How my lifestyle made me weaker (how to become anti-fragile)
Most people are fragile.
They break easily under pressure, when things don't go their way or as they expect.
I've seen people have complete meltdowns if a restaurant doesn't have a certain food on the menu, or if food is not cooked a certain way.
These people have created such rigid systems in their lives that they have built a prison, thinking it's making them stronger or more robust. At best, this is fragile thinking, fragile behavior, and a weak mindset.
But the reality is that their rigid lifestyle and rigid systems are making them mentally, emotionally, and physically weaker.
Rigid systems make you vulnerable to your surroundings, environment, and circumstances. Anyone vulnerable & exposed to these without the right tools is, by definition, fragile.
You're easy to break.
Instead of being easy to break, your goal should be to become antifragile.
You should be so resistant to change that it's not a problem if you have to do things at times that don't suit you.
Life will rarely go your way
So if you create routines or structures in such a rigid way, you're only setting yourself up for failure or setback.
The systems, routines, and structures in your life and work should prepare you for:
Inconveniences
Changes to plans
Things not going your way
Most people think rigid and tight routines and structures make you stronger and more resilient.
In my experience, it does the opposite.
They make you fragile, weak, and easy to manipulate.
If you think optimizing your entire life and work is helping you in the long run, you're in for a harsh surprise. Because when something big does happen (which it will), and you've avoided everything possible to deal with hard things, it makes it even harder to deal with.
I've seen people completely flip out over the smallest things.
And yet at the same time, I've seen people manage huge life-changing, business-changing, and relationship-changing events like water off a duck's back.
Between you and me, there used to be times when if I couldn’t do what I wanted to do in the mornings, I wouldn’t do it. I would skip it until tomorrow.
Why? Because if I can't do it when I'm most creative or productive, what's the point?
There have also been periods in my life where this showed up in my training.
If I couldn’t train when I wanted to, I’d convince myself it wouldn’t be a good training session or that I wouldn’t benefit as much if I trained when I wanted to.
This entire way of working, training, and living will make you fragile. It’s setting you up to be easy to break when things don’t go as planned.
Becoming antifragile.
In my experience, these four things below are great ideas to help you become antifragile:
1 – Step Out of Your Structures
Now and then, step out of your structures and routines.
Get out of your optimization and productivity cycles for a day or two. If reading this makes you feel a little uncomfortable at the thought of doing so, this is exactly why you should do it.
Maybe skip your normal morning routine for a day or two. If you didn’t journal before you started work, it's OK. You won't die.
But you might just free yourself from your rigid system.
2 – Voluntarily Do Hard Things Outside of Your Skills
People say they do hard things all the time, but do they really?
If you love weight training, lifting heavy things, and powerlifting, is lifting heavy things “doing hard things?”
I say no. Why? Because most people who train love to train.
So to call it “doing hard things” is a little bit of, well, an untruth.
But take that powerlifter who never does anything except lift weights and ask them to hike a mountain, that is actually a hard thing.
“Doing hard things” should be outside of your skill set and what you love to do.
It shouldn’t be something you’re good at or a little bit challenging; it should be hard.
3 – Endurance Training
Long runs, long bike rides, or anything that takes physical effort over a long period of time changes who you are.
Something rewires in your brain, and you learn to become more adaptive to your environment and surroundings
You learn to shut off physical pain. You learn not to give meaning to your thoughts.
Endurance training gives you physical and mental tools to get through things in life and work that are unmatched by most other things.
In my experience, endurance training will make you antifragile.
4 – Breathwork
While endurance training gives you the mental and physical traits of becoming antifragile, breathwork gives you the psychological and emotional traits to stop being so weak.
Most people’s nervous systems are jacked all the time.
This means they are in fight or flight. Their bodies think everything is an emergency and has to be dealt with right away & live in a state of urgency.
Ironically, most people also have no idea how to breathe, and mostly breathe from the upper part of their chest or throat. Breathing this way keeps them in fight or flight.
Learning how to breathe will regulate your nervous system. And when you regulate your nervous system, you'll become antifragile.
I've yet to meet anyone with a jacked nervous system who makes good decisions, doesn’t flip out at the smallest things, and isn’t always rushing around dealing with massive emergencies.
The goal of structures, routines, and systems in life or business should not be to trap you into a certain way of living or working.
Because if that certain way of living or working should change (which it will), and you can't adapt to that change, things break down.
You break down. Your relationships become strained. Your health suffers.
This is a fragile state of living.
The goal should be to have systems and routines that make you anti-fraile, not 100% dependent on these routines.
You should not create a life that feels like a box or invisible prison walls because of how rigid the systems and routines are.
Remember how I mentioned at the start that creative or productive work had to happen first thing in the morning?
Now I don't care. It might be 6 AM, but it could be 1 PM or 9 PM. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that it gets done. And if it’s not possible to get done at all, it happens tomorrow.
Something to think about:
Rigidity creates fragility.
Appreciate the share!