Like the rest of my contemporaries suffering from a quarter life crisis, I have found myself in the midst of training for a marathon - in Denver of all places. Training for an event that pushes my body into uncharted territories has left me wrestling with a question: How do I know when my feelings of tiredness are derived from my body’s need to recover to prevent injury vs my reptile brain singing the siren song of comfort? In other words, how do I distinguish between an actual need to rest and mere laziness?
If a feeling of tiredness is the indicator I have, my objective is to peel back the layers of the onion and find the root cause driving this feeling. This endeavor requires some level of objectivity which can be achieved one of two ways:
Internal Objectivity
External Data
Internal objectivity refers to the ability to remove yourself from your emotions such that you can observe them objectively. One can reach this state from practicing meditation or journaling one’s feelings. Both practices detach the practitioner from their emotions to where the practitioner splits into two personas: the feeler and the observer. For the journalist, the feeler bleeds onto the page and afterwards, the observer dissects what the feeler feels. The meditator enters a mental space where he passively observes thoughts passed along by the feeler. Both involve creating a space where the feeler can express himself without shame and a logical observer can dissect the root cause without judgment. This path can take years to walk since it requires significant discipline, persistence, and most importantly, self-love.
While self-mastery is a noble goal in life, everyone starts at different places and some reach it through different means. Such a journey doesn’t help my immediate need to know if the voice in my head is being rational or singing a siren song. External data can help those in this situation. Rather than using your own mental horsepower to delineate between tiredness and laziness, you leverage a tool that provides insight into recovery indicators that cannot be conflated with emotions. Such a tool removes the guesswork, assuming the indicator is proven to serve as a reliable proxy for recovery.
In the context of a goal such as marathon training, the decision making process fits within a cybernetic system: information is presented at a certain point, steps are needed to identify the relevance of the information, and a decision is made that is either coherent, incoherent, or neutral with respect to your goal.
An example of this cybernetic path might stem from a feeling that indicates I’m tired the day after a twelve-mile run. Through minimal reflection, I surmise the root cause of this feeling stems from my body’s need to rest since it is not conditioned to running twelve miles in a day, so I decide to take the path that appears most coherent with my objective to run a marathon in a few months: take a rest day so I am prepared for a longer run later this week. An incoherent path would involve another strenuous run since it creates an injury risk and inhibits my ability to recover. The neutral path might look like a core workout or a short two mile run.
The primary advantage to the use of external data is that it shortens the decision making process illustrated above. A swipe of an app shows us an indicator of tiredness and an objective root cause. By outsourcing the first two steps, we only need to focus our energy on the last step: what will we do with this information?
The danger of this approach can be viewed twofold: from the pragmatic lens of your goals and the spiritual lens of your calling. Let’s clarify what this might mean. From the pragmatic lens, we run the risk of following in Narcissus’s footsteps. He discovered his reflection in a pond and became enamored to the point where his journey stalled and he eventually drowned in the pond housing his reflection. We too may meet this fate if we become enamored with the metrics we track to where we become deviated from our original endeavor. For example, tracking recovery metrics may become an obsession to the point where you stress over it, impeding your journey more than the marginal gains you would have received from improving your recovery score by two points. Such tools have created many modern day Narcissuses and drowned their dreams with distractions.
If we view the drawbacks of external data through a spiritual lens, tools that grant accessibility to such data may serve as digital pacifiers that stunt our development. If we come to rely on a tool to tell us when we feel tired, our ability to identify and address our emotions can atrophy like an unused muscle. The decision to use a tool that replaces sorting through our emotions can set a precedent. We may find ourselves relying on data in more and more instances, until our emotions become alien to us. When unpleasant emotions like fear arise, we struggle to cope without the ability to identify our emotions. Contrast this with a breathwork practitioner who views dread as an old friend.
The prevalence of tools like Cronometer, Whoop Bands, and Oura Rings offer insights into our health that previous generations could not access. The introduction of these tools illuminates just one front in a cultural war between two hyperbolized camps: The Lords of Leisure and The Hustling Huberbros. If we were to further personify these groups, we could describe them as a coalition of feet-dragging luddites at philosophical odds with naive technophiles.
I find the first camp an undesirable place to reside since we typically see Dunning and his buddy Kruger here. If a luddite doesn’t practice a skill that builds the ability to identify and process emotions, a false confidence can build. The luddite reasonably reasons, “I don’t need a tool to know when I need rest,” but when his reptile brain eventually sings its siren song of laziness, the luddite is susceptible to unknowingly falling victim to his own biology. The reptile brain finds success so it tries again. Thus a habit forms and our luddite falls into a routine of listening to primitive biology which still believes its next meal is an uncertainty. To return to our compass analogy, the luddite finds himself on a fool’s errand of embarking on an adventure in unfamiliar terrain without a map or compass.
The second camp drifts too far in the opposite direction. Our technophilic friends embody all of the drawbacks we previously discussed by following the same path as Narcissus. They lose touch with their emotions and only see what is measurable, causing them to lose the forest for the trees. Within the paradigm of the compass analogy, the technophile refuses to take a detour around a dangerous river because his nose is buried in a compass informing him that the destination is on the other side of the river.
The technophile’s fate is reminiscent of the vegan who began their diet with the intention of eating healthy. Somewhere along the way, the map became the territory and Oreos among other unhealthy yet vegan foods worked their way into our friend’s diet. An outsider can only shake his head and wonder how someone can lose sight of the big picture so easily. Many of us fall into trouble when we mistake means such as money, sex, and alcohol for ends like freedom, intimacy, and fun.1 Our technophile belongs within this category when he mistakes means like heart rate variability for the objective he originally pursues like holistic health. He hyper focuses on one detail that contributes to health while missing the variety of other factors that comprise health.
Neither of these polarized camps appeal to me, so I’d project that our objective is to find the balance that works for each of us. If you know the woods like the back of your hand, there is no need for a compass. If you wish to accelerate your journey into unchartered territories, a compass would be a wise addition to your backpack of tools. If you have no specific destination in mind, a compass serves little need. Your personal context matters in these decisions.
From my vantage, I see data as a tool. Since I have a specific destination in mind and my metaphoric woods offer uncharted terrain, I will include a compass in my backpack for my journey ahead. As a contingency to prevent spiritual malaise, I am exploring simple breath holds to nurture my relationship with unpleasant emotions like dread. A clear delineation between an objective and the means to reach that objective should also help me from falling into the practical pitfall of data obsession.
What’s your ideal balance of data usage?
If it involves external data, how will you protect yourself from stumbling into the practical and spiritual pitfalls we discussed?
This is a topic for a future essay - you can hold me to it