Buddha Bike

  • A few things I believe about exercise

    I don’t consider the body to be my own, because I lack for nothing, and because the law is the only thing I esteem, nothing else.

    Diogenes

    See what daily exercise does for one.

    Seneca
    Prahran Pool – Nov 17, 2021 @ 2.10pm

    I exercise to burn energy

    Exercise turns out to be really great at burning off excess, stored-up, nervous energy. During exam periods in high school, I gravitated towards the pool as place to go to break up my study. Although most of the time in the pool was spent planning, brainstorming and memorizing quotes, I invariably felt refreshed, recharged and clearer in the head. Like brushing my teeth, it was a sort of brain cleaning. Ever since then, I’ve roughly followed a similar routine. I realize nervous energy, excessive thoughts and restlessness will always builds up until I can find a way to burn them off. This is the primary reason I exercise.

    My body is smarter than me

    Any serious athlete knows that performance is synonymous with pain. A lot of us find meaning at those limits. We’re here to see how far we can go. And being okay with physical discomfort is a really useful lesson to learn. But I also believe that there’s a difference between working hard and destroying the very vessel that is allowing you work hard. It’s up to you and your body to find some sort of agreement. Rules of engagement. Code of conduct. Like lying to yourself, only you will know where that line is. Don’t cross the line like Dom Toretto in a ’49 Chevrolet Fleetline engulfed in flames.

    I don’t know what I’m doing

    When you ask someone why they run (or swim or ride or whatever), you’ll get a huge range of answers, ranging from the banal to spiritual. Motivation can cover the full spectrum of human experience. I want more people to exercise and I will always encourage beginners where I can, but at the same time I have to admit that I don’t know what I’m doing. We all tend to compare ourselves to each other and think we are at different stages of some imaginary exercise journey. None of these things are really true or helpful, and I don’t think there are any ways to win, lose or take shortcuts at this game.

    Exercise is not me

    Speaking of shortcuts, I used to think that to get the results you wanted with exercise, you had to become ‘the kind of guy’ who exercises. Well, of course tying your identity with exercise will make you exercise more. You are hooking a habit onto the most important thing in your life. But the downside is not worth it. When injury or any sort of life change happens, you won’t just lose your fitness, you will lose a perceived large part of yourself. This is probably why so many athletes hang on after their prime. Try and keep your self-worth separate from how you spend your energy. No matter how much I swim currently, I know it will obviously lessen and eventually stop. I swim, but I’m not not a swimmer.

  • Going with your gut

    Hesitation is the worst of all crimes

    Mahabharata

    If there’s one positive thing to say about a personality test, it’s that they are short. Answer a few simple questions and a few minutes later you possess a shorthand for understanding yourself. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the most popular personality test, is based on Jung’s theory that we have a mixture of of attitudes (extraversion or introversion) and a primary way of seeing the world (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition). These cognitive functions help us to make sense of stuff, make decisions and form a large part of our personality. But they’re not perfect and even Jung emphasized the fact that these labels are more useful for orienteering rather than any sort of definitive explanation.

    The last time I took a personality quiz, about eight years ago, I was told that Thinking was my primary function. I wasn’t surprised, since I’m often ruminating or lost in thought, but I remembered feeling disappointed with the job suggestions for a ‘logical’ type like lab technician or legal clerk. Recently, I took the test again and got Intuition, quite a different way of seeing the world than categorizing and analyzing everything. Had I got myself that wrong? Have I been ignoring my strength this whole time?

    Jung defined intuition as a “perception by ways or means of the unconscious.” It doesn’t sound practical, but there’s good reason we all have the capacity for intuition. When you live in primitive conditions, like humans have for most of their existence, unpredictable things are likely to happen. The weather turns nasty. Floods. Famines. There’s a river or an impassable mountain right where you least expect. These situations couldn’t always be foreseen by sights and sounds alone. When you can tap into intuition, you now have ‘hunches’, hints, deeper feelings of uncertainty or confidence. To help him survive, man learned to listen to these gestures from the unconscious.

    Since I usually rely on my ego to make decisions, I am not comfortable being intuitive. And it turns out, in 2023, I don’t think you need intuition to get by. Our culture and the modern world is geared around, protects and encourages Extroverted Sensing type people (practical, outgoing, social, pragmatic) types to succeed. We have really good signage, GPS systems and documentation to explain the world and make it really easy to get around. Gamblers, the classic ‘extroverted intuit’, who think with their guts are probably beaten by machine learning models or uber-rationalists. Even dreams are ignored by most people, or denied entirely.

    But without intuition, decision making can degrade. It’s appropriate to use your ego to shave or make your bed. But often it gets in the way and even makes the process of decision making feel worse. Take driving for example. If we are good drivers, we’re usually letting muscle memory do most of the work. But when we need to stick a difficult park, we might find ourselves thinking our way through it: “Is he leaving or not? Can I fit there?” This can feel painful. We hesitate. We second guess. We jitter. This is where we make mistakes. It’s like we have suddenly slammed the handbrake on bubbling unconscious processes. And the longer we hesitate (is it this turn off or the next?), the more confused we get and the more likely we are to take the wrong turn.

    I really can’t blame the personality assessment. Unfortunately, because our sense of self is a bunch of thoughts and feelings we believe about ourselves, there is a risk that a personality quiz can have too much influence on us. I was the one who created a narrow world view, who told myself for years that I’m a thinker and I’m only interested in cold hard facts, not the test. By ignoring my unconscious, and my gut, I have tended to approach decisions (and driving) in a halting, hesitating way.

    If you can accurately find out your primary cognitive function, go for it. Like using your whole leg to push the pedals, life should roll more smoothly for you if you can lean into this strength.

    But if you have any doubts about your ability to self-assess, don’t bother. Instead, I think it’s worth learning the framework, and notice what you can in yourself and others.

  • The Objective Psyche

    The first principle is not to fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.

    Richard Feynman

    A dream is information you should have, but don’t.

    Robert A. Johnson

    Dreams are hard to understand and impossible to write about. I’m publishing this mainly because I want to put some sort of stake in the ground, not because I have anything particularly special to say about the subject. I want to share a little of my experience documenting and trying to decode my dreams. I hope I can continue to develop this skill and above all, listen more carefully to the unconscious parts of myself.

    It took months for me to recognize I was the main barrier to understanding my dreams. Quickly writing the dream down helped me to remember it, but my left brain, who does most of the planning and linear thinking during my waking life simply can’t help but jump to wrong conclusions, ignore obvious points and ultimately fail to connect the dots. To this part of ourselves, unconscious material filled with unicorns and dragons needs to be scrubbed out quickly, like a plate stained with egg yolk. Robert Johnson explains that the ego simply wants to pin down a meaning for the dream so that it can hold a prize in its hands. So even if we don’t dismiss our dreams, we almost certainly get them wrong.

    Once I could accurately capture them, I noticed the content of my dreams is often bright, colorful and deeply symbolic. My dreams can be filled with animals, and over time, I realized the animals sometimes stood in for people, places and emotions I was encountering in my waking life. One night I had a vivid dream about a long tentacled, bright red squid terrorizing a city. Rational Josh brushed it off as nonsense until I re-read it later in the day and I realized that the squid was a exaggeration (something dreams do to get a point across) of how a friend had been acting. Like any good insight, it felt so obvious and true, all I could do was smile to myself.

    It’s also a relief to discover that no matter how messed up we are or how many mistakes we make, dreams tend to want the best for us. The images and symbols are said to be vivid arrows pointing us to own up to our mistakes, say the right thing and generally be a decent human being. Dreams seem to exist for this very reason. “One can never presume to already know what a dream is about, or the dream wouldn’t bother you with it.” Something as harmless as a burp or life-altering as the decision to poison your lab professor can be commented on, complemented or corrected with dream symbolism. For example, you might have gone a bit too far trash-talking your friends during basketball and a dream will balance this behavior with the image of a mouth gripped shut, or brown liquid pouring out of you. Get the picture?

    Putting aside the symbols, exotic animals and moral guidance, I believe dreams are useful primarily because they contain something that gets us a bit closer to the truth. Like an insight that arises from a therapist or friend suggests what might actually be happening, a dream opinion could be seen as a sort of psychic fact, that can help us to step back and objectively look at our thoughts, feelings and actions. If we spend most of our lives with blinkers on, a dream is like the viewpoint from the horses tail.

    Accurate analysis seems to be impossible (and likely expensive), so I think the best most of us can is the following:

    • Face the fact that you do dream (yes, nearly everyone does, unless you have major depression or are very old)
    • Write down your dreams.
    • Practice looking at your dreams objectively. Don’t react to it as ‘rubbish’ and don’t leap to conclusions. This is really hard. Be okay with the fact that you may never understand it.
    • If you feel like you have a significant or recurring dream, give it some more attention and ‘air’. Roll it around in your head. Brainstorm, list out some associations to your waking life, but again, do not try and understand it.
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  • La profesora objetiva

    Listo? – December 21, 2021 at 4:19pm

    When we begin to learn a new skill, our goals are should be simple. When I signed up for spanish lessons, my goal was to learn a conversational level of the language. In the past, I’ve tended to overthink my goals, endlessly rewriting them and shifting the goal posts, but in most cases, you should be able to write it down within a few minutes. At a high level, the goal of the teacher should be the same as the student. Hopefully, the goal of my spanish teacher is to teach me spanish as quickly and effectively as possible. We are aligned. 

    I had started learning spanish in early 2022, when I was staying in a small beach town in El Salvador. Every afternoon, I’d walk up the road and do a two hour class with Silvia, who also worked at the local boutique hotel. Fast forward a year and she agreed to teach me again, this time online. But I wasn’t basking in the sun, and there were no waves crashing in the background. I was leaning over my computer, in the dark, shivering, staring at a ‘your internet connection is unstable’ warning.

    At first, this made me lash against the class, even questioning the value of the goal I had set. I wanted to change everything about the class. If only it was in person. If only we were back in El Salvador. If only it was in the evening rather than the early morning. If only the internet connection was better. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to quit. I’ll pick it up next time I’m back in Central America.

    But I haven’t quit, yet. Silvia’s no nonsense teaching style and the form-factor of (low bandwidth) lessons over Google Meet have reflected all the ways I can get in the way of my own learning goals.

    Seeking praise (buscar elogios)

    After many lessons, I eventually caught my breath and found myself responding to some questions more naturally and stumbling less. But with this progress I also noticed the lack of encouragement. It’s not that my teacher was cold, or mean, or bored or indifferent, she just keeps moving onto the next thing. But I didn’t want to move on. What I wanted was pats on the back. Compliments. I had to remind myself of my goal, to learn spanish, not to receive praise. An objective teacher who focuses on the work rather than whether I feel good reminded me of why I signed up in the first place.

    Stalling (Dando largas)

    Learning a language is neither painful, physically demanding or stressful but it’s draining in a unique way. Most of the lesson, I feel like I’m eating an endless pile of Brussels sprouts, and I’m desperate for any way to avoid another spoonful. If Silvia had good english I might be able to stall and waste time. I could derail the conversation or make jokes. But because she only speaks spanish this is pointless. I can’t even complain in spanish, because I don’t know how!

    Daydreaming (soñar despierto)

    Additionally, because Silvia doesn’t really speak english, I have to listen very carefully. If you can’t clear your mind and concentrate, you’re not going anywhere. The only words you really need to listen to, speak or think in those two hours are spanish words (palabras). So again, the lack of english to hide in shines a spotlight on my wandering mind. For example, when I’m reading spanish out loud, it’s fairly easy to notice english thoughts starting to intermingle and obstruct my translation. No bueno.

    All this is probably obvious from the teachers perspective. They know that most language students will quit because of self sabotage rather than the actual work. Unfortunately, the teacher and the class can easily become a foil for us to project our stuff onto. So before you decide to quit that ‘terrible’ class, or drag your hapless teacher under a bus, remember why you signed up, and honestly ask yourself if you are helping or hurting your chances of ever getting there.

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  • Alive and well

    Cool Hand Luke, courtesy of Warner Brothers

    People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.

    Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

    It’s fairly common to hear that exercise makes one feel alive. LeBron James has said it. Jane Fonda has said it. That annoying guy at your gym has probably said it. It’s also easy to gloss over such a cliche turn of phrase. If I’m breathing, I must be alive, right? What else would I be? Yet, I sort of know what they are talking about. I know I’m a living, breathing, conscious being, but I also seek aliveness.

    So how might exercise help us to feel alive?

    More feeling

    Exercise wakes you up. Like an ice cold shower or a BOSS Iced Double Espresso (起きてる？), cardio enlivens your senses and places you firmly into your body. Blood circulation and a cocktail of feel-good chemicals help yank us out of our thoughts and back to the physical plane. The trouble is it doesn’t last. With any positive change of chemistry (I’m looking at you, first beer of the night), we can’t help but want more. Running around the block turns into marathon training. Runners high can help to bring you back to reality, but it’s not sticking around for long.

    More spontaneity

    Exercise can become a platform for finding flow: control of attention that can turn anything from sawing a log to swimming across the British channel into an optimal experience. Ideally, we don’t get distracted and find ourselves totally immersed in the doing. This is spontaneity. This is dancing like no one is watching. This is noticing an hour has passed in what felt like minutes. Unfortunately, we can’t stay concentrated forever. Like endorphins, flow eventually flushes out of our system.

    Less fear

    Pushing through fear can also make you feel alive. I’ve always felt mildly scared and uncomfortable scuba diving. When I think of diving, I think of disorientation and claustrophobia rather than the stillness and beauty that most people talk about. But when I acknowledged these fears and got back in the water (with sharks), I found myself feeling more in control of my mind and my body.

    Some control

    Although we can’t expect to stare down new fears every workout, perhaps more control and agency helps us feel alive? Alan Watts suggests that total control is no fun but some control is what we are looking for. Like descending down a mountain or getting into a romantic relationship, “we always love controlling something that’s not really under our control.” Our girlfriend could decide to break up with us. The bike could skid or slip. That’s the game. That’s what makes life scary. But that’s what also makes life feel alive.

    Less dead

    Our persistent, dogged drive to feel alive may stem from a desperation or concern about death. If someone doesn’t fall in love with us, or invite us to that party, we might just drop off the earth or fade into a fine mist forever. So we exercise to not only feel alive, but in an attempt to clear away all the thoughts, feelings and beliefs that make us feel dead.  Children and dogs never seem to have this problem. Nothing is really impeding their aliveness or concerning them about their life on earth. They don’t feel pressure to prove it. They form a living, breathing example that being alive is a natural, simple fact. Ordinary. And not something we should be trying to game or control. Paradoxically, as soon as we place conditions on aliveness, we’ve lost it.

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  • A discourse

    I don’t want to get up.

    But you do, don’t you? You do want to get up. You even promised yourself you would get up last night. And 5 minutes ago. And 10 minutes before that.

    It’s cold out there.

    A dumber, more obvious statement has never been uttered. I know it’s cold. You know it’s cold. Everybody knows it. What you are saying is, it should not be cold this morning. Or perhaps that it’s unfair that it’s cold. It is none of those things. In fact, even the word cold is slippery, and I wish you didn’t use it. Even the letters of the word cold seem to shiver when they come out of your trembling lips.

    Well, it’s damn cold and it’s reasonable for me to curl under the covers for a few minutes.

    No one in the world thinks that’s a reasonable thing to do. Who are you talking to? Who is making this order? Who thinks it is reasonable? Who wants to stay under covers and why? Have they ever considered what would happen if they did go back to bed? Have they played out that scenario? Or have they not thought that far? Have they – Oh never mind, you’re asleep again.

    What’s the point in running? 

    You know, some people never ask these resentful questions. Some people have already returned from their run and their mind has moved onto the next thing. For them, the run was neither important nor a waste of time. It could not be categorized. But for you, you demand more. Like a star athlete dreams of medals, you dream of meaning. You obsess over reason, and if an activity has a foundation of logic, you love and caress it, and you are quick to become troubled and frail if you can’t find it. 

    It’s raining. I shouldn’t run in the rain.

    You can and you should. To run in the rain is no different than running in the sun, and perhaps even better. Like I said before, as soon as you have considered this activity as something holy, you have strayed down a dead end path. To run in any conditions is as ordinary as a grocery store or a fallen branch from a tree. Of course, that’s the same for everybody.

    Look, the fact is I’m not so good at running. Look at how my foot scuffs the pavement. Look at how I sweat so easily and get red in the face.

    Ah now we’re talking man! How long I have waited to hear these sweet words. And for the first time, you’re right. You are neither fast nor graceful. You lope like stray dog. But you have recognized there is more for you to do. You should run as often as you can – without overdoing it of course. The more you run, the better you shall get. And soon enough, you will be admired for it, and you will find your question embarrassing. 

    I think I’ve lost some weight from running. I love running.

    How did that happen? How quick you were to leap from hatred to ecstasy. Where was the middle ground? I turned away for a second and suddenly you are a war hero. How did that happen? How can you say such a thing seriously, and with a smile on your face no less! 

    Well look, I’m in better shape aren’t I? Lots of people run to lose weight.

    You fearful creature. You will live longer and easily if you give up your obsession with something that was never yours. Do you comment and obsess over the weight of your neighbors dog? Your body is no different. Like this dog, you should note its appearance briefly, give it a pat and perhaps give it a compliment once in a while. But any more stress or thought paid to it is sheer madness. The dog is not yours, never was and does not pay you much interest either.

    Inspired by Of Human Freedom – Epictetus

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  • Mirror muscles

    “Entombed in this which we carry about with us and call the body, in which we are imprisoned like an oyster in its shell.”

    Plato

    If I cherish my body, I make a slave of myself

    Epictetus

    TLDR: You are not your 6-Pack

    We exercise to look good. This is a reason so embarrassingly fundamental to physical training we hardly ever mention it alongside other benefits like longevity or stress reduction. We want to look good on the beach. At the office. Without clothes on. And we believe that the better we look, the better we will feel. But what exactly should we look like?

    To find an answer to this question, we often look externally. We look to friends, role models and the culture. Legendary strength coach Mark Rippetoe explains how physique focused bodybuilder magazines influenced his training when he was younger. “We wanted to look like the guys in the magazines, contest bodybuilders in contest shape, with thin skin, visible vascularity, nice arms, and most of all, abs. Abs. Slabs of abs. Washboard abs. Abs were the sine qua non of the male physique.”

    Abs still are. But print is dead. In 2023, you’re probably on TikTok or YouTube looking for answers from a laidback Texan or a personal trainer from Adelaide. Not to mention the tried and true method of comparing ourselves with others. These external influences are powerful. Developing your own strong or lean body signals all sorts of important information to those around you and ultimately forms part of your persona.

    Your persona can be thought of like a nice suit or warm jacket, a “protective cover or mask that an individual presents to the world. It has two purposes: first to make a specific impression on other people: second, to conceal the individuals inner self from their prying eyes.”1As humans, our strong need to rely and fit in with others leads us to tirelessly build and maintain these flashy coats.

    Similarly, we sculpt our bodies to look a certain way, helping us stand out or fit in. There’s nothing inherently wrong in doing this, but we might start to obsess and overly identify with our constructed physical image. When we do that, we squash down how we really feel. Pioneering Israeli educator Moshe Feldenkrais warns that when we hide behind a persona “every aspiration and spontaneous desire is subjected to stringent internal criticism”.2 We forget what’s underneath.

    Take mirrors for example. Mirrors are useful. They help us dress ourselves properly and can show us things that we can’t see, like a bit of broccoli stuck in our tooth. But in the gym, mirrors encourage us to focus on specific body parts and fuel our natural propensity to judge ourselves. The more we focus on our biceps, the further we go from naturalness. Not only can the results get freakish, but the dissatisfaction seems to increase. When professional bodybuilders take it to the extreme, both their mind and body become vulnerable to breaking down.

    Our personas and their impact on our physical appearance aren’t going away. But like a squirrel probably doesn’t need that many nuts for winter, we also don’t need to spend all our energy on maintaining these images (which will probably change next month anyway). Ideally, we spend less time on Instagram, and end up looking more like, regular, healthy humans and less like the Liver King.

    So next time you are thinking of going primal, or getting big, or being the kind of guy who does an Ultra at the drop of a hat, consider any of the following questions:

    • What types of food is your immune system sensitive to?
    • How would you hold and move your body if you inherited it today?
    • Imagine you inherited a new, fit body. How might you eat or move differently?
    • How did you burn energy when you were a kid?
    • How would you exercise differently if the internet didn’t exist?
    • How would you exercise differently if you were the last person on the planet?
    • What kind of exercise would you like to be doing in 10 years time?
    • Imagine you fast forward 20 years into future. What do you wish you ate in those 20 years?

    Footnotes

    [1] Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell Publishing, 1964), 350.

    [2] Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 6.

  • Keeping in touch

    Bali, 2023

    Sensory deficit

    I’m a knowledge worker, and by definition, I rely on my brain rather than my body. Most days I’m practically stationary at my desk, staring unblinking at text on a bright liquid crystal display. Even when I move around, I don’t pay much attention to my body. I’m often bumping into things as my brain chugs on multiple trains of thought. It’s not uncommon for me to suddenly realize I possess a working bladder, stomach or set of legs, as they scream for my attention after a meeting runs over.

    After a busy day ignoring my body, if I’m lucky enough with my time and energy, I head to the pool. I swim for fitness, but it’s also a conscious attempt to balance out all the mind exercise. It doesn’t always work. As my body gleefully thrashes up and down the pool, covered in tantalizing sensations of water pressure and temperature, my mind is usually still behind the desk. I usually struggle with my form and can never remember how many laps I’ve done.

    But I keep coming back for more. Which makes me wonder. Is there something else about swimming that my body craves? We know it’s healthy to get our heart rate up but I think there’s also an acknowledgment (conscious or not), that we are often operating in a sensory deficit and need to catch up. 

    When our senses line up, we can find ourselves in highly concentrated flow states. We seem to get a clearer, crisper view of reality. One memory of this happening for me was an early morning swim in Barton Springs, the beautiful outdoor swimming pool in Austin, Texas. I swum laps as the sun rose. The combination of the unfamiliar but visually stunning environment, cold water and early morning stillness left me feeling steadier and more comfortable in my own skin than usual.

    Scrambled Senses

    The importance of our senses working effectively can’t be overstated. At a basic level, when sensory modalities (such as sight, sound, touch, smell, self-motion, and taste) work in harmony together, it allows us to have “meaningful perceptual experiences.” When senses are not integrated together or are overly sensitive, we start to lose touch with reality.

    Individuals with autism show us how difficult life can become when our ‘thinking’ brains receive inaccurate data from the brain stem. Author Temple Grandin covers many of these experiences in her book Thinking in Pictures. Rain can sound “like gunfire”. Blinding, flickering, and bouncing reflections from florescent lights can make a room look like “an animated cartoon.” When vision or sound fails them, a non-verbal person may categorize the world “by smell or touch because those senses provide more accurate information”. Even whole body parts can simply disappear from sight if they are not directly touched. One teenager summed up their life before they were able to communicate with others as “emptiness”.

    With jumbled and distorted senses, it’s impossible to feel safe and calm. The nervous system is in a perpetual flight mode, inaccurately perceiving everything but the most familiar routines and places, like “the safe smell of pots of pans” as a dangerous threat. To help untangle these scrambled senses, therapists may prescribe vigorous aerobic exercise which can reduce aggression and helps to “stimulate both the tactile and vestibular systems”.

    Strengthening our Senses

    For the majority of us, our bodies work like it says on the tin. Although we may be often distracted, senses come and go and we enjoy a clear, stable perception, allowing us to reliably send emails, cross the road and rearrange our living rooms. And yet it’s likely, our sensory processing muscles are wasting away in the office or on the couch. 

    Swimming laps could help. Here are three ways that physical activity could help to strengthen your senses (along with your heart and bones):

    • Soothe: When your nerves aren’t frazzled, you can sense better, and vice versa. Vigorous exercise can calm the nervous system.
    • Sharpen: Even something simple like a kicking drill with flippers is a great exercise to connect with your tactile system.
    • Sort: Sensory integration can be encouraged with healthy, stimulating inputs found in outdoor exercise. Consider the pressure, temperature changes, and rhythmic sensations of running through the woods.

    Next time you move your body, it’ll thank you for the sweat – but especially for the sights, sounds and sensations.

  • Filling in the gaps

    TLDR: Stop mindlessly eating and let your body fill in the gaps where it needs to.

    Do you slurp your food? Ever spilt food on your shirt? Choked on a fizzy drink? Scalded your tongue on something hot? If you eat food, the answer is probably yes.

    Most of the time when we eat food, we are not really thinking about what we are chewing or what we will eat next. We are on autopilot. This is the status quo. We are even more automatic when we are rushing, hungover, bored, distracted, talking to others, tapping our phones and especially late at night when no one is watching.

    We are shopping for, cooking and eating food, but nobody is home in our own head. I call this the the demented autopilot.

    Occasionally, like when we get a divorce, or move overseas, we decide to take control from this mad robot. The goal is typically to lose weight, and the diet we follow usually involves some sort of restriction. Sometimes the diet works so well that we believe that the restriction is the solution. But avoiding something like sugar, doesn’t necessarily give you the control you were seeking. Never letting a drop of alcohol touch your tongue is a very different stance to recognizing that alcohol can be pleasurable, but actually not an especially big deal, and often not worth the hangover.

    Diets do offer the positive effect of circuit breaking some of our robotic routines. Like when you help a Roomba that’s been stuck in a corner, by switching out the sights, sounds and tastes of our habits, we may get a better idea of where we’ve been stuck.

    For example, I used to stumble into a my local 7-11 most mornings and buy a cup of cheap, strong coffee, and pair it with an original glazed Krispy Kreme donut. At some point I started to grind my own coffee beans at home and found myself eating healthier breakfasts. The Sugar Express that I unconsciously rode for many months had been exploded. Emerging from the rubble, I found myself relatively unscathed. Our brain isn’t that loyal to any particular habit. It’s already happily laying some new train tracks.

    Some activities are natural circuit breakers, and we’d be better off doing them more often. Like a diet, hiking has lots of built-in, natural frictions that push us in healthier directions and help to disengage this demented button-pushing part of our brain.

    • We notice the taste of food when we camp, not because we have a waiter describing it to us (although that can help), but because we are actually hungry. I realize some of the best meals of my life were eaten after all day on my feet backpacking.
    • We don’t tend to eat large meals late at night (under fluorescent lights), or in the middle of the night. It takes some time to set up and get access to food, so we eat at set, reasonable times of day and then we put the food away.
    • Most of the time we are snacking or nibbling on small nutritious things. We are moving about all day when we hike and we need food that delivers sustained energy.
    • We can’t eat a large, heavy, elaborate meals because we have limited space in our backpack.
    • We tend to wake up earlier and go to bed earlier. It’s not unusual to take a nap when we need to rest.

    To counter the mindless chewing of autopilot eating, we need to seek some sort of balance. Most animals lean on their left hemisphere for targeting and acquiring prey and their right hemisphere for everything else. One way to introduce this sort of balance (without trying too hard) is to fill in the gaps.

    • Adjusting a flapping sail fills in the gaps
    • When we feel tired after lunch, napping fills in the gaps.
    • Resting from exercise when you feel a cold coming on fills in the gaps.
    • On a hot day, coconut water fills in the gaps.
    • Extending your run when you feel good fills in the gaps.
    • Gravitating towards veggies you haven’t eaten for a while fills in the gaps.

    Homeostasis is the natural process where our bodies balance, self regulate and maintain internal stability, but we can get in the way of that too. For example, when I calorie counted, I would dutifully eat back the calories I had burnt in that days activities. That could be quite a bit of food, especially after a long run. Most of the time, I wound up feeling sluggish, bloated and with indigestion. I tried to force my body to balance. Instead, I could have simply listened to my stomach, and noticed that I all I needed to do was eat a tiny bit more over the next few days. I could have filled in the gaps.

    Although friction and structure, like the kind you find while on a long hike can help to circuit break our automatic eating, we can’t spend all our lives hiking. If we are ever going to maintain our health and fitness, ultimately it’s up to us.

    Luckily, when we ease up our reliance on the rigid, controlling left-hemisphere, we seem to be remarkably good at filling in the gaps.

  • Stick with it

    Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
    By Angela Duckworth
    Simon & Schuster, 2016

    What is it about?

    What we achieve in life depends on our passion and perseverance for long term goals. In other words, how gritty we are. Most of us go through life unsatisfied, dipping our toes, sampling and quitting early and often, especially when the going gets tough. We can become more gritty with deliberate practice and with some help from our friends, parents, coaches and the environment around us.

    A few key ideas

    Practice like a toddler

    To master something, you need to practice. We’ve only got so much time and energy in the day, and some of that needs to be spent deliberately if you’re going to get anywhere. For me, practice can be described as pleasant and painful. Easy and hard. Sweet and sour. Some days you’re in a flow state, others you’re banging your head against the wall. Ideally, you’re doing both at once. Terry Laughlin thinks you can do so by not judging yourself too harshly. Little kids understand this without needing to read pop-psychology. When they are interested in something, they don’t mind making mistakes or spending hours learning something new.

    The dojo is the teacher

    “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

    William James

    Although science doesn’t really back it up, Duckworth intuits that grit is enhanced somehow by a structured activity, outside of your regular routine. I think most parents would agree. Why is that? Pursuits like ballet and basketball tend to have a supportive yet demanding authority figure like a coach and the environment is often designed to encourage you to keep at it, whether it’s motivational lingo or the culture that can rub off on you. If you’re setting off on a long path to get good at something, you want like-minded people around you and structure to help build new habits.

    The benefit of digging an endless hole

    “I’m not afraid to die on this treadmill.”

    Will Smith

    Most people are constantly distracted by more interesting stuff, so nothing ever becomes truly interesting. When we go deep into something, or simply spend a lot of semi-enjoyable time practicing, we learn a sort of reverence for the process. Swimming or maths are bigger than us in every possible way. At enough depth, or with enough time, the activity becomes sort of irrelevant. You learn more about yourself, and most importantly you realize that anything you learn can be transferred to other parts of your life.

    Is it hard to live a gritty life?

    Duckworth uses the example of Tom Seaver, a legendary baseball pitcher who “devoted (his) life” to pitching “the best I possibly can day after day”. It’s tempting, but I would be wary of imitating Seaver. On paper, he sounds incredibly disciplined and gritty. But perhaps these gritty habits were not forced, or designed top down, but naturally unfolded once he settled on something he liked to do. I would bet that Seaver isn’t “gritting his teeth” when he picks something healthy to eat, goes to bed early or doesn’t drink alcohol because he’s pitching the next day. For him it’s second nature, it’s habit, it’s who he is, it’s easy, it’s effortless.