30 Years of Dichotomy- On Meditation, Childhood Anxiety, Fight or Flight, and Rest and Digest.
30 Years of Dichotomy
Today is October 19th, 2017 and I am officially 30 years old. Until I turned 28, it never occurred to me that I would actually be a 30-year old human being. Like many teens and twenty-somethings. I always thought that 30 was such a distant milestone that it would never come, but here it is.
This past Friday night, as a newly crowned lululemon ambassador (yes, that's my real title) I participated in an enlightening evening of fitness, socializing, and personal development. We took a Barre3 fitness class and then I led the group in a brief guided meditation. Afterwards, we drank wine, snacked, and I talked to friends and strangers about life. One of the topics discussed was our purpose and legacy. While I believe that my purpose and legacy is ever-evolving, I want to encourage one of the most valuable pursuits that I have come across in my time on this planet: Be balanced in all of your pursuits. Using some science, anthropology, and anecdotal information, I am going to attempt to explain why you should use meditation to balance out the stress you put on yourself to achieve your goals. If you don't have any interest in my own story and how I came to my love of meditation, feel free to skip down to the "A disclaimer" section to shorten up your read.
Muscles and Musicals
For as long as I can remember, I have always enjoyed bucking expectations. Every year my new 6th-grade students tell me that when they first laid eyes on me they genuinely believed that I was either an ogre who was going to eat them or there on a work-release program from the local prison. About three weeks in, they realize that I am total softie and talk to them about poems that make me cry and books that have changed my life. When I was in high school, I would get into my car immediately after weightlifting for lacrosse and roll down the windows belting out songs
from "Rent." When I tell new clients at the gym that I teach theater at a performing arts middle school, their first instinct is almost always to laugh because they assume I am kidding. My car is a Honda Fit that comes in the color "Blueberry Surprise," which I purchased exclusively because I find it funny to see people's reaction when I hop out of it instead of a 19 year old sorority girl. At least one of my tattoos exists solely to make people laugh. For whatever reason, people often mistake me for someone who knows about cars and fixing things and they are always disappointed when I reveal I am far more well-versed in the philosophical influences of Lost or how Romeo and Juliet is not a love story but a tale of a predatory young man whose overzealous romanticism leads to his own and others' demise. But, I digress.
I don't write this to tell you how totally punk rock and non-conformist I am. I write this to tell you that I think balance is the key to a happy life. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, you love what you love. The least interesting people in the world are those who are exactly who you would expect them to be. The most admirable people in sports, business, music, and everything else have other things going on than what they are most known for. This is the basic concept of The Mindful Meathead blog and business. I believe in the absolute necessity of taking time to reflect on and appreciate (Mindful) whatever goal you are currently working toward (Meathead). Mindfulness and Meditation can give you a much needed break from the rigors of the goals you are trying to achieve. Taking some time out to clear your mind can leave you reinvigorated to tackle whatever you have set your mind to.
A walking meatball of stress and hypochondria with a bowl-cut
Something a lot of people who meet 30 year-old Jimmy do not realize is that growing up, adolescent Jimmy was extremely anxious. I was basically a walking meatball of stress and hypochondria... with a bowl-cut. I was terrified of dying, that my parents would get sick, that World War III was an inevitability, and that there was stranger danger everywhere. A couple of anecdotes to prove this point; When I was 12 years old, I spent all of my book fair money on a Y2K survival kit. Convinced that the world was about to go back into the Dark Ages, I brought this kit with me to a New Year's Eve party and was legitimately waiting for the apocalypse to occur. Fortunately, for just $27.99 to Scholastic, I would totally be prepared. When I was 9, I sat both my parents down to tell them that I had rabies because I breathed in too deeply when there was roadkill by our bus stop. "Mom, listen it's not a big deal but you need to take me to the hospital for a series of four rabies shots. I looked it up on Encarta and I have most of the symptoms, I have insomnia and I don't really like drinking water." Anytime I learned of a new ailment at school or on television, I immediately contracted it. I spent many sleepless nights envisioning the awful fate that would befall me and my loved ones once the other shoe dropped. But it never did.
My anxiety and general stress continued into my teens with my mind rarely quieting for even a moment. Only two things that could get me to stop thinking, judging, and worrying was athletics and performing. When I was solely focused on the task of defending an attackman in lacrosse, I didn't have time to stress about the plethora of worries plaguing the average teenage boy. If I needed to inhabit the spirit of William H. Blore, a detective in 1930's England, all of my external concerns seemed to disappear. All there was in that moment was me and my immediate actions on the field, stage, or in the gym. This form of meditation and mind-clearing served me well for years and I began to sleep better, focus more, and not be so ridiculously anxious all the time.
Then I began to push it a little too hard. Like many novices, I made the mistake of thinking that more of everything is better. I ended up placing so much stress on my body in the form of exercise that it no longer became a meditation but another source of anxiety. I was over-caffeinated, over-stimulated, not recovering well, and I couldn't keep my thoughts together.
Something I learned about in my earliest days of fitness was the idea of antagonist muscle pairs. Simply put, some of your muscles pairs are arranged so that when one flexes the opposite one must relax. These antagonist muscle pairs must work together to create movement. Balance is necessary for progress. This idea always struck me as fascinating. I felt like the dichotomy of my life would make me a more successful and interesting person if I allowed parts of my life the freedom to both flex and relax. Too much flexing of one aspect of my life would lead to imbalance.
In truth, my meditation journey began because people that I thought were cool meditated. David Lynch, Jerry Seinfeld, Oprah, Derek Jeter, and Steve Jobs all meditated, so why shouldn't I? I attempted to "officially" meditate about 5 years ago when I was living in an apartment with two of my best friends from college. Believe it or not, a house of sin that was populated by booze bags and Bethlehem's weirdest is not the ideal place to find your zen. Eventually, I persisted and began to do some meditation with guided work from YouTube and apps on my iPhone. The more I read and researched, the more sense it made to meditate as I was training and competing at a relatively high level in CrossFit. When I started consistently meditating, I started understanding my body more, recovering and sleeping better, and my performance in training sessions rapidly improved.
A Disclaimer:
As I am sure you are aware, I am not a medical professional. While I have taken an online course in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and am working to become certified in a meditation discipline, my experience and knowledge mainly stem from being an avid reader and researcher. I try not to speak in absolutes because I don't think that any one activity is universally beneficial or universally counterproductive for everyone. That being said, I think the overwhelming majority of the population would improve their lives through some form of meditation. In my argument for meditation, I am going to try to speak in generalizations and oversimplifications to keep things accessible. If you want more information about the science behind what i am talking about, reach out and I can point you in the right direction.
Our Bodies Are Dumb
Paleolithic men and women spent much of their physical and mental resources keeping themselves alive. They had to be on high alert to find food and clean water, they needed to keep watch for predators, and they had to continuosly seek safe haven from natural threats to their survival. When your body is faced with a challenge to its vitality it has an automatic response that is colloquially known as "fight or flight." Your body turns on the sympathetic nervous system and there is a hormonal reaction that primes you to be ready to escape or ward off whatever is threatening you.
Often, I jokingly say that our bodies are dumb. They have no idea that it's 2017. For a great deal of us, survival is not a primary stressor in our lives. In 2017, most of us have food and shelter (but not everyone, here is a link to donate to Puerto Rican disaster relief https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation) But we still have plenty of stress. And our bodies interpret the stress of a new job or an intense training session in the same manner as our nomadic ancestors' bodies interpreted a dangerous predator showing up near their shelter. Fight or flight kicks in and our body stays in that state until we signal to our nervous that we are safe and can relax.
If we spend the majority of our time in fight or flight, our bodies will struggle to recover, adapt or improve. I'm not just talking about people who put stress on their bodies to adapt in a gym, dance studio, yoga class, or track. Everyone is overly stressed. If the stresses of your everday life lead you to struggle with sleep, focus, understanding your feelings, or any combination of these, you are probably not giving your body the opportunity to process and overcome the challenges that you are facing.
This is where meditation comes in. Meditation will trigger your parasympethetic nervous system, also known as "rest and digest." This is where your body begins to recover and adapt to the stress that you put on your system in a training session. When the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, your hormones can return to normal, muscle tissue can begin to repair, and you can calm the hell down. Balancing the stress in your life with meditation has many proven benefits which have been written about ad nauseum, by people much smarter than me. http://liveanddare.com/benefits-of-meditation/
Don't I have to be a monk or yogi or hippie or some other stereotype?
Meditation looks different for everyone. I have informally dabbled in Transcendental Meditation, MBSR, Guided Visualization and Tai Chi. There are tons of other types of meditation that I have yet to try. Yoga is a form of meditation. Find something that puts you into a better mental and physical state than you started in. I tend to steer clear of meditations that have roots in religion, chakras, and "energy." It just doesn't suit me, but I know it works for tons of people. Experiment and find something that works for you. My favorite type of meditation is mindfulness which is essentially focusing and being aware of your present state non-judgmentally. This form of meditation is incredibly accessible and is a great way to start. Mindfulness can be done while you're eating or walking or doing almost anything else. It's all about being aware of the feelings and sensations that go into any given activity and not performing the activity mindlessly. Meditation doesn't have to be you alone in a room being still. There's so much freedom in how you could do it that it is almost impossible to "do it wrong."
While I generally regard the internet as a fun and distracting toilet, it has been an enormous tool in my self-pedagogy. There are tons of resources online, and I can personally testify that Calm.com and an app, Headspace, can guide you through your first foray into this. If you are more of a reader than a doer, I cannot recommend both Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now and Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are enough.
"30 is the new 20, I'm so hot still" - Jay-Z
I told a bit of a lie. I finished editing this blog at 8:45 on October 18th, just shy of my 30th birthday. The person who is writing this has no idea what his 30's is actually going to feel like because it just hasn't happened yet. Meditation has helped bring me to a place where I am not worried about what my 30's or beyond will look like. Meditation has helped me realize that all any of us have is the current moment we are living, and that is more than enough for me.
