The Muscles we Cannot See

All muscles grow from repetition and consistency... or shrink from a lack thereof.

Nov 13, 2024

“You can be in the most trying of circumstances, but you are always the arbiter of your own fate, you are always the arbiter of your own decisions, and you are always the arbiter of your own reality… you always have agency. And the people who use agency tend to build it as a muscle. They get used to it. And they realize the consequences when they go against the grain, when they are contrarian, tend to be a lot less than what they expect. The fear does so much more than reality when we make the right decisions in our own heads.” — Danny Crichton

Last week, in the buildup to election day, I remarked to several people about the crippling anxiety I was experiencing by rendering so much mind space to an event so thoroughly outside of my control. When self-help speakers go on stage or social media stating that we should simply “Practice focusing on what we can control,” it’s complete bullshit. We’re social; we live in a social, interconnected world. Our core operating system is designed to be aware of the world around us, to care about the world around us, to care about our tribe.

Focusing on, and caring, about the world around us can be destructive—especially in a world where media platforms and social media algorithms are designed to engulf us in our own confirmation bias and inflame our animosity toward people who think differently. In the wake of this election, my X (Twitter) feed was inundated with emotional outbursts; people shouting or despairing into the void. I was guilty of it as well. Having watched the party I generally support fail to learn from their repeated mistakes as they infuriatingly patronized the very people whose votes they courted from a pedestal of misguided arrogance, routinely making false assumptions about human behavior, I lamented as much on Twitter.

These outbursts are symptomatic of a learned helplessness developed over years and decades. A feeling of powerlessness to influence change. Like a lithium-ion battery needs to vent heat lest it explode, sometimes the occasional outburst is necessary. But on the whole, they aren’t particularly constructive.

Learned helplessness has the potential to exist in many aspects of our life. Feeling trapped in a toxic work culture; feeling trapped in a relationship we can’t get out of; unable to change our habits and improve our health. It’s a natural feeling. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

I’ve certainly been guilty of learned helplessness. I think it’s fair to say there are few people who’ve never experienced it. But we can minimize its frequency and severity. When speaking to Microsoft employees in 2014, Simon Sinek was asked if exiting is the best solution when you find yourself stuck in a toxic work environment. His response was this:

“Absolutely not. The best strategy is to step up; the best strategy is to be the leader you wish you had; the best strategy is to find someone you trust and say, ‘we have each other, let’s look after each other, but let’s also commit to looking after everyone else.’
…Leaders have power over us as individuals, but as a group, we control the leader. And so in toxic environments where you don’t feel safe, very often what happens is an environment of fear and paranoia is created such that the people no longer help each other; they’re too busy worrying about themself…

In The Most Important Conversation We’ll Ever Have, I discussed the importance of how we talk to ourselves. The conversation we have within ourselves to show up when we don’t want to, to lead when we don’t want to, to push ourselves when we don’t want to. I also included the Huberman Lab episode with David Goggins, which discusses willpower and the anterior midcingulate cortex—the part of our brain recently discovered to be the core driver of our willpower. This part of our brain behaves similarly to a skeletal muscle: It grows when we use it and atrophies from disuse.

Awareness as a muscle

Awareness, like willpower, can help counter feeling helpless. Awareness gives us a perspective of our surroundings near and far, as well as what lies within ourselves. It allows us to recognize patterns. When you keep hearing the same thing over and over, you can begin to understand what happens next. This election cycle was a perfect example. Americans are frustrated. While national numbers appear to show we’ve come out of Covid reasonably well, millions of people don’t feel like they’re doing well. Who gets blamed? Incumbents. As Derek Thompson observed, it was, in fact, a second COVID election—the economic one.

“The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world. As I reported earlier this year, inflation at its peak exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, 10 percent in Italy, and 20 percent in Argentina, Turkey, and Ethiopia.
Inflation proved as contagious as a coronavirus. Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year. Even strongmen, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost ground in an election that many experts assumed would be a rousing coronation.”

Nelson Mandela famously said, “I never lose. I either win, or I learn.” Democrats working in national politics appear to have not taken heed of these words too well. For that matter, neither did pollsters. Both groups unequivocally lost.

But awareness also allows us to look internally. Recognizing our own patterns and habits is invaluable for building a disciplined approach to our health. Stress, for example, has a massive adverse effect on health—primarily chronic stress. This election cycle, an estimated 69% of adults felt stressed about the election. But, short of measuring our cortisol levels, stress is fairly abstract. How do you know if you’re stressed? Being aware of your patterns and tendencies. Maybe you have trouble focusing? Perhaps your sleep is suffering, or you’re waking up feeling depleted. It could be that your appetite has dramatically increased or decreased? If you know the signs, you can act quickly (similar to when you recognize that you are about to get sick) and minimize the impact.

Being mindful of how your body responds to the different foods you eat and how your body recovers from workouts are two other important ways to practice awareness. Do you feel energized or sluggish after you eat? Are you sore for a day and recover? Or are you sore for days and achy? As a personal trainer, I find it much easier to help a person who practices awareness of their own body. We can act quickly and pivot if the program is causing overtraining or is too easy. If I design a nutrition program, but the individual comes back and says they’re feeling lethargic in the afternoon, we can look for a possible sensitivity in the food they’re eating or a lack of certain nutrients in their morning.

“It’s really up to you. You just have to make up your own damn mind to either accept what I’m going to tell you or reject it.” — The Oracle to Neo in The Matrix Reloaded.

In the wake of the election, everyone on the left was doing their own postmortem on why the result was what it was. These assumptions are largely based on our own pre-conceived ideas, with little data to back them up. “Racism, sexism, people are voting against their own interests!” Maybe. But show me the data. Musa Al-Gharbi absolutely nails it with his latest article: Despite her loss, Harris did better than any Democrat since Obama in one key demographic: White people. And white men voted for Harris at the same rate as Biden in 2020.

How often do we challenge our own assumptions? Expediency and experiential biases are easy to fall victim to, trusting our own intuition over what the data is telling us or what science tells us. But these assumptions are akin to choosing a fast food or TV dinner. Here is an example that is all too common in my world: “I can’t run because my knees hurt.”

Superficially, this makes perfect sense. Why subject ourselves to more pain if our knees hurt? But why do the knees hurt? Is there a mechanical issue going on that could be solved with a proper training regimen? Perhaps the glutes and hamstrings aren’t activating properly, which means the legs cannot recycle properly, compromising the stride? Perhaps the core is not engaging, reducing the body’s ability to absorb the force of striking the ground? These are all factors at play. Maybe the answer is, no, the subject should not run. But you have to test for these problems to solve the root question. Far more often than not, the individual can run. Furthermore, when someone learns to run well, they may actually experience less joint pain than they had before running.

Critical and first-principles thinking are a strong counter to learned helplessness. In the previous example, the individual had fallen victim to a learned helplessness that they would never be able to run again.

Though I have become much more of a pragmatist, I still cling to some of my youthful idealism. One of these ideals is that everyone is capable of thinking this way, starting with recognizing our biases and seeking more information. When we can’t get to the root cause ourselves, it’s no small thing to say, “I don’t know,” and ask for help.

“The people who use agency tend to build it as a muscle.”

We are incredibly fortunate in this country to be able to assert a reasonable level of agency over our own lives. There are, of course, exceptions, and many of these freedoms had to be agonizingly fought for—and continue to be fought for—over the previous 250 years. But on the whole, we are living in one of the best times in human history to be able to exert agency over our lives. We can relocate ourselves with relative ease; we can start a business; we have a massive wealth of information freely at our disposal; and we can spend our time how we choose to.

At the same time, our attention is constantly being bought and paid for. You cannot go anywhere, physically or electronically, without being marketed to. It’s important to remember that when we use social media platforms, we are not their customers—we are their products; the advertisers are their customers. Everyone wants our attention, myself included! I’m asking for your attention to read this piece as well as my other writing. It’s up to us how we allocate the precious little time we have.

Although I am not as consistent and disciplined as I would like, I frequently revisit one of my favorite quotes, “Your success will be determined by what you choose to ignore.” from Dan McMurtrie. We have this immense amount of agency, but with it comes responsibility to ourselves. We get to choose if we’re sucked into distraction or if we are productive towards our goals. It’s not zero-sum—I enjoy videogames as much as anyone, and I certainly spend too much time on Twitter. It’s simply a matter of making time in your day to practice building your resilience to distraction and exerting your control over your desired outcome.

Working out these unseen muscles

My approach to training these four muscles—willpower, awareness, critical thinking, and agency—is primarily through the lens of health. It’s fairly straightforward. You show up, or you don’t; you are mindful of what your body is signaling to you, or you’re not; you take responsibility for controlling your outcome, or you don’t. It’s not rocket science. Fortunately, it is also not quite this binary.

Coming back to Simon Sinek’s 2014 presentation to Microsoft, he is asked how to spot a toxic leader. His response is time. You have to look, not at what they say, but at what they do, over and over and over. This is just as true for evaluating yourself. If you show up nine out of ten days, yeah, you did really well! If you showed up one out ten days?… Same thing with reducing alcohol consumption or quitting smoking. The objective is to make better decisions. But no stock goes up every day of the year, no political party wins every election, and no one is perfect with their health.

I will end with this wonderful quote about the potential and capacity to strengthen our mental muscles:

“What is the one thing where we can have unlimited, infinite growth? Our minds.” — Jim O’Shaughnessy

How do you strengthen these muscles in your own day-to-day life? Is there one of these that you are stronger at than the others? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Conversations with a Personal Trainer

Many of you were dismayed about the results of the election last week. Some of you were even downright enraged to the point where I joked that I needed a punching bag for you. But you showed up anyway and did something for yourself. That’s what matters. Keep showing up. The beautiful thing about this country is that we have the freedom to vote, to speak our minds, and to have agency over our lives. We win a lot, and we lose a lot, and we keep showing up.

Worth Listening To

Danny Crichton is one of the brilliant minds of my generation. He possesses a remarkable understanding of history, risk, and human behavior that enables him to see where the puck is going before others do. In his conversation with Jim O’Shaugnessy, Danny explains how riskgaming helps people make better decisions, the different thought processes people tend to make based on their background, and how vital it is for us to be able to change our mind.

(Plus, they’re both from Minnesota, so that’s pretty cool.)