How To Be Comfortable Being Uncomfortable - Ben Aldridge | Modern Wisdom Podcast 352

Ben Aldridge is an author, musician and teacher. After finding himself increasingly anxious and suffering regular panic attacks, Ben purposefully spent an entire year doing things which really pushed the limits of his comfort in an effort to regain control of his mindset. Expect to learn what Ben's Mrs thought of him sleeping on the floor next to the bed, what he discovered when he climbed Everest up and down his house's stairs, why acupuncture in the face can be useful, how exposure therapy spills over into regulating your daily emotions and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy How To Be Comfortable Being Uncomfortable - https://amzn.to/3BPpMhC Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #mindset #stoicism #training - 00:00 Intro 00:28 Year of Adversity 07:47 Applying Philosophy to Life 18:15 Growth Mindset & CBT 24:17 Ben’s Small Challenges 29:13 Summoning Adrenaline 36:34 Most Challenging Task 42:03 Climbing Everest at Home 47:14 Lessons Learned from Discomfort 51:30 Where to Find Ben - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The idea that when things go wrong, it's not a problem. You embrace failure and you look for the lesson and always trying to take from the experience. Doesn't matter what happens to you, it's what lesson you can take from it.

• 0:16Chris Williamson?

  Benjamin, welcome to the show.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Hi Chris, great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  It's an uncomfortable day, right? We're both sweltering, we're both too hot.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely, but we've got to embrace it.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the lesson that we're going to learn today. So you decided to spend a year doing a bunch of challenges, physical stuff and mental stuff and social stuff. What was the impetus? Why bother putting yourself through hell for a year?

• 0:40Speaker 00

  So all of this came off the back of anxiety, actually. So that was the trigger for me to get into challenging myself. I was hit with this severe anxiety and I started reading about all of these things that I could do to handle that, how I could manage it. And I came across a lot of different philosophy and psychology. And one of the things that really caught my attention was the idea of deliberately stepping outside of your comfort zone. It felt very counterintuitive at the time to be doing something like that. But by doing that, it helped me to gain confidence and to actually understand myself better and to build a bit of resilience, which is something that I was lacking because I had no sense of how to deal with this anxiety.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  What's a panic attack feel like?

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Well, if you don't know what one is, it feels like you're dying, to be honest. The first time that I had that panic attack, it was just insane. I had no sense of that my mental health could cause such physical symptoms. So I imagine, let me compare it to if we were to go skydiving together. We would probably have very physical symptoms within our bodies, like shaky hands, you'd probably feel a bit sick, you'd feel scared, you know, you would feel this nausea and this sense of fear. But that's pretty normal because that's something, you know, there's a reason for that. Now imagine not having a trigger or a reason and you just have those sensations all the time, 24/7.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  It's hard to sleep, it's hard to eat. And that's basically what an anxiety disorder becomes. So it's very hard to function as a normal human being. So this was a trigger that started this whole journey and got me into writing, got me into Stoicism, Buddhism and all these different philosophies and actually encouraged me to start challenging myself.

• 2:26Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea what caused you to get into this spiral of anxiety and panic attacks and stuff in the first instance? Was there some sort of a trigger? Is it like a compounding effect of just general ambient anxiety and malaise?

• 2:41Speaker 00

  I think there wasn't actually a trigger as such. It was, I think, it was more of a compounding thing. I think it's not being able to understand my mind very well. I didn't understand mental health and it's just the cumulative stress and it was just the not being able to handle difficulty. And I just had this internal dialogue that wasn't really helping me and would just make things a lot worse by spiraling things out of control. So there wasn't a clear trigger. There wasn't like an event that caused it to happen. It was just, it just came out of the blue.

• 3:15Chris Williamson?

  Which I guess is even more brutal, right? When you don't know, you can't draw the line from cause and effect. You're actually like, oh, hang on, like, am I dying? Like, I actually might be dying.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:27Chris Williamson?

  So I had James Nestor on the podcast yesterday, the guy that wrote Breath. And he's talking about the two main functions that you do with breath work, right? So one of them is an extreme activation of the sympathetic nervous system. It's the Wim Hof. It's a, it's that shit. And then the other is an extreme activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. It's dialing yourself down to three breaths a minute, two breaths a minute. It's extreme holds at the end. It's free diving, holding your breath for a long time, stuff like that. And what I had in my head while he was talking about it, and this will, that episode will be out, so everyone will know what I'm talking about, even though you don't. You know, the concept of an Overton window, right? Like, which is a bound of

• 4:10Chris Williamson?

  acceptable speech within, so you can imagine that you've got all of the speech that you could do on a little spectrum from zero to 100. And then you have the Overton window with, which is what's acceptable in normal society. And people won't look at you like you're a weirdo or some sort of like crazy person if you say it. And that's maybe, let's say, from 25 to 75. So you can still say things that are out on the ends, but those things are likely to get you into trouble and to cause you problems. And what James was talking about was that a lot of the time, we exist in a increasingly narrower and narrower band of this sympathetic to parasympathetic situation. We're going from perhaps 40 to 60 or from like 30 to 70, something like that. And when you do get knocked out into one of those, you have to give a presentation at

• 4:54Chris Williamson?

  work, or you have to have an awkward conversation with your spouse, or you're sat on your own in a room, but you know, at the other end of the scale, you're just sat bored and your phone's died at a train station and you're driving yourself crazy because you can't bear to live with how much relaxation you're going through. That's where the issues arise for people. And breath was his focus. So he was saying, look, by doing this extreme sympathetic and parasympathetic activation, you're actually starting to pull that window back out. Like, look, it's okay to be in this situation because our ancestors would have run for ages and chased something down. And then they'd have sat around for ages and done absolutely nothing. And we kind of just exist slap bang in the middle, not going to either of the extremes.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Well, I think the thing is, we're not taught this kind of stuff. It's, I certainly wasn't taught this at school. It wasn't something that I was aware of. And I think it's, it's something that is incredibly important, this education. How do you deal with something when it comes along? How do you deal with anxiety? Or how do you, how do you change? How do you create change in your life? And I think that educating yourself and getting into that is extremely important. And that's the great thing about what so many people are doing with their podcasts and what you're doing with your podcast as well. You're helping people to be exposed to these ideas that can ultimately change their lives. And that's something, I loved his book. I loved Breath. I thought that was fantastic. And I think

• 6:19Speaker 00

  it would have been really helpful, actually, for me to have, to put two and two together, to have got the, the sense of what you can do just from the power of breathing as well. I think it would have been helpful at the time.

• 6:33Chris Williamson?

  Think about, talking about the learning thing, like, that's the same as well. You have this band of people that you typically see who all have relatively similar worldviews. And even if they have different worldviews, after enough time, you've heard all of their worldviews. Like, it is, without exposing yourself to books and podcasts and YouTube and whatever else it might be, travelling. You are stuck, hearing the same rhetoric and the same narrative over and over. You're not going to learn that many things, but you're totally right. The ability for people to consume as much as they want, from wherever they want. And, you know, I think the job of a podcaster, at least the type of podcast that I try to create, is to be more like a museum curator than anything else. So what you hope when you go into a museum or an art gallery or something,

• 7:17Chris Williamson?

  you know that maybe not every single piece of art is going to be like, wow, I'm in, I'm in love with that. But you have faith that the curator has been able to put together an experience, which overall you're going to see new things and get exposed to stuff that you hadn't seen before. And then maybe get exposed to stuff that you already love, but you see it in a new way or whatever it is. And that's how it kind of feels to me. But again, pulling people outside of that Overton window, like speaking to a porn star and a philosopher in the space of a week or doing something like that. So yeah, that's the get your ears comfortable at being uncomfortable, perhaps that that might be the equivalent. All right. So you, so you go through this stuff, you're struggling mental health. What do you start to resonate with first? What's the first thing that you read where you're like, right, okay, there's something to this?

• 7:58Speaker 00

  So I started reading a lot of different things and it became a bit of a quest to try and figure out what I can do. And actually, I really like connected to a load of different ideas. But I have to say, the one that made the biggest difference in my life was Stoicism. And I kind of, I got into that because it caught me with this concept voluntary discomfort. And I love how the Stoics were so creative in the ways that they would push themselves out of their comfort zone. So they would sleep on the floor, they would expose themselves to the cold and the heat. They would fast from food and water. And there was a Stoic called Cato, who would deliberately wear things to feel shame. So he could practise feeling like an idiot.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 8:37Speaker 00

  And so he would, I mean, back in the day, it would have just been a different coloured cloak or something like that. And we can play with that today, but I just love that idea. It's so counterintuitive, this, this concept of someone deliberately seeking out attention like that. And not in a way, it's not attention seeking, but it's to. To get that feeling of self-consciousness and being able to work with it and understand it and and not be worried about how people are judging you. And this this just caught my attention. I fell in love with this idea. And this is really why I started challenging myself. And I started off with very small challenges. The first one was actually walking to the local bench, which was only about a hundred metres away. But that should give

• 9:20Speaker 00

  you an idea of how like what a dark mental space I was in. But over time, it compounded and I started to get more confident and ended up doing bigger and bolder things. And some of them were very stoic. So things like sleeping on the floor, that's a great one. And that's something that everyone can try. It's not easy. No mattress, nothing, just sleep next to your bed. And that's that's very, very hard to do. But it's a mindset thing. So I love this concept from Stoicism. And that got me into it. And then I just, you know, explored the philosophy more. And now it's just something that helps me every day.

• 9:54Chris Williamson?

  I think Cato practised walking backward through a crowd that was leaving a theatre. Did you see this one?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've heard I've I've heard the cynics as well. The cynic philosophers inspired the Stoics and this kind of someone described them as the trolls of ancient Greece, which I think is a great way, great way to discuss this this type of philosophy.

• 10:18Chris Williamson?

  Diogenes was absolutely a troll, man. That wasn't it? So Alexander the Great, for anyone that doesn't know this sort of the Diogenes story, Diogenes is this guy in ancient Greece, I want to say, and he lives in a pot, which is literally the thing that you piss and shit in. And he lives in that he wears a like an old rice sack rag thing. That's his clothing. And but he's walking around and telling people good philosophy insights and stuff like that. So Alexander the Great, he is of him. And he arrives in Greece and he finds him just bathing in the sun. And he walks up to him and he says, Diogenes, I've heard that you're an incredible man. Tell me what you would wish for. And if it is within my power, I will give it to you. And Diogenes said, I would wish for you to

• 11:01Chris Williamson?

  get out of my sunlight. And just shifted Alexander the Great out of the way. That kind of tells you tells you all that you really need to know. Yeah, he absolutely was. He was like the low key, the low key of ancient Greece, I suppose. But um. Yeah, it's fascinating, man. I mean, wearing itchy clothing they used to do, walking around barefoot purposefully, dropping things, wasn't it? Didn't Zeno used to push his disciples when they were carrying food and drinks and stuff so that they'd accidentally drop vases of wine and everyone would turn around and look at them or he'd spill, he'd spill stuff on them so they'd have to walk around with like wine stains on them. So all of this, what people are trying to do is learn that the level of discomfort that you go through isn't a mortal threat. That's what you're trying to do because it feels so overwhelming, right? It feels, oh my

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  God, the phenomenology of this crazy set of hormones rushing through my body is terrifying and my heart rate's high and I'm sweating and I've got clammy hands and my vision's all blurred. But it's fine. It's just okay. And that voluntary exposure, I think, is, is what you're trying to get at there.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. It's such a beautiful concept. And I think it's, what I find so appealing about it is it's like a combination of fear and play, which are two things that don't really go hand in hand. And I love this concept. So there's something that I would love to contribute to Stoicism. And it's kind of an extension of this. And it's called the anti-bucket list. And it's basically this thing, it's like fear exposure. So we know what a bucket list is. It's a list of things we want to do before we die. The anti-bucket list is things that we don't want to do before we die. And we can easily avoid them being adults. We don't have to push ourselves out of our comfort zone. So I love this idea. You collect things that scare you and you create your list, your anti-bucket list. And then you deliberately go out and you do

• 12:46Speaker 00

  that. And that is a very stoic thing. I'll give you an example. For me, I had a massive fear of needles. I mean, I had a fear of a lot of things, but needles was one of the things that just really, really got me. So that was on my anti-bucket list. So I turned that into a challenge. And when it had acupuncture, which is the most extreme version of having to deal with needles when you get them in your face and you're, you're all over your body. So that, it feels counterintuitive and it's, it's scary. But actually, the growth that you experience when you push yourself out of your comfort zone like that, when you use fear as something to play around with, it's, it's an amazing, amazing thing that can happen to you. And it can help build confidence and ultimately resilience as well. So I love this concept.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  And I think the Stoics just, you know, really started off something wonderful with, with this idea.

• 13:36Chris Williamson?

  What's on the anti-bucket list that you haven't done yet?

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Oh, it's uh, I'm giving blood. That's, that's the next one.

• 13:42Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's needles. That's serious needles.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, and for some people, that's not, that's no, no bother for them. You know, a lot of people will, will listen to this and say, oh, that, that's, that's ridiculous. Like, it's very easy. But if you've got, uh, it's blood as well. It's not just the needle. It's the needle and the blood. So, um, that's, that's the next big one. Uh, I'm look, I'm looking forward to it, actually. It's gonna be one of those, uh, those things that, I kinda don't wanna do it, but that's the point. So I'm looking forward to the growth that I'll experience in probably very sweaty palms as well, but it's uh.

• 14:12Chris Williamson?

  I think it would be, for me, it would be spiders, snakes, stuff like, I'm not, I'm just not, not my bag. And you're totally right as well. With the anti-booket list, I could spend the entire, easily, easily spend the rest of my life never exposing myself to snakes and spiders, other than on the other side of some glass somewhere. Uh, yeah, and I've got something very wrong if I accidentally have to pick up a snake or a spider. It's something very, in, in fact, I've probably got more to worry about than the snake or the spider if I need to do that. All right. So you start off with, with Stoicism. What else did you study that you thought gave you a good impact?

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Um, so I loved Buddhism as well. Buddhism was very helpful. And there's lots of ideas. Interestingly, Stoicism and Buddhism, there's a real crossover. Um, there's a lot of ideas that balance, um, and they, they're kind of similar, even though they were created thousands of miles apart. So I think that's quite interesting that they came to some conclusion. So there's a focus on being present. Um, and actually living in the moment, which is something that both the Stoics and the Buddhists talk a lot, a lot about. Um, and gratitude, building a sense of gratitude into everything that you do. And they came about it from different ways. So in Buddhism, there's this thing called the loving kindness meditation, where you think well of someone and

• 15:26Speaker 00

  you, uh, even people that you struggle with, challenging people, you wish them well, which can feel, again, counterintuitive, but this is to help you, I guess.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Develop empathy and to help you to to explore compassion in an interesting way. The Stoic way of doing this was through negative visualization. So they would picture things being taken away from them. So they would contemplate loss as a way to increase their gratitude. So although they're two different approaches, there's a similarity there. There's a developing gratitude and a deeper sense of gratitude. And so, yeah, there's lots of crossovers. But I really liked some of the ideas in Buddhism, mainly the philosophical Buddhism, rather than the religious side of things. Because obviously Buddhism has developed into lots of different types of,

• 16:22Speaker 00

  it's got loads of different schools and different branches. And I think some of them are very ritual heavy. And the very, well, there's certain ideas and certain rituals that aren't necessarily going to help me. But I like going back to the actual core philosophy and some of the ideas that's behind Buddhism is very, very helpful. The idea of impermanence is a great one as well.

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  How did that help?

• 16:55Speaker 00

  So the idea of impermanence is that everything changes. So when you're in a terrible situation, you focus on the fact that it will change. And this is perfect for dealing with a panic attack. Because when you're caught up in panic, you think that's it. It's you're just here. But remembering that everything moves and evolves and changes is something that can really help you. And it can help with doing difficult challenges as well. When you're in a scary situation, focusing on the fact that it's going to change is very powerful. And again, this is also an idea in Stoicism, impermanence. So it's lovely how they connect and I think it's very practical.

• 17:37Chris Williamson?

  One of the main insights about why people commit suicide that I learned was that lack of an understanding of impermanence. It's a bunch of different prerequisites. And the final one is, and it's not going to get any better. So that's it. It's the fact that this moment for now is going to stretch for eternity. I've had friends who have been weaning off different types of medication and all sorts of different things. And in the moment, one of the things that you're desperately trying to tell them is, look, like, I know that it's uncomfortable now, but it will get better. It will get better. It will get better. And, you know, keeping that in mind, that's an important one. You looked at Carol Dweck's Mindset as well, right? And you did some CBT stuff, too.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. Mindset is one of my favorite books of all time. I think it's an unbelievably useful concept. The idea that there's a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. And I could see when I was in peak anxiety, I was very, very fixed mindset on so many things. And the growth mindset is this openness to new ideas and the ability to step outside your comfort zone, I guess. You could think of it like that. The idea that you, when things go wrong, it's not a problem. You embrace failure and you look for the lesson and always trying to take from the experience. Doesn't matter what happens to you. It's what lesson

• 19:02Speaker 00

  you can take from it. So I think that's, again, a very powerful thing. And throughout all of these challenges that I started doing, having this in the back of my mind, this growth mindset, the ability to look for the lesson, to always look for the lesson, was something that I kept coming back to. And it's very, very helpful.

• 19:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, it reminds you as well, the, this won't last forever. That's impermanent, right? Here's a lesson. I'm not in a fixed mindset. It also helps you to dissolve the ego away. Look, I failed, but that's not really a comment on me as a human. It doesn't change the person that I am, or all of the things that I've done. It's just, just a failure. Like, what's the lesson from it? Move on. So, yeah, again, mindset, I think, coalesces nicely with the Buddhism and the Stoicism. Then what about CBT? Because I know CBT, like, some of the principles and stuff come out, come out of Stoicism. What was this specifically from CBT that you hadn't got from anything else?

• 20:00Speaker 00

  So I think it was mainly just being conscious of my internal dialogue. This is the great thing about CBT. It really gets you to question the way that you're talking to yourself internally. And during peak anxiety, again, negative like frame of mind, very fixed mindset. And the way that I would talk to myself in my head was unhelpful, very, very unhelpful. So I think being conscious of that is the first step to be able to change it. When you're aware of something, you can then act and you can try and change it. So the CBT kind of golden rule is that you blast your negative thoughts with logic. And you use logic to destroy the negative dialogue.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  And you might have to work really hard and it's not always going to be natural to start off with. But the more you do it, the more natural it becomes. And then you kind of automatically start doing that in your head. I mean, I'm not perfect, but I'm getting better at it. And it has certainly helped me to manage that anxiety.

• 20:59Chris Williamson?

  What was the best CBT book that you read or some of them?

• 21:04Speaker 00

  The best one I read, it was, it was actually like the the CBT, CBT for Dummies, that kind of really base level introductory one. Yeah, yeah, one of those. I can't even remember the exact title and I can't remember the author. So I don't want to, I don't want to say, because I obviously I like to be able to say what the author's name is. Because I feel that do the book justice. But yeah, I think it was, it was just one of those sort of introductory books. It wasn't, it wasn't a particular one.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  It feels to me like, because at the moment we've had like pop psychology is kicking off and stoicism is kicking off and Buddhism is kicking off and stuff at the moment in the intellectual awakening world. But I haven't really seen someone popularize CBT. I don't know whether maybe stoicism and Buddhism and pop psychology are taking so many chunks out of the insights that you would get from CBT that someone doesn't think it's worthwhile to put a CBT book out there. But certainly the Relationship that we have with our inner monologue, the blasting our thoughts with logic, some of the insights from CBT, I personally, I think, haven't been popularized as well as they should have been yet. There hasn't been a scientific communicator or

• 22:22Chris Williamson?

  a research communicator, or just a, you know, anyone, an author that's come out and really been like, look, here's the too long didn't read of 35 years of CBT research.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  No, it's so interesting. And I definitely think it should be taught in schools as well. It's something that would make a huge difference to the next generation. I think so many mental health problems would be alleviated, almost preemptively solved if we were teaching things like that in school, teaching children how to have that narrative inside their head and how to manage these things when they crop up. So yeah, I'd love to see, I'd love to see more of that.

• 22:59Chris Williamson?

  I think a buddy is in America and his kids go to a school and he was telling me that the teacher teaches them to name their emotions and give them different colors. Like, it's like the pirate is angry and there's something like the hippo is happy. And so I can't remember, I'm butchering it again. But um, yeah, they are, they're trying to step into your own programming and to just notice, look, there is something that's captured you. There is a sensation that's inside of you. Just sit and name it. And obviously, they've had to kidify it up and make it about like whatever hippos and pirates and stuff like that. But yeah, you're right. I mean, think about most of the people that are listening

• 23:40Chris Williamson?

  to this, the adults that have been adults for a significantly longer time than they've been intellectually awakened and on this path of trying to become better humans. Imagine if you didn't have to undo, imagine if you were starting, even if you're just starting from zero, not like minus 1,300, like it would be so much, it would be so much easier.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Of course. And that's why I think getting these ideas into schools would be just brilliant. Things like meditation as well. I think that's so important. That's been very helpful for me. And that ties in with a lot of these other ideas.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  All right. So you do these, you did hundreds and hundreds of challenges and then you sort of listed forty three in the book. What was the second one after going to the bench? Can you remember?

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Second one was going catching a bus. So it's a little bit of an upgrade from walking to the bench.

• 24:34Chris Williamson?

  Moving.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  But then, yeah, and then it compounded. And then it just started getting, you know, more confident and bigger and bolder things followed.

• 24:44Chris Williamson?

  What about that Welsh train station? You learned the name of the longest word in the world?

• 24:49Speaker 00

  It's the longest train station in the world. Yes. Clan wiai por gwinge i go gero fwy drwywch lant i siliogogo. Now, I've probably done a terrible job of that. And if anyone in Welsh is listening, they're gonna say that was, that was a horrible rendition of it. But it was a very small challenge. But I just love the fact that it's something new, it's something novel, and challenges can be found in many different places. And they don't always have to be epic. So some of my challenges were very big. Running a marathon and climbing mountains, learning Japanese, but some were small. Like that one is the perfect example of a small challenge. And it's a great one as well. It's fun. It's a good one to learn.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  All right. And then

• 25:31Speaker 00

  You should learn it.

• 25:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I'll replay that. I'll just go to sleep listening to you going

• 25:39Chris Williamson?

  talking to a stranger on the streets. I think most people tend to have capacities within certain domains that all line up. So someone might be very good physically at putting themselves into, you know, like a zone four, a zone five heart rate. But then if you had to tell them to do something socially, they might struggle. Or someone that's social might really struggle to make themselves go into the discomfort of learning and memorization or something like that. Out of the sort of broad buckets of challenges, was there one that you were like, look, this continues to come, I find social situations significantly more difficult. I find physical situations significantly more difficult. Was there something that you discovered there?

• 26:17Speaker 00

  I think that all of the challenges present unique insights into how my mind works. I certainly find that, well, I'm an introvert, so for me, putting a stupid hat on and walking down a busy high street is, it feels, maybe it'll be harder. I don't have it to hand, actually, I wish I could show you, but I've got this crab hat. I bought it in Japan and it is literally a crab that goes around your face like this and it's got little claws and it's very, very ridiculous. So if you wear something like that, it's, people will look at you and that's fine, but it's just dealing with that. As an extrovert, probably, I've got a friend who, I've seen him dance naked on a table

• 27:02Speaker 00

  in front of thousands of people at a festival. He's not supposed to be on the table, this is just, it's just a festival and he loved the attention, he loved having people look at him. So for him, putting a crab hat on and walking down a busy street, he's gonna love that.

• 27:17Chris Williamson?

  He wears a crab hat for fun.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So it's playing around with the things that you personally find challenging. So for an extrovert, maybe it would be the opposite, so going on a silent retreat or cutting yourself off from that, just exploring the introverted side, because we've all got a mix of introversion and extroversion. But I think it's nice to explore how that relates to us as individuals and to play around with both sides of it.

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  Weren't you getting naked at some point as well? Didn't you do like a naked challenge?

• 27:49Speaker 00

  That was one of the worst, like, as in, I didn't really do a great job of that. I talk about it in the book, but yeah, that was a nudist beach for a very short amount of time.

• 28:00Chris Williamson?

  How do you not do a good job of being naked?

• 28:03Speaker 00

  Because you feel so paranoid and I think there's just, the internal dialogue wasn't great and I was just very self-conscious and I didn't spend a long time naked, so that's how I did a bad job of it.

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Are you familiar with the 100 Days of Rejection Therapy Challenge? Did you look at this?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  I've heard about rejection therapy, which is, I like that where you deliberately do things that people are going to say no to, or you might, if they say yes, you might end up with a very funny story, like trying to order a square pizza, or trying to do that kind of stuff. Yeah, I love that idea.

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  People should go and check that out. If you're bored and on your phone at the moment, just Google 100 days of rejection therapy challenge, and it's exactly what it says. It's 100 days of rejection. Like, you go up to a stranger and ask them for a hundred pounds. Like, just random, random, random, stupid stuff. And that's exactly the same. I'm sure that the principle that you're trying to learn is exactly the same as you. It's obviously very focused on the social side, overcoming social anxiety, overcoming the fear of other people thinking that you're dumb, or rejection specifically, I suppose. But yeah, and then you worked on summoning adrenaline as well. Obviously, a lot of the things that you did gave you adrenaline. But I suppose as someone that was suffering with panic attacks and a little bit of social anxiety as well, actually working on getting

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  that adrenaline, pushing that parasympathetic system as we were talking about, how did you do that? How do you summon adrenaline?

• 29:31Speaker 00

  So you basically do stuff that scares the living daylights out of you. And that's going to be different for everyone. For me, I did a lot of climbing and pushed myself with climbing. And that's very, very physical and mental at the same time. So if you're climbing a scary route, you're going to have a lot of adrenaline in your body. And just learning how to manage that, learning how to be okay with having adrenaline in your body, because actually, that feeling is very similar to a panic attack. So learning how to be okay with having adrenaline is essentially learning how to manage almost anxiety as well. And so I did lots of things. I really pushed my climbing and

• 30:11Chris Williamson?

  What was the scariest route that you climbed, or the scariest mountain that you went up?

• 30:16Speaker 00

  So I mean, it's hard to say because there was a lot of stuff. I did a route in winter in Wales with that was just so intense. It was completely frozen and it was it was like a technical rock climb, but very icy and it was very scary. So managing that with my friend as well, we maybe threw ourselves in a little too deep. And other other things, deep water soloing is a great example of this, where you climb above the water and if you fall off, you fall into the sea. So I mean, you can imagine you've got the waves like bellowing around and it's very atmospheric and it's you can feel it, the adrenaline in your chest and you really don't want to fall off and you're just desperately making sure that you don't. And then you fall off and it's fine and you have this

• 31:00Speaker 00

  release of endorphins and you prove to yourself that you can you can do something very scary and and the growth as well that comes with that is addictive.

• 31:09Chris Williamson?

  I went to the United States Outdoor Whitewater Training Facility a couple of years ago, and they have a huge climbing wall over a 10 meter pool. So this is the artificial climbing and there's some that are easy and some that have got overhangs and you have special shoes on. And that's it's just you just do endless rounds, just constantly climbing up. And there is there's a point where you get to, it's a battle between trying to keep your focus on what you're doing and not think about how high you are away from the water. And then obviously, as you get higher up, the difficulty increases, but so does the anxiety and the distraction of you thinking

• 31:52Chris Williamson?

  about being below. If anybody has the opportunity, it was in Charlotte, it was near Lake Norman in Charlotte. So if anyone's in America listening to this, you should totally go and do it. It's insane. But yeah, it was it was so weird being, you can get up to 10 meters high and that you're on an overhang and you can be hanging on with like one hand and one foot and you're thinking, right, okay, so where's the next handhold? Where am I going to go from here? And be completely unstrapped and fall and it'd be fine. It was mad experience.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Always. It's all about the head game there, really. When you're right, as soon as you're above a certain height, you really don't want to fall.

• 32:31Chris Williamson?

  There's an invisible line. There's a line that you get to and then you're like, right, okay. My bum hole is puckering hard.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  I think 10 metres is probably the, at that point, if you start going over 10 metres. I mean, you should watch, I don't know if you've seen, there's some amazing climbers out there. There's a guy who does a lot of this deep water soloing called Chris Sharma. And he's a pioneer in this, this kind of niche type of climbing. And some of the routes he does, they're just insane. You look at them and you just think, this is unbelievable mental control. Not only is it technical climbing, but he's like 20 metres up. And you've got to be very careful how you land in the water because you can really, really hurt yourself. So, yeah, I like it. It's an interesting sport. You don't have to be extreme. You can just dip your toe in a little bit.

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  It's pretty scary at three metres away from the water. You don't need to be, you don't need to be that high up. So you did, you waited in a queue that you didn't need to do, and I'm a club promoter. So for me, I'm like a queue aficionado, so I want to know all about your queue.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  So the queue, the queuing one, everyone loves this because it's ridiculous. And I love the novel and crazy ideas. And some of the challenges that I started doing were based on these ideas. So queue unnecessarily. And there's multiple ways you can do this. You can queue in a car, which is horrible, especially like, we all have to put up with traffic. But when you deliberately seek it out, that's when it becomes a different thing. And you've got an internal dialogue. It's very, very simple. Rush hour and then M25. Or wherever you are, you just know where it's going to be busy and you just go and you commit to it. And it's very. Yeah, it's that dialogue that you're having with yourself, like, why am I doing this? What what's the point in this?

• 34:24Speaker 00

  And actually, even that in itself, just working with that dialogue, it's a very practical way to test out whether the philosophy and ideas that you use in your life work. And a lot of these challenges are all about that, testing out the ideas in a very practical way. So your queuing is a perfect example, and any tourist attraction, you just go and queue at the end. And then when you're done queuing, just leave, don't go and don't reward yourself. If you reward yourself at the end of the queue, then you validate the queue. And you don't want to do that. You want to just go away because then that makes it the challenge.

• 34:59Chris Williamson?

  I always remember thinking in freshers week when we were waiting in queues. Before I was the guy that controls the queues, I was the guy that was waiting in the queues. Haven't queued since like two thousand and seven, I don't intend on starting again. But um, yeah, I always remember thinking that I could imagine there was like a queue appreciation society. And they'd wait in a queue for ages. And then at the end, they'd all like high five like, yeah, that was sick. Let's go again. And I can just go back to the back of the queue and start again, decide to go off. Um, you said about sleeping on the floor. What did your misses think about the fact that you were like, like the dog, basically, like just deciding to curl up on the floor?

• 35:38Speaker 00

  She's got used to me doing ridiculous things now, so it's it's it's not that unusual. Um, yeah, she, the thing is, she's, my wife is very stoic, um, which is amazing. She's she's been such a rock for me and she just does all this stuff naturally. She's like, it's it's so funny. Um, she she thinks like a stoic without having studied the stoic.

• 36:06Chris Williamson?

  No formal training, yeah.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, she just does it. It's just natural for her, the way that her brain works. So she doesn't need to work so hard to to kind of put these ideas into practice and put them into place in her life. Whereas I have to actively seek out things to to make sure that I'm I'm keeping on top of my game. Um, so, yeah, I mean, she's just, she's fine with it now. She just doesn't bat an eyelid.

• 36:29Chris Williamson?

  Mentally, what was the what was the most challenging one that you did sort of cognitively?

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Um. In terms of fear based or in terms of like skill based?

• 36:42Chris Williamson?

  Skill based, yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  It's still ongoing. It's learning Japanese, hands down. It's a ridiculous challenge. Um. It's such a hard language and it's relentless when you think you've, uh, well, I mean, you do make progress and but then when when you get to that level, then suddenly it just unlocks a whole another world of pain. And it's a it's a great experience because I've never been able to speak another language. And now all my Japanese lessons are entirely in Japanese, which that is a huge confidence booster for me to lean into something difficult and to see that I can do that when my initially I didn't think for one minute I'll be able to do it. So it's that dialogue that I I really love to challenge by pushing myself because

• 37:29Speaker 00

  when you think you can't do something and you prove to yourself that you can, that is a very powerful thing. Um. So that's what Japanese has been, been able to communicate. Uh, and before the pandemic, I found myself in Japan in this bar. And this geisha and these two businessmen came in and the the guy who was behind the bar started playing the oboe and he started playing Moon River on the oboe and it was just this very bizarre experience, but because we were all communicating in Japanese, I was like just had to sort of take a step back and think what is what has happened?

• 38:05Chris Williamson?

  Mind fucking here or something. Yeah, exactly.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  What's going on? But I think that as soon as we start seeking out challenges, as soon as we start doing stuff like this, we invite that kind of novelty into our lives and we bring color into into everyday life and that's exciting.

• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  It's a really good word to use. So novelty and intensity are the two main drivers of memory formation? So when people say that life is getting quicker, they don't mean that life is that time is moving more quickly, like it's times relativistic, it will always move at the same pace. It's the same ticking clock that it was when you were two, or that when you were 40, or that when you were dying. And it's the same one that Elon Musk's got, like you have the same number of hours in the day as Beyonce, or whatever. But what people mean when they actually say time is moving faster is my impression of time is moving quicker. And again, because you only ever experience time in the moment. So when you're talking about, look at how fast time is moving, you actually mean, look at how fast time moved. So it's

• 39:08Chris Williamson?

  always a retrospective. You're always talking about, I can't remember where the time went. There is a month, or a year, or a couple of years. And to me, it doesn't feel like that much time elapsed. So I was really interested in this. I wanted to find out what the function is that's causing people to feel this way. And there's a bunch of different theories. And one of them is to do with the proportionality theory, which I think is total bollocks. It's that basically, when you've been around for 40 years, each day is only this amount of 40 years. But like, you don't think about your whole life in one go. You can focus in on months. So I didn't think it was to do with that. And then I had this woman on the show called Laura Vanderkam, and she wrote, she's a time management expert. And she'd learned that one of the key drivers of memory formation

• 39:51Chris Williamson?

  to create memory blocks is novelty and intensity. And it's one of the reasons why when you go away on holiday, you can remember insane stuff. So I remember I went away to Africa, and I can recall the type of shoes, and the sound of the shoes, and the book, and the way that the man held the book that walked us from reception to the boat, like the day that I arrived. And yet, I couldn't tell you what I had for dinner last night. Like, if you held a gun to my head right now, I have no idea what I had for dinner last night, or what side of the bed I woke up on this morning. But I can tell you, I can tell you, Reese wasn't, wasn't his actual name, but I think he adopted Reese. I can tell you, Reese's shoes, and the way that he walked, and the sound of it, and the smell, and everything,

• 40:35Chris Williamson?

  novelty and intensity. So you must, looking back, do you see that within this year? Does it feel like a very expanded sensation of time, the period that you were doing these challenges in?

• 40:48Speaker 00

  I think so. The thing is that I've carried on doing it. I've carried on seeking out novelty. And initially, this was a, I called it a year of adversity because it was like, I'm going to test this idea out of deliberately seeking discomfort, stepping outside of my comfort zone. I'll try it for a year. Why not? And I guess I tried it for a couple of months and because I could see that it was actually really helping me, I carried on. And after a year, I kind of, I achieved a lot and it had really changed my outlook on life. But it's now something that I continue to do and there are some challenges that are ongoing and I'm always seeking out new things. But the novelty factor is, is something that I think it does make it more memorable, but for me, it just brings in

• 41:32Speaker 00

  that, that element of colour. Like when I was in my very anxious space, life was very black and white and everything is scary. But when you have this introduction of novelty and all of these kinds of things, it brings colour and it just makes life exciting. And it seems more of an adventure than something that's out there to be scary, the scary world. It's, it's the adventure that could happen. So I think it's just a shift in mindset.

• 42:02Chris Williamson?

  What's the thing that you did with Everest and the, and the marathon last year?

• 42:07Speaker 00

  So that was, that was really fun. That was to continue pushing myself. That was during lockdown. I decided that I would climb Mount Everest on my stairs. So I basically did 2,137 reps up and down, and that's the equivalent height of Mount Everest. And it was, my wife was working at the table and I'm just like next to her, just going up and down the stairs constantly. And it was hard. It was a hard challenge. It's very boring. And but it was, the novelty of it is something that I will look back on in lockdown. And I will think, well, that was, that was a bizarre experience. And I wrote about it for the British Mountaineering Council and on the last day, I dressed up in all my mountaineering kit and just had a lot of fun doing it.

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  Do you know your stairs inside out now as well?

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, a little bit more creaky than before.

• 42:57Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, yeah, like, that's a lot of repetitions. That's more than you'll have done in the house previously.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Do you know what? I worked out, it's probably about a year's worth of. Like stair usage.

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  I guess you've got, you've got a lot of time to do dumb mental arithmetic when you're spending two, 2,000 flights of stairs to go up and down. How many days or how long did this take you?

• 43:17Speaker 00

  So it was about 21 hours in total and I think I did it over eight days maybe. Um, so I broke it, broke it down into chunks and it was just the monotony of it. It was very interesting. I ended up with some virtual climbing partners as well, some people, different people, because I, I was talking about it on Instagram and loads of other people started joining in as well, which is, which is something that it just brought a little bit of fun and novelty to that. Actually very difficult time and everyone was in lockdown. You couldn't do anything and there were lots of restrictions. Um, so, so that was really fun. Another variation was, well, it's not variation, but, um, I ran a marathon in my garden and my garden is tiny, seven meters. Um, it was like

• 43:59Speaker 00

  seven or eight meters. Um, so I had to do like 4,000 lengths to actually hit the marathon length, the distance. So again, that's just bizarre, but I, I remember, I was like eight hours. It was so, because you can't actually run. You run, you just run and then you have to turn and my neighbors just, uh, they think I'm insane. We had, there was a, they've got kids next door and they were just holding like signs over the fence, um, to encourage me, which is lovely, but they, they just think I'm mad. They just see me like repping the garden. It's, uh, very bizarre, but it was fun. Again, it just brings this novelty to, to that experience. And I, I'll always look back at lockdown and there's these two things, climbing Everest and running a marathon

• 44:42Speaker 00

  in my garden that I would never have done before if it wasn't for the restrictions. So sometimes a restriction can actually, um, give us creativity. The limits can actually enable us to have more creativity because we have to work around certain things.

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a really, really good insight. I learned this from a guy called Jack Butcher, who is a graphic designer. He does visualize value. And the paradox of choice is that when there's too many variables for you to play around with, you actually don't end up doing any genuine creativity because you just get lost in the choice making from other bits and pieces. So one of the things that he chose to do, all of his images are a black background with white geometric shapes on them and a very simple font. So he never has to choose colors or style or font or any of that stuff. So that's a forcing function that means, okay, if I want this image to look different to the last image, it needs to creatively, at its fundamental essence, it needs to be different. And this is what everybody gets caught up in,

• 45:38Chris Williamson?

  right? Like, people will spend six weeks debating over what shade of blue their company logo should be, but they've only spent two weeks actually developing and researching the product and testing it out with their friends or whatever. So yeah, restricting the choices on a thing that you know doesn't matter. I use the same intro music every single time for this podcast. I haven't updated the main album artwork, like the image from three and a half years ago, even though it's if anyone actually wants to go and look, it's slightly off center. So it doesn't actually look the same. But I'm like, look, like, no one's coming for the fucking album artwork. They're coming for the experience of listening to the podcast. Like, Rogan's got, like, all sorts of different quirks and stuff on his show that it's just like, well, look, it doesn't like, is it fundamental to the way that the show runs? No. The same thing with

• 46:23Chris Williamson?

  this, like, reduce down the choices, reduce the restriction, increase the restrictions that you have. And actually, okay, these are the parameters that you're working with. Now, what can you do?

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. It's a nice way of thinking about things. And you can definitely use that when you're coming up with challenges. And one of the things I always like to encourage people to do is figure out how they could challenge themselves and how they could leave their comfort zones. Because obviously, the things that I do are not going to challenge everyone. And they, for some people, they might be too ridiculous. For other people, they're too easy. So I think it's, it's trying to be creative, trying to come up with fun ideas and not having, you know, not having those self imposed limits that stop us from

• 47:10Speaker 00

  You know, discovering something interesting and yeah, exciting.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  How much spillover have you seen from these acute periods of discomfort exposure to the more general ambient sensation that you have day to day?

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, completely. It completely changes that. Firstly, it makes me aware of it when I'm feeling uncomfortable for when life makes you uncomfortable for whatever challenge you have to face. You know, there's two types of challenges. There's the ones that you choose and the ones that are forced onto you. So I think by practicing ones and selecting different challenges, it helps me to figure out what I can use when life throws curveballs and life constantly throws curveballs. So I can feel that my mindset has definitely changed. So for instance, about three months ago, I fell off a climb and really badly injured

• 48:08Speaker 00

  my ankle and it's still not properly healed. It was a bad strain or sprain. And it's just, it's a very simple kind of level of discomfort. When I put my foot down, it hurts. But I think my attitude towards it is completely different from how it would have been in the past. I can look for the lesson and I can kind of see it as something that, well, there's no point in me complaining about it. I need to focus on the solution. And there's lots of lessons that I've taken from all of these different concepts that I've been studying that I can directly apply to problems that crop up in life.

• 48:48Chris Williamson?

  That's

• 48:49Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm not perfect at it. I have to say, like, I do, I'm not gonna, I'll put my hands up. I'm not

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  Not Jocko Willink, not yet.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Oh, no, not yet.

• 48:56Chris Williamson?

  It's um, but it's

• 48:59Chris Williamson?

  It's just, it's so interesting because get comfortable being uncomfortable is a term that's used a lot in CrossFit and that's my, one of my sports of choice over the last few years. But I have a real problem with people in CrossFit that use that term because what they mean is get comfortable being uncomfortable and then in brackets afterwards, within a domain that I get to choose.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  So the difference, I'm so glad that you brought it up to say the difference between the elected and the unelected, or the ones that you choose and the ones that are forced upon you, like that's so important, because if all that you're doing, let's say that in some world you were able to control all of the different actions that occurred, and all that you were doing was getting yourself better at being uncomfortable in situations in future that you were going to choose to be uncomfortable in, it's kind of pointless. It's like, look, I'm not making myself more robust for anything other than challenges that I want to do. The whole point is to prepare yourself for when the catastrophe occurs, for when the family member passes away and it's chaos and you need to give the eulogy and you're terrified of public speaking, for when, pick your piece of chaos

• 50:06Chris Williamson?

  in life. But the weird thing with this is that by its very nature, by definition, the forced upon you challenges are the ones that you can't choose. Like, I mean, you could have chosen to throw yourself off the cliff or whatever, but I think that's probably a little bit rich. Yeah, you've taken it too far. Like, if you're throwing yourself off cliffs, you've taken it too far. But do you know what I mean? Like, it's, you need to do the stuff, work within your domains of choice to be ready for the times when you're ripped out of that.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that's really been the whole point of this whole project for me, is training for life. And that's why I think the variety is important, because for people who are very athletic, just seeking out athletic challenges isn't necessarily going to give you that, that kind of broad, that the broadness that you need, because a lot of these things are mental. So it's trying to really get into your psyche and figure out what's going to push you and just exploring it, because it can be little things. And it's, it's just looking for all these different places. And the more you do it, the more you feel prepared for whatever chaos is around the corner, because that's the one thing we can guarantee, that life is going to keep throwing challenges at us. So it makes sense to prepare. In fact,

• 51:26Speaker 00

  it's crazy not to.

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  Benjamin, thank you so much for coming on. People want to check out your stuff, where should they go?

• 51:34Speaker 00

  So, very active on Instagram. The handle is @dothingsthatchallengeyou. I'm on Twitter @IAMbenaldridge. Website benaldridge.com and there's a newsletter there. And yeah, that's probably, that's a good place to come and say hi.

• 51:50Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Cheers, man.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Thanks so much. Great to chat.