Overcoming Physical & Emotional Challenges | Coleman Ruiz

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Wrestling was the first turning point

  Ruiz grew up in New Orleans, the son of a father who had wrestled, and says he knew within a week, maybe at his first practice, that wrestling was his thing. He also boxed between seasons. What he valued most in combat sports was the respect: fighters understand what it takes to face someone on a mat with no equipment, nowhere to run and no timeouts. The love of hard physical effort has stayed with him.

• 02

  Earning your place daily works, until it doesn't

  At the Naval Academy prep school in Newport, Rhode Island, and later, Ruiz never felt he had arrived. Each day was a restart where he had to prove himself again, driven largely by fear. He calls this adaptive in that it made him go all in for his team, but also maladaptive: after loss, his response was simply to work even harder.

• 03

  Three backgrounds predicted who survived BUD/S

  As a first-phase officer in charge, the phase that runs Hell Week (five nights with barely an hour of sleep, where most quitters ring the bell before Wednesday), Ruiz says instructors found that pull-ups, run times and home region didn't predict success. Their informal survey found that roughly 90–95% of those who made it had been varsity athletes, had divorced parents or had been suspended from school. He stresses this was anecdotal and would not pass independent review.

• 04

  Having no other team can make someone refuse to quit

  Asked why divorce would predict grit, Ruiz says that for him the thought was 'if I don't have this team, then what team do I have?' However cold and miserable it got, he wasn't leaving. Huberman relates to looking outside the household for family and belonging.

• 05

  Repeated loss was absorbed rather than processed

  Serving at a Tier One unit from 2006 to 2011, Ruiz lost well over 40 people he knew. Averaged out, he attended a funeral or memorial about every 90 days. The routine was a funeral, a few beers, then back to work. His closest mentor, a Marine named Doug whose toughness he had never seen equalled, was killed in 2007. Ruiz describes taking the call in his kitchen in Virginia Beach and feeling 'the whole scaffolding of the world' disappear.

• 06

  Leaving the military was the hardest part of the journey

  After separating in fall 2011, Ruiz had night sweats and no idea what to do with himself. He had thought PTSD 'the biggest joke on the planet' until he read the symptoms. Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces gave him a framework: he felt trapped in the return stages, especially the 'refusal of the return', without a mentor to help him cross the threshold back into ordinary life.

• 07

  An intense psychedelic experience was followed by collapse

  Ruiz describes physician-supervised, legal sessions of ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT two days apart, one of the most profound experiences of his life, which left him feeling connected to all warrior cultures. A few months later he fell into severe depression. He now calls that combination 'the nuclear option' and says it isn't right for everyone. When friends ask, he initially tells them no, and he favours slow, skilled talk therapy first.

• 08

  Emotional pain can be physically overwhelming

  The depression shocked him most because he had not believed something like it was real. He couldn't believe emotional pain could be so physically painful, and says he came close to the line of suicide. Looking back, he likens those months to being cut open, scorched from the inside and put back together to start over. Huberman, drawing on psychiatrist Paul Conti, notes that the limbic system's dread doesn't know the clock or the calendar, so it feels like it will last forever.

• 09

  Recovery came in small steps

  His wife Bridget insisted on full-time help immediately, and he admits he would otherwise have avoided it. Gains were minuscule but steady. He stopped drinking easily during that period. Huberman shares that he took low-dose bupropion for about four months during a postdoc depression and adds, after Conti, that many such medications are designed to help people get over a bump, though some people need them long term.