A Cardiothoracic Anesthesiologist · 5 Parts · 11 Chapters · A Lifetime of Evidence
Prepare Your Neurobiology Before the Moment Arrives
“The moment feels like the test. It isn’t. It’s the grade.
The test was everything that came before.”
The Story Behind the Science
There was a season when Dr. Christopher Larson came home each night with nothing left — the kind of empty that had stopped alarming him. A cardiothoracic anesthesiologist, a husband, a father of five daughters, and a bishop, he had spent a decade mastering the preparation of his patients before the demand arrived. He had applied almost none of that discipline to his own system.
“I gave everything outward and called the depletion virtue.” What he eventually understood was that his problem had never been simple overload. It was the absence of a coherent way to prepare the whole person before the moment arrived.
So he wrote the framework down and tested it — against his own shifts, his own marriage, his own daughters, his own Sundays. It held. Imperfectly, incrementally, with failures he won’t sanitize out of the pages. Still, it held.
“Your brain is not a Polaroid camera. It does not record reality. It predicts it.”
“This book calls it your starting condition — and your starting condition is not fixed. It is buildable.”
“PRE►LOΔD will not make hard things easy. It will make you different before hard things begin.”
The Pattern
Your brain forecasts every moment before it arrives. Name the pattern and you can catch it in the act — and change it before the moment begins.
Relabeling the same bodily arousal from threat to challenge changes the physiology the moment delivers. Name → Test → Replace.
“The body takes its orders from the story you assign.”
Measuring from the ideal produces depletion. Measuring from where you started produces fuel to continue. The Gain Tracker recalibrates the filter.
“Measure from where you were, not from an ideal.”
Your environment quietly resets your baseline expectations over time. Your “normal” is downloaded from the people around you — and you can choose the inputs.
“Your ‘normal’ is borrowed, not chosen.”
5 Parts · 11 Chapters · One Framework
Part One — The Pattern
Part Two — Preparing the Inner Self
Interlude — When PRE►LOΔD Isn’t Enough
Part Three — Preparing Your Life Around You
Part Four — Preparing for What You Can’t Control
Part Five — The Practice
The Toolkit
Six practices that change your starting condition before any moment begins — simple enough to actually keep.
When the surge hits, run Name → Test → Replace. Name the prediction your body is making, test it against the evidence, replace it with the most accurate label.
Each evening, write three places reality beat your forecast today. Measure from where you were, not from an ideal. Make one item new.
Gratitude as a trained skill, not a mood. Each day find one genuinely new thing and dwell on it for a full twenty seconds, felt in the body. The dwell is the mechanism.
Read each strong feeling as data about a prediction. Name the feeling in one precise word, surface the forecast underneath, and test it before you trust it.
Before anything that matters, prepare the self, not the script. Close your open loops, decide who you want to be for this person, forgive what’s keeping a prediction locked.
Sort the situation into what your actions can change and what they can’t. For everything you can’t, don’t merely let it go — name it, write it down, and hand it to God.
The Architecture of the Whole Person
“And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.”
— Luke 2:52
Everything in this book hangs on one simple frame, and it is two thousand years old. Four dimensions, growing together — the Spiritual at the center, intersecting all the rest.
Your deepest predictions: who you are, what your life is for, whether you are known and loved by something larger than your circumstances. The center.
Not merely the vehicle for the mind, but the raw data stream from which every emotion and prediction is built.
The mind that learns — which, at the level of the brain, simply means updating old predictions with better ones.
The relationships through which your sense of “normal” is downloaded, and through which your own state is broadcast to everyone near you.
“This book gives you the science behind practices your faith has always known.”
“Gethsemane was not the beginning of His preparation. It was the proof of it.”
The Companion App
A companion app walks the daily practice in real time, for readers who want it. No download, no account — it works on any device.
A pre-loading sequence — coherence breathing, spiritual anchor, WOOP, HRV check — calibrated to the time you have.
Every practice from the book: the Biological Pivot, Gain Tracker, Emotional Ledger, Sphere of Agency, and more.
Log your daily heart-rate variability as a readiness signal — measured only against your own baseline.
LDS, multi-faith, or secular framing, with pondering prompts and prayer coaching built in.
Personalized coaching that uses your actual practice data. Currently free — no key needed.
Personal Google Drive sync. Journal entries stay on your device. No tracking, no ads, no accounts required.
The app is currently free. The framework is complete. Your nervous system is waiting to be trained.
► Open the App — FreeTools & Resources
The full 90-day guided practice, HRV tracking, and AI Guide. Free, on any device.
Practice and Tracking Toward Establishing Redeemer’s Nature — a companion tool for building Christlike attributes.
An emotional-intelligence tool for kids — naming and reading feelings as data.
A personal-discovery assessment for mapping your own patterns and starting condition.
The peer-reviewed science behind the framework — every work cited throughout the manuscript.
Spiritual tools, family & wellbeing apps, and more — the full collection in one place.
The app is currently free. The framework is complete. Load it well.
► Launch PRE►LOΔD — Free“If ye are prepared ye shall not fear.” — Doctrine and Covenants 38:30