Episode Transcript
Hi, everybody, and welcome to The Arm Coach podcast, episode
#12.
Hello friends, how are you? What are you up to? What are you
reading right now? I will tell you, I just finished an article, it was a
truly strange article, but anyway, I wanted to share it with you
because when I was reading it, in the article they were talking
about Arthur Conan Doyle. So if you don’t know who that is, he is
the author of the Sherlock Holmes series and they talk about how
before he became a writer, when he was a young man, he actually
served on a ship that sailed from Scotland to the Arctic.
So apparently, he did this and it was like a couple month journey I
think, I’m actually not sure how long it was, but apparently, for
the rest of his life he would tell anyone and everyone who would
listen about this voyage to the Arctic and how being on that ship
was the best thing that ever happened to him and he attributed
that time on the ship as contributing to his literary success but
also to his longevity and his health in life. So he really thought
that this trip was the best thing.
Now, here’s why I wanted to share it with you. In the article, they
talk about the fact that Arthur kept a diary, a very detailed diary
while he was aboard the ship and he was heading to the Arctic and
his diary entries are really kind of rough. So everyday, he’s writing
about what’s happening on the ship and how he’s doing in his
mental state and each day it keeps getting worse.
So he’s writing in his diary everyday during the trip, and he’s
talking continually about how he’s kind of bored, he has all this
anxiety that the ship is going to get trapped in an ice pack and
then they’re going to be stuck, he has all this fear that he is going
to fall into the water and basically, he just keeps talking about how
unhappy he is.
Yet, for the rest of his life, you couldn’t shut this guy up about how
wonderful and impactful his trip was on his life and he attributed
that trip in his 20s going to the Arctic as having all these really,
really positive benefits for him. With his literary career, with his
health. It’s so funny and it made me think about something that I
have been wanting to talk to all of you about, which is the power
of doing hard things.
Okay, so if you are listening, it’s probably because you are
contemplating sculpting your arms by lifting weights, losing
weight and not overeating, and my guess is that you don’t think
that it will be easy. If it was easy, you probably would have done
so already and you wouldn’t be listening to this. But you’re
probably thinking this is going to be a lot of struggle, it’s going to
be really difficult, it’s going to be uncomfortable, maybe it will be
even a little embarrassing and it’s sure not going to be fun and it
will probably be boring and I’ll have to tell everyone or talk to
people about it. This just doesn’t sound very good.
And this is what is so challenging when we want to change a habit,
right? We look into the future and we see all these ways of like,
this just doesn’t particularly look like it’s going to be a very
enjoyable time, and then we have to get into a place of convincing
ourselves to do something that’s going to be hard.
Now, I’m not going to tell you that changing your exercise and
eating habits is going to be easy. It’s not true, it’s going to be
challenging, it is going to be difficult, is it going to take effort. But
what I want to explain to you is why it is challenging to get
yourself to do hard things and also the real benefit and real power
behind deciding to do hard things.
So the main problem that we all face is the process of how our
brain evolved. Our brain is actually designed to avoid hard things.
I’ve talked about this before in these episodes but what we are
innately motivated to do is very simple: seek pleasure, avoid pain
and do both of these things while expending the least amount of
energy possible.
This is basically our motivational triad that explains how we
survived, and it makes a lot of sense. It makes, actually, incredible
sense when you think about humans thousands of years ago in a
world full of danger, when you didn’t know when your next meal
was coming or where it was coming from, when shelter and basic
necessities for life weren’t a given, when violence was around
every corner, there were hard things all over our environment.
Just existing, just living was hard, surviving was hard. And so
looking for easy solutions, looking for ways to seek pleasure and
avoid pain by using the least amount of energy as possible so the
easiest way to do it, that was a smart thing to do. That helped us
survive. That was a really beneficial way that our brain evolved to
look for easy things to do. It makes a lot of sense when you’re
doing hard stuff all the time, just to survive.
Now here’s the problem: in today’s world, if you are listening to
this, most of us do not have to do that many hard things in order
to survive, right? I certainly did not have to do and have not had
to do a lot of hard, really difficult things in order to survive. Food
has been pretty easy to get, clean water is as simple as turning on
the tap, shelter has never been a question for me. I’m not always
facing a world in which violence is always coming round the
corner.
And you know what? My brain is kind of happy that I don’t have
to do difficult things to survive. It likes not spending a lot of
energy and when you have to do difficult things to survive, you
have to expend a lot of energy. My brain likes to save energy
because that’s what has essentially allowed humans to survive. It
was saving energy, expending the least amount of energy and
moving towards pleasure and moving away from pain. That
allowed for survival.
But we’re in a very different world than we were thousands of
years ago, when we don’t have to do, a lot of us, very difficult
things in order to survive. So then choosing something difficult to
do like changing a habit, changing any habit, is going to require
energy and changing the habit of not lifting weights or overeating
will be a difficult thing to do. It will require awareness and energy
and doing things that make you feel kind of uncomfortable. That
is actually kind of going against the grain of evolution. It does not
come naturally for most of us and this is also part of why not
lifting weights and overeating can so easily become a habit,
because also, our brain wants to seek pleasure. It wants easy
pleasure.
So screens and eating, I’ve talked about this before, are the
quickest and easiest fix to feel differently. And for a lot of us, not
only are we getting the reward of pleasure, not only are we getting
the influx of dopamine, but also solving a difficulty for us. They’re
solving how we don’t want to feel in this moment. They’re solving
our desire not to feel stressed or anxious or uncomfortable or
bored or lonely. Whatever it is, it’s also solving a problem. Your
brain wants instant gratification, but not only that, it wants easy
instant gratification and then easy instant gratification that solves
a problem? Well, that’s just like hitting the jackpot.
The problem is, if you keep going towards that easy instant
gratification and that easy instant gratification to solve a problem,
to take care of a difficulty, a difficulty that your brain already
doesn’t want to deal with, it doesn’t want to do the hard things, it
wants to do the easy things, sooner or later, you’re going to find
that you will have created a habit.
What this means when you want to start lifting weights and stop
overeating is that you have to purposely choose to do the hard
thing. You have to purposely choose to move towards something
that is difficult, and basically no one wants to do this. I know I
certainly didn’t. That was a big thing that held me back for a long
time. Just thinking about “this is too hard, it’s going to be too
hard, I know I’m unhappy right now, but this looks like a ton of
work.”
And it’s not because I was lazy, it’s not because something was
wrong with me, it’s because doing the hard thing went against my
brain’s most basic instinct to have things be easy. So if you’re
going to choose to do something hard, there has to be a reason.
There has to be some sort of power in doing the hard thing, there
has to be some sort of long-term benefit that will sustain you well
after you’ve done that hard thing. Otherwise, you’ll look at that
hard thing and kind of think, “What’s the point? I like it easy. My
brain likes it easy. Easy is comfortable. Easy is what I’m designed
to do, let’s just have everything be easy.”
So it brings me back to Arthur, who was so unhappy on that ship,
right? You look at his diary entries everyday and he was talking
about his fear and his anxiety and his boredom and this guy was
afraid that the ship was going to get stuck in an ice pack, right?
Like that’s a hard thing to get out of. But afterwards, when he got
back and then throughout his life, he couldn’t stop talking about
how great this voyage was. He couldn’t stop talking about how it
had set him up for so many things, including becoming a great
writer.
He found something really powerful in doing something that at
the time you can read in his diary was really, really hard for him.
So here’s the power in doing hard things. It’s not only the power
that you have to decide to do it, you have to go against evolution,
you have to go against how your brain was designed, you have to
go against this desire for easy, instant gratification that solves a
problem, you have to make that decision.
But the power is really in what is revealed to you about yourself
when you do it. Hard things force you to grow, hard things force
you to evolve, hard things force you to stretch beyond what you
think you’re capable of. Hard things force you to become
something greater and more and bigger than who you were before
you did that hard thing, because you have to stretch, because you
have to push yourself, because you have to step outside of what is
comfortable for you right now and do things differently.
So I think about this all the time in my own personal experience
with exercise and overeating and how it wasn’t for me just to start
lifting weights and not overeating that made me grow, because
actually, I talk about this, I had flip flopped many times in my 20s
and 30’s. I had even lost 80lbs for a year when I was 23, and the
growth for me really was not in that. It was not in the just
repetitive saying no over and over and over again, and in fact, I
found that experience kind of miserable.
What changed for me is when I decided to do the challenging
thing, when I decided to do the difficult thing but what I also
decided was that I was going to learn how not to need food to
change how I felt, to not to need ice cream to feel better, to not
need food as a crutch to feel connected, to feel relaxed, to feel
rewarded, to fit in, to not need it to get rid of my anxiety and to
learn other new much more sustainable ways to feel connected,
feel relaxed, feel calm to feel self possessed.
And that was what was so powerful for me, and I will tell you, I
wouldn’t trade that experience for a second because I am someone
who is different on the other side of it. I was forced to grow, I was
forced to stretch in ways that I didn’t even think at the time were
really possible. And I’ll tell you that I also don’t regret all the years
that I was not exercising and overeating. And it was really a
struggle for me and it was causing a lot of pain and it was
something that I spent so much time worrying about and thinking
about and beating myself up over. I wouldn’t trade in that time
either because I needed that period. I needed that in order to
become this next version of myself. I need that in order to grow.
Not lifting weights and overeating for me, and I’m sure for you, is
comfortable, it’s easy. You don’t have to grow, you don’t have to
stretch. You don’t have to do anything really, at all, to feel
different other than looks at your screens and scoop up the Hagen
dais. It’s simple, it’s easy, it gives you immediate pleasure, instant
gratification, and not only that, it moves you away from pain. And
it does this with almost expending no energy. I mean, think about
the energy your brain has to expend to grab your phone and get
ice cream. It’s very little. It’s especially very little when our phones
are in our pockets and if you have a gallon of ice cream in your
freezer or if you just walk up to a parlor, or if you ask a waiter for a
bowl. That’s very little energy that you’re expending.
So yes, for me, not exercising and overeating were causing me a
lot of pain and there were tons and tons of repercussions. And as
it continued, as I got older, the repercussions started to mount.
But my brain was on the path of least resistance. And sometimes
our brains will choose something easy at our own expense, and
that’s what I was doing. I was choosing something easy at my own
expense and the more comfortable my brain was at relying on
screens and food as a way to feel differently and to feel better, and
also just a way to feel good, to get pleasure in my life, the more I
stagnated. The more I didn’t grow, the more I didn’t evolve
because I wasn’t expending any energy to. I was just doing the
same thing over and over.
I think about it sometimes and I really had the hang-ups and the
fears and the awkwardness of a 13-year-old girl really locked
inside the mind of a woman in her 30s, because I wasn’t making
any progress in any of it. I wasn’t making any progress in feeling
less awkward or feeling less uncomfortable or feeling less anxious.
All those same negative feelings that I had when I was 13 and I
started overeating, guess what? They were still there. They hadn’t
really budged. I hadn’t made progress because I kept turning to
the same solution.
I kept feeling awkward or feeling uncomfortable and deciding I
would have a snack. It was easy, it was pleasurable, it helped me
avoid pain. It took almost no energy, but it was stunting my
growth and making me feel miserable at the same time. And that
piece about stunting my growth, that was the piece that took me
the longest to understand. I didn’t understand how it wasn’t just
that I was choosing pleasure, it wasn’t just that I was in a habit.
It’s that I was actually stunting my own development and my own
evolution as a person.
Choosing the easiest thing kept humans alive back in the day
when we were faced with having to do hard things and difficult
things all day long just to survive. We were expending all this
energy just to get food, just to get shelter, just to be safe, and so
choosing the path of least resistance made sense. It made a lot of
sense, but now, most of us are in a situation where we’re actually
expending very little energy to survive, very little energy to get
food, to get clean water, to get shelter, to be safe. But our brain is
still choosing the easy way forward.
We’re caught up in seeking comfort over and over, and it’s never
occurring to us that we should even have to do the hard thing
because our brain is programmed not to want to do the hard
thing, because it thinks doing the easy thing is how we survive.
Now, here’s the crazy thing: not only are we choosing the easy
thing to do, but by using screens and food as a quick and easy fix
to feel better, we start to tell ourselves that without that fix, we’ll
be unhappy, we won’t have fun, we’ll be missing out, life will be
boring. So not only are we choosing the easy thing, but then we
turn around and we kind of don’t like the fact that we’re relying on
food as our go-to way to feel good, our go-to way to have fun, our
go-to way not to be bored or to get through that party to make
these people more interesting, so of course we don’t want to take
it away.
I was talking with a client yesterday who really wants to change
her eating habits and she was telling me that she is so sick of
where she is and she wants to stop overeating but the idea is
intimidating because she’s afraid that she might fail. And what I
told her was this: you get to define what success and failure look
like for you. And my definition of success is not and has never
been that I will never overeat again. That is not my definition of
success.
Never overeating is not the metric of my success that I choose. My
metric of success is not I’ll never have seconds, I’ll never snack.
Who cares? That’s what I think. Who cares if I do that? Because I
could do that and just say no and not learn any of this work, not
do any of these tools, not understand how to change my desire,
not understand that my thoughts create my feelings, not
understand or know how to help myself feel better right now
without relying on anything external outside of me. I don’t want
that metric of not overeating.
What I want is can I learn how to stop relying on food? Can I learn
how to not need a quick and easy fix to feel better because I’m
capable of making myself feel better? Can I feel better on my own?
Can I learn how to change my desire so I don’t feel like I’m
missing out? But I actually feel like I don’t want it, my desire is
different. That was my metric of success.
And that’s what I said to her when she was really feeling, well, I
don’t know, what if I fail? Right? You get to define what your
metric for success and failure look like. And if I overate tomorrow,
I wouldn’t decide that I had been a failure, that I had failed,
because that’s not the metric that I use.
But all of this work, it takes being uncomfortable, it takes
choosing the hard thing. You have to do what is difficult and go
against your brain’s instinct for everything to be easy. But it’s so
worth it. It’s really hard to explain this to someone who has never
experienced being pulled to eat more than they want to, feeling
more desire than they want to have, feeling like eating often feels
like this insatiable thing that they don’t have full control over. But
if you feel like that, then you will understand that to be free of
your desire, to feel like you have control, to feel like you are not
being pulled in this direction that you don’t want to go, that is the
best feeling in the world, and that is the power of doing hard
things.
That is something that you have to choose to work on and
practice. It will go against what your brain wants, it will be
uncomfortable, it will require effort, but you will look back on it
the same way that I do and you will think wow, that thing, that
difficult thing that I did that was uncomfortable and I struggled
through and I had to deal with all these difficult feelings and
situations, that was the best decision I ever made.
And not just because you won’t have to spend all this time
thinking about your arms and your eating or worrying about your
overeating or worrying what you ate last night, but because you
will grow as a person. You will become someone that you weren’t
before you started. That is the power of doing hard things. You
discover a whole new you.
That’s it for this week, keep on sending me your emails, your
questions, comments, whatever, and I hope everybody has a great
week. I will see you on the next episode.
