Behold the Stars

Tip #34: Spiritual Cross-Training August 15, 2009

Posted by beholdthestars in Tips.
Tags: cross training, exercise, gratitude, happiness, inverse gratitude journal, meditation, muscle confusion, personal mission statement, self help, spirit, volunteering
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Do you ever exercise? You know how it works. You make the trek to the gym to lift weights. You suffer for a couple of weeks until your body has gotten into the swing of it. You soon feel better, stronger, and you’re starting to see changes in your out-of-shape body. Two or three months down the road you have transformed your body.

But after a while, something starts to change. You don’t feel as strong. Where once you could add weight to your exercises each week, you now can’t seem to get any stronger.  Those bulging biceps that grew like weeds six weeks ago have stopped growing. You’ve hit a plateau, and your progress has come to a discouraging halt.  What happened?

The scientists know. It called adaptation. Your body had adapted to the exercise routine. That’s why you get fitter in the first place: your body adapts to the exercise. That’s the good part. The bad part is that after your body adapts, you don’t get the same response to the exercise. You can’t do the same things and expect the same results.

But what about our spiritual/emotional/happiness work? I noticed that my beloved Gratitude Journal began to have less impact as time wore on. For the first few months, the effects were astonishing, totally unlike anything I’d done before. But as time went on, I found it harder and harder to find the energy to come up with list items. In fact, it got to the point of being a chore. Little good it was doing for me at that point. Like the effects of exercise, the effects of my Gratitude Journal were stalling.

I just found an explanation in “The Mixed Success of Positive Psychology” from the August 7, 2009, issue of The Chronicle Review: A Weekly Magazine of Ideas, the supplement that comes in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Sonja Lyubomirsky, a research psychologist at the University of California at Riverside, has found that “people who take time to count their blessings, write optimistic visions for themselves, or express thanks, report greater happiness.” Okay. We expected that. And she found that “subjects who performed any of a list of 10 acts of kindness three times a week for 10 weeks reported increases in happiness.” But what interest us here is that “another group that performed the same three acts every time actually ended up feeling worse.”

Of course, it makes sense. Our bodies adapt to exercise, our minds adapt to learning, wouldn’t our spirits adapt, as well?  And since they adapt, we’ll have to adapt our efforts, as well.  What do athletes do to counter the negative effects of adaptation? They use techniques like cross training and muscle confusion, methods that constantly confuse the body and force it into a state of continuous adaptation. In other words, they build a routine that is never routine.

Let’s do the same. Rather than taking an exercise like the Gratitude Journal and drawing from it until the well is dry, we can draw from different sources by regularly selecting from a number of exercises: meditation, exercise, volunteering, reverse gratitude journals, personal mission statements, and so on.  Doing that will allow us to stay fresh, and perhaps more importantly, allow all our sources of inspiration to recharge.  After all, variety is the spice of life.

Make a great day.