The world is complicated. As we’ve previously explored, this means that we cannot plan for every change around us. To flourish, we must be adaptable.
The Six Pillars of Adaptability describe the skills necessary to adapt to the modern environment. Part 1 explores the first four pillars, which relate to changes in the external environment.
In this post, we discuss the two pillars of adaptability that pertain to changes in your internal environment: attention dieting and coping.
Like your external environment, your internal environment can change without warning. This internal change can happen because of an unexpected external change. Some say you should have control over your internal environment, but this isn't always realistic. You are human. You evolved to care about things and experience emotions. Your emotions change as the world around you changes. So, you need to learn how to adapt to a changing internal environment.
As humans, we tend to pay attention to things that induce the greatest emotional response in us. This means that emotional stories get the most views in attention marketplaces like the internet. As we collectively spend more time on the internet, and competition increases to hold our attention, we become bombarded with emotionally jarring content.
Pillar 5: Attention Dieting
The best way to provide stability in the face of this attention economy is to create an attention diet. This is where you consciously decide what you pay attention to, similar to how a nutritional diet is a conscious decision on what foods you eat. This creates a sense of control over your environment where you limit your exposure to emotionally stirring content. Attention dieting is important because perpetual exposure to strong emotions drains you of your energy.
It is estimated that a human brain can consciously process only 185 billion events over the course of its life. An event is either a thought, feeling, or sensation. These events make up your memories, sense of self, and models of the world around you. These events are your entire life.
Every time you choose to pay attention to something, you quite literally change your life. This makes attention dieting that much more important. Controlling where you direct your attention gives you control over your life. Allow any stimulus to harvest your attention and you quickly lose control of your life.
The story of the Sirens in The Odyssey illustrates the utility of an attention diet. In Greek mythology, Sirens are creatures that captivate sailors with their beautiful songs. Sailors are said to always surrender to the seductive songs by leaving their ships in a frenzy. Defenseless outside their ships, the sailors are drowned by the Sirens. The protagonist - Odysseus - is forewarned of his ship's course towards the Sirens. So he orders his crew to put wax in their ears, deafening them to the Sirens' songs.
Odysseus is a curious hero. He decides he wants to listen to the Sirens' songs. He does not put wax in his ears, but he orders his crew to tie him up to the mast. When his ship passes by the Sirens, Odysseus enters a mad state. He spastically pulls on his restraints, desperate to find the source of the seductive songs. His deafened crew is unbothered by the songs, so their focus remains on the goal: bring the ship home.
The maddened state that fills Odysseus is no different than when you become blinded by your emotions. Anything that triggers these maddened states are modern-day Siren songs. From news of genocide and hate crimes to rush hour traffic, Siren songs sap you of your energy and distract you from what is important to you. An attention diet serves to put wax in your ears, allowing you to focus on meaningful goals. With wax in your ears, there is no need to channel heroic restraint.
It is impossible to control everything you experience, but an attention diet is a strong first line of defense for protecting your internal environment from negativity.
Eventually you come across something that triggers a strong emotional response in you. Loved ones pass away, breakups happen, and people say rude things. To deal with strong emotional responses, some suggest you simply control your emotions better. This is not exactly realistic.
Emotional states are like the weather. Trying to control your emotions is like opening the windows and increasing the heat in your house in an effort to make the weather warmer. It is a profound waste of energy. You are better off adapting to the weather rather than trying to control it. Adaptability is important since neither the weather nor emotional states are predictable. The forecast may call for sunshine, but a storm can unexpectedly sweep in.
Pillar 6: Coping
Emotional storms can be overbearing, but we must learn how to adapt to them for everyone's sake. Coping skills, the sixth pillar of adaptability, guide us through emotional storms including sadness, frustration, and anger. Without coping skills, we let these strong emotions dictate our behavior. And we all know what happens when we leave strong emotions in the driver's seat for too long.
A cope is something that helps you process your emotions. This can easily be done through whichever impulse you have. Be it eating a whole pizza and guzzling six beers or smacking your dog around. The key aspect of coping is to find activities that are both effective and healthy. Finding a cope that is effective for you but unhealthy is like pumping your wastewater right back into your well. It solves your immediate problem, but eventually you eat shit.
So how do we determine what makes a cope healthy and effective? A healthy cope helps you process your emotions without harming others. Bonus points if it actively helps others too.
There are two primary healthy ways to cope with difficult emotions:
1) Flow
2) Direct Confrontation
Flow, a concept proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes becoming so involved in a challenging activity that you lose your sense of self. In a flow state, you do not experience self-consciousness nor do you pay attention to any distressing emotions. Your sole focus is on the present activity. Once you end your focus on your challenging activity, you return with a fortified sense of self, improved self-confidence, and a sense of accomplishment. You feel more complete challenging yourself with activities you enjoy, dampening the impact of difficult emotions.
A flow state can be reached from almost any activity. It is a state of mind. Csikszentmihalyi names three primary conditions for entering the flow state:
1) Active engagement in an activity with clear goals
2) Clear and immediate feedback on said goals
3) A balance between your perception of the activity's challenges and your perceived skills to perform the activity
A flow state can be reached in any activity given you satisfy those three conditions. Playing tennis is one way I choose to enter flow.
It has clear goals: Hit the ball over the net and within the lines.
There is clear feedback: Did the ball go in or not? Did I hit the ball where I intended?
A balance between the perceived challenges and my abilities can be met by playing someone I believe to be an evenly matched opponent.
Chess, work, weight training, community service, yoga, music, and reading are a few other examples where people frequently find themselves in flow states. The next time you are struggling with an emotional storm, enter a flow state by giving your undivided attention to an activity that satisfies Csikszentmihalyi’s criteria.
Flow can be a great way to cope with difficult emotions, but it should not be your only solution to difficult emotions. Enter direct confrontation. This is in contrast with the approach of flow. Instead of tuning out your problems with a constructive activity, you choose to boldly face your emotions head on.
Confrontation involves taking the time to understand three primary questions: What emotions am I feeling? Why am I feeling these emotions? And what underlying values are driving these emotions? The Case for Confrontation goes into greater detail about confronting your emotions.
Flow and confrontation sit on opposite ends of the spectrum of each other. Flow employs a "Don't think about it" strategy while confrontation is a serious analysis of your emotional state. Think of flow and confrontation like weights on opposite ends of a barbell. For effective balance, you want to stress the ends of the barbell and add no weight to the middle. Similarly, stressing flow and confrontation while avoiding the middle ground leaves you balanced.
This is what Nassim Taleb calls barbell strategy. Your body is best equipped to employ it in multiple circumstances. Your body thrives when balancing between complete rest and acute stress. But living in a state of chronic stress destroys your body. Similarly, your mind thrives in a balance between flow and confrontation, but struggles in a semi-anxious state where your brain partially processes emotions in the background.
Continuing with our barbell analogy begs the question: how much weight should we add to each side to achieve balance? At first thought, the answer is simple: add equal weight to each side. But not all weights are created equal. What if you only have a 45lb weight and a bunch of 5lb weights? Then to achieve balance, you must use a different quantity of weights on each side. Like different sized plates, equal quantities of flow and confrontation do not hold the same weight.
Confrontation is much heavier than flow. It requires more energy to practice, so frequent use leads to fatigue. Our brains create noise in the modern environment. They are meant to detect tigers jumping out of bushes, but we rarely have to worry about that. So instead, our brains make up things to fret over. The truth is, 95% of the things we worry about either A) never happen or B) don't matter. So there is no need to confront every little thought.
If you overload the confrontation side of the barbell, you start to overthink everything and become riddled with anxiety. You try to overcorrect every problematic thought and emotion. As Friedrich Nietzsche said:
"Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you."
Wrestling with difficult thoughts and emotions is akin to fighting monsters. Since we become what we pay attention to, we risk becoming the monster we study.
The story of S. illustrates the results of staring too long into the abyss. One night, S. watched a particularly violent movie with his wife and was disturbed by some violent thoughts he had later that night. His thoughts frightened him, yet they kept returning. This trend of disturbing thoughts continued for months, to where S. convinced himself that he was going to act on these thoughts. He became so fixated on these thoughts that they consumed him, destroying his mental and physical health. It took years of therapy before he could resume his life without perpetual fear of doing the unthinkable.
S. looked too deeply into his capacity for evil because of a single strange thought. The analysis resulted in a cascade of frightening thoughts that paralyzed him with anxiety. We can learn from S. that we don't have to take every thought or emotion seriously. Had S. shrugged off his first violent thought by losing himself in a flow state, he may have saved himself from the years of anxiety.
The next time you find yourself in an emotional storm, consider engaging yourself in a flow activity. There's a good chance your feelings will dissipate after returning from your flow state. After flow, an absence of emotion signals that your stressor resides in the category of the 95% of things that never happen or don't actually matter to you.
It is generally prudent to enter flow states to cope with your emotions. But overloading the flow side of your barbell leaves you unbalanced. You must add direct confrontation from time to time to challenge your beliefs and maintain self-awareness. If you pursue the flow state every time you are stressed, you resemble the crackhead that chases the high within his spoon. Both of you chase an irresponsible feeling that numbs your emotions.
Flow becomes an addiction without confrontation.
A stereotypical workaholic surgeon overloads the flow side of the barbell. Work addiction is common in this profession because it provides the optimal environment for flow conditions: clear goals, immediate feedback, and an opportunity for challenge. By nature, the profession tends to put stress on surgeons’ relationships.
Any relationship stressors can be "solved" with the flow provided by surgery, where it is available 24/7. It is no wonder that surgeons have some of the highest divorce rates of any profession. The seduction of flow distracts them from their most meaningful relationships. Workaholics let their families disintegrate right under their noses because they fail to confront their own and their family’s thoughts and emotions.
So what is the proper balance of flow and confrontation to effectively cope with difficult thoughts and emotions? The nuanced answer is it depends on each person. Everyone worries about different things. Some only stress about things that truly matter to them while others are worrywarts. You have to find the balance that works for you, but a general rule of thumb is the 95/5 rule. For 95% of the things that set you off, engage in a flow activity. For the remaining 5%, use direct confrontation. From here you can adjust.
If you struggle to determine which category an emotional storm belongs to, first try engaging in a flow activity for thirty minutes to an hour. After your flow session, use your emotions to guide you. If you are still burdened with emotions, your brain is signaling a need for further exploration. Confrontation is your next solution.
Some examples of inevitable challenges that require confrontation include: death of a family member, serious relationship problems, breakups, etc. You can engage in flow all you want, but these challenges will haunt you if you do not take the time to confront them
Conclusions
Adapting to your internal environment is just as important as reacting to your external environment. If you are distracted by persistent emotional states, you cannot focus on fulfilling the wants and needs of yourself and your loved ones. There are two primary ways to improve your adaptability to your internal environment.
An attention diet is your first line of defense against the modern Siren songs that stir up unwanted emotional storms. Closely regulate your attention so you do not need to react to every emotionally jarring stimulus. This regulation prevents avoidable stimuli from dominating your attention.
It is inevitable something blinds you with emotions. Coping skills manage these emotions. By leaning on the barbell strategy, you are best off losing yourself in a flow state for a vast majority of difficult emotions. For greater challenges, direct confrontation helps you process your stressors in a healthy manner. Your healthy balance of flow and confrontation helps you tune out the noise and process what truly matters to you.
Through the practice of attention dieting, flow, and direct confrontation, you will adapt to your internal environment effectively. Become more adaptable and you become more alive.
Adaptability is a primary criterion for life itself. As Lao Tzu beautifully wrote:
Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.