Option A

Live in a barracks with 19 other same-sex peers. You will all be woken up every morning before 5 am for arduous physical training. You’ll eat the same three healthy meals every day: oatmeal with fruit and sunflower seeds; tilapia, broccoli, brown rice, and beans for lunch; a chicken walnut salad with olive oil and apple cider vinegar for dinner.

You have two choices. Over the next year you can either:

Option A

Live in a barracks with 19 other same-sex peers. You will all be woken up every morning before 5 am for arduous physical training. You’ll eat the same three healthy meals every day: oatmeal with fruit and sunflower seeds; tilapia, broccoli, brown rice, and beans for lunch; a chicken walnut salad with olive oil and apple cider vinegar for dinner.

You’ll attend challenging classes learning Mandarin, logic, psychology, history, economics, and computer programming after breakfast each day.

After lunch, you’ll spend every afternoon in the desert heat building a large school with your roommates. You’ll return to the barracks to shower, then eat dinner, and spend the evening studying, reading, and writing until 10 pm when you all return to the barracks.

Teachers and work managers will demand that you work at the fringe of your limits each day and will punish any effort that falls short of that standard. Every month there will be a 72-hour period where your roommates and you are dropped in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a map and a thermos of water. If your group fails to return within three days. You’ll repeat the exercise the following week.

Option B

Wake whenever you like each morning. Eat either French toast, donuts, Captain Crunch, cinnamon rolls, or biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Choose any fast-food taco, hamburger, or fried chicken meal you prefer for lunch.

Eat as much pizza, chicken wings, nachos, pasta, chicken fried steak, loaded macaroni, loaded baked potatoes, or sweet glazed ribs as you like for dinner and follow that up with whatever dessert you like. Between meals, feel free to snack on as many sodas, chips, and store-bought cookies as you like and drink whatever adult beverages you like, whenever you like.

You can choose to spend the day playing video games, watching TV, viewing pornography, scanning the internet, participating in social media, shopping, getting massages, lounging at the pool, attending concerts, or heading to bars.

You can combine these activities however you like and hang out with whoever you like, but they will all be people who have chosen option B as well.

Each option is non-negotiable. You will live one full year of your life in complete accordance with these stipulations.

What Do You Choose?

Clearly, option A will require far more suffering, hardship, and effort than option B, while B will feature far more immediate pleasure.

The majority of people’s ethical worldview is defined in exactly these terms and oriented entirely towards Option B—enhance pleasure, decrease pain and suffering. Even our natural operating system is oriented to promote pleasure and avoid pain. So, why are you skeptical of B?

Despite this massive differential in pleasure and pain, there is an inexplicable sense of satisfaction and joy that we anticipate from option A.

As anyone who has experienced a challenge of any length with elements similar to that of option A will attest, such experiences are somehow full of profound highs and frequent hearty laughter.

Heading into such a decision, I imagine a random sample of people would be split on what decision they’d make. Yet from the other side there would be no split at all. If we were told that we could choose an option and skip ahead to realize the effects of that year, then everyone would choose option A.

At the culmination of a year, we’d all wish we’d chosen option A, because we know we’d be healthier, stronger, smarter, more resilient, deeply connected to a group of peers, and full of amazing stories. We’d have talents that unlocked opportunities and unique perspective.

We’d feel accomplished seeing a school standing where once there was nothing and know that with daily effort we were capable of amazing feats.

Option B is the “good life,” full of constantly satisfied desires, but at the end of that year, we would we be more impulsive, fatter, less resilient, mentally duller, and surrounded by relationships based only on superficial interests.

In fact, as each day within this year went by, option A would begin looking more appealing and option B less.

There is a certain law of diminishing returns when it comes to these addictive low-order pleasures. Option B is the better way to spend a day, but a far worse way to spend a few months, a year, and certainly a lifetime.

Finding Meaning Through Challenge

“My dear child, I do not worry about the bleakness of life. I worry about the bleakness of having no challenges in life.”

– Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Letter to my Unborn Daughter

As we saw last time in my piece on how to use fitness to counteract automation, this is the great struggle of raising children in this age of temptation.

Absent of a need to secure our own survival and while immersed in incomprehensible opportunity to satisfy our impulses, we are unlikely to choose the experiences that breed fulfillment. How do we orient our kids towards a life of purpose?

I wouldn’t advocate a life of constant boot camp either. There is joy to be had from careless nights eating pizza, drinking wine, and enjoying good company. Yet, these are only meaningful as contrasts to a life of effort and purpose.

Given the extremes of modern society, the bigger risk is certainly allowing oneself to live life as a passive, entertainment driven impulse machine.

We go in debt chasing elements of option B and we’re diminished as a result. Ironically, the hardships of option A are mostly free, potentially lucrative, and fulfilling, but few messages pull us in that direction.

The modern parenting paradigm obsesses on providing to excess and protecting from pain, yet excess grows insufficient and comfort breeds a soft entitlement that promotes constant dissatisfaction.

Pain is clearly a necessary antecedent of lasting happiness and purpose. In a world of abundant comfort and entertainment, the fulfilled will consistently choose exercise, learning, and challenge.

As congressman Ben Sasse advocates in his book, The Vanishing American Adult, from a young age we should be building our children a menu of hard, yet appropriate challenges. This is the only route to growth and endearing a willingness to overcome adversity.

Older kids need to experience hard physical labor and self-reliance. Sasse found a farm for his daughter to work at one high-school summer. My worldview changed immensely from my summers working landscaping and then later construction. Talk about a workout.

“From sacrifice comes meaning. From struggle comes purpose.”

– Ryan Holiday

Even though the scenario that began this article is clearly a rather exaggerated hypothetical, many of our youth are making a similar decision right now. Following a linear standard model of success, 17-year-olds across the country are trying to decide what college to go to.

Lacking life experience or the challenges that endear purpose, most have no idea what they want to spend a hundred thousand plus dollars learning. Their decision is disproportionately weighed in favor of finding pleasures and staying comfortable, rather than seeking the real, vulnerable experiences they need. Unconventional as it is to say, most have no business going to college at this point.

We get one life. It is tempting to waste that living according to other people’s conception of normal and falling prey to the impulse mine-field constantly pulling us away from the challenges that would make us more—choose challenge. Over and over, choose challenge for your kid’s sake. Sign up for the half-marathon, the Obstacle Race, or the triathlon.

Go to the Brazilian jiu-jitsu class. When your kids are old enough, take them on a three-day backpacking trip. The most profound lessons defy language. Meaning can’t be imparted from a book. These experiences are true education.

This Week’s Mission

If he or she is old enough, take your kid and do the following fitness gauntlet. Record your numbers. It is a challenge you can repeat and compete.

• Max push-ups in a minute – Each rep you have to get all the way to the ground, take your hands off the ground, and then return to push-up form to press up.
• Bodyweight (round down to the nearest 5) farmer’s walk.
• 300-yard shuttle
• Pull-ups to failure
• Bear crawl to failure – How far can you go without putting a knee down?

The post Choose the Challenge appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

“All that is real you can’t buy or steal.”

Matt Kearney

Comparable to most of human history, we have an inconceivable amount of stuff filling our lives with incomprehensible convenience. Your daily diet features a bouquet of extravagance scarcely imaginable. Tomatoes and strawberries in December! How is this possible?

“All that is real you can’t buy or steal.”

Matt Kearney

Comparable to most of human history, we have an inconceivable amount of stuff filling our lives with incomprehensible convenience. Your daily diet features a bouquet of extravagance scarcely imaginable. Tomatoes and strawberries in December! How is this possible?

We have more, but we are not more. In fact, driven by this headlong quest for more, we’re less capable of ruling ourselves than ever. As obesity, depression, anxiety, suicide, and shootings all increase, perhaps we should confront our self-imposed powerlessness.

The Stoics had a concept called oikeiosis, roughly meaning, your natural orientation. We don’t fault a lion for killing a gazelle. It is her orientation. We don’t criticize the cow for eating all day. Other than humans, all species are driven purely by instinct.

We, however, can transcend shallow impulse. We can decide that virtues are worth more than immediate gratification. If we don’t then what separates us from the gopher digging holes in your yard?

The 4 Noble Virtues

There are four noble virtues in stoicism: practical wisdom, morality, courage, and moderation. In light of the current state of American health, I’d like to explore moderation and how to create a regiment to promote being more this holiday season—more present, more loving, more appreciative, more connected, and of course, more healthy.

The holiday season is upon us and a great feast awaits. Friends and family will gather embracing tradition and melting stress away through celebration. It’s a truly beautiful thing. But, there is an ugly side.

Our modern culture of extreme consumption often replaces and distracts from those moments of deeper connection.

As I presented in my recent piece on preventing seasonal weight gain, one of the stoic philosopher Seneca’s greatest works was a response to the extravagance characteristic of Rome’s December holiday season. Still, the decadence Seneca witnessed in 1st century Rome had nothing on us.

The reality is that the excess we see in December is only a small magnification of the excess that characterizes all of modern life.

These same patterns leave millions physically limited, mentally lethargic, and emotionally anguished. Most of these masses will earnestly desire to break their impulsive dependency by making a change this next year.

But, having no understanding of the principles behind health, willpower, or the mind, they will fail. It is human nature to consume ravenously when there is more to consume. Working against instinct and a culture of impulse overload, they will lack the tools and resolve.

Take back control. Rather than immersing yourself in a month of consumption this December, I recommend taking some time to train your ability for self-mastery.

Seneca recommended picking a few days of self-denial where you are “content with the scantiest and cheapest of fare, with coarse and rough dress. Let the bread be hard and grimy. Endure all this for three or four days at a time, sometimes for more.”

The Challenge

Specificity is power. We need to clarify and adapt this challenge for the modern world. Look at your calendar and pick three days where you can practice self-denial without significant disruption to your loved ones. If they want to join you, that’s cool, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Your three-day challenge must follow these rules:

• Food: Eat at only two times per day. No salt, pepper, or spices. No condiments. No meat. No bread or processed foods. No canned or frozen foods. No fruit. You can use only fresh vegetables and lentils or barley.
• Media: No smartphone use. No social media. No television or screen time at all. The only exception is using a computer for work. If it is a work day, you can check your work email up to two times. Acceptable entertainment options: board games, cards, books, ping-pong, pool, darts, campfire communion.
• Spending: No purchases.
• Transportation: Walk or bike any distances under 2 miles. If possible, plan and take public transportation.
• Dress: Make it “coarse and rough”—whatever that means to you.
• Sleep: 6 hours or less each night.
• Meditate: 20 minutes each day.
• Train: Each day complete: 50 supermans; 100 push-ups; 150 air squats; run 2 miles. All require no equipment. Split it up however you like.

As with any challenge, please do not skip the entire challenge because there are elements that aren’t feasible in your lifestyle or at your current level. It does not matter where you are, only what your trajectory is. Be realistic, plan, and commit.

Also, keep in mind that this is a training in resiliency. These practices aren’t all healthy. Furthermore, long-term success is not born of extreme denial. However, it does require an ability to define actions and persevere. In this way, this challenge is the best possible practice for a healthy lifestyle.

“… you will leap for joy when filled with a pennyworth of food, and you will understand that a man’s peace of mind does not depend upon Fortune.”

Seneca

Remove the Excess

When you remove the excess you often find what is real. You are living how millions have lived and continue to live while finding immense joy. In our age of materialism and artificiality, boundaries help us reconnect with humanity.

I highly recommend doing a 3-day challenge like this a few times a year. Seneca believed that by consistently interjecting periods of less, he’d be resilient to adversity and train a capacity for fulfillment and satisfaction in any circumstance. Now that’s a hell of a lot better than being mad at Aunt Sally for getting your sister a more expensive gift.

The post The 3 Day Stoic Holiday Challenge appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Imagine having a peaceful state of mind every day. Just sit with that thought for a second. Sound good? If you think meditation isn’t for you, this is your perfect challenge.

The Breaking Muscle 28-Day Meditation Challenge

Meditation is no longer considered a “new age” activity. The benefits have been proven in hundreds of peer-reviewed, published studies.

People who meditate enjoy:

• Faster and more complete recovery from workouts
• Enhanced mood and decreased effects from everyday stress
• Improved mental performance
• Better sleep patterns
• Reduced cortisol and lactate levels

The Breaking Muscle 28-Day Meditation Challenge is a simple and effective daily practice that anyone can do. It will teach you the principles of meditation and grow your personal practice day by day. But there’s a twist: as a Team Activist Charity Challenge, taking on this challenge benefits more than just you.

How Does This Help Sick Kids?

Breaking Muscle has partnered with Team Activist to fund raise for The Painted Turtle, a charity camp experience for children with serious medical conditions.

While it costs an average of $1600 per camper to provide the weeklong experience, The Painted Turtle never charges the camper or camper’s family, relying solely on donations.

More about the Painted Turtle from their web site:

The Painted Turtle offers children with serious medical conditions and their families a unique camp experience designed to foster personal growth and exploration. Our goal is to empower campers—to make new friends, try new things, build self-confidence, and become more independent in their medical care. In short, we aspire to help our campers discover all that is possible in their lives.

Our on-site medical support allows us to provide a unique and safe camp experience to children with special medical needs. Recent groups served include children with spina bifida and paraplegia, cerebral palsy and limb deficiency, rheumatic diseases, skeletal dysplasia and mucopolysaccharidosis, kidney disease and transplant, liver disease and transplant, immunodeficiency disorders.

While you help to bring happiness to these kids, we’ll bring 28 days of 100% free guidance, inspiration, and education to you. A short, effective meditation practice will arrive in your email each morning. Follow it, and your practice will grow and evolve, resulting in a calmer, more peaceful you.

So if more coffee in the morning and more wine at night haven’t brought your life into balance, spend a few minutes a day with us. Click here for details or to join the Breaking Muscle 28-Day Meditation Challenge.

The post The Breaking Muscle 28-Day Meditation Challenge appeared first on Breaking Muscle.