Your mind has an unbelievable ability that a lot of people don’t get to see. When you start pushing yourself to levels that are rather uncomfortable, your mind will start throwing stuff at you that you haven’t thought about in a long time. Your mind knows all your fears and demons you are keeping locked up, so when it starts getting uncomfortable it wants you to stop whatever you are doing. If it sees that you aren’t going to slow down, it will start trying to trick you with anything at its disposal to stop you.
I keep coming back to this, but the sauna is the best example I can give to people to understand what I’m talking about. Back in 2014 I would go to the gym at night and after my workout I would go in the sauna for 20 minutes. Usually the temp was set for 180 and 20 minutes was rough. During those last 5-10 minutes, your mind starts fucking with you. It starts looking at the other people in the sauna wondering if they are going to attack you. It starts asking, “what if someone locks the door?”
Then, when it sees you don’t give a fuck and will stay inside, it starts getting a little more aggressive.
Zyzz was an internet phenomenon from back in the late 2000’s. Zyzz did a bunch of Steroids and looked like he partied all the time. The reason I bring him up is because in August of 2011, Zyzz died of a heart attack in a Sauna. Who knows what kind of cocktail of drugs precipitated this. It doesn’t matter. In my mind of minute 15 of the sauna, my mind is screaming at me, “get the fuck out or you’ll have a damn heart attack like Zyzz.”
It doesn’t help that there are also signs in the sauna warning you of the dangers of heat stroke and to make sure someone else is in there with you. I imagine they have to do this stuff for legal reasons, but it doesn’t help me at all to stay in there when my mind is like, “see, they put these signs up for a reason, you should get out of here.”
The mental battles I have to do are crazy when I want to get out of the sauna. I look up at the clock on the wall outside the sauna and see I have 5 minutes left and I already want to leave. So before my mind has any chance to come up with some bullshit to get out, I break down those 5 minutes. I know that if I can get through 1 minute, that means I’ll only have 4 more, so I focus the mind on just powering through that 1 minute and re assess where I’m at after that. Once I get to 4 more minutes I just keep powering through minute by minute until there aren’t anymore minutes.
On one hand this is good for breaking down long chunks into more manageable time, but the downside is my mind knows that it wants to get out of there and the best way to do it is to get me thinking about time in general. I know that if I start breaking down the time into smaller increments, that I’ll be forced to at least acknowledge that I will be in there for the whole chunk. So as soon as I break down the time increments, I have to immediately think about something else to get through it. I say let me count down this minute here, I start and then as soon as my mind starts wandering I focus on some specific thing that takes my mind to another place. Today, I went back into the past and brought up something that really pissed me off. I like to use anger to fuel me to keep going past limitations. So for each of the 5 minutes I was thinking about some event from my past that really pissed me off to power through. This way, when my mind started to come up with some bullshit to get me out of there. I was too pissed thinking about some shit to care about what my mind was bringing up.
This is what happens when you go in the sauna and your body isn’t used to it. I see a lot of people go in there completely unprepared for what is going to happen. Others just leave whenever they feel like it and don’t use it as the insane mind strengthener that it is. What you should do is go in the sauna with the intent of staying in there for a set amount of time. Now at this point I’ve been going to the sauna for years now, so I know that 20 minutes is a good time to shoot for at 180 degrees. I say this because I go so infrequently now that my body isn’t used to it anymore. I used to go 3 times a night so my body became accustomed to 20 minutes and it became easy. That’s when I started to bump it up to 25-30 minutes. Then, when that wasn’t enough, we figured out ways to bump the temperature up to 200 plus degrees.
The point is that I was using the sauna for the regenerative benefits, the meditation benefits, but most importantly the strengthening of the mind. I found out real quick that shit gets uncomfortable in the sauna and it’s a good test ground for your mind.
I started seeing parallels in other things I’ve been doing. In writing, I’ll notice that I start to tap out around 500-700 words before I get tired of it and some distraction finds its way into my view. My mind will start saying things like, “hey you’ve written a lot right there, you deserve to click over to youtube and watch a vid.” I’ll be making posts on one of my niche sites, and I’m challenging myself to write 10 posts one day. About 2 posts in, I start thinking about dumb bullshit like what kind of plugins will get me more pinterest followers. It doesn’t matter what you are doing, if you aren’t fully trained with your mind, when you start doing something uncomfortable, the mind will find ways to stop you.
Don’t listen to your mind when it’s trying to stop you. Acknowledge when it’s doing it and use it as fuel to take full command of your mind. What I like to do when my mind starts sending me these thoughts is I like to laugh at how insane some of them are and say “Not today”.
Don’t allow your mind to trick you into stopping you from pushing beyond what it thinks is possible
-Tate
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