Funding the Adventurous Life
David Champion retired early at 53. In his own words, the first five years were “magnificent,” with endless opportunities for climbing and adventure. However, he knows the next five won’t come so easily.
Continue reading “David Champion: The Psychological Challenge Of Early Retirement”
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.
Continue reading “Cory Richards: The Color of Everything”
Escaping the grind is wonderful and often needed. But life is long and money scarcity motivates us to do hard things that make life rewarding.
Continue reading “Life Without Money Scarcity Might Just Make You Lazy”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chronic pain—pain lasting at or beyond three months—affected over 20% of U.S. adults, or 51.6 million people, in 2021. Symptoms were severe enough to substantially restrict daily activity for 6.9% of Americans that same year. And with chronic pain comes soaring medical costs, pharmaceutical over-reliance, and addiction.
Mounting multidisciplinary research suggests that most chronic pain is not of structural origin. In other words, most chronic pain can not be directly attributed to injury or physical abnormality. Neuroplastic pain results from the brain misinterpreting signals from the body as if they were dangerous. We habituate to pain, creating behaviors that either avoid pain or alleviate symptoms.
Encouragingly, those undergoing a psychological treatment known as Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) are showing vast improvements in pain management without pharmaceutical or other medical interventions. One major study found that two-thirds of chronic back pain patients were pain-free or nearly pain-free after four weeks of PRT interventions. In addition, patients showed visible changes in the prefrontal brain regions associated with pain after therapy. While psychological treatments are effective in managing chronic pain, this does not imply that the pain is imaginary.
My guest today, Miriam Gauci Bongiovanni, suffered needlessly until she discovered the concept of neuroplastic pain. Today, now pain-free, she works from her home in Malta as a Certified MindBody Practitioner and Trauma-Informed Coach. But beyond her skills as a wonderful teacher and educator on chronic pain, I found her story of embracing a nontraditional career fascinating. Today we dive in on everything from how our personalities and fears inform our pain cycles to living a good life.
Continue reading “An Emerging Revolution in the Treatment of Chronic Pain”
If you haven’t noticed, the concept of achievement and even competitiveness has weighed heavily on my mind as of late. A gift of the nontraditional life is the opportunity to step back and see the world around us with a degree of unusual clarity, far from the treadmill. For years I valued athletic and professional progress in ways that weren’t making my life better, but I thought they were. I searched for and implemented solutions to the wrong problems. Meanwhile, what truly mattered—mainly my relationships—withered on the vine. The journey toward rectifying these tendencies continues today.
My guest today, Lincoln Stoller, is a former mountaineer who now specializes in psycho-, hypno-, and neurofeedback therapy, in tandem with numerous other counseling and coaching services. Lincoln holds a PhD in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from UT Austin, including a post-doc assignment at UC Berkley. Lincoln eventually moved from quantum physics to create a management and automation software platform for businesses, learned to build Norwegian log homes, traveled and lived abroad in far-flung foreign lands, and is even a certified pilot. To say Lincoln lives well outside of the bounds of normalcy is probably a half-truth at best. As he says in the interview, we should “just keep doing out-of-the-box stuff. And if people aren’t calling you a little crazy or a little nutty, then you probably aren’t exploring enough of the boundaries.”
Today’s conversation revolves around the high-risk potential of hard-charging performers and achievers, whether they exist in sports, business, or other areas of life. While these individuals hold our collective attention and admiration, Lincoln outlines how their psychological roots run shallow. They often struggle to stay satisfied with themselves or those around them. Lincoln might even say he holds an anti-hard-man philosophy. I think you’ll see why.
Continue reading “A Therapist on Satisfaction in Sport, Life, and Love”
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.
Continue reading “All Work and No Play Makes You…Normal”
For four years I’ve watched something slowly bloom. In my old life, the “before time” you might call it, I moved from task to task. If I wasn’t working, I unknowingly made a practice of turning recreational or hobbyist pursuits into something that, from an outsider’s perspective, looked an awful lot like work. Goals and accolades were everything, and the more quantifiable, the better. But the farther I’ve separated myself from this life in space and time, the more clarity I’ve gained.
Grasping for metaphors, I was tempted to explain this budding awareness as a slowly growing flower. But for perhaps all the wrong reasons, I hesitated to describe my growth and awareness as floral, preferring to drop the metaphor. But I can’t quite shake it, because I have watched something slowly grow. It’s not me that has bloomed–again, all the wrong imagery–but it is the world I could not see then. I could not see the flawed logic buried in the cold and wet earth because I identified with it. It was my life, so I could not reject what protected me. And four years later I’ve watched something slowly take root.
Continue reading “Four Years of Financial Independence: The Slow Growth”
We’re back to the digital mailbag to answer your questions!
For this week:
When I left my corporate career in early 2020, I didn’t fully understand the ways that I would, in later years, slowly become decoupled and desynchronized from a society that values hustle, status, and self-worth generated to a large degree around our career titles. You’ll read the same thing repeatedly on the internet: Ignore the haters, do your thing.
But when I actually sit down and talk with those who are living a similar nontraditional lifestyle, regardless of their financial position, I find that the tidy internet talking points leave many of us dissatisfied. After all, humans are one of the most social species on the planet. We shouldn’t be surprised by the difficulty in overriding instinct, to go against the grain of what the herd values most. My thinking has evolved dramatically on this subject in recent years, so let’s dig in.
Continue reading “Facing the Rest of the World with a Nontraditional Lifestyle”
By popular demand, I’ve decided to extend a travel series centered around the topic of building community or maintaining our need for social interactions when away from home. Community building is especially complicated when abroad, where cultures and languages vary considerably from our own. My guests today, veteran travelers with considerable expat experiences, are perfectly suited to discuss this topic.
Meghan Walker, a previous guest who writes at awaytofi.com, spent many of her formative years living abroad in Kenya and New Zealand. Her husband, Callan Cooper, is an expat living in the United States from New Zealand, where they met. Meghan and Callan joined me in my home in Colorado for a rare in-person interview, where we discussed in detail the beauty and challenges of international extended travel, careers, evolving travel philosophies, and financial tactics that can have you living a similar life much sooner than you think.
Continue reading ““The Rewards of Being in One Place for a While” (Meghan Walker and Callan Cooper)”