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3. Interview: Your Life Lived Well w/ Dr. Kevin J Payne
51 Plays2 years ago
Kevin is a social psychologist and entrepreneur, author, podcast host, speaker, teacher, and frequent guest interview or panelist. He shares the results of his extensive research concerning how to live a quality life with chronic distress, pain, and illness. He also shares his personal exploits as a collector of experiences — even while battling Multiple Sclerosis for decades. He also never misses a chance to jump from a perfectly good airplane.
Kevin's Website: http://kjpayne.com/
Kevin's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourllwell/
Your Life Lived Well Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6pH548B0mmvhY12H2qq5Qa
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Transcript
Introduction to Dr. Kevin Payne
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Pursuit of Infinity podcast. I'm Josh, one of your two hosts, and today I have a very special interview with social psychologist Dr. Kevin Payne. Kevin has a wealth of knowledge in social psychology and works to help people to live their lives well while battling chronic illness. He himself has been battling multiple sclerosis since 1989, which happens to be the year of my birth.
00:00:24
Speaker
And also he's a fully licensed skydiver. You definitely do not want to miss this one. He was one of my favorite people to talk to with so many interesting insights and inspirations. Um, and you can find all the links to his socials, his website, his book down below in the show notes.
00:00:42
Speaker
But before we get to the interview, I would just like to request that you leave a five star rating for this podcast on any platform of your choice. Also, please consider visiting our Patreon at patreon.com slash pursuit of infinity. And we're also on Instagram at pursuit of infinity pod. All of those links will also be in the show notes as
Living with MS: Challenges and Management
00:01:03
Speaker
well. Thank you for listening and please welcome our guest, Dr. Kevin J. Payne.
00:01:33
Speaker
Hi Kevin. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Glad to be here.
00:01:41
Speaker
So why don't we start off by just sort of explaining who you are and what you do? Start off with the big question, right, Josh? Sure. Let's get right into it. All right. I guess there are probably three things that are important to know about me. One is that I'm over educated. I've got a doctorate in sociology and psychology and I've spent the last
00:02:10
Speaker
30 years studying people and the last decade I've focused on the question, how can we still live well even when we're sick? And that brings us to the second crucial thing to probably know about me and that is I live with multiple sclerosis and I've had MS for
00:02:38
Speaker
Well, I've been symptomatic since 89, and it went undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for a long time there. And that's not unusual with MS at all. I was finally correctly diagnosed in 2006. So living with MS, and for people who don't know what MS is, it's an autoimmune condition that causes our central nervous system, our brain, and our spinal cord to degenerate.
00:03:08
Speaker
Because everything we think he'll do, say, goes through our brain and our spinal cord, that means the symptoms can be almost anything. And probably the third thing that your listeners will be interested in is, in spite of all that, I am an enthusiastic skydiver.
00:03:31
Speaker
And I, I came back to the sport in 2019 and that's a whole big story. I'm sure we'll get into and I've, I've logged 600 jumps since and, and I'm a, I'm a regular fully licensed rated skydiver. So why does it generally take so long? And in your case, why did it take so long to properly diagnose your symptoms as MS?
00:03:59
Speaker
Because MS symptoms are potentially almost anything. So in other words, a lot of people, in the popular mind, MS is, oh, one of those that put you in a wheelchair, right? And that's kind of the way we think about it. And that is true. That can happen. And certainly, leg issues are one of my personal challenges.
00:04:28
Speaker
And sometimes they'll go spastic. Sometimes I have difficulty walking. I never, almost never, actually we can get into this. It's a little better now, but I don't have feeling below my knees. And so that's certainly part of it. But I'm always in pain. So chronic pain is part of it. I'm always fatigued.
00:04:53
Speaker
So I'm always tired. You know, the best I ever get, even if I get a good night's sleep and I do everything right, which I do most of the time, the best I get is tired. And there's always cognitive fog that's going around. It's always, you know, a little bit confusing and a little bit fuzzy around the edges of my world. And so
00:05:21
Speaker
Those are all things that are very common with MS and that I certainly live with as well. How do you find that you keep your mental clarity during painful situations? Well, I had to, and this is kind of an interesting thing because there was a time where
00:05:51
Speaker
my pain became so overwhelming. I was popping like 20 or more ibuprofen a day. And I refused to go on an opioid for it. Because just personally, I didn't want to go there. I didn't want that challenge that went along with it because
00:06:13
Speaker
I'd already known the research surrounding that at the time. And I thought that's just not an additional challenge that I wanted to take on at that point. So for me, managing pain was about retraining my brain and reframing the experience. And so I still feel
00:06:43
Speaker
pain. I still feel that pain is there. It's just not overwhelming. And it's probably fair to say I reframed it so that I don't care any longer. And and I did that through meditation and exercise and just rebuilding some different habits. And in the way that I negotiated
00:07:14
Speaker
my world, even though it has got this layer of pain over it.
00:07:22
Speaker
Yeah, that kind of brings me to a quote that I found on your website, which was, most of our challenges are non-medical. And I think you covered the changing of behaviors type of portion of it. So does your background in psychology assist you in changing the way that you approach the altering of your behaviors?
Psychological Insights and Chronic Illness
00:07:50
Speaker
Oh, it's crucial. It's crucial. It is one of those things that, you know, after I was diagnosed, and I knew what I was dealing with, I started getting into the research surrounding MS. And then that wasn't enough. I was interested in other conditions, because what what I'm interested in as a social psychologist is is not
00:08:21
Speaker
diagnosis specific, it's about, well, how do we deal with the experience of life with a chronic health condition that is not going to go away? How do we deal with that experience? And that's really crucial because by definition, a chronic health condition is something that medicine doesn't have a cure for. They may Sunday.
00:08:51
Speaker
but they don't now. And I still have a life to live. I can't wait until medicine figures it out. So for me, I was interested in how can I use my education to help myself, but more important to help other people as well, because I've had, I've had the privilege
00:09:18
Speaker
of being really educated in a field that I care about a lot. And a lot of people don't have that luxury. And I got that. And so that means that I think because I had that privilege, I have an obligation to pull something out of that that's going to be useful.
00:09:49
Speaker
And so for me, that's why over the last decade, I focused on how do we live well with a health condition that's not going to go away. And that began with me and understanding my own conditions, but then
00:10:08
Speaker
You know, I'm a scientist. Research methodology is my primary specialization. So I did the research. And so I interviewed hundreds. I surveyed thousands. I built a scraper that went out on the web and collected 2.23 million data points. I did meta-analyses across thousands of studies because I think we get too caught up sometimes in our specific diagnosis.
00:10:35
Speaker
And that's really crucial. And I don't want to downplay that because that gives us a label to hang it on and a way to understand it, but it also gives us access within the medical system to crucial treatments and supports. But day in and day out, that I have MS, doesn't really help me better cope.
00:11:05
Speaker
What I live with is the experience of, oh, my legs aren't working right now. Or, oh, I'm in pain. Or, oh, I'm really fatigued. And there can be lots of different medical causes for that. And obviously, as we've already said, medicine can only do so much to help us. But we are not just bodies.
00:11:28
Speaker
where bodies with brains and minds and behaviors and relationships and environments and all of those things can be tweaked and modified to adapt to a life that we care more about and that we want to be engaged with. So as a social psychologist who not only lives with a chronic illness but spent many years
00:11:58
Speaker
supporting a wife who was dealing with a very advanced cancer. I lived it not only as diagnosed, but as caregiver. And my educational background gave me kind of a unique set of concerns and a different lens into having this experience.
00:12:24
Speaker
So how were you able to manage while dealing with your own symptoms, also balancing the fact that you had to care for your wife? Oh, evidently I sucked on it and evidently she did too. It completely blew up our relationship and we'd known each other for decades and had gone through a lot to do that.
00:12:50
Speaker
year after year after year after year of two chronic illnesses in the house completely blew up our family. And, and that's another reason why I devoted myself to what I'm doing now, because even though I had the education, that's the knowing of it. That's not the understanding of living it. And, and I wished
00:13:19
Speaker
that I had somebody who could provide me with a better framework for understanding and living it back when I was first diagnosed or she was first diagnosed, right? And if I can do anything to help others not go through that level of pain and heartbreak and awfulness
00:13:48
Speaker
that I went through, then that means that I've pulled something good out of something really bad. Why don't we backtrack and sort of begin with you sort of explaining your first sort of symptoms and how you were diagnosed? Sure. So back in 1989, I
00:14:17
Speaker
I just turned 20 when this started and I was in college and I was in a really demanding undergraduate academic program. And so it was stressful. So I started having weird experiences. My balance started just kind of going wonky on me. I started itching everywhere. I was tired.
00:14:49
Speaker
I was mentally kind of foggy and I got really down about the whole thing. Cause that's a lot of little weird kind of squishy, hard to define symptoms that are going on. And so after a few months of that, I went to the physician.
00:15:16
Speaker
And he diagnosed me as clinically depressed. I was like, Oh, okay, you know, that that could certainly be it. And and I certainly had those symptoms, but I also had some other symptoms that were not associated with, you know, the depression. So he sent me on to a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist confirmed that I was dealing with a major depression and put me on drugs. And I tried
00:15:46
Speaker
The first one, it didn't work. I tried the second one, it didn't work. I tried the third one, it didn't work. And so my diagnosis got added with the TAG, treatment resistant. And so they just kind of left it at that. And then a few months later, I felt better again and kind of went back into my normal life.
00:16:12
Speaker
And so then there were spells of this sort of thing that kind of came and went over the next few years. And the worst one was in the late 90s. And by this time, I had gone through all the coursework from my doctorate. I'd set my comprehensive exams. And I was now teaching at a couple of universities, and I was writing on my dissertation.
00:16:41
Speaker
the wheels just came off my life. I was, you know, again, dealing with the fatigue and the cognitive fog. And I didn't know what it was. And I slipped into a really deep depression. And this time, in under two years, I gained 120 pounds.
00:17:08
Speaker
I went from what had normally been a 27 inch waist to barely squeezing into a 46 inch pan. And so everything had just kind of come apart and I didn't really understand what it was. So one morning I wake up and I walk into the bathroom and I look at myself in the mirror and it's like I was really seeing myself
00:17:32
Speaker
for the first time in a couple of years. And I thought, oh my gosh, I look like the guy who ate Kevin. So I very slowly, very carefully started trying to rebuild the habits that I had lost in my life and started exercising again, stopped eating out all the time. I stopped, you know, up to that time I'd probably
00:18:03
Speaker
drunk two liters or more of Mountain Dew a day for years. And I quit soft drinks. I started exercising again. I started eating healthy again. I started meditating again. And within the next couple of years, I was back down to a me that I could recognize.
00:18:29
Speaker
So yeah, within four years there, I gained and lost 120 pounds. And life was back on, I got my dissertation finished and we settled down and started having a family and went on with my professor career and then things were going pretty well until 2002. And in 2002,
00:18:54
Speaker
I woke up one morning and I couldn't feel my left leg below my knee. I thought that's kind of weird, but I figured I had just like overdone my workout the day before, maybe pinched a nerve or something like that. So I didn't think a lot about it. And in a few days it was back to normal and I thought, okay, that's good. And then it was gone again and then back. And then it started happening with different body parts.
00:19:22
Speaker
And I just lived with this for a while until finally one morning I woke up and I could feel my right arm and my head, but the rest of my body was gone. And at this point, my then wife said, I'm putting my foot down. You're going to go get this like that. So I did. And that kick started, you know, a series of consults and tests and stuff like that. And
00:19:51
Speaker
I eventually walked away with or limped away with MS diagnosis. And so that was, you know, and by this time it's 2006. So a relatively common story with MS, it takes a long time to diagnose because it's often a diagnosis of exclusion.
00:20:17
Speaker
They go through all of the other more likely explanations that it could be until you're left with MS. And then in my case, once they got a high quality MRI, they could tell that there had been lesions all through my brain and spinal cord and had been around for a long time.
00:20:41
Speaker
Did you find that there was a sense of like relief knowing what it was that was going on with you finally having a diagnosis? You betcha. And, and that's really common. It's on the one hand it's, it's never pleasant to get a diagnosis like that, but it is such a relief to have a name for, for what the weirdness is.
00:21:10
Speaker
And it's such a relief to then have a body of knowledge that you can start kind of diving into and helping yourself understand more of what it is you're dealing with. And of course, it's really crucial to get that label, to get that diagnosis so that you can get access to whatever medical care is available.
00:21:36
Speaker
at the time. Of course, they're not going to cure me and they may or may not come up with a cure in my lifetime. I'd be delighted if they did, but there are good disease modifying drugs for MS out there. A DMD is not a drug that is helping my symptoms, for example, but what it does mean is that
00:22:05
Speaker
Over the course of this disease, I am likely to have less degeneration and likely to maintain a higher level of functioning for longer and likely to have fewer exacerbations and less serious exacerbations. So that's all and good.
00:22:30
Speaker
So what was your treatment plan upon discovering that MS was your diagnosis? Did your doctor sort of go over like a multi-step treatment plan? Was there like any setbacks within that? Well, there's, I mean, generally speaking, our medical system is geared to
00:22:58
Speaker
Here's a drug, here's a surgery, here's something, do this and then go live your life normal. And there's not a lot of, you know, they're just not trained that way. So I was put on a disease modifying drug and back then the only disease modifying drugs for MS were injectable. So I just started injecting myself several times a week and
00:23:27
Speaker
That's no fun. And some of your listeners may be living with diabetes and they certainly know it's no fun to inject yourself all the time. But that's what I was living with. And then a few years later, the first oral meds for MS came out on the market and I switched to one of those. So there's that drug. And then there's also
00:23:56
Speaker
For various symptoms, they'll try something that may help. In other words, for MS, it's common to take some kind of pain medication. It's common to take some kind of medication for fatigue and for confusion or focus. They cross-purpose some drugs for
00:24:23
Speaker
anxiety, ADHD, depression, that sort of thing for treatment of some MS symptoms. And I've tried some of those over the years and most of them didn't work real well for me for very long. So I find symptom management for me is more effective with cognitive and emotional and behavioral and environmental changes.
00:24:52
Speaker
It's so interesting to me because that goes along the lines of something that doctors don't necessarily recommend much is are like lifestyle changes, whether it be behavioral or mental. So I guess that would bring us to some of your
00:25:13
Speaker
It's like the skydiving and some of the things that you've been doing to mitigate the mental aspect of it. So can you go into some of the things that you've done lifestyle wise to adapt?
Skydiving as Therapy
00:25:27
Speaker
Yeah, certainly on the more conventional front, then I start my day with meditation and I lift weights and I row and so I'm
00:25:40
Speaker
working my body and working my mind. And then I also spend some time writing each morning. And so those are things that I do that are not only intrinsically good, they help me build and keep the necessary capacity I need so that I can go through a day and build a life that I'm interested in living. The one that is
00:26:07
Speaker
probably more extreme and unusual is skydiving for me, is therapy. The story behind me in skydiving, I'll give you the really brief synopsis. I wanted to be a skydiver from the time I was a kid in the 70s. I thought it was fascinating. I really wanted to do it in the 90s while I was in graduate school. I did the training for the first time and I got a handful of jumps in, but
00:26:37
Speaker
skydiving isn't really a hobby, it's a lifestyle choice. It demands a lot of time and energy. And I just could not do that and complete a doctorate at the same time. So that had to kind of be put on the back burner. And then, you know, so education and career and then family and young kids, and then eventually health got in the way. And I
00:27:03
Speaker
eventually despaired of ever being able to go back and get to it. So when I hit my absolute bottom a few years ago, and I had had a really serious exacerbation that had taken out a good chunk of my right frontal temporal region. And so I'm dealing with severe cognitive issues, emotional regulation,
00:27:33
Speaker
social signaling, lots of stuff like that. And it just really destroyed our family. And so I'm alone. And then my dog even died, dramatically, in front of me. And so my careers in shambles, nothing that I wanted out of life could I see a path toward again.
00:28:01
Speaker
And I really despaired of ever finding a way. And so I thought, I will give myself finally at the end of the rope, I literally couldn't see a path forward. I thought, I'm going to give myself one more shot. I'm going to give myself one more chance to try to reclaim something that I value about my life and that gives me
00:28:30
Speaker
confidence and hope in life, that I can still build something out of this mess that that I value. So I said, I'm going to go back and become a skydiver. And that was in 2019. So I had to go back and I did the training again. And
00:28:54
Speaker
started now to get your A license that your first license in skydiving generally takes 25 jumps. I was dealing with wonky legs that didn't want to stay in control and I couldn't feel the wind on my legs so I wasn't getting the right kind of sensory input that I needed and so it took me 47 jumps to get my A license and
00:29:24
Speaker
I had to do a lot of extra work in the vertical wind tunnels with, with an instructor right there who was like holding my leg in position saying, this is exactly where it needs to be so that I could learn, even though I couldn't feel on like below my knee, I could feel the tension, say in my tendons behind my knee there in my, in, in my lower, you know, my, my lower five. So.
00:29:53
Speaker
I had to get creative. I had a really good team of people with drop zone that worked with me and helped me. And I got my license. And in 2019, I logged around 140 jobs or so. And then in 2020, I set myself a bigger goal. I said, I want to be a serious skydiver.
00:30:17
Speaker
And so what would that mean? Well, 500 jumps in skydiving is kind of an important milestone. 500 jumps is when you're qualified for all the levels of licensing in the sport, and you are eligible for professional ratings. So I wanted to do that. And what that would mean was, if I were to do it in 2020, I would have to, from where I was then, I would have to log better than a jump a day.
00:30:48
Speaker
in 2020. So I set a goal of at least 366 goals and jumps in 2020. And I logged 370 and I broke 500 and I got my licenses and I got my co-trading. And so I came out a serious rated regular license skydiver. And that was
00:31:12
Speaker
That was really crucial to me. That was like, this is something that was for me, a big goal, a stretch goal, a goal that I didn't know whether I could achieve with my body and my brain. Because the very first thing they tell you when you're diagnosed with multiple sclerosis is avoid stress. Well, skydiving is an inherently stressful activity.
00:31:38
Speaker
flinging your body at the earth is not natural under any circumstances. So how how did it feel for you to finally hit that goal something that you didn't think was even possible for you? Yeah, I mean, I was I was I was really proud of myself for the first time in a long time. I because
00:32:09
Speaker
On the one hand, I went back to skydiving to reclaim a childhood dream that I thought I'd lost. But on the other hand, I'm not naturally a fearful person, but I had become afraid of my own body because my own body had betrayed me so many times in so many different creative ways. And when you skydive,
00:32:40
Speaker
you have to be able to save yourself. You're putting yourself into in a circumstance where you're headed to the earth that 120, 150, 200 miles an hour, whatever, depending on the orientation that you're flying in. And there will come a point where you've got to deploy your own parachute, or you're going to die. Now, we do have all kinds of safeties and backups and that sort of thing. But nevertheless, you every time you exit,
00:33:09
Speaker
you've got to deploy your your your shoot and you've got to pilot yourself to a safe landing. And putting myself into a position where I had to do that every single day. That was that was a big stretch goal for me, and that gave me a lot of confidence that I could then carry into the rest of my life.
00:33:39
Speaker
because I can say, yeah, as a matter of fact, I'm the kind of guy who can fling myself to earth and save myself every time. You said that the first thing a doctor will tell you is to avoid stressful situations. So do you find that there are different types of stressful situations, some that would benefit you and some that would not?
Stress and Personal Growth
00:34:09
Speaker
skydiving being one of the things that would be beneficial? That is a wonderful question. And this is a topic that I spend a lot of time on in the book, Your Life Lived Well. Snazzy book, snazzy cover. And there are two different kinds of stress, okay?
00:34:38
Speaker
They're called distress, bad stress, and eustress, EU stress, right? Eustress is good stress. And they're right next to one another at what I call the edge. So think of the edge as a ratio. Whatever you have in front of you to do, whatever task it is, it has a certain demand to it. In other words, there's certain things that you're going to have to do in the right way in order to succeed.
00:35:08
Speaker
And we also have a certain capacity that we're walking around with in the world. And if your capacity is really high and your demand is really low, well, you're going to succeed all the time and things are going to be very easy. But as we are more challenged and that demand comes closer and closer to the capacity we can deliver in that moment, we start triggering the stress response, okay, our acute stress response. And that acute stress response
00:35:37
Speaker
Sometimes we call it the fight or flight response, and we talk about it being fear, but it's not. It's not really fear. It's challenge. When our system senses a challenge in front of us, it's going to amp us up so that we have our bodily resources, our cognitive resources available to handle a really targeted task right here, right now in this moment. And then,
00:36:07
Speaker
If the demand reaches over the capacity we can deliver, well, that's still stressful, right? But now it's distressing. This is eustress going up here. Now it's distressing and we are overwhelmed and we will fail. And if it's really quite a bit more demand than the capacity we can deliver in that moment, then this is trauma. And we have to understand that we have
00:36:35
Speaker
physical challenges, but we also have cognitive challenges, emotional challenges, behavioral challenges, social challenges, all those things. And if we if we start looking at the world as challenges, rather than as fear, that's the first step in that reframing. Because fear isn't the acute stress response. Fear is how we framed
00:37:03
Speaker
acute stress response. Fear is how we framed it when we say, oh there's a challenge in front of me and I don't believe I can succeed. I am likely to fail and that's going to hurt or that's going to have consequences that I'm really trying to avoid and fear is the next layer beyond pain in our system. So pain
00:37:30
Speaker
is a really ancient somatic bodily system that warns us away from something that could be negative and harmful to us. Fear gives us a little more distance and a little more warning, okay? But it's doing the same kind of thing. And what we have to understand is that our fear responses are adapted to be overly conservative.
00:37:59
Speaker
So in other words, they're adapted to be overly protective. They're things, and you've had this experience. Everybody listening has had this experience where there's something they feared, and then they got into it, and they were like, oh, I can do this. This is a really cool experience, right? And so we have to learn to better interrogate that fear response.
00:38:31
Speaker
because sometimes it's holding us back when it should and we should listen to it, but sometimes it's holding us back because it's overprotective. And with skydiving, you see all the fear is on the inside of the door. When you are on the inside of the door, those first few jumps, you're looking out and it's like, this is freaking crazy. But once you are out on the other side, it is the most mindful, present,
00:39:01
Speaker
in this moment living that you will ever experience. And it is joyful. And it's amazing. But you got to go through the fear to get to it. It seems that most spiritual experiences require you to sort of befriend your fear, sort of put it in its proper function and surrender to it in a way
00:39:26
Speaker
And then like you said, on the other side of fear is joy and true spirituality. So can you talk a little bit about what it feels like to be falling from thousands of feet in the air spiritually? Yeah. And I'm so glad you brought this up because spiritual experiences are commonly like that because they are age experiences.
00:39:53
Speaker
And that's part of those crucial edges that we have to interrogate. And so for me, the experience of hurtling through the sky. Now first, the first thing that's important for people to understand is you don't feel like you're falling when you're skydiving. You feel like you're floating. You feel like you're flying.
00:40:22
Speaker
And the reason is because there's, there's nothing nearby to give you the context of falling. So you're just out there and, and, you know, occasionally there's cloud or there's another person or something, and that gives you a little context, but you feel like you're flying, you're floating. And that is an amazing, no pun intended uplifting,
00:40:49
Speaker
Experience that that is joyful you feel weightless suspended in this and and it has a characteristic of a spiritual experience in another way the second way is On the one hand you feel really really small and tiny and insignificant
00:41:16
Speaker
in the midst of this enormous, endless sky. And you see all the works of humanity spread out below you and the city looks tiny and all that, and you feel small. But at the same time, paradoxically, you also feel expansive. You feel so large and so big and so connected
00:41:46
Speaker
to everything. It is just because you're seeing the world from horizon to horizon and and you are out there and especially on days when they're like really beautiful clouds that nobody gets to see except from you know it's only skydivers and pilots they get to see it from this perspective and pilots have a window in between them and and
00:42:11
Speaker
And, or like on a sunset load or a sunset sunrise load where you've got the beautiful magic hour colors that are filling the sky. And, and you are there with your friends and, and you are like say tracking along the edge of a cloud. And that is a beautiful, glorious experience. So, and then, you know, at, at like,
00:42:38
Speaker
20 seconds or like at 5,000 feet, you've got 27 seconds left to live. And that's kind of high for experienced skydiver to deploy at, but generally will be deployed by 3,000 feet. And 3,000 feet, you've got about 18, 16 seconds to live, something like that. And so the experience of waving off and deploying your parachute is, and then suddenly
00:43:07
Speaker
And you're just flying among the clouds, right? And you're flying in the air. And you want to turn left, you want to turn right, you want to spin, you want to, you know, whatever you want to do, you're flying. And I had a jump a little over a year ago, where if you look on my social media, you can see the little video clip that I posted about it, where as I'm flying a bald eagle,
00:43:38
Speaker
makes a couple of strafing runs on me and then he comes right in ahead of me and flies in formation with me. Now, how can something like that not be just an awesome, humbling experience? And I find skydiving, yeah, it makes me feel competent.
00:44:04
Speaker
and and yeah like I've got this but it is also humbling and and I'm not a a religious person you know in a traditional sense in any way but the only way I can describe it so the basic way of skydiving you've seen it is called belly to earth and and we're making like a big x in the sky and then if you want to
00:44:33
Speaker
shoot forward and you want to travel along, then you sweep your arms back and you extend your legs so that you look like Iron Man. And so you can, in less than a second, accelerate from 120 miles an hour to 200 miles an hour. I mean, that is
00:45:00
Speaker
mind blowing, right? And when you do that, the only way I can explain this, the way that it feels, is it feels like the hand of God just reaches up below you and pushes you through the sky. Because you can feel that air and you just get into this groove and it's just, and there's an amazing, awesome spiritual feeling.
00:45:32
Speaker
That's beautiful. And almost everywhere. I mean, a lot of times we'll, we'll call it the church of altitude. So the cover of your book at what point during the jump was that photo taken and how was that photo taken? Yeah. That's so cool. I say, you know, people say, don't judge a book by their cover, but I wanted a cover that was the story of the book.
00:46:01
Speaker
And so I had a really specific image in my head that I wanted to be on the book. And so it took us eight jumps over six weeks because the atmospheric conditions had to be just right. I had that sun on the horizon and we had to jump and I had to orient it so it was behind me and I wanted some big, beautiful puffy clouds at the right place. And so on this jump, that cloud layer is about 4,000 feet.
00:46:29
Speaker
So I had to be a little bit above it. So that's about 5,000 feet when I'm pulling to get the right look. So I had to hit my mark and my cameraman had to come in and get it framed up perfectly to get that shot. And we'd only have one shot at it a day because you can't get down and back up again and still have the sun where I needed it to be and all that.
00:46:57
Speaker
So what I'm doing on that cover is my hands are, you can see my hands up on my forehead and I'm about to make this big sweeping gesture as I extend my arms out. And that's a universal skydiving gesture. All skydivers recognize this. It's called the wave off.
00:47:18
Speaker
And the wave off is so we've we've done our freefall and we've had our fun and we've done formations or free flying or whatever it is that we're doing. And now we have to get separate from one another so that we can each safely deploy our parachutes. So we track away from one another and we get the wave off signal and the wave off signal says to everybody in my airspace,
00:47:47
Speaker
watch out, I'm about to take action to save myself and deploy my parachute. And that's the message that I wanted to get across to people with the cover of this book. When you pick up this book, you are about to take action to save yourself. And you may feel like you are out of control, like you're free falling through your life, like
00:48:14
Speaker
You are overwhelmed by all the circumstances of your life, but right now you do this and you are about to take action to save yourself. So along with the book and all of the experience that you have, what sort of things do you offer in the realm of living your life well?
Improving Quality of Life for Chronic Illness Sufferers
00:48:36
Speaker
Yeah, as a social behavioral scientist, I focus on all the non medical ways that we can improve our quality of life. And by improving our quality of life, coincidentally, we also often improve our health in some way as well. But but I'm not focused on the health part of it. I'm focused on all the stuff that the medical therapeutic community doesn't
00:49:07
Speaker
focus on. Again, we've got chronic conditions, so medicine doesn't have a solution for what we're doing. They're just giving us something to maybe help manage some symptoms or something like that. Well, I'm interested in living a good quality life and I want other people to live a good quality life.
00:49:31
Speaker
We do seminars and webinars and, uh, you know, guidance sessions and, uh, you know, in a few months there'll be a mobile app and, you know, all these tools that are about helping you figure out which ones of these things are going to work for you. So what I want to really emphasize, and it's this point of difference. And that is a lot of people are out there are, are,
00:50:01
Speaker
pushing, well, here is the way that you need to live in order to live a good life. And somebody else has their way, and somebody else has their way, and none of them agree. And all of them will work for someone, but only some of them will work for you. So what I'm interested in is helping you develop the tools so that you can make better decisions
00:50:29
Speaker
for building the path that's going to work for you. Because your path isn't my path. Yeah, maybe you'll end up wanting to jump out of an airplane, but I'm not going to push that on anybody who doesn't want to do it. And so with the book, with the curriculum, with the other materials, it's about giving you tools that are grounded in
00:51:00
Speaker
thousands of studies and decades of cognitive and behavioral and social and emotional and biomedical science that says these are things that work, but here's how you make a choice for which things can work for you.
00:51:24
Speaker
Cause I don't want to be, yeah, I don't want to be guru. I don't want to be, you know, anything like that. I don't want anybody to follow my path. I want to empower people to be confident in their own paths. Yeah. There's not enough of that for sure. And, uh, I really appreciate that perspective and all the work that you do. And thank you so much for being a part of this. Um, where can, where can we find you?
00:51:54
Speaker
Uh, you can find me at YourLifeLivedWell.co and YourLifeLivedWell.co will have, we've got all the links to all the social, you know, on social, YourLifeLivedWell is your LL well on pretty much all the platforms. And I am personally Dr. KJ Payne, Dr. KJ Payne, pretty much everywhere. Uh, so you can certainly find those. Um, there's the YourLifeLivedWell podcast.
00:52:24
Speaker
which is it's an informational podcast and it's available anywhere you want to consume your podcast. Kevin, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. And your story is very inspiring. Well, I, I appreciate that. And, and, and, you know, I'm, I'm delighted that people find it inspiring, but what I care about is what we do after the inspiration fades because the inspiration will fade.
00:52:54
Speaker
So how do we keep going? And anybody out there who wants to talk or anything, I am delighted to help others in their journeys to try to still live full lives, even if we have a diagnosis, even if we're a caregiver, even if we're medical health wellness professionals who are trying to figure out ways to
00:53:22
Speaker
do better for our patients, but still maintain a life for ourselves. So thank you again, Josh, so much. I appreciate it.