In my 33 years, I’ve made two decisions that changed everything.

One decision was to save my life, the other was to save my heart.

One Decision to Save Your Life

At 20 years old, I was stuck on a hedonistic rollercoaster of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll.

I was a college student at the time, and I figured "this is what college students do, right?" All the people around me were doing the exact same thing, so I thought.

The voice of my identity rang, "This is just who I am." I thought I was my behavior.

Ultimately, I made a decision that saved my life: uprooting everything to attend a wilderness therapy program in Hawaii.

While there, I was stripped of all external identifiers and I discovered I wasn't my behaviors. I was something much more expansive, with the capacity to choose differently.

This revelation transformed how I approached change. When I separated my sense of self from my actions, I found freedom to transform without feeling the pressure of perfectionism.

Years later, as I began working with clients, I noticed this same pattern—one true of every client that I've ever worked with (I've coached 100+ men over the past 7 years and have over 2,000 clinical hours working as a therapist).

The common thread? Those who identified too strongly with their behaviors found change nearly impossible.

"I'm just a night owl," "I'm an addict," "I've always been overweight"—these identity statements create invisible barriers to transformation.

Understand the Brain to Better Understand Yourself

Humans are run by emotion. Our modern brains developed around primitive brain structures.

Brain development in order:

1. The reptilian brain; responsible for our primitive instincts of aggression, dominance, survival, and basic autonomic functions.

2. The limbic system (mammalian brain); responsible for emotion, pleasure, memory, and social bonding.

3. The neocortex, particularly the prefrontal cortex; responsible for higher cognitive functions, reasoning, planning, self-regulation, conscious awareness, and the construction of identity.

While these systems evolved sequentially, they function as a layered, yet integrated whole.

Our conscious identity, formed in the prefrontal cortex, is profoundly influenced by the older emotional and instinctual systems.

This fact is crucial to understanding trauma, therapy, self-awareness, and personal development. These older brain systems override our rational mind, explaining why logic or willpower alone often fails to resolve emotional issues.

Stop Focusing on Your Habits

Psychological research suggests that cognitive flexibility is the key to happiness.

This means you're able to adapt your thinking and behavior in response to changing situations, and able to consider multiple perspectives simultaneously.

This mental agility allows individuals to:

• Generate creative solutions to problems

• Maintain perspective during difficult situations

• Recover quickly from setbacks and disappointments

• Adapt more effectively to life's changes and challenges

I'd like to take this a step further and suggest that identity flexibility—the ability to adapt, evolve, and reimagine aspects of who we are—is the key to sustained happiness.

This is especially important when it comes to changing habits and behavior.

James Clear, in his best seller Atomic Habits, writes about habits in relation to our identity. He suggests that it's important not to identify with our habits or behavior.

When we rigidly identify with external or changeable aspects of ourselves—our habits, job titles, relationships, physical appearance, or social status—we create vulnerability, because these elements are inherently dynamic and often beyond our control.

Even seemingly positive identifications ("I'm a high achiever," "I'm always the responsible one") can become prisons that limit growth and adaptation when circumstances change.

We (collective science) are incredibly limited in our knowledge about the brain.

We are incredibly limited in understanding how powerful the older parts of our brains are.

In fact, I thought my mental health was fine—until I learned how to release trauma from the primitive brain and realized what I’d been missing all along.

This might sound scary or depressing, but in reality it’s incredibly helpful.

If you accept it, there are ways to work with it—best I've found is in your relationship to identity…

I no longer identify with behaviors that cause me concern.

This does not mean I avoid accountability or effort, quite the contrary, it liberates the shame attached and creates opportunity for solution (in therapy, this is known as problem-separation).

Instead, I identify with things greater than myself and my behavior i.e. virtues.

• Wisdom: Seeking deeper understanding

• Justice: Commitment to fairness and equity

• Resilience: The capacity to recover and adapt

• Growth: Commitment to learning and evolving

• Courage: The willingness to face fear and uncertainty

• Integrity: Alignment between your values and actions

• Compassion: The desire to alleviate suffering in yourself and others

This approach is significantly more holistic than identifying with your behaviors or habits, you create space for your humanity while maintaining direction.

For example, instead of saying "I'm not a person who gets angry" (behavior identification), you might say "I value peace and understanding" (virtue identification), which allows you to acknowledge when you feel angry while still orienting toward your deeper values.

This focus reduces the stress of perfectionism (nobody can embody this virtues all the time) and reduces our brain’s bias toward self-centered thinking.

This, my friend, is the key to happiness.

The paradox is that in surrendering identification with your behavior, you gain access to greater resources to shift and change said behavior. Therapeutic research backs up this line of thinking; there is no better way.

There is one thing in your life that is killing you sooner than you intend: diet, addiction, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, and/or chronic stress.

My invitation: Recognize one behavior that is killing you, but don't identify with it.

Instead, identify with the virtue that calls you to change it. If it's poor diet, perhaps identify with self-respect; if it's addiction, perhaps identify with clarity or freedom; if it's lack of exercise, perhaps identify with vitality.

Create and execute on a plan to eradicate this behavior immediately—not because you're trying to become a "different person," but because you're aligning your actions with your ideals.

One Decision to Save Your Heart

The identity flexibility I learned in wilderness therapy gave me the tools I needed years later to make my second life-changing decision.

April 2023, I opened a sober-living with a dear friend of mine.

Bright eyed, bushy tailed, the excitement and possibility was real. Sober livings are considered box businesses, low entry and infinitely scalable. We raised money, found a house, and started the endeavor.

I've always sought to find or create a career that exists at the intersection of purpose and profit.

Undoubtedly, capitalism has its flaws, but the way to battle unethical business is to create ethical business. The way to battle unethical people (who create unethical jobs) is to be an ethical person (who creates ethical jobs).

This was the goal with our sober-living… the kicker, I hated it.

The moisture of my life began to dry out. I was putting out fires all day, dealing with very sick folk who had no interest in getting better. They were looking for ways to exploit the system and exploit the care of those whose hearts were in the right place.

The one thing I could not ignore was a restless whisper: "this sucks, I don't want to be doing this."

I was tied to this endeavor; financial investment, a long-term friendship, hours put in marketing, in setting up the house, and building a clinical structure for our clients.

This reality was measured against my inner knowing that "this is not what I want to be doing."

It took me three months to finally adhere to it.

The results of me leaving that business led directly to you reading this letter.

I'm so grateful I had the intuition to hear my "restless whisper" and the courage to act on it.

Life's too short to waste your heart, it's too precious to let fear win.

Are you aware of your own restless whisper? That one thing gnawing at your sleeve, begging you to listen?

There is one thing in your life that is actively working against what you know to be true in your heart: career, a broken relationship, avoidance of a difficult conversation, avoidance of pursuing a dream or creative passion.

My invitation: Recognize the one thing that is killing your heart, but don't identify with the situation or your current role in it. Instead, identify with the virtue calling you forward—perhaps courage, authenticity, or integrity.

Create and execute on a plan to eradicate it immediately - not because you're failing at who you are, but because you're ready to align your life with the deeper values you already hold.

The Power of Identity Flexibility

These two decisions—to save my life and to save my heart—might seem different on the surface. One involved breaking destructive habits, the other involved walking away from a seemingly good opportunity. But at their core, both required the same fundamental shift: separating my identity from my circumstances and behaviors.

When we identify with virtues rather than habits or roles, we create the psychological freedom to make the changes we need—whether those changes save our physical health or our spiritual wellbeing.

You’re worthy of this freedom. The path begins with a few courageous decisions.

With love and healing,

Brian Maierhofer (Professional Human)

P.S. I’ve got something exciting for you guys starting next week. Stay tuned :)