Ancient versus modern

Natural versus stimulants.

The author in caveman mode, out running at dawn, yesterday.

I recently discovered something about myself. I can wake up quickly without artificial stimulants I was once addicted to. All it requires is going outside in Northern Europe in the rain just after 5am like some kind of modern caveman.

For weeks I have experimented with going outside to exercise to wake up instead of drinking coffee or, indeed, staying inside in a warm, watertight building.

The goal was part of a broader raft of self-improvement measures I had embraced since quitting smoking at the start of the year.

I woke up earlier and earlier. I was aiming for something like Jocko Willink’s get up at 4:30am and exercise without coffee like a psycho thing.

I did this by going out and running at dawn.¹

Then one day, just after 5am, I was striding across a carpark in the rain in a British city at the tail end of summer after a brief period of fighting with myself after the alarm rang. Against any common sense I felt amazing.

I was at most two minutes outside and I felt unexpectedly strong as I confidently strode across this carpark to get to my starting destination.

Dawn was 15 minutes away and it was raining although not cold, about 14°C (just under 60°F).

I had consumed no coffee or cigarettes and had only been awake for about 20 minutes. I should have been half asleep.

For a moment I wondered if I’d lost my mind. What was I doing out at 5am in the rain feeling great? Was this the beginnings of a psychotic episode?

But I wasn’t just awake, I felt invigorated. I had a sense of awareness and strength about me I hadn’t felt before.

This was a revelation to me given how I used to live.

The bad old days

I used to be much less healthy. I was a heavy smoker. I drank many cups of strong coffee, particularly in the morning.

A pint of strong coffee and at least half a dozen smokes just to feel human was my norm. The pinnacle of a sedentary life, all those stimulants to compensate for the routine sense of fatigue I experienced with consistently bad sleep patterns and heavy nicotine and caffeine use.

I always hated it and struggled for years to quit both the cigarettes and the dependency on coffee. It didn’t help that they complemented each other and had long become fused together in my mind like cornflakes and milk.

Then I ditched the cigarettes earlier this year. I quit cold turkey after a bad chest infection requiring a dose of antibiotics.

I still drink coffee, but I now have one cup and not multiple mugs. I need it much less. Importantly, it is no longer part of the process of helping me wake up.

I am phasing it out of my life completely as I think it might be unhealthy for me. I now delay the coffee by exercising to reduce dependency.

That led to the get outside and exercise thing.

I have no idea how this happened. It certainly wasn’t planned, but I suspect that is why it worked.

Exercising outside in the rain

The exercising outside feels normal. More natural once I am there.

Getting there is less easy. I fight with myself, particularly as we move into Autumn and the mornings become colder.

It was a nightmare to get to that point. Until recently I had to talk myself into it, really psyche myself up.

This is pre-dawn too. It is early. I have to plan for it the night before.

Then the carpark episode happened a few weeks ago.

From then on I just thought about that strange unexpected experience. I felt like superman, a natural elation and sense of endurance that manifested in a confident stride and feeling of satisfaction.

It was not a euphoric high, a narcotic effect. It was just an impression of alertness that felt great.

It seems like it is that sensation I am now chasing, a bit like a junkie chasing a high.

When I am lying in bed, and I can hear the rain outside and imagine the low temperature as well as the general insanity of getting up from a nice warm place to go outside into Northern European weather, I struggle.

But then I think of that feeling of natural strength and I do it anyway. And when I make it outside it feels incredible. I feel unnaturally awake, with none of the side effects of stimulants.

The speed is odd too. This is 15 to 20 minutes after waking, often with an alarm clock, so not necessarily fully rested.

Am I tapping into some ancient routine my body is designed for? Some caveman adaptation that gets you up and moving because to not do so is dangerous? Are we meant to rise at dawn anyway?

If we look far enough back, to the times much of modern homo sapiens’ mental machinery is being created, there would be little in the way of artificial stimulants. Most stimulation comes from within ourselves, using powerful mental routines to help embed beneficial behaviours. Dopamine loops in particular help us anticipate pleasure even with unpleasant tasks.

One way or another our ancestors got up and got moving without fresh coffee, cigarettes, instant messages, news feeds or alarm clocks. Whatever processes are at play must still be lurking deep within our minds and the physical apparatus of our nervous and endocrine systems.

In the past I had always assumed the lack of coffee and other modern conveniences indicated our ancestors led a bleak life with few enjoyments. Now I am not so sure. Artificial stimulants cost us, sometimes our long-term health. Distractions like television and always-on smartphones are damaging our attention spans and are addictive.

I have no idea about any of this. All I know is the resistance to getting moving first thing without coffee is probably about habit and convention more than anything. I struggle because it is early. But once I am out it is fine. It can feel amazing.

Changing habits

One day I went back to coffee (although no cigarettes). I talked myself out of the early morning walk/run.

I drank strong coffee instead and looked at my phone like I used to do.

This time it felt wrong Something had changed. I had unwittingly damaged my ability to sit at my kitchen table and abuse my body as I blearily skimmed internet bullshit while I tried to wake myself up, an activity I had willingly lost years to in the past.

It felt entirely off, so much so I went to the gym a few hours later to compensate.

I had somehow recalibrated my body and perhaps my mind. I no longer enjoyed the coffee, cigarettes and mindless consumption routine.

On the days I couldn’t get out or chose not to I felt mildly agitated. Getting up and outside still took some doing, and yet once out it was easy even on colder rainy days.

It is the first time a major lifestyle change for the better has crept up on me. I certainly didn’t plan any of this.

If I can do it anyone can

I am the worst candidate for this kind of thing. Go back a year and I am a heavy smoker, taking no exercise beyond walking because I don’t own a car. A total mess with the ill health to prove it.

Now I’m the opposite. It would take effort to sit and veg out first thing. This is not a boast. I didn’t plan any of it. I become restless if I don’t get moving.

But it has given me some pointers as to how real, lasting change can happen, at least for me.

1. Focus on the process, not the end goal

I literally had no end goal for the 5am thing except to do it. It was all process.

At most it was something like, don’t smoke or loaf about for hours. All my effort was focused on getting out the door and just doing it.

The positive feeling was unexpected, a bonus. I think the idea is teach yourself to look for satisfaction from the process, the doing, not the imagined end state.

2. Life is action

Remind yourself life itself is doing. Life happens in the actions, not the plans, the grand visions or the fantasies.

We joke that life is what happens when you are busy making other plans, and we understand the concept.

I am beginning to wonder if it really matters what the actions are. It must do as some actions are more important to us than others.

And yet, there seems to be satisfaction in the most mundane of acts, even the drudgery. A sense of fulfilment in a job well done or perhaps just tackled at all.

Is this the secret? You dig deep and find something to salvage from everything you do? Work, chores, toil; maybe the nature of the effort is less important than effort itself.

Whatever the answer, life is buried within a series of actions we take and not thoughts we conjure up or belief systems we adopt. Life is found in the doing.

3. What you imagine is probably false

I imagined quitting smoking for years and how it would feel. Like many smokers it felt impossible, and yet it wasn’t. It wasn’t easy, but nor was it the nightmare I thought it would be.

Much of life is unknowable until you experience it. The anticipated rewards we invent are often wrong as are the obstacles preventing progress.

The process just is. It is immediately graspable by trying, by doing it. An actionable version of an awareness of ignorance is to get started then adapt as you go. Don’t plan so much or too deeply; you probably don’t know enough.

Just start, then adapt the actions as you learn.

What has all this taught me? Something disarmingly simple.

Life is in the mundane activities, the doing. It is in the grind, the process itself.

It is while engaged in action when we are most alive even though we imagine life is found in the highlights it often isn’t. Those are usually retrospective analyses of a past event we lost ourselves in at the time.

When we embrace the doing part of life it may pay a little euphoric dividend every now and then when we least expect it, usually when immersed in the activity itself.

I have resolved to incorporate this into all that I do. Focus on the doing, getting it done, then adapt based on the experience and what I learn. To plan less and do more.

And who knows, perhaps life might throw me other rewards every now and then if I focus on the process of doing and less on the nonsense in my head.

Feel free to join me in this misadventure. Empty carparks at 5am have plenty of room for company.

1. I am not a natural runner. I tend to cycle and walk. But I reached a point where I stopped progressing. I could walk or cycle for many miles. I had strength and stamina. And yet I had stopped progressing.

When I really pushed myself and increased my heart rate I would struggle. Out of breath and winded quickly. In extreme cases I felt really stressed as if my heart would give out and I would need to stop all activity. I can never tell how much of this is physical or mental.

Advisers online who know about such matters kept suggesting interval training as a good way to increase cardio strength and stamina. As a cyclist and walker it didn’t appeal. But then I plateaued and decided to try.

My early morning expeditions are interval based. I am terrible at it. I am at the very beginning of my running journey. It is mostly walking interspersed with short bursts of jogging. Not real running at all.

I get winded easily, a legacy of the smoking. At the moment I manage at most 5-10 percent of the 3 mile morning route running. That is only about 250-500 yards running. But it is a start, and it is something to build on. My current goal is to run 25 percent of the route; a little less than a mile.