Editorial source note
Your Mind Will Play Tricks on You, Principle #9 Explained
Joe expands his cardinal principle "your mind will play tricks on you" into a field guide to ghost problems — sympathy sickness, imagined ailments, and early-fasting panic he compares to his own 2006 painkiller withdrawal.
Related principles
An editorial summary of views Joe expresses in the linked video. The original recording remains the primary source for his full words and context.
Detailed notes
A closer look at the ideas, examples, and reasoning Joe presents in this recording.
The one cardinal principle that got its own sequel
Seven months after reciting his cardinal principles, Joe returns to expand the last of them: your mind will play tricks on you. He opens by calling it "rule number 10," though the video's title and the March 2016 recitation both place it ninth — a small slip that shows him citing his own list from memory.
The occasion is a coworker Joe was helping to lose weight, who insisted he could not fast because he would get sick. Joe reads him as a "sad personality" — sweet, self-victimizing people he says are easily broken in by life — and diagnoses sympathy pains: by day two of fasting the man felt ill, but only after others had warned him fasting would wreck his metabolism. His mind, Joe claims, recreated the sickness he was told to expect, the way people feel drunk around a drunk person. The lesson he draws is to watch for "ghost problems" during adjustment: a body convinced by constant eating that it must keep eating will stage a mini panic attack over one missed meal.
Joe's comparison is withdrawal, drawn from his own history. After foot surgery in 2006 he was prescribed Vicodin and Percocet, and coming off them brought panic attacks "like the world was ending" that took days to pass. Early fasting, he says, works the same way for someone used to eating every three hours — shakiness and dread that are frightening, temporary, and not fatal. "You're not going to die" is the refrain.
The middle of the video is a rule about attribution. Fasting will not make your hair fall out — a question Joe says women send him nearly weekly — but neither should fasting be credited with long life or cures without proof: "don't give credit where credit's not due." In his account it is deficiency, not fasting, that causes trouble, and meeting bare-minimum nutrients (he mentions B and D vitamins) prevents the feared complications. He closes with his claim that the hunger-driven surge in growth hormone and productivity exists to push you toward food — and that by the time normal eating returns, the faster has become a lighter, less dependent person.