Mindfulness Without Meditation

Last week we discussed this concept of strengthening our ability to navigate Stress through Top-Down control, by voluntarily engaging with difficult physical activities, such as heat exposure, cold exposure, or intense exercise, as a means to increase our stress tolerance through purposeful engagement.

Summarized simply: The more stress we voluntarily pursue, the more our capacity for handling stress increases.

This works. It’s simple and effective. What might come as a surprise, however, is a unique mental benefit as a result of this practice. It’s the one we all seek which few find.

A Reframe of Anxiety, Stress, and Depression

Let’s for a moment consider the big three ailments in the modern world: anxiety, stress, and depression. We are no strangers to these experiences. When navigating these waters with coaching clients, I have found the following reframe invaluable:

Consider these experiences as companions which you bring along for the ride.

See the experience of Anxiety as, for lack of a better term, really crappy company on a road trip. He’ll tell you all the ways in which things are going wrong, all the things we should worry about, and he talks incessantly. He is both annoying and ever-present.

The aim of a mindfulness practice like meditation is to create a space between you and that companion, in which his words become more distant, less pressing, and in that space, we find the quiet in which those thoughts no longer demand our attention. We find freedom from Anxiety through the space in which we observe Anxiety, releasing its hold.

Many of us don’t meditate. (I rarely do and I teach the stuff). This is fine because we can experience the same benefits through training the body.

Tax the Body To Empty The Mind

If you’ve been reading these emails the past few weeks, you probably know where this is going.

Amber and I have been getting in the cold plunge every morning since Thanksgiving. This has done wonders for my energy, focus, and resolve. But there has been an added benefit, more meaningful than the rest, that I did not expect.

Daily cold plunges have been the best antidote to stress I have ever found.

The physical discomfort of the cold is a rocket ship to the present, leaving those unwanted companions behind! It’s a crazy experience, but here me out:

The cold is so consuming of your attention, in which every inch of your skin is reporting to your brain discomfort, that this overrides the system. The companions we bring with us into the cold – our stress, our anxiety, our depression – disappear immediately. We crowd out the space through immediate experience, being propelled into this moment at a rate so fast, that we don’t have time to carry our baggage.

Your mind becomes free through the discomfort. Mental discomfort dissipates in proportion to physical discomfort. Reliably.

It's as if the survival software in our body kicks in, and we no longer have the capacity to entertain these “companions”. They get left behind because they are needed for survival. They get left behind because they impede survival.

By no longer having the ability to attend to them, they wither on the vine, and this reveals the great truth of mental health:

Often (not always, often) our mental unwellness is when our attention is hijacked by one or many of these passengers. We find ourselves unable to free ourselves of this unwanted companion, and we suffer. It’s an attention problem, not a mental health problem.

And here’s the good news: we have the capacity to create environments which are so consuming of our attention, that these unwanted companions lose their hold.

A Real World Example

We had an instructor fitness challenge at the academy over the holidays. The challenge was simple: how many workouts can you do in a 28-day period. We purchased a trophy, had a live scorecard with google sheets on our phones, and got to work.

I was hellbent on winning the competition, hitting my goal of 100 workouts in that 28-day period.

And you know what I noticed? I did not experience anxiety for 28 days. I did not experience stress for 28 days. On top of my daily responsibilities, I had started a new business and somehow had LESS stress.

How is this possible!?

Because these unwanted companions are fed by the energy we don’t use. By exhausting my body, I simply had nothing left to feed my stress. It starved and disappeared, amid one of the heaviest seasons of workload of my life.

It's really hard to be anxious and stressed when you are working out for 3-4 hours a day. I did not have the juice that my anxiety needed, so it left.

While that worked, it certainly isn’t sustainable. So what is?

Tax The Body Daily

If you exercise hard enough, if you experience enough struggle through your body, you free the mind. We all know this. We know how good we feel after a Jiu Jitsu or Yoga class, or after a hard lift.

The key, I believe, is to tax the body on a cyclical basis.

Pent up energy manifests as anxiety. Using the imagery of a gas tank, imagine that unused energy slowly fills the tank over time. When that energy becomes more than our reserves can store, it overflows in the form of mental discomfort.

By draining this tank daily through physical endeavor, the energy doesn’t overflow as stress.

In Closing

I’m starting to see a theme in life: Nothing is complicated, but everything is hard.

Mental health, I believe, follows this trend.

We have the capacity to find a home in the present moment free of discomfort. And we don’t have to become a meditation master to do it.

What do we have to become a master of? Voluntary Physical Struggle.

This is the fastest pathway for most of us to a better experience of being, and considering the culture we live in, is what our Being needs more than any other.

If we daily tax our body – whether through cold, heat, strength, or endurance – we leave it all on the field. What is it that we leave?

Our companions of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression.

I know this is overly simple, and the nuance of this argument is well-beyond the scope of an email designed to be read in 4 minutes.

… But it’s also true.

Every person that leaves the Jiu Jitsu academy each night is lighter than they walked in. The same holds true for every yoga studio. And the same holds true, perhaps even more so, with 3 minutes in cold water.

It turns out the way to leave these companions behind is to replace them with another: voluntary physical struggle. Make this companion your shadow, and those lesser companions will not find the light.

Wishing you good health, great struggle, and a sound mind,
Chris Matakas