Thread by @stevemagness

When you haven't worked out hard in a while, at the first sign of discomfort, you tend to freak out. You want to quit, even though you are okay.

It's a perception problem. And it applies to far more than exercise.

THREAD on embracing discomfort instead of choosing avoidance.

As a lifelong runner, I recently experienced this in coming back from a long injury. At the first hint of my heavy breathing and tired legs, “Stop! Why are you doing this!” is all that went through my head.

When we haven’t experienced discomfort in a while, our mind forgets how to deal with it. It resets its baseline, having forgotten what it’s like to feel pain or fatigue.

With practice, that voice becomes a little quieter, and more delayed.

As you get to know discomfort again, you push that voice off until you truly are on the edge of fatigue and danger.

This doesn’t just apply to exercise. It applies to just about any sort of ‘discomfort.’

Take masks during a pandemic. Not do they work or not…but why do people complain about wearing them?

They don’t impair breathing in any meaningful way. They don’t limit Oxygen. They don’t lead to any meaningful change in CO2. The slight shift in air exchange is easily handled.

This is basic respiratory physiology. You can even test it yourself with a pulse oximeter if you doubt me. I did.

So why do people panic, freak out, complain, etc. about wearing a mask?

Perception.

It’s no different than the guy who hasn’t exercised. For masks, because they’ve built it up in their head and it's right there in front of them making them hyperaware of their breathing, the slightest hint of any change, seems like a big deal.

Even if it’s not.

How long can you hold your breath?

Some think it's connected to lung health/volume. It's not. It's a perception issue too...

When the everyday person holds their breath they aren’t limited by lung capacity or oxygen levels or even CO2 build up. They are limited by perception

That alarm that urges you to breathe is tuned to slight changes in CO2. But for those of us who don’t go around holding our breath, the alarm goes off super early, well before any real danger.

Why? It’s better to have a sensitive alarm to urge you to breathe than a delayed one

But, we can easily train this perception very quickly. Once you practice holding your breath a few times, all of the sudden a novice can jump from holding his or her breath for 20 seconds to 60sec+.

With a little training, that can go for several minutes.

All without any change in any true capacity. Just getting used to the urge.

The same goes for wearing a mask, exercising hard, or even dealing with performance anxiety.

Feeling a little discomfort, be it pain, fatigue, or anxiety can be a good thing. It shifts our set point.

As a society, we tend to treat these things as bad. As items to avoid. Wearing a mask, getting up on stage, speaking, all make you feel uncomfortable, so we take off the mask, avoid the stage, etc.

Part of life should be about experiencing and working through that discomfort.

If we don’t. If we simply avoid. Then we are the person who hasn’t exercised in a while, feels a tinge of fatigue, and desperately wants to quit.

Discomfort adjusts our alarm. It resets it to an appropriate level.

I’m not commanding you to go experience pain, fatigue, anxiety, or nerves all of the time.

But we need some in our life. We don’t want a hyperactive alarm system, that somehow thinks we can’t breathe after wearing a mask for 5 minutes.

I’m reminded of something my college coach said after a particularly hard workout where we were all layed out on the track, “Your parents probably haven’t felt what you’re feeling–that lactic burn in your legs– in 35 years!”

It was a reminder that part of the journey is experiencing the discomfort. And never getting so far away from it, you don’t remember what it was like.

And research largely backs this up. Not only does experiencing emotions, sensations, etc. shift our alarm, but it allows us to understand the nuance of them.

The difference between pain and injury, anxiety and excitement.

The better we're able to sort through the shades of grey, and understand the nuance of complex feelings, emotions, and sensations the better we're able to navigate them: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Reading our body is a skill. And the better we get at it, the more it helps with not only performance but our overall well-being.

thegrowtheq.com/what-i-learned…

Feelings, emotions, and sensations aren’t something to always avoid. We should explore, navigate, understand them. Even if we ultimately then choose to ‘avoid’ them.

But the only way we know what they truly mean and whether danger truly exists is if we get just comfortable enough exploring them.

So next time you feel a little bit of discomfort, explore it. Don't run away. It'll make life better for you next time.

I hope you enjoyed this thread and found it useful.

Every week I tweet a thread about the science of performance. If you find this sort of stuff interesting, follow along.