This morning I kicked back and read a fantastic piece by my friends Steven & Omar of Habitry on the issues with nudging. It’s a very long piece, which you’ll dig if you’re into behavior, habits, and that kind of thing. But if not I’ll summarize it very briefly.

Nudging is the idea that you can, basically through psychological trickery, nudge people towards decisions that are better for them. Whether that strikes you as a very reasonable premise or a really fucking stupid one depends on your background in ethics, logic, philosophy, psychology, history, and so on. But it’s safe to say that nudging is pretty problematic.

There are all kinds of pop behavioral psychology books and articles out there (that are fun to read, but not very rigorous) used to both explain why people do what they do, and used as frameworks to change what people do. Most of it is, you pretty quickly learn, is total bullshit. Sure you can come up with discrete scenarios where people pretty reliably do the same weird things, contrary to their own self-interest or whatever, but none of it reliably tells us why people do what they do, and how they can do what they really want to do.

That’s because you don’t know what you really want. This is conundrum has puzzled writers and philosophers since we have records of people thinking about things. You think you do, but trust me, you don’t. And you’ve got all sorts of justifications and rationales for why you think you do.

But if you don’t even really know what you want, what are you doing every day? What’s the point?

Well, look, I obviously don’t have this figured out or I’d collect a Nobel prize of my own, but I think there’s an approach you can take that might help.

Do you believe that Dwayne Johnson was always going to be The Rock? I do. Not in any sort of predestination sense at all. But, The Rock obviously has certain genetic or otherwise gifts that he has discovered, and cultivated to become who he is. I just don’t think think The Rock was ever going to be a 95-lb computer hacker.

I think if you look at what really successful, seemingly fulfilled (because who knows, really) people have in common it’s never a morning routine or a productivity hack (because all that stuff is bullshit) but you can almost always draw a straight line between what they were obviously gifted to do and what they actually did.

In other words, it’s not that they won out in the battle of their rational-analytical-ideal self against the impulsive devil on their shoulder – it’s that they more often than not followed themselves towards what would naturally be a virtuous cycle.

I think, and maybe I’ll turn out to be wrong but it seems to be working out pretty well for me, that this principle is bigger than “success” or fulfillment or whatever we might call that sort of end state where you feel pretty good about things. I think this principle of doing what is best for you applies to everything.

So how do you figure out what’s right?

Well, what if you test it? Of course with something as discrete as exercise you can simply test it with biofeedback and see what your body’s response is. If it makes you better, it must not be going against what is best for you. If it makes you worse, maybe don’t do it?

Since exercise and movement is just a stimulus, really you can test anything that is a stimulus. I’ll let you experiment with that.

But what if big picture you approach everything with an experimental mindset?

“How does the ketogenic diet work for me? I don’t know let me try it for 6 weeks.”
“OK that didn’t seem to work very well, let me try a Ray Peat style diet.”
“I’ve always wanted to try archery, do I have any natural ability?”

What if instead of being nudged around by some benevolent philosopher king, or worse, or trying to find a framework that allows you to rationalize why you don’t always do what you think you should want to do if you really wanted what you think you want, what if you just led yourself?

What if given the decision between vegging out with Netflix and going to the gym for a workout there actually is an empirically correct choice, and sometimes it actually is Netflix?

Let’s say you have a goal to deadlift double your bodyweight, but the pull of your favorite TV series is pretty strong.

What if you tied in this idea, and just asked “Can I do the deadlift workout today?”

Maybe the answer is “no.” And it’s consistently no. Well maybe at some point you revisit this experiment, and try a new one with a goal that comes up “yes” sometimes. What if you don’t have to wrestle with your own rationalizations, if you’re just doing what seems to come easy?

With a bunch of experimentation, a little intuition, and a pinch of luck I think you have a pretty good chance of teasing out what actually IS best for you. No nudging required.

 

When I was a kid I never had any video game systems of my own, but I remember fondly how you could fix problems with games by mashing the reset button several times, or blowing into the cartridge. Now days most people fix their computer issues by turning it off and on again, or by smashing it with a hammer if they want to fix it permanently.

What if you could press a reset button for your body that would clear out whatever had gone wrong and let you start fresh again?

That’s the promise of Original Strength, and I was excited to take their Pressing Reset workshop this weekend outside of PA. I’ve heard good things, and Jen attended earlier this year. Plus, after flying half-way around the world to be the teacher last weekend, it was nice to just be the student.

So the idea of OS is that by using simple, fundamental movement patterns you can reset the nervous system to a better state, and by doing that you can feel and perform better.

The meat of the workshop is taking you through a logical progression, starting from basic breathing movements on the ground, through rolling and crawling, all the way up to standing/marching. In working through these movements you’ll figure out which ones work best for you, and which ones don’t work at all. In OS parlance, you’ll see which resets are best for YOU. The progression of the movements is great, and honestly most of the time it just feels good to work on fundamental movement patterns you probably never do in your training or daily life.

How do you know which ones are best? Drumroll please.

Biofeedback. That’s right, at the beginning of the workshop you choose a baseline movement that you refer back to after trying the resets. If your movement quantity or quality improves, then that reset is said to work well for you. It could be something like a goblet squat checking for range of motion, depth, and ease of movement, it could be a maximal effort overhead press seeing it in unlocks further capacity, or it could be as simple as a toe touch in the fashion that I teach most often. Whichever the case, you are using the movement as a form of biofeedback to see how you responded to the resets.

Here’s where I disagree with the OS premise. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a reset, and I don’t think there is anything special about the movement patterns used as resets. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great movements and I would suggest digging into their material or going to a workshop to work through the progressions alone. But I think that this mechanistic application of the idea that you can reset the body the same way you reset a computer is misleading. You can make the body’s state better or worse, but you can’t reset it. If it were simply a matter of semantics it would be pretty easy to let go.

But the idea that these movements “reset” the body misses a bigger picture, and a much bigger idea. This was the big insight that Frankie Faires had many years ago and introduced me to.

If you can these movements, or resets, then why can’t you test any movement? If you can test every movement (spoiler: you can) why wouldn’t you?

If a reset makes you better or worse, by way of noticing changes in range of motion or quality of movement, then couldn’t any movement do the same thing?

And if you could tell that, why wouldn’t you simply do all the things that make you better and none of the ones that make you worse?

This is not a subtle point folks. The body responds to stimulus. The ability or inability to respond to the stimulus is what makes it eustressful or distressful. If the response to the stimulus can easily be resolved then it’s eustress and you get to move happily along instantly better than before. If the body can’t resolve the stress, or can’t resolve it easily, then it’s distress and you’ll adapt to it in time, or you’ll break. One of the things I spend a lot of time on in my workshops is teaching people how to find more ways to make their movements better for them.

But all movements can be tested. Not just special ones.

To give one last nod to OS, because I appreciate the system they’ve come up: Just because no movements are special doesn’t mean you couldn’t stand to flex your thinking outside of the box of squat, deadlift, press. Most people spend way too much time moving in way too few ways, and the simple, primal movement patterns that OS focuses on are really great. Something that has been “sticky” for me recently is any kind of spinal rotation, so getting down on the ground and just moving through articulations I may not have thought of was great.

tl;dr: You probably can’t reset the body, but you can definitely make it better and worse. You can tell which of those you’re doing using biofeedback. Moving better helps you move better.

When I was on my back from Manila, which was an absolutely fantastic trip that I’ll talk more about at another time, I posted an Instagram story of people dutifully walking into the body scanners at the airport and literally throwing their hands up to submit to the scan. It felt to me like an awfully apt metaphor for the way we’ve pretty much given up standing against authority in the face of eroding freedom. I’ve opted out of the body scanner ever since Jen turned me on to the option many years ago.

Naturally, this generated a lot of questions. The easy one is “can you really opt out, and how?” Simple, you just tell them you opt-out (or as I like to think of it, opt-in for the pat down lovin) and they will escort you around the machine where you’ll get a begrudging pat-down by the nice TSA officer. I’m always very nice because they probably hate the pat-down as much as I actually do.

The harder question is “Why? Aren’t they harmless?” and of course one in four respondents quoted back to me the common refrain they’ve been sold which is “Isn’t the radiation less than you’d get on the actual flight?”

Before I tackle the specifics of the body scanners, I think this is a great example to demonstrate the precautionary principle.

The precautionary principle is the idea that, given unknown but potentially great harm, you should avoid the risky action whenever possible and that the burden of proof lies on those making the decision or applying the harm to prove that it’s harmless.

Another way to think of this is in terms of cost and benefit.

If something has a (potentially) extremely high cost, but provides very little benefit, we should be exceptionally cautious in using it.

The big idea of cost is something I’ve written about extensively and is an idea that is woven into how I live my life. For example, when it comes to biofeedback training one of the things I teach is that you can always do movements that don’t test well, but you may pay a higher cost. That might not be worthwhile on a training day, but if it doesn’t test well on meet day maybe it’s worth going for broke. The important thing is that you recognize the cost, weigh the benefit, and make an informed decision.

One of the most common examples of the precautionary principle being invoked (or not being invoked) is when it comes to Genetically Modified Organisms. The fact is, despite a modicum of studies being done in infinitesimally small parts of an incomprehensibly complex system, we don’t really know everything that happens when you splice part of the genome from one living thing into another (note that GMO is not the same as traditional cross-breeding like we do with dogs and apples [not at the same time, you can’t breed a dog and an apple]). It could be totally harmless, or it could be the butterfly effect that destroys the entire planet’s ecosystem. Big shrug emoji because not only do we not know, it’s almost impossible to know. So the precautionary principle would say we should be exceedingly careful how we proceed, because the risk of harm is so great.

But, you say, David there is great benefit from GMO we are able to feed a starving planet. Fine, let’s pretend for a second that’s true then maybe it’s worth it.

Going back to the body scanners, there’s a very simple cost-benefit. You get almost no benefit by participating, and it potentially exposes you to great harm. The extra 3 minutes it takes to get a pat-down isn’t worth it.

It’s entirely possible that the radiation you get from having a cell phone in your pocket all day is many times worse, but the benefits are so (ok, arguably) great that you could say it’s worth the potential harm.

What harm? Glad you asked. The general consensus in the U.S. (I’ll let you figure out the motivations) has been that any radiation that is non-ionizing (anything lower frequency than ultraviolet) is basically harmless. But the WHO and the International Agency for Research in Cancer actually classifies non-ionizing radiation as potentially carcinogenic. Several European countries have ditched the body scanners completely because they don’t think they’re harmless AND they found that the false alarm rate was so high they were nearly useless. So much for the benefit side of the equation.

So what about the claim that you get more radiation from the flight itself. On the face of it, this is true. Looking at the raw exposure numbers it’s true that you get several times more radiation just being at the higher altitude during the plane ride. But as explained by several UCSF faculty in biophysics and biochemistry in a letter to Obama (actually to his asst. for science and tech) in 2010, the exposure on a plane ride is distributed over the entirety of your body. In a body scanner, the radiation is focused on a millimeter layer of skin. Which means that the actual exposure for that tissue is many times higher than it would be if it were distributed across the whole body.

But that’s not all. As a single example, one study showed that indeed non-ionizing radiation can cause genetic damage. I quote: “Hence, this project confirmed the existence of THz genotoxicity, but it remains unclear under which specific conditions such effects occur.”

Which is a perfect summary because it conveys the limitations of science in this regard. When it comes to something that is potentially very harmful, you need to test the exact specific conditions, not extrapolate and hope for the best.

When it comes to the body scanners I certainly don’t care what you personally decide to do.

But knowing and understanding what the precautionary principle is will serve you greatly.