The Holy Sh*t Moment: How lasting change can happen in an instant

The drive arrived in fall 2007.

She took a call from a man who worked at a carpet mill in rural south-eastern United States. He was calling because his young son had been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. The man was so relieved because he had just been recalled to work after a layoff and had medical insurance again.

Unfortunately, Lee had to tell the man his policy had a “preexisting-condition clause,” and any new diagnosis in the first year was not covered. This was prior to the Affordable Care Act, when the law changed, requiring policies to not have such restrictions for children.

Lee wanted to help. She had previous experience working for a state Medicaid contractor and saw a chance to get the boy coverage. She called the Medicaid office and was told they would cover the child, but only after they received a denial explanation from the insurance company Lee worked for. Prior to her company being able to issue such a denial they needed to send the boy to a pediatric oncologist. The problem was, the only such specialist within one hundred miles of the client refused to see the boy unless they knew they’d receive payment. Her company wouldn’t cover them. Medicaid wouldn’t guarantee payment until they received a denial explanation from her company. It was a catch-22: her company couldn’t provide denial until the boy saw a pediatric oncologist, but the oncologist wouldn’t see the boy unless payment was guaranteed.

But she’d done her job. In fact, she’d already gone above and beyond. Company policy was to end the call and move on to the next customer.

“At that moment, something in me broke,” Lee Holland told me.

Not caring that it was against the rules, she blocked calls on her phone and walked into her manager’s office. “I told him he could fire me at the end of the day, but I was going to get that child on Medicaid and in to see a pediatric oncologist.” Her manager replied with, “Do what you have to do.”

It required several phone calls, a discussion with her company’s legal department, and signing of privacy release forms, but she got the boy approved for Medicaid and scheduled to see an oncologist by the end of the day.

It was all buildup. After her shift, Lee’s life-changing moment came in the parking lot as she walked to her car.

It was a gray November day; a light drizzle fell. Then a question popped into her head: What are you doing working in customer service when you can help people like this? There was a sudden snap decision to change careers. It came so fast, she didn’t even break stride as she closed the final steps to her car. “I didn’t know what it was yet. It was just between me and the universe that I was going to do something. I felt I had potential to help people through the chaotic mass of the American health-care system.” The realization, Lee said, was like a dislocated bone suddenly popping back into its joint.

“I had instant drive to do it,” she told me.

The moment she got home she logged on to her computer to look at what education programs she would need. Thirty-six years old and possessing a degree in cultural anthropology, she began by upgrading her science and math courses at a community college. There were many challenges over the next decade, but for Holland, there was never any doubt she was going to make a difference in the world. She recently graduated with a doctorate in pharmacology and a master’s degree in public health, and has accepted a research fellowship in D.C. that ensures pharmaceutical quality for Medicare and Medicaid recipients. She has won prestigious grants, awards, and scholarships, conducted important research, delivered numerous presentations, and mentored other students.

At first, Lee was leery of pursuing a doctorate as part of this new path in life, because it was a four-year commitment and she was already in her forties at that point. But a friend explained the time would pass anyway, and in four years she’d be four years older either with or without the degree, and her mind was made up. “There were a lot of challenges in between,” Lee said. If one path didn’t work out, she had to find another. “Even though I had suddenly become singular in my determination, I had to be flexible about the way I did it.”

And it all changed in that parking lot in 2007. “Since then I’ve met so many amazing people. My social life exploded. I got to travel the world.” She also met her husband and has been married for eight years.

“Now I feel like I’m really fulfilling my life’s purpose.”

Tuning In to Being Turned On

In the introduction, I discussed the “magic moment” and how you might need to meet it partway by engaging in traditional methods of behavior change for a while and hoping epiphany strikes somewhere along the way. It’s also important to not let the magic moment pass you by. This is your final task for chapter 1: I want you to envision what it’s like to seek the magic moment.

Lee Holland might have missed hers. It wasn’t anything jarring like a sudden pregnancy announcement. She had done her job and could have ended the call, but in her mind, there was an opportunity to really help, to make a difference on that one day. She was somehow attuned to that opportunity, and it primed her brain for that epiphany in the parking lot.

Imagine what it’s like to be attuned.

Now that you know a life-changing epiphany can come from anywhere, it’s important to be able to recognize it. Yes, it is powerful; usually so much so that there is no denying the experience. But perhaps it needs a nudge. Perhaps it doesn’t take place in a microsecond, but over several seconds. So instead of squashing down the beginnings of overwhelming emotion because you’re too cool for that, imagine what it’s like to embrace the feeling, explore it, and let it flow.

Because in the first second or two you could lose it by ignoring the sensation or even crushing it. Society conditions us to not show too much emotion, but screw that. You must feel this experience and feel it deeply. This book is about learning how to experience something so powerful it changes you down to the bone marrow. I want you to experiment with breaking with your conditioning and seek.

Seek meaning from your sudden insight.

Too often we tune out, seeking constant entertainment to distract from what our unconscious is trying to tell us. Break from that and examine these moments when the brain goes off on a tangent and, rather than try to snap out of it, explore it. Feed that sensation some fuel.

What kind of fuel? The kind that understands that, as humans, we seek experiences that allow us to be comfortable, and by attuning yourself to a life-changing insight, you must be willing to get uncomfortable. Lee had that comfortable sit-down job her family envied, and she knew that rejecting it to chase opportunity would involve struggle.

“One does not become fully human painlessly.”

These are the words of twentieth-century psychologist Rollo May. In his 1950 book The Meaning of Anxiety, he wrote of how such negative emotions can be a good teacher, because while we can avoid the reality of certain problems, the feeling of disturbance is something we carry with us: it gnaws. Suffering, said May, is an integral part of growth. Take that pain, pull it like a sword from its scabbard, and wield it!

That being written, please don’t go off your prescribed anxiety medication. This is just about using your negative emotions to spark personal evolution. Mark Beeman explained that anxiety triggers analysis, and analysis is the opposite of insight. But it’s still part of the process. Remember: Work until you get stuck. Analyze, then engage in diversion. As we will learn later, it is during a positive mood when epiphany is most likely to strike.

This book is not all “Think positive and you can live your dreams!” ad nauseam.

There is an adage in motivational speaking and internet memes: “Dream it. Wish it. Do it.” And it is bullshit, because this is not an easy road of endless happy thoughts in which if you keep your eye on the prize and always think positive, you’ll miraculously attract what you desire.

You must rethink positive thinking.

Gabriele Oettingen is a professor of social and developmental psychology at New York University and the author of Rethinking Positive Thinking. She explained to me it’s beneficial to have these lofty goals you wish to pursue, but not to daydream about your achievement, because it creates complacency. If you fantasize about how wonderful life will be after you’ve attained your goal, it fakes a sensation of already achieving it, so you no longer strive. Instead, focus on overcoming obstacles to achieving the goal. (Details on how are in chapter 8.)

Changing who you are can be frightening. As a concept, it may fill you with dread. But it’s not some scary Jekyll and Hyde personality shift. You’re still you, just an improved version. It’s about change for the better, not worse.

When you learn to control fear of change, you open yourself to becoming more.

Priming Directives and Quantum Leaps

“Mount St. Helens blew up in a single moment.”

Sherry Pagoto told me this as an analogy of a life-changing epiphany. She’s a full professor at the University of Connecticut and a clinical psychologist specializing in behavioral counseling for obesity. “But the explosion was years in the making.”

We may not even see the pressure building, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, simmering away, ready to explode like a Diet Coke with a dozen Mentos dropped in.

Thinking about the future is but one action helping prime a brain for change, Pagoto explained. Often, for people to be able to make a massive leap of behavior change, they must have been pondering it in some way. It can involve a feeling of malaise, depression, or dissatisfaction. Conversely, such thinking can revolve around a desire to improve, to transform from good to great. Such thoughts may reside in the back of our minds for years before we’re ready to act upon them.

Contemplation can be subtle. It can build and build, but still, there is resistance to change because it is both fearful and challenging. And yet one day a time may come to pass when one cannot hold it in any longer and the emotional volcano erupts. A specific life event can bring it about. But what control do we have over these dramatic, triggering events?

That is not an easy question to answer, because life, and our approach to it, is often chaotic in nature.

Chaos theory can help us understand the dilemma better. A branch of mathematics examining complex systems sensitive to small changes in initial conditions, chaos theory has been referred to as the “butterfly effect,” a metaphor that lets us imagine the minor air disruption of a butterfly’s wings culminating in tornado formation weeks later. Slight alterations at an earlier juncture can end up yielding widely different results farther down the line in a person’s life.

I first learned of chaos theory from actor Jeff Goldblum in the 1993 film Jurassic Park. While seductively placing droplets of water on costar Laura Dern’s hand to show how minor alterations in initial conditions would affect which way the drop would roll, Goldblum explained that the theory “deals with unpredictability in complex systems.”

The human brain is a complex system. Life is a complex system.

About those “minor alterations” in initial conditions: Subtle changes in where the droplet was placed or how Laura held her hand or even the way the breeze was blowing could cause the droplet to go in a different direction. Such is the case with life as well. What if Lesley never picked up a sword? What if Chuck and his family had chosen a different bar? What if Lee hadn’t gotten that call? What if the person who decided to quote Joan Baez in the school paper picked Judas Priest lyrics instead? How would all our lives have turned out?

Such questions are difficult to answer because behavior change is not always a rational, linear process.

Sometimes it’s a quantum leap.

Act Now!

 Take a break from rationalizing change and instead examine your feelings. Get emotional and listen to what it tells you.

 Remember that song by Journey and “don’t stop believin’.”

 Let the fast, intuitive System 1 be the hero, and make the slower, rational System 2 the supporting character. Don’t let System 2 overanalyze the benefits of the story System 1 constructs. Get the confirmation, then stop.

 Forget worrying about the “cons” of change and instead imagine how powerful the “pros” will be. Endeavor to become pro focused.

 Again: Work till you get stuck, then divert and let the unconscious do its thing.

 Accept that this is about change both in identity and values, rather than a change in behavior. The altered identity-value construct makes new behavior adoption automatic. Lose the fear of becoming a new person, because this is a critical component.

 Aim high, but realistically so. Choose goals that have a high value to you but are deemed achievable via concerted effort.

 Embrace self-compassion. Don’t hate yourself or what you see in the mirror. Realize positivity is the path.

 Don’t daydream overmuch. Keep your fantasizing of achievement to a minimum so as not to sap energy. Rather, consider the primary obstacle to success and how to overcome it.

2

EMBRACING CHAOS: QUANTUM VS. LINEAR BEHAVIOR CHANGE IN THE ROLE OF EPIPHANY

A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience.

—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.

My grandmother was an evil and bugshit bonkers hell-beast of a woman who hated everyone and everything. A while back, we were having a family get-together, and my sister asked which kid had possession of grandma’s engagement ring.

“Isn’t that one of her Horcruxes?” my son said.

The joke slayed; 10 points to Gryffindor.

Speaking of crazy grandmothers and things that slay, there was blood everywhere, and I was screaming. The blood was pouring out of my left knee. Childhood trauma provides vivid recollection despite more than four decades having past.

We were visiting my grandmother in Victoria. A friend named Brent was chasing me through the house in a game of tag, and the sliding glass door that led to the back deck was sparkling clean.

In other words, I thought it was open. I was only five.

Fortunately, I did not go through the glass. I hit it with my knee and it shattered, then I fell backward, away from the shards. Blood poured forth from my knee as screams ripped from my throat in equal measure. This, followed by Uncle Jim driving me to the hospital through the rolling coastal hills at a speed that punished the suspension of the pre-1970s-model four-door car while my mother had a minor meltdown in the back seat as she attempted to hold my knee together with six squares of toilet paper.

I still hadn’t stopped screaming. I remember the screaming, not the pain.

Thirty stitches plus an annoyed doctor and nurse later, we went back to Grandma’s house, and she proceeded to chew me out about her shattered door.

That was my first inkling she wasn’t such a nice person.

I achieved a fuller realization she was “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” a few years after destroying her window. My parents had split, and we had no choice but to live with her for six painful months. I was getting an apple and she told me to give her half. I got a knife and cut, and being a young lad, it was a haphazard job. I was left with one piece substantially larger than the other.

It seemed wise to give my grandmother the larger half, so I did. Then she proceeded to berate me for being a “greedy little bugger.” She told me I should have given her the bigger half. I was looking at my half, which was about one-third of an apple, then looked at her two-thirds of an apple and said to myself You really are a nutbag.

I won’t repeat any of the racist slurs she often spewed.

For three decades, I watched my grandmother torment my mother. My mother told me horror stories about her childhood, and I believe them. Mom had one of the shittiest, most abusive childhoods you can imagine. So, yes, she’s a little neurotic as an adult.

But she is not at all abusive, quite the opposite.

I have never wanted for love. Mom showered my sister and me with love to the point it was almost annoying. “Yeah, I get it, Mom. You love me, but now you’re embarrassing me.” I always knew from my earliest days that, no matter what, Mom had my back.

And yet, when she became pregnant for the first time with my older sister, there was panic. My mom dreaded she would be like her own mother and perpetuate a cycle of abuse. She spoke of this to her doctor, who gave her some simple yet poignant advice: “The suffering you’ve endured can be undone by loving your children with all your heart. Think of what your own mother would have done, and do the opposite.”

The advice sounded good but did not resonate. The fear remained.

Later, at home, she felt my sister kick. My mother told me of feeling the growing child inside her. She believed the kick was a message saying, I am here, and I need you. Even though my sister was not yet born, my mother realized in that instant she loved her in a way she had never loved another person before.

Her heart soared.

In a moment, she knew she would never be like her own mother. Down to her core, she was certain she would be the most loving and caring mom she could be. And she has been.

I’m not crying. You’re crying. Shut up.

Such a sensation, in which you achieve total clarity of purpose in an instant, qualifies for the word “epiphany.”

No matter which way epiphany manifests, you must listen. It’s the path to a better life.

Speaking of a better life, my mom didn’t let her upbringing hold her back. She earned her corner office in a male-dominated industry, becoming a business juggernaut celebrated in the community. What’s more, she took a near-impossible high road with her own mother, continuing to look after her rather than write her off. She even forked out for a nice nursing home when the old bat lost the last of her marbles.

The lesson is this: The circumstances of the first part of your life don’t have to define the second part. No matter what transpired yesterday or the days preceding it, this does not determine what happens on neither this day nor the days yet to come.

No one makes it through life without scars. Some are visible, like the one on my knee; others reside below the surface. Sometimes change happens fast via epiphany. Sometimes it takes years and baby steps. Change is inevitable, but you’re the one who influences the direction such change will take.

If you’re tired of the path you’re on, you can switch to a new one. They’re your feet, and you have the freedom to place them where you choose. A quantum leap of inspiration to change your path does not mean you lack liberty. Just because your new way forward has become irresistible does not mean you have sacrificed self-determination. Rather, your heart and mind being united in what feels right is what gives epiphany its power to push you.

When you feel such power, it means you are about to fulfill your destiny.

Off the Quantum Deep End

The word “quantum” is being increasingly used in health circles to the point that it is almost considered to be pseudoscience.

What I am about to write is not pseudoscience. It’s Einsteinian science. And other kinds of real science. Quantum has been a real science thing for a long time and it’s still a real science thing.

Ironically, I chose a science-fiction author to explain it to me.

Digital Decision-Making

The first time I met Rob Sawyer, I was worried he was about to die. Being we were not yet friends and that I am sometimes selfish, my initial concern was how this affected me.

Rob is a Hugo Award–winning science-fiction author. Early in 2005, I registered for a weeklong science-fiction writer’s workshop at the Banff Center in the Rocky Mountains, to be led by Rob and taking place in September of that year. I’d read Rob’s work and seen his photo on book jackets, and when I met him at a book signing four months prior to the workshop, he looked nothing like I expected.

He’d lost a lot of weight. So much so I was concerned he had a terminal disease. My baser self worried that if he died, there would be no workshop.

But Rob was happy and energized, and the workshop was a great experience that led to us becoming friends. The first book of his I read was titled Factoring Humanity. I recall the main character created a “quantum computer” that could process infinite calculations per second because it operated in multiple dimensions, or parallel universes, or something.

Now you know why I wasn’t cut out to be a science-fiction author.

In addition to being a best-selling author (one of his novels, Flash-Forward, became a TV series on ABC), Rob is a sought-after speaker and futurist because of his ability to communicate complex scientific phenomena in lay terms. At the time of our conversation on the nature of quantum leaps, Rob was putting the finishing touches on his twenty-third novel, serendipitously titled Quantum Night. The fact that Rob had his own epiphany, which led to dropping a third of his body weight, a loss he has sustained for over a decade, makes his insight even more relevant. But before discussing his personal story, we spoke of the true, scientific meaning of the word “quantum.”

“Most things in life go along in an analog wave; they go up and they go down and they change gradually and continuously,” Sawyer said. He explained, when it comes to losing weight, the motivation for most is like that analog wave: sometimes it peaks, such as when the high school reunion is coming up, and other times it bottoms out, and the only desire is to braid one’s ass into the couch and shove Doritos down one’s neck.

With quantum cognition, however, there is no wave. “Quantum is not analog,” Sawyer said. “It’s not wavelike. It’s digital. It’s either on or off. It’s either this or that.”

This or that … these are the same words I heard from Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen, who we’ll hear more from later, when he spoke to me of battling his addiction. After a struggle with alcohol, Collen suddenly quit drinking at the age of twenty-nine. “It was very black or white,” Phil said of quitting. “I knew I had to go this way or that way.” (Note: It can be dangerous and even deadly to suddenly quit substances such as alcohol as well as benzodiazepines, more commonly known under names such as Valium, Xanax, and Ativan. Consult a physician.)

To reveal the science of the quantum leap, Sawyer went down to the atomic level. “We talk about the quantum leap of an electron, going from a lower energy state to a higher state.” Sawyer explained that this doesn’t mean an electron travels to that higher state the way a mountaineer ascends Everest. It’s not step-by-step. It means the electron has gone instantaneously from the base of the mountain to the peak, bypassing all the intermediate steps.

Quantum leaps can also take place with human motivation. The base of the mountain represents having no desire to work toward a change of behavior, and the peak indicates a strong and ongoing drive to do all the things being a new person entails.

The traditional models of behavior change, as already discussed, involve climbing the mountain one step at a time. But a quantum leap takes a person’s motivation right to the top. You are facing a mountain. You stand at the bottom. Peak motivation—your ultimate ability to do the work with inspired vigor—resides at the top. You can climb to that peak one step at a time (where there is risk of slipping and sliding back to the bottom anywhere along the route, but especially at the beginning), or you can step inside a Star Trek–style transporter device and materialize at the summit.