years. So the ability to anticipate those needs before they arise, the ability to recognize people from that particular sector will probably require A, B, C, D, and E.

And to have that on hand or the ability to provide that, and that frees the clinical team. Okay? What we don’t want, what I have seen happen is where that hasn’t been done well. And then. A lot of therapeutic time is spent dealing with the natural resentments that arise when people don’t get what they feel they’re paying for.

You know, to be fair, I would be as well, you know, if I’m paying for a certain level of syllabus and I don’t feel I’m getting that, I would be unhappy and resentful and annoyed, and then that. Hijacks the therapeutic process. Whereas if that is seen to and taken care of in anticipation, then what you get is that doesn’t bleed over into the therapeutic space.

But I tell you what, it is an absolute job, a whole team of people to just ensure that that is taken care of.

[00:41:05] Jordan Harbinger: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you’re right. You want it to be sort of frictionless, right? You want it to be, I’m getting what I need and so that it’s not a distraction. You want them to be comfortable enough that this is not going to be an issue.

Well, thanks so much, Russ. This, this stuff is fascinating. I really had no idea this existed. I’m curious how this is gonna land with the listeners. Usually when we do episodes like this, some folks get personal in the inbox. I pretty much guarantee someone listening to this episode. Is dealing with this kind of stuff right now.

So thank you very much for speaking with me today. Really super interesting, uh, an insight into something I’d never heard of before.

[00:41:39] Resh Joseph: Well, it’s a real pleasure talking to you Jordan, and thank you so much for having us on your, you know, podcast and it’s been a real joy talking to you as well. I.

[00:41:49] Jordan Harbinger: Imagine facing a rare, incurable disease and finding out that AI could repurpose an FDA approved drug as a potential cure.

That’s the breakthrough achieved by Dr. David Feigenbaum and the mission of his company.

I’ll never forget, the doctor walks in the room and says, David, your liver, your kidneys, your bone marrow, your heart and your lungs are all shutting down. That’s it. Like, we’ve tried everything. There’s, there’s nothing more that we can do.

I was terrified. I was like, had my last rights read to me. Course, you know, no one thought that it was even possible that I could survive. You’re dying from this horrible disease, chemotherapy just gave you a little bit of a window, but it’s probably gonna come back. So, you know, what’s your game plan to prevent this thing from killing you?

Well, the only way to get back is to use the tools that you have within reach. I’m like. Shit, I’ve got this horrible disease and the only way that like I might be able to save myself is if I can find a drug that’s already at the CVS. And so my mission then became could I figure out what the hell’s going wrong in my immune system?

So then maybe I could find a drug that already exists that could treat it. I’m not supposed to be here, like my drug wasn’t made for me. It saved my life. It was. Always there. I am completely on fire about this idea that there are drugs at your nearby CVS, your nearby Walgreens that could help more diseases and more people.

But the incentives aren’t aligned for us to do that. So we created every cure a couple years ago because we believe that every drug should be utilized for every disease that possible. We can, regardless of, you know, whether it’s profitable or not, 80% of our drugs that can help people today and tomorrow.

No one’s doing any research whatsoever to figure out more uses for them.

[00:43:28] Jordan Harbinger: Tune into episode 1005 of the Jordan Harbinger Show to explore how existing medications are bringing new hope to those confronting elusive illnesses. Thanks again to Rush for coming on the show today. Highlands Recovery is a luxury rehabilitation center in Sydney, Australia that offers holistic and personalized treatment approaches for high net worth individuals suffering from trauma, addiction, and related mental health issues.

Again, something I think most of us never knew existed. All things Rush Joseph will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Thanks to Highlands Recovery for bringing this episode to us sponsored and ad free. I’m at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

This show is created an association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

So if you know somebody. Who might need a little, uh, attention in this department or is suffering from anything that Highland’s Recovery might be able to treat. I highly recommend that you share this episode with him. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we’ll see you next time.

I’m Bernard, I’m 67 years old and I am an alcoholic.

I’ve been a chartered accountant since I was 18 and I started my own accounting firm at 27 and ran that business, very successfully, together with my business partners up until four years ago when I sold out of the business.

I have always drunk a lot, but it never seemed to be out of control. However, After I sold the business, I faced a lot of changes and challenges in my personal life; my partner and I moved from the city to a small country farm to start our new retired life.

Moving from a situation where I knew what I was doing and was in control of my day-to-day life to a small, isolated farm where I had absolutely no idea what I was doing was a challenge. I really lost confidence in myself; going from a fast-paced, structured environment to a non-structured farm life resulted in the start of my cycle of heavy binge drinking. It got to a point where my partner, my family and my friends all knew about my drinking problem and were gravely concerned for my welfare. In that period, it didn’t occur to me that “Hey, this isn’t normal”.

My daughter found Highlands Recovery’s website and with the encouragement of my partner, we came down to meet with their Clinical Director Resh Joseph and Cam Francis their CEO, we had a conversation and afterwards I felt like “Wow, I can think again!”. I thought I could get my life back into control again, on my own, however that didn’t work, so I signed up to their Recovery Program.

After the first few days of settling in at Highlands I started to get into the flow of the schedule and routine. The first week or so was addressing the problem for me, which was alcohol. The next three weeks were less focused on alcohol and more focused on me; my body, my mind, my gut the “conscious” and “unconscious” and I was really fascinated by the science of it all.

Understanding the science of my addiction enabled me to understand the tools and the methodologies that Resh uses to counteract the “craving”. As Resh would explain, the “craving” can be alcohol, drugs or as simple as wanting to change your clothes five times per day. Resh helped me to understand what has driven my addiction for the past four years; what the warning signs were, and he’s given me the tools to counteract or control the warning signs before my cravings start.

Understanding the relationship between the “conscious” and the “unconscious”, the warning signs and utilising the tools and techniques that have been given to me by Resh and the other psychologists I worked with, has allowed me to counteract and manage the cravings and their warning signs. For example, there was a moment during my stay when something triggered me and made my anxiety rise. I immediately remembered the tools that I’d been taught, which in this case was to go and do an activity by myself, which helped placate my anxiety and cravings. My anxiety went from being (on a scale of one to ten), a nine and by using my tools, I could bring it back down to a six-seven and reduce my cravings.

A fantastic part of the Program here at Highlands is the activities you’re encouraged to participate in like Yoga, Personal Training, Massage, Sauna; they all really helped me to relax and regulate my system.

So, you’ve been to other rehabs, what in your view, made this experience different and better?
Over the years I’ve seen several psychologists, but nothing has been like what I’ve experienced at Highlands Recovery. Resh has created this Program that he wholeheartedly believes in, which he sticks to, and that program has worked for me.

I’ve been to another rehab under negative reinforcement, basically to appease my daughter and I lasted three days. There was basically no psychology involved in the program. They were counsellors, not psychologists and there is a big difference. I went to a second rehab that believed in the learnings of Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12-Step Program. There’s no psychology, no filtering of who came in, what they did. It was supposed to be four weeks, and I left after two weeks because I just didn’t get it. Their strategy was basically lock you in a room for four weeks and go to a few meetings and “you’ll be fine”. It didn’t work for me.

So, the difference here was, in the first couple of days, it takes time to just get settled. Accept why you’re here, chat with fellow guests, meet the therapists and participate. It’s hard in the first couple of days in the group meetings but it’s fulfilling and it’s all learning. The biggest thing was learning about myself and how my addiction works. That’s the difference between Highlands and those other places; they did nothing like that.

They might help you detox and become sober, but they don’t help you learn how to regulate your own anxieties and nervous system and control your cravings. Resh’s program is based on finding the source of your cravings and then giving you the tools to manage that source.

If I could give advice to anyone who my situation might be resonating with, is that it’s important to participate in the group therapy; the input and comments you get not only from the therapists like Resh, Georgia and Peter but also (most importantly) from your fellow guests who are there doing the program with you. The feedback from fellow guests here is just as valuable; a comment someone else might make can really resonate with you. All the group activities here both therapy and exercise-based gives you a social environment and a community to connect with. There have been guests here who I’ve connected with, and I hope they think I’ve helped them because they’ve certainly helped and supported me.