I call it the fugue. When I was playing Zelda, watching DBZ, eating Andy Capp’s Hot Fries, and chugging Mountain Dew Code Red as a teenager, I wasn’t thinking about my future body composition and performance prospects. When your parents crammed your feet into shoes when you were two years old, they didn’t know they [...]
I call it the fugue.
When I was playing Zelda, watching DBZ, eating Andy Capp’s Hot Fries, and chugging Mountain Dew Code Red as a teenager, I wasn’t thinking about my future body composition and performance prospects.
When your parents crammed your feet into shoes when you were two years old, they didn’t know they were setting you up for all sorts of physical dysfunction in the future.
Your mom didn’t know about third trimester metabolic imprinting.
(If you couldn’t tell, I’m not a hardcore motivational speaker. My generally low self confidence, pessimistic attitude, and severe introversion fight the rah! rah! stuff.)
Humans are finite creatures. You won’t become a bird if you start flapping your wings as fast as you can. You won’t become a rabbit if you start eating carrots.
…and now I’m depressing even myself with all of this.
BUT…
Remember how I said humans are misers?
Worrying about things beyond your control zaps cognitive and physical reserves better used elsewhere. In this article I wrote for T-Nation many moons ago, I wrote about a similar behavior I called idling.
Don’t be an idler. Turn the car on only when it needs turned on.
“In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.”
Epictetus
In other words…
The fugue? It’s done with. Gone. Can’t change the past. Worrying about it takes away your finite reserves that could otherwise be spent elsewhere, a direction forward, an escape from the fugue…
Now for the big question:
What CAN be controlled in order to escape the fugue?
Let’s go through a strange loop and return where we started. Remember the secret? Remember this psychedelic moment from the secret –
Changes. Under the hood. Without your conscious thought.
Sometimes, in an existential funk, you can forget something…
The things we often wrap ourselves with don’t matter to our body…only to our mind. Your body doesn’t need to know WHY gravity exists in order to walk, jump, and throw things. Your body doesn’t need to know WHY six reps builds muscle in order to build muscle with six reps.
This is the difference between the phenomenon and the phenomenology.
When a meathead lifts barbells and chews on iron like its his job, he knows 1% about how muscle is actually physiologically built. The kicker? Not even the best scientists in the world know 100% how muscle is built.
Yet people all around the world (including the meathead) build muscle. And I’d venture to guess there are a lot of misinformed meatheads, just as there are a lot of incredibly informed couch potatoes.
Your body is operating on a different level than your mind (the consciousness thingy) is operating.
The labels of System 1 and System 2 are widely used in psychology, but I go further than most in this book, which you can read as a psychodrama with two characters.
When we think of ourselves, we identify with System 2, the conscious, reasoning self that has beliefs, makes choices, and decides what to think about and what to do. Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book. I describe System 1 as effortlessly originating impressions and feelings that are the main sources of the explicit beliefs and deliberate choices of System 2. The automatic operations of System 1 generate surprisingly complex patterns of ideas, but only the slower System 2 can construct thoughts in an orderly series of steps. I also describe circumstances in which System 2 takes over, overruling the freewheeling impulses and associations of System 1. You will be invited to think of the two systems as agents with their individual abilities, limitations, and functions.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
System 2 is the thinking and rationalizing part, the YOU that’s reading this, the YOU that’s thinking about everything we talked about so far.
But an important note for this YOU, System 2:
System 1 most often calls the shots. You, System 2, are just trying to make sense of it all.
System 1’s information triggers and points of lust are different than System 2’s. System 2’s reasons and triggers have been polluted your entire life. You see this and that on the news — chewing on wood bark helps you lose weight! X, y, and z in a magazine — try this brand new agave butt cream!
You feel like the world will crash in on itself create a black hole if you do five reps instead of six…or if you break your fast at 11:59 AM instead of 12:00 PM.
System 1 doesn’t care about what’s pushed by the Don Drapers of the world. System 1 cares about something a little more real.
A little something called…
Everyone—no matter background, genetics, steroids, other drugs, macaroni and cheese, senzu beans, no matter WHAT—uses the same recipe to hijack the body’s perception of what it means to be biologically fit in order to get leaner, build muscle, jump higher, learn skills, do backflips, et cetera…
In the end, the recipe is pretty simple: adjust the environment so that it sends information to your body, so that it triggers a physiological response, so that it then changes how (this) and (that) works.
It’s like being a stand up comedian. A comedian’s job is to produce a response (laughter) that changes how this and that works (mood, feelings), and they do it by sending information (talking, acting) through the environment.
Sure, some people have it easier. Some people have some epi/genetic wind at their sails. Just like sometimes a comedian has an easy crowd, sometimes bad jokes are funny. Life is unfair. Asymmetrical. Whatever.
But the recipe doesn’t change.
Now it’s time for an incredibly non-suble transition…
This whole business sounds a little too easy.
I mean, just tell me the sets, reps, exercises, blah, blah blah…my body is a wizard, right? I don’t need to know the why, my body has my own why. Why are you still typing? You’re wasting my time. JUST TELL ME HOW TO SEND MY BODY INFORMATION THAT’LL PULL MY TRIGGERS.
And if you were REALLY thinkin’ that, then touche.
You’re correct.
It’s a great transition to my next point(s): common reasons for failure.
- The first, which is public enemy number one: sending misinformation.
- The second, which is going to sound crazy: even though System 1 does the legwork, sometimes System 2 can sabotage you. (This is a little something I call Nerd Brain Syndrome.)
Let’s start with the first…
…next letter.