Perhaps the worst part about bad days is the feeling that we don’t deserve to even have bad days. Likewise, the downside to ambition is the likely possibility of not following through on them, or worse, not feeling entitled or good enough to even try.
It’s a Sunday morning and I’m rolling in bed, like many other Sunday mornings.
If you’re any bit of a worrier as I am, you would know that it’s right around this time when the guilt of doing nothing starts to creep in.
In recent years, I’ve become a huge advocate of having time off for just doing nothing. I think it’s such a healthy thing we can do for ourselves. But with emptiness and silence also come the intrusive thoughts and the chatter.
I begin to think of all the things I still want to explore and all the projects I still want to start but the instant response in the mind is almost always, “No, that’s a bad idea.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Are you good enough to even do that?”
“You’ll only be judged and ridiculed.”
“Stop wasting your time.”
Gradually, these thoughts begin to take the shape of memories and imaginary scenes in my head. All of a sudden, I’m back in grade school reliving some embarrassing moment, or I’m somewhere in the future, either winning or failing at something. It’s an uncontrolled swell of thoughts, which began with a single innocent thought.
I’m on my bed but it feels like I’m in a foot-deep tub of water.
My face is right on the edge of the surface and although I can still breathe, the moment I turn sideways, the struggle begins. It’s that weight on the chest. The mind races. It’s less drowning and more struggling to stay afloat.
As a kid, I had this terrible fear of the water. I would stay on the sides of the pool, holding on for dear life. If my feet don’t reach the floor, that’s off limits to me. So when I stumbled upon this Ted talk by Tim Ferriss where he mentions his own fear of the water and how he eventually learned to grow past it, I was all ears.
In his talk, he introduces a man named Terry Laughlin, the founder of Total Immersion Swimming. By looking at the first principles of swimming and breaking our long-standing notions on how to swim fast and effectively, Laughlin was able to turn him from swimming one lap like a “drowning monkey” at about 200 beats per minute heart rate, to being able to “jump into the ocean and swim one kilometer in open water, getting out and feeling better than when [he] went in.”
Of all the lessons mentioned in this talk, I found the excerpt below to be the most relevant:
“So here are the new rules of swimming, if any of you are afraid of swimming, or not good at it. The first is, forget about kicking. Very counterintuitive. So it turns out that propulsion isn’t really the problem. Kicking harder doesn’t solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion.
The problem is hydrodynamics. So what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body, much like a small car behind a big car on the highway. And you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position. The only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water. The body is denser than water. 95 percent of it would be, at least, submerged naturally.
This is Terry (Photo below). And you can see that he’s extending his right arm below his head and far in front. And so his entire body really is underwater.”
Let me repeat that important bit:
The only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water.
Much like swimming, our first instincts when dealing with unwanted thoughts and the noise in our heads is to try and stay on top of them. We’d rather just float above all of it. But the most efficient way through, according to Laughlin, was never floating on our bellies and staying on top of the water. The best way through is through.
Water is the resistance.
It is what holds us back. But if we avoid it, we stay in place. Similarly, avoiding stress, work, and our lingering thoughts might just mean we don’t move forward from or with them. Or if we forget them for the time-being, they are likely to reappear at some point in the future. Ideally, the goal is to swim through it so that the very thing that slows us down is what propels us forward.
Of course, this is messier in practice, but I think the basic flow remains, more or less. We’re in the water and we want to get up and out the other side.
It starts with a deep breath.
We dive in. We get a feel of it, the buoyancy, the weight and the weightlessness. What thought floats to the surface? Where does it come from? Is it even mine? Is it a feeling? Is it a question? Is it a question worth answering? Is it true? Does it linger? Does it fade away? At some point we’re going to need to take another breath. Turn your head towards the surface. You’re allowed to take that breath.
As a kid taking swimming lessons, it took me a while to learn how to do this. On my first few tries, I would get water in my lungs. So instead, I was told that I could stop in the middle of a lap to do some “bubbles,” which just means those breathing exercises where you inhale above the water and exhale underwater, and repeat. It’s basically making bubbles underwater, hence the name.
And when we’re ready, we take another plunge.
This is the cycle, at least the one I’m in. But it’s a cycle that moves forward at its own pace.
We dive in by creating the space for thoughts to arise and for us to listen to them. We glide through the water by engaging with these thoughts, noticing them, and if warranted or when we’re ready, we ask the questions to unravel these thoughts. Personally, writing them down has become a default, and it’s been a lifesaver. And then – and this is important, know when to get your head out of the water. “Bubbles.”
As they say, it’s about “snuggling (not struggling) with our demons.” There is no floating on air. Even floating on water means being mostly submerged in it. We swim through.