Miracles Are A Thing

and imma tell you about one

With apologies to Hume, I must conclude that miracles are a thing.

Here’s a miracle I experienced over the last week.

If you have significant difficulty paying attention to what you want to pay attention to — if you are someone whose attention is constantly fragmented and who finds it difficult to concentrate, like so many of us do these days — then maybe the means of my salvation will be yours, too.

First, to tell you how I came across the opportunity for this miracle.

The picture above is a screenshot from episode 244 of the DarkHorse podcast’s “Evolutionary Lens” series, the livestreams that are co-hosted by Dr. Bret Weinstein and Dr. Heather Heying. There’s a green border around it because it’s from the beginning part of the show, where they do three sponsored ads.

They put the green border around the screen at that point so the audience can tell exactly when they are saying words for which they have been paid, and when they aren’t.

Now, I need to tell you what I know about how Heather and Bret vet their sponsors, so you will know why I acted as I did in this miracle story.

I know for a fact that they take their sponsorship choices extremely seriously. How do I know? Because I’m one of the people they have had test products out. Their endorsement of MD Hearing Aid quotes a friend of theirs with “substantial hearing loss.”

Hi! That’s me. I’m their deaf friend! They have their ad broker arrange for MD Hearing Aid to send me samples of their new hearing aids every time they put out a new product. I then test them, thoroughly. I go out to lunch or dinner with

Josh Slocum

and test them in a restaurant. I test them in Discord chat with Josh,

Dr RollerGator PhD

or other friends. I talk on the phone, both on speakerphone and not. I go to therapy, which is the real test: my therapist is soft-spoken and there’s a white noise generator.

Then I write them up a detailed description of my experiences and an endorsement text, which is lightly edited (if at all). The first time I did this, Heather and I discussed at length how my hearing situation might or might not apply to the general public, so that she could have full understanding and context. Once they were satisfied that they were endorsing something legit and valuable, MD Hearing Aid became a DarkHorse sponsor.

I have also tried to get them to consider endorsing stuff that I like (because it’s hella fun to get to share something awesome you’ve found with the world!) but if it doesn’t fit into their evolutionary worldview—isn’t something they would do themselves—they simply don’t go there.

I really like the low carb options of the Factor meal delivery service, but H&B don’t do “heat up food in a plastic container in the microwave,” so they politely declined my suggestion.

All that to say — if H&B endorse a thing, they actually believe in it. They say this in every episode, but I am affirming here that it’s true, to the best of my knowledge and definitely in my experience.

The relevance of this context—for why I did what I did, and why I’m writing about it—will soon become clear.

When Good Coping Mechanisms Go Bad

There are times when it’s not so easy to differentiate a healthy coping mechanism from an unhealthy one.

I live alone and work remotely, so I’m alone the vast majority of the time.

Humans are social creatures, and that much solitude is not good for anyone. It made, and continues to make, my battles with depression more difficult to win. Early in COVID, when my university shut down and went to remote-only, there was a fifteen-month period when my therapist was the only human being with whom I was ever in a room. Those were fifteen very dark and damaging months.

During that insanely isolated period, I started streaming “content” for background noise and a sense of company.

Consequently, there are several TV shows that I’ve cycled through many times. Many, many times. Know-all-the-jokes-by-heart times. Start-crying-when-Data-names-his-daughter-Llal-because-I-know-what’s-coming-times.

Star Trek: the Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and Star Trek: Voyager are mandatory nerd viewing, of course. But I’ve also seen every episode of shows that various people, usually friends who found out I grew up in a religious milieu where I wasn’t allowed much access to secular culture, recommended to me. Some of my favorites are The Golden Girls, Little House on the Prairie, the Cosby Show, Sister Wives, The Good Place, and Young Sheldon.

Is this healthy or unhealthy?

It started out healthy, I think. But it quickly became an addiction. It didn’t take long until I desperately needed background noise to manage my anxiety.

When having video streaming in the background wasn’t feasible, sometimes I would listen to YouTube videos, podcasts, or audiobooks (always of books I had read before, as this is no way to reliably take in information or a narrative). Even without my hearing aids in, having something streaming on the other monitor that I could glance at, read the captions, and convince my brain that I wasn’t alone became crucial.

The common denominator was words — words being spoken by a human, which served to reassure my brain that I wasn’t alone.

This is absurd, of course. Because I was alone.

Brains, it turns out, are not particularly hard to fool.

Despite having a serious and daily meditation practice, my addiction in this regard continued. I developed a kind of “check-in, check-out” mode for meditation, where my brain wouldn’t panic as long as I was sitting half-lotus on the cushion.

Then, it was ok to be alone and fully present with myself until the timer went off.

But only then. And that was it.

Eventually, other than that period each morning, I was fully dependent on streaming content to keep my anxiety managed, typically through my phone.

I knew this was a problem, and I worked hard at trying to at least manage it, even if conquering it wasn’t a realistic goal yet. I did the “ramp” method to try to work on it, where you start very, very small and build up.

And that worked to some extent. I could manage short periods.

But never enough, and never for very long.

The inability to be fully present and engaged with one task is a miserable way to live.

But…so is constant anxiety.

Thus it was an ongoing calculus, a constant weighing of what kind of misery I could tolerate best and still be productive.

I thought this was something that might never get better. Or, at best, might only get better after a lot more work on the trauma history that gave me such an anxious brain to begin with.

It’s something I never gave up on. I tried many different techniques and tactics, and the battle was a conscious part of every day.

But I was losing, and losing badly.

Even when doing things I loved — like staying up all night working number theory problems — I’d have some kind of audio content streaming in the background.

Obviously I wasn’t paying conscious attention to it. Sometimes I’d be surprised when the episode of whatever had finished playing. But I needed it to be there, to keep my anxiety managed and often to keep panic at bay.

When reading books that required deep thought, I could turn it off and focus to some extent, but never for very long.

For the last four years, I read most books in hundreds of very short bursts, and I was absolutely never anywhere near as productive as I wanted to be, or sensed I could be.

The Most Recent DarkHorse Livestream

On the most recent livestream that I watched, H&B endorsed a new sponsor, brain.fm.

Because I knew that they take their sponsorship seriously, as a massive responsibility to their audience, I signed up before Heather finished the first ad reading.

That’s why I tried it—I had a problem. They were talking about a possible tool to at least help. And I know these people. I know how they choose sponsors. They’re my friends. I love them and I trust them.

Now I’m going to tell you what brain.fm is, what happened, and my hypothesis.

Brain.fm is an app that provides specially chosen music, slightly manipulated by their technology, to produce what they call “entrainment”. Their tech eliminates attention-grabbing elements from the music, and it does so magnificently. I’ve been using it most of my waking hours for a week now, and I’ve had the music grab my attention only twice. Both times, I tapped thumbs-down on the app and was immediately notified that the track I had disliked would never be played again.

That’s it; other than those two brief moments, the music has not claimed my attention at all.

You can read about their process and technology, including some white papers, here.

What Happened

It would be impossible for me to exaggerate how powerfully this app has changed my life. It’s not a tool. It’s a fucking miracle cure.

I am entirely free to focus now.

Entirely.

Just a few of my experiences since I started using it:

1. Getting on my exercise bike with my iPad to read a Kindle book, intending to do 5 minutes. This is a normal practice for me — 5 intense minutes a couple of times a day, to try to keep my metabolism humming throughout the workday. 23 minutes later, I looked up, having been engrossed in the book almost five times longer than I planned.

2. Losing my phone. That may never have happened before, y’all. (If it has, I don’t recall.) My phone feeds sound directly into my hearing aids, and I had to walk the perimeter of my apartment to deduce the location of my phone by noticing where the sound started to break down. Why did I lose my phone? I didn’t need to be tethered to it for my source of distraction anymore!

3. I have been, for many years now, hyper-aware of time. No longer. I now need to use the brain.fm timer function to make sure I stop doing things when I need to stop. I am able to focus so intensely that I lose track of time.

My Hypothesis

I’m basing this hypothesis only on a hunch—a feeling. A gut instinct. Take that for what it’s worth.

My hypothesis is that in the case of someone like me, who has been anxious since early childhood, there’s a part of the brain that never, ever, ever relaxes or shuts up. If not given something to do, it will invent something to do.

I call it the “scary story teller”. If it’s got an engrossing TV show to watch, it’ll (mostly) veg out and leave me alone. But without that, it was committed to keeping busy by making me miserable.

Something about the brain.fm music just keeps the scary story teller busy.

That part of my brain goes chill and relaxes.

And without the need to manage the scary story teller, I can focus.

Y’all….I. Can. Focus.

I CAN FOCUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now, to answer the obvious question—is this a miracle cure for me because I have ADHD? I have no idea. I certainly have many of the classic symptoms, especially as they tend to present in girls. But I also have a history of complex trauma, which makes the differential diagnosis a very tricky thing. Possibly I do have ADHD in addition to complex trauma, and possibly I just have some consequences of my trauma and a long history of depression that manifest as some of the same issues.

So if you or your kid have ADHD, is my experience relevant? Will brain.fm help you or your kid? Maybe, but I can’t guarantee it. In my case, a definitive diagnosis isn’t really feasible.

But attention problems are attention problems, diagnosis be damned.

And mine are solved.

If you think you might benefit from this, here’s the DarkHorse link. It will get you a month of brain.fm free, which is more than enough time to see if it’s your miracle, too.

Thanks for sharing my joy!

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