From Avalanche to Addiction: Cory Richards on Trauma, Survival, and Rewriting His Life

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Cory Richards
The air blast of this avalanche just took us. I took a photograph after this of my face.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Ended up on National Geographic cover.

Cory Richards
Right. So that very much launched my life and career into a new phase. At the same time, it triggered all of that internal turmoil that I was living with. Corey Richards Is a world renowned photographer and climber. Known for capturing the raw edge of human experience.

While battling his own inner extremes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Now, before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real time lab insights. And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at DrHyman.com for my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products.

Welcome to The Doctor Hyman Show, I'm Doctor. Mark Hyman, and this is a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation with Corey Richards, who's a world renowned photographer, professional athlete, climber, bestselling author of The Color of Everything and Bipolar, will be an incredible conversation because it dives deep into our own inner landscapes and how we navigate those in ways that teach us about ourselves, the world around us, and how to navigate places that are pretty tough. And Corey has had a tough life.

He's struggled with mental illness. He's had a tough childhood on and off the streets, and has spent his life pushing the boundaries of human potential both in terms of extreme landscapes of our planet, climbing top peaks and doing crazy athletic feats, as well as in his deeply personal journey of self discovery and transformation. You know, all of us have stress in our life, traumas, little t traumas, big t traumas. And many of us often don't know how to navigate through them. And I think through Corey's story, his book, The Color of Everything, his his own metabolizing of his own struggles, I think we can learn a lot about ourselves.

He's done crazy stuff, gone to the remotest corners of the earth. He's summoned Everest without oxygen, one of I think 600 people to ever do that, being the only American to climb one of the world's highest peaks in winter. And I don't I mean, I always thought winter was when you saw Mount Everest, but that was summer. It's summer most of the time. So doing it in winter is pretty nuts.

He survived an avalanche, which helped transform him, and his work has been featured in National Geographic. He was actually named National Geographic Adventure of the Year. And his bigger journey in some ways had been his profound exploration of the depths of his own mind and including PTSD addiction and bipolar disease. And I think he's really used his own story and advocacy to sort of break the story of being broken, tell a different story. So you're gonna love this conversation.

Let's jump right in. It gets pretty deep, so stay with us. Corey, welcome to the Doctor. Hyman Show. It's so great to have you.

Cory Richards
Thanks for thanks for having

Dr. Mark Hyman
me here. When I meet people who've done extraordinary things, like climb the highest peaks in the world, done the dream feats of human endurance and stretched limits of what's possible for human beings. I'm always a little bit in awe because I'm like, damn, I don't think I could do that, like climb Mount Everest. And, you know, know, these are outer challenges Yeah. Yeah.

That are extraordinarily hard. They require mass amounts of training, planning, mental fortitude, sort of a mental toughness that makes you go when your body says no. Yeah. Yeah. And you've also had to climb very deep and hard places in your inside life.

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I'm I'm very curious about how you sort of kinda leaned into the external challenges as a way of navigating your internal peaks that you had to climb.

Cory Richards
Yeah. I mean, it's it's been an interesting journey because I think so often, there's a natural tendency to try to solve x, like internal problems through external means and and and that can be very very healthy at times, and it can also be very maladaptive. And I think for me initially, it was a very healthy expression because it gave me a way to anchor in the world. It gave me a way to try to counteract some of the stories that I had learned about myself in my adolescence when I was really going through sort of the introduction to a mental health journey.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's a nice way of putting it. Yeah. In psych units and living on the street.

Cory Richards
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
In other institutions for years.

Cory Richards
Yeah. I mean, was institutionalized, and then I was on the street, and then I, you know, I dropped out of high school. And so when I rediscovered climbing, because I started when I was five, and then I lost it, but when I rediscovered it, it was very much a way to anchor. And then photography, as a sidecar to it, sort of gave me a voice. And I think but in many ways I was it was more an examination of self.

Initially that was I think a very healthy thing, and then over time it became less healthy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You mean your your attempt to kind of seek salvation in in great achievements of Yeah. Human endurance. Which is not actually helping you on the inside.

Cory Richards
It it never really does, at least in my experience. It never fully helps you resolve that internal turmoil. It gives it a vehicle to express, but it doesn't necessarily resolve it, if that makes sense.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You've done some of the hardest things like climb Mount Everest without oxygen. Yeah. Which very few human beings have ever done. Yeah. You know, it seems like a crazy thing to do.

What they call the death zone up there. Yeah. For a reason. Yeah. Those those those were extreme beats of of what a human being could potentially do with their body.

Mhmm. But the the mental challenges, I wonder for you, were those were those harder?

Cory Richards
Oh, by leaps and bounds. Mental challenges are always the harder thing in my experience because they're more complicated. There's this very hard reality of climbing mountains or, you know, descending rivers in Africa. It's it's it's a container, and there's the physical world that you're you're moving through where in your mind, it's a whole universe unto itself. So the barriers and boundaries in there are much more immaterial.

And because of that, it is much harder to sort out where you are on the journey and what the progress is. And it's very it's very just difficult.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So basically, you've got a circumscribed task, which is climb a mountain

Cory Richards
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or descend a river or Right. Do some crazy shit.

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's it's a very circumscribed, defined It's very clear. It's very delineated. Piece of work.

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But the piece of work to heal and sort through what's going on inside is a very different

Cory Richards
It's just nebulous.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Cory Richards
Like, how do you even define growth? The only way that I've found to define growth is messy. Right? Like, it's not clear, and you're backsliding, and you're regressing, and devolving at times, and that feels like you're going backwards, but it's always forward motion, but it's just messy. Yeah.

You know, it's just a messy messy process.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you describe a lot of this in your book, which is sort of a memoir

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Call of Everything, A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within. You know, I've been in the mountains and it's so quiet there, so peaceful, so still. And you just feel like you can kinda hear the the sound of God there. And and yet, the internal turmoil was just still happening.

Cory Richards
I mean, some ways, it was almost amplified by those environments. Because when it's so quiet externally, you're made aware of how loud it is internally. Right? And so I could find moments of calm, and I could find moments of peace, but oftentimes that was when I was engaged with doing something very hard because it demanded a reduction of of that noise inside my mind simply to survive.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. When you're about to die, you know, you're basically get only thing think about is like not dying. Exactly. How to not die. Exactly.

Yeah. I've I've been in those situations not as many as you obviously, but you know, and it's like everything just kind of goes away and you just focus on the the task in front of you so you don't fall off a cliff.

Cory Richards
Exactly. Or

Dr. Mark Hyman
fall off a mountain or something.

Cory Richards
Whether it's a metaphorical mountain or not, you know, anytime we're in survival mode, we're we're going to have a an element of flow and that is because, you know, we're uniquely programmed to survive. The funny thing about survival that I've found is that it's reaction based versus resilience, which is a response. Right? And so the the shift from reaction to response, I think is part of that internal growth because as somebody who's dealt with, you know, bipolar and these these difficult mental struggles, it's very easy just to default to a reactionary thinking. The other interesting thing about that is survival is not values based.

Right? Like when people are in survival mode, they'll do crazy shit. Yeah. When people are in a resilience mode, it's slower and it's and it's underwritten by values.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Cory Richards
And the values are actually guiding it. So that shift into into a resilience mindset has been one of the most important things I've done. And I would say that climbing and photography was actually mostly survival.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Mean, it's so brave of you because it's one it's a brave thing to go climb Mount Everest. It's a much bravery thing to talk about mental challenges that you have. They're still prevalent. Know, twenty five percent of Americans struggle with mental illness, you know, suicides, deaths of despair, opioid, you know, people eating themselves to death, anything about people that get to a thousand pounds, six hundred pounds, mean, that is just a response to trauma.

Yeah. Not being able to navigate it, and not having a path.

Cory Richards
And not having the tools to. You know, not having the infrastructure. Herman, who's a Harvard psychologist, in 1995, she basically said, look, all all psychological dysfunction is really one diagnosis, which is trauma. It's all an extension of trauma for them. I mean

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Cory Richards
For the most part. Trauma has become a buzzword now, and everybody's learning about it, which is so important. And at the same time, there's this overcorrection where we're sort of believing that by knowing our trauma and being able to voice it and explain it, that that is healing it. Which isn't the case.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No.

Cory Richards
In fact, it becomes a new narrative that I've observed stops people on the Self identify with Exactly. We reinforce it by telling, oh, this happened to me. This is and now this is my new story. And I did that for decades.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So maybe you can walk us back through your early life and what what happened in your family and in your life where things broke down when you were a teenager and you ended up hospitalized in a psychiatric unit, institutionalized for months in the streets. Like, what what was that and what happened to you? And what was going on in your internal world at that moment?

Cory Richards
Very early on I I realized I had a I had a loud interior landscape and I remember that from a very very young age and by virtue of that there was a sense of isolation where I was almost trapped in my own mind and thus engaging with the external world felt difficult. And there was a sense also of like on the outside looking in. Now I think that's pretty human. As I grew into adolescence, there was a lot of violence in my home. And it was it was between my brother and I.

He was only two years older, but to me, he was like, he was my adult. You know, my parents were loving. They did the absolute best they could, but families are crazy intricate. The dynamics of families are wildly complicated.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. You throw a bunch of humans with unsolved tasks into a small container and daily basis. See

Cory Richards
what happens. And so that violence, it wasn't as simple as brothers beating each other up. It was rage based violence, and rage, I would actually say, was the more traumatic component of that. And it was his rage that perpetuated it, but then I learned also that when he beat the hell out of me, I got attention. For many years From

Dr. Mark Hyman
your parents.

Cory Richards
From from my parents, we both did. Right? So it was a means of having our emotional needs met, both of us. But then because I looked like the victim, the attention that he was getting was very detrimental to his sort of sense of well-being and self value. And I learned that, well, I feed into this, then guess what?

Like, I I get all the attention. I get all that soft attention. But ultimately, it didn't work. It just amplified the violence. And then I remember I was 12, and I just had this moment this night.

I couldn't sleep. I couldn't just I I was so unsettled, and I was I was in my family's den, and my mind just sped up to the point where I couldn't track my thoughts, and it was almost it was just these almost flashes of of black and white, and the only thing I could remember is I could track it to my heart beating. The noise was so profound, and I remember just sort of collapsing and pulling at my hair and trying to make sense of it. And it was at this time that, you know, I was a smart kid. I went to high school two years early, and I'd gone from getting straight A's to getting basically failing everything.

And so then it was that was the first time I was medicated with SSRIs. And then about God, I'd say about a year later, eight months later, my mom was like, hey, can we go to Primary Children's Hospital and sort of try to get a handle on this? And I knew something was wrong, so or something was off. So I I I agreed, and we went. There was sort of this evaluation.

I remember the the therapist so clearly. I remember, like, Enya playing in the back.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, wow.

Cory Richards
I remember the smell so vividly. And and then as we were leaving, this guy, his name was Ivan, came up. He's like, oh, we've just had a bed open up. And I was like, what? So I thought I was leaving and then I never left.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Your mom checked you in?

Cory Richards
She checked me in. And

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, that's gotta be a very disorienting experience to be that young and be hospital.

Cory Richards
And I think what's so interesting is that at that point, there's a splintering of stories. Her story and mine. So my story becomes one of abandonment. Right? Her story is one of love.

I'm trying to help my child. Both those things exist concurrently, but they are conflicting. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

And resolving that both individually and collectively over time is incredibly hard. It's very hard work to do. After that, I was put in a long term institution or or care facility for eight months. I ran away three times.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And heavily medicated, I was

Cory Richards
Heavily medicated. Heavily medicated. I was on it was actually there that I got diagnosed. And again, I'm very much like you. I don't love diagnoses because I think they come with tremendous baggage, huge stories, especially in mental health.

There's a story of brokenness that's inherent in mental health issues. Something is wrong

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's so stigmatized, right? Yeah. Yeah. The labels really are kind of just descriptions of symptoms. They don't They're just a container.

Cause or why or Yeah. What's going on.

Cory Richards
They're just a container for a set of behaviors. Right. Right? But but they come with the story of dysfunction, illness. I mean, we call it mental illness, right?

Or we have. That implies something, and it's a very hard story to get out of. And like we were saying earlier, now we're in this culture of like, we're owning it sort of in not necessarily a healthy way. Right? And that actually perpetuates the stigma.

Oh, I can't do that, I'm ADHD. Or I can't, you know, my triggers prohibit me from being in this environment. So that's hiding behind it and further stigmatizing it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's identifying with the diagnosis. Exactly. As opposed to saying, oh, this is something that I can heal or work with or shift.

Cory Richards
Or work alongside or turn into a superpower. During that time, you know, ran away from this place three times. And the last time, my my dad, who's very big on agency, was like, great. You can run away. You can do whatever you want, but you can't come home.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And how old are

Cory Richards
you? I was 15 at this point. And some people would say, that's the worst thing apparently

Dr. Mark Hyman
Child abuse.

Cory Richards
Child abuse. Right? Quite frankly, they I I fault them in no way for that. They were scared of me. I was, you know, erratic.

I I wouldn't listen. Like, really home was just a bed and a source of food, and then I'd leave and do whatever I wanted. So there was a learning that rules in in every way are arbitrary, and I just broke every rule because I had no respect for them and I remember watching them change the locks on the house and Just being like now what for the most part I was kept off the street by family friends and and friends But there were times that I was on chapter eight in the in the book, profoundly dark experience that some people would categorize as rape and some people, the way I describe it is a much different interpretation of that. But all that to say that there were things that happened that almost certainly To you. To to me or there were things that happened in my life.

I try to stay away from the language of to me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Two or four.

Cory Richards
Yeah. Yeah. Like I got things happened. Right? Yeah.

And they had an impact. And that took years to like, this sort of quasi homelessness took, I don't know, two years to really resolve, you know. And then I ended up in the hospital again when I was 17.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So imagine when you were out, you were off your medication.

Cory Richards
Sometimes, like, if I especially when I was running away, the medications would just run out. You know? Like, I was actually still I would take them because one of the stories that I picked up is that my mind was dangerous. And if I didn't take the medications, I was gonna go crazy. That was so deeply ingrained in me that I I didn't wanna go crazy.

I didn't wanna scream at trees, so I kept taking them. And I think that was actually to to great benefit That I had that I had picked up that story that I was gonna go crazy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And then and then you when you kind of were were kinda out and about

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like something and you kind of kinda lifted up yourself up to kinda get back into place of doing something. Right?

Cory Richards
Yeah. I ended up living with my aunt and uncle in Seattle and because I was out of Salt Lake, I think, and out of that environment, even though I had dropped out of high school, I'd gotten my GED by that point, but I think living in an environment where it was not the deeply ingrained tapestry of my home life was so beneficial. And it was there that I sort of rediscovered climbing, and I discovered photography, and started to go down that path. And that was, again, that's where it became healthy. That's when it was generative.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So when you were when you were in your teenagers, were you using drugs and alcohol, and were you self medicating as many people with mental illness do

Cory Richards
or something? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I love I love drugs, and I and I still love drugs. But in a very different I have a very different relationship with them now.

For me, actually, I would say that the vast majority of my maladaptive behavior was focused mostly around drinking and sex.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Cory Richards
Right? That was because I was so hungry for connection that was a source that at least felt like there was some level of desire to have me in your life even if it's like that, you know, even if it's a very short lived thing. But I I I think that was actually those were my behaviors that really kind of were the most detrimental. Drugs, again, because I had this story of I was gonna go crazy, were a little bit more had a more tenuous relationship with them.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So those those alcohol and those drugs you were more afraid of because you felt like they were

Cory Richards
Alcohol, I wasn't, but but like more psychoactive drugs like psychedelics and, you know, cocaine, all those things, I was much more reticent of. Later in life, of course, I've used psychedelics as as part of my mental health journey, and that's been wildly generative.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And did you when you when you started sort of your journey back down to yourself,

Cory Richards
which

Dr. Mark Hyman
sounds like where you've come almost full circle and

Cory Richards
like Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Gone through this horrible childhood and traumatic childhood with Yeah. Which, you know, in itself was traumatizing

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
From the trauma of trying to deal with the trauma.

Cory Richards
Yeah. So meta.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So meta, right? You kinda got back into a world of physical Yeah. Endurance and climbing and also trying to see the world through a lens.

Cory Richards
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which I imagine was your way of reimagining the world and your relationship to it. Mhmm.

Cory Richards
Yeah. Beautifully put.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Tell us about how you kinda got from that dark place into sort of this attempt to try to feel that through these external things. And what were the what were the limitations of that? Did you think, oh, you know, you've conquered so many things. Right. You've you've pushed so many limits.

Yeah. And and yet, it didn't quite do what you wanted.

Cory Richards
It did until it didn't. So part of it was being with my aunt and uncle. I got three jobs. I started saving money because I wanted to go climbing. You know, I wasn't in school, and that was such a beautiful observation that photography was really a way for me to try to interpret and understand the world that I was moving through.

One of the things that I write in the book is that there was a sense that if I looked hard enough at anything or anybody, I could see my own reflection. Because there is a shared experience, not just with other people, but with the natural world in the entire world our entire physical world that we live in there is a reflection of ourselves that exists and I think photography was a way to try to see that and anchor myself to the world. Also, it gave me a very real voice, meaning that coming from a place of feeling like I really didn't matter that much and I wasn't wanted, there was no belonging, To have my name printed in ink on a page with my expression sort of was this proof that I had a place in the world. And I love that. And I also use that for validation.

Over time, it became it became maladaptive in its own way because I was mistaking validation for love or external attention for love, which is not the same thing. I mean, that's like the likes on Instagram, right? Oh, look at me, like, everybody loves me, and you're like, that's not love, bro. No. But then the the physicality of it also was trying to, I think, get out of my mind and marry somehow my mind and my body.

And and it was a way to get all the angst out. And then it just got harder and harder and harder, meaning like the climbs got more and more difficult, then I got more and more attention because then I'm getting sponsored, I'm going on bigger trips, and I and and I was just filling myself with that, but it becomes much more dangerous too. In what way? Just more dangerous climbs. Right?

More dangerous endeavors. You're going to higher altitudes, harder ways, and then that is sort of its own swelling of hubris and ego that allows you to escape what's actually happening inside, which is also driving it. So you don't wanna resolve it because you want it to keep fueling you. Yeah. There's the fear that if I if I am actually somehow healthy

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're happy, then you won't wanna do the

Cory Richards
hard things.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Out of all all success comes out of somebody chasing pain away somehow.

Cory Richards
Chasing pain away, getting their heart broken. I mean, look at the vast majority of amazing art Yeah. Is all about getting your heart smashed. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's why I was wondering when I was in college. Was like, is there is there a place for art without suffering? Like, did art come out of joy or light or beauty or magic or wonder?

Cory Richards
I actually think all art is an expression of love. But oftentimes, it's coming through the lens of pain. But it's try it's in my mind, it's love trying to be expressed. And so the reason we create during pain and and crisis is because the love feels suppressed. It feels pushed down.

And so art is the expression of the of love coming through you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you can see in your book, Bipolar Photographs from an Unquiet Mind, it's sort of a double entendre, bipolar, like both poles and everything in between. Yeah. It's an incredible book, a beautiful book of photographs from all around the world that you've taken and and how you see the world and what you see and the things you photograph that reflects, you know, who you are. Yeah. And I imagine in some ways, it's it was very healing to do that for you.

Cory Richards
It was healing. I mean, the photographs putting the photographs in a book, putting them into bipolar as a collection was very healing. The memoir, The Color of Everything, the way I often refer to them is they're actually one book. There's the internal exploration, and then there's the external manifestation of it. And so they're really companion books where one you get to see how my mind was interpreting the world around me, but the other one you get to see what was really happening underneath it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Cory Richards
And what was at many times driving it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, some of these pictures are just stunning, know. And I I, you know, often wanted to go see what it would be like to go to Mount Everest or K2. You should. The top peaks. But I'm like

Cory Richards
Dude, come on. Look at you. You're ready to go right now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I actually had a dream of to backpack and hike and be in the mountains. And I had a dream of being an expedition doctor and wanted to be on expeditions. And I actually was a wilderness medicine doctor for a while Idaho. Was a family doc and I I was part of the backcountry rescue team. We learned No kidding.

You know, rescue people from really rugged mountain But it wasn't climbing Mount Everest with like to no oxygen.

Cory Richards
Well, friend, Doctor. Luann Freer, she was the one that actually sort of was like I went to Everest in 02/2012 and she was like and and got evacuated, and she's like, I think you had a panic attack. And this was after the avalanche. My point in bringing that up is she never climbed Everest. She just created the Everest ER.

Yeah. And that was her life for for years and years and years. Yeah. Was creating a medical facility to care for Climbers. Climbers, sherpa, high altitude workers.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Crazy. So I want you to take us to this sort of this moment where and tell us the story of when you were climbing in winter Yeah. A mountain that never been climbed in winter Yeah. In Pakistan. And something catastrophic happened.

But tell us what happened in terms of the actual events Yeah. But also what happened on your inner landscape.

Cory Richards
Okay. So just so people know, there are 14 mountains in the world that are above 8,000 meters. So 26,240 feet roughly. Five of those are in Pakistan, and the other nine are in right on the border of Nepal and Tibet, and then there's one down in India. After all those peaks were climbed, in the early eighties, there was this crazy idea, and it was really the Polish doing these sort of nationalist expeditions to start climbing these peaks in winter.

So it's like, okay, now we've done it. Now we've been to the top. Now let's try to go there in a much harder way. So all nine that are South Of Pakistan had been climbed, but over, I think, twenty six years, sixteen expeditions had gone to Pakistan to try to do one of the winter ascents, and they'd all failed. And so in 02/1011, I was invited by an Italian guy, Simone Moro, and and a Russian guy, Dennis Arupko, to try to do one of these peaks, Gashubram 2.

And that is the thirteenth highest mountain in the world. So we ended up climbing it in this very short weather window, about a twelve hour weather window. And then we got hit by a storm on the descent.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You made it to the top.

Cory Richards
We made it to the top.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And in winter, I mean, just to put a perspective for you, was feeling Mount Everest, even climbing the summer, it's like snow and cold and like 30 below. Like, what is winter like? That's not winter. What is winter? If summer is 30 below, what's winter?

Cory Richards
Winter is like this. We got up on the summit day, we're at 6,800 meters. There's three of us smashed into this sardine can of a tent that's really a two man. We're sleeping head to toe. I mean, it's incredibly cramped and tight.

We wake up in the well, at 11PM.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you barely sleep at that altitude.

Cory Richards
Oh, my sleeping is like yeah. No. That's like trying to sleep at, you know, an ACDC concert. So we got up at eleven and, you know, I had my altimeter and my thermometer hanging from the ceiling. It was minus 51 centigrade in the tent.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Without the wind chill?

Cory Richards
Without the wind chill. So that's like minus 60 Fahrenheit. It's terrible. Right? But this is like, I loved it at the time.

I absolutely adored it. And we start climbing through the night, you know, six or eight hours later, we're sort of it was almost as if it just happened. We were on the summit. It's almost like I blacked out, you know? And then the weather came in.

I think on the summit, it was registering at minus 80 without the wind chill.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You get like frostbite where you have enough clothes. I mean, it's like how do you how do you project against that cold weather?

Cory Richards
Well, you're wearing these huge down suits Yeah. That kinda look like space suits.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Cory Richards
And you've got a ton of layers on, but it's tricky because if you if you layer up too much, you start sweating Yeah. Which makes you cold. So if your feet are sweating in that kind of temperature, your toes are gonna get frostbitten. And it's very, very Tenuous too. It's you have to be very very careful because if you say you drop a glove or a mitten I mean that hand is gone

Dr. Mark Hyman
right,

Cory Richards
you know you can't handle stuff at that temperature It's kind of like grabbing dry ice So we got to the summit, and I'm I was I became I didn't know this by the way at the time. I became the first, and I still am the only American to summit any of the 8,000 meter peaks in winter. So we start descending, and this storm hits us, and it just starts dumping snow. And we got back to Camp 1, and we had a you know, it's relatively flat, but it's this huge glacial valley that's just if you look at pictures of it, it looks like it looks like sliced bread. These crevasses just kind of as the grade gets steeper, they just spill over.

I have video of it where like the snow is up to our waist, and I heard above us this sort of crack. Sounds a little bit like thunder, and I know what's coming. And I turn and I look, and the cloud ceiling was very low, and then the air blast of this avalanche just took us. And then we're in the snow, and

Dr. Mark Hyman
it And you're tumbling around.

Cory Richards
We're I mean, it's just like being in a washing machine. It's very violent. It's very loud. Your mind goes absolutely crazy trying to make sense of what to do, how to make it stop, how to not die, and and yet it's flooding with memories at the same time. So the idea that like your life flashes before your eyes is accurate, but in my experience what there was like wasn't poetic.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Cory Richards
It was just like random shit going through my head. Yeah. But a million thoughts in a second. So you're living this this this elongated timeline in a very short timeline. I just remember being angry, and then I remember just kind of resigning to the fact that I was gonna die, and there was nothing I could do about it.

And then stopping and realizing my face and my head kind of above the surface. And and then my first thought was, well, Simone and Dennis are dead because there's no way we all all of us survive this.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Your climbing

Cory Richards
partners. My climbing partners. And there's no way I'm gonna dig them up. I don't have a shovel and the snow is gonna compact very quickly. I could pull the rope Mhmm.

That we were tied to to see if I could get down to them. My thought was well, there's no way I'm gonna get to them in time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Were your hands free?

Cory Richards
One hand was free. Mhmm. And so I started kind of thrashing and flopping like a fish trying to get out of it before that that that my body heat would actually kind of freeze me in a sort of a cocoon. And then I heard Simone's voice. And it was so confusing because I was like, there's you're dead.

Right. You're dead. Like, there's no way you're alive.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Cory Richards
And then I felt him on me. He was more in the periphery. Somehow when he was in leading. He was ahead when we got hit, and somehow I ended up ahead when we stopped. We'd gone over several big crevasses.

There were huge chunks of ice in the snow. So any one of these things could have killed any of us. And then I heard Dennis' voice too. So somehow, we had all survived, and really that is because what what the impetus of the force was actually the air blast in front of the snow. And then we got hit by a little bit of the snow.

And that's that's how we all were mostly on the surface. And then So you were kind

Dr. Mark Hyman
of ahead of it in this Yeah.

Cory Richards
Yeah. Because it we were on basically flat ground. So what happens is it slides off the steep ground and the snow starts to slow down, but it actually amplifies the force of the air blast. And so we got thrown about 500 feet. And then I felt Simone's sort of hands on me and digging me out.

What happens in those moments, the way trauma works is basically it stores a memory. So trauma is not the event itself. It's it's the mind storing the memory in the hippocampus. And when it's very traumatic, it then triggers the amygdala in this

Dr. Mark Hyman
Your spider pipe area.

Cory Richards
Into your sympathetic nervous system. And so that shuts down your prefrontal cortex, so you have no logic and reasoning. Mhmm. And you're just living in this recycling loop because your mind is telling you everything is a threat. That's what we call PTSD.

Right? And that recycling system becomes so problematic that then we search for any way to slow that down, to zone out from it. That's why there's so much substance abuse within people with PTSD. That's why there's anger. That's why there's violence, because you're you're trying to express Good stress.

Yeah. Through it. Then by virtue of that, it becomes sort of a life path that you can't get out of. There's two ways to rewire the brain. Only two.

One is through intense experience, and one is through repetition. And so that's why when people have these intense experiences, it changes the brain entirely. And then oftentimes, the only way out of that is repetition, which is much, much harder.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what do you mean by repetition?

Cory Richards
Meaning meaning you have to change your neural pathways. You have change what's going on in your head by repeating new patterns over and over and over again to get out of the trenches of the shift that happens during a traumatic event. You can also have profoundly intense experiences that are very positive, that change the wiring of the brain. For example, psychedelic use

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Cory Richards
Can facilitate that. That's why people have this big blowout experience, and all of a sudden, they're freed from years of addiction. Mhmm. Because they had a positive intense experience.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so when you when you you were in that avalanche and then you came out of that, you already had, you know, experience in living with PTSD and trauma Yeah. From your child. You're already having struggles with bipolar illness. When you came out of that, what what shifted? Did you kinda have an exacerbation of the PTSD experiences?

Was it a a vehicle for you to sort of navigate a new way out of all those? What happened?

Cory Richards
Well, yes is the answer to that question. Both. All of it. When we have complex post traumatic stress, which is, you know, deeply ingrained repetitive traumatic experiences, say for example, like my childhood, it's much more likely that you'll have a PTSD episode when something big happens like that. So what happened was I took a photograph after this of my face.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which ended up on National Geographic cover.

Cory Richards
Right. And this story blew up well beyond the climbing world. And so that very much launched my life and career into a new phase, which was very very positive and generative, and changed the course of everything for me. At the same time, it triggered all of that internal turmoil that I was living with, and so I started to unravel internally. There was the hyper stimulation of the external world, which was something that I knew how to navigate because of childhood.

And yet, the trauma inside started leading me down some very, very dark paths, specifically with substance abuse.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And after this experience.

Cory Richards
After the after the avalanche. But it was subtle, and then it kind of grew. And then it there was anger, there was a lack of memory, there was

Dr. Mark Hyman
It wasn't like holy shit, I survived. Now I have a new lease on life and let me free. It was like the opposite. You went into a darker

Cory Richards
Well, I wanted that. Again, they they existed concurrently. Right? So I wanted intellectually the new lease on life. But what I was experiencing internally was why is this getting harder?

Why is this why is the why is this actually louder in my brain now? So I used the external success again to quiet that down, but internally, I was like, give me anything to make this stop. Just like give me anything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And when you say this, can you kind of describe what this feels like?

Cory Richards
It's like an internal that never goes away. It's like a it's like the way I describe it in the book, it's like the the the edges of the world become fragmented and sharp, and yet there's a dullness to your perception and ability to function. It's like living in a haze where you've had too much coffee, you've gotten yelled at by somebody that you love, you've got you know, like, it's like all the worst shit, and you're so you're stuck in these rumination loops, you know, having conversations and arguments with the person that cut you off in the Whole Foods parking lot, but it's like all the time, you know? It's it's just so deeply uncomfortable. It's like jagged edges in your mind that is ceaseless and constant and will never ever shut the fuck up.

You can't find a moment of calm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's interesting that you you call your your photography book Photographs from an Unquiet Mind and and in the cover of everything you you kind of have a flip way of talking about that which is really about how to get you out of quiet. Yeah. So can you kind of just kind walk us through that?

Cory Richards
Well, the photographs were made in a you know, throughout a life of a very, you know, this this disquiet. And and the memoir is all about the journey to find the quiet and and where I found some of that. Which is not to say that I live with a very quiet mind, but it's about the process through which I found ways to regulate and and to manage the dysregulation and to manage the highs and lows. But again, like, it's not as if it just is is an instant resolution or or it all just goes away. I just went through something recently where I was like, just got my heart absolutely smashed.

And it was like, I feel good. I feel good. I feel like, you know, in the past three months, there were the fires. Nine of my friends lost their homes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Los Angeles.

Cory Richards
Yeah. I left a relationship that I had been in for a year and a half. My dad died. And then I fell madly in love, and then it got and then that just ended super abruptly in a very confusing way. And so you look at like the kind of dysregulation that that causes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Any one of those things is enough to knock you off your Right.

Cory Richards
And then you're doing four of them.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A bunch of life comes

Cory Richards
at you. Yeah. And then you think, well, I've really done a lot of personal work. And then there's this vacuousness after all of this loss, and it was instantly back into these patterns, you know, these pathologies. And so in some ways,

Dr. Mark Hyman
it's like When you say the pattern, you mean the narrative in your head?

Cory Richards
The narrative in your head and the behaviors, and like, not not necessarily abuse, it's different. It's a different expression now, but it's just like, wow, I'm grabbing for anything to calm this, and it that it's a very it's a good barometer and road map for, oh, this is still where I need to do some work. You know? It's because it's it's easy to be regulated when things are going your way. It's much much harder to stay regulated when the world falls apart, and that's usually where you see your markers for growth.

You see what I mean?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's when the fit goes down that you start to have a place for heal up. Someone said to me, either you're happy or you're growing. Right. I think that's really true and it's what we do with that.

You know, some people come up against that and they hide, they run, they numb, they

Cory Richards
tell a story of

Dr. Mark Hyman
brokenness. And they don't they don't actually use it as an opportunity for growth. Right? Yeah. They they use it as a sort of

Cory Richards
An excuse for fuckery. Yeah. You know?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Because that's one way of putting it. Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's easy to fall back into that, right?

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Because it's sort of easier, it's our culture sort of supports it. Mhmm. We don't have structures and systems to help us navigate out of that. And I think the psychedelic revolution is really interesting to me because it's a way to talk about trauma collectively. Talk about destigmatizing mental illness to understand that the brain has this plasticity that can shift out of trauma.

There's this funny joke in medicine that neurologists pay no attention to the mind and psychiatrists pay no attention to the brain.

Cory Richards
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and and a lot of the the things you're describing are brain dysfunction. Yeah. That is a response to external triggers Right. Or external influences. And it could be anything from actual psychological trauma to changes in your metabolic health to inflammatory change in the brain that come from toxins Mhmm.

Diet or Mhmm. Very sec you know, external factors Mhmm. That drive mental illness. So mental illness is sort of the end result of many potential causes.

Cory Richards
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I wrote a book, I don't know you know this, but I wrote a book about fifteen years ago called The Ultramind Solution, How to Fix Your Broken Brain by Fixing Your Body First.

Cory Richards
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And in that book, I basically call myself the accidental psychiatrist because what I was doing was helping people address physical complaints that they had about

Cory Richards
a

Dr. Mark Hyman
or digestive issues or psoriasis or whatever the heck it was. And they would tell me that their ADD was better. Yeah. That their bipolar disease was gone. Mhmm.

That their schizophrenia was improved. That whatever what whatever it was Mhmm. Mhmm. Dementia would get better, depression would get better, PTSD would get better, panic attacks would go away. I mean, and I was like, what's going on here?

Cory Richards
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
This is not what I learned in medical school.

Cory Richards
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? This is something fundamentally different. And it's sort of got me down this rabbit hole of asking the question about what the causes are and what does the brain need to heal in order for the mind to heal. Mhmm. It's a lot harder to heal the mind if the brain is not working.

Cory Richards
Right. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Exactly. Doesn't mean you don't have to do the work once your brain is healed.

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's a much easier path than dealing with all the physiological things that are driving brain dysfunction.

Cory Richards
And so, like, for example, this is like the ACES scale, the adverse childhood experiences scale. Right? Like, so if you have you know, it's it's it's basically a questionnaire of one to 10. Did you have this happen in your childhood? Did you have this happen?

If you

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like, did you have a divorce in your family? Was somebody in your family in jail? Were you abused? Were you yelled at? Exactly.

Great.

Cory Richards
Were you ever hungry? Right? Did somebody ever hit you so hard that there were marks? Right? And the more you add this up, there's this profound expression of both physical ailments and behavioral ailments.

Right? So, like, you're I I don't know the exact figures, but you're far more likely to be a smoker, you're far more likely to attempt suicide, you're far more likely to

Dr. Mark Hyman
30 times more likely to attempt suicide.

Cory Richards
Right. I mean, it's crazy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
High score. Much more likely to be depressed or

Cory Richards
Get divorced. One of the things that's so beautiful that you're talking about, and and one of the things that we miss is also the integrated system of the heart. Mhmm. Because the heart is not a metaphor. Mhmm.

As we're learning so much more about it, there's mirror neurons in your heart and your mind, and emotion processing in some way starts in the heart. And then, you know, it's the signal for it travels up your vagus nerve, and then it starts this this bilateral conversation between your mind and your heart. So it's not just this metaphor. So in my mind, wellness is the integration of the mind, the body, and the heart. And those those three components that when they're working in in concert, you are stepping into a place of more holistic wellness.

But you're absolutely right. It's an inside out and an outside in job, and it can work both ways. Right? And it does work both ways.

Dr. Mark Hyman
As an elite athlete, when you when you started working with all this on, you know, both internal and external. You know, you try to manage it in some ways by doing all these crazy things. Yeah. Most people think are nuts.

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And it helped you in some ways. For sure. And it I think probably take you out of a maladaptive behavior Yeah. You know, although people say climbing to Mount Everest is crazy.

Cory Richards
Yeah. What's the scale?

Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's sort of a socially acceptable crazy.

Cory Richards
Right. It's like

Dr. Mark Hyman
what we look up to, you know.

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Were there things that you found helpful that that helped quiet your mind that were were not these extreme endurance things such as what you ate or because you were obviously extremely fit and

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Healthy and from that perspective, but also what was food a part of this? How did you use things like meditation or supplements or other things that that helped you to sort of regulate? Because you seem pretty well regulated

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Now and I imagine compared to how we were, it's a big shift.

Cory Richards
It's a huge shift and there were many modalities out side of therapy. That was one, right? But in my daily life, there are some very basic things that I try to hit. One is journaling. Like literally mind dumping.

Yeah. And it's not I'm not trying to write well. I'm not trying to be pretty. It's mind vomit.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It Purging. Yeah,

Cory Richards
purging. I do that in the morning if I can. Just get to it, vomit what's going on, and you just get it out.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you basically what we're talking about is your inner dialogue that's your lower self. Right. You're you're not keeping it inside. You're basically it's like having shit literally shit inside you instead of being constipated mentally, you literally get it out. You get it out.

You just kind purge

Cory Richards
or vomit. It's a mental suppository.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, exactly.

Cory Richards
Basically, it's just Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's so powerful.

Cory Richards
It's so powerful and consistency is key with it. Right? Doing it regardless is great, but consistency is really Do you wake up every morning and you journal? I wake up in the morning, I meditate. One of the things I've really learned is to remove the roadblocks.

If you think that meditation has to be sitting up straight with your legs perfectly crossed, trying to get a blue light shooting out of the top of your head, you're missing the point. If you remove all the roadblocks to these things. So I wake up in the morning, I prop myself up in my bed a little bit, and I meditate. I don't try to sit up straight because I found that that means I won't do it. Right.

Then I go to the gym or I do my my sort of morning pages or, you know, those can happen whatever time it happens. But by then, you know, by the time 09:00 rolls around or 08:00, meditated, journaled, exercised.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it sets the foundation for your day.

Cory Richards
Exactly. It sets and so again, I I've tried to be the guy who does it at 05:00 and then you do that. That's fuck that. Like, that is a hurdle. Right?

And then you'll feel the sense of failure when you don't hit it. And then I have other pillars, which are community. I do a lot of men's work now, where it's we call it the tree house, and we are just a group of people who are committed to our own growth and the growth of other men

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Cory Richards
Through the messy work of change and accountability. Mhmm. And that provides the structure for one of the other pillars, which is community. Right? So spending time with other people.

Dan Puechner, started Blue Zones, has done a lot of research on this. He's a dear friend and a mentor where it's like Okay. Spending a lot of time with people is actually healthy people is really good for you, you know? And then creativity. Do you hit that creative whatever it is?

Doodle for for thirty minutes while you're on the phone. Just be creative in some way. Giving. And that could be simple. That could be listening to a friend.

Mhmm. Not trying to fix it, just listening. That is a huge gift. So there's I try to hit all these things, and then diet, of course. I try to get enough food.

I try to bias protein basically for for muscle function, and get plenty of greens and veggies in, and kinda stay away from sugars and bad carbs.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And do you notice that those adversely affect you when you do go off the

Cory Richards
I'm just foggier.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Cory Richards
Foggier and I don't feel as good in my body. I feel lethargic. It doesn't mean I don't love them. I mean, give me some pizza. Right.

You know, like, just being mindful of that. And then with supplements, again, it's my supplement sort of regimen is very, very basic. It's vitamin d, it's omega threes, it's, you know, maybe some probiotics at different times. I also supplement with like a super greens

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Cory Richards
Thing in my in my protein shakes Mhmm. And fiber because I have naturally high cholesterol. Mhmm. So when you're eating a lot of meat Yeah. And you have naturally high cholesterol, you gotta be careful.

But it's very simple,

Dr. Mark Hyman
you know. And has that affected how your brain is in terms of how your your mood is and cognitive function and inner dialogue and by the swings of mood?

Cory Richards
I would say it has, but it's by virtue not only of the like the actual chemical reaction in my body and what that's doing and the reduction in inflammation, but it's also the consistency. Being consistent with with things in in your life in general creates a foundational sense of stasis Yeah. Because it's reliable.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like, uses of agency Yeah. And not being not being at the effect of the world, but being in charge of your world.

Cory Richards
Agency. It's so interesting you say that. Agency is everything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What do you mean?

Cory Richards
Like you said, it puts you in control, and it takes you out of a state of this is happening to me to this is happening, and I get to choose my response to it. Yeah. When you're not an agency, you're reacting to it and you're always back looking backward. Not having agency is living in a place of blame. Yeah.

So it's backward focus. This happened to me and that's always in the

Dr. Mark Hyman
rear blame.

Cory Richards
Yeah. Victimhood is like and we're fostering victimhood right now. And that is we we are a culture right now that is rewarding victimhood.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's really true. We have a victim based culture. Mean Yeah. I mean, the whole woke movement Yeah. Is really about I'm the victim, I've been abused.

It's the oppressed oppressor narrative.

Cory Richards
Right. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which which has a place but it's For sure. It it seems to have gotten kinda way over, you know, to the other end where agency.

Cory Richards
Yeah. You know, it's like we get to just be in the trauma of it, and we get to sit in it, and we get to stay victims. I'm not saying that when terrible things happen, there's not a place for being a victim. You are a victim of something happening. There's a time and a place for that.

The goal is not to get stuck in it. When I was writing my book, and I say this in the book, I started writing from a place of victimhood. Look at how hard my life has been. Right? And look at what I've overcome, and look what I'm a survivor.

Yeah. And then I realized, oh my god. Even claiming that I'm a survivor keeps me chained to the trauma. Right. Because I'm still always in reference to the thing that happened.

Right. Versus there's there's data and then there's the stories we create around it. The data is the event, and then there's the stories that we spin up to find meaning and navigate life with that. Right. But we have to be very careful about the stories we're telling.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Cory Richards
And right now, as you point out, we are stuck in a story of this happened to me. But when I look back now, and I look at the relationship with my brother, I look at my family, I look at being institution I am literally profoundly grateful for it. Mhmm. And that's the shift.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's the alchemy that made you who you

Cory Richards
are. Exactly. Yeah. I wouldn't I literally would not be sitting here with you

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Cory Richards
Had all that stuff Okay. Not happened.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. You wouldn't gone on to do all these crazy

Cory Richards
things I wouldn't have done it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And yeah. It's really, know, sort of what you're talking about reminds me of the this sort of profound extreme examples of where one would think that it would be impossible to have this perspective. Mhmm. You know, and I There's, you know, three stories that I I kind of things that I've heard that really kinda always echo in my mind. One was, you know, Viktor Frankl's book, Man's First

Cory Richards
Man's Search for Me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Man's Search for Me.

Cory Richards
Man's He's Favorite books.

Dr. Mark Hyman
He realized that he was in a concentration camp. Yeah. And, you know, he the only thing he could control was his response to his environment. Yeah. Couldn't change the environment.

Right. He couldn't change what he was getting to eat or how he was being abused or the fact that people were in crematoriums burning next to him. But he realized that, you know, he had agency Mhmm. Over his mind. Yeah.

And he he he said, you know, between stimulus and response, there's a pause. In that pause lies a choice, and in that choice lies your freedom.

Cory Richards
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so he was free even though he was in a prison. Right. And I I remember a story I heard about Nelson Mandela where he was in Robben Island Yeah. In in prison, you know, having to

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Part of labor

Cory Richards
Oh my god.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Splitting rocks with a sledgehammer and there was a moment where he was so angry Yeah. At his oppressors, at the white jailers Yeah. And the guards. And he had this moment where he realized that they were actually just human beings and that if he chose to love them instead of hate them, that, you know, that he was no longer imprisoned.

Cory Richards
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and during his inauguration, and I I had news people who were at that inauguration, it wasn't Bill but there was a after the inauguration, was a sort of a lunch and and he he had the prime minister here and the head of that there and he he moved them away from the chairs next to him and he invited in two of the jailers who he got to know Wow. Who were his jailers and guards during his imprisonment in Robben Island and welcomed them and embraced them. And he had gotten to know them and they'd gotten to be human beings with him. It was really quite an stunning story. And the other story was when I was I was a young medical sort of student and I went to Nepal on an expedition toward Kachinjunga which is Yeah.

The tallest peaks there and I wasn't climbing it. Was just trekking and we were studying this small village and and doing a public health survey. And after I went down to the town in Nepal called Bodhunath, which is where

Cory Richards
all the

Dr. Mark Hyman
Tibetan refugees Mhmm. Hang out. And I I was really interested in Tibetan medicine and I wanted to learn about Tibetan medicine. And so I found there was this Tibetan doctor, this old Tibetan doctor that was practicing there. And I found someone who was a translator and I got to sit with him all day and while he was seeing patient after patient.

And he told me the story of how he spent twenty two years in a Chinese gulag, where he was beaten and abused and tortured and, you know, they took away all the things that mattered to him of his sacred Buddhist

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Prayer. I said, what was the hardest moment for you there? He said, well, the hardest moments were those moments where I thought I might lose compassion for my Chinese jailer. I was like, wow. You know, so that sort of speaks to how we see things.

And Gabbormati talks about, you know, the fact that trauma isn't what happens to you. Right. It's the meaning you make from what happens to you. And I think when you're little

Cory Richards
The story you tell.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The story you tell. And like when you're little, it's hard because you know, you you don't have this perspective. You don't You can't kinda call in your higher self that easily. You're

Cory Richards
You don't have agency.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You agency. You're a little kid. You're at the effect of your parents. I mean, you're you're kind of a You are a dependent. Why they call them, dependents.

Yeah. Yeah. But when you get older, you have to sort of retell that story.

Cory Richards
You have to unlearn.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you have to retell that story in a way that doesn't hold you as that victim.

Cory Richards
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and it sounds like your journey was was through that dark tunnel of victimhood Mhmm. And survival. Mhmm. But out the other side of it, you figured out how to actually tell a different story. So can you can you walk us through how you got from that place where it was hard and you were a victim to the place where you were in power and and actually in charge of your own story narrative and how you were able to sort of retell that story in a way that allowed you to become more free.

Cory Richards
A lot of it was really writing the book. But that something happened concurrently with that where I did start doing more psychedelic work. Mhmm. And as I was writing the book, I was confronted by my own words looking at them in black and white on a page. As I became more aware of my heart, my actual heart, I became more compassionate towards the external stimulus Mhmm.

Of my life. Because I started to see that like Mandela or like Viktor Frankl, when you start to see the world as a collection of complicated contradictory beings, there is a necessary extension of compassion. And it also happens internally when you start to see yourself, you take agency and you start to see that you are full of contradictions.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Cory Richards
You are full of polarities. You know, we are all hypocritical at at different times. And the more we're in search for survival, the more binary we become. That's a natural response of the brain. In writing the book, when I was confronted with my own stories, and I was coming more into contact with my heart, I realized that I could reframe the stories.

I could abandon the narratives. I could literally rewrite them on the page. And what a powerful experience to do that as an exercise for people.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Does it sort of metabolize your life story in the process of the writing? Yeah. It's almost like a, you know, a way of metabolizing your life story.

Cory Richards
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It it sort of got transmuted into something else.

Cory Richards
Well, I saw I literally, one day, had this sort of revelation. I was I I love reading one of my favorite books is The Power of Myth, where Joseph Campbell talks about how there are basically archetypes of humans, and there are stories that we consistently tell throughout history and have. Right? And I started to see there's this moment where I was like, oh my god. It's all a story, and I'm in charge of that.

I have the agency to imagine, reimagine, and unlearn the stories that I've learned in a very conscious way. And it doesn't mean lie to yourself about it. It doesn't mean these things didn't happen. It means that my interpretation of them, and the meaning that I'm giving them is is my responsibility, and I have control and agency over that. And so you step out of the blame mentality and into the gratitude mentality, where you see that the shape of you and all of your contradictions and complexities, all of that beautiful mess is is yours to own versus somebody else's to control or a memory to control.

And there's so much liberation and freedom in that moment. Consciousness is storytelling.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's important. I mean, think, you know, most of us don't even realize we can retell the narrative of our life.

Cory Richards
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That we can change the meaning we ascribe to things.

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That we can end our internal suffering by actually reimagining the narrative that we've created for ourselves. Yeah. And, you know, I've had to do that. And if, you know, if anybody who's sort of gotten to a place of more peace, you know, sort of like I said, your interesting titles of your books are so different. One is Yeah.

One is, you know, Photographs from an Unquiet Mind, another one's A Journey to Quiet, the Chaos Within. Yeah. So it's an interesting

Cory Richards
It's polarity.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Flip, right? Right.

Cory Richards
And that has been My life has been defined on some level by polarity. And there is In the Hermetic teachings, that's

Dr. Mark Hyman
I don't if you mentioned it. My my life has been defined bipolarity. Bipolar Nice,

Cory Richards
dude. That that was great. I'm gonna I'm gonna keep that one. In the Hermetic teachings, which are basically underlying all religious philosophy, one of the principles of the seven principles is basically based around polarity. And so the idea is that every truth is simply a half truth.

And until you incorporate the other half truth, which naturally exists, you are living in half truths, which are falsehoods. Right? It's it's and so part of my journey has been to become more compassionate towards those seemingly paradoxical relationships and allowing myself to expand to include both sides of everything. And that that that extends to myself, meaning that like, the highs that create things would not be the highs that create things without the lows that balance against them. And so to say that I want only one would betray the law of polarity.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's true. I mean, most of us try to push away what's uncomfortable Right. And get seek pleasure. We avoid when we seek pleasure. And and in a way that that kinda misses the point of life, is that it's all part of life.

Cory Richards
It's all part of it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and and and you can't experience one without the other.

Cory Richards
Discovery demands discomfort. So if we're trying to constantly avoid the things that make us uncomfortable, we will no longer discover. And another one of the things that I talk about oftentimes is that certainty kills curiosity. So as soon as you become certain of your story, certain of anything, you're done growing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Cory Richards
There's no more exploration. There's no more discovery. You're done. It's over. So grow your capacity for discomfort, lean into the things that are hard, lose your certainty, take agency, and grow.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. What the questions?

Cory Richards
Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm gonna say, has a famous passage around that, which is beautiful. About welcoming the questions because that's really where you find the answers. Right?

Cory Richards
Well, and it's it's funny that I I opened the book with a quote, which is, let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, just keep going. No feeling is final.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Cory Richards
It just you know, the idea to avoid suffering, there's a lot of that right now in the mindfulness wellness community where there's almost like a it's spiritual bypassing where you're like trying to almost escape the necessity of pain. You're just like bypassing it. No, I'm just gonna be mindful and I think it's a misinterpretation of non attachment.

Dr. Mark Hyman
True. I I I I'm gonna share that real quick quote because it's so it was so important to me as a young man and from a book called Letters to Young A Young Poet.

Cory Richards
He was

Dr. Mark Hyman
a young poet that actually helped, you know, the the poet kind of reflect on his own life. And it was this beautiful meditation. These letters were just mostly poetry. But he said, be patient toward all that's unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now and perhaps you'll then gradually without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Cory Richards
Yeah, it makes me emotional because it I mean, the the one thing that I I still have tremendous amounts of questions and especially right now in my life, it feels almost more confusing than it ever has.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I'll you what, I'm 65 and I still have so many questions and so many unsolved things and so many things I'm still leaning into and learning and growing. And it doesn't matter what age you are, what point of life you are, you know, your your story is one of inspiration, but also I think it's it's one of giving people a sense that that they're they're not alone in these struggles and trials and challenges, whether it's just anxiety, depression, or just tough moments in life, or whether it's where more serious mental illness, that there's there's a way through. Yeah. Right? The only way out is through.

Cory Richards
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you've clearly demonstrated that, Corey, with your life and your life's work. And I encourage everybody to learn more about Corey. Check out his book Bipolar Photographs If You Want In Quiet Mine, his book that he just came out with, The Color of Everything, which is just a beautiful meditation on your life and experience. And in in a way, you're sharing people the alchemy of your change and how you sort of shifted your narrative, which is I think it's almost like you get to see the work in progress of that. Yeah.

You can follow my Instagram at and your handle is just Corey Richards. Yep. Right?

Cory Richards
So No e. No e. C o r y.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and, yeah, there's films you've made. There's all kinds of stuff out there. But I think, you know, we all find challenges in life and your story of overcoming those challenges and and we do overcome those challenges is is inspiration for all of us. So thanks for doing what you do, being who you are and coming on the show.

Cory Richards
Thanks for having me. This is great. Perfect. Loved it. If you

Dr. Mark Hyman
love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts.

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