Soul searching to realise that I’m basic (w a small “b”)
Over the last one year I’ve done normal people can or do that push them to go deeper into themselves- ten day silent retreat (if I may call it that) with over 10 hrs meditation per day, resigned without a concrete plan, ran 100 mile months, did a lot of white-boarding on “myself” (you gotta be a combination of narcissist/ toddler/ techbro to do that.. I think I’m all three), moved to a new country (Stockholm, in November!) where for the first quarter every week was the coldest I had ever seen, met my girlfriend’s parents and got shitfaced multiple times. I didn’t need to do any of it to get existential, I took my first long walk to ponder existentialism before tenth grade boards. But as my wise(st?) friend says, extreme is beautiful for it moves the baseline.
All of this, and I came to realise one thing- I thrive on endorphins. Endorphin monkey/ junky/ whatever you’d like to call it. Much of my life has been manifestation of this, and it’s inevitable that it will continue to be.
Endorphins.
There are multiple happiness hormones, but endorphin do the magic for me. I don’t fully understand why, or I just could be calling happiness a cool name to sound smart, but here’s my thinking-
Endorphins are released when there’s some existence of exhilaration and pain. Heart rate is invariably high. Existence of both pain and relief at the same time, with some control lever in my own control appeals to my senses like nothing else.
Other hapiness hormones can get boring beyond a point, not endorphins. I get bored a lot and endorphins is this ever lasting antidote to it!
Endorphin, onto life
I love the feeling of hitting the wall and getting through it with endorphins.
It leads to positive effects- being on, acting with intensity, being able to tell myself that it’s all in the mind and push more
But has negative effects too- being restless, inventing difficulty, taking lower RoI calls and making it hard to play the long game. Some concrete examples below-
- Getting bad grades in “supposedly easy courses”, or going to drinks before the exam or presentation to make the evening of work “challenging”
- Telling your boss about wanting to quit and startup a month before promotion cycle
- Annoying people with need for speed around things that aren’t most important
- Not caring about resume
- [finally, attraversiamo] Not stopping running even while in pain to achieve the arbitrary goal set last week or last night
Endorphins, (finally!) onto running
I’ve been consistently failing to achieve my goal of running a full marathon since the last two years. Every time, it has been the same story with a different injury- overtrain on things that I like, under-train on things I don’t, get a few PRs but then go down to some nagging pain. Then, start over.
All driven by the need for endorphins.
Hell, I used to seriously say (and my friends thought I joked) that it’s not that bad to get injured since post recovery you can feel the same amount of endorphins in a shorter span of time.
Needless to say, every injury took a toll on mental health and everything else.
So what now?
This need to endorphin is a clear hurdle I need to work around to play the long game and win big. In running and in life, let’s begin to remodel things to acknowledge that boredom is hard and painful. Getting through it gracefully doing the right thing then releases small endorphins in the short run, and set up for a MEGA endorphins boost at a later point in time.
I’m currently injured, but that shouldn’t stop me from doing right things everyday- mobility, foam rolling, diet, upper body strength etc. So I’ll plan on those in adv. and report back everyday.
I’m launching this Github project where I’ll commit a note every night till I run a full marathon. LFG!
