How Ready Are You for Change? (And Using Float Tanks to Help)
When Dr. John C. Lilly, the inventor of the float tank, entered into the darkness and solitude of the sensory-deprived environment, it sparked in him the realization that he had just ventured into a whole other world inside of himself.
Our brain rings out in response to this lack of input from the external world like a wake-up call.
Turning inward allows us to raise our self-awareness and with that, we can start to transform ourselves.
Change awaits us.
And that’s exactly what we’re all longing for right now.
The Changes We Seek To Make
What is life going to look like on the other side of lockdown restrictions?
Are you ready for a change or are you already taking steps to make changes in your life?
While there has been a lot that isn't under our control lately, something that is in our sphere of control at all times is our actions and choosing to become more aware of how we make use of the time we have. The past year has shifted the regular routines for many of us and opened our eyes to the need for change.
We get stuck in our routines and what we are used to because it's familiar and becomes automatically ingrained as a habit. Kind of like how we pull into our driveway after a long day of work only to realize that we were barely conscious of the drive home, unless we are actively trying to identify and understand our habits they will take control before even we know what we are doing. This includes the bad habits that we may be thinking about changing or feel really ready to take a stand against.
Float tanks can help you with making change by allowing you to focus on and understand your bad habits through deep introspection. This can also help you to understand the underlying motives behind the new habits you are trying to create change from.
When creating and refining the first float tanks, Dr. John C. Lily used the quiet isolation of that environment to develop a system around how to alter unwanted behaviours. He used this safe and controlled environment to focus on the negative aspects of bad habits and their underlying source.
Knowing yourself at this deeper level is one of the first steps to making long-lasting changes for the better.
What Is Your Goal?
Because we are creatures of habit, we all long for some return to normal in our lives. We get distressed when our routines are upset and we’ve all been experiencing some not so gentle disruptions to our routines over the past year.
Disruptions, like the ones we’ve experienced, do have an upside though, because it causes a degree of discomfort that makes us motivated to change. Whether we like it or not, the hiccup in our routine that has been the pandemic is something of a catalyst for change and the initiation of your mission if you choose to accept it.
Rebuild It Better
We can rebuild our lives in the way that we so desire and this past year has been a wake-up call for many who have wanted to make a change for some time. People have retired early and set off on new adventures, many others are quitting jobs they are unsatisfied with and analysts believe that a mass exodus from unhappy jobs is still coming as we move into the post-pandemic world.
Right now you have the opportunity to ask yourself, how do you want to rebuild?
Why not build a lifestyle that’s better than before? One that gets you excited to jump up out of bed in the morning.
Floating Your Way To Deeper Understanding
Dr. Lily was a different thinker in many ways, even by academic standards. Some of his work was related to how float tanks might affect our ability to “meta-program ourselves” Thinking of our brains like computers, everything that we experience - thoughts, emotions, actions - are all programs written by code in our brains. And yet, this code isn’t written from a little guy at a control station in our brain, but from our reaction to everything in our environment.
Dr. Lilly believed that if we focus on how our programs are written, we can modify the code and adjust and improve upon those programs. This is why he called it meta-programming but in simpler terms, it’s just another way to think about mindfulness and analyzing our thoughts and actions. Kind of like being your own shrink but instead of laying on a sofa and talking things out, your body is weightlessly suspended in Epsom salts as you do the talking inside your head.
Not only was it Dr. Lilly who found that floating could really help with the process of analyzing his thoughts, but many people who try floating and take it up as a regular practice for improving their health and happiness come to discover how helpful this can be.
Using Changes In Awareness To Make Change In Your Habits
We become much more aware of what is going on internally when we get to escape from the external world for a while through floating. We can use this time to let our bodies deeply relax while also exploring our programs and habits on a deeper level to sort out the cues and triggers and underlying origins of our habits.
This level of recognition is important and one of the first steps that I take when working with clients to understand the “Why” behind their desire to change.
We know that floating helps you to become more aware and present at the moment because there are no other sensory inputs from the external environment that you have to process or to cause distraction around you.
Many of the tools and techniques that we use and that are suggested in the scientific community today to improve mental and physical well-being include raising awareness, also known as mindfulness.
And it sounds simple to just pay more attention and become aware of the present moment but we are all facing the constant external pressures that make this more difficult than ever.
We feel like we’re being pulled in every direction.
Our external world is more and more distracting.
And we feel overburdened by responsibility in our lives. It’s hard to become aware and initiate change even when we still desire it.
We all crave freedom and because of the discomfort that restrictions have itched out in us, we are more mindful of the need for change right now.
Change is scary though. Starting anything new brings with it some excitement and anxiety. But our body and our brain do adapt, and rather quickly, with consistency.
And with change in ourselves, we can also help to initiate and inspire change in others. A lot of what we’re hoping for more of in the world right now.
How Ready Do You Feel For Making A Change?
It is daunting to make changes in our lives. Each of us has the ability to change if we choose to and part of that is knowing on a deeper level what you want to change first. This needs to come first before setting arbitrary goals that sound good on paper.
Are you ready for a change?
How To Make Your Exercise Routine Easy To Stick To
Throughout this quarantine, I've been talking about the importance of exercise and staying active and getting outside.
For me, this was a big shift as a strongman competitor my training has been way off but I dove right into looking forward to a different style of training with bodyweight movements and higher repetition work which is quite out of the ordinary for me and a good challenge.
In addition to going on walks, my fitness routine hasn't dropped off and, in a lot of ways, it's increased because I can work out as well as get out for a walk each day and I'm doing this at least six days a week.
But when my friend Tony invited me on a bike ride just the other day something clicked in me that I haven’t experienced in quite a while and it reminded me of the most important lesson there is when it comes to exercise and consistency.
That's when I clued in and remembered that not everybody loves to do the gym rats scenario.
Maybe for you, the thought of Burpee's and squats and push-ups at home in your living room is as bad as pulling teeth. I remembered that moment the joy that I used to experience when I first discovered basketball because as an overweight teenager I was not physically active at all.
I had played soccer and baseball growing up as a child but I never really liked those sports. But everything shifted at that moment when I found a type of activity and a sport that I enjoyed.
You see, I set out a goal to start running when the quarantine hit just as a way to burn off some energy and get exercise and guess what? I haven't run a single time in the past two months that we've been stuck at home. And so it's all coming full circle almost 20 years later as I'm finding the joy in biking. My sport of strong man beats me up enough and I don't want to feel the wear and tear of pounding the pavement while running which is why cycling has become so great for me since I never really feel like my evening walks do much to get my heart rate up or feel like exertion. And that’s ok too. Exercise doesn’t always have to be hard to be beneficial.
So today I want to take you through how you can find that activity that you love.
And this isn’t to say there's no value in pushing yourself and the discipline of doing hard things. Training that grit is essential for peak performance but as I've been talking about as well lately right now we're not in a state where a lot of us can get to peak performance but rather we need to think about what is optimal for us in this time and so one way to optimize your situation is to make some lighthearted decisions and get more joy out of your daily routine and the activities that you do.
So the more fun you can have with your exercise right now the more willpower that you can exert over staying focussed on doing the deep work you need and avoiding those distractions in your workplace at home and treating yourself with exercise that you like.
The only step to finding enjoyment and exercise is to try a bunch of things.
Now, at first, you may not get peak joy out of something just because the challenge maybe a little bit greater than what you can handle so I would say stick with things for at least 1 to 2 weeks and see how you feel don't make a big investment into it but just get started and if things don't feel right keep moving on to something else.
I think the most important thing is you've got to try a lot of different activities.
Maybe you're thinking to yourself that you don't like to do anything physical but at least in my mind, I have yet to meet somebody that doesn't find at least one type of physical activity to just get more exercise enjoyable.
Do your research and figure out what types of activities you may enjoy. The unfortunate thing is I feel like some of us will struggle in this realm right now just because there are sports that require multiple participants that are out of the question right now and so in those cases you'll just have to do your best to at least make some lighthearted choices with your exercise to stay active.
Increasing Your Wellness With This Easy Stress and Energy Tracker Solution
We are all stressed and feeling anxious right now and one of the most practical things that you can do to get a handle on the situation and help you to focus on the things that you can control is by creating a simple tracker system to monitor the most important aspects of your wellness right now.
One of the most impactful takeaways I got from Tony Robbins at the power of success seminar that I attended was how beneficial tracking your energy levels can be to sustain a higher level of performance - regardless of what that means to you.
Habits trackers are the simplest way to do that and while you can create a digital table or use an app, like a Fitbit or Oura ring to track some of the metrics, writing it down on paper or in a journal seems to be the most effective way of visually portraying this and truly understanding what the trends mean for you.
A simple tracker, like the one that I've included as a bonus download in the wellness challenge week, can allow you to write the number associated with your subjective feelings each day.
In the image below you'll see how I visually represent these details on an X- and Y-axis. Daily I track my energy level with a dot or bullet and my subjective sleep quality with an open circle. I'm also adding in a subjective stress level with a different symbol.
What I want you to do is create a similar tracker for yourself.
You can print off the tracker from the wellness course, or create your own in a journal or even on a scrap piece of paper.
If you're drawing it out for yourself, create the graph that is more visual than just the boxes from the habit tracker template.
-Draw or mark out space for ten lines.
-Each day give yourself a score from 1 - 10 for the following:
Your energy level - how ready are you to perform at your best? 10 would be unstoppable.
Your sleep - 10 would be the perfect amount of sleep for your needs and waking up feeling refreshed.
Your stress level - 10 being the absolute worst you’ve ever felt.
I find that I will personally record sleep in the morning but save energy and stress levels for at least a few hours later once I have had some time to wake up. You can even do these much later after you've had some time to reflect on how well you performed today.
Nobody seeking flow and peak performance, or even just stress-free living in our current circumstances wants to live a life that's always a 6 or 7 out of 10, just as you wouldn’t go around bragging if you scored 60% on a test.
Making the stress tracker something visual like this works so well because it motivates you to want to find solutions.