Learned Optimism – Review

I just finished reading Learned Optimism by Martin E. P. Seligman. I forget which blog pointed me to this book, but it caught my interest because I’ve always been depressed (or at least extremely pessimistic) and because everything I’ve read about sports psychology points to the importance of optimism in sports performance.

• In The New Toughness Training for Sports, James Loehr talks about how important it is to maintain a positive emotional state and to recover quickly from mistakes.
• In Mind Gym, the other book everyone should read, Gary Mack talks about the importance of having a good self image (”No one can out-perform their self image.”).

Learned Optimism spells out the difference between negative and positive thinking better than anything else I’ve read. I’d definitely recommend it if you suspect  your own pessimism is holding you back from succeeding in your sport or in life in general. The book documents the trajectory of Seligman’s research, from helpless lab rats to depressed human beings, and concludes with a method for treating pessimism and becoming habitually more optimistic.

I only have space to review the book, but in the next post I’m going to get into how this connects to mental toughness. I’m going to use a popular webcomic as a point of reference. Get excited!

Review of the Book

Seligman found that lab rats could be taught to be helpless. He discovered that humans, too, could be taught to be helpless in exactly the same way. Something interesting, though: a minority of both lab animals and humans were stubborn optimists, refusing to becoming helpless. The principal difference between people who become helpless and those who don’t is the way they perceive and describe adversity. The idea is that misfortunes in childhood and adolescence teach some of us to be helpless, and the result is pessimism or worse, depression.

Seligman then describes his technique for getting pessimists to see their lives the  way optimists do. This therapy cures people of clinical depression more effectively than drugs do. He goes a step further, asserting that normal, non-depressed people would benefit from being more optimistic.

Explanatory Style

Seligman calls the way people perceive and describe their lives their “explanatory style.” Changing a pessimist’s explanatory style to one that’s more optimistic simply involves getting the pessimist to dispute their pessimistic inner monologue. There are three dimensions to a person’s explanatory style.

• Permanence: The pessimist believes his or her problems will last forever and that the good times are flukes. The optimist sees problems as temporary and fleeting.
• Pervasiveness: The pessimist believes a given misfortune will affect his or her whole life. The optimist sees any setback as an isolated event.
• Personalization: The pessimist blames himself  for his problems. Optimists blame others or circumstances in general. Likewise, pessimists never credit themselves for their successes, while optimists always credit themselves.

For example, if you’re a pessimist and you get into an argument with a loved one, you’ll blame yourself, you’ll believe the problem is going to last forever and you’ll predict the quality of your whole life will suffer as a result. An optimist would blame an external cause (their partner or something else), see the problem as temporary, and wouldn’t expect it to affect any other part of their life.

When to stop blaming ourselves?

The most interesting dimension is definitely personalization. This is where things get a little weird: everyone distorts reality in their head to fit their worldview. Your interpretation of reality is crucial – when you choose to blame something other than yourself for your misfortunes, you are literally bending the fabric of reality itself to keep yourself healthy.

Actually, if you’re a pessimist, reality is usually on your side. Pessimists reach to absurd conclusions to blame themselves for their problems. For example, they’ll blame themselves when it rains on a picnic they put together. Even so, Seligman and other researchers have found that pessimists see reality more clearly than optimists, especially when assessing themselves.

There’s obviously a question here of  responsibility. For myself, I’ve always assumed that being hard on myself was part of my credibility, but I have definitely been going overboard with it my whole life. How much is too much when you stop blaming yourself for your misfortunes? I’ll get into this later.

Ditch the girlfriend

Figure 1: A shrew.

Here’s a good tip for training if you want to stay in the game for the long haul: Ditch the ball and chain. Believe me, if you stay committed to your training while trying to keep a woman happy, it will only end in tears.

Let me take a step back, and get you started again with a little story I’ve been meaning to tell.

I was leaving the gym one night a while ago when I saw something really terrifying. I heard it before I saw it: A sharp exclamation like the short, sharp squeak of a car’s tires before the fatal car crash.

“Hurry up!”

It was an overweight woman with salon hair and designer clothes. She had hostages: a fat skinny guy, his dingy tshirt tucked into a pair of tapered jeans. Her nondescript children scurried past and made for the minivan. Weirdly, despite the harsh tone toward her children, the woman’s expression was serene. She exchanged a few words with her husband.

I watched as this woman and her brood made their way from a sports pub next to my school to their Windstar. As they passed the school, the woman’s pet man looked through the window and saw my friends training inside.

“That’s the stuff daddy would like to do,” he said wistfully. His timid words died in the empty night air as quickly as he spoke them. Like a shaman, or a medium, I was the only sentient being to witness this lowly ghoul’s utterance.

“But it’s too expensive,” he said. I looked at his coiffed and well-fed wife. It was almost more than I could bear.

“Get in the car!” the woman shrieked at her children. I realized this is how she always speaks to her kids. I shuddered at this spectacle and climbed into my own car. Maybe being alone isn’t so bad, I thought to myself.

I don’t mean to come off as a misogynist. This was a particularly terrible family, and the fact that this woman was short with her children is really beside the point (except for the part where I’m blaming the woman for everything, but I’m in the middle of apologizing for being a misogynist, so hopefully it will come out in the wash). But just think of this man, and the way he gave up his dream so easily. Think of all the men and women who have given up their dreams, and for what?

The majority of people who fall in love with training in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and then go on to quit do so because of commitments to a significant other. Like ghosts, you see less and less of them until they’re swallowed entirely by domestitude. I have seen this happen a million times. And from all the lingering young men I’ve seen gazing forlornly into our school, trailed by impatient girlfriends, I suspect that many people with an interest in training never even start.

I realize this is a lopsided discussion, gender-wise. I can’t speak for women. The experience of fight training as a woman is so alien that I can’t really comment on it. I’m sure women face the same general problem though.

People seek comfort. We are told that we will find comfort in companionship and in the nesting instinct. Even outside the issue of training, I think most people get together and stay together for entirely the wrong reasons. You should be able to stand on your own two feet, and enter into a relationship with someone else because they provide extra bonus value to you on top of what you’ve already got going on, not because you absolutely cannot live without them. In reality, it seems that people are completely broken pretty much all the time, and they rush into commitments with other people who are likewise all messed up. They become less than the sum of their parts.

This is a terrible outcome!

If you really love what you do, be straight with anyone you meet. From the get-go, let potential long-term partners know that your training is the most important thing to you, and that they shouldn’t take it personally when you’re still devoting most of your time to it years from now. If they’re not okay with this, or if they pretend to be and then try to chip away at your time, then you should let them go as gently as possible. Because instead of respecting you and your goals, they’re trying to convert you into some bizzaro fantasy version of you that they’ve cooked up.

Maybe I’m a crazy person. I’m probably a crazy person. What normal person  devotes his life to man-hugging and punch-kicking when there’s no paycheck in it? But, to be fair, what girl would want to be involved with this kind of guy?

Look at it this way: Imagine the person you want to be five years from now. Will you look back and say “Thank god I gave into my partner’s desire and gave up my dream of training and becoming really good at something. I’m so comfortable now!” Or, will you say “Thank god I stuck to my guns and watched that girl walk away. I’m super good at jiu jitsu now!”

It’s up to you.

Bollard story is online!

I wrote a story about my journey from discovering Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to my debut MMA fight for The Bollard, a local monthly paper here in Portland. It’s now online at http://www.thebollard.com/bollard/?p=6262

This was a tough story to write. It’s been a long time since I did a feature story and it’s hard to write about yourself, especially when you know people you look up to are going to read it. Chris Busby, the Bollard’s editor, was really patient with me and provided invaluable help with his edits.

Writing this story took up a lot of time and energy that I’m now hoping to put back into training and updating Seven Breaths more often.

Setbacks

Training has been tough lately.

I went into my fight training with a professional job and a girl I was really into. During the training for my fight, I lost the job, and I got dumped by my girlfriend. I’ve since gotten a job working as a bouncer at a local strip club. It’s actually a fun job, and as an aspiring writer you can’t deny the life experience I’m going to get into. But it’s still quite a changeup from the stability I enjoyed a few months ago.

Switching to the night shift has been hard. I’ve physically adjusted to sleeping different hours, for the most part (and I’ve light-proofed my room, thanks to the good advice of a dear friend!), but I still always feel like I’ve gotten a late start on every day, and in general, I’m all out of sorts. I am a forgetful person by nature and when I get thrown out of a routine things get wacky. My experience today was a great example.

I had intended to go into the gym early and leave late, but I crashed hard right away. I decided to sit through live training and take a beginner’s class, but instead went home and took a nap . On the way home, I realized I had only eaten some yogurt and trail mix before training.I grabbed some Chinese food on the way home, scarfed it down like a dog, and crashed landed on my bed, falling asleep immediately.

All this is sort of scary – I’m disappointed that I’m not getting as much training as I’d like to, and I’m worried I’m not going to make enough money to make ends meet. But I’m going to hang tough and see where things go before I do anything drastic.

Breakfast Recipe: Fruit Smoothie

Smoothie to go

I started eating fat-free yogurt with blueberries during my last fight cycle. It’s an ideal breakfast: No fat, lots of protein and natural sugar to get you going. I would eat this and then snack on a banana or some oatmeal a couple of hours later,  and that would get me to lunch.

More recently, I’ve started blending the fruit and yogurt into a smoothie. I like this for two reasons: It tastes better, and you can pack it into bottles for later. This recipe makes four servings, so if you fill up your Nalgene or Thermos, you’ll have breakfast already made for you for most of the week.

Simple Yogurt Fruit Smoothie

A lot of people put protein powder and a bunch of other crazy stuff into their smoothies. This is a basic fruit smoothie that already has a lot of protein from the yogurt, and a ton of nutrients from the fruit – especially the antioxidants from the blueberries. If you’ve never made a smoothie before, start with this and then experiment with adding supplements. I personally like to keep it simple.

For example, I’ve added coffee grinds to my smoothies before. This makes for an eye-popping energy drink, but has the downside that you can’t seperate the caffeine later if you’re hungry and don’t want to get wired.

I list the apple as optional because skinning it adds some prep time. It’s totally worth it in my experience, though – the tartness and texture makes the whole drink a lot more tasty.

Ingredients

Note: All measurements (except for the yogurt) are approximate. I’ve never measured the amount of stuff I put into these things.

Ingredients for the simple yogurt smoothie

• Nonfat Yogurt, 32 oz container (Compare brands for the one with the least sugar. A lot of them have 32mg/serving, but you want more like 16mg/serving. The strawberry-flavored Hannaford brand yogurt tastes good and is sweetened with Sucralose.)
• Bananas (2x)
• Orange Juice, 2 cups
• Frozen blueberries, 1 cup
• Optional: 1 granny smith/fuji apple

Preparation

Blending the smoothie

1. Put the OJ and the container of yogurt in first. If you start with solids, the blades might just spin around and you’ll have to stir before the whole thing will blend.
2. If you use an apple, skin it and put the meat of the apple into the blender.
3. Add the remaining ingredients.
4. Blend until you get a uniform texture.

Enjoy!

If you need to pack your meal away from a fridge, add a few ice cubes in a thermos, and it will last all day.

Remember, this recipe (based on the 32 oz container of yogurt) makes four servings. If you drink a quarter of what you made and you’re still hungry, wait about 10 minutes and it will likely go away. Your body tends to signal desire to keep eating something tasty even when you’re not really that hungry. Even if you’re still hungry, wait a couple of hours and then eat some oatmeal.

Also, remember to clean the blender immediately (especially if it’s your roomates’, which the one I use is!). This stuff washes right out when it’s fresh, but it hardens and gets nasty if you leave it for even a couple of hours.

How to win and still look like a loser

Opening up a can of dumbass in the closing moments of my fight

The good news: I won my debut MMA fight at Untamed 27 in Westport, Massachusetts.

The bad news: I had a bit of a “Hello Japan” moment and ended up looking like a jackass.

I ended up tapping my opponent about halfway through the second round. In the final moments of the fight, I was mounted on him and had thrown about ten unanswered punches. Inexplicably, I stopped and took a couple of seconds to raise my arms and look out at the crowd. Thus satisfied in my supreme douchebaggery, I returned to the pummeling.

Some people might think this is a pretty fine thing. But those who read my blog know I take a spiritual approach to fighting. I got into this as a way to hone my mind and my body. I’m not doing this to win, I’m doing it to become a better person. It would have been better to lose honorably than to look like a shithead winning. If you disagree, look at the picture above. I look like a real butthead! There are a lot of better photos from the fight, photos where I actually look good, and you can see  good technique in action. Unfortunately, this is the photo that’s going to exemplify what I take away from the experience.

Everyone at my school is congratulating me for my win, and I’d rather not talk about it. I just finished posting the following on my school’s message board:

Hey all,

I’m not sure if/when video is going to go up of last weekend’s fights. But when you see my fight, you’re going to see me prematurely celebrating before the fight is over. This was a big mistake on my part. When you compete and fight for the Academy you represent all of us. I let myself and the school down, and you all have my sincere apologies for this.

Yeah, it was my debut fight, and it was a momentary lapse. But it’s a serious matter because the Academy places a high value on honor and sportsmanship. I’ve always thought of myself as being in alignment with these values, too. I don’t know what came over me.

Anyway, like I said, my actions didn’t represent the Academy’s values. Please keep this in mind when you see the video. In retrospect, I would prefer to have lost the fight honorably than to win this way.

-Bronson

It’s true, too: I really haven’t tracked down exactly what it is that caused me to behave this way. It’s very much out of character for me. I do know I spent a lot of energy before the fight preparing to look tough and full of fight, no matter how bad it got in the cage. I hadn’t paid much thought to what would happen if I ended up winning decisively. I found myself in a situation I hadn’t  prepared for. Of course, this doesn’t excuse me in any way.

In the end, I did end up finding something out about myself, and that is this: As much shit as I talk about being an enlightened warrior (or at least a dude who is using this cliché as a guiding star in his training), I’m just as capable of behaving like a cocky jackass as anyone else. No matter how far you go with martial arts, and with MMA especially, it seems you’re always going to get sat down and shown just how much you have to learn about yourself.

To come: More pictures and video of the fight, and more about what I went through before and after. Despite my “Hello Japan” moment, I think I did a good job with being mentally prepared. I didn’t feel as nervous, or as weak from the adrenaline dump as I was worried I was going to.

Just Me and the Nerves

The real struggle begins weeks before Fight Night. Suddenly, with a jolt of icy electricity, your hands are shaking and your hair is bristling. I have a fight this very month. A person somewhere out there is training to hurt me. It’s impossible to know when the nerves will strike. Maybe in the grocery store while comparing brands of oatmeal. Or you’re pulling your clothes out of the washing machine.  This psychological boondoggle will  break you down if you don’t deal with it. The real struggle doesn’t happen in the ring. It comes to you no matter where you go. At work. In your bedroom. On the phone with your mom.

For this reason and many more, sport fighting  is so much more than a fistfight. If you can’t get your head straight, you will defeat yourself. I mean this literally: A guy who fancies himself a badass will fake an injury and back out of his fight. The nerves beat him before his opponent even laid eyes on him.

That’s an extreme case. Usually what happens is your weaknesses surface and your training suffers.

Nerves manifest themselves in different ways, and strike at different times during the training. One guy will feel it as soon as the promoter confirms his fight. Someone else will be fine all month and suddenly wake up in the middle of the night, eyeballs throbbing with adrenaline.

Everyone responds to the nerves differently according to his or her psychology, and must be coached accordingly. Three other people at my school are fighting on the same night I do. One of them, a girl who’s in better shape than anyone I know, slows down and locks up during sparring despite her fitness, paralyzed by self-doubt. Another one of our guys feeds himself with anger, stops listening to his coaches, and abandons his game plan. Each of us breaks down in his or her own way, and one of the many great things about our instructor is he understands how to coach each of us.

As for me, the nerves finally struck last week during sparring. I was clinched against the wall with one of the best guys at our gym, and it suddenly occured to me how difficult things will be with adrenaline coursing through my body. With about a thousand people watching. My mouth went dry, butterflies exploded in my stomach. Oh, there you are, I thought, as my partner broke the clinch and started gamely driving knees into my stomach. Hello, nerves. That’s how it starts. This is the real motherfucker. Three weeks, me and  my nerves in an anything-goes deathmatch.  What you see on Fight Night is just the fallout of a long struggle each fighter has had with himself, between his own ears and inside his soul.

The Art of Relaxating

(title stolen from the hilarious YouTube video of the same name)

Last week, my instructor told me I’m fighting on April 24th. Training begins tomorrow. For some reason, the fact that I’m going back on a diet weighs more heavily on my mind than any other part of the training. I’ve spent the weekend hanging loose and not worrying about what I eat.

I really should say more about the in-the-gym training that I’m doing – this is not meant to be a dieting blog – but while I’ve come a long way with my training, I’ve made the most drastic self-improvement  through my dieting. This has been where I’ve most needed to apply thoughtful planning and self-control to achieve my goals.

Stressing the diet

Perversely, it takes less willpower to stick to a really strict weight-loss diet than it does to eat well when you’re not following a program. When you’re free to eat what you like, you’re constantly negotiating with yourself.

“Hey you wanna come out and eat with us?” For you, the answer is difficult. Have you been eating out too much lately? Do you deserve a break? That’s a lot of messy math.

For me it’s easy. The answer is always “no.” Of course, that’s not strictly true, because a major feature of the diet I worked out during the last cycle is the cheat meal.

Cheater

Once a week, I’ll eat whatever I want for one meal. Usually I do this on the weekend, when I don’t have the training to distract me and my friends are all going out. One of my cheat meals during the last cycle was two rolls of sushi and two glasses of beer (gasp) at a local Japanese restaurant. Knowing I’ll be able to relax once a week makes it so much easier to follow that the balance of my energy intake, even including the cheat day, is much less than if I tried to stick to the same rules every day. I adapted this idea from the Thrive Diet, which some people at my gym have gotten good results from.

I see the cheat day as another way to allow myself to recover when I’m stressing myself. Weight-loss diets stress your body and your psyche, and like every form of training stress, you need to allow recovery time to get any benefit.

Finally learning to relax

I’ve been thinking a lot about stress and recovery since reading The New Toughness Training for Sports (I know I keep bringing this book up. I intend to review it properly within the next couple of weeks). One of the things I’ve picked up through all of this is learning how to relax. As long as I can remember, I’ve never understood the idea of laying out in the sun, or in a hammock, or whatever. Even as an adult, I’d always get bored with laying around, and I’d feel like I was wasting my time. I’ve always been a restless person, and a person of excesses. I wanted to get the most value from my time. For the same reason, I’d order the largest drinks, the largest sandwiches. This weekend, I broke down on my no-coffee kick and got a latte at Starbucks on the way to the gym. I got the smallest size and was totally satisfied with it. Sitting there in my car, totally satisfied with the tiny cup in my hand, I realized I may have finally learned some moderation.

music: Dead Celebrity Status – We Fall, We Fall

Taking it easy

179 lbs!

I took three days off from the gym and today, by the end of work, I was looking forward to going in to train. I realized how I’ve been forcing myself into it for a few weeks at least. Once I got there, I got about halfway through class and I was getting impatient for it to end. This wasn’t even a class with live training. I’m definitely burnt out.

Anyway, so more about what I’ve been doing. I trained for two fights that I didn’t end up having. The first time, as I said in my last post, was just to see if I could hack it. The second time, I was on the list to fight in a local MMA production as an amateur. This means the gloves are a little bigger, you wear shin pads, and the rounds are shorter (three minute rounds instead of five). I was looking for a catch weight of 175 and didn’t end up getting a fight. So that’s two times I’ve gone through the fight training.

I’ll talk in more detail in a later post about what fight training is like. What it comes down to in the end is, no matter how dedicated someone is, at the end of the day you’re there for fun and/or your own edification, and you train accordingly. If your foot hurts or you’re tired, you’ll skip a class. It’s no problem. But when you’re training for a fight, it’s literally another part time job. You show up six times a week, whether you want to or not, and you train hard.

I met my goals, though! My conditioning is awesome – I don’t get tired nearly as quickly as I used to in stress situations like high-intensity kickboxing. And the weight loss was really significant. It was the most drastic change I’ve seen in my body since I first started taking martial arts and took off all the baby fat. My weight has stabilized at about 180 lbs, from a starting high of about 194 and a low of 172. That means I lost about 14 lbs, and was able to cut 8 lbs of water weight on top of that. MASSIVE JUSTICE !! I’ll talk more about how I did that in a later post too.

Anyway. For now that is all.

chronically overtrained

I have been training my ass off for the last few months. I’ve gone through two training cycles for two different fights. The first time my instructor had me go through the training to see whether I could hack it, and the second time I was on the list, but the promoter didn’t find a match for me. I’ve cut my weight from 195 lbs down to 182 in the first fight cycle, then down to 172 in the second.

I felt really good at the end of the second fight cycle, but now I’m starting to feel broken down. Obviously I’ve been overtraining and I need to give myself a break. Speaking of overtraining and recovery, I ordered another copy of The New Toughness Training for Sports by James E Loehr. I’m going to review this book in detail in a later post; It’s been a major inspiration for me, and a road map for getting my head in the game before competition. But I haven’t followed it very deeply and I think I have a lot to learn from a second reading.

I’ve learned some cool new jiu jitsu, which I’ll also talk about later, but I’ve mostly been kickboxing. I’ve been working on kicking into punch combinations, the thai clinch, and on body conditioning. It’s insane how tough a good kickboxer’s shins are. They can kick metal posts pretty hard without flinching.