No One Is Watching
How I Mess Up Following My Own Advice
Bizarre Beliefs #1 – This is part of a series where I voice some of my “avant-garde” wellbeing opinions, just with more panache if you like so.
Here is why I am writing this particularly today – yesterday, I went against all my own advice.
I mean, this is just tragic, right? The year has just started and here I am slacking off already?!
I did not exercise.
I did not eat enough.
I did not apply work stints and breaks appropriately.
I did not take a proper mid-day/lunch time break.
I did not follow my morning nor bed time routine.
I did procrastinate a lot while trying to finish my weekly work tasks.
I did get distracted easily through several parts of my PC and the internet (ha, not my phone! Chronically winning that battle!).
I did take too much time on the simple tasks, and could not dedicated enough time on more complex once.
I did avoid socialising even more than I usually do.
(To clarify: when I coach/mentor people, teams or organisations, there is heaps more individualisation outside of these aspects. These are just examples for myself. I guess this is a disclaimer?)
I pretty much did not follow a single line of my practical advice that I usually do more or less every daily. Everything that I, if you wish so, “stand for”, I could not do myself. All the knowledge that is compiled in my head, all the experience that I had over 15 years on 3 different continents, with a multitude of different people and cultures, all the failures and successes, all of the expectations or “walking the walk” (or however that goes – metaphors are not my forte), ALL of it failed me. Or more like, I failed despite it all.
And that is OK.
It is actually so much OK that for yesterday it was truly good. I cannot even remotely claim that the day yesterday was bad, a failure or anything like that. If at all, it was the opposite – I managed to get through chunks of work I needed to do, albeit with way more downs than I wished for.
That is normal.
That is even well balanced.
I want to even claim, better for us, than continuously following magnanimous goals with endless to-do lists, habit trackers, goal settings, minute by minute schedules, and then adding health and wellbeing stuff which end up only as more chores.
Ever felt like this yourself? You are like: “This Marcin wellbeing guy is sometimes just as much of a failure like me!”. Let us be (sometimes) failures together - I would love to read what you actually think:
So what?
Why am I sharing this if this is not supposed to be anything special?
Well, you see, I am sure that there are plenty people out there, who truly suffer from having such “unproductive” days where nothing aligns quite well, and especially where we are not able to do all the things we want to do in a particular way. Plus, we simply miss or avoid doing anything that the larger society at hand passively aggressively pressures us into having to do every single day (as another check-list point!). Exercise, meditate, journal, being mindful, pomodoro time all your work stints, or whatever is trendy right now.
And the main point: I should be one of the special ones, should I not?!
Why?
Because of what I do.
“What do you do?” is (at least currently) a somewhat unconformable question for me.
Why?
Technically, I am, in the traditional understanding of it, unemployed. Thus, I do not really “do” anything in terms of work right now. There are many reasons why that by itself is currently unpleasant to me, and I will cover those in another article. But besides that it is more of an identity problem for me.
Still, I am a health and wellbeing professional.
I am supposed to lead by example.
I need to be fit.
I need to look good.
I need to be functional & productive.
I am the one that knows all the answers.
I am one of those who has all the practical tools.
I am a beacon of “representation” of what is possible.
Bleh. And it gets even worse!
Particularly because this topic generates discomfort and shame for myself, I am banking a lot of my own confidence on being able to action a lot of what I know is good, practiced and habituated for myself to make myself feel good. Unfortunately, it can then easily become a self-propelling vicious circle.
Anyway, quite often the follow up to the first question will be though:
“Yeah, nice. But what exactly you do? Are you a nurse?” (If I only knew why NZ thinks nurses fall under this category).
Look, as an exercise and sport scientist by trade and heart, but with a multitude of extensions, licenses, international research, science and practical experiences/expertise across many different fields, I cannot really answer this question without rambling. Even when I do, my conversation partner is usually quite perplexed, as the profession of exercise and sport scientists is not really out there crushing any massive population health issues – I wish!
So let me avoid this for here.
What is relevant for today (and it is relevant, because this is me – it will be different for you):
Being this health and wellbeing professional does not make me good at my own advice.
A simple reaction to this could be something like “Well yeah, you need practical experience. Theory by itself does not do anything.”. To make myself clear, when I write advice, I mean individually adjusted, thought out, planned out, but also tested and practice specific methods. I always avoid trying to just spit out knowledge for the sake of it.
The idea that someone who knows a lot, and has done a lot, in any particular field (especially related to our own human body and mind), but cannot execute and apply all that knowledge and practice most of the time themselves is nothing new. The outstanding Prof. Laurie Santos (1) (who has a fantastic course on the science of happiness), together with her colleague Ariella S. Kristal, has coined the term “G.I. Joe Fallacy” for this (2,3). There is heaps more to their findings and approach here, but let me specifically focus on this particular aspect that I started with already:
Even if you know a lot about how to do something, even if you have done it before, even if you are aware that your next behaviour and actions are not going to be towards your goals, even if you applied some fancy techniques like e.g. habit stacking, you can and will still regularly fail to execute whatever you want to actually do.
As indicated further above, I will go as far as saying that it is good for us – every then and now.
Go do unplanned things in an unplanned way.
Go avoid doing what you know is good for you.
Go make a mess.
Go try new stuff.
Go fail.
Fail your day, unplanned, unscheduled. Let it happen, do not overthink it.
No one is watching.
Whether you do or do not hit your 451 day streak on your habit tracker, check in your with your Apple mood questionnaire, meditate for the full 47 minutes you have scheduled, or deliver all work tasks as always planned 4.5 months ago.
No one is watching.
Your FitBit, Apple Watch, Garmin, Hatch Sleep, My(Your)FitnessPal, are not you. You are not defined by some technology company and their endless strive to KPI your life. They are not your audience, fans or friends. Go do life right now, as you need to do it, and do not even “watch yourself”.
No one is watching. Not even you.
Ironically, when you are doing whatever you need to do right then, right there, you are likely more “just in the moment” then many other times when you are trying to disconnect, meditate or deal with life and stress in whatever way. When you are behind on a deadline, scrambling to finish up a draft to send through to your supervisor, but then you get thrown into an ad hoc meeting you do not really know about, while your other colleague is complaining about a client that you are responsible for, and finally your daughter has some school problems that you only hear about now through an email that looks like scam, all while your partner lets you know that the car just broke down; and you deal with it all in the moment, as you go, as well as you can – that is focus. That is life.
In Zen Buddhism there is this idea that everything is practice. Life is what it is. What are you going to do it about, like right now?
You might need a break, or you might need to focus more. Or you want to learn and practice a bit more of this lit wellbeing stuff I am writing about here? If yes, I would be hyper excited to have you as a new subscriber:
So what can we do about it?!
Instead of just jabbering about the theme of the article, and how my muddled mind thinks about it, I would like to always give some actionable steps. Here we go:
I always try to relate part of this problem of the G.I. Joe fallacy to the emotion-action upstream (that is my own term for it - totally made up with my non-native English skills).
First, I think you may want to try to understand the following flow that happens with us humans:
Emotions get generated by the body and transferred upwards towards your brain.
Emotions are, in a simplified way, energy in motion.
Feelings get “produced” by your brain as a reaction to the emotions.
Thoughts get generated by many different parts of your brain as a reaction to those feelings.
Action! Well, or inaction. You either do something, or you do not.
Even then, between knowledge, which technically is kind of part of your thoughts, and actions, there is still a massive gap. At least practically. It is way too simple, and just terrible advice, to say that you should (“naturally”) learn something first in theory and then practice it, well in practice. Of course! Eureka!
No, we need a bit more help here.
This can take considerable time to design, develop and practice yourself. Unfortunately, or more like fortunately, the best way to deal with any chronic problems in this area is to work with a psychologist.
There is though a variety of various practical and mental exercises that you can try to learn more about yourself, your reactions, and how you react to your own action or inaction – particularly on those days when everything does not align the way you wish, like my yesterday. One of them is best started with a piece of paper and a pen. Then you can likely repeat this exercise in your mind, maybe even in real time when you are in those moments of doubt, shame, regret and self-judgement. But try the physical writing first! On paper it could be just keywords or bullet points.
A hindsight or foresight stream observation.
Before you can dive into changing your behaviour you have to be able to describe and perceive your current behaviour. We are designed, particularly with our brains and our mind, to be efficient. This means that as much as possible is automated, which in turn leads to many of your feelings, thoughts and actions being completely run of the same program over and over again – most of the time without us directly influencing, nor sometimes even realising what we are thinking and doing.
Main goal:
In hindsight try to remember a situation where you judged yourself for not doing something you wanted to do (e.g. finally getting through several emails from last week).
1. Write down where you were, what day and time it roughly was, and how generally you would describe your state. One sentence for it, no more, no less.
2. Try to recall exactly what you felt – yes, feelings first, because we are slightly better at recalling those. Write it down. One sentence for it, no more, no less.
3. From there, go one step backwards first, and try to remember if you felt anything from your body before those feelings arose. Skin crawling, temperature rising, breathing increasing etc.. This part is the hardest, because it happens so automatically and so fast. One sentence for it, no more, no less.
4. Read the part about the feelings again (to stay in the right flow).
5. What thoughts do you recall having? “Bloody Kevin from marketing distracting me with his social media requests; I will never get to those emails!”? One sentence for it, no more, no less.
6. What did you do? How did you deal with this situation – and this is for all parts: emotionally, mentally and then in action (physically)? Here you can write more than one sentence.
I specifically gave a work example here, but you can do the same when you had a day like me yesterday and mainly are stressing about your health and wellbeing routines, or anything else for the matter.
I know that I got “stressed” about all the various designs and edits I had to do for a social account I look after. My stress was mainly a feeling of lack of skill, failure and shame; because I am struggling a bit to come up with new designs. My body let me know by being hyper giddy – typical for skipping my morning exercise routine. I was thinking of way too many other things I wanted to do where I felt at that moment I had more skill/ability for – e.g. writing articles for here! I did intersperse my work stints with unnecessary distractions on the internet, watching MTB videos, playing some video games, and similar. I know that I should have just went got my morning cycling training out of the way.
What about the foresight part?
Very tough, very hard, complex, tricky, annoying. Yes, it is not easy to predict the future, who would have thought. You can now, make a simple summary of what happened (with all those single sentences!) - and try to make a prediction and promise to yourself how you will try to act next time when that emotion arises from your body, or when you perceive the same feeling. Or even have those same thoughts, even if usually that is a bit late for short circuiting your automations. Write it down next to each of the sentences:
When this happens next time, I will xyz.
Otherwise, I can only recommend something that, so far in my practice and learning, is quite central to Zen Buddhism:
The beginner’s mind (shoshin).
Everything you ever do, is always a new start. Even if you have done it forever, you fail a bit, next time is just a new start.
For me, today was just another start into my routines. And that is ok.
Thank you, and aku mihi (best regards)
Dr Marcin
If you read all the way down here, I would like to share:
This is technically my first proper article. And even more so, it is one that is loaded with my own experiences and my own opinion on this topic. I fail a lot in my routines and habits. I would like you to know this. I cannot stand those perfect lives that personalities on the internet try to frame, especially in the fitness, health and sports industries. I do not believe them, because technically I am them as well. So just that you know, such a day as yesterday, probably happens at least 1x per week.
References
Feel free to checkout references for all my articles in this document.
Thanks for keeping it real!
I love your voice! Great points and great writing style.
And helpful reminder to zoom out and go easy on ourselves.