On the hottest days of the year what’s a really good idea is to go for a cycle, then go to the gym, do AMRAP, then 3 x 15-minutes rounds in extreme heat. Then, after that, go for another cycle.
What this project comprises of are also three distinct activities that relate to well-being and how to ensure you can always achieve that amazing feeling.
Music is an extremely powerful part of this process. I used to be focused on the aspect of enjoyment in making music using computers and how doing so can induce these states. However I’m more excited about the experience of music now itself and that will play an instrumental role in this project. There are many reasons why and it will be interesting to learn more about these reasons and effects music has on your brain and what music does to your brain. It literally is a form of medicine.
Music has the ability to talk to you, relate to your problems, help you get through hard times, to motivate you, make hard times enjoyable, make you feel energised and inspired. Music has this ability to interact with and light up several regions of your brain, stimulating and increasing your neuronal activity. So if music is not a large part of your life, that’s your first problem. Without the music involvement, this is unlikely to work.
Next is the physical activities you choose to do and not just do but specifically how you engage with them. It’s not enough just to set goals, write them down, and say off we go. You can write them down all you want, off you go, then sit down on your phone and be semi-distracted when you should be pushing yourself to the max. Ease and comfort will never bring it on either. If you’re not struggling, it’s not happening. There needs to be effort. And not just what you can do but the act of going beyond where you are.
And last but not least, as this is a never ending cycle once you step onto and into this process it becomes a loop where you have to continue to act and move within this process continuously, the last is ‘the mental process’: goals which you deliberately set that require much effort on your part to working on.
These mental goals must always be many steps ahead of you. You should always be trying to generate ideas that are well above your present level ability. And for every time you get closer to it, more or better ideas will arise. Therefore through each phase during the process from having these frequent flow states whilst engaged in the tasks, your mind will elevate, ideas will become stronger, your thinking will become sharper. And therefore by following the natural course of this developmental cycle, you will be changed by following this process.
This mix of these three elements: music, physical and mental play a central and critical role to forming how these qualitative states can be accomplished daily through ‘the way’ you choose to act and engage with them. Music is a great motivator. It can also be used a tool to lock your body into a steady rhythm, keeping pace and moving in time with the sounds.
You can also think in time with rhythms too. But this requires going into unconscious thinking states, which we’ll come back to how exactly that happens and works later.
Music is a key factor for the simple fact the effect music has on the brain and how that helps to keep bringing on the state. If you don’t have a love for music or don’t feel it to be an important part of your life, I’m afraid you’re out of the game and this will not work for you.
Therefore you must have a culmination of various interests ranging between many physical and mental activities, all extremely challenging, always seeking to elevate the bar in those activities, making these games harder to play, and in the process, more fun to enjoy.
What you want to do is this: make it easy to make it harder on yourself. Learn to engage with hard as fun. And keep doing that until you understand.
You will know when you have felt it.
You can’t miss it.
IF IT’S TOO EASY, IT’S TOO BORING
And those are two of the exact ingredients that will ensure it will be impossible for you to ever experience it. If you are in the ‘love easy’ but find yourself sometimes ‘feeling bored’ category, then I’m afraid that’s your own fault. Help yourself overcome your own mental state. People sometimes give themselves their own problems, the mental state they deserve many times, is simply a reflection of the way they choose to live, which is: lazy.
Look, all I can do is share different strategies and ways of getting you going. But I don’t really care if you do or don’t because my reasoning for doing these things is precisely to keep me going. I’m doing what’s fun for me.
It’s up to you to put in the time and effort if you wish to find it too.
