Fraudulent Feelings

The case for instinct over emotion.

A few weeks back, I started reading and listening to two books that coincided in what I can only describe as a mild epiphany.

The book I’m reading — The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery, by Brianna Wiest — aims to help you tap into your own power and discover your potential by overcoming trauma, life’s challenges, and working on emotional damages, all through accepting change, envisioning a prosperous future, and putting an end to self-sabotage.

It’s a game-changer. And I don’t say that lightly. It’s honest, brutal in its ability to pull you into intense yet highly rewarding reflective insight, and extremely digestible.

The book I’m listening to is Never Finished, by David Goggins.

If you haven’t heard of “Goggins”, he’s the US combat veteran who;

  • Passed through the Navy SEAL “hell week” three times

  • Broke the world pull-up record with 4,030 pull-ups over 17 hours

  • Runs 240-mile ultra-endurance trail races through the desert

  • And still finds time to work as a wild-land firefighter up in the mountains of Montana for one season a year on arthritic knees.

The guy. is. a. savage!

While his feats of endurance are beyond impressive, what’s more so is how he’s got to where he is.

From physical abuse at the hands of his father as a boy — abuse he witnessed being dished out to his mother, too — to racial abuse growing up as a black teenager going to school in areas of the American mid-west known for Ku Klux Klan activity. His story’s both heart wrenching and deeply inspiring.

The audio-book’s awesome.

The stars aligned with the two books last Wednesday.

That morning, The Mountain Is You had gone into the need to disconnect action from feeling.

“Our feelings are essentially wired as comfort systems. They produce a “good” feeling when we are doing what we have always done — staying in familiarity. This, to our bodies, registers as “safety.””

“If the achievement potentially puts us at risk in any way or exposes us to something unfamiliar, we aren’t going to be happy about it initially, even if it is a net positive for our lives.”

“While your emotions are always valid and need to be validated, they are hardly ever an accurate measure of what you’re capable of in life.”

Fast forward 6 hours and I’m on a lunchtime run in Prospect Park here in Brooklyn.

Goggins is telling the story of a time when his mind was throwing out endless highly plausible reasons to drop out of a monster 100-miler, and he says that at some or many points along a tough journey, you’ll “have a self-sabotaging impulse that will feel like clarity.”

…

Whoa.

“A self-sabotaging impulse that will feel like clarity.”

Whoa because;

a) At that moment I was at mile 2 of my planned 6-mile run, and 200 yards from a point along the route at which I have the option to take a left and cut a mile out, or continue straight for the full whammy.

This is the point in the run that all the thoughts come up.

“I’ve got work I need to be doing”

“I don’t want to fry myself for this afternoon’s calls/sessions/work”

“I don’t want to overdo it on my still healing right calf muscle”

“I’ve already done a lot this week, this can just be a de-load run.”

All of the thoughts.

All of the justifications.

All of the clarity.

And that’s the thing, all of those thoughts are relevant, entirely plausible. But don’t honor me. They’re not honest. They’re not honoring, trusting or testing my ability to adapt and grow.

And…whoa because;

b) This perspective is something that flies in the face of conventional advice, and based on years of obsession with people doing extraordinary things and achieving great success in whatever their chosen domain, it’s very clearly the difference maker.

Your feelings are a composite of what you’ve always done, what you’ve always known.

They exist for one purpose and one purpose alone.

To keep you safe and comfortable.

To move into the unknown, which is, in essence, what all progress and achievement is, is going to feel uncomfortable, risky, uncertain.

Feelings WILL come up that will call us back to the warmth and predictability of The Shire, to what we’ve always done and known, and they will masquerade as a clarity that screams, “this is the better path for you.”

Feelings and emotions are “hardly ever an accurate measure of what you’re capable of in life.”

So if not feelings or emotions, what? What is there that can be relied on?

Instinct.

Instinct is in the moment. The immediate gut sense we have about things. Not just a turn of phrase either.

The vagus nerve runs from the gut to the head, and the gastro-intestinal system impacts the release of serotonin in the brain.

When activated, the vagus nerve triggers the para-sympathetic nervous system, bringing us into a state of calm. It’s my sense that that’s why we’re better able to hear our instinct, or intuition, when we’re calmer.

The connection between gut and brain up the vagus nerve is clearer.

The key to remember here is that your instinct is immediate. It’s in the moment. Not rooted in past experiences or future hopes and fears.

Instinct doesn’t shout or scream, and you’ll notice it’s mostly objective. It doesn’t really care how you feel about it, it just is. Your truth.

“Your first reaction to something is very often the wisest reaction, because your body is using all of the subconscious information you have logged away to inform you about something before your brain has an opportunity to second-guess it.”

Ever had that happen? You have an immediate, in-the-moment reaction to something that feels right, and then your brain comes in and presents all the reasons to doubt it.

I hate running.

A lot of the time it’s miserable.

But there’s something in me that intuitively knows how much it can teach me and how much I get from it. So I do it.

I hear all the voices, feelings and emotions rationalizing doing literally anything else, I thank them for trying to do their job in keeping me comfortable, lace up, and go.

We’ve been taught that how we feel matters more than anything else. In actual fact, while it’s important to know how you feel about things and to be able to process and reflect on feelings, they perform one primary, primal function.

To keep you safe, to preserve homeostasis. To grow is to stretch, to expand, to push.

These things are effortful, energetic and demanding. They’re not always going to feel good.

The sooner we stop expecting them to, the sooner we soar.

In health,

Alex