Reversing Our Mental Diminishing Returns

I took a more stressful position at work three years ago, and I’ve noticed a pattern since then. Whenever I’m on a vacation, my brain works better. My thoughts are clearer, I’m more creative, and I have a broader perspective on what’s happening around me. It’s like a dim light slowly starts to illuminate when I’m away from work, and is fully bright only 3 to 5 days later.

All climbers and athletes understand what happens when you’ve been going too hard for too long. Run, climb, or bike too many days in a row or for too many hours in a day, and you’re going to need to take it easy for a bit. A lot of climbers steal a term from economics to describe this common phenomenon – we call it diminishing returns.

@natalieclimbs showing some serious anxiety

To put it simply, diminishing returns means that when you push your body, you become tired, and the results that you receive from your effort decrease. It’s well understood that when you want to perform at your peak, you need to take some extra rest.

So here’s my question: Why don’t we fully apply this principle to our careers? The typical American work structure is one that allows for very little rest. There aren’t many sports that we could engage in for 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year without serious physical consequences. So why don’t we expect serious mental consequences from our work structure? From both an employee’s and an employer’s perspective, it seems inefficient to have workers who are constantly battling mental diminishing returns.

Getting your hair perfect is so stressful!!

And while it’s actually quite easy for most of us first-worlders to get physical rest, mental rest is much harder to come by. How could we find space to rest our minds with all of the advertising, social media, and 24-hour news access constantly pervading our brains – not to mention the need to keep up with the responsibilities of our everyday lives. With this in mind, one might wonder why we’re surprised by the amount of mental illness and addiction in our country.

It seems strange that a concept that’s so well understood in the physical world is largely ignored in the mental world. Maybe it’s because we can easily pinpoint physical fatigue, while mental fatigue seems more abstract and vague. Maybe we can more easily connect our physical pain to past events. Maybe our minds just have trouble diagnosing themselves.

No work here, just me and the next hold. Photo: @natalieclimbs

I’m writing this because I get more vacation than my non-teaching friends, so my opportunity to frequently observe these mental losses is fairly unique. So here’s my advice: take a true mental break, take it for more than just a weekend, and take a moment to notice what it’s like to be mentally fresh. If you do, we just might start considering mental returns the same way we do physical returns.

This blog post was inspired and written on a climbing rest day, in the middle of a mental rest week, in Hueco Tanks State Park, Texas. :) 

We Are Birds-of-Paradise

If you watch birds around where you live, most just search for food and eat all day long. They need to in order to survive. The rest of their lives are spent mating, laying eggs, nesting, and feeding babies without much spectacle. They seem pretty well adjusted.

Now watch a video on birds-of-paradise. They are insane. They collect colorful rocks, make intricate nests, and come up with all kinds of crazy mating rituals. Why? Well, they can find and eat enough food to survive in their lush rainforests in just a few hours a day. So they have a whole lot of time on their hands to come up with bizarre things to do. Sound familiar, human?

Posing with a stuffed moose wearing a bandana? That's bizarre behavior!

People in this country are especially crazy. We throw balls through hoops, drive in big circles for hours, kill other animals for sport, groom our dogs, shop for the perfect dress (for our dogs), put mozzarella sticks on hamburgers, remodel our countertops, fret over the color of our houses, and endlessly watch other people do all of the above on TV. 

I don’t think evolution had a plan for high-strung species that can satisfy their basic needs so quickly. 

Walking your cat? Crazytime!

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t have to spend much time feeding yourself. So you and I are included in this madness. We all need to find something that we love to do, something to fret over, or maybe even obsess about. What’s most important is finding that weird little thing that’s perfect for you. 

Some of us choose to climb up rocks with our spare time. Not necessarily to the top, not necessarily very high off the ground, and not necessarily using the easiest path.  We fight, we scream, and we bleed our way through the moves. We get emotional when we fail. We curse these climbs, then we praise them, and tell anyone that will listen about the sick moves that we did (while they pretend to listen, waiting for their turn to spray their sick moves back at us). It’s insane. Even more insane than those colorful birds.

It’s a bit sad that the birds-of-paradise, as they toil away at their nests, may never understand how good they really have it. But we can. So next time you are anything but grateful to be climbing, even if it’s a bad day, and even if you feel particularly weak, take a second to realize that your behavior is bizarre… and this is because you’re in paradise. 

Life, Climbing, and Failure

My climbing has become an almost comical real-life enactment of the saying “fall seven times, stand up eight.”

The first of many burns on Dances With Cows

I started a new project a week or so ago — Dances With Cows (13a). I’ll cut to the chase, and shamefully admit that as of today, I have failed on this climb 17 times. This is more than I’ve ever been on any climb before. The thing is, it wouldn’t be the hardest climb I’ve ever done. I expected to send in about 5 attempts, even after giving it a few tries. The combination of high expectations and lack of results feels pretty crappy, and any serious climber has experienced this. Here are some questions I recently asked myself:

Do I think that sending this climb is important? No.

Will I be overjoyed if/when I send? Not really. 

So then the most important question becomes, “Why do I keep doing it?” The answer is simply, “Because it’s my project.” I chose it, and I can’t give up. 

What I realized today on the long slog back to the parking lot is that projecting is about failure, or more specifically, responding to failure. I won’t learn all there is to learn on this climb if I don’t keep trying. And I don’t intend to start the bad habit of cutting my losses. 

... and the first of many falls.

This is where climbing is most applicable to other areas of life.  If you want to grow, it’s important to get outside of your comfort zone and try something new and difficult. And if you want to do anything well, whether it’s learning to play an instrument, learning math, playing a sport, or even losing weight, you have to fail. And then you have to keep trying. 

I think that many of us quit when faced with our most difficult challenges. It’s easier to say that we didn’t reach our goal because we didn’t try very hard, because we weren’t interested enough, because circumstances got in the way, or for some reason that we invented to rationalize away our failing. I’m not going to do that with this climb. 

My story with this route isn’t finished. But my success won’t be defined by sending. Success is never quitting.