Wellness & Striving

One of the most challenging things about pursuing what seems to be a “healthier” lifestyle is managing the feeling of striving.

Striving is that pursuit of the next thing.

It’s not inherently bad. Striving is what drives innovation. It drives change. It is the very thing that makes us want to leave behind old habits that no longer serve us, and move towards something new, different, more fulfilling (likely) and plausibly better.

But therein lies the challenge. If you are always striving to get there, do you ever really arrive?

How do you know when you’ve reached the goal? And, if you do know that you’ve reached the goal, do you now stop? And if you stop, does that mean you start to regress?

There’s no one answer to this.

There are a few possibilities.

The obvious is that you keep striving. You’ve seen this before. Nothing is enough and no matter what we do, we feel like we’re not doing enough. This is definitely not a state we want to be in. It makes the effort of pursuing something moot - what’s the point of the chase if you never catch it?

Which leads to a second possibility. There is a mentality to say that striving is in fact the goal. This is sometimes referred to as “growth mindset.” The obstacle is the way; the effort is the outcome; the process is the purpose

Maybe this is the ideal way? It feels challenging, even though it sounds great (especially on social media, or to sell a book, or to increase podcast listeners). But in the midst, is it really possible for most people to feel that way? Sure, we can all envision what it feels like to live in that way. Sometimes we might feel it. But I believe it’s our natural inclination to get to the finish line and feel the feeling of accomplishment. This could easily just become another, stronger form of striving.

Another possibility is to say, no, no more striving for me. What does this lead to? My fear is that it would lead to a life as a couch potato. I suppose, if striving equals motivation.

Maybe an offshoot of the “growth mentality” ideal is just a mindset of curiosity. “I need to do this” becomes “what happens if I do this? What does it mean if I do this? Let’s try this and see if I want to try this again.”

Let’s bring this back down to the ground with some concrete examples. For now, we’ll focus on the broad topic of wellness.

Let’s say wellness is a combination of diet, exercise and sleep. We could add in relationships, self-awareness and general temperament. Meaning, purpose and fulfillment could be in here as well.

So living a life of wellness means we are eating, exercising and sleeping in a way that makes our body and mind feel well. And we are cultivating honest, two-way relationships; we’re being real with ourselves, good and bad; and we’re not rollercoastering through a wide range of emotions, with the exception of riding high for extended periods of time (genuinely, organically) being accepted. As a result - or maybe as the catalyst to being - there is meaning, purpose and fulfillment in various aspects of our lives. Maybe not all of them; but being well in this area means there’s no one aspect of our lives that really drags the others down below a threshold of toleration. (we know how an unfulfilling job, relationship or responsibility can really weigh down the rest, no matter how hard we try).

On the opposite end of this, in this line of thinking, is striving. Needing more; not doing enough.

What does this mean?

Let’s take diet for example.

Something as simple as “eating your vegetables” can become an act of striving, that if, pursued for too long without conscious recognition of what is taking place could become a negative in our life, and make us actually feel worse and live less (shorter, less meaningfully, or something else).

Is that vegetable organic? Do I cook the vegetable to maximize nutrition, or do I eat it raw? Is the oil I’m using to cook the vegetable good for me, good for the environment, good at all? What if vegetables are actually bad, because they have grown with organic chemicals that make it detrimental to the thing that eats it, as an evolutionary function to increase its chances of survival (e.g. “if I taste very bitter, other things won’t eat me” said the arugula leaf).

Whoa, do you see how this can spiral out of control on just a simple activity of “eating your vegetables?”

And this doesn’t even really take into account all of the information that’s out there. When you start to add that information in, depending on who you listen to or what book you read, it can become paralyzing to do something as simple as eating your vegetables.

This is the striving I am concerned about in the wellness community. There’s no clear answer; no clear definition; no one authority on what is actually “good for you.”

And that, in itself, is the striving. To know what is good for you is the impossible chase that will only lead to more striving, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum of feeling better and feeling well.

So what do we do? Say fuck it, and just eat McDonald’s?

Maybe. If it makes you feel good, go for it.

Ah, we are hitting on something. If it makes you feel good.

This is a positive departure from “what is the right thing to do?”

The “right thing to do” feels like looking outward. It sounds like “should.” It’s seeking approval from an external source that you’ve given a lot of power to decide what is and what is not good for you.

What does he say about that vegetable? What does she say? How do I fit both of those conflicting - or even if there is 99% agreement, what do I do about that 1% - into my worldview.

I think this is the big decision we are coming to. It’s about developing your own worldview.

And shouldn’t that worldview be based on what makes you feel good? Feel good about yourself (creating an identity) and physically feeling good.

That second part - physically feeling good - is important. And it ties in with striving.

Because in order to know how we really feel, we need to be present. We need to be real with ourselves.

Whether you are eating a vegetable, or eating McDonald’s, the only way to get to the truth is by being present with yourself and just sitting in the moment to see how you feel.

I’m really not trying to lead down a certain path. My worldview keeps telling me that “obviously I will feel better after some asparagus compared to a 6-piece chicken mcnugget.” But is that just a “should” floating around my head? Have I really sat in the moment, with myself, after doing both and just felt my feelings in the moment? I have not. That’s something for me to check out.

I digress.

So we’re saying - striving hurts. And striving comes from pursuing some “thing” that an external factor has put into our mind, like some kind of Inception. Striving is at the opposite end of the spectrum from being present with yourself in a given moment.

So thinking about wellness, and not striving towards a “wellness ideal” is really about thinking about being present with yourself. How does this activity make me feel, for real?

Oh no, a little bit of a conflict here.

In some instances, being present in the moment is not the thing to do. I know, I know, totally conflicting. Hear me out.

Take something like sprinting, or, if that’s not something you do regularly, something as human as going to sleep.

I know for sure that I feel better when I get a certain amount of sleep, compared to a lesser amount of sleep. And the amount of sleep I get is, for the most part, determined by what time I go to bed. But in the moment, when it is time to go to bed, I do not feel good! I want to stay up! Just one more page; one more tweet; one more episode of the Office.

Ah so we can’t just say “I must just feel myself in the present moment and that will steer me towards feeling better.” That quickly devolves into YOLO!!!

So there is element of not just being present with ourselves in the moment, but knowing ourselves in this moment, and in the next moment. And, inherently, know how we felt in the previous moment.

So still, the element of presence is important. Being more present in this, the last, and the next moment helps us calibrate what it means to actually feel good. Not just doing what we think we “should” do or what we feel like is the right thing to do but having a confident feeling about what is best for me in this situation for today and tomorrow.

We get to this concept of balance. Balancing the present moment - how do I really feel right now - and thinking of our future self (one minute, one day, one year, or more, in the future), and reflecting on our past self to say, do you remember what it was like last time we did or did not do that thing?

I think there has been some progress here.

Striving takes us away from the present moment. We are thinking about what we should do, what we’ve been told to do, what the next thing is, where we need to get to, instead of just being on the spot in the moment.

(Striving is different from planning (more on that here), because planning involves working back from that end state to decide what it is I can do in the moment now. There is a connection between the future, and the present; and looking into the past to draw on experiences, skills, intuitions that will help us determine which steps we are planning to take in order to arrive at the destination.)

When we strive too hard, we just think about what we’re not doing, or what we don’t have, or where we want to go rather than where we are and what we can do.

And if we are not present, we can’t sit on the spot, in the moment quite as well, which is what we need to do in order to really feel if this or that is a good thing for us.

Then, when we start to think of the future – which is okay! – how can we really know how we’ll feel in that future moment, if we’re not even sure how we feel in this moment, right now?

And if we can’t decide what is or what is not really good for us (based on how it makes us feel right now), we start to rely on those external factors that tell us what we should and should not do. And the circle continues, because there is no “one right answer” in 99% of cases.

What does all this mean?

It’s not about “eating your vegetables,” or “McDonald’s isn’t bad for you.” Both of those are paradigms created by external factors who very likely do not have your best interests in mind.

It’s more about, does doing one of those things make me feel good right now? And based on last time, when I was really present with myself, did it make me feel good one hour, one day, one year after I’ve done that?

The only way we can really know is to just sit for a sec and be present with ourselves.

So when it comes to wellness, maybe the only true answer is “how does this actually make me feel.”

It’s not easy, but if there is anything worth striving for, being present is probably it.