073 • The overlooked power of flinching forward
The most effective self-improvement mantra I've ever found...
Recently I’ve found myself taking more inspiration from one of the most influential books that I've ever read - The Flinch by Julien Smith. Even though I read it for the first time a year and a half ago, the book’s main lesson is still seared into my mind…
Flinch forward.
What this means is to simply accelerate when you notice a feeling of resistance that holds you back from doing something that you know will be good.
Whether it's speaking to someone new, giving a new idea a go, or on the smaller scale just closing your laptop and going for a walk, it's doing the things that will do you good, but have some genuine friction to them.
There's science to back up the fact that this action-taking is going to be good for you. There's a part of the brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (AMCC, I think I got that right) that's involved with employing willpower to do these things that you don't want to do.
The good news is that every time you make these decisions the willpower that you used to do so becomes more and more accessible. The catch is that the activities you do to build this willpower you must find genuinely unpleasant. It’s not good enough them being conventionally difficult.
For someone who's been enjoying hitting the gym for the last decade, going into the gym and doing a set of heavy deadlifts isn't going to build their willpower because it's something they enjoy doing.
What might still build their willpower though is to sit down and stare at the wall for 15 minutes to try and quieten their mind through a meditation session.
The point is that you latch on to something you really don’t want to do in the moment. And this will of course vary from person to person, but some common ones are indeed lifting weights, running, meditation or perhaps taking a cold shower.
I seek these challenges from time to time, but the real magic of this comes from being more mindful of your behaviours on a more micro scale. Like closing the Twitter tab that you've just opened, just before your feed can load and your dopamine craving gets satiated. Or simply putting the impulse-purchase bagels back on the shelf instead of buying them.
These things are easier to do as they're smaller and have less friction to doing so, but each time you beat the impulse you're growing your ability to do so on a larger scale in the future.
And flinching forwards is the simple mechanism that helps to do this. In The Flinch, the book mentions boxers who learn to react in a positive, forward direction after being hit. An instinctive movement that has a positive result.
This is something I've employed with these micro-wins that build willpower. Move without thinking, before thinking. There's no point in getting caught up in a back-and-forth in your subconscious. Just move and choose before this internal dialogue starts up.
It's quite liberating, especially if, like me, you're used to being in an internal state of overthinking decisions. Instead you get on with the day without much attention lost, having made a good decision with a fraction of the willpower, saving this resource for anything more important that might come up later.
Over time you become better without realising it, moving your attention to more difficult things, and it's this incremental growth that I've come to believe more and more in…
It doesn't matter if you get set back a little, come up with three small wins in response. It's a game of positive vs negative and if you can make your net activity positive then you're winning.
I've been using this a lot recently seeing as I've been snowed under with an important university deadline and have required a lot of unbroken focus on my work. It's been a lot of hours and I want to focus exclusively on one thing at a time, which is why there wasn't a newsletter issue last week.
But at least we're back on schedule for posting on Fridays now and I also have another post lined up for next week already that just needs a bit of tweaking then will be ready to go.
Thanks for reading,
— Theo
Last week’s issue (extended cut)…
What I've written this week...
I haven't been working on this piece strictly this week, more like the last month and a half but yesterday, my field report from my week in Portugal in June came to fruition.
It's called 'Comparing the influence of a variety of floral cues on visiting pollinating insect diversity and frequency in a native Portuguese flower'. Now, having looked at this, I'm concerned that it might have been better to write 'of' rather than 'in' but it's submitted now so that's beyond my power to change.
Having written so much on the internet in quite a casual and friendly tone since my last report, one of my saving graces this time around was using a search function to track down and eliminate all the don'ts, haven'ts, aren'ts and other shortened, apostrophe’d words.
Hopefully I caught them all because I got a slap on the wrist for being so informal in some of my last submissions.