Chapter One Why We Feel Matt Maasdam sat cross-legged, hunched in a concrete box the size of a small sewer drain. He’d been there for almost two straight days.
Matt and his cohort had made it to the last forty-eight hours of the U.S. Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) School, and no one had eaten for five days. At first, Matt had been plagued by fantasies of the food and drinks he desperately craved—carne asada burritos from his favorite hole-in-the-wall in Coronado, cranberry orange muffins, and Mountain Dew. But those cravings had subsided. His body was now in survival mode, breaking down its own cells. This left Matt ruminating about what losing fifteen pounds of muscle mass would cost him next week, in the next phase of his punishing training, when he would be swimming in Alaska’s icy waters. As a “new guy” in the SEAL teams, Matt was still proving himself, and knew he had to still somehow perform at his peak. He imagined pulling on his dry suit and feeling it loose against his skin from the weight loss, staring out at the two-mile swim ahead of him. He was a strong swimmer, but even in a dry suit hypothermia creeps up fast in thirty-degree water if you don’t have enough muscle mass to insulate you. Every ounce helps. Not to mention that when sharing waters with sharks, killer whales, and squids the size of small cars, you definitely don’t want to be any slower than usual.
As he sat crunched in his cell like a human accordion, his frustration began escalating. He could feel his heart racing and his jaw clenching. At times there was an angry buzz of electricity along his skin that made him want to start kicking at his cage, screw the consequences. The “guards” weren’t allowed to beat the prisoners too badly, but they could use open-handed slaps, and if you made noise or called attention to yourself in any way, they could drag you out of your cell and bounce you off the concrete. Matt and his cohort had heard that a previous group of SEALs had broken out of their cells and taken over the camp, making a joke of the whole thing. They’d been warned— severely—not to attempt it.
SERE School wears you down; it’s designed to. Plenty of people don’t make it through the training. They either drop out or want to quit and get talked back in. There are the freezing desert nights; starvation; the physical torture of the claustrophobic cells; waterboarding; periodic beatings; and the loudspeaker playing a constant soundtrack of babies crying, tank treads grinding, boots marching, and Russians chattering.
It was a simulation, sure, but the scenario it was intended to prepare them for was very real. As SEALs in the field, they would face an enormous amount of risk and uncertainty. It was quite possible that one day they’d find themselves in this very same situation, except that everything would be real—the cell, the guards, and the physical violence they faced. They were being pushed to their physical and psychological limits, because if they broke, maybe they didn’t belong.
It takes an unusual kind of person to survive SERE School. But Matt was determined to make it. No breaks. No tapping out. And frankly, he’d gone into the “prison cell” portion of the exercise hoping to learn something and thinking it would be relatively easy after going through SEAL training. Chill in a cell for a few days?
No problem. I got this. Now, the thing about being alone in a cell for two days is that you get closely acquainted with your own inner experience. Matt was acutely aware of seemingly every feeling and thought that arose as he sat, muscles burning, doing his damnedest to practice staying still, calm, and focused. There were blips of fear:
What if I pass out during the cold test? There was frustration:
Get me the hell out of this microscopic box! And mixed in with all that were warm feelings of happiness and excitement when he thought about the person in the cell across the prison courtyard from his.
Laura. He’d noticed Laura during their first week of SERE School, when they were learning tactical sign language in a dank Vietnam-era classroom. When he glanced over at her, she glanced back, then held the gaze longer than was strictly friendly.
During the survival portion of the training, they’d been dumped in the high desert with a squad and instructed to survive for five days while being hunted down by the SERE School trainers. Hacking through the manzanita scrub, sucking on yucca for hydration, and crunching on ants for nutrients, Matt found himself scanning the horizon for her group; he had to keep reeling his thoughts in, reminding himself that he was out there to evade capture, not court Laura. But no matter how hard he tried to focus, she filled his thoughts. He picked handfuls of wildflowers and left them where he thought she might find them. One night, scanning for her, hopeful as always, he finally caught sight of her up on a ridgeline, silhouetted against the sunset. She must have spotted him too, because she gave a little mock curtsy before she disappeared.
Back in his cell, when the physical and mental discomfort was really getting to him, he’d lean over and look across at her cell, hoping to see her looking back. She had a unique capacity to make him laugh—even using sign language, not the most nuanced or poetic of mediums. The first day in their cells, she’d gestured around at her own concrete box and signed,
Four-star accommodations? And he’d laughed out loud, risking the wrath of the guards.
Let’s pause here for a moment and take a snapshot of Matt. He’s in the middle of a career-defining training. He’s starving. He’s worrying about the next phase, even though there’s nothing more he can do to prepare. He’s got a bad crush. He’s trying to stay focused and balanced—not tip too far into fear and frustration and, in the other direction, not totally lose himself in puppy love. In a sense, the most logical thing for Matt to do to get through SERE School successfully would have been to simply turn it all off; if his emotions had a valve he could have just cranked shut, wouldn’t everything have been so much easier?
Most of us will never find ourselves in a concrete cell, battling through extreme survival training, but we share the urge to look for an off switch for emotions that sweep in at the most inconvenient times. On the one hand, we have to assume that we evolved to have emotions because they’re helpful. On the other hand, they so often seem to be doing the opposite: sabotaging our health, undermining our ability to perform, and causing problems in our relationships.
When our emotions take hold, it can
feel as if there were some kind of puppet master lurking inside us, yanking the strings. The way fear can paralyze us when we need to act, speak, perform; how anger incinerates our rationality when we so badly need to think clearly; how sadness can surge through the body like a crushingly heavy wave and spill over our edges when we desperately want to
not show our private upset to the world. In these moments, it’s hard to see how emotions are helpful. From that point of view, there’s a logic to wanting to “turn off” our emotions at times. And if there’s anybody who knows where that off switch might be, it would be a Navy SEAL, right?
Matt Maasdam does, in fact, have an emotional superpower. But it’s
not access to an off switch. And it has nothing to do with his elite level of training, his physical fitness, or his background as a Navy SEAL. It’s simply this: He knows that success, in this moment or any, is
not about turning his emotions off; it’s about understanding how to
use emotions skillfully without letting them completely take over. And that’s a critically important insight because experiencing emotions for humans is like breathing air: Our emotions are both unavoidable and crucial to our survival.
Copyright © 2025 by Ethan Kross. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.