Moving Without a Reflection

The problem with self-consciousness // Week two of the Anxiety Study

I am a typical over-thinker, or at least, I was. Changing how and where I place my attention has significantly changed how I relate to movement. A small example is learning the macaco, a single armed backwards diving movement.

For a long time, my attempts fell short and I became frustrated. This frustration caused me to ask: “what information am I missing?”. By asking this question, I would apply the wrong kind of attention, and would quickly stagnate.

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Imagine a goat jumping across a great chasm. You can bet good money that it’s not thinking about extending its legs or pointing its toes. Most likely, the goat is thinking about where its going to land, and perhaps about what it hopes is on the other side of the chasm.

The less we think of ourselves, the better off we are. This observation has been made for thousands of years. Is it a surprise to hear it from sports scientists, too?

When we coordinate our movement by focusing outwardly on a goal, we are more effective (better accuracy, power output, balance) and more efficient (lower heart rate, less muscle tension and lower oxygen consumption). An external focus, also called an effect-based focus, reflects that natural process of self-organization present in the animals; and is a likely cause of that animal grace we all envy.

“Keep your eye at the place aimed at, and your hand will fetch [the target]; think of your hand, and you will likely miss your aim” - William James, 1890

It’s funny that the best way to control our body is to let go of control. If you want, you can try to swallow three times in a row; you’ll notice that swallowing doesn’t come so easily on command. There are things that we can only do when we’re not trying.

Posture and much of our movement are like that; governed by reflexes. That’s why we don’t have to think about everything that we do. It’s also why our movement suffers so much when we do think about everything we do; just as someone commenting on how you eat might make it more difficult to chew.

In this way, self-consciousness can disrupt the reflexes that normally regulate and organize our movements rapidly, automatically and unconsciously. So why would we ever resort to an internal focus if it is so much worse for us? Well, the same reason that we Google our symptoms when we have a cold: uncertainty feels bad.

“Has it ever frightened you to play, and watch your fingers moving, and not know who it is that is making them move?” - Victor Borge

When movement is the source of our uncertainty, what information can we find? We can think about how our body is moving, or try to remember the advice of a coach. In either case, attention is brought back to the body, and performance is disrupted. This disruption is motivated by anxiety, but it can also fuel anxiety; and so a downward spiral can occur; stagnating performance and harming wellbeing, sometimes for years and beyond.

So what can we do?

Implicit knowledge: knowing without knowing how

Typically, we learn by being told what we don’t know. A teacher explains how something works, and then corrects us when we fall out of line with their idea of good performance. This sets us up to fail.

In moments of uncertainty, where the correct choice is difficult to discern, focusing on this kind of information will generally lead to worse and slower decisions; as intuitive decision makers are generally faster and more accurate in a sporting context.

When we learn by doing, our performance is more resistant to this “reinvestment” of conscious attention. This is because we skip the “declarative” knowledge part of the learning process, and go straight into learning by doing.

In the video below, I am not sharing “exercises”, but problems to solve. Solving these problems gives the students information relevant to the skills in focus: the kipping bar muscle up, and bar to bar continuous swings.

Mindfulness & non-judgment: what is directly around you?

Our ability to think about how things could be different has given us the developed world, but it is also responsible for much of our unhappiness. The more time we spend focused away from what is at the end of our fingers, noses and eyes, the less happy we are, according to recent empirical studies and traditional wisdom.

“Mindfulness” or present moment awareness is simply the skill of not getting carried away from what is directly available to the senses. There is good evidence that developing this skill can reduce anxiety (which I will write about specifically in a few weeks), and also evidence that mindfulness reduces the reinvestment of conscious attention.

Learning to perceive with less judgment has been greatly beneficial to my practice. This downward spiral of conscious control starts, for me, with a judgment about what I’m doing and how it could be different. It is exactly this kind of “counter-factual” thinking that meditation “prunes” or reduces.

Closing

To move with the whole self, and therefore to move with grace, appears to require a cessation of thought as our driving force. Our conscious mind can perceive only a small amount of information, but in very “high resolution”. Our unconscious functions, which includes all our organs, our stretch receptors and the non-conscious parts of our brain, process many different kinds of information all at the same time. To move as effectively and efficiently as possible, not only in parkour or dance, but in life more broadly, we have to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's”. That means letting go of the “high resolution” control that our conscious minds exert, and inviting the fuzzy wisdom of the whole self.

I’ll share some quotes from two of my favorite books that touch on this topic:

The animal heart directly intends, senses, and responds as a unitary whole. The unitary, wholehearted thought of this heart presents psychology with an animal mode of reflection. This reflection—in which imagination and perception, thinking and feeling, self and world are one—is not a bending back, after the event and away from it. - James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart

I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind—especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called “consciousness” and the other the “unconscious.” For the attainment of grace, the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of the reason. - Gregory Bateson, Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art*

Aldous Huxley used to say that the central problem for humanity is the quest for grace. He argued that the communication and behavior of animals has a naivete, a simplicity, which man has lost. Man’s behavior is corrupted by deceit—even self-deceit—by purpose, and by self-consciousness. - Gregory Bateson, Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art*