The Psychology of Wellness - Part 3

(This is the last post in a series, part 1 is here, and part 2 is here. Read them first if you haven't already)

So, we've covered the basics of how your mind works, and hopefully you've been practicing watching your mind through meditation. And we've discussed how watching mind can help you identify those recurrent thoughts that undermine your health goals.

Today is the last piece of the puzzle; leveraging mindfulness to introduce new positive practices into your life.

Our example this time will be a desk-bound 30 something guy who's found he's getting winded going up stairs, hasn't been to the gym in over a year despite paying monthly dues, and is in general feeling like he's losing control over his health and wellness.

Everytime he thinks about getting some exercise in, his mind throws up the Top 40 thoughts that he's become so used to over the years. If he tried to verbalize them they'd be something like this:

"I can fit it in later today, I really want to finish this project, I'm just feeling a little heavy from lunch, I need to digest it first, I walked this morning so that counts for something right, I'm not lazy, just busy, after all this makes me money and exercise is just a time-suck, I can get on top of this stuff in spring when there's not so much going on."

Now all of us, including this guy, know that in the light of day these thoughts are crude, bald-faced rationalizations. But for someone buying into the story of their thoughts, these lame excuses carry just enough weight to keep them sitting at the desk for the rest of the afternoon. The exercise is never done, and a good helping of guilt and self-loathing come later, which leads to overeating and overdrinking, and more sedentary time feeling bummed out.

Now, the technique we discussed in part 2, of watching your thoughts and defanging them before they plunge you into an unhealthy choice (like eating a candy bar) will not be much help in this situation. This guy's problem is a lack of action rather than a repeated series of mistakes. How should he mentally proceed when the problem is finding motivation where there is none?

The one thing that will not absolutely not work is trying to remove or "cut off" the negative thoughts and rationalizations. You're probably familiar with this old psychological trick: "Whatever you do, don't think of a pink elephant." You, me, and all the other people reading this are now thinking of pink elephants. A similar process happens if you try something like, "Whatever you do today, don't make excuses and sit on the computer all afternoon." Thoughts don't work like that. As soon as you try to delete an unwanted thought, another one will instantly fill its place. So forget about any self-talk along the lines of "Don't be so lazy."

We're not trying to tame our thoughts here, we're learning to watch our thoughts. Once a thought is flashing around the cerebral cortex, it's out of your control, you can either buy into its story or simply watch it bounce around your head, but you can never erase it. What you do have some nominal control over is what thought is being cued up next in line.

And here's the trick. To get motivated, all you need to do is mindfully introduce a positive thought into the Top 40 mix.

By positive I don't mean "I'm awesome." For me, a positive thought is an actionable item which you can reasonably execute in the near future.

So, for our sample guy, a good positive thought might be: "This flab that squeezes out of the side of my trousers is not me, and I'm walking an hour a day to make it go away, so that I can feel great when I look in the mirror." And all it takes is for this man to buy into this thought's story. Someone who can say that sentence with total conviction will have little problem getting in an afternoon walk.

This is why it's so important to introduce an actionable and reasonable positive thought. If your positive thinking is too broad or too distant, it's easy to stop buying into its story as you continually come up empty.

There is always room for big thoughts and dreams, but if you actually want to get anywhere, you need to have your sense of scale well calibrated. For example, if our guy wants six pack abs, it's not very helpful to think "I'm going to get a six pack!" A much more reasonable way to go about things is "I want a six pack but I'm never going to get there unless I start getting into a routine that sheds this belly fat first." However, if our guy is locked into a serious long term training program like the PCP then "I'm going to get a six-pack" is a perfectly actionable thought. You have to be aware of the context in which you're introducing your positive thoughts and tune up or down accordingly.

To put this all together, let's revisit our desk worker guy on a day when he's on top of his thoughts. He's just had lunch, and thinking about what to do with his afternoon. Let's ride along his thought stream, offering a little encouragement along the way.

"I can fit in my workout later, I'm pretty busy today, and I've got to finish this project..." (Unhelpful thoughts and rationalizations! Look at the projector!) "...heh heh, there I go again, I know that's just a bunch of excuses, why do I do that?" (Good! Now use this window to introduce a positive thought!) "I want to get rid of these love handles and keep up with my nephew (Nice, now turn around, look at the screen, and buy into the story!) and I'm going to keep my workout schedule, even when it's inconvenient, because this is the new me. Hell, I'm not even that busy today anyway."

And now the workout is a part of the scheduled day, not a half-hearted desire from a health-potato.

This can of course be used for any goal you have, but it's especially powerful when coupled with fitness because you get a whole feedback loop going as you get an endorphin hit, see your body change, and receive feedback from others. And it all starts and ends in the mind. I'll say this one more time, you will never be able to stop and look at your thoughts mid-stream without training. For any of this advice to be effective you have to put some time in on the practice field of meditation. There's no other way!

Everything I've said here can be verified in real time without you lifting a finger. Watch your thoughts, train your mind, and the body will follow. Because they are one and the same.

Epilogue

This advice about buying into the story your positive thoughts tell you is fantastic for getting in shape, but it is not the end game. Anytime you believe in your thoughts too much, positive or negative, you will be setting up an edifice of disappointment, delusion, and suffering. It's one thing to say "I'm going to have a six-pack" and another to believe that having a six pack will make you a more complete or happy person. The world is full of rich, famous, beautiful people who are completely miserable.

The path to contentment doesn't lie in either mindless distraction or mindful goal-accomplishment. It's about being authentically yourself, without a crust of thoughts, judgments, and desires. So the final step is not buying into any thought too much, to let the torrent rush around you without losing yourself in it.

But I will tell you, being fit and healthy means that as you work through this lifelong process your body will support and sustain the mind component like a wind at your back. So don't get too deep in this endgame stuff if it means you're not exercising or taking care of the body you have RIGHT NOW. Go get em!

A Very Instructive Injury!

About 6 weeks ago, I was teaching the usual a.m. yoga classes at the studio. All morning, my left leg had felt kind of strange, like the head of the femur wasn't quite in its groove. A person going about their regular day probably wouldn't notice this, but when you spend a few hours with your legs in all kinds of yogic positions you pick up on irregularities pretty quick.


The hip socket shifts around all the time, and the femur can get misplaced quite easily. Usually a few hip rotations like the ones pictured below will get everything in place. I did these, of course, but something was still off.
After the morning classes were finished, I spent a few minutes stretching out the leg, but couldn't quite get the hip socket settled. Puzzled, I moved into a front split to try and feel around the edges of the bone... a little pressure here, a little there...
CRACK! It sounded just like a home run off a baseball bat. Without warning the femur had finally snapped back into place, sending my split hurtling into the floor. Several things happened at once here...

1. Not to get too graphic, but the family jewels got a sudden and unpleasant introduction to the floor. Yowza!
2. The strange feeling of the misplaced bone was immediately relieved...
3. ...only to be replaced by a new unpleasant sensation, an ache from deep in my hamstrings.

I pulled myself up from the floor, and lay there for awhile, feeling the back of my leg. It didn't seem to be too bad, and at least the hip socket was back in order.

But by the end of lunch it was very apparent. The sudden acceleration had pulled a hamstring.

However, this was not your rolling around on the floor in agony hamstring injury. I could walk, run, jumprope, or whatever, completely normally. The only real effect was that anything that required a deep hamstring stretch in my left leg was completely inaccessible to me. This meant all forward bends, all seated leg stretches, all splits, and any kind of kick was off the table.

Very annoying, but I could still work and get around, and it could have been much worse. (Before anyone gets preachy in the comments, I was thoroughly warmed up, using correct technique, and being sensible when this injury occurred. It's just one of those freak things that's going to happen when you spend your days working with your body)

What I didn't expect was how much I would learn from this injury and the 6 weeks of healing it would take to get me back in business.

For these weeks, my leg flexibility was essentially set at beginner level. I had gone from this:
to not being able to touch my toes. I had difficulty with even the most rudimentary poses and needed blocks and props to hold any leg pose for more than a few seconds.

I teach beginners all the time, and I'm constantly telling them to forget about meaningless goalposts like touching their toes or achieving some preconceived idea of what the pose should look like. When someone gets caught up in the idea that they should be touching their toes, they'll start to wrench their spines and hips in all kinds of unsightly and unsafe ways, and ultimately lose the real point of the pose, which is to stretch a target muscle, not to touch their toes! (I've seen so many students go off course like this that I even made a video about it.)

And wouldn't you know it, after a few days of the injury, I found myself, even with years of training and understanding, straining to touch my toes. Unlike a beginner, I could feel exactly how the pose was being compromised in my lower back, how I really wasn't doing any good at all and probably exacerbating the injury. In fact, I wrote the book on how to do these poses. Here is an excerpt from the latest detailing exactly what not to do in a forward bend.
But some part of me, intent on getting my fingers to the toes, was committing every mistake in that graphic!

I've thought about this experience a lot. What was it that was driving me to strain for the toes, despite knowing better?

It boiled down to this. When I did the stretch properly, with just a slight forward bend, I didn't feel like myself. And I didn't want my students to think I was the kind of person who couldn't even touch his toes. I didn't want to think of myself as that kind of person. It turns out that this very arbitrary thing, touching my toes, had become bound up in my sense of who I was. Rather than deal with this cognitive dissonance, my ego preferred the pain of pushing on through.

Needless to say, this really softened up my attitude for all those students who try a forward bend, find that they can't touch their toes, and redouble their efforts with a curved spine and gritted teeth. What they are fighting is not their muscles and bones, but their sense of helplessness when confronted with a glaring indication that they're not in the kind of shape they imagined they were in.

This plays out in so many ways. For example, very few overweight people truly see themselves as overweight. They're just themselves, with a little fat covering the "real" person up. Every day they battle with this dissonant feeling. When they pass mirrors they suck their gut in, they avoid having photos taken. How do I know all this? Because I used to be one of them!

I can only imagine that this feeling must also be playing out in the psyche of scrawny people, short people, tall people, big-bottomed, small-chested, freckled, curly haired, short-sighted, far-sighted, sallow-skinned, aging, the list goes on forever and ever. Everyone will have a few unpleasant truths that clash with the image they have of themselves. The question is, how do we handle these hang-ups?

It seems to me you will always have two conflicting urges when you're facing those parts of yourself you don't like.

-The first is acceptance of your limitation. Get over your idea of yourself and see what's really there. So, in this case, after a couple of weeks of struggling I finally made peace with the fact that for the next few months, as much as I hated it, I was going to have extremely compromised leg flexibility.

-The second part is doing something about your limitation. You can go about this in an unskillful way (like curving your back and straining) or in a smart, far-sighted, planned way. For me, it meant taking it easy on the leg, icing it when I had to, eating well, sleeping well, and being patient as the muscle repaired itself.

If we were to find the two parts for someone dealing with weight issues, it would be:

-Hey, you've slowly gained some major weight over the last few years and you're starting to have trouble doing things you used to find easy. Dude, you're fat!

-With exercise and a good diet you can steadily lose the weight, if you stay consistent and don't try to rush it.

These two things will naturally tug against each other. Some days a person will be gung-ho on the exercise part and won't feel "fat" at all. Other days the acceptance of the part 1 stuff, the "I'm fat stuff" will become a grim pessimism about the possibility of any change at all. That's natural, just make sure your percentages don't get too out of whack.

What do I mean by percentages? A good acceptance/do-something-about-it percentage for weight loss is perhaps 30% acceptance 70% do-something-about-it.

Whereas, if you'd like to be a few inches taller, a healthy percentage might be 98% acceptance 2% do-something-about-it (you could always improve your posture and "appear" taller, but that's about it!).

Getting these opposing forces right will not only make you fitter, they'll chill you out about the things you can't change. And that's the only way to real contentment, because there's always another thing to be underwhelmed by with your body.

The leg's still a little tender, but I'm back in the game now, slightly less flexible, but a little wiser!

The Psychology of Wellness - Part 2

Hey everyone, did you try to do some meditating as prescribed in the part 1 of this series?

If you did, (and you really should or the rest of this isn't going to make much sense) then you probably have a little more insight into the way your mind works.

As I discussed before, when you sit quietly and watch your thought-stream ripple past, you'll find that underneath your normal veneer you're really quite a nutcase. What a mess it is inside your skull! Memories from high-school will butt up against tomorrow's shopping list. Past rejections will sting again, and imagined future accomplishments will swell you with pride. Your thoughts will bounce around like a rubber ball in a spinning clothes dryer.

This is fine. It's how your mind is supposed to work. But what we've come here to do is get to grips with the mind and use our thought patterns to make us healthier people. So, having seen yourself for the discombobulated muddle that you are, what's the next step?

Having taken some time to get acquainted with your thoughts, you'll start to see that some have more resonance with you than others. Chances are these are the thoughts that have been with you the longest, that you go back to again and again. These are Top 40 hits of your mental life.

(There is quite a lot of science behind this phenomenon. Every time you revisit a thought or memory, you are tracing a unique electrical path in your neural network. And everytime you retrace the pattern, you solidify and strengthen the synaptic connections, making it even easier to have the same thought again!)

Let's take, for example, a young woman named who has found herself steadily gaining weight since she finished college and entered the workforce. She's getting concerned about it and has tried gyms and diets for a few years, but the pounds keep creeping on. She tends to eat to much junk food, especially when she's stressed, and doesn't have the time to exercise as much as she knows she needs to.
How can she harness her thoughts to get rid of all the negative habits, lose that weight, and feel like her old self again?

If we break it down, here are her 2 needs.

1. Stop eating junk

2. Start being active

In this post we're going to take on the negative part of this equation, the difficult challenge to stop doing something that you've become accustomed to. In this example, the habit of eating unhelpful foods that make you fat and sick.

Eating junk (and by junk I mean most processed foods, sweets, and beverages besides tea, coffee, and water) is largely a function of habit. For example, after her lunch this woman feels a need to have something sweet, she usually goes for a candy bar from the office vending machine. And the weekends don't feel quite right without a trip to the local bookstore/cafe for a sweet frothy beverage and some time with a good book. This has been her habit for the past few years.
Habits operate below the level of thoughts, they are more like cycles that the mindbody will try it's hardest to keep going by pushing all the buttons it can. But here's the key, a habit cannot come to fruition without a thought to execute the action.

So, for example, having finished her sensible lunch of a sandwich and salad, she gets the urge for something sweet. Before that candy bar can enter her body a whole series of Top 40 thoughts has to take place, which might go something like this:

"Hmm something sweet I'll go by the vending machine do I have enough change ok I do but maybe I should just have some fruit I know I should but It's been a hell of a day and I can spend a little extra time on the treadmill so fine what'll it be today I kind of want something with some body to it I'm kind of tired of caramel something with a little crispiness to it aha KitKat that'll hit the spot."

This thought stream will happen in a few blinks of the eye and will go largely unnoticed, but don't doubt that it's happening.

This is why meditation is so key to doing this kind of work. The vast majority of people aren't even aware that their thoughts are leading them around by the nose. They just ride the stream, eat the KitKat, and wonder where the pounds are coming from. Only consistently reminding yourself that this stream of thought is there will allow you to work with it.

So, our sample woman wants to stop falling for the post lunch sweet-attack. My advice for her would be the following:

She should start watching her thoughts as she goes through this daily ritual. She shouldn't try to change anything, she should go ahead and buy the candy bar, but watch. She'll get to know the little tics and mental hurdles that have to go down before putting those coins in the machine.

Once she's become best friends with the nuts and bolts of the "buy a candy bar" thought pattern, she can start to do the one thing that will blast it apart faster than anything else.

Turn around and look at the projector!

By this I mean recognizing the thought pattern for what it is, just a series of electrical impulses firing in the frontal lobe that do not have any power over her.

The next time it rolls around, she can have an experience more like this:

"Mmm I could really go for something sweet, I'll hit up the vending machine on the way back, do I have enough change, ok, I do, oh here's that thought again, like clockwork, I'm thinking about buying a candy bar, isn't that funny how it just comes up like that, I guess I don't really need a KitKat, I have some melon in the office fridge after all..."

At this point she is in the drivers seat, and has a good shot at sticking to her diet. Saying no to an impulse becomes much easier when she sees it AS an impulse.

Now, this is where things get tricky, because the mindbody, having been deprived of completing its habit cycle, will start to wriggle. It'll toss up a whole bunch of variants on the thought pattern, usually consisting of different ways of saying "You deserve it" or "you can make up for it later." The key is to keep watching, to not slip back into the slipstream of thoughts. Don't get sucked back into the story of the movie, keep a steady eye on that projector, and have a better choice in your back pocket, ready to be plugged in.

Most people won't stand a chance at winning this battle, because they never put the practice time in beforehand. Meditation and mindfulness can prepare you for these moments. Having spent hours watching your mind wriggle and squirm on the meditation cushion, nothing it does will surprise you anymore. I cannot emphasize this enough. This kind of mindwork will not succeed if you try it on the fly. You might win a few but a habit doesn't tire easily, it'll patiently be there every single lunch until you've confronted it head on. The good news is that once it's exposed as a flimsy urge fueled thought, it will die off pretty quickly and can be replaced with a healthy habit, like an after-lunch piece of fruit.

And our sample woman, having gotten on top of the candy bar thought loop, can turn her attention to the weekend frothy beverage loop. And so on. It's exhausting work, but gets easier with practice, especially as the pounds come off.

With consistent effort at seeing the thoughts for what they are, she will have done so much more than saying craving but saying "no" to sweets. She'll have become the kind of person who doesn't crave sweets in the first place. This is the psychology of a well person, and will last a lifetime!

So what gets you? The after work beer? The movie-night cheesy nachos? The desire to get your money's worth from the all-you-can-eat-buffet? Everyone has different hang ups, but the process is still the same.

1. Watch the projector.

2. Don't get sucked into the story.

3. Make a better choice, preferably one that you've thought out ahead of time.

In the final part of this series, we'll get into those better choices, and how to slip new healthy thought patterns into the mental mix.

Until then, watch your thoughts, and get to know the Top 40 hits that you wish you could turn off!