Zibby speaks with Tom Rosshirt about his poignant and transformational new book, CHASING PEACE: A Story of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and the Spiritual Power of Neuroscience. Tom shares his extraordinary journey from debilitating chronic illnesses, depression, and anxiety to healing through the latest practices in brain science. He explains how self-directed neuroplasticity—a daily practice of retraining the brain—helped him reorient his relationship with pain, fear, illness, and suppressed feelings. This one’s a must-listen for anyone seeking practical tools for living a fuller, healthier life!

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome Tom. I'm so excited to have you on the show today to talk about Chasing Peace, a story of breakdowns, breakthroughs, and the spiritual power of neuroscience. Congratulations on your book. 

Tom: Thank you. Thank you. 

Zibby: I'm also obsessed with this cover because this is the wallpaper, very close to the wallpaper I have in my bookstore in Santa Monica and my home and everywhere in my office here in New York.

And like, I'm just,.. 

Tom: Look behind you, you can see that I've got the same color and I didn't even notice it until the cover came. And I thought they don't know what my wall coloring is on my office, but anyway, thank you. I appreciate that. 

Zibby: I can give you the Farrow and Ball, you know. wallpaper info if you need another little, you know, matching, matching room.

But, and next time I'm in the store, I'll hold your book up and I'll show you. 

But anyway, of course, this is the most superficial way to start because your book is incredibly deep on so many levels and actually is sort of changing the way I think about things. And I was saying to you earlier that there were no parts of this book that I could skim because you had personal information scattered throughout and in every chapter you're telling us stories about you and then philosophy and perspective and it's just so much good stuff as an overly simplistic way to say it.

So why don't you give a sort of a general description and so people know what we're talking about. 

Tom: Sure. Well, the centerpiece of the book. And the reason I came to write the book is that I had been trying meditation of all kinds for a very long period of time and I prided myself on that, but the truth of the matter was I developed some mysterious stress related illness that drove me out of my life.

And just let me give you a short story, which is really hard for people who have gone for eight years of doctor journeys to make it short. But basically I had reached 50 or so and I felt that was in a decline. I was more often depressed. I didn't have the same level of energy. And I started writing down my symptoms in a book, which I don't recommend because it compounds them.

But then one day I woke up with terrifying brain fog and depression and anxiety bordering on panic. It was closer to panic. And I was driving later that day and I thought, how did I end up on this road? And then later that same day, I went into the cupboard to grab something and I found Vegetables that should have been in the refrigerator and then I went to the doctor and she said yeah I don't see what's going on with you, but go to neurology and neurology they gave me a bunch of tests and many of them were abnormal abnormal But they didn't have any diagnosis and they didn't have any treatment so I started wandering among doctors and let me just interrupt right now to say the moral of this story is that running from fear can make us sick and facing fear can make us well.

So I was super souped up on fear. And I was hearing more frightening diagnosis and test results. And then I went from one to another and they started to identify, Oh, you're reacting to mold or, Oh, you're reacting to chemicals, or you're reacting to this kind of food. And everything I reacted to, I tried to remove from my environment.

So my diet got smaller and smaller. I tried to get my environment cleaner and cleaner. But it kept accelerating and I kept finding doctors willing to enable this fear quest that I had until finally some said you need to move out of your house. It's a hundred year old house in a humid area of Washington D. C. You're not going to get it clean to the level that you need. You need to move out. Meanwhile, though, the thing that really terrified me or the image was dementia. I thought that was the thing that drove me. If I look at fears and various intensity of fears. I can measure the intensity of the fear in me by how crazy is the thing I'm willing to do to get away from the fear So I moved away from my home my neighborhood my wife my kids my dog my yard my life And I went 30 minutes away and lived in a very clean apartment with great air purifiers and I was taking saunas and from one thing after another and then in one of the luckiest turns of my life, someone said to me, would you like to join a support group of people who have what you have?

And I said, well, if they're able to identify what they have and they think it's mine, yeah, I want to join. And she said, but let me make this caution. It's not about the best supplement. It's not about some new tea. It's not about a new diet. It's not about taking the right kind of sauna. It's about retraining your brain.

And I said, okay, I'm a hundred times in. And I read this book wired for healing by Annie Hopper. I got the DVDs. I went to the workshop in five day in person workshop. And then within a month, I cleaned out that apartment. I cleaned out the cupboard of 81 bottles of supplements, put them in a trash bag, drop them down the chute, headed to the elevator and went home.

And that was six years ago. And it just, the essence of it was, reversing avoidance. The essence was changing my relationship from fear, from doing everything I could to avoid it. Like, if I had any sensation that scared me, I would want to track it down. What caused it? Was it a food? Was it environment? Was it exposure?

I gotta find out what it is and eliminate it so I never have to feel that again. So, I was in a very ironic state that, I had done meditation for years that was about have equanimity with every sensation. And I stumbled into a pit where I didn't have equanimity with any sensation. And I knew people who were watching me were very worried about me.

And I knew I was headed to a smaller and narrower life. And I had depression, which when you read the book, I had depression that had me like worried that I'm not going to be able to live a natural life feeling as badly as I do, but I found someone who had cured herself from extreme reaction to chemicals by going on a houseboat boat where she didn't react and reading neuroscience and saying, look, I go down the detergent aisle and I react like crazy, but no one else does.

So it's not in the stimulus. It's in my response. How can I rewire my response? And she did it for herself. And now she's doing it for others. And that's basically what led to the book, but that was the first move. That was like the mother of all the other breakthroughs, but that was the start and it was reorienting my response to fear.

Zibby: I think the conclusion in the book is that your mind is in control of your brain, which I love. Because that empowers everybody to fix or handle whatever comes their way, right? 

Tom: Right. Well, Jeffrey Schwartz, uh, the research psychiatrist put out that book, Your Mind Is Not Your Brain, but he says your mind, your mind definitely can control your brain.

And, and frankly, There are so many false signals, and neuroscience is supporting this. There are so many false messages that the brain sends to the body. And for me, long ago, my brain sent to my body, This is dangerous. And I believed it, and I obeyed it, and then I had to undo it. So interesting. 

Zibby: Well, you talk about this health journey, which is, you know, full of ups and downs and meetings with doctors where, you know, they're like, this is so sad.

Like, you're just gonna have to live with this. Like, conversations nobody wants to have with a doctor, right? But then you take us back to, to you growing up with your three brothers and one of whom tragically died of AIDS and that whole story, which was so poignant and beautiful and also funny. I mean, you know, you know, that dark humor was so amazing, just the way you all interacted, and your own addictions, right?

How things started for you really early. I feel like you were self medicating from a super young age and only able to stop it when you realized it was really impacting your life. So maybe talk a little bit about that storyline, which was incredibly powerful or your brother too. I mean, oh my gosh. 

Tom: Yeah, I talk about in the book six states of breakdown and they can come in any order They can come numerous at once at a time and they're all an internal battle a fight between who you want to be and that part who is also you that you're trying to shove out and the states of breakdown I describe are anxiety, depression, addiction, illness, crisis, grace, and addiction is a chapter unto itself as they all are.

But addiction for me, I, I came to realize that, yeah, I was addicted to alcohol at different points, certain kinds of foods, caffeines, certain habits, drugs. All of that. But the ultimate addiction was to the story I had of myself, who I thought I had to be, and I'm convinced I'm convinced that if you could get a transcript of my brain.

And if you could bear to read the transcript of my thoughts, you could see how much each person is obsessing over their story, because we are a core concept in the book is the self image. And this is really our defense against fear. If we want to face fear, we have to realize that the self image and the story we create about ourselves is a defense against fear.

And if we want to really face fear, which is to really get well. We have to slowly dismantle the self image. So the self image, the story is what we get addicted to. So I decide, here's the person I am. I'm a really good writer. I'm a spiritual person. I'm a reliable friend, but there's all kinds of evidence that I am other, the opposite of those things too.

So I start denying those things. And then when I come to a breakdown and the book really is about. How one angle on the book could be, how do you flip breakdowns into breakthroughs and breakdowns is our good news. If we can step back, watch what's happening when we're in pain and see what is breaking down.

And as I see it, there are three things that's breaking down when we feel absolutely defeated. We can't go on. Everything is broken. There are three things that are breaking down. One, our self image is breaking down. We create a story of ourselves. And, and we tie our happiness to a story of who we are, and we need other people to tell that story back to us.

But when people don't tell that story back to us, when events start to contradict the self image, the self image starts breaking down. Then the body starts breaking down because we exhaust ourselves trying to defend the self image. And the third thing that breaks down is our plan for happiness, because our plan for happiness is all premised on, If I am this thing in the world and I get people to affirm that I am this thing, then I'm going to be happy and either you are that thing and you're not happy or you never get to be that thing, but then you're left with now.

Now, what do I do? Because I think this, this, this book is not for people whose lives are going well, and they're not really even for people whose lives are okay. And they want to tweak it a little bit. It's really for people who don't know what to do. Their lives are in a broken down state and they don't know what to do.

And so just to jump back briefly to addiction, I found that the more command I have, because when we quit drinking, we have to still have to deal with the things that made us want to drink. . 

Zibby: Mm-hmm . 

Tom: So it's, that's not the cure. That's the beginning of the cure. And in the end, the thing that made me wanna drink is I wanted to be somebody that I wasn't.

Zibby: Mm-hmm . 

Tom: And that's like an internal battle. And the more I began to concede, okay, I'm not this all the time and I'm actually not that all the time, and I am some things I don't like. And I, and I gotta admit it. And the, and this, this is also the essence of intimacy. Like, here's some things I don't want you to know about me.

So that when you get to that level and you start to give in on your self image, the pressure drops and then the need to soothe yourself with addictive substances is less urgent because you don't have the inner battle going on between the person you are and the person you're pretending to be. 

Zibby: It's so interesting.

I mean, it's very philosophical too. A part that I feel like I responded to a lot was this notion that we are all almost addicted to this current chapter that we're discussing, to the feedback, of what we're doing. And so we work all the time and we have no boundaries. Like you gave examples of when you would accept when you were starting your, your business and accepting speeches that you would write in the middle of the night.

And you would, you're like, sure, totally, I could get that done by the morning. And, you know, as I'm reading in the middle of the night and I'm like, uh huh. Yeah, I get that. Like I have no boundaries because you're, you're trying so hard to defend who you are. Right. And when you try that hard, To be that person, you can't relax enough to say, sort of, you know, I, I have to let go, and I am who I am.

And that is, it's not a failure. It just is, it has to be acceptance. 

Tom: Right. So I am who I am, but we come into the game with the idea that I can't be who I am and get what I want. So I have to make up this thing, like I'm the Iron Man speechwriter. You can test me. I can do anything. And, and yet that is exactly what drives the breakdown.

So this interesting thing about working at the White House for me was on the one hand, I felt, okay, I totally belong here. I, I know I can write at this level. I get praised for these speeches. On the other hand, I had to completely exhaust myself. Because I was terrified of handing in something mediocre.

So that, that was trying to be your self image and then exhausting yourself in the service of your self image. So that was, you know, that was a valuable tour of duty on, on the path to breakdown. Whereas, you know, I just, I broke down from the strain of trying to defend and promote this self image. 

Zibby: Yeah. I love your handing, Al Gore said, like, this over prepared speech with, like, a huge packet of anything he could possibly ask.

And this question, that question, and he just, like, looked at it and was like, yeah, no, I'm not doing this. 

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. He became the victim of my obsessive overwork, but he knew what it was, and he just glanced and put it aside. But yeah, that, there was a lot of that going on there, as you, as you can imagine.

But the thing is, what, what the self image Ultimately, and again, I'm just trying to understand this more deeply now, but the self image is a defense against all the feelings we don't want, right? What I have arranged and organized my life to avoid the feelings I'm afraid of and We heal and there's a big difference between what's soothing and what's healing right soothing is oh, this feels good Someone gave me some praise.

Oh, you're a really good writer or something like that And you know, I respond with a false grace of an addict who just got a fix and everything's great in my world but but actually I have these feelings of fear, terrified that, you know what, I'm going to get kicked out. I'm going to be mocked. I'm going to be laughed at.

I'm going to be publicly humiliated. I'm going to not measure up and all these fears are so terrifying that we're running from them. And if we can turn and face those fears. Then not only do they lose their power, but the energy we've been using to fight them becomes available for other uses. What one of my favorite stories in the book is not my story, but it came out of James Pennebaker's book, uh, open up by writing it down.

And it's a fascinating story about About bringing out the things we're hiding is healing, bringing out, expressing and experiencing the feelings we're hiding is healing. And he told the story of a kid named Warren, who was a valedictorian in his high school. 

Zibby: Mm-hmm . 

Tom: And he went to college and was doing well for a while, and then suddenly he developed debilitating testing anxiety.

And so he went. He ended up having to drop out of college and he went for two years from one therapist to another and then he went to Dr. Pennebaker who said, Warren, would you mind if I talk to you while I rate your heart? You're wearing a heart monitor and he said, fine, let's do it. So they started talking, they talked about school, they talked about his life, they talked about his girlfriend and his heart rate was steady at like 75.

And then, then, so one, let's talk about your parents divorce and it's spiked to 105. And even as his heart rate was beating at 105, he said, it's really fine. You know, they're happier now. And it's like, lies. We're telling lies to protect ourselves from feelings and the feelings that he was protecting himself from our classic feelings.

He was furious with his parents and that kind of fear. I mean, this is sort of standard psychotherapy, right? We all start out with feelings and impulses that are natural and universal and we get scared of them because they can endanger the bonds of the people we love and we need. And so we begin to suppress them.

But when we start suppressing feelings. All hell breaks loose, both emotionally and physically in our health. So Warren then talked about his, how angry he was with his parents, talked to his parents about how angry he was. And then he went back to school. Still unhappy, still sad. But he wasn't suppressing the sadness, and so he was functioning at his level, so there are a lot of ways, some people don't like to talk about the unconscious, but whether you're saying unconscious, or non conscious, or semi conscious, or whether you're shoving it down, or pushing it in.

Whatever name you have for it, bringing out the feelings we're hiding is healing. 

Zibby: And the whole notion of the body's relationship to this, that this is not just like, let's go to psychotherapy and deal with this, but it, it affects every system. Like I had something happen when I was going through a divorce myself, which I like don't, don't want usually discuss, it was like this weird thing where suddenly I became allergic to everything. Like, I went to the allergist, like you had happen in the book, and they were like, actually you're allergic to like every food. I'm like, what? Like, I haven't been allergic to any foods. Like, why? And they were like, yeah, basically, you know, your body's freaking out and you're allergic to everything.

And I was like, sorry guys, I can't eat this carrot because I'm, I'm allergic to it all of a sudden. 

Tom: Even carrots? 

Zibby: Every, like the most random things, like my list was like. Beyond long. And of course now. 

Tom: Were your doctors understanding? Did they understand the brain firing dangerous signals is going to create this?

Zibby: Of course not. No, because when you see a doctor, you go in and you have a symptom and they do a test and then they give you the information and then they send you on your way. Right. Cause they're, you know, they're looking at like, you know, it's like a skin cancer doctor who only looks at like one mole.

Well, what about the rest of your body? Right. You know, they have such a micro. Every doctor, like, zeroes in on what their specialty is, and they often miss exactly what you're talking about, which is like, let's evaluate the entire system, and like, why is this happening? And I feel like this book is so useful to anybody who could help you.

Who, who needs to just like take a minute, right? Like just take a minute and step back and think about things. Not to say that like you can cure every illness, but just what is going on here and what else is going on here? 

Tom: Exactly. And so, um, Dr. Howard Schubner, who I quote extensively in the book, and he's now actually working on a book now with Penguin Random House about mind body.

But he was a lead researcher in the Colorado back pain study that I talked about in chapter one and, and it showed, okay, let me just, I love this story. I love this study. They had 151 people who had suffered chronic back pain for years, and they separated it into three groups. And there was a group that kept doing what they were doing.

Another group that did nothing. Another group that did. Pain reprocessing therapy and this is a technique developed by Alan Gordon at the pain psychology center in Los Angeles and for eight weeks the people with the chronic back pain were training themselves to reinterpret their feelings from the back pain so that what the brain was sending out was danger signals and they invited the patients to reinterpret that from not danger signals you unpleasant, but not dangerous.

And over eight weeks, as they learned to practice this, the danger signals went down, the fear went down and the pain went down to the point that 98 percent of that group said, they felt better, and 66 percent said they were nearly or totally better. And this is chronic back pain. Of course, I read a recent study from the Journal of Pain sent to me by Dr. Schubner that said in the last 20, in the last 18 years, there's been a 25 percent increase in chronic pain. And so It's pretty evident that Dr. Sarna, who I also mentioned, who died some years ago and was a leader in the field, said the problem with mainstream medicine now is it has a deep bias that emotions cannot cause physiologic change, and he said that's poor medicine and poor science.

The beneficial aspect of this is they can sort out, is your back pain due to tissue injury? And then we need to treat it at the site, or is it potentially due to, does it start in the neural circuits of the brain brought on by fear and a sense of danger, and it gets your limbic system firing and you get stuck on high alert.

And then the raging fear in your brain starts creating havoc in your body. And it can be IBS for one person, pelvic pain, it could be back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain, fibromyalgia. For me, it was brain fog and neuropathy and a host of things like that. But the striking thing about this is this is a treatment that is, that can cover a range of mysterious and there's no, ultimately there's not a serious competition going on between mainstream medicine and treating backs.

And neuroplastic approaches in treating backs because mainstream medicine is not doing well. So it's not as like hey, we're fighting over but but but neuroplastic approaches to back pain They're safe. They're quick. They're non invasive They're effective. And if they don't work, you can do physical therapy and get steroid shots and opiates and do surgery.

There's nothing preventing you from trying this and then trying that. But the, the, the understory of this, and Dr Schubner is going to write more fully about this in his book is Mainstream medicine. Right now, the great centers of medicine in the United States, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic, they do not greet someone who reports with fibromyalgia with this kind of inventory, right?

They go straight to the standard of care, which is not working. 

Zibby: So the last piece of this whole book, because I feel like, honestly, I could talk to you about every chapter. Like, I have so many questions and thoughts and whatever. This is like, not feeling satisfying to only have the 30 minutes, but your whole notion of chasing peace itself is like an oxymoron in a way, because the fact that you are chasing it means that you do not have it.

Like you cannot actually try to achieve peace. You have to accept it. You have to like, shift your whole mindset to achieve peace and that of course is one of the goals of the book, right? It's teaching you how to live A happier life because you are not one of these people out there trying to have a happier life.

Tom: Right, right. So, what I talk about a little bit in the book is the first and second half of life. And the first, the first half of life I describe as, and we all do it, we all should do it, we can't help it, and if we do it well, it's better. Then if we do it poorly, but it's about taking a goal of who you want to be and striving super hard to be that and that's the first half of life and some people excel at it with for great benefit for others.

So we can't sidestep that. We can't vault over it. We all got to do it and do it intensely. But in many cases, if we're paying attention to what's going on when we're in pain, we notice we break down and that self image can't work anymore. And our body's exhausted trying to make it work. And so then instead of trying to achieve our self image to be happy We start letting the self image go to be happy and that that's the breakthrough and it means ultimately to put it in concrete terms. It means accepting all the things you've been trying to deny and shut out so one line I think one of the most important lines of the book for me and and I would I would like to leave it leave you with this is You Dr. Coughlin, who wrote the book lives transformed, which was a seminal work for me to read and learn from said the full and direct experience of previously avoided feelings. Is the key to healing? And I just circled it and what's striking to me is I talk about three modalities of self improvement There's the neuroscience insights their psychology and their spiritual practice and what dr Coghlan said is absolutely true in each discipline in each domain We've got to let those feelings that we're running away from We've got to turn and face them.

Zibby: Wow. Well, I appreciate that You're Facing Them became a book and that, uh, we all got the benefit of the deep dive that you have done over the years into so many different things from philosophy to medicine and addiction and mental health and all of the things. And I am delighted that Maria Shriver found you and asked you to write a book and thank you for the, the really in depth, uh, interesting, thought provoking book that this is, and I really hope people discover it and, and enjoy it as I did.

Tom: Well, thank you so much. New authors need friends. So thank you for being my friend. 

Zibby: My pleasure. Best of luck, Tom. Thank you so much. Okay. Bye bye. 

Tom: Bye.