The shirt comes untucked.

Both hosts show up exhausted this week — and the arc gets demonstrated in real time. Gerren was out late at a gala, then a college bar. Keith hasn’t slept right in three days.

Keith walks through his pattern on-mic — hard training, undereating, waking at 2am with “the hum” in his body, snapping at his kids by day three. Gerren tells the gala-to-dive-bar story: the tight utensil work, the smaller movements, and the moment the shirt comes untucked at the second bar. Code-switching as a physical act. “Not everybody knows how to act” — what the friend who invited him said.

Also — the environmental privilege of being able to design your own recovery, and Gerren on carrying a goldfish memory for the things he can’t control.

Arc closer. Part 3 of 3.

Key Topics: Performing through exhaustion, environmental privilege and recovery, Keith’s sleep-nutrition-cortisol cycle, code-switching as a physical experience, and the gala-to-dive-bar transition.

The Full Arc: 🎧 Part 1 — The Zebra Who Can’t Stop Running 🎧 Part 2 — What the Body Remembers and What It Doesn’t 🎧 Part 3 — The Shirt Comes Untucked

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection.

Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

What the body remembers — and what it doesn't.

Part 2 of our body arc. Where last week was about chronic stress chasing us like an endless sequence of lions, this week is about what the body holds — the stuff from earlier that doesn't go away just because the circumstance changed.

Keith opens with revertigo — the How I Met Your Mother concept for how you can be 30, independent, functional, and the moment you walk into your parents' house, you're six again. Nothing wrong with you. The context is just doing what context does. Which means the hardest conversations we have — the ones with family, especially about politics or ideology — happen in exactly the environment least likely to let us access the dialogue skills we've built.

They engage honestly with The Body Keeps the Score — what van der Kolk's clinical work got right, and where the specific cellular claims aren't actually backed by peer review. Same with Rachel Yehuda's intergenerational trauma research on Holocaust survivors and their children — the real science, the honest hedges, and Gerren's direct question: what does three or four hundred years of generational stress do to a person's genes?

The strongest moment of the episode — Keith admits he can't empathize with what it's like to be a Black man in the South and be called "boy." He can understand the concept intellectually. He can't feel it in his body. That gap is the thing the arc is about.

Part 2 of 3. Part 3 next week.

Key Topics: Revertigo and context-dependent memory, cue-dependent forgetting, ACE studies and HPA axis calibration, honest engagement with The Body Keeps the Score, Rachel Yehuda's intergenerational trauma research and FKBP5 methylation patterns, cultural trauma and dominant-culture recognition, and Mark Bouton's extinction learning as a path to changing the signal.

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT

Thinking out loud about what gets in the way of connection.

Like what you heard? Leave us a comment in your podcast app. See you next week.

The zebra who can't stop running.

Part 1 of a new arc — pivoting from the mind to the body. After months of talking about cognition, judgment, communication, and loneliness, Keith and Gerren finally get into what all of that is doing to us physically.

The framing is Robert Sapolsky's zebra — get chased by a lion, escape, calm down, go back to grazing. Nervous system reset. Modern humans don't get the reset. We're chased by an ongoing sequence of lions — inbox, kids' schedule, news cycle, credit card, dinner-table politics — where one stops and the next one picks up. Chronic fight-or-flight activation without the resolution the system was designed for.

Gerren pulls in McEwen and Wingfield's research on allostatic load — specifically type-two overload, where the stressors are social and structural, and can't be counteracted by escape. Only by learning and by changes in the social structure itself.

Also — Repetti's research on workload spillover to home (showing up as absent, not just angry), the person sitting in the driveway trying to reset before walking inside, and the honest permission slip at the center of the whole episode: you're not lazy, you're carrying a lot of load. Naming it is the first move.

Part 1 of 3. Part 2 next week — how we talk about all this now, and what the body remembers.

Key Topics: Sapolsky's zebras-and-lions framework, McEwen and Wingfield on allostatic load, technological pace of change vs. biological adaptation, Repetti's workload-spillover research, closing margins for connection, box breathing and the parasympathetic nervous system, and rest as a discipline rather than a reward.

Find Us: 🌐 https://www.moreincommonent.com 📸 https://www.instagram.com/moreincommonent 🐦 https://twitter.com/MoreInCommonent 📘 https://www.facebook.com/moreincommonpod

Gerren Taylor: 🎵 https://www.tiktok.com/@gerrent 💼 https://linkedin.com/in/gerrenT