Recovery and Strength

Ask most people what strength looks like, and they’ll describe someone unafraid. The hero who walks toward danger without fear.

But fearlessness isn’t strength. Some people are born with a fear response that doesn’t work properly. Jon Ronson writes about them in his book The Psychopath Test. Our culture actually values psychopathic traits: risk-taking, coolness under pressure and the readiness to do whatever it takes to win. Yet there’s no strength in not feeling something you can’t feel. It’s like someone went into the brain and switched off fear. Without fear, there is no courage, and so, no strength. Nothing can be learned from these people.

For the other 97% of people, fear is very real. So real strength has to mean something else. It means taking on a challenge, being knocked around by life, learning from it and coming back better equipped for the next adversity. Real strength is resilience, and recovery is the engine of resilience.

How physical and mental strength are similar

Muscles don’t grow while you’re lifting weights. They grow while you’re resting.

Imagine you do a set of heavy repetitions, pushing as hard as you can. When you finish, you can’t do another set like that. Your body needs time to recover. For most people training without chemical assistance, that’s something like three days. If it’s your legs, it’s more like four or five.

This essential recovery gap is called the refractory period: the time you need to recover from stress before you can repeat an effort. That repair happens during recovery.

Every athlete knows this. Nobody would train the same muscle flat out every day and expect to get stronger. They’d actually expect to get injured.

The mind works the same way. It uses energy, and not only physical energy. There’s cognitive energy, emotional energy and motivational energy. Each one gets spent, and each needs a refractory period to recover.

Relaxation

Most of the things we do to relax don’t switch anything off. They switch something else on.

We already sense that relaxation is part of recovery. It’s why people say, “I watch TV because it helps me relax,” or, “I have a glass of wine to unwind,” or, “I scroll on my phone to switch off.”

Modern devices all tell stories to capture our attention. These stories of heroes and villains, outrage and melodrama, bleed back into your day and reappear as mind-wandering.

Consuming media isn’t recovery. It’s a change of channel. The mind is still working, still spending energy, and so it never gets the chance to repair.

Meditation is a refractory period for the mind

When you meditate, you aren’t swapping one narrative for another. You’re stepping out of the narrative altogether, into the present moment: the breath, the body, the sounds around you.

With meditation, we can recover our energy. The mind stops spiralling into doom and returns to this neutral present moment. With practice, this becomes healing.

I often meditate during the day specifically to recover if I’ve spent a lot of energy and need to get some back.

Why stress makes recovery so hard

When you’re stressed, you can’t think your way back to calm. That’s why recovery needs deliberate practice, not just the hope that you’ll wind down and a device’s on-switch.

Stress switches thought off. As stress increases, short-term memory reduces. That’s why a nervous speaker freezes mid-sentence and why actors forget their lines. Then the audience starts to look out the window, which stresses the speaker more, and the stress spiral goes round and round.

The tools that neutralise stress are breath and relaxation.

One more thing to remember: there’s a difference between the problem and coping with the problem. Our culture is obsessed with the problem. Recovery is about coping.

Strength is built one small step at a time

Resilience is a resource. It can be used up, and it can be replenished.

The largest study of its kind, which followed 2,398 people in the United States over four years (Seery et al., 2010), found something notable. People’s resilience grew through their first four adversities, such as illness, injury, taking on a big loan, or bereavement. After that, resilience started to fall.

The same research found that the most resilient people were the most connected, surrounded by people who love and care about them. Mindfulness is closely linked to resilience too, and you can build it through practice.

Your calmness, your focus, your relaxation, your strength, your ability to recover: none of these arrives all at once. They build up one small step at a time, one refractory period at a time.

If you’d like to build that practice with us, sign up for the Bromley Mindfulness newsletter.

References

Seery, M. D., Holman, E. A., & Silver, R. C. (2010). Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(6), 1025-1041. doi.org/10.1037/a0021344

Photo by John Arano on Unsplash.