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“Isn’t that one of her Horcruxes?” my son said.
The joke slayed; 10 points to Gryffindor.
Speaking of crazy grandmothers and things that slay, there was blood everywhere, and I was screaming. The blood was pouring out of my left knee. Childhood trauma provides vivid recollection despite more than four decades having past.
We were visiting my grandmother in Victoria. A friend named Brent was chasing me through the house in a game of tag, and the sliding glass door that led to the back deck was sparkling clean.
In other words, I thought it was open. I was only five.
Fortunately, I did not go through the glass. I hit it with my knee and it shattered, then I fell backward, away from the shards. Blood poured forth from my knee as screams ripped from my throat in equal measure. This, followed by Uncle Jim driving me to the hospital through the rolling coastal hills at a speed that punished the suspension of the pre-1970s-model four-door car while my mother had a minor meltdown in the back seat as she attempted to hold my knee together with six squares of toilet paper.
I still hadn’t stopped screaming. I remember the screaming, not the pain.
Thirty stitches plus an annoyed doctor and nurse later, we went back to Grandma’s house, and she proceeded to chew me out about her shattered door.
That was my first inkling she wasn’t such a nice person.
I achieved a fuller realization she was “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” a few years after destroying her window. My parents had split, and we had no choice but to live with her for six painful months. I was getting an apple and she told me to give her half. I got a knife and cut, and being a young lad, it was a haphazard job. I was left with one piece substantially larger than the other.
It seemed wise to give my grandmother the larger half, so I did. Then she proceeded to berate me for being a “greedy little bugger.” She told me I should have given her the bigger half. I was looking at my half, which was about one-third of an apple, then looked at her two-thirds of an apple and said to myself You really are a nutbag.
I won’t repeat any of the racist slurs she often spewed.
For three decades, I watched my grandmother torment my mother. My mother told me horror stories about her childhood, and I believe them. Mom had one of the shittiest, most abusive childhoods you can imagine. So, yes, she’s a little neurotic as an adult.
But she is not at all abusive, quite the opposite.
I have never wanted for love. Mom showered my sister and me with love to the point it was almost annoying. “Yeah, I get it, Mom. You love me, but now you’re embarrassing me.” I always knew from my earliest days that, no matter what, Mom had my back.
And yet, when she became pregnant for the first time with my older sister, there was panic. My mom dreaded she would be like her own mother and perpetuate a cycle of abuse. She spoke of this to her doctor, who gave her some simple yet poignant advice: “The suffering you’ve endured can be undone by loving your children with all your heart. Think of what your own mother would have done, and do the opposite.”
The advice sounded good but did not resonate. The fear remained.
Later, at home, she felt my sister kick. My mother told me of feeling the growing child inside her. She believed the kick was a message saying, I am here, and I need you. Even though my sister was not yet born, my mother realized in that instant she loved her in a way she had never loved another person before.
Her heart soared.
In a moment, she knew she would never be like her own mother. Down to her core, she was certain she would be the most loving and caring mom she could be. And she has been.
I’m not crying. You’re crying. Shut up.
Such a sensation, in which you achieve total clarity of purpose in an instant, qualifies for the word “epiphany.”
No matter which way epiphany manifests, you must listen. It’s the path to a better life.
Speaking of a better life, my mom didn’t let her upbringing hold her back. She earned her corner office in a male-dominated industry, becoming a business juggernaut celebrated in the community. What’s more, she took a near-impossible high road with her own mother, continuing to look after her rather than write her off. She even forked out for a nice nursing home when the old bat lost the last of her marbles.
The lesson is this: The circumstances of the first part of your life don’t have to define the second part. No matter what transpired yesterday or the days preceding it, this does not determine what happens on neither this day nor the days yet to come.
No one makes it through life without scars. Some are visible, like the one on my knee; others reside below the surface. Sometimes change happens fast via epiphany. Sometimes it takes years and baby steps. Change is inevitable, but you’re the one who influences the direction such change will take.
If you’re tired of the path you’re on, you can switch to a new one. They’re your feet, and you have the freedom to place them where you choose. A quantum leap of inspiration to change your path does not mean you lack liberty. Just because your new way forward has become irresistible does not mean you have sacrificed self-determination. Rather, your heart and mind being united in what feels right is what gives epiphany its power to push you.
When you feel such power, it means you are about to fulfill your destiny.
Off the Quantum Deep End
The word “quantum” is being increasingly used in health circles to the point that it is almost considered to be pseudoscience.
What I am about to write is not pseudoscience. It’s Einsteinian science. And other kinds of real science. Quantum has been a real science thing for a long time and it’s still a real science thing.
Ironically, I chose a science-fiction author to explain it to me.
Digital Decision-Making
The first time I met Rob Sawyer, I was worried he was about to die. Being we were not yet friends and that I am sometimes selfish, my initial concern was how this affected me.
Rob is a Hugo Award–winning science-fiction author. Early in 2005, I registered for a weeklong science-fiction writer’s workshop at the Banff Center in the Rocky Mountains, to be led by Rob and taking place in September of that year. I’d read Rob’s work and seen his photo on book jackets, and when I met him at a book signing four months prior to the workshop, he looked nothing like I expected.
He’d lost a lot of weight. So much so I was concerned he had a terminal disease. My baser self worried that if he died, there would be no workshop.
But Rob was happy and energized, and the workshop was a great experience that led to us becoming friends. The first book of his I read was titled Factoring Humanity. I recall the main character created a “quantum computer” that could process infinite calculations per second because it operated in multiple dimensions, or parallel universes, or something.
Now you know why I wasn’t cut out to be a science-fiction author.
In addition to being a best-selling author (one of his novels, Flash-Forward, became a TV series on ABC), Rob is a sought-after speaker and futurist because of his ability to communicate complex scientific phenomena in lay terms. At the time of our conversation on the nature of quantum leaps, Rob was putting the finishing touches on his twenty-third novel, serendipitously titled Quantum Night. The fact that Rob had his own epiphany, which led to dropping a third of his body weight, a loss he has sustained for over a decade, makes his insight even more relevant. But before discussing his personal story, we spoke of the true, scientific meaning of the word “quantum.”
“Most things in life go along in an analog wave; they go up and they go down and they change gradually and continuously,” Sawyer said. He explained, when it comes to losing weight, the motivation for most is like that analog wave: sometimes it peaks, such as when the high school reunion is coming up, and other times it bottoms out, and the only desire is to braid one’s ass into the couch and shove Doritos down one’s neck.
With quantum cognition, however, there is no wave. “Quantum is not analog,” Sawyer said. “It’s not wavelike. It’s digital. It’s either on or off. It’s either this or that.”
This or that … these are the same words I heard from Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen, who we’ll hear more from later, when he spoke to me of battling his addiction. After a struggle with alcohol, Collen suddenly quit drinking at the age of twenty-nine. “It was very black or white,” Phil said of quitting. “I knew I had to go this way or that way.” (Note: It can be dangerous and even deadly to suddenly quit substances such as alcohol as well as benzodiazepines, more commonly known under names such as Valium, Xanax, and Ativan. Consult a physician.)
To reveal the science of the quantum leap, Sawyer went down to the atomic level. “We talk about the quantum leap of an electron, going from a lower energy state to a higher state.” Sawyer explained that this doesn’t mean an electron travels to that higher state the way a mountaineer ascends Everest. It’s not step-by-step. It means the electron has gone instantaneously from the base of the mountain to the peak, bypassing all the intermediate steps.
Quantum leaps can also take place with human motivation. The base of the mountain represents having no desire to work toward a change of behavior, and the peak indicates a strong and ongoing drive to do all the things being a new person entails.
The traditional models of behavior change, as already discussed, involve climbing the mountain one step at a time. But a quantum leap takes a person’s motivation right to the top. You are facing a mountain. You stand at the bottom. Peak motivation—your ultimate ability to do the work with inspired vigor—resides at the top. You can climb to that peak one step at a time (where there is risk of slipping and sliding back to the bottom anywhere along the route, but especially at the beginning), or you can step inside a Star Trek–style transporter device and materialize at the summit.
If you can locate such a transporter and figure out how to make it work, is it not worth giving it a shot if it means you get to bypass all those steps?
This does not mean the traditional model of slow-and-steady behavior change isn’t sometimes worthwhile. This isn’t one of those books filled with the Truth that “they” don’t want you to know about. The reality is that millions have changed their lives via psychological baby steps, whereas many others achieve sudden change. And some people have experienced both types.
My friend Paul Ingraham, a health writer in Vancouver, has gone through three major behavioral changes in his life. Two of them were in the traditional linear fashion he called “forced marches across a tipping point; one desperate, determined step at a time.” The other was via epiphany, which he described as “Way easier, completely irresistible. To have it was to change, no work required. Just *Poof!* I’m different now.”
“Forced marches across a tipping point.” This is an apt description for what most cognitive-behavior-change models are built around. But it doesn’t always work that way.
I do not wish to dismiss decades of work by respected psychologists in the baby-steps approach to change, because it’s a valuable tool that can be used to lead to epiphany. As I mentioned previously, look at the case of Lesley the fencer. She forced herself to struggle along for a couple of months, then came the poof Paul referred to. Same with my own physical transformation; I did not enjoy the first two months of battling to adopt an exercise regimen.
I struggled to develop the habit, and I almost quit. But when a staff member at the gym asked me if I’d had a good workout, and I realized that it had been pretty good, I had another epiphany: it was starting to not suck. And if it could not suck, then one day it could be enjoyable. In that moment, I promised myself I would keep exercising until I died. I met the poof partway, and over the next nine months, I lost fifty pounds of fat and gained twenty pounds of muscle. I’ve become a lifelong exerciser, going so far as to qualify for the Boston Marathon after seeing the horrific bombing in 2013, so I could run it the following year and be part of taking back the finish line from the terror of that day.
Time for another task.
Start thinking about what baby steps you can engage in to meet the poof partway. What is your desired outcome in terms of ultimate motivation? What is the peak of inspired Mount Everest in terms of what you could achieve for your life situation? Visualize that peak and what it would look like to be transported there, bypassing all intervening steps.
Now imagine the transporter device is broken and you need to hike a step at a time. Maybe not all the steps, but at least some. You can’t stand around and wait for someone to fix the transporter. You need to start climbing.
What does the hike look like?
What is the first step?
Visualize your primary wish of this new person you’d like to be, whether it involves changes in activity level, diet, attitude, career, budgeting, education, a combination of any of these things, or some other things. Now forget that the transporter device exists.
What is the logical slow-and-steady path to achieve the goal? What is the first baby step? What is the second? The third? Start to map it out. Create the beginnings of a plan to just get started. It’s okay to seek help from a professional or otherwise knowledgeable person in formulating this plan.
Because the reality is, you may need to walk that path for a time. You may need to hike a while. But if you’re attuned to the possibility of epiphany on that journey of many baby steps, the transporter may one day pick you up and materialize you at the peak. Or not quite at the peak, but a lot closer to the top, at least.
Sometimes the process is passive. It’s something that happens to you, arriving unbidden. Other times, you must act.
Lace up those boots, because the poof is worth climbing toward.
The sudden-leap formula, which Ingraham described both as “way easier” and “completely irresistible,” warrants further investigation so you can understand why it’s worth the striving. Forced marches of motivation have a high failure rate, with not many people achieving lasting behavior change via such methods. This raises the question: What is the success rate of the quantum leap?
To uncover that, it is first important to gain deeper understanding of the mechanics of quantum change.
A Void in Need of Filling
“It’s like a switch has been thrown and you’ve gone from where you used to be to somewhere else, and the intervening steps didn’t occur,” Rob Sawyer said. “That’s a quantum change.”
Sawyer’s own change causing dramatic weight loss was quantum in nature. He spoke of twenty years at his sedentary job of being a writer leading to gaining significant weight, but he stayed affixed to that office chair because he had a mission.
“It was only when I won the Hugo Award for best novel [for Hominids] in 2003 when I had a void in my ambition that needed to be filled,” he said. It was the top professional achievement he could attain in his field. Afterward, this other goal of losing weight that had been hovering in the background went through a quantum change. A return to discussing electrons explains how it happened.
“The lowest level of an atom holds two electrons, and the next highest level can hold eight,” Sawyer said, explaining that you cannot push one of those lower-level electrons up to a higher state if all of those spots are occupied. But if one spot is vacated, there is an opportunity for a lower-level electron to complete a quantum leap to that higher level. It is promoted instantaneously. This is what happened for Sawyer. When he achieved ultimate career success, space was made for something else to become a top priority.
“It’s no coincidence the year after winning the Hugo I lost a third of my body weight,” Sawyer said. And true to the descriptions of it being a digital process and not analog, this or that, on or off, Rob was committed. “There was no wavering,” he said. “It was going to happen.”
Sawyer has kept the weight off more than a decade.
Make Room for Change
I have a big task for you now. So big, in fact, it needs its own header and section.
Reflect on what Sawyer said about winning the Hugo. Recall the description of how an electron at a higher level must vacate the premises prior to a lower-level electron being able to make that quantum leap to the higher energy level.
This is all about achieving a higher energy level.
And if your higher level is full, something needs to vacate it and make room for your inspiration to be instantaneously promoted, the way Rob’s desire to lose weight was.
It’s a fancy way of describing prioritization.
If your highest energy level is maxed out with “life stuff,” you must reevaluate that stuff, because something needs to be deprioritized, perhaps even eliminated.
What takes up a lot of your energy?
Some things are critical. There are aspects of work and family that are challenging to deprioritize, but everyone wastes time, even those who think they don’t. You say you need your downtime to watch TV or surf the net, but how much time? A 2016 Nielsen report determined that the average adult American spends over 4.5 hours each day watching TV shows and movies. This doesn’t even consider surfing on your laptop or phone. Surely there is room to make room.
MAKE IT HAPPEN!
I have a few of these special exercises in the book. Call them “Act Now!” on steroids. I save them to call attention to more critical tasks. This one qualifies, because if a quantum leap of motivation is going to take place, your highest energy level needs an open slot. This is the detailed analysis, rather than sudden insight, for which writing things down may help. Examine your schedule and where your focus lies. Make a list of the stuff you do that sucks up a lot of energy and time. Consider where room can be made. You need this hole, this vacated spot, because then there will be a yearning to fill it. Give this task of making room the extra attention it deserves.
What may happen as a result of completing this first “Make It Happen!” exercise is that, through careful analysis, you determine, “Of course staring at a screen sucks up a lot of my time, so I’ll just cut way back on that.” But you don’t. You keep staring, because it’s paying off for you in some way.
But now you know this is part of the solution, and it sticks and gets unconsciously turned over, and then perhaps the epiphany comes through that uncovers why you have that behavior, how meaningless it is to continue the way you do, and how much more meaningful it would be to your life to spend that time on a passionate pursuit.
One day, you could be watching The Big Bang Theory and say, “Wow, this show has strapped a couple of hydrodynamic boards to its feet and achieved altitude overtop a carnivorous fish,” and you start walking each evening instead.
The Ground Shifts
“This is about exponential change.”
Ken Resnicow is a professor of health behavior at the University of Michigan and has published several papers on the phenomenon of quantum behavior change. He explained how the stages of change—the transtheoretical model discussed in chapter 1 (#ulink_432c42ac-62e6-5b08-b240-728394934c71)—“is a very linear progression that is also quite proportional. They even talk about standard deviations of change.” This means studies of TTM show groups of people based along a bell curve changing a specific amount at a specific rate.
Conversely, Rob Sawyer explained that quantum leaps of change are not linear, not proportional, and not in stages. “Exponential” means going from baby steps to Olympic-caliber long jump in a single stride.
“Using their terms [from Prochaska’s TTM],” Resnicow said, “one can jump from precontemplator into action at a moment’s notice.” And this is not just action but dedicated action, aka “maintenance.” In TTM, the “action” stage is tenuous. One is struggling to adopt the new behavior to achieve maintenance. But with a powerful epiphany there is no struggle; it is not a half-assed adoption. It’s full-assed.
Lee Holland did not slowly slide over into laborious action because of her epiphany. Rather, she became dedicated to taking “action” regarding her career and into “maintenance” in an instant after the realization in the parking lot that she was destined to do much more with her life.
“Epiphany can be primed for,” Resnicow said. “The raw materials for the perfect storm are something that can be provided.” Priming can give people the information and skills that make it happen.
“Don’t pressure yourself worrying that your light bulb hasn’t gone off yet,” Resnicow said. Doing so creates a state of anxiety. As we’ll examine further, it’s positive mood states that set the stage for sudden insight. Besides, “Sometimes things have to marinate for a while before epiphany happens.”
It’s a struggle to escape struggle.
Post-epiphany, the changes in behavior won’t feel like work. It doesn’t mean you don’t have work to do first. I’m going to kick your ass a bit in coming chapters, and then, suddenly, perhaps …
“It isn’t about struggling,” said Professor Miller, who has been treating addictions for forty years. “With overcoming addiction, some people are often white-knuckle holding on to not go back to their previous situation.” But he explained it is different for others, the ones who experience an epiphany, because they suddenly realize they’ve had enough.
“The typical epiphanies are, ‘Oh, shit! I don’t want to be this person anymore!’” said Resnicow. “If you’re religious, it can be, ‘This is not what God put me on Earth for.’ It’s an overwhelming sense the ground has shifted beneath you.” Resnicow explained quantum change as a tectonic-plate movement in how you view your identity and your behavior, and how the two no longer are compatible.
An example of how well sudden change in behavior works comes from a 2009 study of seventeen hundred smokers and ex-smokers published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research. The authors found that those who spontaneously quit smoking are almost twice as likely to still not be smoking after six months than those who chose a carefully planned quitting attempt. It’s also interesting that spontaneous quitters were less reliant upon pharmacotherapy to quit. They didn’t need that nicotine patch. They were just done.
My best friend Craig woke up one day and promptly decided to quit when he realized how much money he’d wasted over the years. This cessation of smelling like an ashtray was done much to my and my wife’s approval. After more than a quarter century, he’s never wavered.
Battling addiction or weight or finding purpose are not the only things a quantum leap can assist with. A 2005 study published in Behaviour Research and Therapy looked at “sudden gains” in cognitive-behavioral treatment for depression. The research found not only did 42 percent of patients experience a great leap of improvement in a short time, but those who did were more likely to sustain such gains and had a higher rate of recovery.
I want to repeat something regarding epiphanies: It’s not calculated. Professor Resnicow refers to it as a “metacognitive event.” This means the solution to the problem often arrives while you’re not actively trying to solve the problem.
