Scott Carney - The Wedge

Dave Asprey

Its common to think that your emotions are something that happen to you. When your boss corners you at work, or when youve told your kids to clean up their room for the hundredth time, or when youre stuck in traffic and miss your planethese things make you feel a certain way.

Or do they?

One of the most profound steps Ive taken toward hacking my biology and improving my performance has been to learn how to control my nervous system. Being able to bring myself back to a clear and even space makes all the difference in how I work, my creativity, how I relate to my family, and how much I like my life overall.

Journalist, anthropologist and adventurer Scott Carney wrote this book to show you how to take back the wheel yourself. He has developed techniques to control his emotions, and so much more. He has also been able to master his own biological regulation things like his heart rate, his internal temperature and stress responses by leveraging a concept he calls the Wedge.

The Wedge is that space between your environment and your reaction to a sensation or stimulus that has been shaped by your life experiences. The first time you experience a sensation, the emotion you attach to it at that time is likely what youll feel the next time you come across the same sensory input.

When we spoke on an episode of Bulletproof Radio , Carney told me that any time you sense something, youre reliving your past. It makes perfect sense. You were born not knowing what sound a teapot makes or what a cat looks like. You were born not knowing whether Mom and Dad are safe people or dangerous people. You were born not knowing whether you like to eat steak or dirty socks.

You spend years of your life exploring the world around you while your brain organizes massive amounts of sensory information that you can retrieve later. You add to your mental files every day of your life. Your interactions with people and objects over the years determine how you experience the world and all of your interactions in it.

Carney shows how you can separate sensory input from your reaction to it. He shows the connect and the disconnect between everything that youre feeling, everything that youre touching, everything thats happening around you and how your brain processes that information.

Carney illustrated this when we talked. He posed the question, Does pain happen in your bone or in your brain? Its reasonable to say, My knee hurts, and assume your pain is coming from your knee. You can press down on a pain site and it hurts worse, or you can change the way you walk and it feels better.

Truth is, pain comes from your brain. In fact, there are people born without a sense of pain, a condition called congenital insensitivity to pain, or CIP. Its common for someone with CIP to die young because they dont notice the early stages of injury or illness. This condition has to do with the amount of endorphins in your brain, and zero to do with the site of injury.

Sensation in and of itself is meaningless, and its your brains job to make meaning out of what youre experiencing. For example, if someone is yelling at you, one of the sensory inputs is loud. If youre at your favorite concert, the sensation is also loud. But one input makes you angry or frightened, while the other input makes you dance around all happy. Thats where life experience comes in. Somewhere along the line, you attached totally different emotions to each type of loud.

The best part about the Wedge is, you can use that space between stimulus and response to control how you feel. Ive noticed that when Im doing really intense treatments like Rolfing, or when Im getting 100 injections of stem cells in one go, or when I have my bone marrow taken out for stem cells without anesthesia, my body initially wants to panic and fight it. Ive worked over the years to approach the pain in a different way. I say, Im going to welcome this, because this is part of the experience and it doesnt hurt. Im not going to lie and say that someone hammering a needle into my hip bone doesnt hurt. But talking my brain out of zeroing in on 100% pain and panic makes it far less painful. Im talking like 5% as much as it would have been.

Theres a switch. And you can teach yourself to work your own Wedge to turn down pain, anger or fear, and turn up pleasure and happiness.

Carney is an adventurer, and he weaves incredible storytelling throughout The Wedge to show you the development of his own changes over time. He offers practical tips that you can begin to apply right now to sharpen your own Wedge and become the Super Human you were meant to be.

Dave Asprey, author of Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever