Arnold’s (THE Arnold) got an email newsletter which is a pretty decent read. He, or whoever is ghostwriting his emails, has been writing a lot about avoiding negativity in your life.
I can get behind that message. I’m a staunch believer in staying the hell away from the cesspools of the internet.
How things are with your inner life shape how things are in your outer life.
That includes your fitness goals and results.
Yesterday, Arnold wrote about a study backing up what I have long preached about the perils of filling your mind with garbage.
Here’s the money quote:
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Researchers randomly assigned adults to watch one of three 14-minute TV news bulletins: negative, neutral, or positive content. Afterward, participants reported their mood and completed measures of how they were thinking about their own personal worries. Those who watched negative news were sadder, more anxious, and far more likely to catastrophize about unrelated problems.
Even stories about a crisis on the other side of the world made their everyday concerns — work, relationships, finances — feel more dangerous and unmanageable. Positive and neutral news did not produce this effect.
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Think about that for a couple seconds.
I don’t mean to minimize the bad things that happen to other people.
But a little magic trick is happening with mass media, which you are probably aren’t going to pick up on unless you’ve got a deeper awareness of psychology and the propaganda circling all around us.
You’re being told a story. That story has the purpose of creating an emotional response.
The electronic toys that give us access to the world of “information” are not simple tools for educating yourself.
They manipulate your feelings. They push you into certain moods.
You can poison your mind with worry, fear, anxiety and despair by consuming the news to “stay informed”. Since “the news” now includes the never-ending flood of moving images formerly called social media, the mind-poison extends to your scrolling habits.
Lest you think this is unimportant because you’ve got PHYSICAL FITNESS goals, man… well, I remind you that your mind and your feelings are not magical forces independent of your body.
Your physiology responds to mental and emotional states.
Whip yourself up into a state of constant stress and you are doing your health and performance no favors. You can stress yourself sick (and worse).
The discovery in this study, which is to me about as obvious as discovering that the sky is over your head, reminded me of a quote I read in a book by the late director David Lynch:
“Where the attention is, that becomes lively.”
Lynch was talking about an important part of the creative process. Whatever you put your attention on… if you’re setting up a shot with the camera, or writing a scene in your screenplay… that’s what gets frisky.
Put your attention on the worst possible gutter-trash of life and guess what gets energized?
Bad things happen. Tragedy is a real part of life.
But so are good things.
Which one of them gets your attention?
Something in our heads is wired up to make us focus on drama, conflict, outrage, anger, whatever is awful, nasty, dangerous, violent, and wicked. It attracts us like fire attracts moths.
The misery and nastiness come down to a choice of what gets our attention.
It’s natural, almost automatic, to focus attention on the negatives. But as I can tell you first-hand, living in negative feelings, focusing on negative events, is a pretty miserable way to live.
It comes down to a question:
Do I want to live in this or not?
If you want a happy well-lived life, I suggest that too much time staring into the abyss is not going to be a major contributor to that outcome.
Removing the mental junk from your life is as important to your healthy and flourishing life as removing the junk food if you want to blow-torch body fat and shred up.
If I have one lesson for you, it’s to stop treating your inner world as separate from our outer life. You need both in good shape to be in good shape.
If you want help using that lesson for consistency and gains in your own life, you can join us here.
Matt Perryman