The Urban Monk podcast with Dr. Pedram Shojai

The Fear of Boredom Is the Fear of Your Own Mind

🎙️ What happens when you stop reaching for the phone and simply sit with nothing? Dr. Pedram Shojai explores the surprising science of boredom and why it is not the absen

Decision Fatigue Is Not a Character Flaw, It's Architecture

🎙️ Somewhere between 4 and 7 PM, simple questions start to feel heavy, patience runs thin, and small frustrations trigger outsized reactions. Dr. Pedram Shojai calls it d

The Dopamine Trap: Your Phone Is a Slot Machine

🎙️ Why do you keep picking up your phone, scanning it, and putting it back down without feeling any better? Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down the dopamine trap: how dopamine

Loneliness Is Not a Mood: Why Being Known Is a Biological Necessity

🎙️ How many people in your life genuinely know you? Not like you, not admire you, but actually know you? Dr. Pedram Shojai unpacks the science of loneliness and why it is

Perfectionism Is Not a Personality Trait

🎙️ One more revision, one more check, and the thing that matters just sits there. Dr. Pedram Shojai reframes perfectionism not as a personality trait or a badge of high s

Why Sleep Is Your Most Important Health Practice

🎙️ You spend roughly a third of your life asleep, and most of us treat it as dead time after the real day ends. Dr. Pedram Shojai turns that framing around. Sleep is not

My 100-Day Gong Is Done: The Real Science of Keeping Your Word

🎙️ Day 100. Dr. Pedram Shojai marks the completion of his personal 100-day gong and uses the milestone to unpack what actually happens when someone commits to a daily pra

Live Fully By Facing Mortality

🎙️ What would shift in you if you knew, with total certainty, that you had one year left to live? Dr. Pedram Shojai opens with that question and a personal story from Var

The Predictive Brain

🎙️ Your brain doesn't record reality. It predicts it. Dr. Pedram Shojai unpacks predictive processing, the neuroscience showing that the brain constantly generates a mode

Your Brain's Most Expensive Habit

🎙️ Your brain's most expensive habit isn't scrolling, overthinking, or multitasking. It's the default mode network, and it's running the show nearly half your waking hour

The Mitochondrial Root of Being Wired and Tired

🎙️ Feeling wired and exhausted at the same time, and sleep isn't fixing it? Dr. Pedram Shojai traces that specific kind of tired back to mitochondria: not just the powerh

Fascia: The Sensory Organ No One Taught You About

🎙️ Your fascia is not just packaging. It's a sensory organ. Dr. Pedram Shojai introduces fascia as a continuous connective tissue web running from feet to skull, densely

The Gut Is Talking: How Your Second Brain Actually Runs Your Mood

🎙️ Your gut isn't reacting to your emotions. It's generating a large share of them. Dr. Pedram Shojai unpacks the real science behind the gut-brain connection, showing th

Your Bad Mood Might Be Inflammation

🎙️ Your bad mood might not be psychological. It might be inflammation. Dr. Pedram Shojai unpacks psychoneuroimmunology, the decades-old field showing the brain and immune

Your Nervous System Has a Ladder

🎙️ Most people oscillate between stressed and crashed without ever finding ease. Dr. Pedram Shojai breaks down why that's not a willpower problem, it's an architecture pr

The Noise Pollution Crisis

🎙️ You've stopped noticing the noise. But your body hasn't. Dr. Pedram Shojai opens with a live listening experiment revealing how much sound we're swimming in without re

How to Stop Living Outside the Present Moment

🎙️ The past has no location. It cannot be found, weighed, or measured. Dr. Pedram Shojai builds a scientific and contemplative case for why the present moment is the only

Money Stress Is a Body Problem

🎙️ Your nervous system reads a low bank balance the same way it reads a predator. Dr. Pedram Shojai opens by naming what wellness spaces rarely do: money stress is not a

The Pain Body & The Somatic Witness Practice

🎙️ Have you ever been flooded by a feeling that had nothing to do with what was in front of you? Dr. Pedram Shojai explores the pain body, the accumulated emotional resid

How Sensory Starvation Is Dimming Your Emotional Life

🎙️ What if a significant portion of what gets diagnosed and medicated as depression isn't a chemical problem at all? Dr. Pedram Shojai makes the case that chronic sensory