Adrian Schug
Subscribe to my newsletter and get weekly insights about the mind. I've been sending a new episode each Monday for more than 90 weeks! 🚀
The Ripple You Call Self 🍎
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 096 Everything you experience appears in consciousness. A sound.A thought.A feeling.A sudden impulse.The image of a friend.The image of yourself. All of it shows up in the same place: the open field of awareness, the light in which your life unfolds. That simple observation is part of what makes meditation so strange. It reveals that there is nowhere else your life could ever happen. Not outside of consciousness. Not somewhere behind it. Every color, every memory, every...
Your Mind Is All You Have 🫧
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 095 The question that forever grips me: How does consciousness emerge from (seemingly) unconscious processes? Modern science, centered on matter, often sidesteps that question. Consciousness becomes a byproduct—an accidental side effect of electrochemical processes in the brain. But even within this assumption, the core mystery remains untouched: How does the vivid experience of my life arise from the soulless wetness that constitutes my brain tissue? It can feel like...
My Final Exam Turned Into an Ego Death 💀
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 094 Ready After twelve years of medicine, I faced the final challenge of my training last week: the specialist exam. Six years of study, six years as a resident – everything led up to this moment. In recent months, preparation clearly took center stage. Anyone who has read the previous episodes knows that the material eventually spread into all areas of my life. In Sri Lanka, I even found myself one evening sitting with my wife’s mother and grandmother, explaining how...
My Top Highlights 🖍️
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 093 This week, the specialist exam is (finally) coming up. So for this episode, I chose a time-saving format: my favorite highlights from fiction books I’ve read recently. Fiction is always a bit of a tension field for me, because my inner critic automatically labels it as unproductive and keeps bothering me with pressure and guilt. A helpful compromise: I also collect highlights while reading fiction. That turns it into a hunt for particularly beautiful phrases,...
How Much Anxiety Is Healthy? 🚨
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 092 Imagine you are walking through a forest. Suddenly, you hear a noise in the bushes. Before you can consciously think about it, something happens in your body: Your pulse rises.Your muscles tense.Your attention narrows. Fear 😱 What makes sense in the forest often appears misguided in our modern environment. Then our emotional system can sometimes feel like a bad advisor: Fear makes situations seem bigger than they are.Shame makes us ruminate about things that are...
How to Use the Dodo Effect to Improve Your Mental Health 🦤
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 091 The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy During my medical training, I was used to thinking about effectiveness in clear terms: Ibuprofen not only relieves pain, but it also inhibits inflammatory processes. Paracetamol, on the other hand, is more effective for fever and is gentler on the stomach lining. One can name mechanisms, compare effects, and weigh side effects. It's less straightforward with psychotherapy. As in all medical disciplines, there are clinical...
How I Study for the Most Important Exam of My Life ⚖️
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 090 I am now in the intense phase of my preparation for the board certification exam in March. For me, this marks the formal completion of my academic training, which has lasted two decades!(8 years of secondary school, 6 years of medical school, 6 years as a resident.) The practical part of the state exam at the end of medical school was very open-ended and therefore felt quite arbitrary, which made preparation difficult. Only on the evening before the exam did I find...
The Discovery of the Future 🔮
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 089 When There Were Still Dragons 🐉 Our ancestors saw the sky as a beautiful dome, with the stars arranged in meaningful symbols. The world was a disc, from whose edge one could fall into chaos and corruption—at least catching a glimpse of the giant on whose shoulders the Earth rested. Unexplainable natural events (including one’s own life) were personified as the works and reflections of gods. These beliefs were not merely thoughts—they were reality. Real-Life...
Boredom as a Tool
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 088 The Hunt Because his brother had been injured during the hunt the day before, he was out alone today. He had left the camp before sunrise, spear over his shoulder, his breath visible in the cold air. The ground was frozen hard, the grass gray and brittle. A time between times. At the edge of the plain, he stopped. At this time of year, a small reindeer herd usually passed through here. The tracks in the ground provedthat. But now the plain lay still before him. No...
The Consistency Model 🏝️
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 087 Mental Health At the beginning of my psychotherapy training, I felt intimidated by the complex classification of mental disorders. While attending different therapies as an observer during my medical onboarding, one question kept occupying my mind: What are we actually treating here? Only after a few weeks did I find a model that gave me a sense of orientation. In a depression group, we discussed the “CBT triangle,” consisting of thoughts, feelings, and behavior....
Subscribe to my newsletter and get weekly insights about the mind. I've been sending a new episode each Monday for more than 90 weeks! 🚀