The One You Feed | Personal Growth, Emotional Resilience & Purpose
Why Connection Is the Medicine We've Been Missing | Julie Holland
26 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How can we shift from fight or flight to a calmer state?
How can we get into parasympathetic? What can you do to get out of fight or flight and get into parasympathetic? And, you know, for some people it's put your phone down. Your phone is making you sick.
Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Chapter 2: What role does genuine human connection play in mental health?
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
There's a saying in addiction medicine that Julie Holland and I both love. You can never get enough of something that almost works. We moved on and started talking about phones and she put it in a way that stuck with me. A text is like a vitamin. A conversation face to face is the food.
Chapter 3: How does digital communication affect our relationships?
You can live on supplements for a while, but it's never the nutrition of the real meal, which is why it never quite fills you and you keep reaching for more. Julie wrote Good Chemistry about the science of connection. Her case is simple. Stop trying to live on vitamins. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. Hi, Julie. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I'm excited to have you on. We're going to be primarily discussing your book called Good Chemistry, the Science of Connection from Soul to Psychedelics.
Chapter 4: What insights does Julie Holland share about addiction?
But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say in life. there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.
And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Well, I guess the first thing it means to me is just where you place your attention, where you place your energy and what you're trying to accomplish. You know, one of the metaphors I use is like, first, you have to decide what a garden is to coordinate off and get rid of the rocks and change the dirt around and add the plants.
Chapter 5: What are the therapeutic potentials of psychedelics?
Like the first thing you have to do is say, this is going to be a garden. So some of the energy that I think I put toward things is figuring out what to build, where to build it, what it's going to look like so that you can kind of defend your space with other people. But from a personal perspective, my two wolves are sort of like the yin and yang energies that I am constantly trying to balance.
I am very naturally sort of yang, testosterone heavy. I have things to do, I've got a vector, I have places to go, get out of my way. Whereas the yin energy is more receptive and hanging back and seeing what people say and taking it all in before you make a decision. So it's very easy for me to be sort of all in and aggressive and barreling forward.
And where I really need to put my energy is to having more of a balance of yin, receptivity, openness. That's my own sort of personal battle. I think I have issues with like impulse control, for instance, which I feel like is a very Yang thing to just kind of shoot first, ask questions later, you know, shoot from the hip.
Chapter 6: How does disconnection impact our physical and mental well-being?
So luckily I'm married to someone who's very introspective and receptive and takes a lot of time before making a decision and is like sort of what I call a slow metabolizer. I'm a very fast metabolizer. I'm like, if this has changed, then we have to accommodate the new thing and pivot.
You know, whereas the person that I am emotionally yoked with is like, well, let's think about this and see where it's all going. So that's my real battle is to put the brakes on, not be all gas, to have some impulse control, to stop and listen and take things in, which is why I should stop talking now. Right, Eric?
Well, I'm not going to touch that. It's interesting, though, as you were talking about your partner that you're yoked to, it made me think about a section in the book where you are talking about when we fall in love, there's this limerence period. There's sort of a high or not sort of. There actually is a high that comes from that.
Chapter 7: What simple actions can we take to improve our connections?
And then we settle into the harder work of building a relationship. And you have a line there where you say this. The optimal outcome, the way out of the dead end, the dead end being the tendency to just kind of like keep looking for something else, you accept and embrace all the disowned traits in your partner and that helps you accept them in yourself.
And I was thinking about how it sounds like you found the way to do that. You found the way to appreciate the way in which your partner is different than you and how that is helpful. I'm not saying all the time you feel that way, but that in general you do.
And how did you get to a place where you were able to see that as different but a positive compliment to you versus this person is wrong about the way they see things or do things?
Yeah, I would say it's constantly in flux, those things like Jeremy, through basically sheer will and brute strength has, you know, consistently reminded me that my way is not always the best way and that he is not the enemy, you know. So and the truth is, you know, it's funny, because like, if we play opposite each other, like a game of Scrabble, it would be a very close game.
And he would drive me crazy because he took forever.
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Chapter 8: What is the relationship between oxytocin and social bonding?
But if we're on the same Scrabble team, and we're playing against our friends, we are unstoppable. Yeah. And so I kind of remember that we work better as a team and it's sort of like buckshot. If I'm all white and he's all black and you put us together, we're covering a lot more ground. But because of the way I was raised to be self-reliant, And trust no one and take care of myself.
And also, you know, those sort of very yang and I would say even maybe kind of misogynist sort of traits. Like I think I had internalized misogyny growing up. I was the youngest of three girls. My parents both wanted boys. They told us they wanted boys. I heard so many times growing up, Julie, you were our last chance for a boy. Yeah.
So there was some way where I was operating of like, how tomboyish can I be? Can I be a bully? Can I be a brute and a bruiser? And those traits honestly served me really like being a pre-med, being a med student, being a psych resident. You know, I kicked ass because I did it all myself and I didn't trust anybody to do it.
But when you're a wife and a mother and, you know, like a parent and a spouse, like you can't act like a surgeon, right? You know, like it just it doesn't work. So when I was at Bellevue, you know, I spent nine years running the psychiatric emergency room at Bellevue Hospital and I was a cowboy. You know, I was a tough guy. And that's how I survived in like a very challenging environment.
I lasted longer than any psychiatrist at that psych ER had. I had the same job for nine years and I didn't get burnt out mostly because I worked weekends and I had all week off to recover. But over those nine years, I got pregnant twice. I nursed babies twice. By the end of it, there was so much oxytocin like drowning out the testosterone. I couldn't really work there anymore.
You know, I got too soft. I became a softie. And maybe you can be a softie there, but I couldn't. I had to really be a tough guy to make it through. And I got punched in the face because I was kind of being a bitch, pardon me, to a patient. And when I look back at my notes from Bellevue, I wrote a memoir about my nine years in the psych yard.
But when I look back at my notes, all my notes stopped after I got punched in the face. Like it really... did something to me and how I went about my job there. But I ended up writing about this sort of transformation from, you know, a butch, tomboy, manly woman to somebody who had gone through having two kids and I couldn't be a cowboy in there anymore.
What does being a tough guy mean in that sort of circumstance or that sort of situation? At Bellevue? Yeah, yeah.
Now looking back, I would say tough guy at Bellevue means that I was like kind of an asshole. Like nothing got to me. I didn't care how sad the story was. I'd heard it all before. It didn't matter. You know, I would say things like all of it is sad, so none of it is sad. Like I had a threshold.
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