Podbit · On Purpose with Jay Shetty
When patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder achieve remission through dietary intervention, many don't celebrate — they grieve. Thirty lost years of relationships, careers, and independence collapse into a single devastating question: why didn't someone tell me this 30 years ago?
Where this was said
At 59:50 · chapter starts 59:05
One of the episode's most humanly powerful moments arrives here: Palmer describes the emotional arc of patients who experience full remission from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder through ketogenic interventions. [1] — Dr. Chris Palmer "When patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder achieve remission through dietary intervention, many don't celebrate — they grieve. Th…" 59:50 The expected response — joy, relief — comes, but it is consistently accompanied by something darker: profound grief for the decades of life stolen by the illness. These patients lost their relationships, their education, their independence, their identities. The question 'why didn't someone give me this 30 years ago?' is not rhetorical — it is raw and real. Palmer conveys this with the authority of someone who has sat with those patients repeatedly, and it gives weight to everything he has argued throughout the episode. The stakes of getting psychiatry right are not academic; they are measured in human lives.
More than 1,900 people have participated in published trials of the ketogenic diet for mental health conditions, with the overwhelming majority showing some benefit.
Dr. Palmer's mother — a normal middle-class woman raising eight kids — broke down in her early 40s and was never helped by psychiatry. She lost custody of her children, her home, her money, her identity. He watched it happen furious at the field he would go on to join and try to transform.
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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