Episode 452: Henry Abbott on Misogi - The Extreme Challenge With a 50% Chance of Failure

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle.
Crush it. Welcome to Fitness Friday.
Today I'm joined by journalist Henry Abbott to explore Misogi, which is a powerful practice where you take on a challenge so tough there's only a 50% chance you'll finish. Think underwater 5Ks with rocks or nine-hour paddleboard treks through

sharky waters. We also talk about the science behind mental limits, Henry's journey through chronic pain, and why pushing to the edge might be exactly what you need to break through.
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JEN for 20% off. Livemomentous.com Why do you write about Misogi? Do you know about Misogi? I do.
Do you know where it comes from? Isn't it like, yeah, I do. Do you know? It comes from this guy.
This comes from Marcus. Oh, it does? Yeah.
Yeah. You should read that chapter.
Oh, my gosh. Okay, I'm going to read that chapter.
That's the chapter I did not read. And then Kyle Corver.
We'll talk about it. Okay, so when Marcus was in medical school, Harvard Medical School, he and a friend named Garth were very outdoorsy, and they didn't like being in Boston, and they wanted to sort of get back to the country.
So they went to the Wind River Range in Montana, which is extremely high elevation, like 12,000 feet at the low parts, and it's very intense. And they were going to pack almost nothing and catch what they were going to eat and deal with altitude by just being tough.
And like 10 minutes in, that's a slight exaggeration, Garth gets altitude sickness and has to go home. So then, but in the lead up, he's been talking to Marcus about how he does all these martial arts.
And there's this like Shinto tradition of Misogi where you do it as Garth explained it, which is not totally accurate with the Shinto tradition, but you once a year, you do a challenge that's so intense that you think you're only 50% likely to make it. And so Marcus lashed onto it as this idea of a way to get into your capabilities that are beyond what you think they could be.
We're held back by our brain a lot of times. A lot of the times, even in breath holding, you get this panicky feeling you have to breathe long before you need oxygen.
So you want to defeat that a little bit. And so they've done crazy things.
One of the ones was run a 5k on the ocean floor carrying a rock. So if we were partners, I would drop the rock.
It's like, they do it in like the Channel Islands. So it'd be like 10 feet deep under the waves, drop the rock on the ground, and then you dive down and pick it up and run as far as you can, and then drop it.
And then I swim down, pick it up, run as far as I can, and they do and then i swim down pick it up run as far as i can they do 5k or they they paddleboarded from the channel islands to santa barbara which is nine hours of like wind and sharks and like you know craziness and like nine hours or they climbed the height actually most of them failed this one they they arranged to climb the height of mount everest in like i think it called the U.S. Bancor Tower in L.A.
Is that what it's called? Something like that. But a skyscraper.
A skyscraper. What's the point? So this idea, why did he do it? So the idea of doing this Misogi? Yeah.
Yeah, it was basically picking one thing a year that you're doing that is something that you think you have a 50% chance of actually completing, basically. It's like a super hard challenge.
Yeah. What's the purpose of it? So the purpose of it is to shut your brain up when it tells you you can't do something, right? The purpose of it is to show your brain.
Movement is actually interesting in rewiring your brain in terms of limits and also pain. So if you have chronic pain, which is a big topic in the book too, because it's the reason why a lot of us don't move like we want to.
I talked to this awesome pain expert, Rachel Zofnus, who explains basically like the way that you convince your body it can do something where like it's sending pain signals is carefully progressing through more movement, right? The movement sends the signal back like, no, we're okay doing this. So in doing a masogi, you're telling your body like, you might feel like we can't paddleboard for nine hours, but I'm telling you we can.
I'm showing you we can. We're going to feel that we can.
And then once you've finished that, you kind of have this self-regard where you're like, maybe I can do anything. Right.
It's the concept of doing hard things to show and prove to yourself that you can do hard things. So it gives you the confidence to do something again or different.
And they used to have this thing called the Harvard Fatigue Lab around World War II where they would just abuse people and see how much they could take. And they found there's almost no physiological limits.
People can deal with insane amounts of heat or know, dehydration or whatever. Like they just like can't really find the limits are in our brain.
So I mean, this, this is where it sounds like kind of trippy, but like in writing this and I went through this research, like every animal that flies used to not fly, which means there was like a first one to fly. Like that is trippy, huh? How badass is that?

Right. And they just like one, one day an animal was like, Hey, I'm going to try to fly.

I got this.

And then they just started flying.

And I think about the lemmings, right? It's like, they're all trying, right? They're all

just like, maybe I got it. Maybe I got it.

That's so true.

Like maybe one day one of them will.

So can one day a human could just try to fly? Why don't you just go outside and try

to fly? Have you tried?

People have those skin suits. They're getting closer, you know?

You think so?

I don't you just go outside and try to fly?

Have you tried?

People have those skin suits.

They're getting closer, you know?

You think so?

I mean, I don't know, but like, I'm not going to tell them they can't, right?

Like, I'm going to leave that up to them.

Do you think humans are going to be able to fly one day?

I mean, not soon, but... But if animals can do it.

There are things that used to be fish to fly now.

You know what I mean?

Like what?

I mean, we all evolved from like little sea creatures, I think.

That's true. That's true.
Yeah, I guess I just, you know. It's limitless to what we can actually achieve.
And there's this great study about like, you can see on an MRI in the brain, like a little thing that happens when a thing starts to fly. Like when the first dinosaur started to fly, the skull got a little different to accommodate like this little new brain activity.
Yeah, I this for my day. Yeah, yeah, I did.
And when a pigeon flies, that same little part of the skull like has this little extra activity of like whatever they have to do to fly. Like I'm guessing that the first step in humans flying would be that in our brain, right? We're flying.
So this is the Masogi to me is like, you can change your brain. You know, they can put a freaking, I don't know why they chose this thing, but they, like an owl can only survive if it catches mice and stuff, right? And that's why its eyes are like way bigger than ours.
Like 30% of their head is eye and they have better eyes than we do. But they would put like a, like basically goggles or lenses on the owl so that it was seeing the whole world through a prism and it was like totally screwed up.
Now they can't survive, right? But it would take them like two, three days to learn how to catch a mouse looking through that crazy mess. Because they just like learned a new language.
They learned a new way to do it, right? Wow. And that's like only survival will give you that like crazy burst of learning, right? And I feel like this is what the Masogis touching a little bit is like maybe we can do way more than we thought so is the idea that this place gives tells people that they need to choose and pick a miso a misogi every year so they can then not feel limited by anything and get rid of limited beliefs of themselves great question so you know how i said this is of like learning language? And there's like the two ways, right? There's like drilling with your teacher, doing vocab drills, and then there's like just move to Quito and see if you can speak Spanish, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right? So in the lab, you know, you pay them, whatever. That's going to be the vocab part.
That's where they're going to assess you and watch you and coach you. Like the outside the lab part is not part of the paid service, right? This is just like, that's how Marcus lives his life and a lot of his friends.
And a lot of the NBA, you know, Kyle Korver was an NBA player for a long time. He and Marcus became like best friends.
And that's kind of how Misogi got out into the world because there was an outside magazine article about Kyle doing his first son with Marcus, I don't know, like 10, 15 years ago. And so there's like this, you know, that knowledge is out there.
Marcus does it all every year. He does Masogi.
And I think if you want to, you know, his recommendation is somewhere out in nature, not something you practice with friends and not something that's like easily measured. So it's fun to have it kind of amorphous, you know, like we're going to go from here to there or from that mountain to that mountain or whatever it is but uh the problem is if it's something you practice then you're gonna be thinking the whole time about well i know i can run this mile pace and it's many miles and blah blah and that's not he wants you to think like the kulk over had never been on a paddleboard before in his life when he first started to paddle from the Channel Islands, which means his brain is like massively expansive.
Wow. He's just like, what am I doing? That's so scary.
It's so scary. At some point, someone dropped a chicken burrito in the water, and they thought they were going to have a shark attack.
And then there was a, I don't know what a sunfish looks like, but I guess it has a fin that looks like a shark. And they all freaked out because there was this fin in the water.
So he did a paddleboard without ever doing one before. Yeah.
That's so dangerous, though, too. Isn't there like a...
There's a fine line between being bold and being stupid. They did have a...
Well, they had each other. There were a bunch of them, but they also had a boat of they could retire if they wanted.
They can jump in the boat. Okay, okay.
Yeah, don't die. That's one of the other rules.
Oh, that's another rule. Don't die.
Don't die. Wow, that's a good one.
It's a great one. Yeah.
Yeah, very important. Very important.
What else did you learn about pain and how to... You're asking today because you're in pain.
Push through pain, maybe. Yeah, yeah.
No, I went through hell while... I'm writing a book about joy of movement and i went like i was like on the floor in the dark with like an open bowl tylenol like it was like the most pathetic oh my god my brother-in-law i was feeling like oh i'm getting better like i'm figuring out my stuff and my brother-in-law popped by it was christmas and he's like he's like this is so sad i'm like seeing it through his eyes.
I'm like, yeah, it's super sad. Oh my god, that's hilarious.
So then I did regular PT like all of us would do, but I had to come back out to Senator Barbara to finish writing the book, and when I got out here, they were like, can we just try to help you? Can we assess you? And I had said I didn't want to be part of it because i don't want to like lose my journalistic objectivity or whatever and uh but finally i was so desperate i was like all right let's go and they assessed me on a friday and put me through a little i had one session of physical therapy and then just did the workout including that thing i mentioned with the foot on the floor and weird stuff like a stork press look that one up that's kind of cool there are. There are a bunch of weird moves I had never done before.
Stork press, okay. Stork press is cool.
And then the next day, Marcus, who is a doctor, he's a medical doctor and he knew all of my results. He was like, why don't we go for a hike? And then on the hike, the hike that he took me on in the hills above Santa Barbara, which are so beautiful, we're hopping from rock to rock, which isn't something I would have been doing.
I was in so much pain before. But because he knows what he's talking about, he gave me permission to give it a whirl.
And Jen, it was like, first one, I'm like, we'll see how this goes, right? And first one, I'm like, okay. But then my right leg was usually more painful.
So then there's a stream, and I have to clear it and make it to the next rock. I'm like, I go airborne.
I'm just like, this might be murderous when I land. But it was okay.
And like, I'm thinking about using my hips more and I'm thinking about the ball of my foot. And then next thing you know, I'm like, I can do this.
And I think that I had, since I had already done the PT, I was ready for this, but I wasn't going to give myself permission to take that kind of risk. But I needed to move like that.
I needed to convince my brain not to send wild pain signals all the time. Right, right, right.
And it totally fits with the research. At some point, you've got to move, right? And it's not the day of the injury, right? Right.
Well, they say, like, even when you get, like, to stop moving is, like, that's what becomes deadly, right? So, like, when I never, I'm like you, I need to move. I'm not someone who does well being sedentary.
So, even when I have the flu or something, like, I have to really feel terrible because movement is, to me anyway, movement is, like, right? If I have a bad back, even with an injury, I still walk to get the blood circulating. Did they teach you that back there? Yeah.
Well, there was an article in New York Times three years ago maybe which said basically to cure what else you, walk. And there's a lot of evidence about this.
And so I sent that to Marcus. I wasn't sure what he was going to say.
And he was like, yeah, for like a broad swath of people, walking will cure a lot. Right? A lot of us are so immobile that this counts as.
Right. But he's like, but, you know, don't you want to do more fun stuff than that? Right? Don't you want to learn how to really move? Marcus's take is that basically, if you manage your hips and your ankles and feet well,

then these things will still come up,

but they'll just be speed bumps.

Rather than being out six months,

you'll be out two weeks.