Podbit · The School of Greatness
Geography and stigma used to gatekeep grief support. Kessler's Tender Hearts program at grief.com now runs 26 specialized online groups — from suicide loss to anticipatory grief to faith-based groups — in multiple time zones, with no cost barrier.
Where this was said
At 1:12:10 · chapter starts 1:11:20
Lewis gives Kessler space to describe his resource ecosystem in detail. AboutGrief.com is a free introductory video resource explaining what grief is. Grief.com is the main hub, hosting the Tender Hearts online grief groups — 26 of them, organized by type of loss: losing a sibling, a child, a parent, through suicide, through violence, anticipatory grief for people whose loved ones are sick, even a faith group and an afterlife group [1] — David Kessler "26 online grief groups at grief.com: Kessler's Tender Hearts program at grief.com offers 26 specialized online grief groups covering differ…" 1:12:14 . Groups are available four times a week, in time zones spanning Australia to Europe, and no one is turned away for lack of funds. Kessler also describes the grief educator certificate program, which draws psychiatrists, therapists, coaches, and laypeople who want to turn their own pain into purpose. He reflects on the evolution of online grief groups: initially skeptical that emotions could translate through a screen, he was quickly converted — and notes that online delivery solved a longstanding problem. In-person, a local group might only offer widows while you need a sibling group. Online, the specificity is unlimited.
Kessler's Tender Hearts program at grief.com offers 26 specialized online grief groups covering different types of loss, with no one turned away for lack of funds.
Kessler imagines arriving in the afterlife and meeting his son, who asks: 'Wasn't Earth incredible? Did you eat the food? Did you travel?' The implication is devastating: his son would not want him to have stopped living. Grief is real. But so is the decision to live again.
Spike your cortisol in the first 1–3 hours of your day — with sunlight, hydration, exercise, or caffeine — and you set up elevated mood, focus, and stress resilience for the rest of the day. Miss that spike and you get a flat cortisol curve: brain fog, poor learning, and bad sleep. The bookend is equally important: dim lights, no caffeine, and wind down the final hour.
Bottom-up impulses — just eat the cookie, keep scrolling — are driven by deep brain structures. Top-down prefrontal control is the thing that lets you wait, learn, and grow. Every small act of choosing the harder thing, from picking up trash to doing the workout you dread, greases that top-down circuit — and it transfers to everything else.
A Washington University in St. Louis study found that the attention-improvement effects of Ritalin are effectively equal to a great night's sleep. Stimulants also stunt growth and reduce sleep quality. The new direction is combining lower medication doses with genuinely better sleep — not replacing sleep with pharmacology.
Two big inhales through the nose, then a full exhale to empty — that's the physiological sigh. It fires a specific vagal pathway to slow your heart rate, offload CO2, and tip the autonomic nervous system toward calm instantly. Doing just 10 deliberate exhales throughout the day measurably elevates HRV by nighttime.
Presence isn't a state you fall into — it's something you actively produce by anchoring perception to the immediate environment. Ask 2–3 trivially specific questions about your surroundings (how many cans, what does it smell like) to pull your brain out of past/future mode. Then deliberately choose what to think or say next. That's it.
Acknowledge the thing, feel all of it, uncouple the emotion from the memory, then transmute the experience into something meaningful. Most people stall at step 2 — feeling the feelings — and never reach uncoupling. An entire generation is stuck there, confusing emotional processing for healing. Moving through all four is the actual path out.
Nicotine creates a uniquely alert-and-calm state ideal for learning — but only at low doses used occasionally. If you're using 3–6 mg pouches multiple times a day, you're not getting a cognitive enhancement, you're just rescuing yourself from withdrawal. For a genuine performance effect, use it once or twice per week at most.
Two injections of BPC-157 (100–200 mcg) eliminated shoulder pain Huberman couldn't shift for months. The peptide pinealon gave him 2.5–3 hours of REM sleep inside 6 hours — an effect that persisted into subsequent nights and scaled down to just once per week. Neither is in the book because the human data aren't there yet, but the animal evidence is strong.
Long, slow cardio builds capillary networks and mitochondrial richness; high-intensity intervals push VO2 max. You don't need huge volumes of either. Huberman's protocol: one 45–60 minute long slow session, one near-maximal effort HIIT session (Airdyne 20-on/10-off for 6–8 rounds), and one medium 30-minute effort per week. That's the complete cardio picture.
We use essential and analytics cookies to run Vuci. To understand how the site is used: Privacy Policy.
Install Vuci on your phone
Add it to your home screen for a faster, app-like experience.
Install Vuci on your phone
Tap the Share button, then “Add to Home Screen”.
A new version is available
Reload to get the latest Vuci.