When we have trouble forgetting a sad memory or even have trouble remembering an important one, we must be patient with ourselves. One thing that helps us to be patient is to reflect on a certain neurological function that I went through again this week– long-term potentiation.

I had decided to change up my breakfast diet. I like the same thing every day, but now and then I change up a bit. As a younger man, I began my day with a coffee cup full of plain Shredded Wheat. No milk. No sugar. I was driving semis then, and I could work and have breakfast whenever I was hungry. Very convenient.

In my memory, the whole grain flavor was rich with layers and layers of taste and subtlety that made my taste buds jump. So, when I decided to change from yogurt and Fiber One to plain Shredded Wheat, I became excited at the memory of how those little biscuits tasted.

What a disappointment when I bit into one after nearly twenty years. It tasted like paper. Bland, dry, nothing. Even a little unpleasant. Well, I had already bought the box, and I knew the nutrition wouldn’t kill me, so I ate the entire serving, dry as it was. Washed it down with coffee and got on with my day. Next day I poured a mug full of Shredded Wheat and crunched it down. Not bad. Still nothing wonderful, but not as tasteless as the first day.

It was on the fourth day that I experienced that return of flavor. The first crunch released an “ah-ha!” that I remembered so well. The taste was back and I enjoyed every tiny bit of it.

This is the function of long-term potentiation of neurons. My taste receptors had been potentiated twenty years ago to the deeply-layered but subtle flavor of Shredded Wheat. The intervening years had allowed the conscious recall to fade into fantasy. However, the long-term potentiation had remained physically in the synapses and the axons of my taste receptors. It took four days for the pathway to be re-routed to my conscious mind, but there it was at last.

This is why I still remember the slope-intercept form from high school algebra after thirty years. It is also why I can’t let go of the powerful memories of my first wife. It’s a sad and beautiful thing. Frankly, I don’t want to forget the good things about her. And the negative things can be allowed to fade. They never go away, either. So what?

Back in April and May of this year, I was writing about Johnny Rambo’s outburst at the end of First Blood. “Nothing is over!” he screamed. “You don’t just turn it off.” One of those updates included the good news about the tragic situation he was in. The Rambo movie series brings out the good news slowly, over a life time. The message is patience. Rambo had most of the gifts he needed to overcome his sadness: loyalty, courage, endurance.

The thing he still had to learn was patience. Be patient with yourself.

Many great warriors, generals, etc. over the millenia of human history have subscribed to the commandment, “Know your enemy.” Most scholars consider Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to be the earliest form of this doctrine. But I have found that another step must follow simply knowing your enemy– particularly if the enemy is inside you.

I am preparing updates on the various “entities” that live inside us. No, there are not other beings inside of us. Not on this site, anyway. But the human mind is so complex that our consciousness can split itself into different awarenesses that compete with and confuse one another. The most common acknowledgement of this is in Acoholics Anonymous meetings when they admit that they are “powerless to alcohol.” Alcohol is a chemical and has no power unless we give it power. Alcohol abuse is not common among other animals. Only homo sapiens.

The human mind is capable of giving volition to other “beings” within itself and even being defeated by these so-called beings. Dealing with and conquering them is the next step following Sun Tzu’s doctrine, “Know your enemy.” The next step is “Name your enemy.”

Here’s how it works. I have recently been struggling to lose weight because my shins and Achilles tendons were getting strained during my workouts. Yes, I could stand to lose fifty pounds or so, even though I work out like a fiend. The Updates from earlier this year deal with my different strategies to lose weight by calorie counting and increasing metabolism. All the methods I discussed were marginally successful until I learned the “Name your enemy” technique.

I could not lose more than a few pounds because I was constantly sneaking in calories during the day and at night. I did not want to snack, but I still did. Why? One day it dawned on me that someone else was asking to be fed. Not me. I called him “Comfort Guy.” This is the guy who has to have a snack or he will panic. This is the guy who wakes up in the middle of the night and heads for the ice cream to quell the hunger in his belly. Comfort Guy does many other things that disrupt my life. I’ll discuss them in future Updates.

Comfort Guy is my enemy. He defeats my long-term purpose in order to get his way in the moment. If I simply name him and tell him to go and sit in a corner, I can control the urge to snack at any time. I feel powerful telling him to go and sit in a corner. He is not getting fed because I am in charge.

Oh, and I lost fifteen pounds over the next month. I’m down to my weight of five years ago. And I’m still heading down. I have not been suffering or starving. I’ve felt better in the mornings because my stomach was not full all night. Most importantly, I am in charge.

As I said above, I am preparing more notes on the neuroscience behind these so-called enemies that form in our minds and defeat us. Go ahead and subscribe so that you don’t miss the information. Those of you who read these Updates know that I’m not one to flood your inbox or your blog reader with frequent postings. Just relax and learn with me as we move along on our journey.

If our neural pathways change and grow physically as we learn things and have experiences, how can it be that we ever forget anything? Very simply, the things that caused us to learn can happen in reverse order and cause us to forget or at least get “rusty” on a few things. We’ve all heard about things that can kill the neurons in our brains. Alcohol comes to mind. But stroke can kill neurons as well. And, of course, Alzheimer’s. However, the information that we learned is not always lost forever. In most cases, the storage pathway in the brain needs to be re-routed once a neuron dies. I can’t go into the complexities of the associational pre-frontal cortex here. But, yes, forgetting can happen. But not at will.

So, what is the good news? The good news is that you can still learn and go forward. That is what living with a sad memory is all about. Going forward. Surviving. Critics can say what they want about the Rambo movies, but they honestly portray the concept of survival. Survival is a struggle that can end in triumph if you don’t give up. And quitting is a certain path to failure. Survival requires surpassing endurance, courage, and loyalty.

Surviving anything requires commitment to one’s self. Survival of a lost love, a bad marriage, drug addiction, abuse all require commitment to yourself. Notice in First Blood that Rambo had no friends. They were all gone. Even his commanding officer seemed to be alien to him. In the second movie, he reached out to some prisoners who reminded him of his comrades. By the fourth movie, he had reached outside of himself and helped those altruistic missionaries who openly rejected violence. He even went home to visit his father.

Commitment to yourself sounds like crock sometimes. I have to be honest, some days I have no idea who my “self” is. That is why meditation is important. My “self” is not what I think it is. It was born and existed before I had much of a consciousness. Your “self” tells you what it is through meditation. The great mystic Thomas Merton says that the “self” is God speaking Its name inside you. Whatever. Either way, “self” knows what it is, and it ain’t what I think it is some days. But it does require commitment.

Well, it looks like I’m coming to the end of another Update, and I haven’t offered much good news yet. What’s the good news about being unable to turn memories off? The good news is that you can survive. In other words, you can learn HOW TO FEEL. The good news is on hundreds of websites all over the world. And it’s on this site, too. How2feel.com doesn’t claim to heal your problems in 30 seconds by rubbing lettuce on your feet or taking rice pills. How2feel.com does offer techniques that you can use to feel better over time by being committed to yourself and maybe even reaching out beyond yourself.

Millions of people my age have heard Johnny Rambo bellowing those words at his commanding officer who tried to tell him the Viet Nam war was over. “Nothing is over! You just don’t turn it off!” We all knew Johnny was talking about memories– his friend getting his legs blown off while getting his shoes shined and who knows what else combat veterans carry around inside. But Johnny was referring to a problem we all have if we’ve ever experienced anything. You don’t forget it, at least not by wishing to.

I’ve talked with hundreds of people who experience intense reactions to a smell, a sound, a color, even a word or phrase. Many of us have had well-meaning friends who tell us to “just let go of the past” and “you’ve got to move on.” Makes you want to go up and knock the shit out of them. But before you knock the shit out of them. Forgive them. They know not what they do.

The reason that we and Johnny Rambo can’t turn off memories is the same reason that we don’t forget the Pythagorean theorem or the color of our lover’s eyes. The reason is deeply rooted in a neurological function called Long-Term Potentiation or LTP for short. This fancy term refers to a few different ways that the neurons and synapses in our brains change as we have experiences or learn facts. A synapse is sort of like a spark plug in your brain that helps the nerve cells connect to the rest of the nervous system. Just like the spark plugs in your car, your brain needs them to function. But unlike spark plugs, your synapses become better at firing when they are stimulated repeatedly. In other words, long-term stimulation gives them more potential for firing. Hence the concept, Long-Term Potentiation.

When I say change, I mean the synapse changes physically in function and even shape. For example, a synapse can deploy more receptors to absorb more of the message that is fired across the synaptic cleft. The nerve cells can even learn to send more neurotransmitters across the cleft. And most amazingly, the fibers called dendrites that connect synapses and nerve cells can actually increase their capacity to transmit the information better. These physical changes to the neural pathway have all been observed with powerful microscopes. And these physical changes remain after the stimulation ceases for long periods.

This is great for people who spend years in Calculus I, II, III, and IV. You wouldn’t want to spend all that time in class just to forget it over the summer. Of course, we can forget things, but the general tendency of Long-Term Potentiation is that the potentiation of the neural pathways remains. And you certainly can’t put your Calc IV class behind you just by wishing to.

Most of us can’t forget the vomit scene in The Exorcist, either. Much as we may wish to. And our beloved friends who tell us to just put the past behind us are really just saying they want us to shut up. It’s okay. Take it for what it is. Leave those people behind. Not the memories.

But don’t blame yourself if you can’t forget your ex-husband drawing back his fist and plowing you in the eye. It’s not your fault if the sound of Christmas carols fill you with anxiety. There is simply too much stimulation around those neural pathways to turn off the things you learned under certain conditions.

And, of course, there is good news despite the fact that you can’t turn off the past. I will deliver the good news in the next update. For now, let’s just forgive those who have tried to tell us that the past is over. It’s never over. It’s never closed. You don’t forget the past. You learn to live with it. And you learn to live without some things, too.

(to be continued . . .)

Read “Nothing is over!” Part 2, here.

People ask me why I fight. Yes, it’s animalistic. Nobody cares if you had a good day in the ring.

Whadja do this weekend?

“Well, I went to a karate tournament. Won couple of fights. Took first in my bracket.”

(silence) That’s real nice, Fred. ( . . . if you’re twelve.)

Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Sport fighting is a safe, legal drug. I may fight only five or ten matches a year, yes, but the training is a drug, too. If you’re training for a fight you had better be visualizing. Lots of the techniques here at How To Feel are about visualization. You can use them for anything. I use them for fight training as often as for anything else. That’s why the training is almost as good as the competition. You must be in the moment as much as possible.

Well, anyway, last Saturday, my concentration slipped in the ring with some rather funny results. I’ll post the video below. Some of you may have seen this on The Fred Effect, but it’s so authentic and classical that I want to use it here, too.

I’m the guy in white. The guy in black is a friend of mine from another club. We know each other pretty well, and we always have a good time. In the first exchange, he comes over the top at me and clips me in the back of the head. I hook-punched his belly, but I thought he got the point first and stopped fighting. We both stopped for a second. Then he realized that the judge hadn’t called “Yame!” which means stop. I’m standing there like a dork, and Randall clips me in the back of the head again. Tessa said my reaction looked like I was mad, but I was laughing. Randall was laughing, too.

That little judge in between us is an old Hanshi from Lenexa, Kansas. I can’t count the number of black belts and instructors and schools that have studied under him. He’s an excellent teacher, and I know what he was doing. By not calling “Yame!” he was stimulating our concentration. An officiated fight is a controlled environment, but it is still about life. Never assume that the fight is over just because you landed a punch or two.

I know I will never forget the lesson.

But I’ll probably screw up again.

Hey, learning how to fight or learning how to feel is a process. Some days you get your ass kicked. I got whiplashed by a face punch at one of Hanshi’s tournaments about a year ago. Then I got whiplashed again at a tournament just a month later. But that wasn’t the end of things. That was just another step on a journey.

Okay, enough footprints in the beach. Here’s the video. Take what you can from it.

I spent a half-hour this morning traveling ten years into the future. Yes, it blew my mind. Am I rich in the future? I don’t know. I might be. The future self said wealth is unimportant. Was I healthier? Thinner? Fitter? Didn’t matter. Was I drinking less? More? Was I having more sex? Less sex? Better sex? Absolutely immaterial, was the answer. My future self kept reminding me that my strength is in feeling good no matter what the circumstances. My power is in empowering others. My comfort is in discovering the truth about myself.

I spent a solid half hour pestering my future self about the future me. And my future self kept bringing me back to the present. He kept saying that happiness in the future comes from the same things that bring happiness now. I just have to recognize them.

And, what if I don’t hear anything from my future self? Will that mean I’m dead? Nope. It means only that you’re not relaxed. Meditation is the best way to do time whispering.

First of all, the fact that I contacted my future self ten years from now does not convince me that I will still have this body in ten years. I could have both legs amputated. I could be paralyzed from the neck down. Not really the same body, is it? But truths that my future self told me still apply. What if I am dead? So what? I may be hit by a milk truck tomorrow. But I do not think the spirit can die. Whatever we become, in whatever dimension, the things I learn from my future self still apply. I suppose that’s why my future self refuses to discuss wealth, health, sex, and all that. They are irrelevant. There is plenty to think about beside those incidentals.

Suppose you found yourself, by some stroke of fate, having been transported back in time to mid-March of 1986. Suppose also that you heard a news report about some little company called Microsoft making its initial public offering of stock. Would you buy any? Look, you’d probably max out the cash advances on your credit cards and buy as much as you could. And you’d probably be one of the 12,000 Microsoft millionaires of today.

I’m not writing this piece to make greed jump around inside you. Time travel is not possible. But time whispering has always been possible. People have always done it. It’s no secret. You have done it. So why am I writing to explain a technique that everyone already uses? Time whispering is a valuable tool for learning how to feel. We don’t need to learn how to do it; we need to learn it’s value.

What is time whispering? Very simply, you can whisper through time to a sad experience in childhood or teenagerhood and offer comfort to yourself from your adult perspective. Or you can whisper forward through time and ask your future self for comfort and advice through rough times.

Quick example. If you’re a male, you were probably punched or even beat up as a kid. If you’re a female, you probably experienced some similar kind of abuse. You can’t travel back in time as a big strong adult and protect your child self. But you can reach through time with your mental voice and your mental presence. You can communicate with the child who is experiencing the immediate pain. Most importantly, you carry a message from the future: “Everything is going to be all right.”

Too simple?

Remember, you are not offering solutions or fixes. You are offering comfort and strength. In some strange way, the child learns to look forward and to trust you. I don’t understand it, but it works. Not only does the child feel better. Your present self feels better.

This technique works in the other direction also. It is early February 2011 as I write this. Much of the United States has just come through a history-making blizzard. We are mentally weary from winter, and physically sore from digging our cars out of drifts and snow plow furrows. But I am certain that millions of people are thinking of spring. This is simple time whispering. We all do it. If you can focus two months into the future, try focusing ten years into the future. Ask your future self for comfort and inspiration. The results will probably blow your mind.

I’ve been whispering backward and forward through time for as long as I can remember. I started doing it deliberately about ten years ago. The deliberate practice of time whispering helps you to harness the overpowering emotions of memory and to inject your own personal wisdom and skill. It’s very much like therapy. The real problem with therapy is that no therapist knows you as well as you know yourself.

“What if my future self is dead in ten years?”

I get to that in the next update.

Read “Time Whispering, Part 2” here

Before I move into the Time Whispering in the next blog, I want to wrap up a few loose ends on this tangled web that I started to weave regarding weight loss and metabolism that I opened up last month.

• Click here to download a free audio recording of this post.

I have nothing specific to offer as advice for weight loss. There are no tricks. There is no easy way. In fact I think there are as many “ways” as there are people. There are a couple of things that I have discovered on my own that are not very clear in the books I’ve read on the subject.

The Role of Insulin

I’ve read a few books on the glycemic index and all that. Still not sure what it is. The books all try to explain what’s going on with insulin and blood glucose and fat storage. I get lost. And I aced all my anatomy and biology courses.

Very simply, insulin tells your body to store fat. Without insulin, you burn all your energy and excrete the excess glucose in urine. Of course, excess glucose in your blood is horrible because your capillaries retain water and burst and you go blind, for example. No exaggeration. Insulin regulation is vital.

Not everyone’s pancreas is created equal, however. The pancreas releases insulin by measuring the glucose in the blood. Beautiful. But my pancreas just releases too much insulin. Many people are like me. We eat; we crash. It happened to me at least once a week for a while. An hour after I ate, I would be sitting there with a 55 blood glucose. This means that I was storing my 300-calorie lunch as fat. Yes, I could diet and gain weight.

So, I’m screwed right? Wrong.

The Role of the Mind

As I said, the pancreas measures the glucose levels in the blood. That’s how it knows when to release insulin. However, in societies where there are regular meal times, the pancreas starts releasing insulin fifteen minutes before a meal. How can it do this if the blood glucose has not increased yet? Because the brain is also an endocrine gland. What do I mean? I mean the brain can tell the pancreas to release insulin.

Almost any stimulus can become associated with insulin release. You eat; you release insulin. You feel hungry; you release insulin. You look at the clock; you release insulin.

My point is that abstract thought can govern your endocrine function. This is not true for everyone. I’m only saying it works for me. I suspect it works for everyone who is basically healthy. Abstract thought can govern endocrine function.

I have discovered, for example, that I will stop crashing if my body stops expecting food. Some diets tell us to eat five times each day. I tried that. There was no joy in it. I was never hungry any more. And it trained my body to expect food more often which made my pancreas secrete insulin more often. That was the last thing my endocrine system needed.

Based on my weight, height, and age, my Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) requires about 2100 calories a day. I don’t really know why this is. But I do know that I can get through a day on 1000 or 1500 calories without discomfort. I have been doing it regularly. I’ve also been losing weight.

What about going into starvation mode? Honestly, I don’t know what that is. I do two things when I’m hungry. First, I do Thought Stopping. There is a link to Thought Stopping in the Toolbox on my navigation menu. Next, I do brief exercises. I may drop and do five or ten pushups or I may grab a pair of dumbbells and do five or ten curls in each arm. I may do core exercises, too, like crunches or something.

Thought Stopping and brief exercise do two things. The Thought Stopping tells your mind to stop telling the pancreas that a meal is coming. IT AIN’T COMIN’! Effective Thought Stopping must be harsh and firm. The exercise then tells the body to get out of starvation mode. In other words, it tells the body to wake up and burn some energy. Unless you are emaciated, we all have some fat reserve to burn. We just have to find the right way to light the fire under it.

Okay. Now, I’m going to get sued for telling people to starve themselves to unconsciousness. No. I’m saying this worked for me. I’m also saying that any weight loss program that I’ve tried does not work quite right until I tailor it to my mind/body needs. And that’s my point. Don’t expect some diet prescription to work unless you are willing to explore how to make it fit your needs.

Next entry: Time Whispering.

In addition to dealing with low energy this winter and the weight gain that accompanies it, I’ve been trying to keep the ice clear in the arctic passage between us and Tessa’s son. He’s thirteen and has become withdrawn. Hey, it happens. Your body has become a live grenade. Your number of friends of the opposite sex has gone viral. And your mom still wants to you to be a little boy. It’s too much. So I lay off, mostly. But this week I decided to ask him for some advice with my two problems.

Low energy makes you feel sort of depressed, so I said, “Sean, I’m sad. What should I do?”
He said, “I dunno.”
I go, “What do you do when you feel sad?”
“Talk to my friends.”
“I don’t have any friends,” I said.
“You got Mom.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll try that. What else should I do?”
“I dunno.”
“Maybe I should stop being such a pussy, huh?”
“Yep.”
I swear, he smiled a little. It was a victory.

But I also decided to take the advice. The B vitamins have been working okay to help my metabolism, but I’ve still been struggling with the blues a little. Hey, everybody gets ’em. I want to go out into the wilderness with a chain saw and cut some trees. I want to get in a barn and toss some hay bales to some cattle. My first wife used to say, “Want in one hand and pppbbbttt! in the other and see which one fills up first.” I have been wanting things that I can’t have. At least not right now. That’s the same as wanting not to have problems. So what could I do?

Yep. I followed Sean’s advice. I made a goal. I have karate match in thirty-four days. I have been needing to lose a few pounds for many months. I will lose ten and gain it back. Been doing that for most of the last year. The problem comes when I start crashing from fasting too aggressively. I always seemed to be unable to get my fire to kick in. Well, this week, I simply said, “I’m going to lose twenty pounds before this next match.” That’s it.

So, I went back on my most successful diet. I’m not going to say what it is. Doesn’t matter. All diets work. Mine is just lots of protein and fiber along with my regular karate regimen. And I keep the calories at 2,000. Simple enough, but I often don’t eat enough and then crash and then I over-eat fats and sugars. On the first day back on my old diet, I was nervous because I expected to crash at any moment. Yes, I felt a crash coming on, so I downed a few ounces of orange juice. Yes, I felt hungry, but I held off from eating the wrong things. I had healthy food, low in fat, high in protein.

By mid-afternoon on the first day, I was over the first crash. I still felt a little low on energy, but I was sure my blood glucose was okay. How was I going to kick up my energy without eating? Sean’s advice: I dropped to the floor and did five quick push-ups. Well, maybe not so quick. My upper body strength is a joke. I did five rather slow meditative eagle-claw pushups, using only the first and second fingers and the thumb of each hand. It didn’t take long. It wasn’t anything spectacular. But it definitely fit into the “Stop being such a pussy” advice. The pushups kicked up my heart rate, and I even felt a little adrenalin rush. I repeated this two more times through the afternoon. That was what I had been missing.

I dropped three pounds the first day, but that’s not such a big deal. I always lose lots of waste weight the first day of a diet. But it’s a good start. The pounds are coming off on schedule, and I’m sure I’ll reach my goal by the mid-February match.

Another technique that I’m using with this new effort is what I call Time Whispering. Coming soon, I will talk more about whispering through time to your future self for advice. The best part is hearing what your future self has to say back to you. It’s fun. And very effective. Talk to you soon!

This is a continuation of the last update about energy and metabolism. Of course, energy level is vital to feeling well. Feeling exhausted is, by itself, depressing, even though your mood is otherwise cheerful. The depression comes, not from sadness or loss, but from looking around at all the work that needs to be done. The dishes need washed, the dog needs brushed, the floor needs swept, and a one of the kids needs a belt. But you can’t move. A cookie and a glass of milk might get you moving, but it might also get stored as fat. That’s depressing.

I have been taking a single dose of certain B vitamins to see whether those claims about energy and metabolism work for me. Okay, the preliminary results are confirmed. Yes, they help a little. But there is a twist in the experiment this week.

I have a slight knee injury from my karate class. Quick explanation. The instructor sometimes varies our warm-up by telling us to jog around the room rather than jump rope. I’d rather jump rope because I’m a huge guy with long legs. I get up such a velocity in that room, that I have lots of knee strain on the corners. Anyway, I hurt my knee jogging too fast. I just have to go slower and take the outside on the curves.

The knee injury is clouding the results of my experiment. Yes, my energy is higher this week because I have done only one workout in the last seven days. My home workouts are very intense kickboxing routines and weight training sessions. I had to discontinue the workouts to let my knees heal. So, yes, I have more energy because I’m not spending it on exercise. I had my first workout in seven days yesterday, and I had more strength, more agility. All that crap. But I can’t credit the B vitamins. Not yet.

For the record, I’m just taking the Wal-Mart basic B1, B6, and B12. No B Complex.

Coming Up Next Month

I hope everyone made it through Christmas without too many tears. Or maybe the tears were good. I’m not a teary type. I have to let go of the past and look to the future. After this energy and metabolism stuff is a little more settled, I will write some updates on how to look into your future. There is a future you that exists somehow. It’s inside you. You can talk to it, and it can talk to you. We’ll get into that through January.