Lincoln Stoller (he/him)

Lincoln joined Momma on January 20, 2025 for a live Q&A via Twitch and YouTube to talk about Personal Growth, Growing Up & Mental Health

About Lincoln

Lincoln Stoller is a clinical counselor, psychotherapist, and neuropsychologist with expertise in sleep, dreams, hypnosis, and brain biofeedback. Born in 1956, he was influenced by civil rights, counterculture, and public education. Growing up in a secular, artistic family, Lincoln embraced independence, pursuing mountaineering and solo expeditions in high school.

After earning a PhD in quantum physics, he founded a software company and explored diverse interests, from throat singing in Mongolia to shamanism in South America. Lincoln later trained in hypnotherapy, Past Life Regression, ceremonial psychedelics, and psychotherapy.

Certified as a clinical counselor and neurofeedback therapist, he integrates clients’ reasoning, emotions, and nervous systems. Drawing on his diverse experiences—as a physicist, mountaineer, software developer, and psychonaut—he continues to explore physics and computational neurology.

Socials / Links for Guest Connection

• Website - https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lincolnstoller/

• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/lincolnstoller

• Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/mindstrengthbalance/

• Twitter / X - https://x.com/stoller_lincoln

References / Things Mentioned During the Stream

• Book Recommendation: A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas 

• Movie Recommendation: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 

• Book Recommendation: The Once and Future King by T.H. White 

Episode Summary

Stuck, scattered or tired of being told to pick one thing and stick with it? Lincoln Stoller, a therapist who used to be a quantum physicist and mountaineer, has a lot to say about mental health, personal growth and growing up.

Lincoln Stoller has been a mountaineer, a quantum physicist, a software company founder and a psychonaut. Now he works as a clinical counselor, psychotherapist and neuropsychologist, with a focus on sleep, dreams, hypnosis and brain biofeedback. On this episode of Even Tacos Fall Apart, we talk mental health, personal growth and growing up, and he skips the polished therapist answers.

He starts with his own winding path. He was a frustrated kid in suburban New York with distant parents and no love for school, and rock climbing gave him somewhere to put that energy. Physics came next, then a month with a remote village in Panama, years of ceremonial plant medicine, brain science, hypnosis and finally a counseling degree. Along the way he stopped respecting the advice to pick a niche. Being just one thing sounds boring to him, and he thinks specialists get stuck in old ideas.

Lincoln tells clients up front that he is not their friend. Friendship runs both ways, and therapy doesn’t. He says the first thing that comes to mind, pulls out the traits you hide from everyone else and works toward making himself unnecessary. Most people arrive with a story that ends at “this is why I’m stuck,” and he looks for the holes in it. He also tells clients they are a little crazy and that this is fine, since we all are and it’s easier to deal with what you can see.

We spend a good stretch on what getting unstuck really means. Lincoln says it rarely means knowing where you’re headed. Usually it means leaving the structure you’ve been living in. He tells the story of a former colleague who retired and traveled to Antarctica and the desert, sending back photos of himself and his wife, who was still the same person in a new place. Plenty of things in our culture help us dodge this, from entertainment to shopping, all designed to keep us “satisfied and fat and happy and stupid.” Lincoln also looks at lineage. You represent your family line, and whatever you leave unfinished gets handed to your kids.

Dreams get their own part of the conversation. Lincoln thinks dreams carry many messages, and every scene can be pushed in a new direction once you wake up. He shares a client’s recurring nightmare about a shadowy figure with a knife and what happened when the client let that figure open its other hand.

Near the end we dig into our regular closing questions. His advice for starting personal growth is to do something, accept that most new ideas fail and keep going. His life hack is to sleep whenever you can, because sleep is recovery time. And if he could change one belief about mental illness, he would ask people to reconsider what they call a disability, since it may be a power nobody has helped them learn to use.

His last word is that everybody should work on themselves, because when you lift yourself up, the people around you come up too.