← Tony Mantor: Why Not Me ?
Tony Mantor: Why Not Me ?
Dr. Adi Jaffe: The Truth About Addiction, Trauma, Shame, and Breaking Free
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- [00:02]
Kalpen Modi
Hey everyone, it's Kel Penn. I'm inviting you to join the best sounding book club you've ever heard with my podcast, Hearsay The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. Every episode I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audiobooks available on Audible. It's the book club for your ears. Listen to Earsay the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:30]
Veronica Roth
What does possibility mean to you?
- [00:32]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Um, that's a hard question. Something that you can strive for. I'm able to do anything I set my mind to.
- [00:38]
Orderly Meds Announcer
You're confident in yourself and you believe in yourself.
- [00:41]
Veronica Roth
Stuff that you could achieve.
- [00:43]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
I feel excited at Evening is possible when you're more confident. Shoes are a huge part of that. They are the most important part of my style.
- [00:52]
Orderly Meds Announcer
You can like express yourself in the right shoes.
- [00:55]
Tony Mantour
Anything is possible.
- [00:56]
DSW Advertiser
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- [01:00]
Colin Coward
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- [01:35]
Ryan Seacrest
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- [02:00]
Tony Mantour
What if everything you thought you knew about autism and mental health wasn't the full story? Today's conversation might change the way you see it. Welcome to why Not Me Embracing Autism and mental Health Worldwide, where real conversations and lived experiences inspire understanding and hope. I'm Tony Mantour. This is where understanding begins. If this kind of conversation matters to you, then follow the show so you don't miss what comes next. Joining us today is Dr. Adi Jaffe, a UCLA trained psychologist, TEDx speaker, and one of the most forward thinking voices in the addiction space. Today he's also the author of Unhooked, a book that pushes back on the traditional labels and stigma surrounding addiction and asks a very powerful question. What if addiction isn't a disease, but a deeply human response to pain, trauma and unmet needs? He doesn't just study addiction, he's lived it. In this conversation, we're going to explore what it really means to break free from destructive patterns, why willpower alone isn't just the answer, and how understanding the why behind behavior might be the key to lasting change. It's a great story, so let's dig into it. Thanks for joining us today.
- [03:20]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Yeah, appreciate you having me, man.
- [03:21]
Tony Mantour
Oh, it's my pleasure. Let's start out with what you do and how you got there.
- [03:26]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Sure. I mean, nowadays I do a lot, but I speak, I coach and consult, especially executives and professionals. And then I run a company called Ignited igntd that offers mental health and addiction support for people through software that we created. So that's my hope, my attempt at being able to give help to people who can't afford high end care and just really need support. And so, you know, think mobile based. We've been doing that since 2018, so before COVID and everybody went online. And I've helped thousands and thousands of people struggle anything from depression and anxiety all the way to addictions.
- [04:00]
Tony Mantour
So what is your focus? You have a great spectrum there, as we all know. You can have one end of the spectrum to the other, but in the middle is probably where you'll land and what you'll focus on. So what is that focus? Or in your case, maybe specialty.
- [04:14]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Yeah, good, good call. I mean, my main focus now is on trying to help people who are struggling with where they are find a way to a better place. And that takes a ton of different approaches. And it depends on the client and money, time, availability, all those things. Right. In terms of what they can do. But yes, that is a central theme to everything.
- [04:33]
Tony Mantour
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. What are some of the more common issues that you face on a daily basis?
- [04:38]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Yeah, I mean, one of the main, most common issues is people are used to behaving the way they're used to behaving. And they've been doing it oftentimes for decades. And so even when they want, you know, we've all heard the thing, right. If you keep doing the same thing, you're going to keep getting the same results. Right. That's easy to say. Really, really hard to change your habits. I was actually just leading a group yesterday and talking, you know, there's so many books on habit change. Atomic Habits is obviously one of the ones that really comes up for people. But that comes from a book called tiny habits by Dr. B.J. fogg and other books on behavior change. And so people are often preoccupied with how to change their behavior, but they don't really want to change their behavior. They want to change their life. They want to change their outcomes. So on the executive professional side, they may look like somebody who feels like they want to advance more, they want to move up in their career, they want to make more money and get a bigger title in charge of more. But there's something they keep banging ahead against the wall. They can't reach that level, or it's going too slowly for them. On the addiction side, it could be somebody who, you know, they've been over drinking for 15, 20 years. They know it's a problem. They know it's caused them issues. It's causing issues to people around them, and they can't seem to get their head around it. But, you know, for so many people that I've worked with on the family front, it's. They keep getting into fights with their wife or their husband, and they can't get themselves out of it. I look at all those things through the same lens, and that is you're stuck in a habit. It's a loop. It keeps playing. In order to get the results you want, you've got to be able to change their behav behavior. So what I talk about in my book, and you know, this is my. My most recent book, unhooked, what I talk about is the way to get that change is not actually to try to change the behavior itself, although that's a small part of it. It's to understand what is driving the behavior underneath the surface. Go change that, and then you'll get the changes you want in your life.
- [06:13]
Tony Mantour
When people think about addiction, lots of times they think about substance abuse. When you really get into what addiction is, lots of times it's a reason to go to something, to get away from something. How do you approach that? When you get into that type of scenario, you can't depend on something else to fix it. Sometimes you have to take control yourself.
- [06:36]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
You have to fix it yourself. You have to confront the situation that you're in and be honest about it. I'll tell you a story. It ended up being, I don't think in this book, it's in the previous book, but I had a woman who came to me, and she had been struggling with drinking. And when she walked through the door. It was the classic line, hey, I'm an alcoholic. I've been trying to slow down or stop drinking for a number of years now. It hasn't worked. My husband is threatening to leave, et cetera, et cetera. And she could kind of, you know, told the quintessential story. Three kids, Orange county, well off drinking, soccer mom. Right. Well, we started working together and within three days of working together, it turned out her marriage has been an unhappy marriage for about the last 15 years. She and her husband met in college and she didn't realize that when she got married and once the kids came, she would have to give up her life. So she was on her way to becoming a lawyer, gave that up to raise the kids. Now she's stuck at home, really frustrated. She never made anything of her life. On a daily basis, her identity was giving her struggles. And then every time she interacted with her husband, who was this traveling salesman, so he was gone five, six days out of the week, home for the weekend, back out on the road. And then the relationship is a nightmare too. And I said to her, I said, look, we're not going to be able to help you drinking until we fix the way you feel about your day to day life and fix what's going on with the relationship. Because even if I stop you from drinking, you're going to go to something else in order to fix the fact that you don't like your life. And that's just an example of one of thousands of stories that always follow, well, almost always follow the same line. And that is I'm really unhappy, I'm miserable, I'm using fill in whatever the blank for you to deal with it. How can you help me stop dealing with this? Through drinking, using porn, drugs, whatever. And it always, like you said, it always goes back, Tony, to figuring out, well, what is the struggle? What are you struggling with on a daily basis? What is hurting you? What is making you anxious, angry, frustrated? What is hurting your belief in yourself? What is, you know, removing your hope for a better world? We've got to get to that. And once we solve that, we'll solve the addiction.
- [08:22]
Tony Mantour
Now, I'm sure you've heard this many times, people will say, well, that comes down to personal responsibility. All that is is a couple of words people use many times. I'm sure people feel like they've lost control and they're trying to gain that control back. So do you phrase it in such a way that by taking control back, you are actually taking your own personal responsibility back, and hopefully that makes them feel better in the end.
- [08:47]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
I want to. I want to answer that in a few different parts, if I can. There's certainly a ton of personal responsibility, but all of us started in a place in the world. We had absolutely no control over our lives when we were children. We didn't have a say. We didn't have a say in where we were born, what we did on a daily basis, what culture, what habits, what world environment in our home we were born into. Right now, for many of us, the environment was relatively safe and maybe casually traumatizing and stressful, but not in a severe way, but for a subset of people. And the subset I'm talking about is 15 to 20% of the population, that's not true. They grew up in our version of hell for that subsection. That's why I'm going to answer this in a few different sections for that section of the population. They are fighting an uphill battle because those experiences of childhood shifted the way their brain processes the world in a way that for many others, is unfathomable. I've never struggled with this, but I've dealt with hundreds of clients who were sexually abused as children. It's hard to only rest on personal responsibility when that happened to you as a child. And you're also still right. The abuse happened 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago. You unfortunately. It's not fair, but you unfortunately, are now saddled with a ton of work to do to overcome something you had no role in doing.
- [09:58]
Tony Mantour
Yeah, that's a very tough situation.
- [10:00]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
One of my favorite therapeutic kind of retreats, environments that I went to, the practitioners there had this saying that I really like, which is, everybody's guilty and nobody's to blame. What does that mean? I'm here now. All the people who hurt me in the past may be guilty of hurting me. They have their own reasons. They tried whatever in their distorted version of reality was the best, and still the one sitting here trying to change my life, they can't do it for me. So it still falls in line with what you were talking about, Tony. It's still your responsibility, but you're saddled with this weight for many of the rest of us. There's a version that I want to answer which is a much more subtle version of what happens to those who've been heavily traumatized as kids. Most people don't know this. You know, the way memories and the way habits are formed in the brain is biologically structural. What do I mean by that? There's this concept in neuroscience called Hebbian synapticity. It's the idea that neurons that fire together, wire together. I literally ran a group on this a couple of days ago in my program. But so I won't belabor an hour long explanation of this, but the idea is this. When you have parts in your brain that work together a lot, they become more entrenched. They literally, there's these things called dendrites. Your neurons grow like these bigger, thicker roots to connect areas of the brain that are regularly connected. It's literally like the cable, the wiring that is connected that becomes thicker and better.
- [11:13]
Tony Mantour
Okay, yeah, that's really interesting. Can you dive a little deeper on that?
- [11:18]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
That happens for people and for things that happen regularly. So habits that you have in your everyday life, they become like physical structures in your brain. You can think of it as a groove. Imagine like you walk through the jungle and if you walk the same path a thousand times between your feet stomping on the ground and the machete moving around and cutting down some trees, there's now going to be a really clear path in the jungle. Right now, technically you could cross the jungle through other paths, but this path is really clear. And you're going to want to go through the clear path because it's easier. That's what habits do in your brain. It is easier to follow the same habitual route. So even for the rest of us who don't have highly traumatized past, the way we learn to do things at a younger age and through our development become the soft, easy, automatic path. And when you decide that you want to change, you again are now fighting against the built in physical mechanism. And I try to explain that to people because so many people get disturbed or anxious, resentful, upset that changing their habits gets hard. And then they read a book like Atomic Habits that says, hey, you know, just make the hard things easier, make the easy things harder. Connect to an identity of somebody who wants to change and go out there and do it. And they try and they fail.
- [12:29]
Tony Mantour
Sometimes failure is the path to success.
- [12:32]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
What I try to explain to a lot of people is odds are you will fail multiple times in trying to recreate a new route through your jungle. That's okay, next time get back up. Remake the commitment to try to go down that new path. Over time you can forge another new path. Number one. Number two, there was a massive disservice done to us a couple of decades ago when this idea of a 21 day habit change thing became a reality. Yeah, I remember that I think that's complete BS. You don't change a habit in 21 days. I don't know who picked that frickin number. It's like picked out of a hat. The number of days it takes to change a habit is totally variable. You can start it as early as 20, some 30 days, 40 days. Like that's on the lowest end. It can go up to a year or more. The average seems to be more around 65, 70, 75 days. And if you think about that, that's two and a half months of work on something to change. I'll give a stupid example, but it'll serve the purpose. I brush my teeth with my right hand. If I want to start being able to brush my teeth with my left hand for somewhere between a month to two to three months, I'm going to have to wake up every morning and remind myself that the thing that feels natural and easy, which is just doing this, is not what I'm doing today. I'm going to go do this and it feels awkward and it's weird and I'm not covering my whole mouth, but if I stick with it, day after day after day, two, three months later, the thing that feels weird is going to feel normal. And so what I really try to enforce for all my clients, there's a process. So in the book, there's a path in which I help people understand where is my behavior broken? Where am I screwing up? And then there's another process, a loop that I take them through which helps them understand how to change it. I call it the Eat loop. The Explore, Accept. Transform. Explore. Identify where the loop is broken. Accept. And there's a process for acceptance. But you can't change what you haven't accepted about yourself because then then you're fighting an internal battle. So acceptance means reducing shame about it. It means having compassion, forgiving you, yourself and others who have brought you to that place. And once you get to that place, you're ready for transformation. And transformation is normally not always, but normally less about stopping the bad behavior and more about replacing it with better alternative behaviors. And there are a whole set of different ways to get that done.
- [14:40]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Earn four times the points on your favorite brands now through July 28th on eligible items like Pantene Moisturizing Shampoo, 20 Gillette razors and Refills, Secret Clinical Strength Deodorant, Herbal Essences, Hair Care, Old Spice Deodorant, Pampers, Swaddlers Diapers and Crest Clean Breath Toothpaste Enjoy Savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy pickup or delivery. Restrictions apply. See the website for full terms.
- [15:06]
Orderly Meds Announcer
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- [16:07]
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- [17:05]
Tony Mantour
hey everyone,
- [17:06]
Kalpen Modi
it's Kalpen, host of Irsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Divergent author Veronica Roth to talk about her sprawling new novel, Seek the Traitor's Son. It's a sci fi fantasy epic about two protagonists on opposite sides of a war and a prophecy neither of them wanted.
- [17:25]
Veronica Roth
My first book was Divergent and when that came out like because it was so popular, I think it attracted mostly positivity, but the negativity I Sucked in like a sponge. And I think. I think it was, like, critiques of things I liked. When I was like, you know, I was 23 and I wrote this book and it had all my, like, dorky little cheesy or maybe unrealistic loves in it. And I started to feel a lot of shame about those things. And so for the rest of my career, I steered away from those little things that, like, make you feel pleasure when you read. But I also was, like, saying no to these parts of myself that I then was like, screw it.
- [18:06]
Tony Mantour
Yeah.
- [18:07]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
So that's this book.
- [18:09]
Kalpen Modi
Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [18:16]
Tony Mantour
I'm glad you brought up the shame part of it. That's a big thing that people really don't think about. If you took the shame out of whatever it might be, addiction, put a term to it, anything, how would that change the way that people perceive themselves and perceive the world to help make that change?
- [18:33]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
I think shame is one of the most insidious emotions we have. It plays a role. Right. If you think back to tribal times and when we lived in small communities, you know, 20, 30, 50 people, you know, shame is the idea that I am different, less than the people around me. And the different part is what matters, right? Because if my insides don't match what you need from me, I could get ostracized, right? I could be shunned. Nowadays, if I'm shunned, less of a big deal. There's a huge community out here. I'll go find some other friends. Think evolutionarily. If my community kicks me out, I'm on my own. Out there in the wilderness, I may die. So there's a real need to belong. And shame makes you feel like you don't belong. I have a really weird example. I hope this lands for the listeners. But I just went through it in a group. We were actually unpacking this in a group I was just leading. And I believe all of us have unhealthy beliefs about ourselves that create little moments of shame. There's big shame, right? Like, again, if you were molested as a child, a lot of people have shame around that. I'm not even talking about that.
- [19:29]
Colin Coward
Shame.
- [19:30]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Very crucial, very important, very, very problematic. But there are these little micro moments where we feel shame. So we were unpacking people's unhelpful beliefs about themselves. And this one woman who's very high functioning, but she said she had a belief to share and the initial belief she shared that was upsetting to her when she thought about it, was that if she has a request of others, if she needs something from others, they may judge her. I think some of us can understand that, right? If you need help from other people, they may look down to you. Okay, but. But I wanted more information. So, Tony, I asked her, hey, can you give me an example? Because it sounds like you're talking about something pretty spec. She started getting embarrassed, right? That shame started building up. You know, she thought about it for a second and she said, yeah, you know, the other day I had to go return something that I bought at the store. She wanted credit back. She wanted a refund for it. You could see her, you know, blushing and getting embarrassed just thinking about this moment. But she said, I thought to myself that as I walk into the store with this item that I want to return, she started getting anxious just thinking about it because she thought, you know, the clerk at the store would judge her. Maybe the people standing around would judge her. Now, I know that's really small, but think about the sort of belief somebody must have about themselves and the world to think that if I bought something and then I want to return it because I don't like it, people might look down at me. In what other places in her life does she not ask for what she needs? Does she not say what she wants to say? Does she not raise her hand in the class or tell somebody she's in a disagreement with that she disagrees with them? Because the fear, shame is that if I do this thing, I will be different than I will be laughed at. I will be looked down at right now. I think most people listening right now have had at least a couple experiences in their lives where they can relate to feeling like people are going to look down at you. The fear and the feeling is semi natural. If you start stopping yourself from doing things in the world because of that feeling, or if you start having to drink or use drugs or in some other way escape the feeling, that's where we develop some serious problem. I always used to have a lot of social anxiety, and so I would have to get really drunk before I would go to events because I didn't want to be judged. But the judgment was happening in my own head, right? So that's where shame, I think, comes in the moment we remove. And it's funny, as we get older, we care less about it, right? When I was 14, 18, 25, I really cared what people thought about me. I'm almost 50. I'm not going to say I don't care at all what people think about me, but I don't care about it all that much. And that provides a lot of relief so that I can act in ways that are more. More aligned with who I want to be.
- [21:49]
Tony Mantour
I think what you're describing really comes down to a sense of personal comfort within yourself. When you're younger, you tend to be more focused on what others think. Trying to fit in, trying to belong, trying to meet expectations. But as you get older, something begins to shift. You have more comfort in your own skin, more confident in who you are, and less dependent on outside validation. You reach a point where you can be completely alone and feel at peace, or you can stand in the middle of a thousand people and still do exactly what feels right to you without worrying about judgment. It's like you create your own space, your own sense of belonging to wherever you are. What you said makes a lot of sense, but the truth is, getting to that place isn't easy for everyone.
- [22:36]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Difficult to get there for some people. Definitely difficult to speed up that process. You know, we didn't talk about it much, but I went through a lot and not that early in life, right? I was in my mid to late 20s, early 30s, but including my own addiction story, getting arrested, spending time in jail. By my late 20s, early 30s, I was confronted with a reality which was parts of my life were going to make people feel uncomfortable because I'd sold drugs, I'd used drugs, I'd gone to jail. I had nine felonies on my record. You know, everything is double sided, right? Everything is good and bad in an interesting way. The experience was negative, but I had to figure out how to live in a world where, you know what, Tony? I knew for a fact some people will judge me. And I had to be in some moments where somebody listened to my story and they just didn't want to spend time with me anymore because they didn't trust me. I could play the victim or I could understand, hey, you know, I understand that for somebody who's never lived on the side of the tracks that I lived on and didn't do the things that I've done, sitting next to a nine time felon that's been in jail may be uncomfortable and they may just not want that. So I have to play this game with myself of judging myself less because I'd been there and I made it out. And now I was trying to live a normal life, or my version of normal anyway. But then, Tony, I learned not to judge them as well, because what's right for me does not have to be right for everybody else. We all need to discover our version of what works for us. And again, for people who are stuck in depression, in anxiety, in addiction, or in any other version of being malcontent with their own experience in life, some part of it may be external, but a lot of it is internal. A lot of it is their own judgment of the experience and that they don't feel like they're getting what they want out of life.
- [24:06]
Tony Mantour
How do you help people move beyond their preconceptions, especially when what they believe turns out to be completely different from reality? How do you present your lived experience in a way that allows them to see the value in it so they can begin to lower those internal walls and become more open to understanding?
- [24:25]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Let me just say that not everybody needs the same thing. So the way that I do it is not the right way for everybody. We've all seen the David Goggins kind of, you know, motivation by Marine Corps, you know, get up off your butt and do what I told you, kind of a version. Some people need that, by the way, and it works really, really well for them. That's not my version. So the way I do it, the way I go about it, is by trying to actually understand the person's path so that I can mirror back the lesson you just said, because you said something really important, which was, how do you get somebody essentially who doesn't believe in themselves or only looks at darkness, only looks at what's wrong? How do you get them to understand that their experience is actually motivational, hopeful, et cetera? Right? Easy to say. Hard to do, man. Hard to do. Because when somebody has always looked at what doesn't work, there's this concept in the brain. It's called confirmation bias. Their brain is now trained to look at what's broken. And in a way, like, I'm an entrepreneur. You've had this podcast for a long time. In a way, if you wake up in the morning and think about all the things that aren't working, you may be really good at achieving things because you'll be there first thing in the morning to fix the thing that didn't work. And you'll spend all night up in bed unable to sleep because you can't stop yourself from thinking about the 40 things that need to be fixed tomorrow and the 12 you didn't do right today. You're constantly trying to make things better because you can't calm down until they're perfect, but they're never perfect. So in a way, that might be debilitating for you, but it might actually cause high achievement.
- [25:47]
Tony Mantour
Yeah. I call that the comfort zone. People will stay there because they feel safe. The truth is, if you never step outside that comfort zone, you're never going to grow. You're never going to take the risks that might push you forward or even knock you down. Life is always going to be hills and valleys. Some days you feel great, others not so great. Sometimes a bad day turns into a bad week. Then it starts to feel like everything is going wrong. After enough of those moments, you get to the point where, I can't keep doing this. Maybe it's time to give up. Up then. Sometimes it only takes one small moment, one sliver of hope to break through that wall. And if you can grab onto that, it can shift everything. Because in the end, it's not just the circumstances holding people back. It's the mindset. And once that starts to change, that's when people can begin to move forward and create again.
- [26:41]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Yeah. You know the way I say that, I love that. That's so true. The way I always talk about that is, you know, there's that saying, we make plans and God laughs. In case everybody listening to this doesn't already know this, I'm sure you do, but we have zero control over what happens in the world. Zero. We barely control what we do. And this is hard for a lot of people to believe or understand or just accept. Even though we control what we do, we rarely control the outcome of what happens when we do it.
- [27:07]
Tony Mantour
Right. Yes.
- [27:08]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
There's this story I use in my program, my online program, that when I first heard it, was such a good example of this. I'm old enough to remember Queen Latifah. Do you remember Queen Latifah?
- [27:17]
Tony Mantour
Oh, yeah.
- [27:17]
Colin Coward
Yeah.
- [27:18]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
All right, Perfect. There's so many people that are too young listening right now probably for this, but go look her up. Queen Latifah came from a very poor neighborhood. Mom had nothing. I think her mom was a school teacher. I don't remember this exact, but. Poor family. Poor family, had nothing. You know, she started rapping, got famous with her little group, then started producing. She made it. Yeah, she made money.
- [27:40]
Tony Mantour
That's right.
- [27:41]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
And one of her biggest joys, having money was being able to give back to her family that didn't have much. So she. I think she got her mama house first. But then afterwards, I want to say, for his 18th birthday, she got her brother this bike that he'd been dreaming of motorcycle, right? That was like a Suzuki GSXR9 1000 or 600, something like that. Anyway, the bike that he had been. He had posters of this bike on his freaking wall, right?
- [28:02]
Veronica Roth
Yeah.
- [28:02]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
She bought him his dream bike. He killed himself on it two months later. Two months. She got everything she wanted in life. She gave her brother everything he wanted in life. And the gift that she gave him killed her, killed him. You know, you look at that and you go, damn. You know, I'm damned if I do, I'm damned if I don'. When I was broke, I couldn't get him the bike he wanted, and he was sad about it. When I made all the money in the world, I got on the bike. He died on it. We do not control what happens in the world. And for me, the moment I started realizing this, because when I was younger, I was stupid and I thought I did control what happened in the world. And so I was always looking for the best way to control it. Once this dawned on me, the amount of relief. Some people have a really hard time with this. For me, it provided a massive amount of relief. Because here's the thing. If I already don't control what happens in the world, then the way I look at it is you only have a couple of options. We can just give up control and just wake up every morning and not do anything because the world's going to do whatever it's going to do anyway. Or we can just show up and do our damn best every single moment. Because then I'm giving everything I can, and the rest, I leave up the chance, which I was going to have to leave up the chance anyway. And so the way I try to get to people is to say, look, you did your best until this moment. It's just that you can change what your best means.
- [29:12]
Colin Coward
Moving on.
- [29:13]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
I love. You know, you said something essentially about you could have a whole bad week, man. I was just. I was just in that place three days ago. Every day I was talking to my wife on the phone. It almost ended when the right front wheel on my new truck was this close to falling off.
- [29:27]
Tony Mantour
Wow.
- [29:28]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
And the reason it was this close to falling off was because I bought some land. It's just land. There's nothing on it. So I camped on it the night before. And apparently sometime from the moment I parked it to the moment I left, I was there for about 24 hours. Somebody stole four out of six bolts out of my right front tire.
- [29:42]
Lele Pons
Tired.
- [29:42]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
I realized it just in time. Before the wheel fell Off. I was late to a meeting. I was already tired because I've been up all night, like in this camping area, and it was already a hard week. Like you said, Tony. And I remember I was talking to my wife and this thing dawned on me. I said, you know what? I'm just happy. I'm not falling apart while this is happening. Because day after day after day, it seems like everything is harder than it needs to be.
- [30:05]
Tony Mantour
It is. There's no doubt about that for sure. It's not just our lives now. Now it's what's going on in the world. The world is an upside down mode that has never been. Yeah. With the world the way it is creates a lot of stress on people. And that stress is in so many different levels. Then when you combine the stress that's going on in the world combined with what's going on in your little part of the world, then with everything that's going on, it just compounds it. And people say, why do I even try?
- [30:38]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Well, I even try.
- [30:38]
Colin Coward
Yeah.
- [30:39]
Tony Mantour
So somewhere deep down, you have to find that motivation to keep moving forward. Because if you don't have control, give it your best and see what happens.
- [30:49]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Exactly. And that's by. By the way, that's a big understanding shift. That's a big perspective shift for a lot of people. Right. Because if everything's going sideways and I don't control whether it's going to go up or down at any point in time, all I can do is my best is the way I look at it. Now, here's the other thing that I think is important for a lot of people to remember. Whether you like it or not, whether you like hearing this or not, we need the bad times, we need the downs. Because it's only in comparison to the downs that the highs feel good.
- [31:14]
Tony Mantour
Yes, that's right.
- [31:16]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
If everything worked out, every moment of every day, whether you think about it or not right now, whether you understand it or not, whether you believe it or not, right now, you would get so bored of life. You would get so bored. Like, imagine if every single person you asked out said yes. And every single thing you wanted to buy, you could have. And everything you tasted was the best thing you've ever tasted in your life. And every show you saw was the most. The most interesting show you saw. You'd love the first week. The first month might be exciting. By the end of the first year, nothing would matter anymore.
- [31:44]
Tony Mantour
That is so true.
- [31:45]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
And by the way, the reason I know this, because I've never been, I've Never gotten to live through that life. But the reason I know this is I've worked with a lot of people who made a ton of money. And some of them made a ton of money because they sold a company. I'm talking for hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. So they went from working their butts off every day, slaving, slaving, slaving. Maybe being comfortable, but not being rich by any stretch of the imagination.
- [32:04]
Kalpen Modi
Right.
- [32:04]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
And all of a sudden their bank account has nine figures. They can do anything they want, Tony.
- [32:08]
Tony Mantour
Yeah.
- [32:09]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
They can fly anywhere, buy any plane, do anything they want. You know what ends up happening pretty quickly?
- [32:14]
Colin Coward
Yes.
- [32:14]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
They get bored.
- [32:15]
Tony Mantour
Yeah.
- [32:16]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
And frustrated because nothing is a challenge anymore. And that's why these people start taking on massive world challenges. Because nothing at the lower level becomes interesting anymore.
- [32:26]
Tony Mantour
Right.
- [32:26]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
And I think we can adopt a learning from that.
- [32:29]
Colin Coward
Yeah.
- [32:29]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
And that is appreciate the difficult times because you'll remember them when you're on the other side.
- [32:36]
Tony Mantour
Yeah.
- [32:36]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
And in comparison is how you'll know you're happy.
- [32:39]
Tony Mantour
Tell us how people can get in touch with you, find you, follow you, so they can see what you're doing.
- [32:46]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Yeah.
- [32:46]
Veronica Roth
Yeah.
- [32:46]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
100 so unhooked is the recent book. If you want to get that, it's on Amazon and anywhere else you get it. I have a website called adjaffee.com if you want to either work with me or watch me speak or read any of the stuff I've done. And then I wore the hat. IGNTD is the name of the company that offers a very low cost health for people who struggle with mental health and addiction. 24. 7 Help. You can literally go on right now. Sign up for a very, very small price and get the help you need.
- [33:12]
Tony Mantour
Yeah, that's great. Well, this conversation has been awesome. There are so many things that we didn't even touch upon. We could talk forever on this. It's been a pleasure having you join us today.
- [33:21]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
I love it. Thank you.
- [33:22]
Veronica Roth
Yeah.
- [33:22]
Dr. Adi Jaffe
Thank you for all the great, great examples and questions. It's been really fun.
- [33:25]
Tony Mantour
It's been my pleasure. Thanks again. A sincere thank you to our guests for sharing their journey with us today. We appreciate their honesty, courage, and willingness to open their heart in hopes of helping others. If today's conversation helped you see the world a little differently, then we've accomplished exactly what we set out to do. Until next time, keep believing, keep learning, and most importantly, keep asking yourself, why not me?
- [33:58]
Ryan Seacrest
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Dr. Adi Jaffe
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Lele Pons
This is lele Pons from Suite 305 with Lele Pons Game day at my house. It's chaos, but like in a fun way. The TV's ready, the remotes are ready, the kids stores are going off and somehow everybody needs batteries at the exact same time. Time. That's why I keep Duracell stocked and Duracell just released limited edition Duracell and Messi battery packs. The design is inspired by Messi's iconic left leg tattoo so every battery feels like it comes with an extra kick. From the TV remote to automatic corkscrew, Duracel keeps us game day ready. Duracel double and AAA batteries are the only ones built different with power boost ingredients for long lasting performance you can trust. Find the limited edition Duracell and Messi batteries in store stores at Lowe's and Walmart or on Amazon.
- [35:26]
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