Let’s Weaken Ourselves Together!
You do realize this is what you’re doing when you choose to go to the gym right? I’m going to spend this article highlighting what doesn’t get enough attention. It’s what actually and literally happens when you workout and why you get stronger over time, assuming you’re training in a way that leads to that result. I want to discuss it briefly and then draw some connections to emotional and intellectual strength and stability, something not enough people take seriously. I’d strongly encourage you (and I’m speaking to myself too as I write this) to think about where you succeed and fail with respect to what I am about to talk about. I’m going to call outright bullshit on anyone who says they don’t struggle in one area (physical, emotional or mental). If you think you have “arrived” or achieved “success” then stop reading, I don’t to waste your time. For those that are open-mined, yearning for growth and want enhance their physical capacity, read on.
Why do we, when subjected to the appropriately dosed stimuli, get stronger? The dramatic oversimplification is this: Your muscles are temporarily weakened and torn down, damaged on a micro scale. Your body then spends time actively rebuilding and recovering above and beyond your previous baseline (assuming you are supporting this process with appropriate lifestyle, sleeping & nutritional habits). There are names for this; hormesis & anti-fragility. In both instances, there is a system (your body, emotions and thoughts) that benefits, and even thrives and grows, from chaos and turmoil, on a small or even large scale, depending on the stimulus and the duration and intensity of exposure. The point is this. You are weakening yourself temporarily to strengthen yourself over the long haul. If you don’t create small scale chaos you cannot grow and change your body. Likewise, if you don’t allow the opportunity to create optimal conditions for recovery and rebuilding, the chaos you created will have been in vain. Now, and really think about this carefully, how does that relate to mental and emotional performance?
Let me tell you, and I’ll do so with some slight overemphasis and exaggeration. You need to find your breaking points emotionally and mentally and push on them just a little bit more than they are pushed on by the day to day stresses of life. You need to put yourself in a place of emotional and mental turmoil, struggle and failure. You need the current way that you function mentally and emotionally to fail, at least a little bit. That’s what you do to your body. You take it to the edge of it’s current capacity and perhaps a little beyond. That’s called a workout. And millions of people love doing it. Over and over again. And it makes the physical stresses of daily life more manageable.
Some people look at emotional “weaknesses” and mental “limitations” as things that shouldn’t be exposed. I’m using quotes on purpose because these are often looked at with a negative connotation. In fact it’s looked down upon, generally, to “expose a person’s emotional weaknesses”. That’s bullshit. And here is why. You can’t make people do things. If you believe that you can control people you probably believe that people are capable of controlling you. If that’s your belief and assumption, I’m not going to argue with you. Whatever benefit you’re getting from believing that must be worth it and I’m not here to take that away from you. I won’t deprive you of something that you derive value from. Now, that being said, can you knowingly expose a person’s emotional or intellectual limitations and then leverage that against them for personal gain. Sure. But, you’re still not controlling them. They are choosing based on what they value most, which might be compliance and accommodation over a greater fear of defying or fighting and resisting.
I’ll give you a really extreme example. If you put a gun to my head and tell me to do 10 jumping jacks and I comply, you didn’t make me do 10 jumping jacks. I chose to do 10 jumping jacks becasue I valued compliance and my life more than resistance and potential death. I chose based on some value I have that wins over the choice to defy and resist. Why am I saying all this and how the hell does it relate to emotional performance enhancement? Like this. My emotional and intellectual limitations are mine. They’ve always been there and my lack of interaction with them is also my fault. Situations that uncover and expose them are merely pointing out what has already existed. Another example; if I have tight hamstrings but never put myself in situations that expose my tight hamstrings, I very well may believe that my hamstrings are fine because I’ve never felt their restrictive nature. Until I get a trainer. And that trainer “makes” me do exercises that uncover this limitation. Upon experiencing my limitation or weakness, I choose to react and say that the trainer is exposing my physical weaknesses and using it to manipulate me into doing what they want me to do.
If you’re a reasonable and sensible individual you’ll recognize the absurdity of such a made up reaction. If the above scenario actually played out, I (the reactive client) have forgotten that I’m the one who chose to put myself in a situation that would probably expose my physical weaknesses and limitations. We are so quick to blame that we forget all the decisions we made that got us into the situation we are now blaming for our discomfort. Do you know who else does that? Little kids. And if we’re being honest, we are little kids emotionally and intellectually in certain areas, especially in our ablity to navigate and manage our health.
For now, back to the point of this article. We have a much more accepting view of identifying, experiencing and working through physical limitations. In fact we have an enormous industry built around it (fitness and health). Millions of people love working on their physical limitations and are even considered in a special class of their own for doing so. We’ve built facilities where people like this can congregate together with special ritualistic practices, movements and gestures. You can even wear special uniforms to show others how serious you are about your desire to conquer physical weakenesses. I’m a happy member of this community and will continue to be for some time. However, I find it interesting, entertaining and silly that we don’t view emotional and intellectual strength and conditioning as equally vital or normal. To make matters even more interesting, the assumptions and perceptions we have in fitness don’t carry over to the realms of emotion and mental exercise, a very fascinating case of domain dependence.
“Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them….. they get it in the classroom, but not in the more complicated texture of the street”. That’s Nicholas Nassim Taleb on this logical fallacy that plagues humans in his book “Anti-Fragility”, a wonderful book for those whose ego’s needs a size reduction and reality check. In other words, the domain in which we learned that it makes sense to temporarily weaken ourselves (the body) remains the only domain in which our conceptual understanding of this process makes sense to us. Our understanding ceases when we try to translate our conceptual understanding into another domain (emotions and feeling). If you doubt me, go tell a bunch of your closest friends that you are going to start having “emotional breakdowns” a few times a week by identifying your emotional weaknesses so you can get get stronger. See what kind of responses you get. Few people think it is weird that the body has to struggle and even breakdown in some instances in order to more capacity to be uncovered. Yet we live in a world where being “emotional”, whatever the hell that means, is viewed as a negative or undesirable trait that renders a person prone to being taken less seriously or less tough, mature or capable. Do we view athletes as less tough because they physically weaken themselves all the time? Not usually. In fact we glorify them for their heroic willingness to do what others won’t.
So, my question to you is this. Why is weird to weaken your current emotional and intellectual capacity? What do you think it takes to make yourself stronger, more flexible and achieve greater bandwidth in your ability to think and feel? You almost certainly won’t get to enjoy the benefits of more emotional and intellectual fortitude without first discovering and breaking your current boundaries. What will that look like? Probably not pretty or sexy by conventional societal standards. What does it feel like or look like when a person has reached the end of their emotional and mental capacity? We usually call it a “breakdown”. I call it a moment of being a human. If you have had your fair share of breakdowns where the fabric of how you perceived the world or yourself or others was torn down, it’s not really that big of a deal once you’re through it. You’re still here and I’m willing to be you’re stronger and more self-aware because of it.
All those feelings and thoughts that “overwhelmed” you and made you feel like you weren’t yourself (when are you not yourself?) aren’t some mysterious, oppressive force. It’s just you feeling all the things that you probably usually don’t give yourself permission to acknowledge. Congratulations! Your a human and not a robot! Is it weird to exercise to failure? Is it weird to “hit the wall” when running? No! And it’s because we know that the body has limitations and they must be found, pushed on and occassionally broken down for growth to occur. How could it be any different with your thoughts and feelings? We’ve all just been very successfully lied to about what it means to think and feel stuff. Imagine for a moment that hitting your emotional and intellectual failure points was just as commonplace as hitting failure in your last set of squats or running a little bit longer that you previously had. Really think about it. How would that change the way you live your life? How would you behave?
It’s not the strongest that survive and thrive. Rather, it is the one most able to adapt, those with the best evolutionarily stable strategy. When the framework you’ve used to handle reality and the world around you crumbles, and it’s going to numerous times, maybe even daily if you’re living a life full of growth, your ability to adapt emotionally and intellectually will determine your ability to succeed. Some people cannot bear to have anything, ever not go the way they think it should or not make sense with their model of the world. Those people will be stressed out, angry, resentful, full of judgement and generally struggle with the whole “being a human” thing. Those that continuously work to expand their physical, emotional and intellectual potential will be the ones that survive and thrive the most. Life will happen but they welcome the breakdowns because they know that with each physical, emotional and intellectual breakdown, comes a better, more accurate set of assumptions, frameworks, and models with which to navigate the world around them. These are the people we look at and say “How they hell do they do that?” with their emotional intelligence and mental fortitude in the same way we look at Olympians and wonder “How the hell do they do that?” with their bodies.
So, without further ado, let’s weaken ourselves together! What do you have to lose?
