Deus Ex Machina

No Magic Medicine

In classes (and my forthcoming book) I use the analogy of a Check Engine Light to describe the idea of signals from the body that are flashing to let you know a potential malfunction may need your attention. This lends itself to the discussion of various indicators and tools that we may use to address these problems and perhaps even prevent them in the future. When I discuss these tools with class participants one of the common misnomers is the desire for simple 1+1=2 type answers to the problem of human health and performance. People often desire prescriptive answers in the form of protocols, tinctures, tonics, supplements, and exercises and with them the certainty of an outcome. This never works because health is not a stable condition. There are vast amounts of variables interacting with each other between both the person and their environment (physical, social, emotional factors, etc.) with the two influencing one another constantly.

Biological organisms, which we are, are not simple machines. You can't take a part out put a new one in, and as long as the install went according to the manual, all will go to plan. We are far more complex than that. When we introduce any health remedy, protocol, or solution into the web of a human being the ripples not only go far but it's nearly impossible to predict how they will interact with all of the other simultaneous ripples. Much in the natural world cannot be boiled down mechanistically without abandoning the truth about what's actually happening. Just ask the weatherman in Abu Dhabi.

While it is certainly easier to do things by the number these types of solutions to health problems will ultimately fail us when circumstances change and almost certainly always do. Rather than having a singular, simple, and stiff answer to health problems we need to have frameworks that help us think through problems. Having a framework for how we think about our health is more robust not because it will deliver to us all of the answers any more than just doing protocols, but because we can more easily maneuver ourselves to solve the many different challenges we will have to maintaining our performance and longevity over the span of our lives.

Let's See

Part of the issue I have had with this as a provider and educator is that often people who are desperate for help are made promises, whether implicitly or explicitly, and when those promises fail to deliver, they not only are bereft of solution they may lose hope in the possibility of a solution existing at all. Obvious examples of this are in the domains of pain relief and weight loss. "Got back pain?? This is THE exercise!". "Wanna lose weight?? Carbs are the devil!" This kind of closed off and simplistic thinking creates unsustainable and inflexible behavior that ultimately sets people up for failure. In turn many providers will say "people don't want to do the work" or "just want to take the easy path". I guess that's true in some ways. We are wired to look for simple and easy solutions. It saves energy. Rather than label anybody who look for easy solutions as inherently lazy, we can instead display how investing in what may be like a longer path actually leads to the solutions they so badly crave. If they choose not to at least we've told them the truth about how things really work.

With all of that said quick fixes, buzz words, and catch phrases can be helpful to initiate the process of engagement. If those social media video clips and sound bites are used with the intention to get people started, I'm all in. But if there's an empty promise attached, then charlatan be damned. That begs the question: what's the practical implication for all this? If you're looking for long term solutions for performance longevity the most stable ones are not found in one size fits all social media posts that purport to have the answers to what are the complex problems of human life. Any resource, no matter how seemingly credible, can at best offer you a place to begin exploring. No protocol, program, or plan can offer the perfect solution for you. Even if it could, the you that solution works for the you of today may not be the solution that works for the you that exists in a year. Context matters in the complexity of real life.

ReSearch

Scientific research while an essential part of informing our approach is performed in isolation from the world. Even the best research measures mechanisms of cause and effect that when placed back into the dynamic environment of human life may not get the outcomes we expect. As an example this past March (Sleep Awareness Month) I decided to take the sleep supplement "Rest" made by the company Protekt in an effort to see how it would effect my sleep. (I have no financial relationship with Protekt. I had positive experience working with them on a previous fundraising project and pay for their supplements out of my pocket.). "Rest" is comprised of valerian root, GABA, and L-theanine; all of which have been shown to reduce sleep latency and improve NREM sleep.

Here's what I found.

On nights when I went to bed on time and had relatively normal quality sleep, there was no measurable effect. I could not tell the difference. Normally, people might think that I took it and since there was no effect that it doesn't work. But that is not the whole story. What I also found was that when I took Rest during travel or any night when I anticipated having reduced sleep duration or quality, that there was a marked improvement in my ability to both fall and stay asleep. It's not whether or not this supplement "works". It's whether or not this supplement works for me and under what conditions. Again, context matters.

The best thing any of us can do is to know what outcome we are after and engage in what my friend and super coach Stu MacMillan calls "safe to fail experiments". Essentially this means we have a known starting place and an outcome that we are after. Then we try something that we are pretty certain won't hurt us and see what happens. We don't just search once; we search over and over again.

Ad Opus

The frame of realizing that we are not simple mechanical devices can be put to work rather easily. Instead of looking for plug and play options that may or may not work as final solutions for you as an individual you can use tools and protocols as starting places for exploration. When married to informed curiosity you now have an opportunity for finding solutions that work for you and even more importantly, the skill to find your own solutions.

Here's a helpful starting place I've found in my time as a health and performance professional:

Unpack what it truly is that you are trying to accomplish. In Check Engine Light we say, "Bring clarity to problems and identify targets."

By this I don't just mean a cursory glance at what you are trying to achieve but really spend time to think things through. What is it that you are truly after? When I work with athletes as a strength and conditioning coach this is the most essential part of the process. What is it that they really want to achieve? Where do they feel their performance is lacking? Why have they identified that particular quality, whether it's speed, power, endurance, or whatever, as the thing that needs attention?

The motivation underneath is what drives the choices we will make in our attempt to solve that particular problem. It's not necessary to have a perfect answer or even to be able to perfectly articulate the answer right away. More important is the asking of this kind of question of ourselves. This will keep us from getting stuck in the spin cycle of the next protocol offered to us by a talking head that is in direct conflict with another tool by a different just as famous talking head.

Practice

Ever notice that the job of physicians is called medical "practice"? Final solutions do not exist in biology because environment and organism are always interacting with each other. We may displace the burden of responsibility from one area of health onto another or delay a negative effect but the only final answer to the puzzle of health is death. To get solutions we are always on the hook to try and try and try again. Adaptability is the name of the game.

By understanding how to practice we become foragers of information. We learn to look and feel and think about our own experience as it matches against newer and hopefully better data. Cursory and half-hearted commitment to protocols that are delivered by others offers no stable solutions to the real world problems of being healthy for a long time. We have inquire through trial and error, adjustment, and doing again.  

It can be helpful to think of ourselves in terms of mechanisms. We can identify problems and use reliable tools to help us resolve them. But we are not simple machines. We are complex, adaptive, biological organisms. This means our approach to bolstering our health and performance must respect this fundamental reality if we are to achieve the kind of longevity in health and performance we claim to desire. 

Thanks for reading,

Rob

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