Welcome to the Ageless Warrior Lab. I'm BJJ Black Belt at Dirty Dozen member Dave Meyer, here to draw wisdom from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the martial arts and explore how it applies to success in business, relationships, your long-term health, and making the most out of your life. It was September 23rd, 2005, just weeks after Hurricane Katrina had made landfall and flooded and destroyed much of New Orleans, killing nearly 1,400 people. The city was empty of its residents and under control of the military. The levees had been patched and the water had receded, and I had arrived there weeks before to co-lead a team of volunteers who were working round the clock to rescue animals, mostly dogs and cats who had been stranded in their homes. You see, what had happened was people had been told to evacuate the city as Katrina approached, but many people didn't own a car, or even if they did, some people couldn't fit their whole family and all their animals on the car. So many people just left their pets with food and water and thought they'd be back in a few days after the storm passed. And then when the storm did hit, it became a category five hurricane, and the levees were breached by the storm surge and the city started flooding. Everyone who hadn't already left was then forced to evacuate, and they weren't allowed to bring any of their animals onto buses or trucks. And the upshot of all this was hundreds of thousands of people who really loved their pets had left them behind for what they thought would be just a day or two and then couldn't return to a destroyed city. But on this day, another hurricane, Hurricane Rita, was about to make landfall and was threatening to flood the city all over again. And now we were told that we needed to immediately evacuate and head inland to safety. And it was honestly a scary moment. So today, the lesson from the lab is about fear. Fear is a huge topic. You may be a person who deals with it all the time, in various ways, or you may feel like fear isn't anything on your radar at all. But it's maybe our most primal and important emotion. It can help keep you alive. People in our human history who didn't experience appropriate fear would have been less likely to survive long enough to reproduce. So we've mostly descended from people who experienced at least enough fear to stay safe. I say that because it's okay to acknowledge that fear is a part of us. But while fear can help keep us alive, it can also be debilitating and ironically keep us from living our fullest life. So there we were, ordered by the state of Louisiana to evacuate our makeshift animal shelter, base of operations, which meant evacuating 3,000 rescued animals. They said the only animals that could remain were those too sick to transport, and we could only keep a skeleton staff of no more than 30 people from the hundreds of veterinarians and vet techs and rescuers who were working there. Me and my partner, Jane Garrison, who were leading the rescue, elected to stay back with a handful of our volunteers to ride out the hurricane because we wanted to stay close to New Orleans. So when the storm passed, whatever its effect, we could as fast as possible resume our race against time rescue efforts to find starving animals that might still be alive in the city and bring them out to safety. So we took these motor homes and the other trucks that had been left behind and we made a circle with them, like you see a circling of the wagons in an old Western movie. And then we moved all the sick animals in their cages into the center of that circle and we covered them over with tarps. The storm was supposed to make landfall in the middle of the night, and all we could do now was just go to sleep and hope for the best. But in the morning, I remember being surprised that I hadn't been shaken awake by the wind. And it turned out that the storm had slowed and wouldn't be making landfall until later that afternoon. And I remember looking at Jane and her looking back at me, and we were both saying the same thing. Well, if we have a few more hours, then let's get our asses into our rental vans and get back into New Orleans and get as many more animals out of there as we can ahead of this new storm. The few rescuers who had stayed back with us were down with this plan, but we were all scared, and none of us really wanted to be the one to show it. I have to pause here to say we weren't trained first responders or anything like that. We were just animal lovers who had volunteered to show up to do this job, and the few people we had there with us honestly were just housewives who had the time to come down and help for a few days. But we were all on this mission to save animals' lives, and we were willing to risk ourselves to do it. So, against the government orders, we got in our two vans and started speeding the 45 minutes it took to get from our makeshift animal shelter into New Orleans. I remember driving like 80 miles an hour towards this dark, dead, black sky. To say it was ominous is an understatement. And as we approached New Orleans, we saw that all of the military checkpoints we would normally have to pass through were just gone. And military convoys were passing us in the other direction, speeding out of the city to go inland and get to safety themselves. You've got to understand, I'm a California boy. I'm fine with earthquakes, but I had never experienced a hurricane. And what I'd been seeing in the last few weeks after Hurricane Katrina was literally cars hanging in treetops and other shit that would just blow your mind. Not to mention that an entire city had been submerged when the levees had given away and over a thousand people had died. Those levees had only barely now been restored, and there was no reason to think they could withstand another direct hit from a similarly big hurricane. We were also hearing these warnings on the radio of twisters moving ahead of the storm. And someone told me that if you see a twister, lay as low as possible on the lowest spot on the ground and grab any tree or roots or grass that would possibly hold you from being picked up by the wind. And I thought, great, this wasn't comforting. And honestly, I was scared. It was pouring rain, and when we got into the city, I drove us to an area of the town that I knew would remain above the floodline should the city flood again before we could get out. But if that happened, we'd be stranded. Now there was this code among us rescuers: don't become the person who needs to be rescued. And this was the closest I had let myself get to that. So I was determined to get my team out of there before the storm fully kicked in. The skies continued to darken and the wind was really kicking up. And I gave us exactly one hour to work, getting into homes and opening doors and looking for trapped pets. We were able to fill our van with dogs and some cats, actually, more than we could fit in the cages that we'd brought. So we literally had them sitting on our laps in the vans. It was like these little starving Hurricane Katrina survivors knew that the ship was going down again. And as we found them, they were literally jumping into our arms. It was crazy. I gave the word that the time was up and we had to move. And we got out of there ahead of the storm and made it back with about 15 animals who hadn't eaten or drunk anything or seen a human in weeks. Hurricane Rita ended up veering slightly away from New Orleans up the coast, and the city didn't take the direct hit, so it didn't flood again. Our rescue center was absolutely pummeled with wind and rain, but the people and animals there were safe and it was a happy ending. That was a scary morning for me. Now, I'd been scared before, like anybody, but that was honestly a bit different. In thinking about that experience, I'd divide fear into four general categories, but these lines aren't super clear. Number one is there's something dangerous and threatening right in front of you in the moment. Someone is pointing a gun at you or they're about to hit you, and you just have to deal with it, and the fear is justifiable. Number two is a fear of something that is imminent but not happening right at that very moment. This is like the fear that I felt speeding into New Orleans when we should have been speeding the other way. I was scared of what might happen, but it wasn't about to happen yet. Number three, I'd call a lower level fear, anxiety. And that for some people, this is always present. It might be, but it doesn't have to be tied to a specific situation that you're facing or thinking about. And when you feel anxiety about something, if you were to dial it up enough, you would discover it is just fear. And lastly, number four is fear to do things in your life, which might absolutely involve anxiety or might not, but the fear is keeping you from taking a needed action to improve your life. Like, for example, a fear of the consequences to leave a bad job or leave a bad relationship, so you don't make the change that you really should make. These last types of fear, anxiety and fear to do what needs to be done in your life, we'll talk about those in the next few podcast episodes. So today we'll stick to the more imminent types of fear of something physical. If you've ever felt really threatened, you know what a bad feeling that that is. So here are some things to note about fear. First, have you ever realized that fear in any form is always a fear about something in the future? You're experiencing fear in the moment, but the thing you fear that the dog is going to bite you, or this person's going to hurt you, or the plane's going to crash, all of those are things in the future. It could be the very near future, like what if that guy pulls the trigger on the gun? But more often it's more of the distant future, a fear of what might happen if the storm hits, or if this plane were to crash, or if I get fired or lose my health insurance, or something like that. The feeling of fear is happening right in the moment, but the actual thing you fear is always in the future, and it's not happening at that instant. And that's important to remember, and we'll come back to it. It's also important to remember that there's a difference between fear and danger. Danger is an objective condition. It may be physical danger, like the thing you're standing on might be about to collapse, or it might be a danger that something bad will happen in your life, like a loss of a job or something like that. But it's a condition that objectively exists. You might be aware of the danger or not be aware of the danger, but that doesn't change the level of the actual danger. But fear, fear is a feeling. I'll say that again. Danger is an objective condition, but fear is just a feeling. It's possible to be in danger and not be aware of it, so feel no fear at all. And it's also possible to experience fear when you're not actually in any danger at all. So today we're talking about that feeling of fear and how to cope with it. When powerful emotions like fear arise, we sometimes become the feeling. We don't just feel angry, we are angry. Emotions like that can be all-encompassing, like rage or grief, and of course fear. So we need to learn how to appropriately modulate fear. Fear in any moment should inform you, but not define you. As Dan Milman says, fear is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. Besides the terrible way that fear makes you feel, if fear becomes the master, it can actually cause a lot of harm, both to individuals and to our society. People who are scared make mistakes. We see this overreaction on the mat. When someone fears something you're attacking them with, and so they overreact to it, and you can capitalize on that. When governments are overcome by fear, they overreact to perceived threats real or imagined, and regular people usually end up paying the price. So when it comes to that fear of something right in your face now or in the near term, you can't let the fear take over. What matters is how you cope with it and if you can assess its validity and how you can act despite it. For what feels like a dangerous or life-threatening situation, how much fear arises and how you deal with it can have a lot to do with if you've been trained and if you have experience with that situation or not. So if you're a martial artist and you have experience with aggression and fighting, you'll likely handle a scary confrontation better than someone who's never felt physically threatened at all. Or if you're a cop who's been in similar tense situations before, you may have developed some sense of how to act or that you'll be okay, which may help you keep your cool and take the right actions. Fear can cause adrenaline, and adrenaline, if managed well, can be useful. There were a set of studies conducted by Jameson and then Crum, including one in 2012 called Mind Over Matter, and this was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, that showed that people who reframed being stressed as something positive and helpful had better outcomes. The stress became sort of a performance boost rather than a handicap. I remember when I was 12 years old, during the summer, just prior to seventh grade and a new school, some friends and I were playing basketball in the gym, and this bigger bully kid and some of his friends grabbed our basketball. We asked for it back, but they wouldn't give it back. And the bully guy, who we had never met, kept saying, Hey, what are you gonna do about it? And my friends knew that I was the kid who was training in jujitsu, and so they all, of course, looked at me. So I gathered my little 12-year-old courage and stepped up to the guy and just asked for the ball back. And he said that I should try to take it from him. And I said, Listen, I don't want to fight. And I remember he said, What are you, a chicken? And I had this sense that a fight was inevitable now. And I felt the pressure of all these kids looking at me. So I said to him, Well, would you fight a chicken? And he said, Yes. And the best way I can describe it was rather than succumb to the fear I was feeling, I used that fear to perform a bit of mood alchemy, transforming me from being scared to being outraged that someone would fight someone else who's weaker and scared. And this allowed me to focus that adrenaline outward, and I hauled off and punched him right in the face, whipped my head to the side, flinging my glasses off in case he was gonna hit me back so I wouldn't get glass in my eyes. And then with my other hand, just punched him so hard right in the stomach that he doubled over, and then I put him in a standing guillotine choke. Now, nothing of that, other than the choke itself, was anything I had particularly practiced for real on the mat. But in that situation, and even as a kid, my training kicked in. I then let him go and I calmly took the ball and tossed it to my friends, and I decided it would probably be best for me to then head home before this bully guy regained his strength and might try for a round two where I wouldn't have the element of surprise and get in that first punch. A side benefit of that day was it gave me a reputation in school and no one ever messed with me again, including that guy. My jujitsu at that time was, you know, kid-level training, but in adult life, some professionals face these fear triggers daily. Over the years, I've taught many people in law enforcement, and as a part of that, I've had the opportunity to do what are called ride-alongs, which is when you accompany police in the field, like in their car, to go out on calls and see the actual environment and situations that they have to deal with every day. And I've noted how when a call comes in, maybe there's an active shooter somewhere, they spin the car around and they put on the siren and they go as fast as possible, careening towards the danger. And in those moments, I always think like, slow down, guys, like you can let another cop get there first. But cops are trained to act under this kind of pressure, and many police officers became police officers because they actually like that feeling of excitement and adrenaline. So if you have the opportunity to get trained, not just in physical skills, but in dealing with pressure or stress, I think you should definitely do it. Martial arts training can be part of that, but if you're in an art that practices only with a compliant opponent, or only like striking pads, but basically where you're never at risk for being hit or injured, I don't think you're getting from that the full buildup of physical toughness to approximate a real fight. It's the arts like boxing and kickboxing and wrestling and judo and jujitsu, where you're in a sport with a non-compliant opponent, that you can get more relevant skills for real physical confrontation. But even then, unless you're competing regularly, you're likely practicing in a safe and friendly environment and never dealing with actual adrenaline, certainly not fear. That's important because the way you react on the mat with your friends in a one-on-one situation with the rules of your sport can be very different from how you'd react when suddenly confronted with a scary situation on the street that catches you completely by surprise. Fear and adrenaline change everything. It can cause you to freeze or it can cause you to go berserk and get tunnel vision, and neither is good. That's why I advocate competing. If you can, we'll be talking lots about this in future episodes. But most people I understand aren't able or willing to compete in grappling, and certainly not in boxing or kickboxing or MMA, where you're going to possibly get hit, and definitely get hit. So they're not being trained to deal with adrenaline fear. Fortunately, there are some great adrenal stress training systems like impact and model mugging that I think are a must for anyone who wants to know how they can perform under pressure. Basically, training to fight is always about training around the edges of a real fight. So we put in rules in these sports to make things safer so we can come back again and again and train. If we're striking, we maybe don't allow certain strikes and certainly don't allow eye gouging or a weapon or something like that. If we're grappling, we don't allow strikes at all, but then we can go full force on joint locks. The key to think of fight training is as this circle. And in the middle of the circle, that's the real fight that you might be in one day, where there's absolutely no rules. Maybe it's happening on concrete or on the street or who knows where. And with possibly multiple attackers, maybe there are weapons involved, who knows? And around the edges of this circle are the various points where you can isolate skills that may be relevant when you step into the circle for the real fight. So those are the points that can be kickboxing and grappling and weapons training and strength increase and increasing speed and flexibility and all the things that you can isolate and safely train. But the one point that almost everyone misses is dealing with adrenaline. So systems like impact, model mugging, try to fill that gap. They use a heavily padded guy, I think it's almost always a big guy, who is screaming obscenities in your face and shoving you, and who isn't really going to hurt you. But I promise you, even if I were to give you a nice hug right now and say in a soft voice, don't worry, my friend, you're safe. It's Dave. I'm not going to hurt you. And then I put on this giant padded suit and everybody's looking at you, and I start shoving you hard and screaming at the top of my voice obscenities right nose to nose into your face, your heart is going to race and you are going to get adrenaline. It happens to everybody. And that's what these systems do. And then you get used to experiencing that kind of pressure and that bit of adrenaline, and then you get used to moving through it and unloading strikes on the attacker in various ways that his padding will absorb. His head and his body and his groin is fully padded. For us grapplers, you can't go putting the guy in an armbar or leg bar or something like that. But you can tee off on his body and his head, which actually could be kind of fun. I'll post a video of me doing this in the show notes, but it's an important and an overlooked point to train on that perimeter of the circle that will help you get used to adrenaline and help you if you're ever suddenly thrust into a real fight. And I'd add it's particularly important for women to occasionally train in this way. Many men, because of their lived experience in contact sports, can be more accustomed to adrenaline and roughhousing. But some men and many women will have never experienced this type of verbal abuse. It's called woofing. So it's good for them to learn that they can take it and kind of get used to it. Of course, far too many women have had personal experience from abusive relationships. And that's why courses like impact and model mugging have all kinds of warnings to let people know the exact emotions that they're going to be intentionally trying to trigger in case that's not something that someone wants to relive. Now, back to fear specifically. Fear isn't just about something external beyond your control, like an attacker trying to hurt you. Sometimes you might also have a legitimate fear about something dangerous that you actually want to do for fun, like skydiving or making a jump from a high rock into the water or something like that. So here's something to consider. Most people have too thick of a border between what feels dangerous and what is dangerous. They think something is dangerous well before it really is, and so they overly limit themselves. They might stay farther back from the edge of a rooftop than they need to, or not be willing to try rock climbing even with a rope. If your border for what feels dangerous is too thick, you miss out on fun experiences like rock climbing or flying a plane or whatever. Of course, if it's too thin, you take risky chances that will likely punish you or maybe even worse, get you killed. So it's always better, of course, to err on the side of caution, but you can narrow the gap between what feels dangerous and what actually is dangerous. And if you can do that, you'll have a bit more fun in your life. We see this in BJJ. Beginners during a grappling match sometimes feel like they're running out of air and they may stop training because they feel so scared, they're panicked, and they just think they have to take a rest and breathe. But I've never seen anyone actually pass out simply from exertion on the mat. That's just them thinking they're in some sort of danger when in fact they're not. A dog can run full-tilt laps around the dog park again and again, just panting and panting, but there's just no drama, right? They're just getting out of breath. So I tell people, it's okay, you're not dying, you're just out of breath. Count to 10. And usually by the time they get to five or seven, they're calmed down enough to realize they're actually okay. So here's a quick checklist to see how warranted your fear of doing something you might want to do is. Number one, what percentage of people ever get hurt or killed doing this thing? Is it one in a hundred? Is it one in a thousand? Is it one in a million? Number two, is somebody guiding you who has a track record of guiding others safely? And do they really know what they're doing? Number three, do you have the right equipment if equipment is needed? And do you know how to use it? Can someone double check your setup? Number four, are the people around you doing this thing again and again and showing you that it's safe? Like, are you literally watching people jump off the rock again and again and have a good time? And number five, are you actually concerned that if you do this thing you might have a bad outcome? Or is it more that you're just scared to take the first step, like to make that jump? If all of this leads you to believe that the objective danger is acceptable, and the real problem, if you're having one, is just your feeling of fear itself, then it pays to learn how to manage that fear and not deprive yourself of what could be potentially fun experiences. I've struggled with this myself. On one of my trips to Brazil, some of the fighters took me and my then wife on an all-day hike up a steep mountain called Pedra de Gavia. Look it up. It's a challenging hike that ends in this insane 360-degree view of Rio de Janeiro. There's a steep path that starts in a densely forested area and then opens up to this sheer rock face before you can make it up to the very top. We'd been running the path in sections and everything was great, but then we got to this exposed rock face just prior to the summit. To cross that means you're scrambling across a barren rock face with no trees or anything to hold on to, and it's at a steep grade, and it has this high degree of what climbers call exposure, which means a feeling of nothing between you and a sense you could fall a great distance. It didn't seem objectively all that dangerous to me, you know, just be careful and don't fall. But the penalty for falling seemed really crazily bad, and my gut was telling me, you know what, don't try to cross this. Of course, the Brazilian guys I was with had been doing it since they were kids, and they were telling me not to be scared and to just keep going, and the view from the top is totally worth it. And my wife felt like she could do it, but it just seemed a bit too dangerous for me, and I felt scared, so I told them to go up ahead, and I elected to stay back. Now I'm generally pretty brave, and I've rock climbed before, and I don't have a particular fear of heights, so it was a tough decision for me to say I don't want to continue on because I didn't want to appear like a wimp to those guys, but I just needed to be true to what I was feeling. A funny side note to this is we'd been running and hiking hard all day to get up to that point, and it was a hot Rio summer day, and I was wearing shorts and a thin t-shirt. And when we got to that height where it was really windy and it was much cooler, when I stayed back and stopped hiking, and I began just to hang out for an hour or so to wait for them to go up to the top and come back, I was getting really cold from the wind sitting there in my wet t-shirt. And I saw these patches of long grass. So I squatted down on my heels, hugging my thighs against my chest, and I pulled my t-shirt over my knees and around my legs, and then I started stuffing this grass up in the shirt between my knees to make insulation. I thought it was really clever and it totally kept me warm and it shielded my chest from the strong wind. But when the group came back and saw me squatting on the ground, my shirt pulled over with grass sticking out from the top of my shirt and from the sleeves, it looked like the scarecrow and the wizard of oz, and they just fell over laughing. And Brazilians like to give people nicknames. So from that moment on, my nickname in Brazil has been Capim, which means grass. And I tell people it's because I'm tall and thin like grass, but given enough time like grass, I can break through concrete. But now you know the secret truth of where I got that nickname. I should also say I learned when we got back that lots of people stop where I stop because they get that same feeling and they get scared. And in fact, people have died there. All the guidebooks say you need ropes to cross that point. So my fear was justified, even though my friends had done it many times, and to them it was no big deal. So it's easy for me to say to narrow the border between what you think is dangerous and what actually is dangerous. But sometimes we just feel what we feel. Our perception is our perception, and it doesn't always line up with objective reality, but sometimes that's hard to know in the moment. We all have our filter through which we perceive the world, and what's scary or intimidating for one person can seem easy for another. Fear is just a feeling, yes, but in the moment, feelings are as real as anything else. So don't beat yourself up if you don't do something because you find it scary, even if other people are doing it. They obviously aren't dealing with what you're dealing with. But do take the opportunity to learn about yourself. Now, what can we do to help in those moments when we're facing fear? How can we act despite it? I have a thing I call making friends with fear. When fear arises, accept it and smile and say, hello. It's a valuable system to keep you safe, but it's very bad at assessing reality. Remember that there's a difference between fear and actual danger. Fear is a feeling, and feelings are not facts. I'm gonna say that again. Feelings are not facts. Fear is about the future. So remember that. It's about the future. So if you can focus on the present moment, that brings yourself back into a space where you're not gonna feel as much fear. You can say to your fear, I see you, but I will not become you. And you can help me, but you cannot become me. Fear can be managed with courage if you are feeling it in the moment, and even with faith. But the opposite of fear is peace. When you feel inner peace, there's just no feeling of fear. Now, for some people, it helps to have a spirit. Spiritual belief or faith. If you have a strong belief in God or some higher power, that can taper your fear. There's that saying, today is a good day to die. If you are really at peace with your own mortality, perhaps because you're completely sure that something better is waiting for you, that can definitely help you mitigate fear in a dangerous situation. But for most people, the most accessible way to mitigate fear, at least a little bit in the moment, is your breath. A few slow, deep breaths can help calm you and clear your thinking, even in a scary situation. And this isn't just pop wisdom. There are tons of studies like Ziccaro et al. 2018 called How Breath Control Can Change Your Life. It's a review of about 90 studies that all show that slow breathing, around six breaths per minute, calms the mind and body and improves emotional control and reduces stress. This means that breathing slowly isn't just relaxing, but it measurably shifts your physiology towards balance and resilience. When people get scared, they hold their breath. It's a bit chicken and egg. You hold your breath because you're scared, but holding your breath makes you tense and can make you more scared. So consciously breathing deeply to release that tension actually causes you to be a little less scared. Hopefully, enough so that you can use your adrenaline to take the right actions in the moment. There's obviously so much more we could say about fear, and we'll look more at it in a couple of the coming episodes. But let me leave you with this. We talk about fear leading to a fight or flight reflex. But between fight and flight is acceptance, doing nothing. Now, for some animals, that acceptance between fighting or running away is playing dead, which is exactly what some animals do, and it's literally doing nothing. But what I mean is going back to what I said about courage is the ability to act in spite of fear. But the opposite of fear is inner peace, acceptance. So being at peace with what is in the moment is sometimes what's needed to let fear go. Remember, fear is just a feeling you're having, and it's a feeling about the future. And if you can accept, I'm feeling fear, it's just a feeling, and bring yourself back to your breath, be in the now. Fear needs you to be thinking about the future. Your deep breathing brings you back to the present moment. It's what's happening in your body in this moment, and you're focusing on it. And if you can just accept what is in this moment, that will remove the fuel that fuels the fear. And with the fear taken down even just a little bit, you can then act more calmly and ensure you get the best outcome. When we decided to go for it and race a hurricane into New Orleans to try to save a few dogs and cats, we acted in spite of our fear. But the thing we feared didn't actually happen. And our ability to push through it at that moment and not give in to the fear is what saved the lives of 15 scared and hungry dogs and cats. Fear can keep you alive, yes, but fear can rob you of living the life that you're here to live. Remember, the opposite of fear is inner peace. So do what you can to foster inner peace whenever you can, and it starts with your breath. More to come about that next week. If you enjoyed this podcast, please remember to subscribe, like, and share, and please leave me comments and let me know your thoughts. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, a review would really help us spread the message. I'll be back next week with more lessons from the lab. And in the meantime, as always, keep developing your strengths and your wisdom and go out and do good in the world.