In the winter of 2022, I had just started working on my new book. The idea for it began with a small scribble: “What does it mean to stay strong and endure when everything is always changing, including us?” My goal was to research, report, and wrestle with this question, hopefully coming up with an answer.

In the early stages of that wrestling, on a chilly morning that February, I awoke to a phone full of text messages from colleagues and friends: Have you seen the Nils van der Poel document?

Shortly after winning two gold medals and posting a world record at the winter Olympics in Beijing, the 25-year-old Swedish speed skater Nils van der Poel published a 62-page PDF entitled “” referring to the two events he had just won.

I was curious about why so many people were texting me. I am not a speed skater, and I don’t follow the sport closely. But within a few minutes of downloading the PDF, my question was answered. The first page of this so-called “training” document was entirely blank except for a single quote, from the psychologist Carl Jung: “It seems that all things true change and only that which changes remains true.”

Yes, the PDF contained specific workouts and training protocols, but it also contained a meditation on the pursuit, meaning, and value of excellence—trial, tribulations, and ongoing change included. And that, dear readers, is the content I am here for.

Van der Poel repeatedly mentioned how he actively worked to develop his identity beyond just speed skating. He had other hobbies. He took weekends completely off to hang out with friends, even if that meant eating pizza and drinking beer, which is essentially blasphemy for an Olympic-level athlete.

But rather than curtailing his performance on the ice, these other activities propelled him forward. “Creating meaning and value in life outside of the speed skating oval helped me get through tough training periods,” he wrote. “I knew who I was and I was not just a speed skater.” Diversifying the sources of meaning in his life, he continues, helped van der Poel “face the horrific fact that only one athlete will win the competition and all the others will lose; that injury or sickness can sabotage four years of work.”

Showing maturity and wisdom beyond his years, he recognized that everything always changes: he could succumb to injury, he can’t control how his competitors skate, and one day he’d have to retire and move on from the sport altogether. Whereas so many athletes fuse their identity to their sport—and suffer all manner of performance anxiety and retirement or injury-induced depression as a result—van der Poel made himself more resilient and durable in the face of life’s inevitable flux. The upshot was more freedom and joy.

Once he opened up to change, he wrote, “there was no longer anything to fear.”

It’s not that van der Poel didn’t care. He trained upwards of seven hours per day, Monday through Friday. He pushed himself to the limit and then some, persisting through the physical discomfort that comes with being a long-course speedskater. He literally became the best in the world. And yet he maintained his strength by being flexible. What allowed him to lay it all on the line was the fact that he knew he’d be OK if—when—things changed. Because they always do.

Van der Poel epitomizes a quality I’ve seen across hundreds of interviews with happy, healthy, and high-performing athletes. It’s also something that comes up repeatedly in the literature on resilience and longevity. The goal is not to be stable and therefore never change. Nor is the goal to sacrifice all sense of stability, passively surrendering yourself to the whims of life. Instead the goal is to meet somewhere in the middle, to be both grounded and accepting of change. I’ve come to call this quality rugged flexibility.

To be rugged is to be tough, determined, and durable. To be flexible is to adapt and bend easily without breaking. Put them together and the result is a gritty endurance, an anti-fragility that not only withstands change but can thrive in its midst. Rugged flexibility is the quality you need to become a master of change, to successfully navigate the impermanence and chaos that accompanies even the most average human existence.

Unlike old ways of thinking about change, rugged flexibility conceives of change not as an acute event that happens to you, but rather as a constant of life, a cycle in which you are an ongoing participant. Via this shift, you come to view change and disorder—for athletes, this includes the three inevitable horsemen: injury, illness, and aging—as natural occurrences that you are in conversation with, as an ongoing dance between you and your circumstances. The more skilled you become at this dance, the happier, healthier, and stronger you will be.

You may not be as dominant at your chosen sport as van der Poel, but it doesn’t make becoming a rugged and flexible athlete any less important. This mindset (and its habits and practices) are crucial for a long and fulfilling active life.

Here are six guiding principles for becoming a more rugged and flexible athlete so that you can excel and stay strong amidst continuous change.

Understand, Accept, and Embrace Change

Change is inherent to a long career as an athlete: examples include injury, aging, rule adjustments, and new technology. There will be wonderful periods of flow and frustrating periods of friction. This is just how it goes. You do not have to like it, but work to embrace it. The more you resist change the more distress you experience. The more you open up to change the better you feel and perform. Plus, it’s not like you have any choice in the matter. Change is inevitable.

Adopt a “Being” Orientation

The 20th-century psychologist Erich Fromm distinguished between being and having orientations. When you operate in having mode, you define yourself by what you have. This makes you fragile because those objects, achievements, and attributes can be taken away at any given time. “Because I can lose what I have, I am necessarily constantly worried that I shall lose what I have
 I am afraid of freedom, growth, change, and the unknown,” Fromm in his 1976 book, To Have or To Be. When you operate in being mode, you identify with a deeper part of yourself: your essence and core values, your ability to respond to circumstances, whatever they might be. A having orientation is rigid, static, and intolerant to change. A being orientation is dynamic and open to it. Make being a lifelong athlete more important than having any particular achievement.

When You Face Setbacks, Practice Tragic Optimism

Tragic optimism is a term psychologists use for a mindset that recognizes and accepts that change is inevitable and so is the pain, disappointment, and surprise that often accompany it. Tragic optimism doesn’t ask that you repress or bury negative emotions, but that you decide you’ll feel whatever it is you’re feeling and trudge forward nonetheless. Tragic optimism says: “Like it or not, this is what is happening right now; I am going to focus on what I can control, do the best I can, and come out the other side.”

Diversify Your Sense of Self—Within Sport and Beyond

Be like Nils van der Poel: develop multiple components of yourself as an athlete, and be sure to have interests and sources of meaning beyond sport altogether. This not only helps your performance now, shifting you from playing to win versus playing not to lose, but it also makes managing injuries and transitions easier.

Respond not React

Reacting is immediate and rash. Responding is considerate and deliberate. When faced with setbacks, you want to respond as thoughtfully as you can. A helpful heuristic is the 4P’s: pause and take a deep breath, process what is happening, plan how you want to go forward, proceed and adjust as you go.

Play the Infinite Game

In finite games, the point is to accomplish a set goal. In infinite games, the point is to keep playing. Running a marathon in under three hours is a finite game. Continuing to run and staying involved in the sport for as long as you live is an infinite one. Both are worthy goals, but working through the challenges of the former is a lot easier when you keep the perspective of the latter. The broader that perspective, the better. There is only one way to win a race or summit a mountain, but there are infinite ways to be a lifelong athlete.

This article was adapted from Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything is Changing, Including YouÌęby Brad Stulberg and reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2023.ÌęIt is available atÌę,Ìę,ÌęÌęand everywhere else books are sold.

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In the self-help, biohacking, and personal improvement crowds, people often turn their entire lives into work, all in the name of getting better and living forever. I know some who get so into optimization, recovery-tracking, cold-exposure, and nutrient timing that every meal and shower—and even sleep—becomes something to excel at for a future goal.

No wonder everyone is so exhausted.

If the wellness industrial complex of the last decade was focused on “self-care” via lotions, potions, and pills, then this decade is shaping up to be one that champions “optimization” via , , , , and .

This new wave of wellness rests on the complexification of everything using jargon and scientific terms (or in some cases, simply scientific sounding terms) to describe habits and practices that promise a version of physical, and something spiritual, enlightenment. But there’s a difference between an activity sounding super important, versus an activity actually being super important. Just because you can measure something, doesn’t mean it matters.

Consider the much-hyped between waking up, submerging oneself in ungodly cold water, and “ feel-good molecules like dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.” It very well may be the case that freezing water is useful but you know what else likely has an effect similar to those same neurochemicals? Having a coffee and taking a morning poop. There are myriad activities—a long walk out of doors, deadlifting, gardening, dancing, swimming, watching a sunset—that make us feel good, many of which are easier, more accessible, more enjoyable, and more beneficial than a cold plunge.

Might some new-wave wellness techniques work for certain people in certain situations? Absolutely. But I have three main concerns:

First, for those trying to understand health, wellness, and longevity, the conversation will get flooded with so much static that it will be impossible for laypeople to separate fact from fiction and hype from efficacy. If everything sounds fancy, scientific, authoritative, and like it is effective than how can people discern what actually works? The zone gets flooded with crap.

Second, many new-wave wellness habits and practices are actually quite hard to sustain. You’ve got to eat specific nutrients during specific hours, wake-up and start an elaborate morning routine, and so on. Yes, we should strive to be healthy and excellent and all that, but sometimes the key to adult life—especially if you’ve got kids—is that you’ve just got to order a pizza and move on. It’s better to be consistently good enough than it is to try and be perfect and consistently fail.

Third, by complexifying everything in health, wellness, and longevity we may make it harder to do the activities that matter most. Complexity is a way to avoid facing the reality that what really matters for most things in life is simply showing up and doing the work. The more complex you make something, the harder it is to stick with it. Complexity gives you excuses, ways out, and endless options for switching things up all the time. Complexity is procrastination’s best friend.

What Actually Matters for Health, Wellness, and Longevity (and How to Stick With It)

What we know genuinely matters for health, wellness, and longevity, based on decades and decades of evidence, is actually quite simple.

According to published in 2011 in the American Journal of Health Promotion, adopting basic healthy lifestyle behaviors can increase lifespan by a whopping 11 years! A 2016 published in the British Medical Journal found that the same behaviors—physical activity, avoiding highly-processed foods, not smoking, and limited alcohol consumption—reduce all-cause mortality, or someone’s chance of dying at any given time, by 61 percent. I’ll summarize the key behaviors—the stuff that actually works—shortly.

For each, of the following, keep in mind three overarching principles. First, do the thing as best you can. Second, don’t freak out if you can’t do the thing. Third, don’t let not doing the thing because something came up be an excuse for forgetting about the thing altogether.

Let’s take sleep as an example. Sleep really is that important. You will get no argument from me on that. I am right there with the optimizers on the value of sleep. But it is also true that you can have poor sleep for an extended period of time and not suffer any detrimental long-term consequences. We know this because shows that people who have children—the ultimate sleep disrupters—live longer than those who don’t. Not sleeping for a period of time still sucks and makes most people, myself included, feel like crap, but it is not going to kill you.

Now, without further ado, here are health and wellness principles that will get you 99 percent—if not all—the way there.

Move Your Body Regularly

If exercise could be bottled up and sold as a drug, it would be a billion-dollar business. Decades of studies show that just 30 minutes of moderate to intense daily physical activity lowers your risk for physiological diseases (ÌęČčČÔ»ćÌę), as well as psychological ones (ÌęČčČÔ»ćÌę).ÌęThere doesn’t need to be anything special about it. You want most days to be moderately hard (you can still have a conversation while you’re doing it) and every once in a while it’s beneficial to increase the intensity beyond that.

Avoid Highly Processed Foods

Avoid highly-processed foods when cost and time allow. “Foods that undergo ultra-processing tend to see much of their nutritional bounty stripped from them,” says Yoni Freedhoff, an Ottawa-based doctor and author ofÌę. Another reason to avoid processed foods is related to energy density, or calories per gram of food. “Generally speaking, ultra-processed foods are much higher in energy density than foods made from fresh, whole ingredients,” says Freedhoff, “which isn’t great for maintaining a healthy weight.”

Build Community

A mounting body of evidence is revealing that hanging out with friends and family doesn’t just make you feel good in the moment—it’s also good for long-term health. Social connections are associated with reduced levels of the stress hormoneÌę, improvedÌę,ÌęÌęand stroke,Ìę, lessened systemicÌę, andÌę.

Sleep at Night

Regardless of what the biohackers may tell you, you simply cannot nap or intermittently sleep your way to optimal health and functioning. It’s only after you’ve been sleeping for at least an hour that anabolic hormones like testosterone and human growth hormone—both of which are critical to health and physical function—. What’s more,ÌęÌępublished in the journalÌęSleep showed that with each additional 90-minute cycle of deep sleep, you receive even more of these hormones.

Don’t Smoke (Get Helping Quitting If You Do)

Smoking isÌę, as well as heart disease, dementia, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. According to the American Cancer Association,ÌęÌęin the United States, killing more people than alcohol, car accidents, HIV, guns, and illegal drugs combined.

Don’t Drink Much, If at All

Like smoking, excessive alcohol use isÌę, such as liver cirrhosis, throat cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Drinking too much also impairs sleep and daily function. While some older studies have found that limited drinking—one drink per day for women and up to two for men—carries minimal risk, the most shows that when it comes to alcohol, less is more and none is best.

Brad Stulberg (@) coaches on performance and well-being and is a contributing editor to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. He is the bestselling author ofÌęÌęand cofounder ofÌę.

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Let’s start with a simple question: If you are hungry, distracted, and rushed, and someone places two bowls in front of you, one of brown rice and baked potatoes, the other of peanut M&Ms and Swedish fish, which would you choose? If you’re like most people, you’d probably pick the candy.

This is by no fault of your own. The candy is engineered—from the flavor to the texture to the bright colors—to appeal to your brain far more than the brown rice and potatoes. For over 99 percent of our species’ history, we lived amid scarcity. Thus you, dear reader, like me and everyone else, evolved to seek out high-reward, low-energy-needed-to-acquire goods. This strategy worked well for hundreds of thousands of years. But now, in modern times of abundance, it’s backfiring. Like so many things, what works, works—.

The above analogy of brown rice and potatoes versus peanut M&Ms and Swedish fish is one that I used in my book, , to discuss the challenge of choosing deep-focus work and connection over superficial distraction and stimulation. But since the book came out late last year, I’ve realized that the analogy extends far beyond just that.

In many areas of our lives, things that are not as satisfying now tend to be more satisfying and leave us better off later. If living a good life in ancient times of scarcity was about seeking fast-reward, lower-effort goods, then living a good life in modern times of abundance is about seeking slow-reward, higher-effort goods. Scientists call this the evolutionary mismatch—when strategies that were once adaptive to a species become harmful.

A 1995 published in theÌęEuropean Journal of Clinical Nutrition evaluated the diet of most people in developed countries. The lead researcher, Susanna Holt, concluded that “the results therefore suggest that ‘modern’ Western diets which are based on highly palatable, low fiber convenience foods are likely to be much less satiating than the diets of the past.” I suspect this has only gotten worse in the past 25 years. Today many people focus on hustle culture, so-called optimization, and short-term profits, leaving less time, energy, and incentive for producing and consuming more nourishing foods. And it is no longer just the food manufacturers and engineers who are taking advantage of our hardwiring, but also social media designers, cable news channels, and even politicians. Cheap and superficial hits of feel-good vibes are everywhere in our society.

Here are just a few examples of the trade-off between brown rice and potatoes versus peanut M&Ms and Swedish fish that most people face every day: junk food versus nourishing food; deep-focus work versus distraction; scrolling social media versus reading a book; porn versus intimate relationships; retweets and likes versus building a strong community; heavy drinking versus abstinence (or at least drinking in moderation); day-trading speculative assets versus slow and steady investing in stable funds; immediate and cheap consumption of nearly everything versus living on a habitable planet.

What all of these examples have in common is that the former require less —the initial self-discipline and oomph to start something—and feel good immediately but crappy later on. The latter require more work up front and don’t feel great immediately but feel wonderful in the future.

Once you become aware of the , you start to see it everywhere. Overcoming it is key to being grounded in an increasingly frantic and frenetic world.

The challenge is choosing the brown-rice-and-potato activities when doing so requires overriding basic biology that has evolved over millennia. This is compounded by the fact that Western economies are set up for short-term profits, not long-term fulfillment. As a result, we are bombarded with products, services, and marketing aimed directly at the part of our brains that crave immediate-reward products, services, and experiences. Consumerism feeds off the evolutionary mismatch and traps us in a cycle of seeking shallow pleasures that have short half-lives. ThisÌęmay be good for the bottom line but not for our health and happiness.

The big question, of course, is what can we do about it? How can we live a good, healthy, and wholesome life amid so much junk and candy?

Simply being aware of the evolutionary mismatch is a good start. When you can identify and name something, it gives you a certain over it. Next, you can take an inventory of your own work and life and begin sorting activities into the brown-rice-and-potato bucket or the peanut-M&M-and-Swedish-fish bucket. The goal is to increasingly shift your time and energy into more nourishing activities.

Another important thing to be mindful of is that in-the-moment willpower is rarely, if ever, enough. Trying to choose brown rice over peanut M&Ms is especially challenging if you’ve always got an open bag of peanut M&Ms in your pocket—and for many of us, an app-loaded smartphone is just that. Rather than try to overcome the evolutionary mismatch in the moment, it’s better to anticipate it and avoid putting your brain in the positionÌęto consume the equivalent of candy all day. The more you can design your environment to favor brown-rice-and-potato activities, the better. (This is precisely why I have no social media apps or internet on my phone. This simple change—though quite hard at first—has had an enormous impact on my life.)

Unfortunately, choosing brown rice and potatoes over candy is made even harder because evolution also programmed us to experience fear of missing out (FOMO), especially in social situations.

Thousands of years ago, FOMO worked to our advantage, ensuring we’d always be in the know and never miss an opportunity to share a meal with our tribe or hear about lurking predators or a warring faction nearby. Now, however, FOMO keeps us glued to our screens, addicted to news, relevance, retweets, and likes—all of which, when consumed heavily, have little (if any) marginal benefit and cause anxiety and restlessness.

Fortunately, the brain is good at learning. Once we start to shift more of our time and energy toward brown-rice-and-potato activities, especially if we can make it through the first month or so, we start to feel pretty good. This effect is compounded if we undertake the journey with others, perhaps by agreeing as a group to limit social media consumption or by organizing a group hike. This is a big part of why groups like Alcoholics Anonymous are so . The mix of gradually feeling good and socially supported—which counters FOMO—makes it easier to overcome the evolutionary mismatches that are all around us. Just as doing shallow and superficial activities can create a vicious cycle, doing deep and meaningful activities can create a virtuous one.

Brad Stulberg (@) coaches on performance and well-being and writes °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s Do It Better column. He is the bestselling author of and cofounder of .

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Since the publication of my bookÌę—which in many ways is a coda to what I’ve been writing about here for the past five years—I’ve spoken with all kinds of people, from elite athletes to creatives to traditional workplace professionals, on what it means to practice groundedness. What follows are 16 common lessons that have come out of our conversations. Taken together, these lessons provide a recipe for attaining more inner strength and stability in a frantic and frenetic world. And as we come to the end of 2021, these lessons could help you in the new year and beyond.

Addiction to Achievement Is RealÌę

In professional life, as in sport, it’s important to create boundaries so you can rest and recover from hard efforts. It’s easy to tell yourself that your work helps or inspires others, so therefore it’s OK to go all in, all the time.ÌęEventually, this mindset ends in burnout.

Wherever You Are, the Goalpost Is Always Ten Yards Down the Field

If you believe that, If I just do this or just accomplish that, then I’ll arrive, you are in for trouble. There is no arriving. The human brain didn’t evolve to embrace this concept. Researchers call this the arrival fallacy: we think that some external goal will fulfill us, but it’s this very thinking that gets in the way of our fulfillment. Instead, focus on enjoying the process and being where you are.

Define Your Own Success

Everyone wants to be successful, but few people take the time and energy to define the success they want. As a result, they spend most—if not all—of their lives chasing the image of success superimposed on them by society. Define your core values, or the attributes you care most about, and then craft a life around them. That is success.

Mood Follows ActionÌę

You can’t control your thoughts or feelings, but you can control your actions. Here is a brief summary of what clinical psychologists call behavioral activation: you don’t need to feel good to get going; you need to get going to give yourself a chance to feel good.

Know the Difference Between Rote Productivity and Productive Activity

The former results in doing stuff for the sake of doing stuff, like chasing acute results and striving to tick off things from a to-do list. The latter requires deep concentration, care, and pacing. Productive activity may lack the constant dopamine hits of small accomplishments, but it delivers long-term satisfaction.

Don’t Mistake Excitement for Ease

Excitement feels a lot more like anxiety than it does true happiness or fulfillment. Ease is a calmer and more restful feeling; it’s like a place where you’d want to stay. Some excitement is great. Too much is not. Don’t be an excitement junkie.

Making Things Happen Works—Until It Gets in Your Way

At a certain point on nearly all big projects, you’ve got to have the confidence and faith to step back and let things unfold on their own. This is the wild paradox of peak performance: letting go and releasing from trying so hard is usually what helps you bust barriers.

Accept Where You Are to Get Where You Want to Go

Acceptance is not passive resignation; it’s starting where you are. Not where you want to be. Not where you think you should be. Not where others think you should be. But where you are. It’s only when you start where you are that you can get where you want to go.

Marry Self-Discipline with Self-Compassion

If you are a hard-charging, Type A “pusher,” that’s great! But you’d better work on being kind to yourself, too. It’s hard to be a human. It’s hard to care deeply. You’ve got to learn to love yourself and create space for your pain and loss and defeats. Otherwise, pushing hard won’t be very sustainable, let alone enjoyable.

Don’t Forget to Experience Joy

This sounds self-evident, but it’s not. The risk of being laser focused on progress and growth is that you get so caught up in where you’re going, you forget to relish moments along the way. As the author Robert Pirsig wrote, “The only Zen youÌęfind on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”

Stop Short by One Rep, One Meeting, One Hour, and So On

Stopping short allows you to pick up where you left off. This kind of restraint and patience is the key to moving faster in the long term. Why? Because consistency compounds. Small steps taken regularly lead to big gains.

Learn to Differentiate Between Habits and Practice

Habits are things you do without thinking. A practice means approaching an endeavor deliberately, with care, and with the intention to continually grow. Both can be great. But they are unique, and the latter tends to go deeper and provide more fulfillment.

Simple Does Not Mean Easy, but It Usually Means Effective

All kinds of so-called performance findings these days come dressed up in fancy words and algorithms and endless complexity. But in most disciplines, if you want to make consistent progress and stay grounded, it’s the simple stuff that works.

What Feels Good in the Short Run Can Contradict What’s Good in the Long Run

Examples include consuming junk food versus nourishing food, consuming junk content versus nourishing content, posting online versus cultivating real community. Pause and think about this more often.

Be Patient to Get There Faster

To make a meaningful difference in whatever work you do, you must persist long enough to break through inevitable plateaus. Not seeing visible progress doesn’t mean what you’re doing isn’t having an effect. You can’t crack a stone on the 30th pound without first pounding it 29 times.Ìę

Presence Is the Key to Happiness

But being present isn’t just about your brain. It is also about your surroundings. If you want to be more present, you need to intentionally design your life in ways that facilitate it. There is a reason monks live in monasteries. The more crap you can cut from your life, the more present you can be for the good stuff.

Brad Stulberg () coaches on performance and well-being and writesÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’sÌęDo It BetterÌęcolumn. He is the bestselling author of andÌęÌęand cofounder ofÌę.

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Over the past few years, I’ve repeatedly been frustrated by the moral failures and out-of-touch actions of politicians, major business executives, and other conventionally “successful” knowledge workers. Certainly not all, but many of these people have repeatedly let us down, among them Microsoft founder , former , Theranos CEO , and of course former President Donald Trump.

After one recent letdown, searching for some solace, I texted a longtime mentor of mine, someone who is old and wise. Here’s the killer part of our conversation:

Me: I can’t believe there are so many egotistical jerks. Why do all these people just completely lose touch? What is it about money or power or status that turns you into an asshole? Is it unavoidable?

Mike: I am getting more weight equipment.

We didn’t talk much further on the topic, because we didn’t need to. I immediately knew, and later confirmed, exactly what Mike was saying: lifting weights helps keep you from becoming an egotistical jerk. Lifting weights helps keep you grounded.

Weight lifting, of course, is just one of many activities in the real world that can help keep you from losing touch with reality. Cycling, swimming, gardening, hiking, and climbing are all just a few other examples of activities that can help you stay grounded.

In researching and reporting my new book, , I came across a common theme among peak performers who are also grounded: they regularly do real things that are hard, and as a result, they regularly practice humility and gain deep and lasting fulfillment.

When the barbell drops, it drops. When you want to run under three hours for the marathon but go 3:04, the result is right in your face. It is hard to get out of touch with the world—or to become full of yourself—when you are working hard on something that is concrete, and when your successes are earned and your failures cannot be rationalized by corporate mumbo jumbo or social media hot takes. Doing real things in the world provides gravity, both literally and figuratively.

Confidence Through Mastery

Throwing yourself into real activities not only helps keep you grounded, but it is also good for your brain. Pursuing mastery, a kind of gradual progress where tangible results can be traced back to oneself, increases self-reliance and . Decades of research in a field called demonstrates that mastery is a core input to mental health, overall well-being, and life satisfaction.

Doing real things also affords you the experience of living in a smaller and simpler world, if only for a few hours. Compared to the complex, frantic, frenetic, and interconnected digital environment that occupies so much of a knowledge worker’s life these days, a squat workout, mountain-bike ride, or trail run are a lot more manageable. In these pursuits, you are the main factor that determines the outcome, and whatever obstacles you face are directly in front of you.

This is a lot closer to how our species evolved. It’s no wonder these sorts of activities, though often objectively harder than sitting at a desk, in many ways feel so much easier.

Satisfaction Through Competence

In the past I’ve referenced the work of the philosopher Matthew Crawford, who that “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics,” most knowledge-economy jobs suffer from “a lack of objective standards.”

Ask a white-collar professional what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they may need at least a few minutes to explain the answer, accounting for politics, the opinion of their boss, the mood of a client, the role of their teammates, and a variety of other external factors.

Ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next race, or on their next deadlift, however, and the answer becomes much simpler.

“The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence has been known to make a man quiet and easy,” writes Crawford, who in 2001 quit his job in academia to become a mechanic. “It seems to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He simply points: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”

Keeping Cool

Perhaps my most humble client, let’s call him Rob, is an executive at a large professional-services firm. I’ve been working with Rob for about four years now. He is supremely understated, at times to a fault. During corporate fire drills, when his colleagues are freaking out, he shows calm and equanimity.

Rob also is a diehard woodworker.

This is not a coincidence. When you are building tables in your basement, you are going to get humbled over and over and over again. Tables either stand or they don’t. And you can’t just use your power or money or relevance or fame or anger to make a shoddy table stand. Instead, you’ve got to stay calm as you adjust the table and work toward a solution.

I’ve got clients who are ultrarunners, and they are much the same.

Make no mistake, nothing I’ve written above is a cure-all. There are still people who do real things in the world and yet are still miserable, egotistical jerks. But it seems increasingly likely that one powerful way to stay in touch with reality, especially as you rise, is to stay in touch—quite literally—with reality.

Not by spending all day tweeting, or by attending Zoom calls, or by joining fancy board meetings. Not by endlessly refreshing your bank account or stocks. But rather by doing actual, real, hard things in the world.

Brad Stulberg () coaches on performance and well-being and writesÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’sÌęDo It BetterÌęcolumn. He is the bestselling author of andÌęÌęand cofounder ofÌę.

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Welcome to our monthly column where Do It Better columnist Brad Stulberg answers our members’ most puzzling mental health questions. Have a burning question of your own? Become an to ask him a one of your own.

Q: Is running or hiking or climbing, or any of the other sports we do the same as meditation?Ìę

Just the other day, I was out in the Blue Ridge mountains with my German Shepherd, Ananda. It was nearing peak foliage season here in Asheville, North Carolina, which meany magnificent colors and cool weather. It was a mid-week, mid-day outing so the trails were empty: it was only me, the dog, the low-lying forest, and the mountains up above. For a moment, maybe even a precious few, I was gifted refuge from all the tumult of launching my . My mind quieted down and I entered a simple state of being. It was wonderful. It was not, however, meditation—at least I don’t think so.

This is a very common question I get in my , and while it can be asked in the context of any kind of physical activity—of any kind of anything, really—to me it has a clear answer: Running is running. Hiking is hiking. Climbing is climbing. And meditation is meditation.

That’s not to say that these pursuits don’t share commonalities. They do. There are two big ones in particular.

1. They can all give way to your mind going quiet and you entering a flow-like state in which your ego, or sense of a separate self, dissolves as you merge with your activity and surroundings. There is no more separate you as a runner or hiker; there is just running or hiking happening. There is no separate you as a climber; there is just climbing happening. There is no separate you taking breaths; there is just breathing happening.
2. All these pursuits also offer challenges or discomforts that can help you learn to separate what is happening from your awareness of what is happening. In running or hiking, you learn to observe your legs burning as they fatigue without getting caught up in the sensation. In climbing, you learn to observe your grip fatiguing without freaking out about it. In meditation, you learn to observe all kinds of thoughts and feelings and urges without engaging in them.

Both commonalities are highly beneficial. In the first, you experience a peaceful and calming union with the universe. In the second, you learn that you are so much more than any one thought or feeling; you teach yourself to become the ocean that holds all kinds of the waves.

Part of what separates meditation from these other activities, though, is that in most forms of meditation you don’t get help from any external activity. It’s just you and your breath. Many people experience this as boring and tedious and thus become impatient and restless: great! The practice is sitting with those feelings. Other people struggle without having an explicit goal, somewhere to go. Great! The practice is to sit with that struggle. There is nothing to distract you from the self. You are truly alone. Learning to sit still and be alone and hold whatever comes your way is a form of personal growth and strength that is distinct from physical activity; just like physical activity has its own value for your being that is distinct from meditation.

Both meditation and physical activity are great. That should be enough in and of itself. There is no need to compare the two.

Brad Stulberg () coaches on performance and well-being and writesÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’sÌęDo It BetterÌęcolumn. He is the bestselling author of andÌęÌęand co-founder ofÌę.

The post Is Exercising șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the Same as Meditation? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

But I don’t have time. It’s the most common excuse you hear for not engaging in regular physical activity. While this may be true if you are working multiple jobs and struggling to meet your basic needs, it is simply not true for the majority of people. A by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked a diverse sample of 32,000 Americans about the use of their time. It found that, on average, Americans have more than 4.5 hours per day of leisure time, the vast majority of which is spent sitting in front of screens. This finding was consistent across income, age, gender, and ethnicity.

Even if you insist that you are too busy to move your body because you work an important and intense job, it’s worth re-framing physical activity not as something you do separate from your job, but rather as an integral part of it.

Why? Research shows that regular physical activity increases creative thinking and problem solving, improves mood and emotional control, enhances focus and energy, and promotes quality sleep. There is no line of work that doesn’t benefit from these attributes.

Consider from Stanford University that asked participants to engage in mentally fatiguing tasks. One group took a break during which the participants sat and stared at a wall. Another group went on a six- to 15-minute walk during their break. Afterwards, both groups were tested for their creative insight. The participants who took the short walk demonstrated a 40-percent increase in creative insight over those who didn’t. And this effect isn’t confined to adults. Other have found that when youth engage in regular physical activity, their academic performance improves.

In addition to facilitating your brain’s performance today, physical activity simultaneously helps your brain . Movement promotes long-term brain development by triggering the release of a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is like fertilizer for the brain. It fuels a process called neurogenesis, which spawns new brain cells and makes connections between them. The link between physical activity and BDNF helps explain mounting evidence that regular movement prevents and delays cognitive decline. To date, there is prevention for neurodegenerative diseases like ŽĄ±ôłúłó±đŸ±łŸ±đ°ù’s and Parkinson’s than regular physical activity. In short, if movement could be bottled and sold in pill form it would be a trillion-dollar blockbuster drug—used for everything from enhancing performance to improving well-being to preventing and treating disease.

It is for all these reasons that I prioritize physical activity in , and why I made it a pillar of . Once my clients begin to view physical activity as an essential part of their jobs, they are more likely to make it a regular part of their lives. This shift in mindset provides them with both the permission and motivation to spend time moving their bodies. They go from seeing movement as something that is purely self-serving to seeing it as indispensable.

Shifting your mindset to view exercise as a part of your job is a good start, but you still need to execute on it. There are two main ways to integrate movement into your life: You can set aside a protected time for physical activity such as walking, running, cycling, swimming, gardening, climbing, dancing, going to the gym, or yoga. Or you can build movement into the regular flow of your day.

At a minimum, you want to be consistent about at least one of these ways. Ideally, you’ll use a combination of both. When it comes to movement, my golden rule is:ÌęMove your body often, sometimes hard; every bit counts.

The following practices will help you to integrate movement into your day and also learn how to get the most out of formal periods of exercise.

Practice: Move Throughout the Day

That we even need to “exercise” is a recent phenomenon. Before the industrial revolution, we worked on farms. And before that we were hunters and gatherers. If you think of the human species up to this point as existing over a 24-hour, it wasn’t until 11:58 p.m. that we stopped moving regularly. We’d be wise to get back to the basics of our species, even if only in small spurts throughout the day.

For a 2016 published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, researchers from the University of Colorado and the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute set out to test the effects of a variety of movement protocols on office workers. The participants came to a lab in which they simulated a six-hour workday under three conditions: During one visit, participants sat for the entire six hours other than to take bathroom breaks. During another visit, the participants went on a 30-minute walk to begin the day, and then sat for five and a half hours consecutively (again, getting up only for bathroom breaks). In the third visit, participants walked for five minutes every hour, in essence repeating cycles of sitting and working for fifty-five minutes and then walking for five.

Participants fared better on nearly all measures of well-being and performance when they had some kind of movement baked into their day, whether it was a single thirty-minute walk or six five-minute walks. Their self-reported mood and energy levels were higher, and their biological markers of health were better. There were some differences between the two movement conditions, though. During the simulated workday that included repeated five-minute walks, the participants reported greater overall satisfaction and more energy. They also reported feeling more consistently upbeat throughout the day, whereas on the day participants took a single thirty-minute walk, their energy peaked earlier. The researchers concluded that while all movement is good movement, breaking up your day with five-minute bouts was the best overall.

The aforementioned studies focused on walking, but there seems to be no reason that the same benefits wouldn’t be true for other forms of movement, such as push-ups, squats, or yoga. Whether done in two-minute, five-minute, or ten-minute bursts, the message is clear: movement throughout the day adds up—every bit counts.

Practice: Get Aerobic

Aerobic fitness refers to your body’s ability to use oxygen efficiently. Higher levels of aerobic fitness are just about every positive physical and mental health outcome imaginable. Though it’s easy to get excited about the latest and greatest trends, from high-intensity interval training to ultramarathons, at the end of the day, regular brisk walking gets you most, if not all, of the way there—fit for a long, healthy, and satisfying life. This was the conclusion in a special edition of the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) in 2019 that was dedicated to walking.

The main study in the BJSM issue surveyed more than fifty thousand walkers in the United Kingdom across a variety of ages. It found that regularly walking at an average, brisk, or fast pace was associated with a 20-percent reduction in all-cause mortality and a 24-percent reduction in the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. Another 2019 , published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, examined nearly 140,000 men and women in the United States and concluded that walking briskly for at least 150 minutes per week was linked to the same 20 percent reduction in all-cause mortality.

Walking has also been compared to more intense forms of exercise, like running. Though experts believe running may be marginally better for you, that’s only if you run regularly and you don’t get injured, the latter ofÌę which more than (me included) have struggled. If you enjoy and are able to stick to more strenuous forms of aerobic physical activity, by all means, do those. Regular running, cycling, swimming, and dancing are all extremely beneficial. But do not fret if you find yourself frequently injured or lacking the time, equipment, access, or motivation to participate in higher-intensity activities. If you walk regularly over the course of your lifetime, there’s compelling evidence that it might be the only aerobic exercise you need.

Practice: Strength Training

Contrary to what you may think, strength training is not just for the tank-topped muscle heads at your local gym—it’s for everyone. Some of the largest research consortiums, such as the American Heart Association, strength training at least twice a week regardless of age or gender. As with aerobic movement, in addition to supporting increased muscle mass, lower body fat, and better range of motion, strength training also promotes sound mental health and cognitive performance.

While strength training can be undertaken at a gym and involve all kinds of equipment, for many people that environment is intimidating, at least at first. The good news is you don’t need to have a gym membership to strength train. There are plenty of movements that can be performed with a twenty-five-dollar kettlebell or nothing but your own body weight.

Taken together, these movements work all the major muscle groups, use your full range of motion, and can easily be adapted to different environments and fitness and skill levels. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I—and many of my coaching clients—did variations of these movements for multiple months at home or outdoors in uncrowded spaces. You can do a few sets of each individually or combine them in a circuit. If you have a kettlebell or weights, you can add those if you wish to increase the challenge.

• Squats
• Push-ups
• Step-ups
• Lunges
• Glute raises
• Wall sits
• Planks
• Sit-ups
• Dips
• Curls (if you don’t have a weight you can use a full backpack)
• Burpees

This was excerpted from , by Brad Stulberg. It is available wherever books are sold.

Stulberg () coaches on performance and well-being and writesÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’sÌęDo It BetterÌęcolumn. He is the bestselling author ofÌę Ìęand co-founder ofÌę.

The post How Exercise Makes You Better at Life appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In the 1640s, French philosopher RenĂ© Descartes introduced what came to be known as Cartesian dualism, or the idea that although materially connected, the mind and body are separate entities. This thinking dominated for more than 350 years. It wasn’t until the turn of the twenty-first century that scientists began to prove that Descartes was mistaken: we do not have a distinct mind and body. Rather, we are an integrated mind-body system.

The bacteria in our guts and the proteins secreted by our muscles affect our moods. The neurochemicals in our brains affect how much pain we feel in our backs and how fast our hearts beat. When we move our bodies regularly we do a better job of controlling our emotions, we think more creatively, and we retain more information.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that exercise improves not only physical health but also mental health. A 2019 out of King’s College in London examined more than 40 studies that collectively followed 267,000 people to explore the connection between exercise and depression. The researchers found that regular physical activity reduced the chances that someone would experience depression by between 17 and 41 percent, a substantial effect that was observed regardless of age and gender, and that held true across various types of movement, from running to lifting weights. has found similar effects for anxiety.

Movement doesn’t just help prevent mental illness; it can also treat it. In addition to their large study on prevention, the King’s College researchers conducted of 25 studies that surveyed a total of 1,487 people who were currently experiencing depression. They found that between 40 and 50 percent of people with depression respond positively to exercise, with an effect that, on a scale of small, medium, or large, is considered large. Researchers from the University of Limerick in Ireland conducted their own analysis that included 922 participants and found a similar response rate for anxiety. These rates are on par with psychotherapy and medication. (It is important to note that exercise is not a panacea for mental health issues. While exercise can and often does help, this is not always the case for everyone. Seek professional help if needed.)

Here’s what daily movement can do for you.

Acceptance

When I began training for marathons, a more experienced runner offered some words of wisdom: I would need to learn how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. This skill is every bit as helpful off the road as it is on it.

It’s not just me, and it’s not just running. Ask anyone whose day regularly includes pushing their bodies and they’ll likely tell you the same: a difficult conversation doesn’t seem so difficult anymore. A tight deadline, not so intimidating. Relationship problems, not so problematic. While it’s plausible to think that exercise simply makes you too tired to care, that’s not the case. that if anything, physical activity has the opposite effect, boosting brain function and energy. The more likely scenario is that pushing your body teaches you to experience pain, discomfort, and fatigue and accept it instead of immediately reacting to it or resisting it.

Evelyn Stevens, the women’s record holder for most miles cycled in an hour (29.81), that during her hardest training intervals, “instead of thinking ‘I want this to be over,’ I try to feel and sit with the pain. Heck, I even try to embrace it.” Physical activity teaches you how to accept something for what it is, see it clearly, and then decide what to do next.

Students who ran twice a week showed more favorable heart-rate variability. Their bodies literally were not as stressed during tests.

But this doesn’t just apply to elite athletes. A study published in the British Journal of Health Psychology found that college students who went from not exercising at all to even a modest program of two to three gym visits per week reported a decrease in stress, smoking, and alcohol and caffeine consumption, plus an increase in healthy eating, better spending practices, and improved study habits. In addition to these real-life improvements, after two months of regular exercise, the students also performed better on laboratory tests of self-control. This led the researchers to speculate that exercise had a powerful impact on the students’ “capacity for self-regulation.”

Another , this one published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, evaluated how exercise changes our physiological response to stress. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, in Germany, divided students into two groups at the beginning of the semester and instructed half to run twice a week for 20 weeks. At the end of the 20 weeks, which coincided with a particularly stressful time for the students—exams—the researchers had them wear monitors throughout their day-to-day activities to measure their heart-rate variability, which is a common indicator of physiological stress. As you might expect, the students who were enrolled in the running program showed more favorable heart-rate variability. Their bodies literally were not as stressed during tests.

What’s encouraging about these studies is that the subjects weren’t exercising at crazy intensities or volumes. They were simply doing something that was physically challenging for them—going from no exercise to some exercise.

Presence

A common way for people to experience flow is through physical activity. The heightened sensations in your body provide an anchor for your awareness, and the increased arousal helps channel your mind. For this to occur, however, you need to leave the digital devices behind (or at least turn them on airplane mode if you are going to use them for music). For exercisers to experience flow, they must “keep their minds into what they are doing,” Prikko Markula, a professor of physical activity at the University of Alberta in Canada.

When I work with coaching clients on incorporating movement into their lives, we explicitly use it as an opportunity to experience distraction-free time. Many realize a big reason why they’ve come to enjoy exercising is precisely because they aren’t constantly being pinged by calls, emails, or texts. The more they have this kind of distraction-free experience, the more they start to prioritize and protect presence in other areas of their lives. This parallels a theory put forth by the author and habit expert Charles Duhigg: movement is a “keystone habit,” or positive practice in one area of life that brings about positive changes in others.

Movement also develops presence because it demands you pay close attention to the signals your body is sending. Do I speed up or slow down? Is this merely the pain of arduous exertion, or is this the pain of a looming injury? Since you receive rather concrete feedback on these decisions, you can continually refine your process. Keep doing this and your ability to pay close attention—not just as it relates to your body, but to all of life—improves.

Patience

I’ve had the privilege of getting to know some of the top athletes in the world. What’s interesting is that they all use different strategies to build fitness. Some follow a high-intensity, low-volume approach; others, the opposite. Some train using heart-rate zones, while others use perceived exertion. And yet they’ve all told me that the key to training success isn’t so much the plan, but whether or not they stick to it.

The key to improving physical fitness lies in adhering to a concept called progressive overload. You work a specific muscle or function in a specific manner, progressively adding intensity and duration over time. Hard days are followed by easy days. Prolonged periods of intensity are followed by periods of recovery. Repetition and consistency are key. Results don’t occur overnight but after months, and even years. If you rush the process or try to do too much too soon, your chances of injury and overtraining increase. There is no escaping or denying this. Your body simply lets you know. You learn patience viscerally, in your tendons and bones.

“Today, everyone desires novelty and endless stimulation,” explains Vern Gambetta, a world-renowned, “old-timer” athletic development coach who has trained hundreds of elite athletes, including members of the New York Mets and Chicago Bulls, as well as numerous Olympians. “Running around and constantly switching what you are doing from one day to the next is in vogue.” But if what you’re after is long-term growth and development, he says, speed and switching just don’t work. Physical progress requires playing the long game.

A regular movement practice teaches you that breakthroughs do not happen overnight. They result from consistent effort applied over a long duration, from gradually pounding the stone in a smart and controlled manner until one day it breaks. Improvement in fitness requires being patient and present in the process, stopping one rep short today so that you can pick up where you left off tomorrow.

Vulnerability

If you choose to challenge yourself in any kind of physical practice, there will be occasions when you fail. Trying to run or walk faster, lift more weight, or cycle farther than you ever have before can be at least mildly intimidating. You are facing all sorts of unknowns. How much discomfort will this cause? Will I be able to push through? Will I quit too early? Will I succeed or fail?

Whenever I attempt a big lift in the gym, sensing my fear, my training partner Justin often utters the words “brave new world.” Regardless of the outcome, I am practicing the art of facing vulnerabilities with courage, of learning to trust myself in challenging situations. And when I fail, sometimes in front of other people, I learn to be OK with that, too. A regular movement practice exposes where you are weak and teaches you not to run away from those areas but to turn toward them instead. The more you confront your weaknesses the stronger and more integrated you become, in the most literal sense.

In the weight room it is just you and the bar. You either make the lift or you don’t. If you make it, great. If not, you train more and try again. Some days it goes well; other days it doesn’t. But over time, it becomes clear that what you get out of yourself is proportional to the effort you put in, and to your willingness to expose yourself to ever-increasing trials and sometimes come up short. It’s as simple and as hard as that. You develop a kind of vulnerability, straightforwardness, and self-reliance that gives rise to a quiet and secure confidence. You learn to trust yourself and take risks in the presence of others, which is precisely how you forge more intimate bonds in your movement community.

Community

A growing shows that exercising with other people promotes connection and belonging, or what we’ve been calling deep community. In her book , health psychologist and Stanford lecturer Kelly McGonigal details the many reasons this is the case. There is the collective joy our species is hardwired to feel when we move in synchrony with others, a phenomenon that at first was an evolutionary advantage that promoted cooperation during hunting. There is the release of neurochemicals such as endorphins and oxytocin, which promote affection and bonding. There is the ritualistic nature intrinsic to many exercise programs, leading to a sensation scientists call identity fusion—feeling connected to and part of something larger than oneself. And there is the shared confidence, vulnerability, and trust that emerges from undertaking physical challenges with others.

“We crave this feeling of connection,” says McGonigal, “and synchronized movement is one of the most powerful ways to experience it.” She writes that outsiders often fail to understand the social effects of movement. “Like any nature-harnessing phenomenon, it doesn’t make sense until you’re in the middle of it. Then suddenly, endorphins flowing and heart pounding, you find [the kind of belonging that exercise gives rise to] the most reasonable thing in the world.”

I’ve come to know this firsthand. Rarely have I regretted the additional effort it takes to coordinate schedules in order to run, hike, or lift weights with others. The short-term effect is that I always feel better afterward. The long-term effect is that some of my best friends are people whom I first met in the gym or on the trail.

This was excerpted from , by Brad Stulberg. It is available wherever books are sold.

Stulberg () coaches on performance and well-being and writesÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’sÌęDo It BetterÌęcolumn. He is the bestselling author ofÌę Ìęand co-founder ofÌę.

The post The Benefits of Daily Movement appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

One of the biggest stories from the 2020 Olympic Games is Simone Biles—winner of 30 combined Olympic and world championship medals, widely regarded as the best gymnast of all time—. Biles explained that her head was not in the right place to perform her trademark movements in which one wrong step or error in timing could result in catastrophic physical injury. It was reported that Biles was struggling with immense pressure and stress from being in the spotlight. Prior to withdrawing, she while she’d been “fighting all those demons,” the load was becoming too much. “At the end of the day, I just have to do what was right for me,” she told the press. “It just sucks that it happened at the Olympic Games.”

Biles’s decision to drop out of the Olympics came just weeks after another superstar, tennis player Naomi Osaka, decided to exit the French Open tennis tournament, also mental health issues. It started with Osaka not wanting to participate in press conferences because they often trigger her anxiety.

When Osaka dropped out of Wimbledon, said that press conferences and other media appearances are part of the job, and she should toughen up and do them. Yet the people saying this are rarely in the arena. They are usually on their couch. And the messaging that these commenters send out into the world can be damaging for professionals and fans alike.

Professional athletes aren’t the only ones to experience the crushing weight of expectations. It’s practically baked into Western culture. In my , I call this “heroic individualism:” an ongoing game of one-upmanship against one’s self and others, where external measurement is the main arbiter of success. In this model, we are never enough. We never have enough, we’re constantly pushing for the next thing, always trying to justify our value, and constantly living in the pressure cooker. In the outdoor world, this could be a climber getting caught in a life-threatening storm because they ignored the weather radar, or a runner cutting their career short by trying to push through a chronic injury, or a person simply burning out on something they once loved and planned to do for the rest of their lives. It is not surprising that anxiety, depression, and burnout are at . What is surprising is that we wonder why.

When star athletes are public about their struggles with mental health, it is unambiguously a good thing. It reduces stigma and it shows that we are all human, even those of us who are considered superhuman. But these stories also highlight two concerning issues for stars and everyday people alike.

Cultural Change Is Necessary

The first issue is that idolizing professional athletes is bad for everyone. Whether it’s reading a front-page athlete profile or simply enjoying the dopamine rush from getting likes and re-Tweets on social media, our obsession with celebrity, fame, and relevance is making us sick. We are in desperate need of cultural change that promotes . Pros need space to be grounded. So do we.

Groundedness is about ditching an omnipresent restlessness to begin living in alignment with your innermost values, pursuing your true interests, and expressing your authentic self in the here and now. You are where you are, and you hold true strength and power from that position. Your success, and the way in which you pursue it, becomes more enduring and robust.

While Biles’ decision appears to be grounded in her present situation, the cultural current pushing back on her is not. shows that a society that supports a more grounded kind of success is a much healthier and happier one.

Avoidance—Without Nuance—Is Not Good for Everyone

Withdrawing was undoubtedly the right choice for Biles. But it’s not always the right choice for all of us, all the time. The stories highlighted above are rare athletes on a global stage putting their minds and bodies at incredible risk. In everyday life, if you’re not on the way to an acute crisis, staying home often makes the sadness or anxiety worse. This is known as . The more you let negative feelings dictate your actions, the deeper and more intense those feelings can grow.

The gold standard treatments for depression and anxiety disorders are (ACT) and (CBT). Integral to both of these therapies is not avoiding things because you are sad or anxious. There are, of course, extremes. If you are feeling 8 out of 10 sadness or angst, then maybe taking those feelings with you is not a good idea. But if your angst or sadness is a 6 out of 10, . Otherwise, those emotions just become more entrenched.

You can feel all sorts of things and still act in alignment with your core values. Oftentimes, you don’t need to feel good to get going, you need to get going to feel good. Mental health is not about white-knuckling your way through. But it is about getting the support you need and showing up for life, even when you don’t want to.

Ultimately, if we took our cues from Biles and decided to withdraw every time we felt pressure or stress, that would just be another example of rote idolization of athletes.

When the story becomes about a single person’s struggle—and not the underlying culture from which it rises—it can be problematic. We risk missing the forest for an individual tree. And while avoidance was the right choice for Biles, it may not be the right choice for you. This tightrope demands more nuance than most hot takes can deliver.

Perhaps the broader conversation on mental health has been so tilted toward grit, repression, and always gutting it out and we need a big correction in the other direction. Unfortunately, on this issue there tends to be two camps: that of self-love and that of toughness. The truth is that all evidence-based models for therapy teach both of these skills and the best path for most people will be somewhere in the middle.

“I think mental health is more prevalent in sports right now
 we have to protect our minds and bodies and not just go out and do what the world wants us to do,” Biles.

I couldn’t agree more. Hopefully her story doesn’t just draw attention to mental health, but also prompts serious discussion on solutions—both culturally and individually.

Brad Stulberg () coaches on performance and well-being and writesÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’sÌęDo It BetterÌęcolumn. He is the bestselling author of andÌęÌęand co-founder ofÌę.

The post Simone Biles Made the Right Choice. Here’s How You Can, Too. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

To make long-term improvement in anything—from runningÌęto writingÌęto eatingÌęto gardening—you need to do it consistently. But you shouldn’t beat yourself up, at least not too badly, when you don’t. It’s simple, but not easy.

Rule #1: Do the Thing

This is self-explanatory. If you don’t regularly run, you will not get better at running. Showing up day in and day out; taking small steps to achieve big gains; being unrelenting,Ìęconsistent, or self-disciplined—whatever you want to call it, it is critical to lasting progress. In a world inundated with self-prescribed hacks, quick fixes, and countless other silver bullets—the majority of which are plentiful on promises yet meager on results—it’s easy to forget the importance of hard work. But even the most talented athleteÌęor the most gifted artist is nothing without pounding the stone. Putting in the work—when you feel like it,ÌęandÌęperhaps especially when you don’t—will eventually yield results.

Stephen King said it well in his bookÌę: “Don’t wait for the muse. As I’ve said, he’s a hardheaded guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks
Above all else, be consistent.”

So, yeah,Ìęget to work, even when you don’t want to.

Rule #2: Don’t Beat Yourself Up When You Don’t Do the Thing

Doing something for the long haul means you’ll make mistakes and have bad days. This is just how it goes, an unfortunate reality. How you respond when this happens is important.

Beating yourself up is perhaps the most common reaction. It is also the worst.

Freaking out about not doing the thing—or at least not doing it as you planned—is a waste of time and energy. It does nothing to change the past. It feels lousy in the present. And it is not helpful for the future; if anything, it often makes it worse. If you are overly hard on yourself, you may just quit. And even if you don’t, you’ll be apprehensive going forward. Why take a riskÌęor attempt to rise to the next level if the cost of failure is a self-inflicted beatdown? Fear is an .

Back in high-school, one of my football coaches would often say, “The key to being a good cornerback is having a short memory.” You are going to get burned every once in a while. The quicker you let go of that, the better.

Having a short memory doesn’t mean you don’t learn from your mistakes. You do. You just don’t dwell on them or get angry. You analyze them. Then you take what is helpful and leave the rest behind.

This kind of self-compassion doesn’t come easy to Type A, highly driven people. If you find yourself being overly hard on yourself, pretend that you’re giving advice to a friend who’s in your situation. What would you say to them? We tend to be a lot kinder and wiser .

Mantras can also help. They snap you out of your head and put you back in the present moment. Here is one I like to useÌęwithÌęboth myself and my clients: This is what is happening right now. I’m doing the best I can.

Doing the thing—whatever it may be—over and over again takes you to hard places. It requires self-discipline and persistence to keep going. Not beating yourself up too badly when you don’t do the thing is what allows you to brush yourself off and get up when you are down. Put them together and what you get is .

Brad Stulberg () coaches on performance and well-being and writesÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’sÌęDo It BetterÌęcolumn. He is the bestselling author of andÌęÌęand co-founder ofÌę.

The post Two Simple Rules for Progressing at Anything appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.