World-renowned intuitive guide and spiritual teacher Sonia Choquette has written about your three best superpowers:
- Meditation
- Imagination
- Intuition
These can be cultivated and developed with focus and attention. But therein lies the greatest superpower of all. It's the thing you have in your grasp right now. It's the one I am co-opting as you read these words with delight and anticipation. The greatest superpower at the heart of every great thinker and philosopher, every accomplished artist and musician, every spiritual guide is this: To be able to sit alone with boredom. What?!? This seems a bit too cute there, mister High-Performance coach, but it's true, I believe. Hear me out.
There is a war going on out there. The turf is within your head and your heart. In your brain and your soul, there are billions of messages that come your way every second. And we allow ourselves to be drawn into them, around them, and by them. They cajole us and beckon us to solve every problem we don't have. This superpower is all about what you ignore. The incessant attraction of the moth to a billion flames is the new normal. Ignoring them takes a lot of skill. I Implore you to develop this skill today.
What is the cost if you lose this war? You might have nomophobia (no mobile phone phobia). Perhaps you contract Phantom Pocket Vibration Syndrome. You can figure that one out. The actual cost is this. Distraction costs businesses $650 billion a year in lost productivity in the US alone. Of course, the productivity gains from using tech are profound, but more than this is the loss we all feel personally.
As I recently learned while getting some excellent training from the Flow Research Collective (FRC), there was a history of modern weapons with medieval strategy in World War I. The result was a devastatingly effective and brutal tragedy. Today we have modern marketing weapons we carry in our pockets with which our ancient evolved brains must contend. We cannot thrive with these levels of contemporary distractions. But there is hope.
Mihaly Czikszentmihaly (Me-high Chick-sent-me-high) wrote that what we strive for in our pursuit of a meaningful life is to create a higher quality life experience. It's that pursuit of happiness thing that's in the Declaration of Independence. Well, what is happiness then? It's an optimal life experience. And what is that? It's enjoyment over pleasure. It's delayed gratification, long luxurious states of creative growth through optimized flow manifested by making attention a precious asset.
And how do we get to a state of heightened attention in our mind candy infested world? That's the rub. The first thing is to understand what we must fight. In a small part of the brain behind the frontal cortex lives the Nucleus Accumbens. This area utilizes the neurotransmitter Dopamine. The excretion of Dopamine creates a sense of pleasure and satisfaction. We are constantly fed Dopamine with high efficiency at high doses with modern tech. For example, it took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users. It took Angry Birds 35 days. Why? Because Angry Birds is accessible visible and audible mind candy. Once we get a taste, we can't get enough.
It's likely you or someone you know needs a Dopamine Detox. When we have access to high-stimulation, low value, easy to initiate experiences like Angry Birds, we find it hard to engage in low stimulation, high value, hard to trigger experiences like practicing a challenging musical arrangement. So what can we do? We embrace boredom. Here are a few activities to consider:
- Sit in silence.
- Stare at a wall.
- Arrive early to every appointment and sit quietly in observation.
- Do not pick up your phone if your dinner guest leaves the table.
- Don't check your phone while waiting in line.
- Fast from eating, speaking, sexual activity. This stuff is not easy! But as the Stoics implied, deliberately seek out some form of hardship, physical or mental, to encourage the strengthening of your resilience in the face of adversity and to enhance your general sense of gratitude for what you already have in your life. I like to call it, Intentional Discomfort. Here are some others:
- Camping
- Cold Showers
- Running far and lifting heavy.
- Abstain from a vice
Well, once we reach the point of a list within a list, I know I've probably taken this as far as it can go for this week. I want to plant two other seeds: Multitasking does not work. Focus on uni-tasking. Finally, develop a Monk Like approach to impulse control.
There is so much more to go into in these areas. Would you like to talk more about this stuff one-on-one? Let's do it! Pick a time from my online calendar, and let's explore some of this together.
More to come.
