Mindfulness 2.0
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Human beings are biological creatures and therefore subject to the evolutionary software that is embedded into our bodies and minds. While we are certainly the most sophisticated animals on the planet (for better or worse) our advanced brains are still underpinned by archaic and automatic drives of behavior. The lack of necessity for top down control in the majority of our behavior is what quite frankly, keeps us alive, as well as allows us to efficiently navigate the complex problems that can and do present themselves in the course of life.
These physiological programs which include both autonomic components (fight or flight and rest and digest for short) as well as emotional and motor behavior are default wired to work without any help from the most sophisticated part of our brains. The cerebral cortex and more specifically the frontal lobe are helpful to build conceptual models of the past and future so that we can learn from our mistakes. Our physiology, mostly built on the need to quickly and automatically accommodate to the stressors we incur in the course of our lives, does not default to the long view. Instead, it simply uses whatever available solution there is in the short term regardless of how current compensatory actions may influence our robustness into the future.
When these adaptations lead to improvements in our ability to handle stress on the whole, we call that resilience. When they don't we call that maladaptation, also fragility. For most animals the moment of truth comes under conditions of systems failure. My dog Kilo has an incredibly high scavenger drive and has eaten all manner of food and non-food items in his day. This has resulted in multiple surgeries, more induced vomiting than I'd care to remember, and a tally of emergency vet bills that likely paid for a year of college for some lucky Virginia Beach youth. This behavior as dumb as it seems is driven by powerful biological drives that no matter what I do, Kilo will never become totally aware of. But humans can be different. We have evolutionary features that can cooperate with technologies that help us become more aware of our internal programming, tendencies, and motivations and then if we choose accept, alter, or mitigate those components of our being.
But the act of doing so is not free.
"Paying" Attention
Attention is expensive. Have you ever really tried to concentrate on something for a long period of time? It makes your brain tired. If you've ever been through something like a prolonged physical therapy process you know that when you focus really hard on something that is normally an automatic behavior, your brain resists you. Why? Because biology seeks efficiency. It wants to make things automatic to save energy. That's great as long as things are moving in the right direction overall.
If we want to alter the course of these internal and automatic happenings however we have to pay attention. Isn't it interesting that we use the word "pay" to describe what we do with our attention. It's as if attention is a form of currency. We have a transactional relationship with the things we are attending to. If you don't pay you get nothing in return. The more attention you give, the more you're likely to get back. It's kind of like investing money. Over time you aggregate interest that builds in your favor except in this case it's aggregating awareness. Like the song goes, "You only get what you give."
Usually things don't garner our attention until they've past the threshold for creating problems. But what if we could develop internal awareness as a skill? What if that skill allowed us to make more precise decisions that would help us in the long term? In other words what if our skill in awareness, as my buddy Mickey Schuch from Carry Trainer would say, "Buys time to act."? What would it look like to develop that skill for our bodies and minds?
Mystical Mindfulness
The idea of purposefully and progressively developing internal awareness is not a new one by any stretch of the imagination. Behavioral technology from both spiritual traditions like Vipassana yoga (meaning "clear seeing") all the way to modern mindfulness practices used in modern psychology have been in circulation for centuries, even millennia.
The purpose of these practices is exactly what it is we are investigating in this article; the ability to clearly understand our own internal world and what we can do to divert the flow of the river if we deem necessary. While these ancient practices have value much of the language is either esoteric or archaic in nature. Additionally, it fails to make use of appropriate external metrics that allow for continual recalibration of our internal felt sense.
There are ways to keep both baby and bathwater so we can glean important wisdom from ancient practices but also use the advantage of modern measurement tools like wearable data and other means of scientific measurement. If we rely too strongly on only our internal awareness without any rubric of validity we can get led futher astray by the very proclivities that we are intending to unearth.
One Accurate Measurement
"...is worth a thousand expert opinions." This quote by U.S. Navy R. Admiral and pioneer in computer programming, Grace Hopper offers us a great starting point for this next section of our discussion. Mindfulness practices and skilled internal awareness (interoception) are essential no doubt. We have to point our attention internally if we are to clarify our sense of what is happening within us. But that skill is incomplete without the ability to verify our perceptions to some degree.
In my work with military personnel it's common for those individuals sense of exhaustion, fatigue, and recovery to be woefully under estimated. That's because their default mechanism whether through birth right, childhood experience, training, or some combination thereof, is to lean into fatigue with effort and ignore signals to the contrary. While this does solve the types of acute problems they're confronted with it does not serve the performance longevity of the system.
In order to rehabilitate their sense of internal dialogue it's an important step to measure their physiology state and then associate that with an improvement in internal awareness or interoception. This issue is not found in tactical and high performance populations either. This is part of the larger problem of the shortsightedness that can come with too much automaticity in the care of our physiology.
Researcher m.c. schraefel (it's lower case on purpose) beautifully outlines this concept in Human Computer Interface technology in her papers on the concept of tuning which I've written about in previous articles. She describes the relationship between our internal sense of our own state and external metrics as "insourcing and outsourcing" respectively. This continuum is a back and forth of developing our felt-sense of what is going on within us while corroborating that perceptual component with valid data. Over time we can create a robust and accurate sense of what our own thoughts, feelings, and patterns are telling us about how we are responding to the demands of life and make timely course corrections when needed (tuning).
This keep us in the center of the circle if you will. Not becoming over reliant on any gadget or measurement to tell how we feel but also not lying to ourselves about what our feelings mean in the "real world".
Dancing in the Dark
Developing the skills of mindfulness 2.0 can keep up ahead of the curve with not only the run of the mill aspects normally associated with our health and performance (i.e. heart rate, blood pressure, aches, pains, sleep) but also more subtle aspects that occur in seemingly innocuous behavior choices. This also applies to our emotional states, our relationships, and how (and how much) we move our bodies.
Developing an attitude of awareness can be cultivated gradually and with very simple practices, many of which I've written about before. As you dig deeper into investigating your internal reality just be sure to validate it with some metric so you're not dancing in the dark.
Thanks for reading,
Rob
If you’re interested in more of my writing lock order my forthcoming book - Check Engine Light: Tuning Mind and Body For Performance Longevity today!