Endurance & the Upper Limits of Human Potential | Flow Research Collective Radio

I think that's really generalizable. And the reason I say that is there's been a big shift in the way we understand physiology or endurance physiology in the last, let's say, 10 years, 10, 15 years, incorporating the brain. So understanding that it's not just about our muscles and heart and lungs and things like that. And the way I think most scientists would explain it now, or at least many scientists would explain it now, is that the master switch for endurance is your subjective perception of effort.

Hey there, if you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community. Of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that, and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We would be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs. Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio. Today, we have a really fascinating episode for you with Alex Hutchinson. So, Alex started out as a physicist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, then went into postdoctoral research with the U.S. National Security Agency working on quantum computing and nanomechanics. During this academic endeavor, he completed a middle and long-distance run for the Canadian national team, mostly as a miler, but also dabbling in cross-country and a little bit of mountain running. And that ended up pivoting his career into science journalism and endurance. And his latest book, which came out in February of 2018, is an exploration of the science and mysteries of endurance. The book is aptly titled Endure, with the subtitled Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. The book did incredibly well for good reason. It is a fascinating exploration of effort, endurance, and the upper limits of human potential. And in today's episode, that's what Alex and I dive into. We talk about how flow impacts effort, how physical and physiological endurance applies in the workplace, and how you can dial up your endurance and create effortless effort by accessing flow state consistently. So enjoy today's episode with Alex. He's an incredible mind. You're going to really enjoy it. Alex Hutchinson, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's absolutely great to have you here.

Thanks, Laurie, and I really appreciate the opportunity.

So your backstory, Alex, is fascinating. There's a quote from, I believe, your website, which says, I actually started out as a physicist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge, then a few years as a postdoctoral researcher with the US National Security Agency working on quantum computing and nanomechanics. So how did your background in physics influence the way that you've approached your running career and journalism and the topic of peak performance, which obviously you've written about The question for me is kind of a chicken and egg question.

It's like, did spending 10 years of my life solving complicated equations and working in a lab fundamentally create the approach that I've carried through as a journalist, which is very evidence-based, I think? And, you know, I can explain that a little more. Or is that just the way I am? And the reason I was interested in physics is the same reason that I was plotting my resting heart rate in Lotus 1-2-3 on a spreadsheet back in the '90s, and the same reason that as a journalist, my question is really not what does Expert A or Expert be think about this question, but what evidence do we have? So I think there's definitely a through line between all those things, the way I, the way I competed as a runner, the way I work as a journalist, and the reasons I was a physicist. It's hard to know what caused what or whether it's just a reflection of the way my brain is wired.

Are there transferable skills that have been significantly advantageous from your prior life as a physicist that you currently leverage?

I think there are a couple of things. One is that I'm not afraid of equations, I'm not afraid of numbers, I'm not afraid of long words. And that's important because actually journalism is definitely dominated by people who come from a humanities background because they can write, which is a helpful thing. But there's a tendency to take people at their word and not to read the full paper, to put it into science context. And I'm always happy to read the full paper even when I don't understand a lot of it because in my years as a physicist I spent a lot of time not understanding things. And you gradually realize that that's fine. If you're working in quantum mechanics, almost nobody in the world really fully understands what you're doing, and we're all just trying to understand better. And you, you make progress by being willing to grapple with some of that complexity. So having gone through physics, I've always been happy to, even in unrelated areas like physiology, which I've written a lot about, to read the full paper and then not to be afraid to go to the scientists and say, okay, I didn't understand that, can you explain to me why this is the case? And I still didn't understand it, can you explain to me again? And that's super helpful. So I think that's probably the kind of, maybe not a direct benefit of studying physics, like you didn't have to spend 10 years solving physics equations to get that, but it is easier said than done to feel comfortable showing your ignorance, asking for help, and grappling with hard things. And then the other thing is just a mindset of looking for evidence and relying on data to answer questions, which I think is a general kind of scientific approach to life, which is not to say that science necessarily has all, you know, all the answers ready right away, but of using that framework to form how I think about questions and how I write about questions.

It's a great breakdown, Alex. I love that. I want to switch to Endure here for a second, and then we'll come back to your own journey and story. So your book is called Endure, for people who are listening, and the subtitle is Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. And I absolutely love the title, by the way. The second part of your book is titled Limits, and the chapter titles are Pain, Muscle, Oxygen, Heat, Thirst, and Fuel. Could you speak to, for folks who have not yet read the book, what you go into across those different topics under the broader category of limits?

The whole book, in particular through that section, is trying to understand when you reach the point where you feel you cannot go any farther, you cannot do any more, what is it that's actually holding you back? And the, the general theme of the book is that all those things you just mentioned, whether it's hydration or fuel or pain or oxygen, they don't directly hold you back. Really, it's your brain decides that it's a good idea for you to stop before you reach the point where you're truly physically incapable of doing it. So that's the whole theme of the book, is that limits are imposed or kind of created in the brain as a self-protective mechanism. And all these other things, they're real. Like, you know, pain is real and dehydration is real. But what we follow is the warning signals, the orange light rather than the red light.

Point being, I'm assuming that the buffer for continued endurance is much, much, much bigger than it feels or seems.

Yeah. And that it doesn't make it easy to just say, oh, now I realize that my brain wants me to stop because I feel like I don't have enough oxygen, therefore I'm just going to keep going. If that was the case, I'd be out, you know, setting world masters records as a runner, and I'm definitely not. These limits are still very hard to transcend, but at the margins, at the margins, understanding that you're dealing with a suggested limit, you know, a recommended speed rather than an absolute hardwired speed limiter, It changes how you approach limits and it reminds you that, yeah, these limits are a little bit negotiable.

I would love to hear, Alex, an example of endurance that really encapsulates the experience of suggested physiological limits and you being able to break through those limits from your own life. And then we can dive into some of the broader tactics and approaches people can use.

The example that has always stuck with me and that I think ended up being the root of my interest in this topic is when I was a runner in college, I was trying to break 4 minutes for the 1500. 1500 meters is a little bit shorter than a mile. So it's like a poor man's 4-minute mile barrier. And I was, I had actually run 4:02 in high school and then kind of hit a plateau where for 4 years in a row, I was running like 4:01, 4:02, 4 flat, 4:01. So this is the picture of physical limits, right? My picture was I've been training hard for 4 years. I'm running the same times over and over again. It looks like my body, my physiology is capable of running 1500 meters in about 4 minutes. And I knew I could run 3:59, right? If you've run 4 minutes, you know, you can run 3:59. And I wanted to do that. And I figured once I did that, that would be kind of the capstone of my career. What ended up happening is at this totally meaningless indoor meet when I was a junior, There was a, it was an early season meet. There was no competition. And I was just going out to once again, try and break 4 minutes. And I went through the first lap. I remember, and in these races, they have a timekeeper at the start finish line calling out your times as you go through. And he called out 27 seconds when I went through the first 200 meters, which is way, way, way too fast for the pace I wanted to run. And I had this kind of weird argument in my head between how I felt, which was pretty good, and how I thought I should feel, which was pretty terrible knowing that I'd gone out in 27 seconds. And the same thing happened second lap. I went through 57 seconds for the first 400, and I still, I, you know, I felt fine, but it was like, this is so fast. I'm having this amazing day and happening in third lap. And I ended up at that point just saying, holy crap, something really good is happening. Everything is clicking. Put your head down and run. Stop even thinking about. The times about obsessively trying to run exactly the right times for 4 minutes. And so that's what I did. And I ended up running 3:52.4, which was a, you know, a 9-second personal best after 4 years of being stuck in a plateau. And the punchline here is that I found out from a teammate after the race when I was— who had taken my splits for me, that the guy calling the splits had been out to lunch. He must've missed the start, you know, when he started his watch. And I'd actually been about 3 seconds, 3 or 4 seconds slower. Than he was telling me. So I wasn't running this amazing time and feeling good. I was running the right time and feeling good, but decoupling myself from my expectations of what was possible. I had ended up running just a completely, completely unimaginable time. I hadn't dared to dream that I could run that fast. And then the post-postscript is that in my next race, I ran 3:49, and in the race after that, I ran 3:44. And qualified for the Olympic trials that summer. So all of a sudden, something was just absolutely uncorked in me. And it was a matter of moving away from this, this physiological barrier that I could feel. I could feel I could not run faster than 4 minutes. And by changing my expectations unintentionally, I had managed to run fast, not just in a one-time way, but in a repeatable way that changed my relationship with the physiological signals that I was, I was getting from my muscles.

Thanks for that breakdown, Alex. That's fascinating. The, the third section of the book, which is called Limit Breakers, the titles there are Training the Brain, Zapping the Brain, and Belief. And there's another quote from you that, that I thought was really fascinating, which was, if I could go back in time to alter the course of my own running career, after a decade of writing about the latest research in endurance training, the single biggest piece of advice I would give to my doubt-filled younger self would be to pursue motivational self-talk training with diligence and no snickering. Was that one of the tools that helped you in the story you just told? And could you tell us more about motivational self-talk training in general and how to apply it for the average person?

Yeah, sure. And just to give some context here, as a journalist, as a science journalist, I'm looking for sexy new techniques and breakthroughs. And so, You know, in the book, for example, I have a chapter about transcranial direct current stimulation, which is basically applying an electric current to your brain to alter your perception of effort so you can go farther and faster. And those sorts of things are sexy. Those sorts of things are fun. But the more I've dug into the research and the more I've followed up all these different methods of trying to alter your limits to sort of reset those barriers, the more I've found that actually the strongest evidence is actually from the simplest techniques. And motivational self-talk, it really is at its essence, it's very simple. It's taking control of your internal monologue, recognizing that you always have an internal monologue when you're doing something hard. That voice is telling you something. And there are studies that look at what people are hearing in their heads during, you know, let's say a marathon. And usually it's pretty negative. It's like, this sucks. Why am I doing this sport? There's no way I can sustain this pace to the finish line. It's very negative. And it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy because that affects how you interpret the physiological signals coming from your body. The signals that tell you how much oxygen you have, how much your muscles are hurting, what your body temperature is, and all these sorts of things. You interpret that as, oh, I'm doing badly. I must be close to my maximum effort. I'd better slow down. As opposed to, yes, this is uncomfortable. This is what everybody else is feeling. This is in fact what it's supposed to be feeling like. This is what I've trained for and I can continue. Keeping this pace up. So if you're able to recognize the problematic thoughts and narratives that pop up in your head and train yourself to come up with alternatives, train yourself to tell yourself, this is what it's supposed to feel like, this is what I've trained for, I'm excited to experience this even though it's uncomfortable, and I know I can do it. As trite as it sounds, there are, you know, randomized scientific trials that find that this enhances performance by large margins, by much more than exciting-sounding or neat-looking things like electric brain stimulation. So you asked, was this behind my breakthrough in this story I told about a college 1500 race? The answer is no. In college, we actually had a sports psychologist who worked with the team, the track team, and we just thought it was the biggest joke. She taught us precisely the things that I've been telling you about. And, you know, she had— I remember she had a mantra for negative thought stopping, which was recognize, refuse, relax, reframe, resume. Which, you know, you recognize that you're having a negative thought, you refuse to let it affect you, then you relax, you reset your thought, and then you resume what you were doing. It's actually a— it's a great technique, but we just turned it into a big joke. You know, we'd be out for a training run, and if someone started to drop off the back, we'd turn around and, you know, hey, don't forget Recognize, refuse, relax, reframe, resume. But we didn't take it seriously. We didn't try it because it didn't seem real to us. We were all about physiology. We were all about trying to improve our VO2 max, not about recognizing the importance of mindset. And so that's what I meant in that quote, is that if I had a time machine, I wouldn't be sending back an electric brain stimulation machine to myself so that I could dominate the world in the mid-'90s. I'd be telling myself, hey, you've got the tools there. You've, you've got what you need. To succeed, but you need to pay attention to what you're being offered, to some of these very, very simple tools. The one other thing I should say about motivational self-talk is that there are different kinds of self-talk. In the context of running a race, motivational self-talk is probably the best approach, but there are absolutely other things like procedural self-talk. So if you're, you know, I remember I was talking to the Toronto Blue Jays. I live in Toronto, so talking to some of their high-performance team, and they said, look, for us it doesn't help to be more psyched up to try and hit a 90-mile-hour fastball. So they use procedural self-talk, which is focusing on, you know, okay, my elbow is here, this, you know, I'm looking there, I'm— these are the 5 things I do. It's like bouncing the basketball 3 times before shooting a free throw in basketball. There are different approaches for different situations, but the common thread is that the words and the sentiments going through your head affect your performance.

I wanna ask you, Alex, about application outside of running or even physical forms of endurance into areas like business, work, even family or relationships. How do you think about the concept of endure and the way that you talk about it in other areas like business, for example, in the workplace? And just as a quick follow-on to that question, One of the other pieces in the book Endure, another quote was, in a wide variety of human activity, achievement is not possible without discomfort. And so I'm curious how you think about these other activities outside of physical endurance and how this all applies there.

I absolutely think it applies. And I think, I don't think you could talk to a serious endurance athlete who doesn't believe that the approaches they develop in the context of their sport are not relevant. To virtually every other area of life, whether it's parenting, whether it's career pursuits. One particular caveat that I'd say is that, as tempting as it is to make this argument, success in business or life, I don't think, is all about pushing harder. And, you know, I have a friend, Brad Stulberg, who's written a lot about this, about— well, Brad Stulberg and Steve Magnus co-wrote a book called Peak Performance a couple years ago. Where they had this growth equation, which was that stress plus rest equals growth, or stress plus recovery equals growth. And so I do think you have to take both those parts of the equation into account. Endure is all about pushing harder, but in the big picture, you also have to have times when you're relaxing and recovering. So the message I would not want to send to people thinking about their careers or, or developing businesses is Here's how you push hard and here's how you push harder. And that's all you've got to do. You've got to keep pushing. That's the warning message. Now, our lessons that we learn from studying marathon runners, are they relevant to, you know, other areas of our lives? Look, it's not like, yes, you should take a water bottle every 20 minutes, whatever that— those aren't the kinds of lessons we're looking at. But when we talk about endurance and what I was talking about before about internal monologue and the way our brains interpret signals about whether We are at our limits or not. I think that's really generalizable. And the reason I say that is there's been a big shift in the way we understand physiology or endurance physiology in the last, let's say, 10 years, 10, 15 years, incorporating the brain. So understanding that it's not just about our muscles and heart and lungs and things like that. And the way I think most scientists would explain it now, or at least many scientists would explain it now, is that The master switch for endurance is your subjective perception of effort. So at any point when you're doing something, you can ask yourself, how hard is this? How difficult is what I'm doing right now? And you could, on a scale of 1 to 10, and it might be 8 out of 10, it might be 4 out of 10, it might be 3 out of 10. And these numbers seem very arbitrary, but what lots of studies have found is that, that subjective number, how hard you feel like you're working, and by hard, it's not how much it hurts. So effort is the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop. So even if it's not physically hurting, if your goal is to read the phone book, you might find after an hour you're like, I have a strong desire to stop. And it takes a lot of effort to continue, even though we're not talking about running a marathon. And studies have found that this subjective rating of effort is literally the single most accurate predictor of how well you'll perform and how long you'll be able to continue performing at that level. Once your effort reaches kind of 10 out of 10, you're going to stop. That's the definition of— if your struggle to continue against the amount of desire to stop is 10 out of 10, you're going to stop. So what that means is, in an athletic context, these sorts of subjective measures, what it's telling us is that it's not just the body, it's the mind. It's body and mind together that are contributing to this effort. And that's why it's a generalizable concept, because if you're sitting up late at night working on a presentation for the next day, for example, and you're getting mentally fatigued and that's increasing your perception of effort. These are the same, same things we have to deal with. You're fundamentally judging, can I continue? Can I push any harder? And the answer is it's subjective. It's not objective in physiology and physiological. So I think that's the commonality between sports and other parts of our lives.

Hey there, just going to interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline. Like, it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those. It allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. So I'm curious at this point where the concept of flow, which is our main focus on the Flow Research Collective, where that falls into this. One of the key characteristics of flow is a sense of effortlessness. And one of the big reasons that flow is so powerful according to the research on flow is the effortless effort that you get when you're in flow. The example I always like to give of that is video gaming. You get teenagers who would be distracted doing anything challenging for 15 or 20 minutes playing video games sometimes for 12 to 14 hours straight. And they are exerting a lot of effort. They're solving oftentimes very complex challenges and they're doing it hour after hour after hour, sometimes day after day after day. So the effort they're exerting feels effortless. And that based on the research is mediated by flow. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on flow state as something that modulates the experience of effort and thus increases enjoyment. Endurance?

It's a fascinating question, one that I've thought a lot about, not with any like brilliant or pithy answers, I'll confess right away. Like, I think flow states are another example of kind of like the self-talk, something that is a subjective experience which has made it hard to study and which made it easy for people like me to dismiss it for a long time. But we're now recognizing that there's real physiology here and that, you know, this has a real effect on people's lives. And so understanding it better is, is really useful. So the I would see flow states as a perfect illustration of something that you can't fully understand using the old model of endurance, using the old model of physiologically-based endurance. Flow makes no sense. If running a marathon or doing any other hard physical task is totally dictated by how much lactic acid is in your muscles, or, you know, how high your heart rate or your core temperature is, then there's no way that being in a flow state should affect that. It shouldn't be able to affect performance, but it's clear that it does. And that's because of what I was saying before, that the master switch is your perception of effort. So if you can find ways of altering your perception of effort, that's going to allow you to enhance performance independent of what's going on from the neck down. It's depending on what's how you're processing those signals. So my view of, from the outside at least, of a flow state is that it's an alteration in the way your brain is processing signals from your body and from the rest of the world. And how it does that through whatever neurochemicals is, you know, is an interesting question that obviously you guys are very interested in. I think it's one example of the ways in which our perception of effort can be decoupled from any sort of physiological reality. In a sense, it's a proof of this idea that it's not just about what's going on in your muscles.

Right. It's actually, it's regulating your perception and experience of effort itself. That state is modifying the experience of effort. So to switch gears for a second and go back to the book, Alex, I'd love to hear a synopsis or a breakdown of some of the most actionable parts of chapter 11, 12, and 13, training the brain, zapping the brain, and belief.

Yeah, so I'll start with the caveat, right? When I wrote this book and I was talking it over with my, you know, my editor at the beginning, we had some hard discussions about what are we going to take away from this book. And my approach and my decision was to say, look, I'm not going to worry too much about the takeaways because as soon as you decide on what the takeaways are, that fixes your perspective on everything else. So all of a sudden, every bit of research you read, you're now starting to interpret in a way to try and serve your takeaways. And so as a result, when you read the book, a lot of people have finished the book and said, "Hey, that's really interesting stuff. I wish there was more that told me exactly how to implement this." And I wish there was too, but I think it's not as easy as it doesn't lend itself to sort of 3 easy techniques. That's my long caveat before giving you an answer. The number 1 thing is what we discussed before, is, you know, self-talk, taking stock of your internal monologue and altering it, which means you can't just do that on the fly. You can't just decide, I'm going to say something different to myself, because these things are automatic. So it's systematically coming up with— you can call them mantras or just ideas that you want to have in your head at critical junctures, whether it's, you know, when you step up to the platform before giving a talk, or whether it's when you step to the start line of a competition, or when you're halfway through, or whatever. You decide what you want to be thinking at that moment, and then you have to practice it so that it becomes second nature. You have to think that thought over and over again. So that's the number one thing, is systematically approaching motivational self-talk. The number two thing is— and I always, I was sort of hesitate to say it because it's become a cliché, but mindfulness training has proven to be— well, I mean, it's been proven to be a lot of things, but in the, in the athletic context, it has proven to affect resilience. So how well you handle deviations from how you're expecting things to go. And there's some amazing studies from UC San Diego that look at elite athletes, that look at Navy SEALs, that look at sort of multi-day adventure racers. And put them through challenges and then evaluate how well they're able to continue. So the challenge is actually pretty amazing. You've got, they're sitting in an MRI machine or lying in an MRI machine, basically breathing through a straw and doing cognitive tests. And then the oxygen flow through the straw gets constricted. So they feel like they're suffocating. And what you find for most people, understandably, is when that happens, your performance on the cognitive test goes down because you're worried that you're suffocating. The Navy SEALs and the elite athletes, their performance actually goes up at that moment because they're being activated into a sort of like state of heightened arousal where it's like, okay, this is where things get real. I've got to focus on getting everything right. To finish that long digression, what they found is that giving people 8 weeks of mindfulness training makes their brains respond more like the Navy SEALs and less like the average person. So the best hack they could come up with for these sorts of elite ability to perform under pressure is mindfulness training and to, in terms of pushing your limits closer to your limits. So that's the second thing I would say. The third thing I would say actually sort of counterintuitively is even though I wrote a whole chapter on electric brain stimulation, I would say, don't get carried away chasing the latest hacks that may or may not have some benefit. Like I think electric brain stimulation actually has some real effects under very specific conditions. In the lab, carefully controlled where the electrodes are. It got commercialized, I think, a little bit prematurely, where you could buy these headphones that would just deliver some electricity to your scalp. And I think the chances of that being successful were much lower. And I think as a result, they kind of led a lot of people to chase illusory gains. And so I really think there's a difference between internal and external locus of control. And if you're kind of trying to outsource your ability to push to a pair of headphones or some other piece of technology, that's a lot less powerful than if you realize that actually the end goal is to alter something that's inside of you and that you have control over. You have control over how you interpret signals from the body and from the rest of the world. You have control over your perception of effort. You can alter it with techniques like motivational self-talk and mindfulness. And so that's where I would direct my focus rather than on technological hacks.

What does your own set of daily or weekly practices for peak performance and well-being look like currently, Alex?

Oh gosh, that's the question I always hope they never ask. Yeah, you know, let me add a fourth part to my answer to the previous question in terms of practical guidance. Lesson number 4, or takeaway number 4, is that knowing is only half the battle. So understanding these things is, is great, but you then actually have to put them into, into practice. So, and I would say, to be totally honest, I'm not great at it. I, I have been resolving to take a formal 8-week mindfulness course for a long time now, and, and, you know, it's easy to find excuses that, oh, the pandemic, or, oh, my kids are young and stuff. But yeah, I think I could do better at that. But for me, I've definitely I've become a lot more deliberate about my internal state and recognizing when I'm being overly negative about what's going on and finding and taking deliberate steps to alter my internal monologue. I mean, in a more general sense, I've also tried to become a lot more deliberate about my interaction with technology, with distracting smartphones and things like that, about where I bring them, when I allow myself to use them, just because I think If you're trying to cultivate the ability to control your internal monologue and push yourself to limits when you want to, you have to view your attention as a precious resource that you take care of and don't just squander.

That makes total sense. Yeah, I like that breakdown. So Stephen Haas, Stephen's my partner at Flow Research Collective, and he has a whole protocol around training grit. Which in some ways reminds me of your approach. I'm curious what you recommend to people as a first set of practices or habits to start to build what we could call tolerance of effort or endurance.

Yeah, I mean, I think the simplest approach is exposure therapy, right? Like, do something that's uncomfortable. Now, what complexifies it a little bit is that you don't necessarily want to do unpleasant things just for the heck of it. There has to be a why behind it. So for me, I often speak to runners because that's the world I come from. And it's a very familiar thing. So even for, let's say you've got someone who wants to, to run a 5K or half marathon or whatever the case may be, they're going from non-runner to runner and everyone understands that if they get out 3 times a week and go for a little run, 3 months or 6 months from now, they're going to have changed their, you know, their heart's going to be stronger and their circulation and yada yada yada, their muscles are going to be stronger. And people don't realize the extent to which their grit is going to be greater, that their mind, their ability to tolerate discomfort is going to change. If you take up running and then sort of a year later trying to remember the difference between then and now, One of the things you realize is, yeah, I'm willing to go out and run and hold a level of discomfort that I would have thought signified my impending death. Now I go out and hold that for 5 minutes or 8 minutes or 10 minutes because I know it doesn't signal impending death. I've gotten used to that discomfort. So that sort of growing of grit happens organically in the context of doing something hard. And so that might be running a 5K, it might be something totally different, it might be some professional goal, it might be a social goal of you know, talking to strangers or, you know, being more sociable, which is hard, but it's worthwhile to you. And you develop the willingness to do things that are on their surface at least unpleasant for you. So I think it really depends on the person, but I think having a why— like, I'm not necessarily a big fan of, let's say, every morning I'm gonna dunk myself in a vat of boiling oil or in a, you know, an ice bath or whatever. Just for the hell of trying to force myself to experience pain and discomfort. I think it has a lot more meaning if it's in service of a goal that has meaning for the individual person.

That makes total sense. You mentioned just before we jumped on that you've got a new book coming, and I'm curious if you can give us a little bit of a teaser as to that and maybe some of the big things that you've been currently thinking about. As you're putting that together?

I wish I had a good elevator pitch ready, and I'm still struggling with that, but the working title of the book is The Explorer's Gene. I'm interested in why humans— why we individually, but also collectively as a species— explore, why we undertake quests that are difficult and of uncertain outcome. One way I'm sort of thinking about it is that Endure was all about how we push ourselves beyond our perceived limits to do hard things. And this next book, call it— let's say, call it Explorer, just for symmetry— is about why we do that. Why is it we undertake hard quests even when, you know, it's like, why did humans spread across the globe? For most animals, they only spread, you know, increase their range if there's a shortage of food or they have to go because of you know, resource shortage. Humans, very soon after modern humans appeared, they were basically everywhere on the planet. They seemed to have some restlessness. And, uh, you know, I don't know if— maybe it's a midlife crisis book. I'm trying to figure out, you know, what is it? Why is it that I feel compelled to write another book? Like, what am I chasing? And, and, um, yeah, so I'm digging into the science of that, trying to understand the sort of the evolutionary science and the neuroscience of exploratory behavior and, you know, setting big goals and undertaking hard things and trying to understand why we do that.

Definitely agree with that. I love the sound of that as a topic. It's great. Final, final question, Alex, which is something we always ask here at Flow Research Collective Radio, and it's a question about a question. So if you could click your fingers and instantly have all of the randomized controlled trials or research done to be able to answer any question What would that question be?

Oh man, oh, that's a dream come true. Um, a lot of things are bouncing around in my head. If this was really truly a magical finger clicking, I would love to have answers about diet and health. Not because I think there are magic foods out there and if only we— or that there's one single diet we have to eat, but just because even though I try and convince myself that, look, just eat What, you know, eat a variety of things, eat whole foods, yada yada. There's always a lot of anxiety. Like, there's just so much information floating around about this one's going to give you cancer, but if— oh, too much of this will, but so will too little. So actually, on that note, David Epstein, the great science writer, has— he had a recent issue of his email newsletter repeating a famous result, which is that pretty much everything in your fridge has been proven to both cause and prevent cancer. So from a day-to-day life perspective, I would love to have the ultimate RCT, randomized controlled trial, that told us, look, what's the deal? Which foods will help you? Which will hurt you? Which don't matter? And then be done with it.

Love that. Absolutely love that Epstein quote. That's hilarious. Alex, where can people learn more, go deeper with you? Feel free to share all those such pieces.

Probably the easiest place to find me is, even though I, I just said I try to stay off the distracting media, easiest place to find me is on Twitter where my handle is Sweat Science, all one word. I'm also on Facebook with the same handle and I have a website, alexhutchinson.net, which has been updated as recently as 2017. So it, you know, gives you a rough idea of where I was at that point, but it also, it gives some of my background and links to some of my stories and things like that. So those are probably the, and I guess I should also say, yeah, I, I I write basically a weekly column for Outside magazine's website called Sweat Science. So if you go to Outside, you'll find my work there.

Love it.

Thanks so much, Alex. It's been amazing. Appreciate your time a ton and really excited for the new book. I definitely recommend all Flow Research Collective radio fans check out the book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. If you like what we do at Flow, you're going to love Alex's work too. All righty, thanks so much everyone.

Thanks, man, that was a lot of fun.

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