Mark: A recent study found loneliness increases your risk of premature death more than smoking. Michelle: Wow. And I'll confess, some of my loneliest moments have been in a crowded room, or even sitting on the couch next to someone I love, both of us just scrolling on our phones. There’s this weird, modern distance. Mark: That feeling is exactly what Dr. John Delony tackles in his book, Own Your Past, Change Your Future. Michelle: And Delony is a fascinating guy to be writing this. He's not just a theorist; he has two PhDs and has spent decades on the front lines as a crisis responder. He's seen it all, from university campuses to disaster sites. Mark: Exactly. He argues that this modern loneliness isn't an accident. It's a symptom of the broken stories we've been told about how to live. And he kicks off the book with this incredible, vulnerable story about his own breakdown that perfectly illustrates this. Michelle: I’m intrigued. A mental health expert talking about his own crisis? That’s a powerful way to start.

Mark: It really is. He paints this picture: he's a successful senior administrator at a university, new house, young family... everything looks perfect on the outside. But internally, he's a wreck. He's working insane hours, his marriage is strained, he's unhealthy, and he's just drowning in anxiety. Michelle: The classic high-achiever burnout narrative. I think a lot of people can relate to that. Mark: Totally. But here's where it gets interesting. His anxiety starts to manifest in this bizarre obsession. He becomes convinced his brand-new house is falling apart. He sees these tiny hairline cracks in the drywall and foundation, and they become the focal point for all his free-floating dread. Michelle: Oh, I know that feeling of displacing anxiety onto something small and controllable. My version of that is obsessively organizing my spice rack when my life feels chaotic. It feels productive, but it’s just a distraction. Mark: Precisely. For him, it escalates. He’s calling contractors who tell him the house is fine, it’s just Texas soil shifting. But he doesn't believe them. The story culminates one night during a rare Texas rainstorm. He wakes up in a panic, convinced the foundation is leaking. So he gets out of bed, in his underwear, grabs a flashlight, and starts crawling around the outside of his house in the mud and rain at two in the morning. Michelle: Oh my gosh. That is such a vivid image of a man at his breaking point. Mark: He’s on his hands and knees, searching for water seeping through the foundation, and he finds… nothing. The house is bone dry. And in that moment, soaked and muddy in the middle of the night, he has this massive epiphany. He realizes the story he's been telling himself is wrong. The house isn't falling apart. He is. Michelle: Wow. So the cracks weren't the problem, they were a sign. A symptom of the real issue. So what were the real cracks in his life? What were the underlying stories that led him to that midnight crawl? Mark: That’s the core of the first half of the book. Delony argues that we are all living within a framework of powerful, often invisible, societal stories that are fundamentally broken. He identifies three of the most destructive ones. Michelle: Okay, lay them on me. Mark: The first is the story that technology and innovation will save us. We believe that the next app, the next device, the next productivity hack will solve our problems. But Delony points out that while technology gives us incredible communication tools, it has actually led to deeper disconnection. He makes this brilliant distinction: "Communication is the transfer of information. Connection is the mutual weight-bearing of one another’s burdens." We’re communicating more than ever, but we’re not connecting. Michelle: That hits hard. We have a thousand Facebook friends but maybe one person we could call in a real crisis. We’re information-rich and connection-poor. Mark: Exactly. The second broken story is that debt will save us. We've normalized the idea that you need a loan for a car, a mortgage for a house, credit cards for daily life. Debt is framed as an opportunity, a tool. But Delony’s take, coming from the Dave Ramsey network, is sharp. He says, "Owing someone money is like handing them the pen to the story of your life and letting someone else write it for you." It creates this constant, low-grade anxiety and removes our sense of agency. Michelle: It’s a loss of control. You’re not making choices based on what you want, but on what you owe. That’s a heavy weight. Mark: It's a huge brick in the backpack, as he would say. And that leads to the third, and maybe most insidious story: that we can save ourselves, by ourselves. This is the myth of the rugged individual, the self-made person. We celebrate independence to the point that we've created, as he calls it, a loneliness epidemic. Michelle: That’s the one that leads back to our hook. The idea that being self-sufficient is the ultimate goal, but the biological and psychological cost is immense. Mark: Immense. He quotes research showing that loneliness is physiologically more damaging than smoking, that it increases the risk of everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's. He says, "We are the loneliest generation in the history of humankind, and that loneliness is killing us." These three stories—our faith in tech, our reliance on debt, and our worship of self-reliance—create a life that is fast, isolated, and fragile. They are the real cracks in the foundation. Michelle: Okay, so our foundational stories are broken. That's... a little depressing. It feels like we’re all swimming in the same polluted water. How do we fix it? We can't just opt out of society. What's the solution?

Mark: And that’s the perfect pivot to the second half of the book, which is all about the solution. Delony’s whole philosophy is that you can’t build a new house until you acknowledge the old one is on a faulty foundation. His first step isn't some grand action; it's simply to own your stories. Michelle: What does that actually mean, to "own" a story? Mark: He uses this powerful metaphor. He says all of our past hurts, our traumas, the lies we’ve been told, the bad choices we’ve made—they are like "bricks in your backpack." We carry them around every single day, and they are heavy. They affect our posture, our energy, our health. He references the famous ACEs, or Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which shows a direct link between the number of traumas in childhood and the likelihood of major health problems in adulthood. These stories have a real, physical weight. Michelle: So owning them is about acknowledging that the backpack is heavy, and then looking inside to see what bricks are actually in there? Mark: Precisely. It’s about being radically honest. And once you’ve owned the stories, you have to acknowledge the reality of their impact. That often means grieving—grieving the gap between the life you hoped for and the life you have. But the most actionable part of his solution, the part that really feels like taking back control, comes next. It’s about changing your thoughts and your actions. Michelle: This is where it gets tricky, right? "Change your thoughts" can sound like a platitude. Just think positive! Mark: Right, and he knows that. He's very critical of simplistic positive thinking. His approach is much more architectural. He tells this amazing story from one of his doctoral classes that completely reframes the idea. Michelle: I love his stories. They make everything so clear. Mark: So, he’s in this counseling class, and the professor poses a scenario: a client you've been seeing for months comes in, furious, and tells you that you're a terrible counselor and they've wasted all their money. The professor asks the class how they would feel. John, being honest, says, "I'd be devastated. It would crush me." Michelle: Which seems like a normal human reaction. Mark: That’s what he thought. But then a classmate, a woman with 20 years of experience, speaks up. She looks at him and says, "Your clients don’t get that type of access to you. They don’t have permission to hurt you. You decide who gets to hurt your feelings, John." Michelle: Whoa. That’s a powerful statement. Mark: It floored him. He said he was initially dismissive, but on his bike ride home, it just kept replaying in his mind. He realized he had been living with his emotional front door wide open. Anyone—a stranger on the internet, a cranky client, a random comment—could walk right in and vandalize the place. He decided right then to change the story of who had access to his inner world. Michelle: So what did he do? Mark: He created what he calls "the box." He decided that he would consciously choose a very small number of people—in his case, six people, including his wife and a few trusted friends—who had permission to get inside that box. They were the only ones whose opinions could truly, deeply affect him. Everyone else's thoughts were just noise outside the box. Michelle: That is such a radical idea. It's not about building walls, it's about building a door and being the only one with the key. That feels so much more empowering than just "don't let people get to you." It's an active, deliberate choice. Mark: It's an architectural choice. You are designing your own emotional home. And this is the core of his solution: wellness isn't something that happens to you; it's something you build, choice by choice. Michelle: But what about the stories we tell ourselves? The ones that are already inside the box, the ones we've been repeating since childhood? Like his story of "I'm not smart enough" after he failed to get into the gifted program in third grade. Mark: That's the next layer of construction. Once you've secured the perimeter, you have to deal with the internal narratives. He tells another powerful story about a woman who called into his radio show. She was from Alaska, and her lifelong dream was to be a stay-at-home mom. Michelle: Okay. Mark: But years ago, her husband made some bad business decisions and racked up three-quarters of a million dollars in debt. So instead of living her dream, she spent over fifteen years working a job she hated to help pay it all off. They were almost out of debt, but her last child was about to go to college. Her dream was officially dead. Michelle: Oh, that’s heartbreaking. The grief must have been immense. Mark: It was. And she was calling in, filled with rage and bitterness toward her husband. She was trapped in the story of "he ruined my life." And Delony said something to her that was both compassionate and incredibly direct. He told her, "From this point forward, every minute you choose to be resentful, angry, or bitter, is a minute you’re choosing to have less joy, less love, and less fun. The debt is almost gone. Your husband is repentant. The only person keeping you in this prison of anger now is you." Michelle: That’s a tough truth to hear. But it’s also liberating. He was giving her back the pen. Mark: Exactly. He challenged her to write a new story. A month later, he got a package from her. Inside were these tiny, beautiful, miniature quilts. The letter explained that after the call, she decided to let go. She made one quilt to represent her anger, one for her resentment, one for her bitterness. As she finished each one, she physically and emotionally let that feeling go. She said she was finally at peace, ready to build a new life with her husband, a different life than she planned, but one that could still be full of joy. Michelle: Wow. She literally crafted her way out of her old story. She took this abstract emotional work and made it into a concrete action. Mark: And that’s the final step in his process. You own the story, you acknowledge the reality, you get connected, you change your thoughts... and then you must, must, must change your actions.

Michelle: So it all comes together in this beautiful arc. You start by realizing you're a character in a story someone else wrote for you—these big, cultural narratives of what success and happiness are supposed to look like. Mark: Right. A story of isolation, speed, and self-reliance that leaves us feeling cracked and broken, like Delony crawling in the mud. Then, you have to consciously take back the pen. It starts with a deliberate choice, like his 'box,' to control your inputs and decide whose voice truly matters. Michelle: And it's not just about thinking differently. Delony is huge on acting differently. That Alaskan mom didn't just decide to feel better; she did something. She sewed the quilts. He quotes the Avett Brothers in the book: "Decide who to be and go be it." Mark: That's the perfect summary of his philosophy. It’s not passive. It’s an active, ongoing process of building. Wellness isn't a destination you arrive at; it's the way you choose to travel. Michelle: I think the most practical first step for anyone listening might be just that: to take inventory. Who is in your 'box' right now? Did you consciously put them there, or did they just wander in? Mark: And it makes you wonder, what are the 'cracks' you're obsessing over in your own life? The small anxieties that are taking up all your mental space. What bigger, unexamined story might they be pointing to? Michelle: That’s a question that will stick with me. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. What stories have you had to unlearn in your own life? Find us on social media and share your experience. We read every comment. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.