Thoughts on the power of critical thinking, walking, and drinking
I made the decision to stop drinking—again. It had begun to disturb my peace of mind, and on top of it all, I’d started gaining weight again, not a lot, but enough, and I simply won’t stand for that. This is now the primary driver for remaining mostly sober. I’ll do whatever it takes not to go back to being fat ever again. The mental clarity and added productivity are sometimes just the side benefits of being sober. In truth, it’s all compounding, and really comes down to deciding how I want to spend my remaining time here on Earth, and it’s not fat and slow-witted.
What I have learned, these past few years, is that alcohol is indeed a poison, and that as you age, your body loses the ability to process that particular poison, and at some point, you no longer bounce back from all that self-inflicted damage. The juice ends up being not worth the squeeze, as it were. It’s simply not worth the trouble.
You can probably hear a billion sober people crying out right now in response, calling, “Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.” The thing is, I’ve also learned something else. Occasionally, it’s fun to poison your body. You just can’t make a regular habit of it, and it probably shouldn’t be part of your complete breakfast. Not everyone can turn that on and off, so it’s a dangerous game, but what is life without a little risk?
The difference is that I know the difference. I much prefer my life when I’m sober even though I revel in the euphoria of ethanol poisoning. It’s glorious and inspiring, but it’s also an extremely shallow sense of reality. Nothing in life becomes better, it just feels better, for a fraction of an instant, and then it feels worse, sometimes by a lot. The danger is that once you start feeling really good, because you’re no longer poisoning your mind and body, you tell yourself it’s time to celebrate, and the cycle repeats itself.
I’m also reconsidering my nightly habit of getting lightly stoned. It’s only at night, and I can’t be smoking that much because it takes me forever to get through a vape cartridge. What bothers me is that I will continue to take hits even after I’m already high, which I remember being confused by when I saw others do it.
“You’re high,” I would think to myself. “I just saw you take a hit five minutes ago. I know you’re still high. So, why are you taking another hit?”
I view being high as a sort of binary thing. You’re either high or you’re not high. I’ve been too high, of course, which isn’t any fun, but otherwise I don’t really notice the difference between being high and a little more high. It’s simply a waste of product, at least the way it works on me.
A few years ago, I can remember the feeling of being completely sober, no weed or booze, but plenty of caffeine. I would drink coffee all day and be writing until I went to bed, my mind a whirling dervish. Oddly, I could just go to bed and fall straight to sleep. My mind would shut itself off, almost inconceivably, all on its own. I didn’t actually need to do anything extra, but I often felt like I did.
I get bored with reality and I miss having a reliable mind-altering experience to look forward to at the end of the day. There’s only so many times you can dip into the coffee pot for your daily dose of a little thrill and there’s nothing waiting for you at the end. No little treat. How do you know when your workday is done if you don’t change your mindset with a little altered reality? That’s the real habit that’s difficult to break. This is why recovering addicts turn to sweets and nicotine. The lesser of evils, or so they imagine.
I try to write.
“You’re high,” I would think to myself. “I just saw you take a hit five minutes ago. I know you’re still high. So, why are you taking another hit?”
I only stopped drinking yesterday afternoon, so we won’t pretend that I split the atom or overcame some torturous hardship. I not going to get too far ahead of myself, but I’ve been down this road before and I know where the off-ramps are. Yesterday, I switched to just soda and smoked a little weed, had a nice dinner, then fell in bed by 8:30pm. I woke up at 3:30am, unsurprisingly since that was seven pretty solid hours of sleep. I stayed up for less than an hour, then fell back asleep again until 7:30am. I woke up rested and immediately took a huge dump, which is exactly how you want to start your day. If you ask me, that’s really how you clear your head. Forget Transcendental Meditation. Give me a well-functioning digestive system.
Before I even came downstairs, I dressed in workout clothes, then immediately went for a two-mile walk. I hadn’t even had coffee yet. This is a rarity for me. Even when I walk in the morning, I have coffee first and then go walk, but this was an idea that had come to me in the wee hours, and I wanted to stick to the plan. It seemed like a solid way to start the day.
The idea wasn’t an original of mine, but came from a podcast I’d listened to about a year ago. The guest was a neuroscientist of some sort. He was talking about the best way to use caffeine, coffee specifically, to enhance your intellectual experience. He claimed it was best to delay your caffeine intake until after you’d already been up for a while, preferably after having exercised. I don’t remember all the science behind it, but it was an efficiency thing—then a productivity thing. It was presented as a way to get the most out of your caffeine experience, to have all your synapses firing right at the moment you were sitting down to write.
His point was that ingesting a stimulant until your brain was ready for it, and then delaying the approach to critical thinking, was a waste of a good high. The strategy was simple. Wake up and exercise first thing, then make coffee, then you sit down to write. Get your body going naturally, then hit the nitrous and get busy. Made sense to me.
So, that’s what I’m going to do, or at least that’s what I’m going to try to do. Create a habit where I wake up, hit the head, brush my teeth, get dressed, and walk out the door. This is going to be harder in the cold, dark winter, of course, but I’m still going to try. It only takes me 35 minutes to walk two miles, so it’s not really eating up a lot of my morning. I’ve wasted way more time than that nearly every day of my life on far less productive activities. Might as well lube up the old body and mind before starting the day.
I am trying to imagine a cold, winter morning, dressing in the dark and forgoing coffee, then heading out to face the elements. It’s not the kind of thing that gets you to jump out of your nice warm bed in January, so you really have to plant that notion deep within your brain. It’s already a huge ask, so you don’t want to be surprised by it. I used to think it was a big deal if I lit a fire before making coffee, and here I am, talking about walking out the door without lighting starting fire at all, or making coffee, or checking my email. What my friend Warner calls going out “naked and unafraid.”
What’s amazing about this strategy, is that you’re immediately getting your heart rate up, and waking the brain. I often listen to music when I walk, but more often than not, I’m listening to a podcast or an audiobook. If my mind is working something out, like a problem for work or something I want to write about, then I might listen to music because otherwise, my mind is going to be ignoring whatever it is I’m listening to, and I have to go back and start again.
If I really need to focus, I don’t listen to anything at all, but that’s pretty extreme. It’s almost too much focus, so it’s sort of a desperate move. It has to be one of those in-case-of-emergency-break-glass moments. In my case, it’s a “turn off everything and listen to that wacky brain of yours” moment, and I’ll be frank, it can be a bit noisy in there.
But maybe I should try walking without the artificial distraction from my thoughts. Perhaps I don’t need the extra noise that early in the day, and that my brain will ramp up better on its own. There probably isn’t just one way to do it, or even how to think about it. It’s likely a mood thing, and I’m okay with that. What do I feel like doing that particular day? How am I feeling? What is it I need?
It’s interesting to think that silence might be one of the options.
The Power of Peripheral Thinking
I believe in the power of peripheral thinking. In my experience, the best ideas are often just slightly out of frame and it’s best not to focus on them too directly. They’re like dreams. If you focus directly on them, they fade out of view. But if you keep your mind open to the things just beyond your perception, and allow errant thoughts to float in and out of your consciousness. Your mind will work on the problem even when you’re not consciously thinking about it, so give your mind a little room to work.
This is the difference between thinking and actively doing something physical. I only do a few hours of actual work a day, but I’m constantly thinking and that is where all the really hard work lies. I’m not working 40 hours a week. It’s more like a hundred. The physical stuff, where I sit at a computer and write or design something, is simply the manifestation of the idea that’s been germinating.
It’s how I bring the idea to life so that others can observe and engage with it, but it’s not the idea itself. The idea is an intellectual pursuit which comes from freeing your mind, to let it wander where it will. You can’t sit at your desk and force yourself to do it. It has to come to you, and this most frequently occurs, when you’re in the act of doing something else, preferably something slightly brainless, like driving, mowing the lawn, or walking.
I’m not read to give in to that just yet.
I like to listen to podcasts with interesting people who know things I don’t. I like to listen to audiobooks about subjects that intrigue or inspire me, with new ways to think about old problems. They almost always trigger something. Maybe they connect with some other tidbit or piece of knowledge I’ve tucked away, or they open up my mind to new possibilities I’d never considered. Occasionally, I have to stop listening to the book and turn on music instead, so I can think about what it was that they said and what it means to me, and then I’m off to the races.
The downside of alcohol, for me anyway, is that it clouds my thinking and narrows my focus. When I’m drinking, I’m not as as likely to see the things in the shadows, the fragments of ideas in my peripheral vision. My ability to see the fog becomes limited and I can only work on the problem directly in front of me. I lack vision and insight because my mind is not as sharp as I’d like it to be. I don’t have to be actively under the influence for any of this to occur. It’s just a by product of the cumulative effects of alcohol on aging brain.
I suspect that by my age, a lot of people expect to be on autopilot when it comes their jobs and those around them expect less of the old guy for precisely the same reason. I’ve known a lot of successful people and more than a few of them have some pretty wet brains, truth be told. You can be entirely functional, but you’re not exactly killing it.
I’m not read to give in to that just yet.