I went to play poker one Saturday a couple of weeks ago. I went because I was lonely and bored in my rental house and could not bear to be there another minute. The trains weren’t running properly so I drove. The traffic was awful and by the time I arrived I had added stress to my generally miserable countenance. You’ll have guessed where this is going; I played horrible poker and lost a wedge. My decisions were poor and my play lacked conviction.
I went to play poker one Thursday a couple of weeks ago. I went because I was looking for a fun evening with people I regard as friends. I travelled by train, picking up some tea and a flapjack from the platform kiosk. I was feeling positive after reaching some interesting insights in a therapy session in the morning. I had a great evening, my decisions seemed simple and I played with strength and clarity. As I left, having won back the previous week’s wedge and a tidy bit more, Ben Roberts, a respected professional, complemented my play. He picked out a couple of moves he’d admired, and in my head I added a hand where I’d bluffed him out of a big pot!
The same applies with work, the course of my day being set by the mood I’m in when I arrive.
The same applies also with a trip to the supermarket, cooking a meal or doing personal admin tasks.
Surely, no insights here, you might say. Feel bad, perform poorly; feel good, perform well. Obvious innit?
However, after three years working with a therapist, I’ve started to realise that the mood in which I go into a poker game or a work meeting is not immutable or pre-determined by a higher power. It is not something to which I must necessarily be resigned.
Sometimes, not all the time, but enough for it to be important, I can control my mood. I can choose to be positive or negative, happy or sad, energized or wilted. To achieve this, I have to create some distance between my conscious self, and the part of me that feels negative. I have to be able stand back and consider why that part of me feels so incapable, sympathise with it a little, but make a conscious decision not to be controlled by it. Then, perhaps while I’m travelling to whatever it is I have to do, that poker game for example, I need to indulge myself, maybe have that tea and flapjack, and allow myself to notice what’s around me: a father playing with his kids, an attractive woman in a good coat, the crisp freshness of the winter air. I’ll allow myself to smile at these things as I board the train.
What I’m doing here is practising mindfulness, a concept that, till recently, I would have regarded as psycho mumbo-jumbo. It only started to make sense once I understood that the changes that result from mindfulness are as much physical as mental, subtle shifts in the balance of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin bringing about subtle shifts in mood. For me, this knowledge of the physical side of what I experience as feelings is helpful. It lets me move beyond “I feel rubbish!” to thinking about how to change that; how to arrive at the game ready to play and confident that, today, my decisions will be good ones and my play will be positive.
I was skiing once with a very fit friend and a French mountain guide. The guide was older than me, wizened from years of high altitude sun and with the wiry strength of all mountain guides. It was late in the afternoon after a hard day. I was shattered and had visibly struggled for the last half a mile. We stood at the top of the final narrow descent before the long, gentle run that would take us to the valley and cold beer. It was viciously steep and, with huge rocks below us, would have been a bad place to fall.
The guide stood in front of me, looked straight into my eyes and said:
“B, you have this. Think yourself fit. Be fit for this 250 metres, then you have my permission to be tired again.”
It worked. It amazed me at the time, but it worked. I stopped leaning on my poles and stood tall, surveying the slope below for a route. I picked the perfect spot for the first turn, knowing that the tenor of the whole descent would be set by it. I attacked, ignoring the pain in my legs and my lungs and focussing only on the slope and the task: up, swivel, down, roll the knees for control, very steep turn so initiate from the top ski not the bottom, swivel again, slide over the patch of ice then three linked turns between the rocks, roll the knees again to set up for the next, focus, focus, focus.
“Bloody hell!” said my friend who had watched my descent from below, “Where did that come from? I thought you were done half an hour ago.”
“Think yourself fit!” the guide had said. And in that moment, as I placed my trust in him, I had changed the chemical makeup of my bloodstream in a way that allowed me to do what I needed to do. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could think myself mentally fit before a product development meeting, a mortgage interview or, indeed, before a poker game.
Well, here’s the surprising thing….
I can!
I’ve always loved this image and it’s on the wall in my office. It perfectly captures that first turn. Or, more accurately, the brief pause when you collect yourself, focus and sink down onto the edges to get them to bite into the snow, giving yourself the perfect platform from which you will unweight.
Then, for the briefest of moments, life seems to stand still.
In that instant, anything behind you is irrelevant; before you is only the slope and the snow.
Ready…. Ready….. and NOW! into the turn!
I suspect it would be helpful if, standing on the threshold of a conference room for a difficult meeting, I could summon that same feeling. It should be possible: pause, review what’s about to happen, compose my opening statement, take a deep breath and then:
Ready…. Ready….. and NOW! into the meeting!
More on neurotransmitters, but in a BDSM context, here.
Love this (is that a shot of you? Fabulous either way, but MORE fabulous if it is, of course).
I learnt something similar when I had a stint with a therapist recently (first time). I was struggling with ALL THE FEELS, and her explanation of what happens physically in the brain because of how you think helped so much. Not least that the brain is kind of dumb for such a sophisticated machine, and can’t tell the difference between thinking a feel and actually feeling a feel: It reacts the same to both. So the more I got frustrated and angry at myself for bad feels (‘snap out of it!’), the more my brain cycled up into ‘bad feels MOAR BAD FEELS!’. Fascinating.
I’m glad it helps :).
Ferns
Not me in the picture I’m afraid, though I wish it was!
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Somehow relating depressed or stressed feelings to the presence or absence of particular chemicals seems to make it easier to deal with. For me anyway.