faith

You need faith to get really deep.

Not the ‘I believe in god’ or the ‘I believe in this guru’ kind of faith, though that undoubtedly works for some. You need to believe that it’s possible based on your own experience and research. I never did believe. I was just placed into a ‘do or die’ state by the drugs, which is one and the same in many ways.

You need the faith for the dopamine.

How can you encode something deeply unless you have dopamine? And how can you have dopamine unless you believe?

Now this is a lovely feedback loop when used correctly. It’s what I did with ironman: fatty fatty bum bum gets on his bike and doesn’t believe at first, but the workout gives him dopamine and he records the progress and it gets ingrained and in a couple of months things have changed.

Isn’t prayer and meditation the same?

You do the work and *then* you start to believe. You record the progress, and *then* you start to believe.

And this makes sense: exercise, prayer, meditation… they all result in higher tonic dopamine, and increased phasic dopamine (at times) which result in an encoding of ‘this is working’. And then you do more, it works more, and so on.

This is why I am recording my training; why I have always recorded it. This is why you are told to quantify your gains at the gym. Dopamine. Faith. Simple. Dopamine is how it encodes, so the belief in itself fuels more practice which fuels more belief and off you go. It’s the basic mechanism of addiction too. Hack that brain, or others will hack it for you.

Plan your work and work your plan.

Leave your bike by the door and your mat on the floor.

Just make yourself to do it for a couple of weeks and record the progress.

The best way to believe is not to read shit on the internet. It’s to do it. Even just holding something heavy and rocking back and forth is enough - the regular rhythm will give you a nice little tick tick tick and you’ll feel relieved. If you do that several days running you’ll start to build a snowball.

There’s no rush. The important thing for ‘faith’ is just to do, and see. It’s all about the chemistry. And the evidence.