Commusings: Rapture by Dr. Austin Perlmutter

Dear Commune Community, 

In today’s essay, Dr. Austin Perlmutter excavates a concept as old as the Buddha. Sitting under the Bodhi Tree some 2,500 years back, Siddhartha Gautama had a revelation. The universe and everything in it – including you – is impermanent and interconnected. 

You are not a product, but rather a process transforming moment to moment in relationship to your environment. In fact, as Austin describes in vivid detail, you cannot separate the function and behavior of your organism from the function and behavior of your surroundings – especially at 100 feet below sea level!

This notion violates our daily sense of self as reliable, stable beings. We peer into the mirror every morning and see – more or less – the same person we saw yesterday. Day to day, the sense of our identity as fixed is underwritten by physical and psychological continuity.

But a glimpse under the hood of human physiology reveals quite the opposite. In fact, we are a collection of 7 octillion atoms experiencing 37 billion billion (not a typo) chemical reactions per second. We are NOTHING BUT CHANGE.

This satori is at once scary and empowering. Frightening because change is unpredictable. Galvanizing because your health exists across a dynamic spectrum. And you have tremendous jurisdiction over your trajectory. Will you be moving toward disconnection – the process of ailing – or toward wholeness – the process of healing? 

In his missive, Austin underscores Commune’s central mission. You have agency to shape the environment and adopt the protocols of positive change. Every one of our 150+ courses is designed to help you transform in some aspect of your life. Well-being is the journey of a lifetime. There is no terminus … until there is. This is why we offer a Lifetime Membership (which is available at 50% off for just two more days).

And, of course, if you scaffold your life with the practices of our great teachers then it will almost certainly extend your lifetime – and your healthtime. 

In love, include me,
Jeff 

P.S. In my new book GOOD STRESS, I dive deep into “The Tao of Health” – my philosophy for well-being. Waking up to one’s impermanence and interconnection is central to understanding the nature of health. Pre-order it here and get all sorts of bonus goodies.

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Rapture by Dr. Austin Perlmutter

At the distant reaches of my view, a massive object materialized. Its dark outline emerged from the green background; broken wings spread wide in undersea flight. I floated closer, my eyes adjusting to the deepening gloom. As I took in the contours of the sunken plane, my focus started to wobble. I was a college student and no stranger to the mind-altering effects of alcohol. But this was something very, very different. A twinge of fear morphed into a growing sense of intense calm. Drifting deeper in the water column, the tiny voice of concern in the back of my head began to fade.

There’s a name for my experience: nitrogen narcosis, or the “rapture of the deep.” Every SCUBA diver learns about this deadly effect early in their training. It’s a well-studied alteration in consciousness driven by the anesthetic effect of breathing compressed air during deeper dives. Though the threshold varies from person to person, it generally becomes a concern at around 90 or 100 feet down.  

Close to 100 feet below the surface in a freshwater spring in northern Florida, I was having my first experience with these unique alterations in consciousness. As I recognized something was off and began kicking slowly upward, the “rapture” quickly dissolved, leaving me with the unsettled feeling of touching something incredibly soothing and exceptionally lethal.

Fluctuations in our brain state this novel and this pronounced are rare in our daily lives. Sure, we throw back a hundred milligrams of caffeine each morning and enjoy the occasional effects of ethanol. But how often do you stop to realize just how much your brain state can change? How much are you directing this change?

Inside your brain are around 80 billion neurons, and about the same number of non-neuron brain cells called glia. Together, and in concert with a dazzling array of signals from inside and outside the body, these microscopic populations shape our moment-to-moment perception of reality, fluctuating in number, form, and function with each passing instant.

In the earliest phases of our lives (up until around age 2), our brains are optimized for new connections, generating up to 40,000 new synapses per second. From the age of 2 to 10, our brains flip the script and rapidly prune unused synapses, losing roughly half by the time we hit age 10. This vacillating process reflects learning, as our brains optimize and refine neuronal pathways based on what they deem the most valuable. It explains why children can so rapidly learn new languages and occurs simultaneously with the development of personality.

As we reach adolescence and early adulthood, the brain continues to develop structurally. Research suggests the prefrontal cortex (the part of our brain most involved with higher level decision-making) doesn’t fully mature until our mid-twenties. After that, macroscopic changes may cool down somewhat, but neuroplasticity (the process of rewiring our brains) continues to run every hour of every day. This is a double-edged sword.

If we’re expanding our thinking, experiencing positive novelty, and creating beneficial behavioral patterns, neuroplasticity helps us form healthy brain connections, strengthening the chances that these habits and thought patterns endure and enhancing our odds for good brain health. If we’re taking on unhealthy beliefs, behavioral patterns, and constrained perspectives on how to live life, neuroplasticity helps write this into our core system of operations. In cultures surrounded by healthy influences (think: Blue Zones), environmental factors help wire the brain for happiness and cognitive longevity.

For most of us living in places where the defaults are primarily unhealthy, our brains become wired for disconnection from cognitive health and mental wellbeing.  Along the way, our best chance for quality lives is dissolved and our brains and bodies become progressively more “stuck.” The longer it goes, the more a push is needed to escape the deepening treads of our daily thoughts and actions.

We forget that our brains are constantly changing and we allow unhealthy environmental factors to drive us towards rigidity in our biology and psychology.

In the weeks after my mind-altering SCUBA experience, I spent a lot of time thinking about how much my own brain function could be altered by a simple imbalance in blood gasses. Over a decade later, and after seeing so many brains dramatically affected by infections, psychedelics, anesthesia, chronic stress, metabolic dysfunction, and more, it’s hard for me to ignore just how malleable our conscious experience is. If we tether our identity to our brain state and how we think, act, and feel, the truth is that we become someone new every second. Yet as unhealthy patterns of brain wiring set in, it can feel harder and harder to appreciate this reality.

Here's what I want you to know:

Your brain is an instrument of limitless potential in constant flux. Research across the fields of neuroscience, neuroimmunology, neurometabolism, psychology, behavioral science, neurology, and psychiatry all point to the same conclusion: You have the tremendous opportunity to change yourself for the better when you take agency over neuroplasticity and chart your brain’s future. 

Every healthy choice—whether it's a bite of nutritious food, a walk in nature, or a good night's sleep—votes for a more resilient, flexible brain, a more positive mental state, and a brain that will remain in excellent working order well into your later years. In a world where poor brain health has become the norm, taking charge of neuroplasticity isn’t just an incredible opportunity—it's a necessity.