Stop Interrupting
THE MINUS TOUCH
Just waiting for work to settle down.
The kids to get a bit older
Or spring.
For whatever chaos du jour to resolve. And then we’ll start looking after ourselves. But best intentions don’t count for much. Ask Jules Winfield.
The consequences might accrue over a longer timeframe, but are ultimately no less serious than the situation our friend Brett finds himself in here.
And this is the fantasy that has us postponing our most important and urgent task to a never-arriving someday.
But like most fantasies, it dissolves on paper. Take a look:
My life will calm down. My health and fitness will follow.
Right.
Movement, sleep, recovery, routine— these are the levers that lie upstream of calm. They produce it. Not metaphorically — physiologically. Our mistake here is not merely believing that order will ever precede discipline. It is our failure to understand that only these will quieten the chaos. Misuse of the word ‘literally’ is literally endemic in the modern day, not here:
There is literally nothing else that will do it.
Because human beings regulate through action. Through rhythm. Through routine and ritual. Through alignment with certain underlying realities that modern life is remarkably effective at disrupting. As recent posts have made all too clear.
Nonetheless, most people, on reflection, will only be able to summon a very different fitness experience.
And even if we generously gloss over the horror stories and look to those whose experience of ‘fitness’ (to include dietary health etc.) produced some narrow positive—lost a few centimetres, felt a bit fitter—very few would recall any sense of calm.
But this does not mean alignment has failed to produce the desired outcome.
It means your efforts—whatever they were— were not aligning you.
We live in environments that steadily erode the very signals human beings historically relied upon to calibrate themselves.
Light and dark.
Effort and rest.
Hunger and satiety.
Movement and stillness.
Stress and recovery.
And our efforts are typically only scrambling us further.
I’m on a detox.
I’m doing a challenge.
Even from the more favourable end of the spectrum and ‘working out’ or accidental alignment, these are brief approximations, at best. Brushing against reality. A mere glimpse.
Instead, we get endless partial stimulation. A low-grade hum of physical inactivity, fractured attention and psychological noise so normal we fail to recognise it as noise at all. We then interpret the resulting fatigue, anxiety, brain fog and dysregulation as personal failings rather than predictable outcomes.
And respond the way modern people respond to modern problems: More.
More systems. More apps. More supplements. More hacks. More optimisation. As if the problem were a deficit. But the modern person is not under-stimulated. Not short on information, options or demands on their attention. They are overloaded — cognitively, hormonally, environmentally — and the last thing an overloaded system needs is another thing added to it.
And certainly not a hodgepodge of bolted-on Band-Aids, few of which make sense in isolation, and none in concert.
Our lives quickly come to resemble the car designed by Homer Simpson — The Homer — with its bubble domes, shag carpeting and tailfins. Three horns, because you can never find one when you’re mad. A car so grotesquely overcomplicated, so bloated with features, contradictions and unnecessary additions, it bankrupted the company trying to build it.
This is the conventional approach, not just to health and fitness but to life more generally.
And this is the chaos. Because, of course, you don’t need more. You need less.
Less interference.
Less distraction.
And certainly less industry.
Not for austerity, abstention or ascetic reasons— or indeed in any restrictive sense. But because you cannot add fitness to your life like a hobby, a side project, or another obligation to manage. You remove what is preventing your body from functioning as designed. None of it requires invention. Just the subtraction of everything making it harder than it needs to be.
The via negativa.
When Michelangelo was asked how he carved the statue of David, he answered: “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”
The organism aligned with its physiology and environment is different from the one that isn’t.
One is The Homer.
The other, David.
Alignment is not something you force into existence, but something you stop interrupting. So you don’t need the perfect program or the ideal routine. You don’t need to be the sort of person who has their shit together. Just someone interested in stopping the bleeding in every direction at once.
A walk.
A consistent bedtime.
Less — but strategically less. Identifying the needle-movers. The points of highest return. So you’re doing less and getting more. Far more than you’ll ever get from your best intentions. Your body does not care what you intend to do. So you don’t need seven solutions—just one relationship.
A relationship built the same way as any other. Through consistency. Through trust. Enough awareness of your own structure that you stop constantly placing yourself in opposition to it.
Through doing more of less.
Leftfield Youniversity begins June 19th, applications close Friday, June 5th,
Enjoy your weekend
- OLI