Eric-Jorgenson The-Almanack-of-Naval-Ravikant indd

you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will 
be a lot harder. [4]
MEDITATION 
IS
INTERMITTENT
FASTING
FOR THE MIND.

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MEDITATION + MENTAL STRENGTH
An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future 
impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually 
exaggerated or wrong.
Why is meditation so powerful?
Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic 
nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s 
involuntary, but you can also control it.
I think a lot of meditation practices put an emphasis on the 
breath because it is a gateway into your autonomic nervous 
system. There are many, many cases in the medical and spiri-
tual literature of people controlling their bodies at levels that 
should be autonomous.
Your mind is such a powerful thing. What’s so unusual about 
your forebrain sending signals to your hindbrain and your 
hindbrain routing resources to your entire body?
You can do it just by breathing. Relaxed breathing tells your 
body you’re safe. Then, your forebrain doesn’t need as many 
resources as it normally does. Now, the extra energy can be 
sent to your hindbrain, and it can reroute those resources to 
the rest of your body.
I’m not saying you can beat whatever illness you have just 
because you activated your hindbrain. But you’re devoting 
most of the energy normally required to care about the exter-
nal environment to the immune system.

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S A V I N G Y O U R S E L F · 169
I highly recommend listening to the Tim Ferriss’s podcast with 
Wim Hof. He is a walking miracle. Wim’s nickname is the Ice 
Man. He holds the world record for the longest time spent in 
an ice bath and swimming in freezing cold water. I was very 
inspired by him, not only because he’s capable of super-human 
physical feats, but because he does it while being incredibly 
kind and happy—which is not easy to accomplish.
He advocates cold exposure, because he believes people are 
too separate from their natural environment. We’re constantly 
clothed, fed, and warm. Our bodies have lost touch with the 
cold. The cold is important because it can activate the immune 
system.
So, he advocates taking long ice baths. Being from the Indian 
subcontinent, I’m strongly against the idea of ice baths. But 
Wim inspired me to give cold showers a try. And I did so by 
using the Wim Hof breathing method. It involves hyperventi-
lating to get more oxygen into your blood, which raises your 
core temperature. Then, you can go into the shower.
The first few cold showers were hilarious because I’d slowly 
ease myself in, wincing the entire way. I started about four or 
five months ago. Now, I turn the shower on full-blast, and then 
I walk right in. I don’t give myself any time to hesitate. As soon 
as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it’s going to 
be, I know I have to walk in.
I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffer-
ing comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold 
shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re 
in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is 
different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your 

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body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t 
mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes 
isn’t going to kill you.
Having a cold shower helps you re-learn that lesson every 
morning. Now hot showers are just one less thing I need out 
of life. [2]
Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.
Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many 
distractions lead to a heavy mind.
Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, 
journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us 
from mentally fat to fit.