Satisfy the Beast - Revisited

We need to recognize ourselves as the human animals we are, understanding that our meat suit houses all our psychological components and significantly impacts what we consider "self." The way stress shapes our bodies and behaviors can explain everything from lacking motivation to experiencing unexplained pain.

• Our biology is the most incredible machine ever created, far superior to any human invention
• Modern society conditions us to ignore physical discomfort through top-down regulation from the prefrontal cortex
• Chronic stress creates hidden tension in our bodies that manifests as pain, emotional problems, and focus issues
• Our bodies are tensegrity structures that need varied, constant movement to maintain health
• Emotions begin as physiological sensations before cognitive awareness
• The lack of species-expected stimuli in modern environments causes our biological systems to short-circuit
• Walking provides both physical movement and creates visual signals that help regulate stress responses
• ADHD often results from being conditioned at home due to stress rather than at school
• Like any animal, humans need touch, play, food, water, sleep, and social connection
• Satisfying these basic animal needs can resolve seemingly complex psychological problems

Check out my upcoming ADHD management course and audiobook release at RethinkingBroken.com. Thank you for listening, and if you want to support the show, buy me a coffee or wait to purchase a copy of the audiobook.

Chapters

• 0:34 Welcome to Satisfy the Beast
• 4:35 The Human Animal and Stress Recognition
• 12:53 Tensegrity: Why Movement Matters
• 20:27 The Brain as a Prediction Machine
• 27:13 Hidden Tension and Emotional Storage
• 31:22 Course Announcements and Upcoming Projects

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:34

Thank you, hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly Podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I am your host, al Medicine, and today we're going to be revisiting an old podcast that I did. It was actually the second podcast I ever put out, and I recently rewrote the article that I released out with it, because I used to do that. I used to release articles and podcasts while I was writing a book, because I'm insane. But I have gotten lots of good feedback recently about this specific episode. It seems applicable right now. Maybe it's because the world's gone to shit, but the world's kind of been shit. So here we go.

Speaker 1: 1:17

This episode is called Satisfy the Beast. What does that mean? Why satisfy the beast? What the hell are you talking about, al? Well, I'm talking about the human animal that you live inside of. I'm talking about the meat suit you walk around in. I'm talking about your concept of self, not like, do I like me or do I think I'm a stupid fat piece of shit? But like what do you think of as yourself? Like what is included? But like what do you think of as yourself? Like what is included?

Speaker 1: 1:45

Usually, we include things like our thoughts, our emotions, our goals, even our personality, but we don't think of the meat suit that we live in and all of those things are housed in the meat suit. So that's kind of silly. It's kind of silly to not think about the meat suit and that meat suit is the animal I'm talking about. The meat suit is the human animal. We all, our self-concept, are these smaller pieces, these psychological, psychosocial, emotional pieces of us, and we forget the bio part. Scientists remember the bio. There's a whole thing of biopsychosocial studies and they're kind of awesome. Gabor Mate, you're probably familiar, is a big proponent of that. He's kind of one of the poster boys of biopsychosocial psychology and influence. But we, as like regular old layman folks, often don't remember that our meat suit has a massive impact on all of the things that we think of as ourself. We think of our motivation. We can't get motivated. Why can't I get motivated? I'm such a lazy piece of shit.

Speaker 1: 2:54

Maybe it's because you're stressed out. Maybe it's because you're stressed out of your goddang mind. Maybe that's why you can't focus. Maybe you're stressed out and you don't know it. Maybe that's why you can't focus. Maybe you're stressed out and you don't know it. Maybe you don't know that you're stressed out. Do you have chilled parents? Because if you do, then you're probably chill and you're probably not listening to this podcast. But if your parents are crazy, like mine were crazy, and not just like abusive crazy or anything like that, but like the way that most people are kind of crazy, like my family, is definitely ADHD kind of stuff, but mostly, I think, just from chronic stress. And this is my whole thing with the book Chronic Stress Adaptation blah, blah, blah. You've probably heard it from me a million times. If you haven't go check that stuff out, chronic Stress Adaptation is what I think basically everything is. And if you don't recognize that you're stressed and maybe that's why you don't have motivation or that's why you feel like you can't create or blah, blah, blah, you need to pay attention to the beast you got, to pay attention to the meat suit that you're living in.

Speaker 1: 4:12

The reason that we often don't recognize that we're stressed is because our job as good little worker bees and through the conditioning of school and working, we have really impressive top-down regulation. What I mean by that is prefrontal cortex, that's the part of your brain that sits above and behind your eyeballs. It's the last part of the brain to develop. It's the newest part of the brain in general, in like evolutionary terms, and that part of the brain tells you no. That part of the brain says nope, that's this is not the right time, don't do that. That's what it's it's supposed to do. It's the executive function bit, and in our society we highly, highly reward a lot of prefrontal cortex activation because we want people to be able to stay focused on a thing for eight hours a day, so they will work for us extremely efficiently. We can take all of their value and give them a tiny bit of surplus in the form of wages.

Speaker 1: 5:22

And that conditioning tells us we may be stressed, we may be uncomfortable, even down to sitting in chairs. Thank you, arnie, for pointing this out to me. Even just the thing of like sitting in chairs and becoming physically uncomfortable and not being able to do anything about it, like just that in school, is literally exactly what a person would need to condition themselves to not notice how uncomfortable they are. And it really is uncomfort or discomfort because we don't have a lot of terrible, terrible crap in the world anymore that we live with. That's like a terrible physical reality. We don't have as many of those anymore.

Speaker 1: 6:16

A lot of the instincts that our body was built for like with the species, expected stimuli and crap, isn't really around anymore. So we don't have to, we don't get to use those parts of us. And if we don't get to use anything in biology, we lose it. Everything in biology is use it or lose it. So, since we can't actually lose stress, what happens is we lose our concept of the stress that we're going through from our cognitive processes. We suppress it for a long time through school and we suppress it so well that it becomes repression. We repress the instinct to stand up, the instinct to stretch, the instinct to move, the instinct to shake, the instinct to yell out, the instinct to stretch, the instinct to move, the instinct to shake, the instinct to yell out, the instinct to go. This is fucking stupid. Why am I in this class? You don't know anything.

Speaker 1: 7:10

All of those no's come from the prefrontal cortex and we like that top-down regulation in our normal, like neurotypical world. But for those of us who are less neurotypical, but for those of us who are less neurotypical, it gets really hard to control the beast sometimes and all of us struggle from moment to moment, from time to time, with things that seem kind of unexplainable. Whether it's not being able to focus, whether it's not being able to create, whether it's a weird pain somewhere in our chest or a weird pain somewhere in the back of our leg or in our hip. We have all these weird, unexplained things that happen to us. I know I'm usually the guy that people call to say, hey, I have this weird pain and I don't know where it came from, and I help them figure that out.

Speaker 1: 8:03

We have lots and lots of these experiences where we're like what is going on, and one of the biggest ways that I help people find themselves or find for themselves what the issue is, is to really think of themselves as an animal, think of themselves as a beast, think of themselves as the human animal and not just who. You think of yourself as, not just me, as owl medicine podcast host. Author won't shut her up. Those things cool, but my biology way cooler, and I say that because every machine in the world, every machine ever made, was made by this one. You're impressed by ai, who invented ai. Humans. You're impressed by the internet, who invented the internet. Humans, you're like. You really like trains. Do you like trains? Do you like trains? Guess who built trains? Humans. Humans built trains. We built trains because our brain, our biology, is the most incredible machine that has ever been created, like light years beyond.

Speaker 1: 9:20

Nothing comes close to what the human body and animal can do. It is incredibly adaptable. It's a hallmark of our species. Adaptation and empathy are two massive hallmarks of our species, and that brings me to the point of thinking about social relations as well. When you're thinking about your body as an animal, if there is weird pain somewhere in your body, maybe instead of stretching that area, you ought to work that area, because we're hairless monkeys and we were made to be moving basically constantly. And we don't, and we need to move constantly because we are a tensegrity.

Speaker 1: 10:02

And I don't know if you know what a tensegrity is, but a tensegrity is a description for a type of machine or a type of structure. And these types of structures that can be called tensegrities are structures with hard objects in the middle and tension, softer, pulley objects on the outside. And, like I'm trying to, it's hard, like I know it's really easy to show you what a tensegrity is. But we are a tensegrity and you can think about that as our muscles and our tendons, our sinew, our ligaments, all especially our tendons, though tendons and muscles, because that's what keeps the majority of the tension in our body, of the tension in our body. If we die, we fall over because the tension is completely released and we fall into a stack of bones and flesh. The tensegrity aspect of this is, if those bones on the inside are what gave us shape and the tension on the outside is what maintains that shape and the tension on the outside is what maintains that shape and maintains the health of the unit, then the constant motion in every single possible like way, like variety of ways, is what's going to maintain health for us. So variety in movement is a major thing that people ought to be thinking about.

Speaker 1: 11:28

If you can't figure out what's going on and there's some kind of pain that you have, whether it's in your hands or your fingertips or your back or your toes, think about what you can do that's going to actually work that area and work the opposite area, but especially working that exact area, don't passively move through it as in like doing your little stretch, where you take your right arm and you put it across your chest and you use your left arm at your elbow to pull and you get to loosen your right shoulder. You can do that, but then use the right shoulder muscles, use those deltoid muscles and use your left arm to give yourself some resistance and actually work through that, because we are a human animal. The meat suit that you reside in has species-expected stimuli. It evolved over millennia to operate beautifully in the natural world that we no longer live in, which is why it winds up short-circuiting so often. Nowadays. Our natural world may be gone for the most part, except we're out here in beautiful Los Angeles where I live. But our biological expectations for the same types of movements, same types of relationships, same types of dynamics, same types of foods, same levels of stress, same types of situations All of those things are what the body expects, and if it doesn't get those things, it starts to short-circuit.

Speaker 1: 13:10

Because the brain is a prediction machine. That is what it does more than anything else. It is constantly predicting you go to pick up your shoe. Your brain predicts which muscles before you move. It predicts which muscles are going to need to be utilized in order to pick that up, and that's the motor copy. Then it sends an efference copy, which is a sensory copy for the brain to tell the body. What to expect about like? Is it going to be hot? Is it going to be cold? What's the texture going to be like? How much weight is in it? All of that information is predicted before any motion ever happens. Our brain is a prediction machine and if we are expecting, especially over the course of millennia, to have constant movement, low-grade movement, then that's what we expect and if we don't have it, the body isn't going to function well. And this is my point.

Speaker 1: 14:08

The satisfy the beast is a hack. This satisfy the beast concept is basically just a shorthand hack to get you to be able to figure out a way to take whatever is ailing you and maybe find a way for you to resolve it yourself in a fun way, because it's actually really fun to be an animal. It's really fun to to shake your body. It's really fun to do big stretches and big yawns. It's really enjoyable to actually move your body in an enjoyable way. You don't have to shove yourself into a gym and do the things that you hate. In fact, one of my favorite rat studies was on mice, where they had mice on wheels, where the wheels were attached to each other and the mice were in these individual cages and mouse A ran whenever he wanted to and mouse B was stuck on the wheel and had to run whenever mouse A ran. And so you'd think that, since they both got the same amount of exercise, that they would both get the health benefits. But no, mouse B, his health went down, while Mouse A's health went up, even though they did the same amount of exercise. Because Mouse B hated it, because it wasn't a choice, it was non-consensual exercise.

Speaker 1: 15:24

So if you're making yourself miserable, trying to make yourself less miserable, guess what? You're dumb. It's not going to work. Not to call you dumb, but that's dumb, it's not going to work. You have to actually enjoy it. You have to actually enjoy it, and that's the thing.

Speaker 1: 15:39

Go, look at being a dog. Think about being a dog, going, laying in the sun and doing stuff that's like enjoyable and cute and simple, and that's the way that we can satisfy the beast. You can't think, you can't focus. Well, think about what you ought to do as an animal. If you were an animal, what would you be doing right now? I mean, you probably just had the instinct to go. I'd say fuck it and go lay down or go outside. Do that. I know you can't fuck off your job right now, but like you can go fuck off 10 minutes and go lay in the sun. You're going to be sitting there scrolling Instead of pulling your phone out and scrolling for 20 minutes. Go lay outside and do nothing for 20 minutes. Yeah, you'll have some weirdness psychologically from the lack of dopamine input, from being addicted to your phone, but you will satisfy the beast and, although it may not be the most perfectly enjoyable 20 minutes because of that dopamine addiction, it will benefit the beast. It will benefit the beast. So put your damn phone down and go outside. Outside is a good place for an animal. See what I mean by like. These are very like large kind of abstract concepts that are applicable to so many things, like to every damn thing.

Speaker 1: 17:01

So really think about yourself as an animal. What do animals like? Animals like to be around other animals like dogs like to be around other dogs, other dogs that they like. Right, because we've all seen dogs that don't like each other. They're always side-eyeing each other and staying a little far away and being like meh, meh, don't be one of those. Don't be one of those animals. Be a nice animal. Be one who finds other animals that are like them and can have a good old time. That's what we're looking for. We're looking for ways to think about what's going on in our lives and find a way to solve it for ourself. That's all that it is.

Speaker 1: 17:38

I'm trying to come up with analogies for you to be able to walk yourself through, a way to just think about. All right, I've got an issue, I need to maybe do something a little differently. But what? What could I do differently? Think of yourself as a human animal. Think about what your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandma would have to say. I know she's been dead a long time, like a long long time, so think about what she would have to say, and then maybe you can come up with something. She might just be like go make some jam. Like, stop worrying about it, everybody's going to be dead soon.

Speaker 1: 18:23

You know like these things help take us out of ourselves, out of our concept of self, out of this concept of like oh, poor me, woe is me, or even just oh, I'm stuck in this mood because this spot in my back hurts. Or I'm stuck in this mood because I had this weird social interaction, I made a social faux pas, and now I can't get it out of my head, and so all you're doing is ruminating on your social faux pas. And maybe what you should do instead of ruminating is run, like, maybe run, maybe, like, move your physical body. If you're feeling stressed, the most surefire way is to move your physical body. Just go on a walk. That works in multiple ways, because not only does it get movement into your body, but the actual forward motion puts your vision in this mode where you launch into horizon mode or default mode a little bit, because as things are passing your periphery, as you walk forward, things around you move behind you, correct, and as things move behind you, that motion of things moving past you is exactly the same as if you were running away from a threat. So there is like this small kind of feedback loop here where there is an association of escaping with this forward motion. So walking not only moves the physical body and can get some of this stuck tension out. It also can cool down the amygdala and say, okay, threat response center, we are moving away from whatever is freaking you out right now. Back to some hidden tension though this concept of being in school preparing us for work, sitting down for hours and hours a day.

Speaker 1: 20:26

Basically, for me, I look at it as you were either conditioned at school or you were conditioned at home. Whichever one was more stressful or more enjoyable is what conditioned you most. So if your home was a terrifying place to be like mine was then you are conditioned at home. The way that you had to be at home as a child is the way that you're going to be, and we call that ADHD, attention deficit hyper disorder, and that's fine. I'm working on an ADHD management course right now. I just finished building out like shaping out all the modules last night, and this is a big thing for me, because we're ADHDers are conditioned at home because of the stress at home.

Speaker 1: 21:24

There is other ways for you to be conditioned. If the worst part or the best part of your day like if you're one of those super nerds and you really enjoyed it then school. If your best part of your day or the worst part of your day was school, school is where you're going to be conditioned most heavily and that is going to create a neurotypical person, because school is designed to give you a safe environment in which you can learn and Like, a safe environment in which you are challenged enough to learn, because that is one of the things that we know about learning in the human animal. You have to have a felt sense of safety and you have to be being pushed outside of your comfort zone just a little bit, because everything that you learn has to connect to what you already learned, so we can only understand a small deviation from what we currently understand. That's just a basic thing of biology, especially for humans. That's just a basic thing of biology, especially for humans.

Speaker 1: 22:18

So if you like school or if school is the most stressful part of your life, then you're going to be neurotypical. You're going to have a lot of this top-down regulation and that's really cool. Also wind up having issues with this because they do a really, really, really good job of suppressing the beast. But what's cool is they do such a good job of suppressing the beast early on. Their prefrontal cortex actually does the communication to the rest of the body and says, oh, this is unnecessary, you don't need to do this, and it shuts down the stress responses in the body. It goes no, we don't actually need to launch this, this hardcore, because it was conditioned in a place that was safe. So you have more of this top-down regulation because you have more of this impulse control, and this leads to so many other really cool things that I won't get into about creativity, about crisis management and these things that are strengthnesses for ADHDers.

Speaker 1: 23:29

But the hidden pains, every single emotion that we have. When you have the emotion, it first and foremost is a physiological experience. It is a physiological sensation, it is a sensation in your body that you can feel. That is how all emotions start. And when you feel that, you feel it because there has been a change in your body. What is that change? Is it neurochemical? Sure, but what is the end of that cascade, or the end of that chain of the neurochemical cascade? It creates a change in the rest of your physiology, most important to us. It creates a change in your resting tension, important to us. It creates a change in your resting tension. That resting tension.

Speaker 1: 24:20

If we are habitual with any of our emotions, it shows up as resting tension in certain parts of our body. This is why acupuncture can be really great and a single needle can go in, hit the belly of a muscle that you have been holding on to with this resting tension for years, that you didn't know you were holding on to. And every time you stretch it it doesn't actually loosen because you're not actually contracting it, you're just passively moving through like a little bit of the range of motion of that and you're not actually releasing the stress. And when you get that muscle to relax, those emotions go away and you're like, oh, I feel lighter. I didn't even know I was feeling heavy. This is how these subconscious tensions and these stresses show up in our body as these kind of vague pains, especially if your pain comes and goes, if it comes and goes with stress, if it moves around. There is lots of like cool stuff about neuroplastic pain and the way the body protects itself through all of this prediction stuff that I've been talking about, but that's a whole nother episode on neuroplastic pains.

Speaker 1: 25:30

I wanted to talk to you today about satisfying the beast. You really can think of yourself as a human animal and whatever issue you're going through whether it's a lack of creativity or a lack of like ability to stick-to-itiveness and get a thing done, or whether it's a pain, or whether it's focus or whether it's a relational problem Think about yourself as an animal. Think about yourself as a dog or whatever your favorite animal is, and try to give yourself those things that you would give that animal, first and foremost, pets and food and water and sleep right. We need touch. We need social connection, social connection that feels good. We want loves, like our puppies want love. Whether you want to admit it or not, you do so shut up. You want loves like the rest of us do. We want loves and hugs and kisses and butt touches. And then we want more food and we want water and we want to play. Think about those things when something is off. When did you sleep well? When did you last play? When did you last laugh? When did you last have a really big stretch that you only did because it felt good? When did you do these things that really show how much of an animal we are? So that's my episode for today. I hope that you enjoyed it. This is Satisfy the Beast take two. I hope that you are enjoying the podcast.

Speaker 1: 27:12

I said earlier that I was working on this ADHD management course. I'm building out a course on RethinkingBrokencom. I'm really excited about it. This upcoming week, I will finally be releasing the audiobook. Yay, I am going to be finally releasing the audiobook. It will not be for sale on Amazon. Like I said, it will be for sale on RethinkingBrokencom and on OwlCrystallisMedicinecom. Really, if you go to OwlCrystallisMedicinecom there'll be a page that picks it up and kicks you over to Rethinking Broken, but you won't have to click on anything other than buy and it'll just move you to the appropriate place. I'm really excited because it's been ages.

Speaker 1: 28:03

I sent the guy the stuff. He sent me everything back. I apparently forgot to send him two chapters my editor guy. I went through and edited everything myself, but then it needed to be like remastered and so I paid a bunch of monies to go get it remastered. I'm really, really hoping that this is the format that people will be able to eat it up in.

Speaker 1: 28:23

I know people have read the book and they appreciate the book. I've heard some fun and interesting feedback, like maybe it's a little too big. I got it. I made it a seven by 10, which is kind of a weird awkward size, but it's the executive size and a lot of law books and stuff are that way and it felt good to me. But I have been asked to maybe change the size to a more standard novel, which that makes sense, and so what I might be doing. I've already spoken to my formatter to help me redo the cover and the formatting on the inside, because obviously it'll make the book smaller in dimensions. It makes it bigger in page number, so I want to release that. That way, if you want to have the novel-sized book with you to take notes or whatever in the book as you listen, you can totally do that. I'm really excited about releasing the audiobook. Stay tuned for that. And then about a month or so after that, I will be releasing the thing that I am most, most, most excited about now, because I get excited about new things ADHD, go figure. Now, because I get excited about new things ADHD, go figure, I get excited about new stuff. And my newest thing is the ADHD management course.

Speaker 1: 29:41

I have put my heart and soul into this. I've decided to just really go full Monty on it and put everything that I think and believe about ADHD in it and just be like this is my entire philosophy on this. It is a stress response. Adhd is chronic stress adaptation and I lay out the science behind it. I go into about five different ways that, or five ways that the ADHD brain is different from the neurotypical brain and not just like oh, they do like their brains like this and our brains like that. But their brains are like this. That gives them this strength and our brains aren't designed that way because chronic stress designed it to be this way, which makes us really good at this, but then also makes it easy for us to fall into this gap. Good at this, but then also makes it easy for us to fall into this gap. So basically we're going through the neurobiology of how chronic stress affects the brain, how that conditions the brain into behaving in ways that we call ADHD, because ADHD is actually just a DSM diagnosis to say, do you fit well in school and work? Because every question in the DSM is about that. For ADHD, it's all were you properly conditioned in a school instead of at home? That's the entire thing. So I'm really excited about it.

Speaker 1: 31:11

That's going to be coming out after the audio book. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sticking with me. Leave a comment If you want to support the show, buy me a coffee or just wait and buy a copy of the audiobook. Thank you so much for spending your time with me. I hope you have a marvelous freaking day, stay curious and stay uncomfortable. Thank you, you Bye.