mental health Archives - CLIPPING CHAINS

July 1, 2024June 30, 2024

Cory Richards: The Color of Everything

Cory Richards shocked the world when he abruptly ended his climbing career at the foot of Dhaulagiri in 2021. He is ready to tell his story.

May 6, 2024May 4, 2024

What Two Writers Taught Me About How to Think

In 1949, a college junior named Barbara Beattie wrote a letter for a school journalism assignment. We can only speculate on Beattie’s youthful expectations: Was she so naive to expect a response, or were these different times? She’d written playwright Arthur Miller at a time when the Broadway run of his most famous work, The Death of a Salesman, was in full swing. He had every reason to ignore a college student’s inquiries into the “formal genesis” of his now-legendary work. What Beattie received–a sprawling and deeply thoughtful essay on man’s common and timeless tragedies–must have impacted her greatly. After all, she’s kept it for seventy-five years. Beattie’s daughter found the letter when helping her mother, now 94, move out of her home.

March 18, 2024March 15, 2024

All Work and No Play Makes You…Normal

The concept of play conjures the image of my three-year-old (and blonder) self, plastic shovel in hand, amorphous stains down the front of my pants. And certainly slobber. Lots of slobber. That three-year-old was certainly not concerned with social hierarchy or status, lacking a whiff of ambition to put the best version of himself forward. He played with a shovel in the sand because something needed to be dug and that was all that mattered.

As we age (and start to exhibit bladder control) the nature of play changes but is not altogether lost, at least not at first. Instead of digging in the sand, we might play a game of Twister, something I played as late as my college years. I challenge you to toss out that board on the floor—putting your head through someone else’s legs—and try and stay serious and stoic. It’s impossible. You’ll be giggling like a child. And that’s the point. We need more play.

November 6, 2023November 5, 2023

Uncertainty Is Forever (And That’s Good News)

Uncertainty is a fact of life, yet we yearn for known outcomes. Every day we make decisions. Some decisions are small and inconsequential, while others are profound and life-altering. Sometimes events happen regardless of our decisions. And above it all and looming like a nervous wind is uncertainty. Uncertainty is forever.

But those who learn to sit with and embrace uncertainty are resilient and innovative. Those who try to fight uncertainty spend more money and live with less contentment.

May 8, 2023May 7, 2023

The Blue Dot Effect: Pessimism in a Beautiful World

As I’ve recently mused, financial independence won’t solve life’s problems. We will never “arrive.” We will never achieve perfection. An impactful 2018 study, nicknamed the Blue Dot Effect (a stand-in for the more lumbering “prevalence-induced concept change” title), helps us to understand the mind’s tendency toward finding problems, even where none exist. The results have broad implications for individuals and members of a progressing society.

March 6, 2023March 5, 2023

Lean Out: The Achievement Paradox with Dawn Baker

Today on episode 57 I’m pleased to welcome Dawn Baker, a board-certified anesthesiologist, wife, mother, climber, coach, and now the author of a new book about the perils of, as she puts it, an intense need to achieve. And Dawn has walked the walk. After years of hard-driving pursuit of linear improvement in both career and climbing, she suffered crushing fatigue and malaise, and ultimately faced a major health crisis during her residency. If that wasn’t enough, she was then plagued with infertility problems. The result was expensive and demoralizing rounds of in-vitro fertilization, an approach that ultimately proved successful and led to the birth of her daughter.

The need for achievement and success is so pervasive in our culture. And this interview is not just for downtown or medical center careerists. This is as much a discussion of climbing and our hobbies, which can so often derail into something quite different from our original healthy and recreational pursuits.

Today, Dawn’s life with her husband and daughter is so different. Through evaluation of her core values, married with a strong financial position, she now works “very part time,” and has moved with her family to a homestead in the high plateaus of southern Utah. But in choosing to step away, or lean out, as Dawn says, we risk our position and standing in the social hierarchy. This is much a discussion of status as it is of lifestyle.

February 20, 2023February 19, 2023

Darrow Kirkpatrick: Beyond Doubt on the Colorado Trail

Today on episode 55 I’m honored to welcome Darrow Kirkpatrick, former engineer, climber, investor, author, and the creator of the popular blog CanIRetireYet.com. Darrow began serious saving and investing in his mid-30s and retired at age 50 in 2011 from a career in software engineering.

In this wide-ranging interview, we explore why Darrow stepped away from personal finance writing after creating a popular blog, his adventures on the Colorado Trail and the inspiration for a memoir, and the journey and struggle to finding meaning and purpose at any stage in life.

October 31, 2022October 30, 2022

It’s Not All Hard Luck with Shay Skinner

In her late teens and early twenties, Shay Skinner was disowned from her family. She struggled with crushing mental illness, which ultimately culminated in a suicide attempt that left her in financial ruin. From this dismal situation, Shay filed for bankruptcy and began a long and fruitful climb toward being whole again. How can we summon the courage to take such measures of personal accountability?

May 17, 2021May 18, 2021

The Shocking Truth About Sleep

New research presents a natural solution to being smarter, stronger, slimmer, wealthier, more attractive, more likable, less anxious, depressed, and generally far healthier. Sounds dreamy, eh? Is there possibly a natural homeopathic method to improve all these arenas in life; some sort of fountain of youth? The answer is a resounding yes, and the solution is simple: We simply must improve the quantity and quality of our sleep.

But you might already know that.

So how do we actually sleep more and sleep better in a world that wants us awake?

March 22, 2021March 22, 2021

Emotional Fragility: Is This the New Normal?

Until the advent of the Scientific Revolution and the pronounced growth of technology and tools of human innovation, the vast majority of humans lived in squalid conditions of abject poverty. Picture your modern neighbor with three garages filled with late-model cars, his-and-her jet-skis, and a really impressive angle grinder. In 1437 this same middle-class citizen would be just another expendable, filth-ridden pawn serving some narcissistic warlord. He likely lived with his family in fetid conditions, in very poor health, with a narrow range of skills necessary to provide life or keep from being brutally executed in front of blood-thirsty neighbors hungry for a good-ole’-fashioned Saturday rip-about. Life was extremely difficult for the vast majority of humanity until very recently. Emotional fragility was not a useful trait.

Life, without question, sucked.

Today, developed societies have everything. We squabble over macronutrient ratios and the pros and cons of carbs while failing to appreciate that our ancestors would have dropped dead of a heart attack if they stepped into a Costco or the produce section at Whole Foods. We have vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers that vacuum and mow without us even being present! The internet provides endless information and the ability to make (in theory) well-informed choices and decisions to better our lives.

Life is unquestionably better and easier in modern times. Yet for so many of us…life still sucks. We aren’t happy, and we’re getting less happy every year.

Why are we so unhappy when life is so much easier? Are we becoming an emotionally fragile society?