Friday, March 29, 2019

Noticing my habitual thinking patterns

Meditation really is a brain training exercise that is so useful for life, but can be difficult to understand the process. I guess without brain training, the mind is kind of on autopilot mode. I have always assumed that anxiety, fear, anger, and general helplessness are part of my nature.  Mean people make me anxious. Unfairness and injustice make me angry. Recently I have realized that external situations are not what make me helpless and angry. It is a habit of mine to react this way to most unfamiliar and/or uncomfortable situations. It is a form of learned helplessness.

I grew up observing my mother solving every issue at home. My dad is a hardworking man. However, he only feels responsible for bringing home the pay check and nothing else. He is what you would today diagnose as autistic: he has trouble expressing his feelings and opinions; he cannot have a conversation with you if he is not interested in the topic, which includes politics, some history/geography, and not much else. He has near photographic memory. He does not participate in decision making processes at home. My mom, being a housewife much less educated than my dad, has to make all the major decisions, such as buying and selling our home, raising children, etc. She learned to put on this very tough, confident, brave, authoritarian front while she made these decisions without much prior knowledge or understanding of the world. She did this to hide her anxiety and low self-esteem.

While this behaviour helped her survive her anxiety, it also gave me a lot of anxiety. Since her husband never participated the decision making process, of course there is no place for her child to get a say in the decisions that she made, even though I really wanted a say in which schools I should go to, interior decorations in our home, which extra-curricular activities I should participate in, etc. I felt my opinions didn't matter, no matter how much I complained. In fact, I got into this pattern of always acting out, complaining I didn't want to do the activities my mother had arranged, be it ballet, or tennis, or go to the schools my mother had picked. My mother would just shout me down, not allowing her authority as a mother to be questioned.  In the end, I would grumpily attend these activities, full of resentment. My mother would triumph that her authority was maintained, strongly believing that it was all for my good, and that I would thank her when I grew up.

My habit of resentment never stopped. I resented everything. Whatever didn't go my way, I would blame my mother. As a child, my mother always forced me to do things her way. She also never got me to stop resenting her. We would just shout at each other. So when I became an adult, when a teacher or a boss wanted me to do something I didn't want to do, I would bite the bullet and do it while secretly resenting them. A better alternative would be to express my thoughts and perhaps offer an alternative solution. But because I have had zero practice at this growing, I didn't even realize that this was a possibility until much later in life, but still now, I am not good at this.

It didn't help that in academia, professors get next to zero training in people management. To be honest, all of my bosses sucked at management. They are more reasonable than my mother, but they needed their students and staff to be good communicators and good at gently pushing back and offering solutions, which can be quite difficult for me to do, since I have always worked on complex topics using bleeding-edge technologies, where knowledge about the topic/issues can be lacking. I often felt tongue-tied, which my bosses would interpret as I knew nothing, when I was merely being overly cautious.

Recently I had to deal with a salesperson who made me feel helpless and that I did something wrong. But since this is not a boss-employee relationship, I realized that this is just my default way of feeling when I am in an uncomfortable situation with another human being. I have had neither training nor  practice taking charge of a situation among a group of people.

What does meditation have to do with any of this? Well, without meditation, I link my anxiety and meekness directly to the situation. With meditation, where I sit daily to observe ongoing thought patterns, breathing patterns and feelings in the body, I am able to put some space between me and these habitual patterns. These patterns are not fundamentally who I am. They are just habits.

I have always wished I could have better training from my mother or from school. Now that I am old enough, I realize most people, including my mother, are mostly in self-preservation mode, despite their claims that they want to do what's good for me or for everyone. I have to train myself to get mentally stronger and to reprogram my brain. Recognizing the habitual thinking patterns is a first step towards making changes.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Meditation practice and morning grogginess

Even though I have started a daily morning meditation practice, I am still as scatter brained as ever. On my way to do thing A (eg. take a shower), I get distracted and end up playing an hour of cell phone game. Or I am supposed to find some cleaning cloth to wipe off a stain from the dining table, then I forget what I am looking for and end up sorting through my makeup basket for nail polish. I'm hopeless that way.

However, one thing that seems to have improved in the short time I have been meditating 10-30min a day is that waking up in the morning seems much easier now. Normally it's extremely difficult for me to get out of the bed every morning. I wake up feeling very groggy, maybe in the middle of a dream that I can't even remember. Often my brain goes back to making up some dream plot and I fall back to sleep again. This struggle happens every day. Now I wake up, and my head is clear, not clinging on to some story plot that leads to nowhere. I don't mean I feel alert enough to do complex tasks, but I don't feel drowsy, yucky, painfully reluctant to fully wake up as I feel most of the time. Of course it helps that the days are getting longer and I wake up in day light instead of in the dark, but the brightness feeling of the brain is certainly refreshing.

I didn't mention that over Christmas when I visited my parents, I was waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweat with crazy ideas of mash up of things that happened during the day. I was just out of a job and my brain desperately wanted to come up with new ideas for my next gig. It was a combination of jetlag and stress-inducing mom that brought about this. I need to accept that visiting mom will always be stressful, because mom just has a very different personality that me and I can't really change her.

Anyways, I am documenting the benefits meditation has brought about so far. Being able to just wake up without an alarm clock (at 5:30am, no less) is amazing. I hope this effect lasts for awhile. 

Friday, March 15, 2019

Where do thoughts come from and where do they go?

I started meditating again recently. About 10 minutes a day, using Sam Harris's "Waking Up" phone app. Often I feel very restless during the meditation sessions. Thoughts come up and I feel like "I've got an idea for a post in my blog!" But I force myself to sit through it, and then 1 minute later, the idea is gone again.

Often I feel like I have something in my mind that I have got to put into writing. The ideas remain coherent. However, sentences I type up are totally different than the ones that come up in my head. I have no idea why that is the case.

Or I get the feeling I have so much thoughts I need to express, and then three sentences later, I have no clue how to complete the paragraph, let alone a whole post. The brain just feels like the idea came out the tap and is lost in the drain, and I only managed to catch a few drops on the page. I know that to be able to write better, I really need to force myself to write more often. More practice will improve my writing skills.

As the guided meditation suggests, thoughts seem to come out of nowhere. If I just observe the thought, it disappears into nothingness too all of a sudden. Sometimes the restlessness persists, then more random thoughts appear into consciousness. Occasionally, I can attain a state where it feels great to sit still for several minutes, where I can just observe the breath, feelings in the body, random sounds in the environment, with no random thoughts materializing from the ether to distract me.

In my climbing, I do notice that sometimes the random thought of fear of falling comes out of nowhere, and I suddenly believe I should get down to the safety of the ground right away, but if I just hold on and breath, then that thought goes away and everything is fine. Or when my forearms start feeling the burn (from fingers clenching the holds too hard), the immediate fear that my body can't handle the stress arises. However, the moment my feet land on the ground, I would suddenly think that I probably could do one more route no problem.

My problem is that considering too many issues leads to indecision and inaction. I hope to be able to be less distracted and be able to accomplish more goals in the future.

Monday, March 4, 2019

Small talk, or unsolicited advice?

A friend went to try climbing with family and friends the other day. Having to take care of their kids, watch their belongings, he did not get to climb, but instead took photos + film the others' climbing experiences + provide support. Upon hearing that I recently got into climbing, he unabashedly offered me advice on what I should do in order to improve my climbing. First, he said that I am already very good (having never seen me climb nor hear about my climbing experiences) and just need more practice and experience to "perfect it". If I want, I should take some classes on improving my techniques. Second, I should do probably do some auxiliary training exercises to strengthen my grip. Third, I can take some supplements after climbing sessions to help speed up recovery.

I must admit I had a strong reaction when I first heard his "advice", because it implies I don't know what I am doing. But now that I have organized and written out what he had said, I realize it's the most generic advice someone would say to a newbie starting any kind of new physical activity. So it was merely small talk.

Come to think of it, I would give the exact same advice if I had climbed maybe once or twice in my life (which is the case for him) and were asked to speculate what to do next to improve one's climbing. You can substitute the word "climbing" with "yoga", "strengthen your grip" with "lift some weights" or "pilates exercises" and so on.

Soooooo.... what are the problems with this seemingly accurate advice?

1) You are already "good" at climbing.

Define "good". I'm guessing he means I can move my hands and feet up a 15m wall on a beginner set-route. Most people in his social circles don't even want to try. That's kind of him, I guess, but it' feels very vapid. Climbing is one of the most intense physical activities I have done that I feel like I can improve with persistence. I have very strong feelings about this activity. I think something like badminton or soccer are "hard" for me because I don't have good coordination and people playing with me usually don't have the patience to train with me and wait for me to get good enough to have a enjoyable session with them. Climbing is something that one can work on at one's own pace, as long as one has the interest and patience to keep doing it.

2) You just need more practice and experience to perfect it get better.  

I'm not sure if an advice can get any more generic than that. I guess people say this to someone who claims an activity/goal is too hard and that he/she can never achieve it.

3) Take some classes to improve your techniques.

We are very lucky in this day and age to have the internet to provide a lot of written and video tutorials on how to do something. I already have a huge list of techniques that I know I need to work on. I think climbing mindfully provides great insights that differ from tips that someone tells you. Climbing, like yoga, shifts the center of gravity, ie. the hips, from directly above the 2 legs, to totally foreign places -- usually tilted sideways where your one foot is standing at a funny angle and you have no idea what to do with the other foot/leg. When this happens, the mind panics -- an alarm goes off in the head. At this point, you can have an instructor feed instructions to you (eg. "place your right foot on the foothold just below your right knee"), or you can just go climbing more often, wait for the "brain alarm" to subside (it usually does after you have been in a similar situation several times and/or when your muscles get stronger and can hold funny positions better), then you can look around the wall and try to figure out the next move yourself. I think a coach can be helpful when I get seriously stuck and frustrated at some point, but for now, I have a lot to learn from the climbing activity itself.

4) Do some auxiliary training exercises to strengthen my grip. 

Honestly, I actually bought some of those grip strengthening toys when I first started climbing. But I ended up not using them that often, and honestly, I'm not sure how much they help. I grip way, wayyyyyyyy harder on the wall when I am in fear of falling. Handholds on the wall feel totally different compared to these toys. A handhold can be gripped at different angles, with different fingers etc. In addition, my grip on the wall is always connected to my arm and/or body body weight. Again, the arms can be bent or be straight at different angles, and my body weight can be in so many different places in relation to my hands. At this point I don't feel the toys help at all with the climbing. Maybe when I become more experienced, the grip toys will come in handy when I have stronger hands (from climbing) and can train specifically while visualizing some specific moves. This is something one probably wouldn't know unless one has had some climbing experiences.

5)  Take some supplements after climbing sessions to help speed up recovery.

Guys with some body building background swear by this. My bf also feels like a protein shake helps him with recovery. I tried it a few times and I didn't feel a difference. My speculation is that some guys naturally recover faster + they really believe in the supplements, so there is an additional placebo effect. I naturally recover slower (coz I'm frigging old), plus I don't believe in supplements, so the effects are very minimal.

Basically, this is the type of generic advice you might blurt out if a reporter asks you "what is your advice for a beginner who wants to get better at climbing?" It's something to say so that one sounds like one knows something about the subject. Some people prefer to give superficial opinions than to admit they don't actually know much about this activity. It only works though if the other person also hasn't thought much about it. Conversations like these are deeply unsatisfactory to me, but my options are to unfriend these people (I might have very few friends left), or to take things less seriously. I need to accept the fact that my yearning to connect deeply with people will be satisfied very infrequently, and I should be mindful and grateful when those rare, precious moments in life happen.