Summary
Joe demonstrates that the brain cannot hold wonder and stress simultaneously. Through a guided visualization of being chased by a tiger, he shows that simply wondering “how much does it weigh?” immediately shifts the nervous system out of fear. Wonder opens up creative problem-solving, removes defensiveness, and changes the quality of questions we ask.
He offers a practical exercise: write down 15 things you don’t know about your biggest stressor, then form “how” or “what” questions around each. This process naturally reduces stress and generates actionable steps. Joe then maps out a broader path for transforming your relationship with stress — from creating separation, to wondering about it intellectually and somatically, to setting boundaries, to experimentation, and ultimately to loving stress itself.
He shares his personal journey of forgiving his abusive father through this same progression: curiosity first opened the door, then seeking reality, then experimenting with boundaries, and finally love emerged naturally. He warns against two backwaters: using love as a management strategy (loving stress to make it go away), and trying to skip directly to love without first moving through wonder.
Key Concepts
- Wonder and stress cannot coexist in the brain
- Wonder removes defensiveness
- Loving something to make it go away is not actually loving it
- Listing what you don’t know dissolves stress and reveals action
- Wonder opens the aperture to creative problem-solving
Key Quotes
“It’s really, really hard to be stressed out and full of wonder at the same time.”
“If you’re in wonder, the answer is, ‘Oh, how is that? How do you see that?’ There’s nothing to defend.”
“Wonder is the thing that opens up the aperture to life and it solves the problems that you think you need to resolve when you’re under stress.”
“If you’re loving something to go away, you’re not loving it anymore, and so it stops working.”
“You can’t just force yourself into loving it. So, you have to be mad at it for a while… and then you have to allow that wonder to open up.”
Transcript
It’s really, really hard to be stressed out and full of wonder at the same time. And I’ll prove it to you. In this video, I sit down with a woman and we talk about how cultivating wonder reduces stress. And we do a superficial experiment at first. And then we do a deeper experiment later on in the video. And I invite you to do the experiments with us because this gets it to be in your body, not just in your mind. And it can totally change your relationship with stress. So, take a moment. Close your eyes. Take a breath. All right. I want you to imagine that you are in a jungle and you hear something in the woods just like behind you. You hear some rustling. You look over and it is a tiger. And it is a massive tiger. It is huge. It is coming at you. It’s You can smell it. It’s starting to run. You can feel its feet land. It’s such a big tire. You start running as hard as you can. You are running as fast as you can, but it’s catching up to you. It’s going to get you. You know that this is your time to die. This is it. It’s coming for you. You’re about to feel it pounce. And now I just want you to wonder how much it weighs. It’s a crazy thing that our brain has a really hard time holding fear and stress when we’re in wonder, when we are in awe of life or anything. And it’s what makes people really capable of seeing different points of view and coming up with great solutions to problems is to be in wonder, to have an open mind, and to be in awe of the world. So, this is how it works. Partially, it’s because you can’t really be defensive if you’re in wonder. So, somebody comes up to you and they say, “You’re a complete asshole.” And if you’re in wonder, the answer is, “Oh, how is that? How do you see that?” There’s nothing to defend. You’re actually starting with a question, which immediately makes the other person feel heard. Wait, I just called you an asshole. You’re supposed to fight with me. And you’re not taking this personally. You’re asking me questions. How is that possible? I know you’ve learned some of this anyways in the connection course when we talk about wonder. But the thing is that it just immediately takes the pressure, the stress out of your system. And it also takes the pressure and stress often, not all the time, but often out of the people around you. So wow, that’s a lot less stressful. The people around you are less stressful. You’re less stressed, there’s less for you to defend. Even being defensive is quite a stressful act. If you think about any time that you’ve been defensive, it’s not like I was just relaxing while being defensive with somebody. It just never happens. So, it’s an incredibly useful thing. But most importantly is that it’s just really, really hard for your brain to be in wonder and to be in fear. Wonder and stress at the same time. And so often times when we’re in a stressful situation and we’re trying to solve a problem, which is usually what our brain tells us we need to do when we’re stressed, how do I work out more to how do I solve this big how do I market the thing? How do I get this thing done that I don’t know how to do? One of the best ways to figure that out is to be in wonder. So, it’s not well the way to work out is to go to the gym every it’s oh I wonder what exercise would be the most enjoyable exercise. What would be the exercise that I could do that I would want to do so bad that I would get up off of Tik Tok to go do it? How do I find out what that exercise that’s all questions that come from wonder? How do I have a marketing campaign that makes me feel more connected to the people we’re selling to and then feel more connected to me? Those are all questions that are answered by wonder instead of, oh, I know I have got these six things to do that everybody tells me to do in the marketing campaign and I make my web page like this. Wonder is the thing that opens up the aperture to life and it solves the problems that you think you need to resolve when you’re under stress. And it immediately neurologically in your brain right now changes your stress to how much does the tiger weigh? In this experiment, you’re going to need a pen and a paper. And it’s really simple. You’re going to write down the thing that’s stressing you out the most right now. Whether it’s something at your work or something in a relationship or anything you can think of that is creating a lot of stress for you. And I want you to write down 15 things. 15 things that you don’t know about it. Stuff that you have no idea about. So if it is your relationship and you’re fighting with your wife, then what’s the experience like for her is something you don’t know anything about. Or what’s the neurological causation of fights is another one. Or what’s the thing that you’re actually scared of happening? What are you fighting for exactly? What does your ego have to do with fight? So, whatever it is that you have no idea about regarding the fight or about the business problem or about the problem with your boss or about your boss or whatever the stress is, I want you to write down 15 things that you know nothing about regarding this issue. And when you’re done writing those 15 things, then you’re going to write one question that begins with how or what around each one of those things. So, if you don’t know what your boss is really trying to get you to do, what is my boss trying to get me to do? Or if you don’t know how your wife feels about the marriage, then you can say, I wonder how my wife feels about our marriage. And so, just write those questions down and be in the wonder of those questions. Pause the video. Go ahead and do that. Okay, now that you’re playing the video again and you have that list of questions about things you don’t know anything about, notice what’s happened to your stress. Notice the action items that you didn’t have before that you have now. Notice what questions you can ask of different people to allow you to solve this problem. This is how powerful wonder is in regards to stress. When I was a kid, my dad was, you know, in the teenage years, not a great father to say the least, right? Alcoholism, abusive, verbal abuse. It was just horrible. And there was this necessary step that I had to take to separate myself from my father. I had to take some steps where he was the bad guy and I was oppressed by him so that I could create enough separation so I could find myself or start to find myself. But at some point that anger at my father prevented my healing. So separating myself and being angry at him was a very necessary step. And also learning to forgive and love him was a necessary step for me to be able to actually be authentic and to be myself. And when I was learning to forgive and love him, the first opening, the first thing was curiosity, was wonder. And that wonder was about what was happening with my father, what was his childhood like? How did this all go down? And then after that wonder started opening up then I started to try to find out what reality actually was. What’s actually happening with my dad? I had a whole bunch of preconceived notions. He was trying to control me. Blah blah blah. But I really wanted to get in touch with what was real. And that was the second step. And then the third step was to do experiments to say, “Oh, if I treat my dad like this, what happens? If I treat my dad like that, what happens?” And that just naturally came into a welcoming and a loving. There was also something in there with the experiments of boundaries that was really important. What were the boundaries I was going to draw with my father and his alcoholism that would allow me to maintain myself enough to be able to stay in wonder and to stay in curiosity? So this is the exact same steps that you would take for stress. So first, how do you create enough separation? Take a vacation, get enough sleep, whatever you can do to create enough separation where wonder can open up. The wonder about stress can be on an intellectual level. Oh, I notice when I have these thoughts, stress increases or decreases or I notice that when I talk to myself in this way, stress increases or decreases. So, it can be an intellectual wondering. There’s also a really important somatic wondering. Oh, right here. Here stress is happening to me. What happens in my body if I resist it? What happens in my body if I tell it to off? What happens in my body if I try to enjoy it or what is it exactly that’s happening in my body? Where is it exactly in my body? So that all that wonder somatically and intellectually really important and the first steps and then some boundaries are going to be necessary, right? And so those boundaries are going to be something my phone use right when I wake up creates stress. So I’m not going to use my phone for the first 15 minutes of the day. Or eating crap food before bed makes me feel stressed in the morning. So I’m not going to do that. And you’re looking for any of those things that you can actually activate on with relative ease that can reduce that. Now you’re wondering about what’s actually true for the stress where it came from. And so how much is the stress trying to care for you? How much of the stress is trying to hurt you? What’s the purpose of it? How did it learn to come into existence? What’s its background? You’re tracing through your system how this whole thing came into existence. And you can notice even right now in your body when you think about that there’s a settling that happens of the stress just to oh what’s going on here? And so that’s the next step in it. And as you do these experiments, what you’ll start to notice is oh when I love stress it’s really effective. It’s really wow this is really effective I love it and it changes and it feels seen and then with that happening more and more you’ll just notice that the love naturally shows up naturally you start loving the stress. There’s a couple eddies or backwaters that you can go into that are really important to know. The first one is and almost everybody does it they realize oh if I can love and welcome stress then stress starts easing starts going away and so then they start loving and welcoming stress to make it go away and then it stops working because if you’re loving something to go away you’re not loving it anymore and so if you find yourself in that place recognize oh I’m doing this as a form of management and when I manage it, managing stress like that doesn’t actually help stress be seen or feel fully felt in the body there’s no wonder in it anymore and so it stops working. And so the other backwater that you can go into is that you can try to jump to loving stress. Okay, Joe, I heard you say blah blah blah. I’m just going to skip all this wonder and curiosity thing and I’m going to go whack. I’m going to just go to love. But love doesn’t work like that. You know, it works like that with babies, thank goodness. You know, you just immediately love a baby. But if you feel oppressed by something, it’s very very very difficult to love. You can’t just force yourself into loving it. So, you have to be mad at it for a while. You have to resist it like I said a little while ago and then you have to allow that wonder to open up. So it’s really hard to just force the love especially if you feel oppressed. So those are the two backwaters. But in general, the main component of loving something is to just let it unfold through wonder and exploration and experimentation and just really try to understand what’s happening and then that slowly turns into love through experimentation of oh how does it react if I relate to it like this? How does it react if I relate to it like this? And that can happen either in your body or that can happen just experimenting out in the world.