Akrasia — Firewalking, J. Krishnamurti, and taking control of your life.
“If greed were as painful to you as the pinprick in your arm, you would instantly stop being greedy, you wouldn’t philosophize about it” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
I love this quote because it points to a great truth that is often overlooked — The reason we do stuff is mainly based on our feelings and emotions, not on intellect.
While that is all wise and good, I for one like it when there is something you can do with wisdom, in a practical sense you know, besides just sounding pretentious.
So, is there a way to make greed, or anything else as painful as a pinprick?
Because if there is, we can use it to gain control of our lives and start or stop and keep doing the things we have never been able to start at will!
I would say that there is, but in order to explain it, I first have to get a bit personal:
I can look back to a number of times when people said I was scrawny growing up. While I do remember that I never liked hearing it, I also kind of did not care too much about it. That was until I got into my teens, then I started caring a ton. The reason for this switch of caring was that two big realizations dawned on me during this period.
The first one was that people judge you based on your looks.
The second that and maybe even more profound was that girls were also people, and therefore included in the first realization.
So, when this kept happening after these two mindquakes, I was increasingly having a harder and harder time dealing with it.
Looking back, I now especially remember one distinct time that might have been the straw that broke my back, as the saying goes.
I was 17 at the time, measuring in at almost 190 cm as I am today, but back then weighing around 70kg. And as anyone who has ever seen a guy being 190cm tall and weighing 70kg would agree on, I was indeed scrawny, which, there is absolutely nothing wrong with, but it was still a fact. So there I was, spending the afternoon at the local gym in order to fix this, as I did every afternoon. This afternoon we were only three people at the gym. The two others were guys in their mid-thirties, both also regulars to the gym but I had never talked to any of them — as the strict hierarchy of any small and quite hardcore gym would imply. I was standing in front of the big mirror, doing my bicep curls, like any and every good 17-year-old guy you find at the gym does. Then, totally unprovoked and out of nowhere one of the other older and bigger guys says, looking at the other:
-Hey, let’s show the skeleton how to lift some real weights
This was followed by both laughing.
Being 17 and having the confidence of most 17-year-old males, i.e. none, this was hard to hear, very very hard to hear.
Fast forward about five years and I weighed about 95 kg, most of it being muscle as a result of having adopted going to the gym and eating like a horse as my main religion.
I was once again found myself at the gym, but this time in the company of a close friend, and he asks me:
-How do you manage to always be so motivated to go to the gym? What is your best tip?
My answer was said in a joking tone, but with complete honesty behind it.
-You learn to hate the look of your body — Said with an emphasis on hate.
As I hope everyone will understand, I did not bring that up to point to as my recipe for bringing about lasting change in your life. I will not be preaching real self-hate on Medium, even if it works very well, but as most reasonable people understand, it also leaves lasting psychological issues.
But I brought it up to highlight the engine behind why it worked for me, and why it works for most other people — We mainly act based on emotion, not intellect.
Hate, Fear, Sadness, and Disgust, these four and other seemingly negative emotions evoke such a strong response that they will overrule any logic, reason, or even totally replace the need for these. Think about it, what are the real reasons why people turn vegan, stop smoking, or start losing weight?
The underlying reasons that truly work are most often found in the category of the aforementioned negative emotions.
Examples could be:
Being exposed to the slaughter of a living animal — Turns vegan.
Having a loved one getting lung cancer — Stops smoking.
Someone makes fun of you for being too fat — Loses weight.
It is well known in psychology and psychiatry that a one-time exposure to a strong enough stimulus can completely change the course of one's life. Although as mentioned, the catalysts needed to evoke these emotions that work are often not desirable nor even ineducable in some cases (1), so it is hard and possibly unwanted to try to “hack” or curate your environment so as to induce these in any real sense.
But luckily there is another way to go about getting similar kinds of effects utilizing the same mechanisms, a way without risking the accumulation of lasting psychological scar tissue.
This is what Josh Waitzkin calls Firewalking — “The cultivation of a deep mental state where you channel the negative emotions related to the outcomes and create the connection between the two”.
While Josh is talking about the technique in the sense of training investors to be emotionally resilient for bear markets, which might be applicable to some reading this, the same technique can in my view be applied more broadly to behavioral change at large. You can find my semi-educated neuroscience-based guesswork as to how this might work in the footnotes (2).
I still have to preface even this by saying that while it is definitely a preferable approach to the sledgehammer of having a real traumatic experience, I suppose this still comes with the potential risk of putting neurotic people in a panic if done to the degree needed for it to work effectively.
On top of that, it takes considerable work to even start using it efficiently.
Josh mentions that in order for it to work to any effective degree, meditation and becoming attuned to your body is key. He also goes into the broader recommendation of having a lifestyle that is less reactive and becoming aware of how we fill space at an addictive level, all in order to become better at separating signal from the noise.
Which I completely agree, I would as far as to say that these are important do develop and cultivate for everyone, no matter if they are to be used for this purpose or not!
While it sounds quite simple, it is not easy. So since this takes considerable time to master I’ll also leave you with two steps along the way that can be used to train this skill and in and of themselves also prove useful towards the same means.
The first would be writing, to write about the possible negative outcomes if you keep doing the thing you want to stop doing, or the negative outcomes that it might entail if you do not start doing the thing you need to start doing. Really take your time, I would say you need at least an hour, and go into depths when you do it, make it vivid and real yet on the more extreme side as to evoke emotions.
Another technique that still seems effective would be a therapeutic method using mindfulness that I have thus far only seen used on smoking called “Mindful smoking” that has been applied successfully in clinically quitting smoking interventions. In this case, effectively all one has to do is to do the actual activity itself, and while doing it being mindful i.e. feeling the taste of the smoke and how it feels to breathe it in and so on. This also to some extent is more effective with at least some prior mindfulness training but should be usable of the bat even without it.
“So find out for yourself how corrupting, how destructive and poisonous these things are, and you will soon drop them; but if you merely say, “I must not” and go on as before, you are playing the hypocrite.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti
(1) Talking about this kind makes me want to write about psychedelics. These are also EXTREMELY potent agents for creating lasting psychological change, for example combating other forms of addictions. But they can also entail considerable risks and should be approached with caution, care, and deep respect.
(2) Here is a short neuroscience-based guesswork as to how it works: A key distinction to be made first for anyone that has listened to the podcast is that while still related, this is NOT the same thing as visualization. So just to be clear, while there is scientific literature backing the use of visualization techniques in sports, his Firewalking technique is much more esoteric and hardly something that will get backed by science at any time soon. This is not at all saying that it does not work, because both based on my experience and his, it does, and even very much so.
First in order to entangle the difference we have to understand what goes on in the case of normal visualization in sports. We know that the neuromuscular movement pattern is just that, both neuronal and muscular. So simply thinking about using a muscle activates the same neuronal pathways leading up to it as actually using it does. Another key distinction needing to be made here is that while this sounds cool it still does not seem to stimulate the actual muscle fiber themselves nor causing any of the mechanisms that are linked to hypertrophy, so you will not be able to visualize your way to a swell body, sorry.
In the Firewalking case, the neural basis would be very different, here we are not talking about an equally strong connection as in the first case and things also get more hypothetical. To make this easier for both myself and any possible poor person still reading this I will only be focusing on the amygdala, a key center linked to emotional processing in the brain. The neuronal connections going from the amygdala to the cortex, the region where we consciously form decisions, account for about 90% of the total “traffic” between the two, and it is well known that whatever goes on in the amygdala will influence the cortex, this is called the “somatic marker hypothesis”. Amygdala activation is also linked to the formation of so-called “Flashbulb memories”, that are not as impeccable when it comes to detail as they get sold to be, but still unquestionably strong in their salience and duration. These two are well-documented cases and form the basis for how emotionally strong events stick with us and influence us, but the training is trickier, as said only 10% of the connection goes the other way around, so kick-starting the amygdala based on thoughts alone is harder but as anyone having gotten themselves worked up and worried about a job interview, date or an upcoming Bungy jump would know, it is still very possible. So, since it is known that neuronal pathways get strengthened by use, something called “Hebb's principle” in neuroscience and since we know this activation is something we can evoke, and that evoking it can have profound and lasting consensuses it makes for an at least plausible case for this working out. Or as said before, I know it does, and Josh also attests to this, but that rant was simply me guessing my way through why it works for the more skeptically minded people.
