Controlling the Need to Control
Cold showers, the inevitability of pain and the equation of happiness.
It seems like such a small thing now, but at the time it felt hard, mildly frightening even. “They” (read: Andrew Huberman, Rich Roll, Pete Holmes… just shake a bag of Californians and throw them on the table), but most notably the Ice Man himself, Wim Hoff, say that getting yourself in cold water is profoundly good for you. But I didn’t read/listen to any of that until afterward. I think the real reason I started turning off the hot water in the shower was because I simply, for a moment in my day, wanted to feel alive.
There’s history and so much I want to write about leading up to this, but it will have to wait until another post. In the meantime, you could…
Suffice it to say, adulthood can be numbing. If you are also an adult, you may also be experiencing this. If you’re a young enough adult you may be fending it off with novelty and an enviable amount of personal freedom. I, however, am speaking from the spot I’m sitting right now, in the eye of the storm of parenting small wonders/monsters, and here the threat of Antarctic levels of frost-bite in the numbing whirlwind of monotony - is high. I reckon I’ve already lost several proverbial digits to it.
There are other ways to arrive here though, at Destination Numb. We get ourselves into ruts in all kinds of unpresuming ways. It happens slowly, in increments too small to notice at first. We find what we like. Good. We discover ways to get what we want. Great. We keep doing what we’re doing because it’s getting us to… something comfortable enough in its familiarity (see: the cognitive bias of loss aversion in this post). And then hey presto! We find ourselves in the desolate country of What I’ve Always Done with a big old rucksack of Things That Make Me Feel Good without much of a clue where to go next or where we even came from.
Some people never make it out of here alive. Really though. There are people who wander around here forever and then die. Occasionally they come across footprints in the parched and frozen landscape only to realise they’re their own. They work out a groove, and as we know, a groove can be notoriously difficult to free oneself of.
While I’ve painted a picture of a solo Antarctic crossing on foot, for most of us, it doesn’t feel like that. When Homer wrote the Odyssey in the late 8th century BC, he described an island of “lotus-eaters” who, because of their enchanted and repetitive diet, live in a state of perpetual bliss. When Odysseus and his sailors are waylaid here, it seems idyllic (especially compared to man-eating cyclops and tempestuous sea gods). Everyone is real nice. And calm. But they also lack any motivation to do or go anywhere else (I mean, why would you? When the algorithm gives you everything you could ever want?) When some of Odysseus’ men try the fruit, they immediately lose their memories and any desire to leave the island to return home. They are all incredibly happy lazing under the palms of this mysterious island, and Odysseus has to literally drag them kicking and screaming back to the ship and out of their apathy. All this lotus-fruit eating and groove-making feels enjoyable, safe, and predictable, until, of course, it feels like nothing at all.
Part of the issue is that our brains are hardwired for control. Our ancestors fought stick, rock, and fingernail to get their hands on a morsel of reliability and security in what was a perilous wilderness of megafauna with big teeth and claws. The humans who managed to reign in some of that wild chaos were the most likely to survive and so on and here we are, trying to control our maximum heart rate, how much saturated fat we consume, the temperature of our houses or the way that idiot at the roundabout should be indicating (seriously, it’s such an easy problem to fix). Obviously, we’ve got to maintain a level of control to avoid mayhem and the disintegration of society. BUT.
At the end of 2021 the ‘round up’ of my most listened to music was the same as my most used playlist. As in, I hadn’t listened to any new music in at least a year, and I’m going to say it was more like two or three. I hadn’t noticed, you know? I just put on a playlist and let it roll. The same one. Every. Single. Time. Keep in mind I’m paying a monthly subscription fee that gives me unlimited access to most of the music in the world. It was a travesty. I may as well have burnt a CD (iykyk, I used to haul around a CD case that weighed about twenty kilos in the passenger seat of my Honda Prelude). It may seem inconsequential, but I believe that how you do one thing is how you do everything and this was a bad omen indeed.
So I did an audit. Turns out the groove was up over my shoulders and getting deeper. Go easy on yourself, you were a new parent in the middle of a global pandemic. Yeah, OK, but how long can you use those things as excuses for your life not being what you want it to be? This is kind of the point I’m aiming for here with this crooked arrow. There’s no one else who is responsible for my life. Who am I going to blame at the end of it? People who enjoy bat meat? My parents? Mark Zuckerberg? Any number of politicians, billionaires, cultural influencers or societal trends or histories? Good luck with that. It’s me, baby. It’s only ever been me.
But I digress. I was stuck and while I thought I had achieved a level of contentment, under further investigation it was more that I had limited the things in my life that were unpredictable so that I could feel, well, in control. I will give you a sampling of things I had become timid of, but it will be at great cost to my personal brand:
1. Driving. My circumference of travel had shrunk to a startling small circle and I tenaciously avoided anywhere that would require parallel parking.
2. Socialising. I’m an introvert at the best of times, but things got pretty out of control there for a minute.
3. New places, new activities, new people. I’d rather not, thanks.
4. New things on my own? Probably not.
5. Exercise. Sweat. Physical effort in any form.
6. Look, let’s just summarise it by saying I was afraid of things that felt like they might be uncomfortable or difficult.
Which, of course, makes loads of sense. Life felt out of control and I was doing the only thing I knew how to make it feel less like a rollercoaster with no harness - listen to the same playlist on repeat, forever. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot (author of The Optimism Bias) notes that a sense of agency is an effective way to increase optimism and reduce anxiety. She theorizes that that’s why people are so anxious on planes. Not only are you locked in a steel tube hurtling through the air at 800km/h, but you also have incredibly limited choice over when and what you eat, where you sit, who you’re next to, how long it’s going to take, when you can stand, whether the lights are on or off, or whether that tube of steel is going to sit on the tarmac for what feels like the rest of your living days.
Which is only nominally different to life outside of an airplane. Because out here in the open air, even though I can get a snack of something other than the blandest honeydew ever grown and I can stretch or swim or run, there’s surprisingly little I have legitimate control over.
It’s one of Mo Gawdat’s Six Grand Illusions - the fantasy that we are in control of, basically, anything. He doesn’t call them “grand” for nothing. In retrospect, I was thoroughly convinced that if I made the right decisions life would more-or-less follow a predictable trajectory. Aim true and watch it fly. Then I had a second kid (that’s when things started getting wobbly). Then there was a global pandemic (pretty damn wobbly). Then my son stopped speaking and we spent countless hours on phone calls and Zoom meetings and offices chasing paperwork and numbers that we thought would give us answers. Spoiler alert: they didn’t. And, in short, the trajectory that we had been aiming for slowly and unpredictably became out of reach.
I’m not signing up for the suffering Olympics. Many of the people I know who read this have plenty of shit on their own plates. They also veered off the course they had aimed for not because of anything they did but because life is uncertain, unknowable, and uncontrollable. Most of all, life owes us absolutely nothing. That’s a genuinely jagged pill to swallow. Cut it, crush it, and mix it with peanut butter all you want, it’s a hard one going down. Especially if your developmental years were between 1990 - 2019 and the world was a magical wonderland where you could be anything you wanted and everything you dreamed of could be shipped to you in a box with a big ol’ smirk on it (does anyone else think that it looks just a bit sinister?). Sure there was terrorism, but at least we were keeping it simple: no urgency around climate change, deforestation, or oceans filled with reefs of plastic. No social media or mental health crisis, no algorithms or addictive consumption. It was an uncomplicated time, filled with music video tv, bikes, Slurpees, phrases like, “And now, back to our regular scheduled program” and a whole lot of boredom. What was I saying before I got all romantic and nostalgic? Oh yeah - we got fed a diet of have everything you want and have it now, and then life, without breaking the pace it’s kept up for millennia, kept being life.
Mo Gawdat is famous for creating an equation for happiness. Maths heads get around it: [Happiness] >= [Your perception of the events] - [Your expectations of how life should behave]. Translation from an English major: Your experience of happiness is no less than what’s happening to you minus, what you expect should be happening to you.
First, let’s just out the gate admit that happiness is only ONE of a few important ingredients to living a meaningful life (but more on that later). Second, it’s important to note that he says “perception,” because if you want to get philosophical (which I always do) then we also have to admit that an objective view of reality is unattainable. What we call “reality” is a set of rapid interpretations coloured by our context, background, personality, neurotype, etc. etc. that lead to our perception of what’s happening right now.
Basic algebra tells us that if your expectations are at an elevation with a view and reality turns out to be somewhere down here in the mud, the result is a happiness quotient in the negative (ie: unhappy, disappointed, resentful?). If you are eight years old and you’re anticipating a tree chockers with pressies on Christmas morning and wake up to find one small brown cardboard box, everyone’s going to hear about it. If you go out expecting exceptional food and service and cop rude waitstaff and food poisoning, everyone who reads their reviews is going to hear about it. If you expected that job to be easy, or that school to be a good fit, or your career prospects to be better, or your mortgage repayments to be more stable… If you expected to travel the world in 2020, or to be able to do “normal” things with your family, or to hold onto your health until you were at least in your 80’s… there is a chance that you will not get what you want.
So, do we bury our expectations in the sand? Be perpetual pessimists so that when things swing negligibly in our direction we can consider it a win? Tali Sharot has a lot to say about this as an expert in optimism and the short answer is, axiomatically, NO. There’s a lot of power in aspiring to and envisioning things going well. If we don’t think there’s a possibility of finishing the race, then we don’t sign up for it, which means we don’t build a habit of training, which means we don’t put our runners on this morning. Running is the perfect metaphor. Have I said this before? ;)
Let’s roll with the allegory. You decide to sign up for the race and on the day you feel like shit. Maybe your kid wet the bed in the night and it was a rotten sleep. Or maybe you’ve just gotten over a respiratory infection. Or maybe you’re at the worst possible time in your cycle. Or maybe you’re battling an ear infection, a bruised toe, or a sore hammy. Whatever. It’s also rainy…or maybe it’s a scorcher. Either way, not what you had hoped for. But you’ve paid the money (this sport isn’t as cheap as you thought it might be) so, onward. There are idiots (as always) not indicating at the roundabout and then when you finally make it to the venue, you get a text message from a family member that is unnecessarily unhelpful so now you’re also carrying around some resentment from your childhood to the starting line.
Already there are SO MANY things that are happening to you that are completely out of your control. This is a recipe for anxiety and a rapid loss of all the optimism you had been trying to foster up until today. Best way to combat that feeling? Increase control. But of what? It’s all going to crap and I think I forgot my energy bar in the car. That’s the bad news. The good news is that in a world of constant change and unpredictability you are ALWAYS in control of two things:
1. Your expectations about how life should be behaving.
2. Your response to it.
This is changing my life. I’m a slow learner. And it’s taken some grieving over the things that haven’t gone as planned. But just like learning to sit up straight, there is a posture I am learning to take towards my existence in the universe. I am learning to manage my expectations and introduce a practice of radical acceptance of all the things I can’t change, control, or force to go my way (ie: almost everything). Accept and reframe. Accept and reframe. Run that race anyway.
So this is why I want to build a cold plunge out of a recycled chest freezer. I have an aunt back on the icy expanse of my homeland (Canada) who has gotten into smashing holes in the ice of frozen lakes and going for a dip. I know. Bonkers. And I love it. I get inspired when I see photos in my feed of her donning a toque (that’s a ‘beanie’ for those of you who don’t speak the native tongue) and gloves, shoulder-deep in literally freezing water. I asked her if it was more difficult the first time and whether it’s gotten easier. To my surprise, she explained that the first time she felt crazy enough to go for a sub-zero temperature swim, she had the guidance of an experienced ice bather who taught her how to breathe through it, to manage her own psychological and physical response to the pain and shock of the cold, and it was…not that bad. You see, the amazing thing about getting in cold water or going for a run is that you quickly realise that pain isn’t the same as suffering.
I have adopted a couple of new mantras lately. One of them comes from that Haruki Murakami memoir about running where he says, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” That’s not something we want to hear. But the older I get, the truer it gets too. Pain is everywhere. This trail we’re on is littered with it. It might be physical, but more than likely it’s coming in the form of profound disappointment, disenchantment, resentment, fear, anxiety, depression, ennui, overwhelm, loss, grief, chronic stress, rejection, despair, anger, failure. It makes more sense to block it out. To avoid it. To shield ourselves from the things that might hurt and remain, as much as possible, in the grooves we’ve worn in for ourselves. I have felt this in every cell of my body. And I have felt numb and distinctly outside of my own life.
Then there’s the other option: to accept life as it is, not as we wish it were. The Buddhists are all over this. The old and deep wisdom says that our suffering comes from resisting pain, or rather, things that aren’t going our way. We chafe at it. Dig our heels into the soft loamy dirt of feeling justified in our expectations and sorry for ourselves that life isn’t seeing our well-formed point. So we suffer. We draw our attention down to the blisters and the sore ankle and the burning in our legs. We focus in on the pain and we let it convince us that it’s in control. So maybe we stop, maybe we quit, maybe we buy some ciders and take up binge-watching as a sport. OR, and this is an important ‘or’: we tell it to quiet down in the back, because we’re trying to do something here. That’s easier to say on a run or in a cold shower than in response to the intense grief of real-life pain, but it doesn’t make it any less true.
In Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch Albom’s bestselling memoir about his weekly visits with a college professor who was dying of ALS (a debilitating motor neuron disease), he recounts the strictness with which Morrie guards his expectations, “Sometimes in the mornings…I mourn what I’ve lost. But then I stop mourning…I don’t allow myself any more self-pity than that.”
I keep stopping myself from writing. Checking myself, am I being too harsh? Am I demanding too much of my readers? This is only what I am learning to demand from myself. I figure if people like Morrie, Viktor Frankl (a holocaust survivor), Mo Gawdat (who lost his young son), the stoic philosophers, the Buddhists, the mystics, the monks, if they have all discovered this, then who am I to be afraid of owning my pain?
Of course, it’s simpler to tell the discomfort to shut up on a hill climb or in a cold plunge (or is it? It would be so easy to just stop), which is my main argument for doing it in the first place. I want to be good at doing hard things. I want to wear in the neural pathways that know it’s OK to feel pain and discomfort. It’s OK to be cold or sweaty or tired or embarrassed or uncertain. It’s OK to feel disappointed or nervous or giddy or a bit lost. This is all part of the territory where life is happening. It won’t hold any punches, but neither will we. We’re the kind of people who can do hard things. We can hold pain without clinging to suffering. We can climb mountains and go to job interviews and sign up for things that feel like they were designed for people who are stronger than us. We’re the kind of people who turn the hot water off in the shower* because we know what it feels like to be alive and there’s nothing better than starting the day by reminding discomfort that it’s not the one in charge.
*I mean..maybe you are. You should be. DO IT. DO IT NOW.
~ I’m back from ear infections and climbing mountains and thinking about signing up for a longer run than I feel comfortable with and now that I’ve written all this it kind of feels like a responsibility, doesn’t it? Ugh. Sometimes I wish I had decided to write a newsletter about how to bake peanut butter cookies and grow green beans. Maybe next time ;) ~
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Here’s the stuff that I directly mentioned in this piece: