I’ve been focusing on distraction lately. It’s led to an important insight: the only specimen we have of the dinosaur, Seismosaurus, appears to have died by choking on a rock.
Allow me to start again.
An important insight is that one (of the many) things that can pull us out of focus is discomfort. Like the proverbial lobster sitting in a pot of water, we don’t notice the heat slowly rising. However, in real life, lobsters reflexively move away from pain. That’s why Swiss government made it illegal to boil lobsters without stunning them first. Shit.
Look, what I’m trying to say is that when you hit a threshold level of physical or psychological discomfort, you are pulled out of the moment. Like a lobster, you move reflexively — without conscious action.
Your operating system has been honed over the last 50 million years to keep you alive. Think of this as a series of default settings. These defaults have an inbuilt pessimism known as negativity bias. Avoiding danger was, for better or worse, the trait that survived the tests of natural selection. Which is how you got to be here. Hello.
Since we have the incredible good fortune to spend most of our days in safety and comfort, you’d think that those blaring klaxons of negativity bias would fade away. As it turns out, this is a hardware issue that we don’t have a fix for. Your power to deal with these requires you to update your mental operating system.
The most popular brand name OS updates are known as religions or philosophies. The best of them help us recognize signals for fear, anger, etc. and then replace default settings. with more enlightened action. We can do this same work for ourselves. Exercise offers this opportunity.
When you exercise with intensity, you give yourself the opportunity to experience — and even cultivate discomfort. You seek out and stretch your own boundaries and, during challenging moments, you update your OS.