Especially the successful ones.

I have a theory about why. I think one quiet ingredient of “success” is a hard childhood — something you're running from, something you're trying to prove. I keep seeing it over and over again – pain is fuel for the engine of “success”.

My childhood was pretty rosy. Loved, safe, fed. So, some days I catch myself wondering if I'm destined for mediocrity. I’m too satisfied and content. That ain’t the recipe for fame and fortune.

Turns out there's something to the hunch. Researchers who followed hundreds of entrepreneurs found that a moderate dose of early hardship builds resilience — and resilience is what predicts success. The official reports say “Not too much; abuse and neglect wreck people.” But my friends and some data show that a little adversity seems to light a fire a comfortable childhood never does.

Here's the part I can't stop thinking about, though. That same fire — the drive, the ambition, the never-enough — is often the thing that kills these men. Early.

The ones who work the 55+ hour weeks. The ones who can't sit still. Long hours alone killed about 745,000 people in a single year — mostly men, mostly from heart disease and stroke. Another study followed 1,600 CEOs and found the stress of a hard downturn knocked about a year and a half off their lives, and you could see it in their faces, aging faster than their peers.

We celebrate the hustle. We don't talk about the bill.

Last week I was picking what turned out to be 5lbs of blueberries in our front yard (can I get an Amen) when a song came on. It’s about love and the next life.

To anyone who cares: I'm a staunch believer in the sacred old world view of death - the one that predated the Greek’s separation of soul and body – that old school term is hypnopsychism - the idea that death is like a sleep for the soul — i.e. I don't think at death we start floating around like naked babies or ghosts.

The song is about love and how for many of us our wounds prevent us from experiencing all that love is.

The allure of the afterlife at least in my opinion is mostly about seeing the people we love again.

Paradise without the people we love would be hell.

The song is about what those moments might be like. No baggage. No trauma to run from. No cortisol or fear preventing us from enjoying the here and now.

Here’s a few lines:

I met you in a lifetime full of pressure.

Where love was quiet and survival was loud. My hands were steady but my spirit restless. We crossed paths in a moment too fragile.

Timing wrong but the feeling was true.

If I can't love you right in this life, If the stars don't light where we stand, I will carry your name through the darkness.

Till I find you again.

I will find you in my next life. When the weight of the past is gone. When we meet with lighter shadows and the heart doesn’t have to run.

If I can't hold your hand right now, if fate won't let us stay,

I will trust the universe remembers every word we couldn't say.

I will find you in my next life. When my heart is less afraid.

Where love doesn’t need to hide. Where we recognize each other on the first look, first sight.

Not goodbye, just not yet.

How my dad was fueled by pain he never dealt with and on more occasions than not – was a jerk in his 40s and early 50s. In the end, he was converted – facing death can do that – not always but sometimes - when no amount of money will prolong life – you start to realize what has value – people. My dad found the thing He’d been chasing that he’d heard about for most of his life but finally began to really get to know for by experience in the closing years of his life – Jesus. I will save that sermon for another day.

My mom was patient and kind. I believe deep down the words above are to those amazing women who stay in relationships with strong successful men – it takes an even stronger woman to often stand by their side.

Deep down I imagine those women long for better and brighter days that the song speaks to.

There's one conversation I'd give every dollar I have to have to go back and have with my dad.

My dad was healthy. Hard-working. Successful. Active. He ate well. He had community, connection, a life full of people. He did what he loved. He loved people. He loved his family.

Not sure he loved himself.

And in his early 50s, his blood pressure started spiking in the middle of the night. Sweating, stressed, anxious. Not during the day. While he slept. Around 1 to 3 a.m.

He did everything he could to figure out why.

I didn't have the words for it then. I do now. If I could sit him down with what I know today, here's what I'd tell him.

The nighttime is your tell.

Your blood pressure is supposed to fall while you sleep. You’re supposed to feel safe, satisfied with your life, hopeful that if tomorrow is like today it will be worth it.

But when your blood pressure climbs instead of falls— when the night number runs higher than the day — doctors call it a “riser” pattern, and it's one of the loudest warnings we have.

In a study of more than 6,000 people, that overnight rise predicted heart attacks and heart failure better than any daytime reading. Most people never catch it, because they only ever check their pressure awake.

And that 1-to-3 a.m. window isn't random. Right around then your body starts pushing out cortisol, the stress hormone, toward its morning peak. Researchers recently found that cortisol grabs onto the heart's cells and scrambles their electrical timing — part of why heart attacks and dangerous rhythms cluster in those early hours. Your heart is a slightly different organ at 3 a.m. than it is at noon. More fragile.

And men feel this sooner than women. We tend to have our first heart attack about a decade earlier — and the risk jumps fivefold in the two hours after we lose our temper. The jerk and the early grave might be branches of the same root.

Dad, it isn’t a mystery at all. First off – what fuels you? Why do you want to wake up tomorrow? What if you don’t? Are you living your life as if you wanted it to last forever? Is there any pain that fuels you? I’ve noticed for many years that you don’t have a lot of patience at times. Did your parents show you patience? Did you feel safe as a kid?

Is there pain that you’ve repressed and suppressed so deep that you don’t even want to address it ever again? If so, I bet its under lock and key never to be addressed again in this life.

Dad, that pain is not gone – it’s festering – while you sleep, in your subconscious – it’s firing those adrenal glands as if you’re still in the midst of that painful childhood moment. It’s rewiring your system and it’s going to hijack your body and kill you.

Those moments you ran away from home to live homeless as a 13 year old in the park in downtown Atlanta – that fear of not being loved, that fear of not knowing if tomorrow was worth waking up for. That wonder if a God is so good, why does he not help me? Hear me?

It is a body keeping score of a life lived in overdrive. The tragedy isn't that the answer was unknowable. It's that nobody thought to ask why would your body would be screaming in silence while you were sleeping?

--

In the last few years of my dad’s life he was confronted with the hardest thing of his whole life at a wellness retreat – forgiving the people that had wronged him – even (especially) his mom. He made peace with her in the final month of his life before he died in a car accident.

I'm writing to the ones living the hustle right now. And the ones married to it. You know who you are. I wish this was a random story about my dad – it’s a pandemic affecting more homes than we would ever care to acknowledge.

Here are four things, if you do nothing else:

·       Check your pressure at night, not just at the doctor. A single office reading misses all of this. Ask about a 24-hour monitor that reads while you sleep. It's the one test that would have shown my dad what was happening.

·       Treat rest like it's load-bearing. Not a reward for finishing — a requirement for continuing. Your body does its repair work at night. If the night is when your system is redlining, the repair never happens.

·       Watch the fuse. The short temper, the outbursts, the always-on edge — that's not just personality. It's physiology asking for help. Listen before it screams.

·       What is fueling your ambition? Is it pain? Are addictions in your life causing you shame and guilt where instead they should be signs that you are trying to numb pain that no one has helped you identify – or are too painful to look at?

As we build Santerra, some of our investors have pushed me to gather real data — real stories, real before-and-afters.

So, we have something we’ve been cooking that we plan to launch next week. I think it’s going to be amazing.

Also, if you’re someone who has done their best to lock their pain away hopefully to never hurt you again – I’d like to hear from you.

Reply to this email and tell me where you are. Let's talk before it's too late.

-Jared

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, are provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual's medical condition.

Here are links to things that have helped me improve my health:

Whoop - Track your HRV and REM Sleep

Function Health - Optimize Your Health via 160+ BioMarkers

Here are a few topics I think you’ll love if you haven’t checked them out before:

How to Breathe for Better Health

How to Supercharge Your Sleep

The Power of the Sauna