Podbit · Modern Wisdom
When Ben was flown back to Milwaukee on June 6th last year, doctors had to fully paralyse him for transport. On arrival, they put him on ECMO — a machine that only about 40% of patients come off alive. Ben made it. Most don't.
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Ben Askren was at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas when his back began hurting. He went to the hospital on May 27th, was told it was a back spasm, collected his prescription, and returned to the hotel irritated. When the medicine failed — something that had never happened with previous back spasms — his wife began videotaping him sleeping and sent it to doctor friends, who immediately told her to get him back to hospital. Ben protested; his wife won. He walked into the emergency room waiting area and that is the last thing he remembers. What he did not know: a staph infection that had cleared from his elbow weeks earlier had entered his bloodstream and triggered necrotising pneumonia — a condition in which his body was literally eating his lungs from the inside out. By the time doctors understood what they were dealing with, the only way to keep him alive was a double lung transplant. He was unconscious for approximately 37 days and in hospital for about 73 in total. When he finally came to, in the dark, alone, unable to speak, a nurse told him he had had a double lung transplant. He had absolutely no idea how that could have happened. [1] — Ben Askren "Ben Askren walked into a hospital thinking he had a back spasm and woke up 37 days later with someone else's lungs. A staph infection on hi…" 01:42
Patients placed on ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) have only about a 40% chance of surviving to come off the machine.
Ben Askren walked into a hospital thinking he had a back spasm and woke up 37 days later with someone else's lungs. A staph infection on his elbow had entered his bloodstream, triggered necrotising pneumonia, and caused his body to eat his lungs from the inside out.
Ben Askren was unconscious for approximately 37 days after being admitted to hospital with what he thought was a back spasm.
Ben Askren woke up in the dark, alone, unable to speak, having no idea why he was in a hospital. A nurse told him he'd had a double lung transplant. His wife arrived in the morning with a day-by-day journal of everything that had happened while he was unconscious.
Self-help fails because people are sold one universal cure by the hyper-responders who had a transformative result from it. The real problem is context: every method works for the right person at the right time, which is almost never you just because the author says so.
Spencer Greenberg was once so socially anxious his heart pounded just approaching a stranger. His therapist gave him homework: go to a bar alone, talk to 5 strangers. Starting with asking for the time, he worked up to asking men for hugs — and his anxiety fell dramatically in 6 months.
A person who flies regularly but obsessively checks weather forecasts before every flight is not doing exposure therapy — they're teaching their brain that flying is only safe with the ritual. Safety behaviors prevent the brain from ever learning that the feared thing is actually fine.
The worry-time technique assigns all worries to one scheduled slot (e.g. 5 PM). Every time a worry surfaces, you write it down and ban yourself from engaging with it until that time. When 5 PM arrives, most worries feel trivial and the act of batch-worrying exposes how little it actually accomplishes.
In a randomized study of 20 habit techniques, 'habit reflection' stood out: recall a past habit you successfully built, write down what helped you succeed, then apply those same strategies to your new habit. It works because it's self-adapting — it uses whatever worked for YOU.
The tiny habits technique — always having a minimal version of your habit you can do when life gets in the way — keeps the mental machinery of habit formation from breaking. Paradoxically, people given a tiny-habit fallback option were MORE successful at the full habit, not less.
Fears and worries act like playground bullies — they want to ambush you. But when you deliberately seek them out and choose the time of engagement, they lose their power. The volitional act of starting the fight on your own terms is one of CBT's most underappreciated insights.
Most downtime defaults are things you regret immediately after — phone scrolling, binge TV. 'Glad you did it' activities meet the same need for rest but leave you feeling like you spent your time well. The switch from a bad screen to a documentary, a book, or a walk costs almost no extra effort but compounds into identity over time.
You rarely control your first reactive thought. But you can train your second thought — the response to the trigger — by asking whether your initial reaction is the most helpful one and replacing it with something equally true but more constructive. Over time, that second thought becomes automatic.
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