This weekend I volunteered at the London leg of the  Wim Hof workshop world tour again.

I like to do this for several reasons.

One of those reasons and a bit self help cliche -ish is, here it comes and I feel suspect saying it……I want to give back. Uggghhhhhh.

Yes, I know a bit sickly isn’t it, but hear me out.

To me this method isn’t a panacea and doesn’t, in my opinion necessarily do, for me anyway, all that it claims. However, at it foundation it certainly does, and there is no getting away from the fact that following this system will get you into an environment you may currently think is impossible.

Its also a way of creating a very accurate simulator for how you and I act under stressful or fearful conditions and how we can learn to overcome those responses.

That’s what I adhere to and believe in.

I just think its so simple in its methodology, but at the same time so hard to do, which is why it is such an accurate – in my opinion – biofeedback mechanism.

That’s what I want to give back when I’m sharing this system.

Secondly its great to meet up with friends who I’ve got to know and trained with since learning this method, especially those who have been there during the winter months.

However, this all gets me eventually, to the point of this post. Overthinking.

Because despite what I’ve just said, I didn’t jump at the chance of helping out this time – despite knowing what I’ve just told you.

Initially I thought yes, and then the thinking starts.

Do I really want to go and do this again? Do I want to lose my Saturday working?What am I going to get from it, really? What if something better happens, that if I say yes Ill miss out on – classic FOMO.

And if I’m honest the only reason I made a decision, that wasn’t on the 11th hour and because I could be sure I wasn’t missing out else where, was because I’d managed to get a friend into the workshop as a favour to me and another friend on the volunteer rota.

My decision was sadly made on ‘well fair play, you’ve given me something, I’ll repay you with my help and a sacrificial Saturday’. Terrible attitude…but the truth.

And interestingly all this overthinking is based on an imagined outcome and never the day I actually have, which is always fun and a pleasure to do, and in fairness nice to be invited to participate in!

This post wasn’t actually spurred on by this initial fact however, but rather later in the day, whilst I was sat on the loo trying to wrestle with another demon.

You see at the end of the day, after all the workshop members have been in the Ice baths as the finale of their day, all the workers also get the opportunity to play in the ice before we empty and pack the baths up.

It’s something I always want to do, or more truthfully, feel I should do to be congruent- it’s easy to tell everyone else to get in the ice and breath, it’s quite another to do it yourself!

Strangely, even after doing this method for some time now, I’m always still apprehensive prior to getting in to really cold water. (However talking to outdoor swimmers, some as seasoned as to have been doing it over 30 years, tell me the feeling NEVER goes away. Its normal to not want to go into freezing water initially it seems. Weird eh?)

And as I was sitting there, procrastinating, the line ‘The problem with thinking, especially overthinking is that it’s usually focusing on failure’ came into my head.

And it was true.

My apprehension was based on me imagining not being able to get in the ice, of failing on the side line unable to get in because it was to cold. And naturally I wanted to avoid that scenario.
And to make things worse, this fact is usually concealed by the other part of that internal dialogue that desperately doesn’t want us to recognise that part of our character, the one that’s afraid and a coward and starts conjuring up legitimate reasons why, in my case, I ‘didn’t need to do it this time’ since I’ve done it before etc! ‘You’ve got nothing to prove, leave it today if you want…..’ and all that smoke and mirrors chitchat.

Overthinking is about trying to imagine every eventuality, to fix the feeling of uncertainty and to prevent things going wrong……and all based on an imagined, worse case scenario reality.

And this can be useful, because it can help us do just that – prepare for all sorts of situations that someone who has a devil may care attitude may fall foul to – often fatally.

Being prepared is brilliant.

However its need to control every situation and prevent disaster – real or imagined –  can also take over and become paralysing and cause inertia where we end up doing nothing.

As someone who over thinks, I know that all I need to do is redirect my thinking into steps. Into action steps.

I ask myself ‘What do I need to do to get from point A to point B?’

In this case it was simple.

Get off the toilet. Put my shorts on. Walk down stairs. Get in the ice.

That’s it.

The rest will take care of itself and you will cope.

4 things compared to the hundreds of alternative scenarios going round in my mind.

And you know how i usually ends.

Not only was it ok, I even managed to do a Navy SEAL exercise I had seen that I’d failed to do last time I got in the ice, of fully submerging myself in the ice and breathing through a funnel as a ‘stay calm under pressure exercise’.

The downside to this sort of carry on was however a savage ice cream head!😂

So if you catch yourself overthinking in the future, just focus on taking action!

Draw a line under indecision  by actually making a decision. Then ask what needs to be done to get from where you are, to where you need to be, make a list and simply follow it.

Want to see how hard changing certain habits or patterns of behaviour can be?

Do a simple experiment and change something about your morning routine.

The route you take when you walk or drive to work, the train carriage you always go to, the seat you sit in every morning (unless that stranger has arrogantly sat in YOUR seat before hand without your consent and forcing you to sit somewhere else anyway.)

Notice how resistant it feels. How much we want to ping back into place and do what feels natural because its what we’ve always done (or at least how it feels we have always done.)

But it was never a default place. We created it to make life easier, comfortable, convenient, and such like. That’s the only natural thing about it.

I started doing this experiment several months ago when I was commuting into the city by train. However several weeks in, on one particular Friday morning, I released I was creating the same patterns, just at another carriage.

What had started as ‘mixing it up’ had turned into just standing at what initially was a different place, but now was becoming where I’ve stood for the last few days.

I was lucky to catch the familiarity habit evolving and moved a few carriages down to keep the experiment going.

It’s also often hard to change what we are doing because our current patterns make so much sense.

They are usually logical.

The route to work is the shortest, the carriage we get on is nearer the exit gates, the coffee shop we go to serves the best coffee (we think anyway….. but how do we really know?)

We often don’t change because we see what we are doing as the best option. And we might be right. Change does not always mean better. Where we are is not always wrong.

For me the idea was not to expect better initially, but instead to explore and be looking for new paths that may lead somewhere new.

Do what we are always doing, usually gets us what we are currently getting.

We want change, but yet stay in the same circles, doing the same jobs, meeting the same people, socialising with the same friends, going to the same gym and at the same time etc.

We wonder why we don’t seem to ‘just bump into that stranger’ that happens to other people, the one that ‘recognises our greatness and offers us a position in their company that fast tracks us to the career of our dreams’.

Serendipity never happens to us. We never meet the love of our life on the train or at the convenience store.

But maybe that’s because we sit on the same carriage and go to the same store.

Lucky people are usually those who put them selves in positions that stand more of a chance of lady luck shining on them.

People who win competitions usually do lots of competitions!

How many times do we take a wrong turning only to pop out somewhere familiar, or where we want to be and say ‘oh, I didn’t realise this was here, that’s actually quicker!’.

This is what happened to me during this time. I took a different route to work every morning and discovered lots of different walkways that offered lots of different stimuli that I would have missed following the same route despite most routes taking longer than my normal walk in.

However, I also discovered the way I had walked for the last year was not the quickest. And not only did I discover a quicker route, the new way was also sheltered from the rain.

Now on rainy days I can walk in the dry or on the dry days I can take the longer route and enjoy the sunshine before the incarceration of the working day begins!

And I think that’s something to reflect on – that  change offers the possibility of discovery and that in turn gives us choices.

Obviously simply changing habits doesn’t ensure happy ever after or even getting what we want. Sometimes trying new things doesn’t work out.

The idea of doing this experiment is simply to show how programmed we are and to create a conscious awareness of where and how we are perhaps getting stuck now and in the future. It also offers us an opportunity to explore, to develop and to expand our experiences of people and places and all that they encapsulate.

Not only will we expand and develop our experiences, we will expand and develop ourselves.

We’ve all got a plethora of reasons why we say we are ‘where we don’t want to be in life’.

And many of them are justifiable. However most of them only serve to keep us stuck.

Whether it’s ‘I haven’t got enough money’, I’m not smart enough, I hate my job, I’m depressed, I’m anxious, I’ve got low self-esteem, I’ve got no friends, I wish I had a girlfriend/boyfriend/husband wife/kids/house/dog/cat, my wife ran off with the best man, the dogs just ate the sofa, the cars just been written off, I’ve just been diagnosed with xyz, I haven’t got enough time to do ABC, if it wasn’t for the kids I sail round the world, – the fact remains that usually, inside of this internal or external dialogue with ourselves and with those who will listen, we tend to stay focused on the problem, what’s wrong about it and in a type of victim mode.

And I say victim, but looking at it more closely from my own personal perspective, it’s more a sense of being trapped inside of a feeling of ‘helplessness’.

Whatever the reasons our default setting is usually to sit inside of the label.

If we haven’t got enough money we look outside to those who have and how it’s not fair.

We compare what we haven’t got financial with others rather than what we have compared to others less fortunate.

We blame the government, the immigration issue, we attack those who seem to be getting money for nothing and are driving around it a much newer car than us!
We say we will have to cut back, no more holidays and nights out etc all of which all add to the problem in terms of making us bitter and cynical and victims of circumstance.

And I know I often fall foul of the ‘this is not fair’ mind set. We all do.

And we all know all too well what often it isn’t fair. All around people are getting more than us.

They are getting away with more than us. They are doing less than us but getting more than us!

People are even being given more than us and are all it seems much luckier than us.

And that’s life.

And don’t forget we are ‘those people’ who have more, according to those who have much less than us……but we never consider that!

So what can we do to hack this mind-set to help us be more constructive in our response to what seems like a badly dealt hand.

Well one very simple why is to use one particular word at the end of our complaints and reasons why we are not happy.

And that word is ‘And?’.

I’m depressed.
And?

I’m lonely.
And?

I hate my Job.
And?

Bear with me, as I appreciate this seems a bit basic and almost uncaring. Even unrealistic when the shit is really hitting the fan.

But try it by yourself first rather than getting someone else to help you, because having someone else – especially family members aggressively saying ‘And?’ after you plead for their sympathetic agreement in a vain hope that they would just agree and say ‘there,there’.

Because using this idea by ourselves will help prevent us coming up with and feeling of resentment and a sense of being attacked, that it may do if someone else asks ‘And?’ after we’ve just poured our hearts out.

This would certainly only serve to ensure we will then spend our time defending why we are where we don’t want to be, rather than looking at why we are there and how we can get out of it.

When we are complaining about something we rarely look at what is really behind our complaint. The discussion is always about the label – I am skint, depressed, anxious, lonely, overworked, unhappy etc.

We never like to look at why we are feeling the way we do and the solutions to the ‘real’ issue.

Why? Surely none of us want to deliberately stay somewhere we don’t want to be, right?

Well, we sort of do.

Because even when we are having a bad time, we are usual familiar with it. And we all like familiarity.

It’s usually a complaint we have had for years and despite often hating it, we have learnt to accept it, make excuses for it and live with it, even though we moan about it all day!

It’s actually, in a perverse way – in our minds anyway – harder to actually do something about it than it is to live with it.

Why?

Because change takes work that also usually comes with very slow progress. Things often get worse before they get better.

There’s no guarantees that what we are attempting to do will even work and we may even end up worse than before.

Being stuck where we don’t want to be may ‘suck ass’, but we know we can handle it. We have proof.

There’s a sense of certainty that we can handle it. Even though it’s maybe a shitty reality it’s familiar.

We don’t risk anything personally to continue doing it – It’s never our fault if we stay as we are – it’s out there happening ‘too us’.  We are safer in our misery.

And remember this is all unconscious. But because we crave safety, we defend it by blaming someone else rather than taking the blame/responsibility and doing what has to be done to rectify it.

Logically this is madness. Emotionally, and under the bonnet, it makes total sense.

Using the word ‘And?’ every time we are attempting to blame our circumstances can help us snap out of ‘where we would rather be’, and put us back to ‘where we are’ and not where the rest of the world is in comparison to us.

Its stops us being hand held and gets us, as one of my old bosses used to say to me ‘off the tit’.

It forces us to take responsibility and to address where we are and what we can do to rectify it.

It forces us to accept our reality rather than day dream about where life would be so much better and whose fault it is that we are not living ‘that life’!

As the saying going 80% of people do not care about your problems anyway, and the other 20% are glad it’s you and not them.

At the end of the day, like the dung beetle we have to be responsible for shifting our own crap, often uphill.

And like the dung beetle who uses the sun and the moon to help them move their shit in the right direction, we too can use techniques like the ‘And?’ idea, to save energy by moving us towards where we’d rather be.

Using the word ‘and?’ like the dung beetle, helps us to get on top of our shit in order to see where we need to go next.

There’s a thousand reasons why we can’t change our circumstances, and many of them are justifiable, but it’s worth checking if they are actually true by asking ourselves ‘And?’ when our excuses start flowing.

We all need somewhere to escape too from everyday life in order to unwind, reflect, engage, get present and to realign ourselves.

Something I love to do is to get out to the coast and onto the cliffs and crags where I can loose myself by climbing, scrambling, running,walking and taking in the amazing landscape.