Follow along with the transcript below for episode: Rewire Your Brain for Health and Happiness With Tom Rosshirt
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 504 of Live Happy Now. Most of us have been taught that if we hit our goals and find success, we’ll also discover peace. But many of us have also found out that’s not always how it works. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and today, I’m joined by Tom Rosshirt, a former Capitol Hill press secretary and White House speechwriter, who reached the top of his profession. But instead of finding happiness, he found himself battling anxiety, depression, and illness. In his new book, Chasing Peace: A Story of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and the Spiritual Power of Neuroscience, Tom details how his drive for success drove him to a physical and emotional breakdown. He shares how turning to neuroplasticity, which addresses ailments that start in the brain’s neural circuits reverse the patterns that kept him unwell and open the door to the life he’d been looking for. Let’s have a listen.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:57] PF: Tom, thank you for joining me on Live Happy Now.
[0:01:00] TR: Delighted to be here. Thanks, Paula.
[0:01:02] PF: I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation. I’ve been spending a lot of time with your book. Before we dig in, I just find your story so interesting because you’re one of many people who tried to find peace, and happiness by working hard, achieving success, hitting all your goals, and becoming everything you wanted to be. So, can you talk about where that got you?
[0:01:25] TR: Yes. Well, I did think success was a path to peace, so I worked hard and that got me some success, but it also got me after a while, sudden exhaustion, depression, anxiety. Really, when I turned 50, I was suddenly getting bouts of brain fog, and memory lapses that made me anxious to the point of panic. They seemed to be triggered by things that had never bothered me before. So, I was desperate to figure it out. I’m not a doctor, I have no medical training, I was just a patient trying to get better. For eight years, I tried everything I could find, and none of it worked.
[0:02:06] PF: I think a lot of people find themselves in that position where they’ve done all the right things. Like, this is everything I wanted. So, why am I feeling anxious? Why is it causing me depression? Why do I have addiction issues? Why am I in crisis? For you, how did you start understanding that like, “Oh my gosh, the things I wanted are not giving me the things that I thought.”
[0:02:31] TR: Well, it was even past the point that, “Hey, I’m a White House speechwriter, this is what I’ve dreamed of. I never thought I could achieve it. I’ve done it.” It was way beyond that. It wasn’t making me as happy as I thought. It was much more like, “I am so exhausted, depressed and anxious,” and I am reacting to so many things in my environment that I got to do something radical.
[0:02:57] PF: Let’s talk about some of the symptoms you were having. How did it change? You were having physical manifestations that were really extreme. I love that you talk about this because I don’t think a lot of people connect those physical conditions with their anxiety, with everything else that’s going on.
[0:03:14] TR: Paula, one of the key insights of neuroscience that makes it so relevant right now is, it absolutely identifies that a disease, or a condition, or pain can start in the neural circuit to the brain. When our danger signals are dialed up and those danger signals get dialed up falsely. That’s what happened in my case. I can tell you my story, which is really long. I can tell you the moral of my story, which is short.
The moral of my story is, fear is one of the great causes of suffering in the world, physical suffering, emotional suffering. And that kind of fear, we ramp it up when we run from it. So, I was running from fear, and here’s the critical thing, I didn’t realize I was running from fear. I thought I was running from danger and it did not happen until I had done every diet, I had supplements, I had chelating agents, I was doing saunas, I had air purifiers everywhere, I had a very limited diet, I was avoiding all kinds of foods and places, avoiding mold, avoiding chemical sensitivity, and all of that.
I finally moved out of my house, and for 15 months, I went to a super clean, recent, no volatile, organic compounds kind of place, and I got worse. When I realized that all these things had made me only worse, then, for me, in my understanding of reality, grace broke through. Because I had given up, I had nothing left, I had no path. Everything I tried had failed. I had no new ideas. At that moment, I got an email from someone said, “Do you want to join a group for people with your issues?” I said, ”I sure do.”
[0:05:02] PF: Well, let’s talk real quick. Let me talk about what some of those issues were you referenced that, and you had gotten a lot of physical ailments, and doctors can’t help it. I’ve been through some of this myself where it’s like they can’t find, they’re like, “Well, just avoid that,” and that becomes what they tell you. Which only reinforces what your brain thinks that, “Hey, things are dangerous.” Because now, your medical community is saying, “Just avoid those things that are triggering you.”
[0:05:30] TR: Right.
[0:05:31] PF: Can you talk a little bit about some of these conditions? You said like you were sensitive to everything. Can you kind of tell us what that means?
[0:05:37] TR: Well, I was a kid allergic to so many things, but it was manageable. Then, when it was distressed – because I was a speechwriter, and I took on a lot of work, and I had harsh deadlines, and everything was a high-stakes event. So, there was this ongoing pressure, this ongoing stress. That put me as any hopper would say, and others, my limbic system just went into disrepair. I even had a brain scan, a couple of brain scans that said, your amygdala is way outsized. It’s like 98th percentile, and it’s supposed to go off in the case of a true emergency. But when you’re 98th percentile, it’s going off for anything, hairspray, a bug, a mosquito. It’s going to set you off.
[0:06:21] PF: Let’s tell people what the amygdala is. Let’s talk about that.
[0:06:24] TR: Amygdala is really – would refer to brain scientists to give a thorough description but this is really a warning center of the brain. It is what perceives danger and responds to danger. You get your cortisol, and your adrenaline, and your norepinephrine. So, it identifies danger, and then gives you a surge of energy to flee from the danger. But when the danger is not real and the fear never gets turned off, it creates chaos in your body.
[0:06:55] PF: So, it is the amygdala is constantly sending out signals of fear and danger, and your body is responding the only way it knows to do, which is to kind of protect you and shut things down.
[0:07:07] TR: Yes, the brain is trying to keep you safe, and so, the signal is run away, run away, run away. Then, literally, not just metaphorically, I was literally running away, and I ran away from my home into this, and none of it worked, because the cause of my illness was fear. I was feeding the fear by running from the fear.
[0:07:27] PF: I think I’ve seen how it can really create the chronic pain, or chemical sensitivities, or illness, and it begins in the neural circuits of the brain. But I think it’s really important, this is much different than saying, “It’s all in your head.”
[0:07:42] TR: Oh, thank you for –
[0:07:43] PF: Yes. I mean, especially women, we hear that all the time, “It’s all in your head.” Can you talk about the difference between those two thoughts.
[0:07:50] TR: Thank you so much for bringing this up, because people did tell me, “It’s all in your head.” What they meant by that is, “This isn’t real, you’re making it up, you need to just get over it. You need to get back in.” What we’re saying is, “Oh, it is manifestly real that fear in the brain can cause physiological change in the body.” You can map and measure physiological change in the body that comes from neural circuits in the brain. Emphatically, it is real. It does start in neural circuits of the brain.
Here’s the awesome news, that if you have chronic back pain, and it’s not due to tissue injury, or structural damage, but due to neural circuits of the brain. Then, you can begin to reprogram the fear you feel when you feel the back pain, and the body can calm down, and the back can heal.
[0:08:44] PF: Let’s talk a little bit about how that works because this is incredible news for people who are suffering and who have heard from their doctors. There is nothing wrong with you or there is nothing we can do. I will put a disclaimer real quick. We are not telling anyone to stop taking their medications.
[0:09:03] TR: For sure.
[0:09:04] PF: To stop taking care of themselves in the traditional way. But this is so important to start understanding how our brain is set up to tell our body to take care of us. When it sends the wrong signals, our body tries caring for us in ways that are destructive ultimately.
[0:09:20] TR: Right.
[0:09:21] PF: One of the early heroes of this movement and method is John Sarno, who became famous for treating back pain without surgery, without physical therapy, without drugs, or opiates. He said in one of his books that it’s the enduring weakness of bias that kept the medical community from appreciating his approach. He said, the key bias is of mainstream medicine is that, emotions cannot induce physiologic change. “That is wrong,” he says, “It’s bad medicine, it’s poor science, and that emotions absolutely can undo, create chronic back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, and a range of other issues and illnesses that can be eased when you start to ease the fear.”
[0:10:12] PF: So, for yourself, you had a friend reach out who said, “Hey, would
you be interested in looking at?” Can you dive in a little bit about how you discovered the magic of neuroplasticity, and how that was so life changing for you?
[0:10:26] TR: Maria Shriver, whose imprint my book, is printed under Open Field Press. When she looked at my story and considered it for a book, she looked at Annie Hopper. And what Annie was offering and looked at my past, which was deep meditation with Buddhist masters. She said, “You know what? You wouldn’t have had the time of day for Annie Hopper if all your stuff was working. It took break down for you to turn to somebody who really could help you.”
[0:10:55] PF: And let’s talk about, let’s tell everyone – I’m a big Annie Hopper fan. Absolute [inaudible 00:10:59] for this woman. She has changed so many lives. Can you tell our listeners who she is and just give us a little bit about her?
[0:10:59] TR: Okay. Well, Annie Hopper was a health writer who lived in British Columbia, who also had a radio – she was on many radio shows. She was a core belief counselor to helping people understand how certain beliefs were limiting what they could achieve. Then, suddenly, she began to get sick. She had a healthy, happy life. Suddenly, she began to get sick. She noticed some symptoms, back pain, neck pain, migraines. Then, as she said, walking through a scented candle display in a bookstore set her off, where she thought she was experiencing a brain Hemorrhage. She went home, slept, woke up with a chemical sensitivity measure.
She would say a 15 out of a scale of 1 to 10.
She went camping, she went to live on a boat, she went everywhere she could because she started reacting to chemicals, electromagnetic fields, lights, sounds. She just got away, but she took books upon books on neuroscience, because she said, “Look, I’m walking down the detergent aisle in the grocery store, and I think I’m going to have a hemorrhage, and other people walk down and don’t notice. So, it’s not the substance, it’s my response. How can I fix that?” She trained herself to fix it by reading Joe Dispenza and Norman Doidge and other leaders in the field, and then, she created this method where she healed herself and now others.
[0:12:35] PF: What is so wonderful is, it’s all rooted in actual science. I know Rick Hanson, and his Hardwiring Happiness book, that’s guided a lot of her principles as well.
[0:12:47] TR: Absolutely,
[0:12:48] PF: This is not something that someone just sat down and made up. I think everyone who’s suffering from something like this, oh, such a debt of gratitude to people like Annie and Rick Hanson who have really dived into how we can change the way our brain is responding and interpreting signals.
[0:13:06] TR: Right. Well, with Annie, the number one thing if I could summarize what I learned with Annie is, reverse avoidance. I reoriented my relationship to fear. First of all, I began to believe her because she – see, I would not have been able to heal myself unless somebody who had been through what I’ve been through had been able to describe it to my satisfaction, and said, “Trust me. I had what you have. This got me well. Take my hand, I will walk you through it.” I did the exercises and she said, “Look, you’re going to freak out. You’re going to think, ‘I’m going to die here. This is going to kill me.’ It’s not going to kill you, go with me, hang with me, we’re going to do incremental exposure. We’re going to go and visit a little bit of the stuff that terrifies you. Then, we’re going to retrain your brain to respond. We’re going to elevate your mood. We’re going to respond very differently to a tiny dose. Then, we slowly grow it.”
But elevate your mood throughout the day is one of her prescriptions. When you meet something that scares you with a high mood, with a lofty mood, it kills it. It takes all the fuel away from it. Fear needs ear to perpetuate itself. When fear meets humor, laughter, it begins to suffocate.
[0:14:24] PF: We’ll be back to hear more from Tom in just a moment.
Now, let’s hear more from Tom Rosshirt. It is difficult, however, for people to stop believing what their brain is telling them. I think that’s one of the biggest things, like, we think our thoughts are real. We make such a huge mistake because we believe what we’re thinking. To start believing that what your brain is telling you isn’t true, especially if you have a history of reactions to certain stimuli, can you explain to us how people can learn to differentiate actual threats out there from the ones that their brains are reacting to.
[0:15:07] TR: This is an excellent point. One of my teachers and a psychologist said, fear – she distinguishes between fear and anxiety. Fear is a tiger’s coming after you, and your body gives you the energy you need to escape. Anxiety is, you’re afraid of your own feelings. So, if you have a condition that doctors cannot explain that you’ve been treated for, and it has not improved, that you – and here’s where the work of Howard Schubiner is also critically important. He’s a medical doctor at Michigan State University. He runs a clinic at a hospital, a neuroplastic pain, and he is an expert at distinguishing between illnesses that can and should be treated by mainstream medicine, that can, and should be treated by conventional approaches to back pain, and clearly differentiated sets of pain, and illness, and symptoms that are responsive to a neuroplastic approach.
First, you’ve got to rule out the very serious conditions that require mainstream medicine. But when you’ve ruled out those conditions, you’ve tried to heal it. Nothing is responsive. Then, you begin to consider, how much is emotion, how much is stress, how much is fear, potentially contributing to this. Then, you’ve got nothing to lose. Try one of the many methods for reducing fear, and see what impact it has on your body when it’s not continuously running full of a sense of danger.
[0:16:44] PF: One obstacle to achieving that can be a sense of shame, or blame, that somehow, you did something wrong. I think women may be better at this than men, where it’s like, “Oh, it’s my fault then that I brought this on.” That is not what we’re saying at all. I have someone I know who I’ve encouraged to try Annie’s program, and she’s defensive about it, because she feels it’s like someone’s telling me, this is my fault. This is not what we’re saying at all. Can you talk about that?
[0:17:14] TR: No. Again, Dr. Howard Schubiner, now, he’s writing a book on the same imprint that I’m coming out on the Open Field Press, and his book will follow in about a year. But he describes the personality type that is most likely to suffer these kinds of chronic pain and illness, the neuroplastic pain in these symptoms. It’s people who are very conscientious, they try to be kind, they want to be good, they’re always going to be there to help you out, they’re unlikely to express anger, they tend not to stand up for themselves.
People who suffer this kind – I wouldn’t say suffer. People who have this kind of personality, because look, we make really good friends. But after a while, the burden breaks us down. It’s not at all, “Oh, it’s your fault because you’re thinking the wrong way.” No, it’s actually a credit to you that you are so conscientious and so hardworking that you ran yourself into breakdown. Now that you’re broken down, we know how to help you break through.
[0:18:17] PF: It’s important to talk about, this isn’t something that happens one day. You don’t watch a YouTube video, and everything’s good, because it’s years of a certain practice being embedded, and changing your neural pathways, and you have to undo that. Obviously, it’s worth it. Can you talk a little bit about what it takes in terms of like your dedication and being able to put faith in the process and continue down that road?
[0:18:45] TR: I love that question. One of the main parts of Annie’s teaching is, you got to stick with it. I don’t think she’s doing five-day workshops now. But when she did and I attended, a lot of the people were coming in to give us pep talks. Stick with this, this actually works. So, it does require daily action. She said, it takes about six months of a daily practice for you to turn it around. But for people who have lost so much money, and often lost their jobs, and sometimes lost their home. In the middle of this, I went to a doctor who said to me, she was a young woman, divorced, small child, medical doctor. She said, “Look, I’ll be honest with you, it’s very hard to stay married with this condition because you’re so needy, you’re so avoidant, and you are in a constant state of anxiety.” So, it’s just hard to have good relationships. So, people who have suffered loss of income, loss of job, loss of home, loss of spouse, loss of life or a sidelined, it’s really a trivial commitment to do an hour a day of this particular practice.
Now, Annie said, it takes about six months, and you should do it, even when your symptoms start to get better. But I did six months and I thought, who would stop, because as you said, look, you think you’re taking down false beliefs. We want to emphasize. you’re taking down false beliefs. “This is dangerous, this is going to kill me. I have to only eat these foods. If I don’t live with my air purifier.” All these beliefs are causing you pain and contributing to the illness, and you’ve got to question all of them. It’s not just Annie saying this. The neuroscientist say it, the psychologists say it, the spiritual teachers say it. We’re plagued by false beliefs, and we have to challenge those beliefs. We have to bring them to the surface, expose them, and change them. That takes time, but I found when I was challenging the false beliefs about the foods that would hurt me or that the mold would mess up my brain. I had all these beliefs. When I started challenging those beliefs, other beliefs fell along with them. I just started feeling better.
When I left Annie’s workshop, we had a chance to pass her on the mic and everyone could say something after the five days. I said, “In terms of joy increase and suffering reduced for time invested and money spent, nothing has ever been better than this for me.” I think it just kept getting better after that.
[0:21:21] PF: I love that you brought up our false beliefs and we don’t know that they are false. It takes really diving in. It’s a process to uncover what’s driving your reaction because they aren’t conscious reactions.
[0:21:37] TR: Yes, that’s exactly right. So, it’s crucial that we find someone that we trust, who’s been through what we’re suffering from, who’s healed a whole lot of others, whose testimonies we can see, that we can read studies in prestigious journals. This is all crucial. Like, there’s Michael Donnino, who’s a professor of emergency medicine at Harvard. He works at an affiliated lab, where he has created something called the physiologic symptom relief therapy. It’s a meditative experience that they go through, a practice that calms people down, and he uses it to treat people with long COVID. He has published studies where he’s had success with people suffering from long COVID by applying this particular therapy, which again, is a form of meditation relaxation that reduces fear.
[0:22:32] PF: Now, you mentioned going to a doctor. Do you see the medical community warming up to this?
[0:22:39] TR: This is a super question. I think, of course, they will. The question is, how soon they will. Everybody who goes into medicine is going to treat people, to make people better. Ultimately, to be the hero for people who are really suffering in a very vulnerable time in their lives. But if they can’t heal them, it’s very painful for them. Then, to hear of something that seems untested, that seems maybe trivial, that seems to be coming from the margins, they’re going to have initially some skepticism.
Right now, a friend of mine named Nathaniel Frank, a science writer, who has used this approach to heal his chronic pain is writing a book for Mayo Clinic Press. Now, if it comes out of Mayo Clinic Press, if he gets through the process, and he’s able to publish this, then that is enormous validation for this approach to pain.
[0:23:34] PF: Yes, I think there is so much more research that’s going to be done. It’s really exciting to see how much is opening up right now, and what that’s going to bring, and building blocks like your book, which just continue furthering that story, and make it more acceptable for people to think about, and they can then walk in, and kind of take a deeper dive into what the science is telling them.
One thing you talked about when they passed the mic around, and you talked about your joy incrementally increasing. It’s important to note that when you change that one thing in your brain, when you change that fear response, it isn’t just that illness or condition that changes. It changes everything. Can you talk about that?
[0:24:19] TR: Yes. Well, the cool thing, Paula is. I wrote this book; I spent three and a half years writing it. Even much longer preparing for it, and writing notes, and keeping it. Now that I am talking with you about it, and I have to distill it down, it becomes clearer and clearer what the core of the book is. It’s these points about fear, that fear is a great cause of suffering, enormous cause of suffering. Yes, it can cause back pain, it can cause migraines, it can cause fibromyalgia, it can cause irritable bowel syndrome, right? But it also causes just an anxious tension, it causes depression. If you reduce your fear, it’s like the number one approach to simply feeling better. Paula, I think that the number one most unifying fact in the world is, we’re all trying to feel better.
[0:25:14] PF: Oh, yes.
[0:25:14] TR: We’re all trying to feel better. So, if there is a path that medical science is saying, this is an approach that reduces fear, and you know what, it also reduces back pain, and that’s only part of it, then this is really – this could be a watershed moment, this could be extraordinary. I would say, the thing to celebrate about neuroscience and neuroscientists, applying the scientific method to this treatment and showing that it works, is that, yes, we’ve known for a long time that reducing fear is good for your happiness. The Bible, I don’t know how many times says, “Be not afraid, fear not.” That would be great if only we could do it.
[0:25:56] PF: It sounds so easy.
[0:25:58] TR: Right. But we’ve got millions of people who would never listen to a spiritual teacher, who would not listen to a psychologist. But if you have a neuroscientist who can cite studies, clinical research, published in prestigious journals that says that this approach to reducing fear has reduced chronic back pain. Millions of people will benefit from that understanding. So, it’s a very exciting moment.
[0:26:27] PF: I love this. So, you’ve learned a lot, you teach us a lot in this book. What would you say is the most important lesson that you learn from getting sick and getting well.
[0:26:37] TR: Oh well, there is one line I quote from a union therapist who talked about this character who is, the arrogance had been beaten out of him by 20 years of fruitless searching. I thought, first of all, a breakdown can be a good thing, but ultimately, Paula, it’s what I just said. That fear is the number one cause of human suffering, I think, that we can respond to. We can’t fix death. We can’t fix tornadoes or potentially fires, as we’re experiencing now. But it seems that we are having a growing number of approaches and methods that can reduce our fear. The ability to reduce our fear has just unmeasurable potential for making our lives better in every way.
[0:27:24] PF: That is so great. This book has so much information in it. It is called Chasing Peace. So, we have to know, did you catch it?
[0:27:33] TR: Peace is chasing me.
[0:27:35] PF: Awesome.
[0:27:35] TR: The reason it couldn’t catch me is I couldn’t bear to stand still, and feel the fear, and go through all the feelings until peace could finally settle on me. But yes, I would say, I’m allowing peace to chase me and catch me more than I ever have.
[0:27:53] PF: I love this.
[0:27:53] TR: Thank you for the question.
[0:27:55] PF: Tom, we’re going to tell our listeners how they can find your book, how they can find out more about you. We’ll include something on how they can find Annie Hopper’s program and probably a few other related resources. Thank you for sharing your story. It’s a great story to share with the world and I appreciate you sitting down with me and talking about it.
[0:28:13] TR: Yes, I’m so happy to do it, and thank you for your interest, and for giving me the chance to talk to people about it.
[END OF EPISODE]
[0:28:22] PF: That was Tom Rosshirt, talking about rewiring our brains for health and happiness. If you’d like to learn more about Tom, discover his book Chasing Peace: A Story of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and the Spiritual Power of Neuroscience, enter a drawing to receive a free copy of the book, or follow him on social media. Just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode. While you’re there, be sure to sign up for our all-new Live Happy newsletter. We’ve expanded to include more of the latest research on happiness, uplifting stories, our new look for the Good Word Search Puzzle, book recommendations from positive psychology experts, and of course, our happy song of the week. That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.
