The last five days all we’ve heard down here in Noo Zillund is how the wrath of the sky-god is about to fall upon thee heads.
There’s a tropical cyclone, allegedly, bearing down on us right now. When I went to my Sunday morning stroll slash workout a short while ago, there wasn’t much to see but the same boring rain we get all the time.
The panic merchants on the TV and out on loan from the universities never miss an opportunity to remind us of Safety First, which is to say, that they are risk averse to the point of barely resembling a human being with a spine and a heartbeat.
Over 20 years ago I lived through Katrina and Wilma in Florida in the same season. Those were storms worthy of fear. After that, no mere rainstorm can make me flinch.
We’ve sank so low that The Experts are out there in tears over a rain squall.
Oh lawsy lawsy it’s gone rain!
Fear-merchanting aside, here is a lesson about the broken mental models that so many people in our culture, experts included, use to understand the world.
They fail so often because their understanding of reality is built on reacting to events.
Whatever is visible, clear, transparent, available, and present before the mind is all there is.
The past never happened, and a future unlike Right Now will never come to be.
It’s the same story when it comes to your health and fitness.
I was reminded, yet again, for about the 18th time this week, that nobody out there shouting about health and wellness has the first idea of how hormones work thanks to yet another “think piece” about our friendly stress hormone cortisol.
They can only see the visible symptom. Cortisol goes up, and that’s bad! Cortisol goes down, that’s good!
The fact that this “bad” hormone is an essential part of our life-cycles, necessary for keeping you alive and healthy, is lost on them.
Peaks and valleys are normal and expected across the day. This is an entirely normal pattern.
The short-term jumps and dips, based on every bit of research I’ve ever seen and not to mention deep understanding of physiology, don’t mean much of anything.
It’s true that chronically elevated cortisol, along with other stress hormones, indicate that something is stressing your whole system.
I emphasize that they indicate.
The actual processes going on in your body are far too complicated to track to a single culprit.
Anyone saying different — and that is most anyone talking about it — is spreading voodoo dressed up in science-like language.
Worrying about your morning light exposure or whether you should have coffee or any of the other mind-numbing nuggets that the bio-hackers and optimizers sell you is a waste of energy that could be spent on enjoyable and useful things.
Ironically, it can stress you out obsessing over how to handle your stress. Ain’t nobody winning from that.
There’s little won by treating the symptoms while ignoring the true cause.
Blowing all the black smoke out of the kitchen while the grease-fire rages on the stove is not the smart play.
Cortisol is not your problem.
WHY cortisol elevates and stays elevated, now there’s a hint to your problem.
Most of the time, that isn’t caused by the external things you are doing, or which are happening to you.
Folks are looking for any dials to turn and levers to pull.
But the fact is, the great majority of the stress in your life, in any human’s life, is not caused by things happening Out There.
Stress is caused, and then magnified many times over, by your emotional and mental reactions to what happens to you.
Get a handle on your inner state and now you’re cooking with burning grease.
That’s a key part in what I do, and what I teach, and it’s applicable to life in and out of the gym.
Understand this and your training and diet plans become almost effortless. Recovery becomes a breeze and fatigue is no longer a constant enemy.
I can help you with this, and I do help my clients learn how to control stress starting in their own heads. If you’d like my help with that, hop on my list and you can send me a message about it:
Matt Perryman