There’s no need to move mountains when you can just switch them off. Certainly no need to go climbing the damned things.
Mountains are figments of our imagination, and the source of expending so much of our energy we don’t even realise it.
(Sail Mhor by Neil Williamson, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Activate Early
Mel Robbins’s TED talk How to stop screwing yourself over started me on an unexpected journey. This path would form connections between Olympic athletes, alpha brain waves, cold showers and solenoids. More importantly, it showed by a side entrance into what can otherwise be a challenging space to enter.
In her talk, Robbins describes the concept of activation energy: the energy we spend in summoning up the effort to do something we don’t want to. In the studies she cites, she describes that this measurable requirement of inner effort to overcome the barriers against get-up-and-go were actually the same no matter the thing we’re trying to overcome. As a visceral experiment to try – and I genuinely recommend trying this – she urges the listener to set their alarm clock for 30 minutes earlier than usual… and get up when it goes off without hitting snooze.
A tall ask to be sure. We all live a busy lives and I’m no exception. (I’m also lucky enough to have two wonderful causes of enduring sleep deprivation in my life.) So when I tried it the next morning, my brain had no shortage of entirely legitimate and well-founded reasons to ignore this daft advice from a ridiculous TED talk.
However, I like conducting experiments with myself, and purely in a bid to learn something new, I went with it.
What I realised from the warmth of my bed, under the weighty pull of a desire for sleep, is that there was a huge mountain for me to climb before the inner battle was won. This simple exercise allowed me to experiment with and directly experience the process of summoning up activation energy. It was not pleasant. In fact, for the brief moments that the inner battle raged on, it was genuinely tough. I’m tired. I don’t want to get up 30 minutes earlier to prove a point… (and so it went.)
What I loved about this exercise is how pure it is. Uncluttered by the many intrusions of the day, undistracted, it’s possible to gain direct sight of this mountain.
I climbed it that morning, and many morning since. Once seen for what it is, this activation energy becomes easier to identify in daily life.
Alpha for Absence
It was while reflecting on this, and learning a little about alpha brain waves in the context of meditation, that I remembered something I heard as a child many years ago on the television about Olympic athletes on the starting block of a race. By measuring their brain activity through electroencephalograms (ECGs), scientists had found that athletes ‘in the zone’ experienced a peak of alpha brain waves. I had always assumed this meant some extra activity, some presence of special kinds of ‘in the zone’ thoughts that existed in their minds.
It was later, exploring the activity of the brain through meditation, that I learned alpha waves actually correspond with an absence of specific conscious thoughts. They coincide with a state of wakeful rest, at least in the mind. So a better understanding of what’s going through the athlete’s mind on the starting is an absence of thoughts, an absence of distractions. So clutter of queries, questions or concerns. Simple alertness.
It led me to think of one of the great powers of the human mind lying in absence rather than presence of thought. Counter-intuitive – thinking is largely what the brain does – but effective.
(Reed switch relay, from pickeringrelay)
The Power of the Solenoid
The solenoid is a great invention. (This is a brief tangent, and worth taking.) Passing a little electric current through a small coil of wire creates a magnetic field.
Now, by placing a mechanical device near this potential magnetic field, you can create physical movement with an electric current and use that movement to switch a much larger circuit on or off. This is a relay switch, based on the physics of the solenoid and ingenuity.
A reed relay involves placing two metal rods (or reeds) inside the coil. When it’s turned on, the magnetic field it creates makes the reeds touch, thereby turning on the larger circuit. There are many other examples, but the principle is the same. With one small circuit and a relay switch, you could turn on or off a whole power station. (Science lesson over.)
Let’s circle back round to activation energy. While learning about its relationship with alpha waves and absence, I continued to experiment with the mental process of inner battle, finding new ways to observe the summoning up of activation energy.
Cold showers apparently offer their own health benefits (one for another time), and are also unpleasant. They therefore need an amount of activation energy. Turning the dial to full cold is a premeditated act that generates a lot of automatic counter-arguments to battle against. No! Don’t do that; I like it warm; warm is good; it’s cold outside; you’ll catch a cold; it’s pointless; no, just no.
We face many such decisions in life. Many such needs for activation energy.
(Solenoids by Jessica Paterson, CC BY 2.0)
Your inner relay switch
All at once the power of absence hit me.
What if instead of winning the argument, there is just absence?
What if I don’t even engage with this process of argument for, counterargument, counter-counterargument, counter-counter-cou…?
What if I break the cycle and stop thinking about it?
With an absence of reasoning myself into getting up early, or of turning the shower cold, or whatever, I realised – literally made real – an absence of argument. With an absence of argument I realised an absence of mental energy required to climb the mountain.
I switched off the mountain.
And then I got on with doing whatever I had decided to do, without thought, without argument, without energy.
Initially I saw this as being like a side door that I found, leading directly through the mountain.
However, in realising that, I realised that I was not now walking through a solid mountain of solid rock in some sort of tunnel. Instead, I was walking forwards (metaphorically) exactly as I had been but through an illusion. An illusion that, to be clear, was no longer active. It was like a projection of a mountain reflecting off mist, and when I walked into the mist, straight at it, the mountain projection simply switched off.
This is the power of the solenoid. Flick a tiny switch in a tiny circuit and an enormous machine loses its power.
Move mountains by recognising they’re not there. Don’t push it out of the way. Don’t climb it. It’s merely a projection. Switch it off.
(Misty mountains by DCSL, CC BY 2.0)
There is no mountain
In those brief, expansive moments when you seek energy to do the things you wish to do, recognise that you have a choice.
A choice to continue to in the energy-consuming near-deadlock of for-and-against, to continue the argument, continue the struggle, continue the climb up that dark mountain.
Or… you can try something simpler, something new. You can try stepping sideways, then taking an unhindered step forwards.
Experiment.
Experience what it’s like to stop the internal argument of for and against, turning it off like a switch, and to respond not with more thought but with action. Get up. Do the thing you need to do. Move.
A slight word of caution here: Celebrate your early successes in this, but never rest on your laurels. Your inner nature, developed over millenia of evolutionary pressures, will take back control as the jungle grows over temple ruins. Remain diligent. Find ways to remind yourself of this experience years down the line when your learnings from your experiments here are long forgotten. I had to remind myself how to do it just this morning – it would have been a shame to have lost it forever.
Put your crampons, harness and rope away. There is nothing to climb. Simply walk straight ahead, unhindered in your endeavour.
It’s incredible how easy it all is, once we get ourselves out of our own way. Stop climbing the mountain: It’s not there.