Making significant progress in any endeavor requires extensive time walking the path. Depending on your masteries, you may have to spend extended time seated, studying, or working at a desk. Deep work. Sitting for extended periods is not good for your body, mind, or spirit. It is necessary to move to prevent rust.
A long working session using your mind, like sitting at a desk, will benefit and reinvigorate with an injection of body or spirit effort. One example is keeping an ab roller by your desk and a typical cube timer. Set a timer for around 30 minutes. When you are summoned out of work, do your sets, and get back into it.
When we feel burned out we are often out of balance with our triplicity of Body, Mind, and Spirit in a way that will not be tolerated.
Balancing can be time-efficient with a short injection from a different pillar. Read our about page for more information.
Examples – (Work area – Remedy):
- Physical labor – Reading a book
- Homework – Going outside for a walk in the sun
- Dealing with others – intense physical training
- A stressful failure and you must continue – meditation and prayer
- Day job – Physical cardio training (then work on real path purpose to BECOME day job)
Below are four strategies useful for holding your focus over a long session. These four are tailored to refreshing work done in the mind arena.
Training
Your body is like a big, dumb puppy; it needs to be exercised to prevent it from misbehaving. If it does not have anything to do for too long it gets scared. Becomes erratic. Starts to lose its shit.
Aerobic exercise reduces general anxiety. A study in the Behavior Research and Therapy journal concluded that both low-intensity exercise and high-intensity exercise lowered the anxiety of 54 participants post-training and for a week after that. High-intensity training produced stronger effects and showed effects in more participants. [1]
Hard Training – healthy mind.
If your work is done sitting, which a significant amount of work is done now, training is your first response when focus becomes difficult. Often the training required to be centered again is significantly less than one might expect, but based on the study above a consistent training protocol is required for optimal performance.
If your mind cannot stop itself from being impaled with thoughts that have nothing to do with the current focus, you need to move.
The amount of exertion needed to quiet thoughts varies for the individual but can often be accomplished with a small circuit, or a walk of medium length and intensity. It is important to find the volume that allows you to regain focus & mental energy. The amount of volume you need will be different each working session so it is important to pay attention to the signals your body provides. For some, they may need to get up and walk around every hour. For someone who vigorously trains following a consistent schedule, you may be able to focus for complete durations because your body is compounding the anti-anxiety effects of numerous training days.
Consider creating an environment that promotes the body while using the mind. You can set exercise equipment around your workspace that allows you to train quickly and get back to mental work.
Equipment Recommendations For The Mental Workspace
Adjustable dumbbells – These can be expensive but they replace an entire rack of dumbbells and could last for 5+ years if used with care, or even longer. Adjustable dumbbells are a good home purchase because their functions significantly outnumber the space taken by them. You can also get a Bowflex stand which adds to the aesthetics and ease of use. You could set them on a table or something, but they are heavy.
Suspension training straps – Suspension Training Straps were popularized by the TRX company, but now there are comparable off-brand copies. However, The original isn’t expensive, and will last forever so it may be best to support the creators. We recommend getting straps because they are easy to travel with and supplement a training program when equipment is sparse. The suspension trainer hangs on the door and causes no damage.
Suspension trainers are not weightlifting; they are calisthenics, so you should use a repetition range akin to calisthenics–pushups, squats, dips, etc–compared to weightlifting rep ranges.
Ab wheel – One of the best exercises you can do for your abs and shoulders. Ab-wheels are cheap, lightweight, and easy to store. Doing abs to refresh your work sessions will help your aesthetics and allow you to have shorter workouts because you are training abs separately. We linked to one below with solid ratings. You may be able to find one used for pennies on the dollar, or an alternative cheaper model. All of them have the same essential function.
Bands – Bands are cheap and easy to store. They will fit in your desk easily. Pull them, push them, and know they will one day snap under your immense strength gained from all of your training–understand they will break eventually and this is normal. You can buy top-tier bands from Rogue Fitness, or an alternative brand, but those will one day snap too. The one we linked has good reviews, is a multi-pack, and is on the lower cost side.
Pulling them across the chest will activate your rear delts; this is a good shoulder stretch. You can also step on them while seated or standing for curls or presses. Same as with the TRX Trainer, bands use your bodyweight so are more of a calisthenic than a weightlifting movement. You could also classify band movements as flexibility improving, or injury correcting; physical therapy instead of performance gains.
Be creative with your training and always look for new methods, improvements on existing methods, and methods that should be replaced.
Boxing Ball headband(reflex ball) – The reflex ball is not a replacement for training in a boxing or martial arts gym; it is a minor supplement to that training that will help you with timing, reducing flinching, stance, pivoting, but is not a substitute for dedicated training. It is an excellent application for taking a 10-minute break from your desk to refresh your mind. In 10-minutes with the reflex ball, you get the roughly the same amount of steps as a 10-minute walk. The ball is good for quick breaks, especially if you do not live in a walkable area.
If you can use the reflex ball outside, that’s even better. Sun and steel.
Grip Trainers – Because the forarms are a smaller muscle, these types of trainers may not be enough to fully clear your mind once mental fatigue has set in. Grip Trainers help you exercise more while working from home. However, They can be used during mental tasks as it is low-effort training that does not require you to leave your mental working space. These will help you increase grip strength, which will help with any kind of sport performance.
There are numerous grip trainers and the best tools are the ones you will use consistently. Beyond that, Captains of Crush grippers are the cornerstone grip trainer. They also make hand stretching bands for hand therapy–important for those who type or work with your hands. Strength is diminished when agility or flexibility is damaged.
If you struggle to take breaks even if your body asks you to, consider getting a classic aesthetic hourglass or a modern cube-timer to set session lengths. At the end of a session, you train no matter how you feel, even if you do just a rep or two.
Without a timer there is a risk of unaware mental degradation; the flow state of fast-moving time without the skill and focus enhancements of flow because you need to move your body or heat your spirit.
Breathing Exercises
Breathing exercises help calm an overactive mind by making it relax. The way this is accomplished is through conscious, deep, manual breaths.
Put a heavy emphasis on conscious breathing. Unconscious breathing, letting the body breathe on its own, typically leads to shallow breathing which results in more breaths over time. Fast, shallow breathing creates anxious energy. We want to do the opposite of that when we are walking down the path for extended periods.
Deep, conscious, and spaced breathing is most appropriate for activities that do not incorporate the body. If you take 40 breaths a minute unconsciously, conscious breathing may allow you to cut that number in half if not more. Slow, deep breathing will make you calm, keeping anxiety and distraction at bay. You will notice you look for fewer ways to escape what you are doing by distraction or a faux responsibility created in the mind.
You can do breathing exercises while at your desk. The term “exercise” here is even misleading. You can just breathe slowly. What you want is fewer breath cycles per minute. A breath cycle is the combination of inhalation/exhalation.
Breathing exercises work well before working sessions and during them. You can do a single set of the Wim Hoff Breathing method(below) when you feel the accumulation of mental or spiritual rust. Wim Hoff gives his method away for free because he genuinely cares.
“Have a good day, or a good night. I love you.”
If your mind is racing do not ignore it. Too many people do. A racing mind is your body, mind, or spirit telling you some need is not being met. Figure out how to meet it and go back into the depths.
Being grounded is a prerequisite for most extended practice sessions. In case it is not clear when we say “grounded” we mean calm, without thought manifested by emotion, and manual, deep breathing spaced appropriately.
Mediation
Meditation is good for calming the mind but if the body needs attention meditation will not be the most helpful.
The human body is a container for the mind, which is a container for the spirit. This notion is not based in science but in faith and observation. Not everything can be studied and you should not rely solely on studies to make your life decisions. Remember, test, observe, and continue what works for you and discard what does not.
Meditation done before working sessions helps the adventurer stay calm while focusing on the path for an extended period. It should be done before the major events of your day so that you face all challenges with a calm, calculating demeanor.
The Transcendental Meditation school promotes a morning meditation after waking up, and a mid-afternoon meditation that would take place after the day job, somewhere between 3-6pm. TM is followed by individuals like David Lynch, Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, and thousands more.
Meditation is often not what is needed during an extended working session in the mental domain. For most adventurers, meditation should be done before sessions and before rest to prepare for each.
As technology progresses, the need for physical labor decreases. First we threw stones, now we shoot bullets.
Meditation can be used to edit down thoughts that may come from fatigue or struggle borne from mental or spiritual realms.
The tone laid in this section may sound like meditation is not a recommendation; that is not what is being said here. Assuming a work session happens in a desk environment and continues for 10+ hours, meditation is not usually the solution; physical activity is.
Anxiety falls when activity increases.
Observing your breathing patterns can help you diagnose your needs. Shallow breathing constitutes a lack of grounding. Deep breathing with proper spacing, and anxiety, warrants physical exercise in most circumstances.
You need to take an accurate self-diagnosis and topple the wall blocking you from your best work in the most efficient way possible for YOU.
Isolation
John Carmack is a legendary programmer who co-created the pioneering PC game from 1993, Doom. Doom is considered by many game historians to be one of the most important games ever made for popularizing the first-person shooter genre. If the history of Doom is interesting to you, consider reading Masters of Doom: How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture.
Carmack, who is now the CTO of Oculus, uses isolation when he needs to grind it out. Carmack will get a hotel room in a random city, fly there, and lock up. He chooses unattractive or unknown locations so he is incentivized to stay inside his room. He doesn’t stay in Miami Florida, He stays in Miami Ohio. He turns off his phone, and codes for 13 hours a day, sometimes more; an artifact from his deep work habits developed while building Doom.
Your best work is done in the lab. Your friends are not scientists; they are not allowed inside when you are creating. Neither are children. You can be a scientist and a nanny but not at the same time.
Turn your phone off. Turn off the internet connection. Cut away all that is not the canvas. Social media and the IOT made us connected to our benefit and detriment.
Adventurers are slowed by the baggage of those who do not move forward on the same path. Adventure alone and you will find the muse. Adventure with other explorers and you may find her together. Adventure with dead weight and your journey will not move.
Curations: