Are Sports a Suitable Replacement for Your Daily Mindfulness Practice?

Do Sports = Mindfulness?

I recently heard a debate from a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher that caught my attention as it related to the question of whether playing sports or participating in physical activity can substitute a mindfulness practice.

The argument was that people who claim they get everything they need out of their physical practice are missing an inherently valuable component of more traditional mindfulness practices and that playing sports won’t carry over any benefit into an everyday situation. One of the primary concerns of the author was that the sport you are most passionate about because a vehicle of escape over time.

I look at it as a situation where there is a complementary value of participating in a physical challenge along with taking the time out to find regular stillness in your week.

The mindful value of sport primarily comes when operating a peak performance, when everything depends on your mind and body working in harmony and you reach the flow state. By meditating, you help to strengthen the mind-body connection, allowing yourself to avoid distractions to reach and maintain the flow state more often, whether in competition or casual sports practice. Vice versa, most people gravitate towards a physical practice that they have enjoyment and passion for which is another critical factor for producing a state of flow.

Playing sports and practicing mindfulness have some of the same qualities to them but they are not exactly the same thing. The statement cannot be made that all sports are mindfulness practices just as much as you cannot say that all mindfulness practices are sports. But are people who say that their meditation or mindfulness practice is found in the gym or on the field or court wrong? I think that if in their own mind they feel a mindfulness benefit from their preferred physical activity, it’s good that it is helping them, at least in the short-term.

Former Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink talks about how the gym and training Jiu Jitsu is his mindfulness practice and it helps to serve him well. Some people really struggle with sitting still to find mindfulness and so maybe you will need to find a balance between the physical and resting types of mindfulness.

One of the statements the MBSR teacher made that cuts through the differences between sports and a more calming mindfulness practice is that many people who gravitate towards sports as their mindfulness practice end up having it as a crutch that cannot help them as much in real life or when they are injured and can’t keep playing.

This is why you don’t want to just practice sports, because you may be missing out on a valuable part of the everyday practice of mindfulness and meditation for helping you to cope with other stressors.

Physical activity is a stress in and of itself, albeit a beneficial one. By getting your blood pumping and releasing beneficial endorphins, you are also activating the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the fight or flight response in emergency situations. On the other hand, meditation and mindfulness practices turn up the parasympathetic nervous system, enhancing calm and relaxation.

The Mind-Muscle Connection and Flow

Many people gravitate towards more traditional mindfulness practices only after having found a passion for a particular sport or physical activity because there is that excitement and passion that comes with doing something that gets your heart rate up and produces endorphins. This also seems to be an entry point to mindfulness as the inherent challenge in sport, whether competing against yourself or others, is a powerful driver of flow. Once people find an activity that reliably produces the flow state, it’s hard to get them to want to stop. Flow is the ultimate destination of practicing mindfulness - finding peak present moment awareness to push the body and mind to its limit.

But it can be very difficult to maintain a flow state even when pushing yourself in a sporting environment because of the intense focus it requires. To strengthen this focus on the present moment I believe that it is absolutely essential to have a daily mindfulness practice. It’s like lifting weights - you can’t expect to get stronger by lifting weights just once; it has to be done consistently over many months and years to produce results.

Sweep The Floor

Or better yet, my favourite analogy for the need to practice consistently comes from the final chapter of Ryan Holiday’s Ego is the Enemy: you’ve got to sweep the floor.

You don’t just sweep a floor once, dust your hands off, and consider it done; you’ve got to sweep the floor regularly in order to keep it clean.

In Ego is the Enemy, Holiday is referring to practicing Stoicism when he talks about sweeping the floor but Stoicism and mindfulness have a lot in common and the analogy works well for either of the practices. Practicing mindfulness daily will bring more richness of experience to your world when playing sports or any other physical practice and that’s why you shouldn’t just do one or the other - they work better together for finding your flow.

An example of someone who fully embodies this dichotomy is Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you’ve listened to any interviews with him, particularly The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, or read his biography Total Recall, you might be familiar with how Arnold spent two intensive years practicing Transcendental Meditation to find peace of mind and hone the mind-muscle connection to improve as a bodybuilder. Arnold claims that he got everything he could out of his daily meditation practice and as a result was able to focus better in the gym and this was part of the practice that made him into the legendary bodybuilder that he was. After those two years Arnold treated meditation as a refresher that he did occasionally to reset himself.

It’s the same with floating regularly - some people love floating so much that they transform it into their weekly mindfulness practice but you still need to keep the daily mindfulness practice in place to get the most out of your float sessions.

So here’s my conclusion:

Physical activities and mindfulness might have a lot in common when it comes to present-state awareness but the similarities end there. The two practices are not the same but work synergistically to get you more deeply in touch with your mind and body and should both be incorporated regularly for living a rich life and finding your flow.

The Year of Living Mindfully

The start of a New Year always marks a time of introspection. While many high-achievers may balk at the need to have a specific time of year when you set goals and resolutions, any time is better than no time to do it. If you are looking towards 2019 as your year to accomplish more of the goals you set for yourself, or even just want to be happier, that’s great!

In consideration of what you want to accomplish this year, I have a challenge I would like you to consider joining me in.

Make this year your year for living mindfully.

Last year I kicked off the year by meditating for the first 100 days and it was transformational in that what had previously been something I tried to do daily but never properly formed the habit for, became a consistent part of my life as it was solidified as a habit. Now a day for me isn’t complete without some sort of mindfulness practice but I’ve come to learn that it doesn’t always have to be the traditional "sitting cross-legged" meditation practice in order to be valuable to you.

Mindfulness meditation is great to learn - it’s the closest thing to a superpower that we have as humans. It isn’t the only way to be mindful though because we still have a lot more living to do and we can’t just sit in silence all the time. Meditation should be treated like cleaning your room - you do a deep clean of your room once per week but then keep up the daily routines required for your room to be neat and tidy at all times.

Another analogy I love to compare it to comes from the end of Ryan Holiday’s book Ego Is The Enemy. You’ve got to sweep the floor. A floor doesn’t stay clean and dust-free without sweeping it, you regularly go back and sweep the floor to keep on top of it. Maybe you will meditate daily to keep your stress and anxiety under control. I certainly try to as much as possible. But maybe you will gravitate more to using meditation more like your deep cleaning day where you actually vacuum and mop the floor and the rest of your days you apply that skill to living mindfully in other ways. That’s the true purpose of meditation after all and will lead you to live a more fulfilling life, regardless of what you do.

So let’s make this the year of living mindfully. Each day, find a moment of silence in your life. Take 6 deep breaths and look around you. Really take in the environment around you. Pay attention. Listen. As the explorer Erling Kagge writes in his book Silence, the only true silence we can find is within us. Even with the world racing around you silence can be found. And when the stress metre gets maxed out, go back to your meditation practice and dig deeper into the silence.

Or if things get really out of control, go for a float. I have found that floating in a sensory deprivation tank offers a more complete escape from stress than meditation alone can offer me, even after extensive meditation practice. It’s wonderful. Nothing can phase you after a float. It’s named the post-float glow for a reason. You become like a beacon of lightness after coming out of an hour of floating. These more intensive mindfulness practices don’t have to be an everyday thing though if you keep up the daily practice of living mindfully. Keep that in mind, set a reminder for yourself each day if you need to, and make the most out of this year by becoming present on a daily basis.

Start using this mindfulness technique to combat stress and improve your wellbeing.

My heart begins to pound first. It’s the feeling of my body heating up - cooking from the inside. Then I can feel my eyelid twitch. Next, the blood vessels in my eye burst. Something is stressing me out and these are the physical signs of overwhelm which have become telltale to me.

Stress is one of the most insidious issues that plague us today. The devastating effects of chronic stress negatively impact the health of both your body and your mind.

Counteracting stress is easier said than done when there are a million tasks on your list and our world is no longer set up to simply allow you to clock out when you need to.

And it’s not going to get any easier.

The good news is that there are still effective ways in which you can combat stress in your life. They often take some conscious effort on your part to be most effective though.

Creating a mindfulness practice like meditation can become your secret weapon in your fight against stress and a whole host of other issues.

Meditation has become a buzzword that makes it seem like the barrier to entry is much higher than it actually is. By meditating you are simply applying one of the many ways of becoming mindful - another word that is full of mystique. Mindfulness means becoming focused on the present moment instead of letting your thoughts wander aimlessly between the past and the future, which is what most people do when they go on an out of control stress spiral and let either depressed or anxious thoughts dominate.

If you’ve ever gazed in wonder at the stars or sat in awe staring at a beautiful sunset then you’ve both practiced mindfulness and have what it takes to continue to build it into a habit that will benefit you even more from regular practice.

In the traditional sense, you meditate by sitting comfortably and then working to clear all thoughts from your head. Most people find it beneficial to focus on a single point which is why you will often be instructed to focus on your breath flowing in and out by noticing the movement of air past the tip of your nose or the rising and falling of your abdomen.

Another common meditation practice is the use of a mantra, which is repeated to keep other thoughts at bay - this is known as Transcendental Meditation or TM.

Many people fear that they cannot possibly meditate because they have too many thoughts in their head or that practicing meditation will fundamentally change some edge that they think they have and will mellow them out too much.

Rest assured that neither could be further from the truth. Meditation will help you reign in your emotions but it won’t change who you are. Also, there are many different ways to start meditating and guided meditation apps that can help you along the way no matter how scatter-brain you start out.

The other great thing is that you can keep your meditation as low key as you want it to be. There are no rules stating that you have to get into a cross-legged position on the floor if that is uncomfortable or just plain awkward for you. I usually sit on a chair or my bed and occasionally even lie down on the bed. You don’t even have to be seated or stationary — you can stand still or walk mindfully - although I will say that it makes it more difficult to get into a truly mindful state and you might be better off waiting until you’ve gathered some more experience while remaining seated.

Being able to better control your stress and emotional response to the world around you is well worth the small amount of time and effort it takes to get into the routine of meditating daily. And these benefits are not exclusive to the yogis who have been practicing mindfulness for years on end - research has shown that taking just six deep breaths is enough to reduce blood pressure and therefore impact your perception of stress.

So give it a shot. Schedule a time and start with even just a few minutes of closing your eyes and breathing deeply. Almost all of us have around seven to eight hours free each day outside of work and sleep and most of that time is wasted on television and social media. Blocking off 10 minutes for a daily meditation practice is insignificant.

If you need more convincing, we’ll go into more of the benefits and how you can implement a meditation practice another time. But for now, just try it out. Do it right now as you finish reading this.

Breathe in for 5 seconds.

Notice the stillness as you pause at the top of your breath.

Breathe out for 5 seconds.

Notice the similar stillness as all of your air is exhaled.

Repeat this 6 times and see how much clearer and calmer your mind is compared to one minute ago.

You Can Use the Same Technique World-Class Athletes Do to Improve Performance. Here’s How.

I find a comfortable position and close my eyes. As I focus on my breathing, my attention becomes immersed in the present moment. Everything and nothing is within my awareness.

Now it’s time to perform. It’s time to visualize.

With my body and mind relaxed I turn my attention to my sport - strongman. We usually know ahead of the competition what the events are going to be. Just like football players watching tape of the opposing team, knowing what lifts we are going to do gives us time to prepare so that we can put on a better show and reduce the likelihood of injury.

I picture the setting - outside on the grass, hot, sunny day. There’s a good crowd cheering us on as we perform these odd feats of strength. I can see the ref’s face as he calls me up for my turn to lift. The picture is painted in vivid detail and when I go to pick up the stone into my lap my muscles and nervous system feel the strain as if I were actually doing the lift. An explosion of movement launches the stone onto the platform and I can see myself shuffling laterally to pick up the next stone and load it as well. This continues for the final two stones to complete the run.

With intense concentration time becomes distorted but if I time it, it will all be over in less than 20 seconds in my mind. My actual time on the day of the competition - 18.2 seconds.

This is how visualization works and it’s a not-so-well-kept-secret performance technique used by almost every world-class athlete who has become a household name.

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Michael Phelps and the rest of the U.S. swim team practice visualization under the watchful eye of coach Bob Bowman. They do this not in place of but in addition to the monstrous metres they put into the actual pool. They know exactly how many strokes they will complete wall-to-wall and can get their visualized swim times down to within milliseconds of their actual race times.

Steph Curry regularly uses a float tank to visualize his three-point shots as the sensory deprived environment is the ideal space to quiet his mind and achieve complete focus on performance.

The human brain is wired with what are called mirror neurons - these are neurons that fire when seeing someone else perform an action as well as when you imagine yourself completing an action. Brain scanning techniques like EEG and fMRI have validated that our brains fire as if we physically performed a movement when we only just imagined it.

Scientists have helped people suffering from the phantom limb pain of amputated limbs get a release of their tension through visualization and athletes who visualize the performance of their sport see a statistically significant increase in performance compared with those who spend their recovery days laying around on the couch playing Xbox.

This all sounds fun in theory if you’re an athlete right? Here’s the cool part: visualization isn’t just for sports performance; anything that you can imagine yourself doing can be improved through focused visualization. Musicians can visualize the performance of their song, a chef can see their flawless knife work, and a lecturer giving a keynote speech can visualize the presentation going without a hitch. If you can visualize it, you can physically improve upon it. Albeit these everyday examples are not as strenuous as sports performance and so they can be practiced more frequently but taking the time to see yourself perfectly executing the action in your own mind can help to hone it further to perfection.

How do you get started with visualization?

• Pick a quiet, comfortable place to do your visualization practice. Your favourite meditation corner is perfect. Float tanks also work really well because you’ve given yourself permission to spend a distraction-free hour immersed in the present moment.

• Spend a few minutes focusing on your breathing. Relax and breath deeply.

• When you’re ready, start to imagine the scene around your activity in vivid detail like the example from the opening paragraph of this article. You may have to do some research if you’re performing in a setting you’re unfamiliar with but the more detail you can generate, the more realistic you can make your visualization practice.

• Picture yourself in minute detail going through the performance. If done with enough effort and focus, your muscles may tense and your heart rate may spike - particularly if it’s a physically intense performance that you are imagining.

• Repeat the practice as much as needed. Practice makes perfect and one of the reasons athletes like visualization so much is that they can continue to do the repetitive practice without putting the same physical strain on their bodies.

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Alex Honnold might be the best athlete in the world and yet most people have never heard his name and wouldn’t recognize what his physically unassuming body is capable of.

In the summer of 2017, Alex approached the base of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park with a pair of rock climbing shoes and a bag of chalk and began to free solo what is considered by many to be the most difficult sheer granite face to climb in the world.

Free soloing means there are no ropes and harness for if the climber happens to fall.

It takes most climbers 3 or 4 days to summit El Cap but that’s also out of the question for Alex climbing free solo since he has no way of taking a nap to recover. But Alex won’t need it.

In 3 hours and 56 minutes, Alex completed the climb to the summit of El Capitan. He was deep within the flow state to complete this performance and attests to the practice of visualizing the entire climb to getting his mindset right to complete this seemingly impossible feat.

Jump to 7:46 in the video below to hear Alex talking about his visualization practice.

Imagine being by yourself in the dead center of a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without a rope to catch you if you fall. For professional rock climber Alex Honnold, this dizzying scene marked the culmination of a decade-long dream.

Visualization is not just a practice in the realm of superhuman athletes, it has been used by people practicing skills across a wide range of industries and you can take advantage of it too for anything you hope to get better at.

The Four Factors of Well-being and Floating

We all face adversity. But what do you do when you receive that bad news? Do you accept your fate as it is or do you seek the opportunity that can be found within all obstacles? 

According to neuroscience research, there are four factors that contribute to our overall well-being and that are within our control. Knowing that these factors are controllable means that we don’t have to play victim to our hardships any longer. What we can control we can change for the better with practice and over time. 

Research from Richard J. Davidson shows that the four areas of mental functioning can be trained to significantly improve well-being; in this way, wellbeing is fundamentally seen as no different from riding a bike - the more we practice the better we will get. 

By incorporating these four factors into our routine and practicing them, we are able to improve our mental health and are better prepared to face hardships that come our way. 

The four factors are resilience, outlook, awareness, and generosity and this is how floating can directly impact these factors and lead to improving your wellbeing. 

Resilience

Resilience refers to how quickly we can adapt to obstacles in our way and the sense of adversity and negative emotions that come from those obstacles. Float therapy harnesses the essence of mindfulness meditation, which is one of the key ways that Davidson has found that you can improve your resiliency. By limiting all external distractions, the float tank facilitates a mindful state that helps to build resilience. When you are better able to practice mindfulness you can look at your situation for what it truly is and not what your automatic reactions are telling you. In this way, you can better address adversity from a calm and logical perspective, not reactionary and overly emotional. 

Awareness

Awareness is focusing on the present moment and there’s no better way to enhance that than through floating. It’s not easy by any means to stay anchored to the present moment, even in the isolated environment of the float tank but it definitely helps when we aren’t bombarded by external distractions. 

Enhancing awareness is how we stay immersed in the present moment without dwelling on the past or anxiously awaiting the future.

As you settle into your float, bring yourself more and more into the present moment by focusing on your breathing. It’s challenging to feel the rise and fall of your abdomen in the float tank, so focus on the breath moving past the tip of your nose. Let this be your single point of awareness for the full duration of breathing in and breathing out at your own pace. If you find your mind wandering, don’t fret, simply return your attention to your breathing. This is the practice of mindfulness. 

Outlook

Davidson uses the term outlook as what is often referred to as optimism or pessimism; outlook is the ability to see the positive in life and to savour those positive experiences. Coming out of a float therapy session being completely relaxed is a perfect time to savour a moment of tranquillity. At Flow Spa, we have designed our lounge to serve in this capacity so that you can continue to further enjoy your state of wellbeing as you transition back out of the float environment. 

Davidson’s research has also shown that practicing loving-kindness or compassion meditations can improve your outlook. Our float tanks offer audio input if you want to enhance your loving-kindness practice during your float session through a guided meditation. These guided meditations are also available after your float session in the lounge.

Generosity 

Generosity is the last of the four factors to be trained for wellbeing and is the least likely to be directly improved upon by floating. Generosity implies expressing compassion and doing good for others, like through volunteer work. Practicing compassion meditation while floating will only go so far to truly impact the factor of generosity. However, by floating and improving the other three factors of your wellbeing, you are going to be much more inclined to act generously and compassionately with others because you will already feel so much better and at ease with yourself. In this way, floating can help to guide you towards more generosity.

A Continuing Practice

While these four factors of mental training for wellbeing are not exclusive to the float tank environment, the additional relaxation and isolation of a float tank do help to turbocharge the process with these otherwise challenging practices to make time for.

Remember that to truly have an impact on your wellbeing, the factors of resilience, outlook, awareness, and generosity need to be practiced regularly - ideally daily. You can’t shovel the driveway once and expect it to stay clear of snow all winter. Whether you return to the float tank to recharge or start a regular meditation practice of your own, there’s always more to be done to keep your mind strong and ready for any obstacles that life throws your way. 

The Value of Stillness

“A moment of stillness makes all the difference”

How many unread emails do you have right now? How many event invitations and social media notifications?

The answer is approaching infinite if you’re anything like the average human being today. But that’s not how we were wired to function - always turned on and plugged into constant alerts. It’s stressful to the mind, body, and soul. It makes you less human and more like a cyborg.

Interesting, but frightening, fact - most humans today meet the definition of cyborg by being addicted and attached to our smartphones which we have on us at all times and cannot live without.

How do we get back to more human and less ‘being?’

By taking a step back and unplugging.

The more you give your body a chance to be free from all distractions and connect again to itself and to nature, the better you will feel.

Feeling grounded or connected to the real world around you isn’t some hippy practice. It’s been an essential part of the human condition since before the dawn of consciousness.

Just because we have the potential to accomplish so much more today than we could ten thousand years ago doesn’t mean that our bodies are any different. In fact, in many ways, our disconnect from our roots has been a detriment to our health and wellbeing.

Give yourself the chance to recognize what it means to be human again. Take a deep breath. Listen to the rain. Go for a walk outside. Float and listen closely to the inner workings of your brain.

Creating stillness is all part of enjoying life and recognizing that you’re human.