Health

Caught Between Should and Am: Fixing My Writing Problem

/ Andrew Tatusko / 3 Comments
shoes beside word lux

Running and light

Ever since I finished my dissertation, almost 5 years ago, I have been caught in a weird head space where I haven’t figured out my identity as an academic, a professional, and even as a person. I’ve had a few starts on blogging that usually stops after a couple of months. I get distracted by something else and totally lose interest. Why?

At first I thought it had to do with marathon training. Doing this is so time consuming and tiring that I would usually post about starting the process and then do nothing until the result. The fiction that I convinced myself was true is that I can’t write and train at the same time. If I am going to perform at my job, maintain my relationships, and be mentally healthy, I can either run, or write. I have told myself this even though I knew it was total bullshit. Great writers all have parallel obsessive habits from drinking and smoking to running. Telling myself lies to avoid doing something is a deep-seated character flaw. I’ve learned much about how this mechanism works, but this time it had me caught. The real question is not why I stopped writing, but what I was avoiding.

It was last night when I was catching up on Supergirl that a little sisterly advice hit me that freshly out of the closet Alex Danvers gave her sister Kara (Supergirl):

Look… sometimes, you know, in our life, when one part is really confusing, we will pour way more attention than necessary into another.

I started running for very good reasons that still hold. It was to improve mental and physical health. It is still the single best tool I have in my toolkit to maintain mental and physical health and stability and I can’t ever see myself stopping. However, I have poured a lot into it. Challenges are really effective to have in front of you to stay motivated. But at what point do you become obsessed with it to the point that you are avoiding something else? I went from at most running one marathon a year, and last year that was enough. This year I am not only running two marathons, but running 2017 miles which is about 700 more than the previous year, and I want to train to get a Boston Qualifying time which would shave about 5% off of my finishing time this past May. Have I crossed the tipping point where running has gone from healthy activity to obsession I am using to avoid something? I might be there.

I have struggled with my identity as an academic and as a professional since finishing my dissertation in 2013. For a very long time, my religious identity as a person of faith was my central obsession academically, emotionally, and socially. At the time I gave that up, a story I have not yet fully told, running filled the void. I traded one preoccupation with another. But my life as an academic sat hollow. If faith is no longer what I want to be doing, what should I be doing?

I have this theory that confidence in what we do is not something we are born with, but something we learn over time. As we become more competent in something we become more confident in our abilities and that alone builds our desire and drive to do it more. So, if I could just find out what I should be doing and become more competent in it, then I would resolve my confusion.

Well, it didn’t work. The experiment failed because my fundamentals beliefs were wrong. I believed I needed to become competent in what I believed others wanted to read. I focused on what others might find helpful like focusing on life hacks and self-help that I think works. How about something in my professional field that others find interesting? What about lessons I have learned in life that others might find useful? After a few tries, I got bored and stopped. None of that was very fulfilling. That material is all out there written by people who are singularly passionate about it. I am not one of those people. The entire theory of becoming competent got derailed by the one thing that all of these ideas has in common: doing what I think I should do based on what I believe others want. It’s like all that advice from successful writers went right through my head – do what inspires you, not what you think will inspire others.

If I should’t do what I believe I should do, what is it that inspires me or consistently interests me? That’s the real question. My answer has been that no one is interested in any of the stuff that interests me, so who cares? Another lie. Keep running. Today I’d rather run on truth than the bullshit I tell myself. Walking the dog last night, after that little moment from a cheesy TV show that struck me, I found an answer. The question was how these things were related. And they absolutely are.

My academic interests have always been first, in how to teach the whole human subject based on an understanding that it is the relationship between teacher and student that is the most revolutionary and fundamental aspect of human learning and progress. The second is related to it. My dissertation focused on secularization and higher education which is tied to patterns of belief in American society, the policies that both respond to and shape those patterns, and how historians tell that story. Both of these are looking at the dynamic relationship between faith, belief, and knowledge in society and in the student.

My professional interests are about how we can help college and university teachers be better teachers. What habits, programs, and behaviors can we improve as teachers to help students learn more effectively? Right now this is about designing a program of teacher formation through critical reflection to find areas of improvement and to experiment with different online classroom behaviors to help students learn more effectively.

My personal interests have to do with the connection between physical and mental health and supporting pragmatic behaviors that help improve health with scientific evidence. I have many friends who have been in long term recovery from addiction who have thrown themselves into physical activity as an integral part of how they manage their sobriety. I know of runners and other athletes who have traded their obsession for drugs, sex, and body dysmorphia for clean living, even without the aid of prescription drugs.

How are these tied together? Anyone can look at these three areas and find things in common: human progress, the nature of belief, evidence-based living, etc. But those aren’t what hit me as interesting. Instead, it’s this idea:

I am fundamentally interested in how groups of people form relationships that support and cultivate healthy patterns of belief, knowing, and action, and in relationships and ideas that do exactly the opposite.

So… that’s what really interests me and the three ways I look at it. With that, it’s time to stop thinking about what I should write for an imagined group of others out there, and just do what I find interesting. Someone out there has to be interested in this stuff too, right?

Starting Marathon Training…Slowly

/ Andrew Tatusko / 1 Comment

I started running in July of 2015 just to lose weight and to give my mental health a needed boost. After I finished my first half marathon that December and signed up for my marathon for May of 2016, I started running just for the sake of running. Today I mostly run because it’s just what I do. Also, if I skip out on it too long my brain gets all squirrely, I get depressed, and get a mild case of the “fuck-its” which neither I nor anyone around me enjoys that much.

I am running the Pittsburgh Marathon again this May and I hope to get in the Marine Corps Marathon this fall. My training program starts on Sunday and now that I think I know what I am doing, I am taking a whole different approach.

Last year, going from couch to marathon in 9 months, my entire goal was to increase mileage as much as possible and at as fast a possible pace. I had no time for base building and was coming off of my third minor injury. For someone who had never run that distance, my training would give me only 12 weeks. That’s way too short a time and most run coaches might dissuade me from doing too much. But I learn from mistakes which means I need to make them. I did not get injured again, but every recovery period was sore, distances were difficult, and I got flu-like bugs twice. I focused far too much on carbs and my protein intake was abysmal. But I completed the marathon in under 4 hours anyway.

After that I decided to work on just building up mileage and pace. I rarely paid attention to heart rate except for when it was too high. My only goal was to get to running 50 miles a week comfortably. I met that goal and did so in good health. I also emphasized carbs less and focused more on meeting protein targets. The result has been a stronger, faster, healthier me. Now I’ve reached a point where I should be far more literal about a training program, work more on strength beyond doing pushups, and run each session with a different goal in mind.

polar_training_program

So what I am doing this time? I wear a Polar m400 (seen at the top) to record all of my workouts. I sync that data to a few other platforms (Strava, Runkeeper, and MapMyRun) for the community and because I am a nerd. The Polar ecosystem has blossomed with each update. Now, Polar will design a training program based on your race goal and over the time period you specify. It mixes up the distances, effort by heart rate, and works in a dozen or so strength and stretching exercises. A feature that I had never used before that I used today is called Zone Lock. By pressing the big “start” button, you can lock in the heart rate zone with which you want to pace yourself and it beeps when you go over or under. You can program it to use a pace lock instead if that’s what you’re after. This is all about becoming more efficient and consistent and little beeps and alarms help a great deal when you are getting used to a new rhythm and relationship between your brain, heart, and feet.

The hard part will be going slowly. I am so adapted to doing everything at a heart rate of 148-165 and at a pace less than 7:50/mile that all of the slower paces just feel weird. But I am also not adapted to push through sprints very well. I need both of those parts of my physiology to improve my time and health for the next marathon. Zone 2 for me, based on age and resting heart rate, is somewhere between 115 and 132 bpm. The hard thing to do will be to keep most of my running time at that heart rate regardless of pace. As you see in the picture at the top, that means running somewhere in the ballpark of 10 minute miles to start. Painfully slow. But I am trusting the science and evidence rather than my feelings. Today was my first shot at it, and I have to say it was enjoyable. Once I got used to the cadence of going slow, I was fine. And after about an hour I was really sweating it out and working hard. that partially because I was running on tired legs at the end of the week, but also because the myth I had that running more slowly was less work was false. It is not less work, it is different work. And different is exactly what my body needs.

So on we go to Pittsburgh. Slow, fast, and everything in between.

Sickness and the School

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image

I set out to write a post every day this year. Then I got a nasty flu bug. For a couple of weeks I have been foggy, tired, and unwilling to probe my mind for an idea worth writing about. That’s because whatever resources I might normally use to think and write have been sucked up by resting and exhaustion. As a result, I’ve missed a few weeks already.

If there is one theme on my mind these days it is what it looks like if I understand the primary function of my body and brain as survival. How I learn, love, and relate to others is rooted in my primary instinct to survive in this world. If sickness does anything, it sends one’s focus inward. I become less observant and less aware of the things around me. This is partially out of a conscious choice. I need to do things like rest to get my body well. But I also think it is more of an automatic defense mechanism that sets in motion. When I’m sick, I’m less aware of the world outside of my body.

The self as an idea our brains create as part of the most complex set of mechanisms that work for the survival of an animal species becomes most clear when the human system is in danger. Whether it’s a flu, a home invader, losing a job, or breaking up with a lover, the shift of focus inward is both automatic and sudden. Maslow understood this in his famous hierarchy of needs.

If we are considering learning, until we meet the basic survival needs of a student, we cannot expect much in the way of mastery of much of anything. The same goes for the general health and progress of a society. We cannot expect hungry and insecure people to make much progress because all of their resources are being used to see that they will simply stay alive. If we are to make progress as a society, we must feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and heal the sick. To expect more out of people such as these is to demand that they go against their nature which is an affordance the privileged never have to imagine in their lives.

Rules for a Happy Life: Sleep

/ Andrew Tatusko / 1 Comment
My dog is a sleeping champion.

My dog is a sleeping champion.

I still need to work on how much I sleep. I average around 7 hours per night and that number is skewed by the occasional sleeping I do on the weekends to “catch up.” I need to be better with this part of my health because sleep and all around well-being are intimately connected. The body heals in every which way during a sleep cycle whether it is a sore knee to stress or feelings of melancholy.

You will find conflicting information on sleep. Some will say that sleeping 8 hours a night of unbroken sleep is a myth. Others argue that there is no such thing as “sleep debt” or that sleeping in is unhealthy. Still others will argue about sleep cycles and how deep your sleep is. By the end of an investigation about sleep you will probably feel guilty because you are apparently doing it all wrong no matter what your habits are.

So this is what works for me. My exercise is directly proportional to the quality of my sleep. I need to exhaust my body physically in order for me to sleep well. The time I spend on electronic screens affects when I actually fall asleep. I have no TV in my room and do not read in bed. But I will do that final online Internet surf before sleep. It does not help me relax and prevents me from falling asleep. I probably do it from an inherent fear of missing out (FOMO) problem I have always had. What I would actually miss is beyond me.

What it might tell me is that if FOMO is my biggest barrier to sleep, the problem I really have is my relationship to social connectedness. I have been divorced for over 4 years and live alone so perhaps it is the subconscious neurosis of aloneness even if I do not feel particularly lonely. Who knows what it is. The reason is essentially irrelevant at this point.

This goes back to brain messages that I can still fix. I am good about getting out of bed and getting into bed when I am on my regular work schedule. I get in bed no later than 10 and get out no later than 6:50. With that said, I need to leave the technology alone and ignore the urge to grab onto it at night. I have white noise to block the sounds from outside and to silence the nasty tinnitus I have in my left ear from drumming for several years. That is enough.

My mornings began to improve last year. I started to wake up at 6:15, have a cup of coffee, read the news in The Economist, do some sort of exercising (right now it’s pushups), and then get going with the other morning stuff. It has helped a lot. I just need to be a bit better at night. Right now I am nursing a painful kneecap so I am not running all that much and my goal of reading has helped because I am not turning on a TV. I know that when I run, I sleep much better.

What I need is better sleep to get my knee fixed so I can run so I can sleep better.

It’s really a very easy problem to solve. I just have to ignore the impulses in my brain telling me to stay awake since there is no real reason for it. When I turn off the light switch, I just need to turn off my brain as well. That’s just a choice and nothing more.

Part five of a series of Life Rules. See the explanation here.

Rules for a Happy Life (And How to Shop for Self-Help)

/ Andrew Tatusko / 8 Comments

good habitsLast year I began a life re-boot. I had been through a lot of changes in the past few years. Some of these were for the better, and some just sucked. I had quit drinking, been to therapy, was faithfully taking three psychotropic meds to balance my brain chemistry, and found a group of friends to help me make useful changes. But I was stagnating and sluggish. So I had a choice. Give in to what I was feeling, or do something to change it. I went with the latter. I weaned myself off the meds slowly and started to feel better, but I knew I needed to take other action so I would not end up where I was when I literally fell apart several years before. (If you are on meds, don’t just go off them. Talk to your doc before you change anything. Your life depends on that talk.)

No fan of self-help books, I took a dip in that area of the bookstore anyway. The thing with self-help books is that most people will peruse them and read them only to be told that whatever they are feeling is perfectly normal and ok and that all they need to do is think positive and great things will happen. While it’s true that positive thinking can help, just feeding yourself saccharine affirmations when you feel like shit is putting a band-aid on a festering boil. To make a real change you need to lance that thing, pour some alcohol over it, get your stitches, and work on the thing that caused it so it doesn’t happen again. Better to have a few hours of pain and a scar than a wound that will never go away and will likely only get worse when things get rough again. I was through wallowing in my problems.

But I found a book that actually helped. I knew it was more or less the real deal because it met my criteria:

  1. It needs to be based in accredited clinical research. This can get rid of most of the bullshit people are trying to sell you. (For example, there is no science to support the claim that so-called “cleansing diets” actually cleanse anything at all. And I love juicing, too.) Accredited means that the body sponsoring the research has someone watching them to ensure the process is ethical and reliable. The best spot where that happens is through research universities.
  2. If it presents the proposed solutions as “easy” or “simple,” it is lying. Change is hard. Changing one’s habits takes discipline, time, and practice. Living well is like learning to play a musical instrument. I don’t care what your natural predispositions are to be an awesome guitarist, you have got to practice. More than that, you have to practice the right way by working on specific techniques and skills to make you a better player. Being happy is no different than this. You can’t expect to be happy. You need to learn specific skills that work for you and then you need to practice them every day and in situations that make you uncomfortable.
  3. It has to be simple. Don’t confuse simple with easy. E=mc 2 is simple. But it is not easy. If you have heard of Occam’s Razor in science, that’s what I am think about with simple. Great theories are concise and simple, but they explain a lot of phenomena and can do so in very complex ways. And most importantly, they are testable. If I can’t work through this self-help program and test the results empirically, it’s useless.

+-+643487111_140The book I found was You Are Not Your Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding. They are researchers at UCLA and have used this method with success in OCD patients. The concept is called self-directed neuroplasticity. The basic premise is that you can not only control your thinking, but by controlling that thinking you can change how your thinking works. One example is to label as false all of those nasty messages we tend to tell ourselves and automatically accept as true. The task is to figure out why those messages might be there, under what conditions they are most likely to pop up, and then how to change our response when they do come up. The four steps are to relabel, reframe, refocus, and revalue. So if I have a nasty thought like “God you’re an idiot,” what I will do is say “That’s not true” (relabel); then say, “Shut the fuck up you bastard,” to myself (reframe); I will respond by doing something like going for a walk or even focusing on the activity that I am avoiding that is sending me that message (refocus); and finally accept that my thoughts were never really a big deal (revalue). This is mindfulness training with a systematic process that works.

Through my practice of these steps I started running and changed my habits with just about everything including what, when, and how much I eat  and sleep. My thinking is healthier and I now see depressive or self-loathing thoughts as this little alien in my brain that has no business living there. Very liberating. But it took practice and hard work. And it still takes practice and hard work.

Out of this experience, I have started coming up with little rules that have helped me and continue to help me on a daily basis if I practice them.

  1. Lean-in to what’s uncomfortable. When I don’t want to do it and start procrastinating, do it any way. The hardest part is the first 10 seconds. You gotta focus and punch through that wall.
  2. When my mind starts to wander, I need to move my body. The brain basically runs on sugar. If you are focused on something for a long time, you use up the brain’s fuel and get sluggish. That’s normal. If I am bored or anxious I see that as energy in my system that has nowhere to go. Either way, moving my body gives my brain a break and restores its energy load while expending excess energy the rest of my body is jacking up my system with.
  3. Eat fewer calories. This keeps me from being sluggish, keeps my gut happy, and keeps off the pounds. Energy and self-image both improve.
  4. Exercise every day. This is about heart rate. I feel better if I get my heart rate up over 70% of maximum for at least a sustained 30 minutes. This changes my body and changes how well my brain works.
  5. Sleep. At least 7 solid hours a night. If I am using my body that much, it needs to heal. Sleep does that.

Over the next few posts I am going to take each of these rules and explain how I do it and how I got started. I don’t know what will work for you, but these sure as hell work for me. These steps have proven to be better for my mental health than any combination of prescriptions or therapy than I have ever tried.

If you are interested in what self-directed neuroplasticity is all about, do watch Jeffrey Schwartz’s presentation on the science behind the practice.

Addiction is Logical

/ Andrew Tatusko / 6 Comments

There is something logical about addiction. But it’s still insane.

Lohan before and after drugs

Lindsay Lohan before and after addiction.
Source: http://www.bestviral.com/image/hf/lindsay_lohan_before_and_after

The math is simple: I crave, I use, I stop craving. I withdraw, I use, I feel better. Simple and elegant logic.

But it is also insane. I crave, I use, I stop craving – but that is all that matters. I run over people, use people, fail at nearly everything, get in trouble with the law, abuse others, and harm everyone in my circle of influence while I am killing myself in the process. None of that matters in order to fulfill the simple, elegant logic of the obsession.

At some point the high is no longer a choice but a shackle. A prisoner has no more choice to get out of a prison than an addict has to get out of addiction. To get out of prison you need help from the outside. You need enough humility to plea for help and even satisfy the demands of the system just to taste free air.

Simple logic. Simple insanity. Simple humility.

Addiction is so simple and so logical that it is a near hopeless condition. It is almost too simple for the mind to comprehend.