Men Are Paying For Amygdala

Guys know something is missing:

Rusty Rahm was perched on a stool, his legs tethered to the piece of furniture and his arms bound behind him. A man stuffed a wad of gauze into Rahm’s mouth and taped it shut, then shoved Vaseline up his nostrils.

He sat like that for more than an hour as an EMT watched.

“Obviously I was having trouble breathing at that point,” said Rahm, a 47-year-old entrepreneur who owns seven different companies and lives in Kansas City, Mo.

“But I was a smoker — and they told me if I continued to smoke, that’s what my breathing would be like if someone tried to kick down the door and break into my home and I had to protect my family.”

“They” are the coaches of Warrior Week — an intensive program for male executives from tech, finance and other high-pressure industries to learn the “hidden science of accessing (nearly) unlimited sex, power and money as a married business man,” according to the program’s website. Rahm shelled out $10,000 for the privilege of being bound, gagged and run ragged for five days and nights in Laguna Beach, Calif., in April.

Drills included being thrown off a boat into the Pacific Ocean while blindfolded, dunked into a tank of ice water, and visiting a cemetery where the men are told they will die in 20 minutes and must first write goodbye letters to their loved ones.

“We teach them how to be a man,” said Warrior Week founder Garrett J. White…

“It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done,” said Thukkaram. He loved it so much that he — and his session’s 10 other participants — signed up for a year of customized coaching with White for $25,000 each.

Guys are made for threats and challenges. When you remove those amygdala stimulants, the human machine is designed to go neurotic, but that isn’t a bug, that is a feature. It is a way of driving the compulsive hedonism that produces success in r-selection.

But just as junkies who hit the heroin every day suddenly find their lives feel worthless and empty, succumbing to the rigors of the pleasure of amygdala atrophy has the same effect. You can see it somewhat in marital arts. When you fight regularly on the mat, you’ll feel calm and relaxed. If you stop, it is mildly unpleasant for a few weeks, as you build up an irritation that you were venting, and then adjust to that irritation.

It is interesting humans are noting the deficiency, and linking the restoration of the amygdala’s function through hardship to the acquisition of the warrior psychology. Now the question you have to ask is, what is the psychology that arises in the exact opposite circumstances, when the amygdala is deficient?

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