Go Wild

by John J. Ratey

  But change can happen. If I can incorporate the concepts laid out in this book in my own hectic life, thereby creating a healthier physical self along with a greater sense of emotional well-being, so can you. Of course, my life didn’t start out in so many directions, at a frenzied and sometimes unhealthy pace. When I look back on my childhood, I see how “wild” I really was without even knowing it. I grew up in Beaver, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Pittsburgh, where we lived in a real old-style neighborhood. “Tribe” was important. Beaver was a place where everybody knew and cared for one another, with the usual crabs and discontented folks, but mainly people who were strivers of Tom Brokaw’s greatest generation. Our food was natural and home-cooked. My mother always had a garden, and we delighted in the fresh summer tastes of tomatoes, onions, leaf lettuce, and carrots. Sleep was regimented, and when the day ended, there was little TV, let alone the digital life that wires us now. Rather than playing video games or texting friends, my job was to play vigorously with my close band of buddies, Fred and Joe, and we were always on the move. From almost the time we could walk, it seemed that every kid in town was playing Little League on the field or touch football on a neighbor’s front lawn. We were frequently in the elements, running through the nearby woods playing cowboys and Indians, putting our architectural prowess to the test as we built forts in the backyard with giant piles of leaves, or just doing nothing as we sat on the banks of the Ohio River fishing for carp and catfish.

  As I grew up, my understanding of sleep, diet, movement, nature, meditation, and the importance of connection also grew. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to delve into these areas, taught by some of the most impressive academic and professional minds out there. Looking back, I now see where, even as lessons were being firmly implanted into my intellectual self, in my personal life, I frequently moved farther and farther away from my wild child days and my inherent genetic roots.

  Upon moving away from Beaver and on to medical school, sleep was one of the first things to go. I was surviving on fumes, burning the candle at both ends as a medical student and resident at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. If I could have, I would have stayed awake 24-7, because this was the mecca of psychiatric training. There I met with the world famous sleep researcher Dr. Allan Hobson. The irony is, although I was sleep-deprived then, he would become a good friend, guide, and mentor. We spent our days and nights in a lab, observing animal behavior in studies of sleep onset and trying to unpack what sleep was. This was the beginning of neuroscience; sleep was a subject of great interest, and it seemed as though we would discover what it was for. But as we said in our sleep chapter, we still do not know that answer. We just know we need sleep.

  I knew that eight hours was necessary for a good night’s sleep, but in my whole life I had never gotten close to this regimen. I was the wellness revolutionary who was proud of how little sleep he needed and even bragged about it. I realize now how wrong this was, and today I see that the more sleep I get, the better.

  The head and emotional leader of the department was Elvin Semrad. He was all about connecting with your patients and their bodies, how they felt, and how you could empathize with them. He shooed us away from constructs and reading, and instead got us to observe ourselves in the moment. We needed to be present with our patients to deeply understand how they felt, both in their body and at an unconscious level. This wasn’t about a symptom checklist but about being mindful and getting them to be mindful of how and where they were in pain.

  Connection is one of the most important tenets of my personal life as well. I do not work or live well alone, and so family, friends, and coworkers are a constant support. My good friend and collaborator Ned Hallowell is a champion at emphasizing the need to work at this, to create the time and rituals to connect regularly with friends. But the power of this was quite evident. We needed to ritualize it with ironclad times, or it would go away. I always created or joined groups that interested me and kept me going professionally. Bessel van der Kolk and others started a group focused on trauma, attention, and neuroscience, and we have met every second Monday of the month for more than twenty years, with frequent guest speakers on a wide variety of subjects. I have never written alone and have a new tribe formed with Dick Manning.

  Along with appreciating the power of connection, I have had a profound respect for the effect of movement on our brains and psyches. Exercise is deeply ingrained in my DNA and I feel it. From my early days in medical school, I saw the power of movement and its ability to regulate emotional well-being. In medical school, I saw an article about a hospital in Norway that was admitting depressed patients and offering our then brand-new miracle drugs (the antidepressants that effected norepinephrine) or an exercise program three times a day. The hospital claimed that each treatment had the same results. This stuck with me during my residency, when the Boston Marathon was just booming—everyone, or almost everyone, was training for the marathon, or at least running.

  In the ’70s we had just discovered endorphins, and everyone was talking about the endorphin rush and its power to stave off depression (simplistic causality was the rule). Then I learned that drugs that approximated the effects of chronic exercise and meditation—the beta-blockers, which act to tamp down the drive of the sympathetic nervous system and allow the parasympathetic to take over—were useful for aggression, violence, autistic disruptive behaviors, self-abuse, anxiety, social anxiety, stress-related disorders in general, and certainly attention deficit disorder. The magical effect of exercise on my own and others’ attention systems led to a whole career of writing about ADHD, then to the brain itself, and finally to exercise, in my most recent book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. After reviewing more than a thousand papers for this book, I redoubled my efforts to exercise daily despite my overly jammed schedule. I run, use the gym frequently to provide the scaffolding for other activities, and love hiking, and a big part of most vacations is physical activity in the mountains or near the water.

  With all my training and access to the greatest minds at Harvard and MIT, the interconnectedness of concepts in this book never really hit me until a chance encounter at a gym in a small town on the eastern coast of northern Michigan. It was here that I met Casey Stutzman, who would send me on a journey I never anticipated.

  It was here, while on vacation with my wife, that I put the final pieces of the puzzle together. Alicia’s family cottage is fairly “wild.” We were surrounded by nature, with the beauty of Lake Huron at our doorstep. We relished sleeping in until we were no longer tired, and it was the perfect environment to connect with each other and disconnect from the world. The only Internet connection involved a drive to the local library.

  Of course, exercise is always a must, and wherever we are in the world, Alicia and I seek out a gym or a hike. Being in Harrisville, Michigan, was no exception. It meant a forty-five-minute drive to the biggest city in the area, Alpena, a town of thirteen thousand, in what some would consider the middle of nowhere. By the oddest of coincidences, though, it is the town where Dick was raised, leading me to believe there’s something special in the waters of the Great Lakes. It was at the gym connected to the regional hospital rehab center that we met an enthusiastic, cutting-edge trainer, Casey Stutzman. Always expanding his knowledge and introducing the community to the latest development, he was offering Tabata and TRX training well before our fancy Los Angeles and Boston health clubs did. Casey incorporates fun and challenge into each hour, and every year since that first we’ve looked forward to our week away from the madding crowd in part because it means working with him. After one very challenging class, I told him we had just signed on to write this book, and he immediately piped up about his wife Mary Beth’s life-changing experience when she began a new diet—how bad she had been feeling, and how it had saved her life. He had also changed his diet and found that he had a lot more energy, focus, and joy in his life. This inspired me, and I began to both change my diet and mak
e sure I got outside more.

  Like many of my colleagues, I had been lowering my carbohydrate and trans fat intake for years, but now I approached this with new vigor and commitment. I concentrated on eliminating all grains from my diet. That meant no more pizzas, crackers, rice, or pasta. Finally, I gave up breads, which I had previously devoured. I added more vegetables and fruits to my usual fare and began to appreciate nuts as an easy, delicious, and filling snack. Also, I started to notice that the cream in my coffee led to a GI reaction, so I stopped that ritual and found that I actually enjoyed black coffee.

  In about six weeks, I lost ten pounds; I was close to my weight in high school. I was never overweight but had gotten a little soft around the middle like most people my age.

  Now Alicia calls me “faux paleo” because I still have Manhattans when I am in a bar or a restaurant. I’m fanatical about the diet—and it’s difficult to be, given my travel schedule, but I do notice that in restaurants and even in airports things are changing a bit, with low-carb options and farm-to-table offerings becoming more prevalent.

  I have to watch myself, as I can tend to drop below my high school weight; then I have to splurge on a pasta dinner or take a break from my usual diet for a day or two. I’ve found that I am now more “mindful” of my food and more open to new tastes and textures; I enjoy greater variety.

  I want to emphasize that I am not a paleo zealot, and I am never hungry. I have seen a great change in my energy and mood, and I no longer have the midafternoon slump I used to have before I adopted this extraordinary low-carb diet. I sleep better and have more exercise stamina, and even with my hectic schedule, my energy remains. I am hooked.

  At about the same time that my “re-wilding” was taking place, I joined an extraordinary group of researchers and caregivers on a massive project to investigate the effects of “smart living” on 360 adolescents with autism at the Center for Discovery in Harris, New York. There, on a hundred-acre farm in the middle of the Catskills, an amazing program was set up that turned the lives of many of these troubled adolescents around.

  Most of the students had been at other programs and arrived on a load of medication, or they’d been in programs that used M&M’s as a reward for good behaviors. So they came in overweight for different reasons and experienced a radical change in diet, with much of the food grown on the farm and a total elimination of sugar drinks, trans fat, and treats. They spent as much time outside as possible and spent up to 65 percent of the day moving. Their sleep was closely monitored and the intrusion of the virtual world limited as much as possible. The treatment worked magic, fairly quickly for some and more gradually for others. Disruptive behaviors diminished, weight dropped, on-task time went way up, and socialization improved.

  I am lucky enough to have the chance to re-wild at a health spa at the home of Deborah Szekely. She and her husband created Rancho La Puerta about seventy years ago, and it serves as a re-wilding paradise that people flock to from all over the world. It has exercise at the core, followed by diet—mostly grown on the land here, surrounded by beautiful mountains and flowers, where ever-present bunnies play with the many cats. It is nature in all its glory. Most of the one hundred to two hundred guests spend a large chunk of time sleeping, because there is little to do after dark—no phones, no TV, no Internet except in one small area. You can almost feel the oxytocin flowing while you drop stress by letting yourself down, down, down. There’s a three-and-a-half-mile hike up Mount Kuchumaa in the morning, followed by a day chock-full of hourly boot camps, circuit training, African dance, Zumba, yoga, Pilates, tai chi, and more. Here, we are members of a new tribe that sometimes lasts beyond the week.

  One of the things that has helped me in my own life is having the ever-present awareness of what happens to my body and mind when I don’t incorporate the principles of going wild on a daily basis. I look for ways to fit them in, whether I’m on the road or in the middle of city life in Los Angeles or Boston. I always look for a chance to run or walk outside before my day begins. And after a day with patients in Boston, I jog along the Charles River. When in L.A. with Alicia, I take a ten-minute drive to Franklin Canyon for a hike, surrounded by trees, leaving city life behind, or we head to the infamous Santa Monica Stairs, where the faithful climb up and down a set of stairs while taking in the ocean views. I monitor my sleep much more than before, shutting off the digital world early to try to get enough sleep. I keep taking on new challenges: new playful activities, new projects, new ideas to follow. All of this keeps me mindful just as walking in the woods, sorting through the novel environments, demands that I be present.

  RICHARD MANNING

  I have been instinctively drawn to wilderness my entire life, so you might think I would have figured out its benefits a long time ago and would not have waited until my sixtieth year to realize the potential of living wild to effect my own well-being. And yet here I am, for the first time in my life, fit, reasonably happy, wholly unmedicated, and optimistic. I weigh less than I did in high school, had to buy all new clothes last year, and run marathon trail races in rocks-and-ice terrain. I am sober. All of this is new.

  In truth, this turnaround was a long time coming, a product of a lifetime of thinking and living, and yet the process that led to this book, the thinking and living of these ideas, intensely built a critical mass that can be easily read today in my body and bearing. A long-held tenet of my writing life has been that there is no reason to write a book unless the process of doing so irrevocably changes your life. This book exceeded those expectations.

  It’s difficult to mark the exact moment, the single thread I pulled to begin unraveling it all, but then it is not altogether arbitrary to say it began in earnest with a fifty-dollar heart monitor. The whole process came together in a flash of realization: I was no longer taking steps to solve a problem. Instead, each new step was directed at exploring how much better life could be. I was no longer salving wounds; I was exploring a potential that seemed limitless.

  The heart monitor I owe to John. We met in the summer of 2010, by coincidence, introduced by a mutual friend, Bessel van der Kolk. I read Spark, which recommended the heart monitor but also introduced many more important matters. At about the same time, I had admitted to myself that I had become fat and sedentary, and so I would resurrect my long-standing, off-again, on-again relationship with running to get back in shape. I did that but was plagued by injuries and meager results, forcing myself into the daily slog as one would swallow a bitter pill. The heart monitor turned out to be the first step in making the pill less bitter. Inexperienced runners try to run too fast, which is torture while you are doing it but especially in the periods between runs. Too much speed too early makes the activity anaerobic, and this heady level of exertion takes a heavy toll, especially on a fat, old body. I was feeling worse, not better, but a heart monitor slows down those of us who push too hard. It governs a sustained aerobic pace, and then you start to feel better.

  I was still fat and depressed, clinically so, but I was moving. Then I happened to read Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, and it struck a deep and resonant chord in the wild side of my nature. It said nothing so much as this thing, this running I was somehow driven to do, was driven by evolution. Evolution I knew. What’s more, the book argued that I didn’t need to pound pavement negotiating a roar of ill-mannered traffic. Running could in fact be done on mountain trails, places I know and love. I live in Montana, and wild is all around, a simple fact that has more to do with my well-being than any other.

  But there were deeper tones in the chord. I had long thought and written about environmental well-being, especially about the role of agriculture in reshaping the natural world and our bodies. All of this was summarized in my 2005 book Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. This was more than environmental theory for me. I had adopted a low-carbohydrate diet in the midnineties and have all my life been a hunter. The red meat supply in my house has been dominated by venison and, in Mont
ana, elk and the occasional pronghorn antelope since I was a child. Yet, like John, I was not fanatical about my diet, occasionally lapsing into plates of pasta and, probably much more critically, drinking too much wine and beer.

  The ideas about evolution and running in McDougall’s book were an exact parallel to the arguments I had long made about food and agriculture: that we were damaging our planet and our lives by ignoring the conditions that shaped us through deep human time. Recognizing that parallel almost instantly, it seems in retrospect, brought me to two thunderbolt realizations: if this was true for food and motion, it must be true for other topics, like sleep and state of mind. But more to the point, if these matters were so fundamental and important to our well-being, they were worth more than intellectual investigation and thought: they were worth living.

  Now I play a wild card in the story: neurofeedback, which is becoming an accepted method for treating depression, among other things.

  Before I knew depression’s proper name, I had my own term, even as a kid: the black hand. I saw it settle periodically on my father, that he would for no reason retreat into brooding silence and anger, it seemed for weeks on end. Soon enough, those habits became my own, and I eventually learned to call this state depression. It is often called “the sadness for no reason,” which is true enough, but it also thrives well if you give it a reason to do so. I had spent a couple of decades leading up to this book writing especially about global environmental degradation, poverty, and government collapse, but not just writing about them. I am a meat-and-potatoes journalist and so researched these matters by traveling and reporting in some of the more desperate corners of the globe.