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

Episode Date: July 31, 2021

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 - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ben Aldridge, he's an author, musician and a teacher, we're talking about how to be comfortable being uncomfortable. 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. Today, expect to learn what Ben's missus 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 exposed your therapy spills over into regulating your daily emotions, and much more.

So yes, obviously this is a bit mental, but what I really like about Ben's approach is that he's taken theories from Stoicism and Buddhism, and then hasn't just sat in an armchair, learned them off by heart, and hoped that his mindset's going to improve. He's used the theories as the springboard to take action, and the action is the thing that has influenced his life, and that underlying principle of having an action first mindset of taking theories that you think could impact you and applying them to your daily existence is super important. That being said, it's quite nice that Ben's gone and done a lot of these because now there's a lovely sort of menu that we can all pick from. You know, maybe you don't fancy the acupuncture in the face or the nudist beach, but perhaps going and climbing some stairs, you'll feel good with that, alerting the longest train

station in all of Wales. But yes, lots to take away from today. I really hope that you enjoy this one. And now, it's time to learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable with Ben Aldrich. Ben Jamin, welcome to the show. Hi, Chris, great to be here. Thanks for having me on. It's an uncomfortable day, right? We're both sweltering. We're both too hot. Yeah, absolutely, but we've got to embrace it. Well, that's the lesson, the lesson that we're going to learn today. So you decided to spend a year doing a bunch of challenges at physical stuff and mental stuff and social

stuff. What was the impetus? Why bother putting yourself through hell for a year? So all of this came off the back of anxiety actually. So that was the trigger for me to get into of anxiety actually. So that was the 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.

What's a Ponic Attack feel like? Well, if you don't know what one is, it like you're dying to be honest the first time that I had that panic attack It was it was just insane. I had 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 you shake your 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, 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 this different philosophies and actually encouraged me to start challenging myself. 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?

I think there wasn't actually a trigger as such. 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 was just the cumulative stress, and it was just 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 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 just came out of the blue. 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, I'm a dying. Like actually, you might be dying. Yeah. So I had James Nester on the podcast yesterday, guy that wrote Breath, and he's talking about the two main functions that you do with Breathwork, right? So one of them is an extreme activation of the sympathetic nervous system.

It's the Wim-Half-It-Sat-Shit. And then the other is an extreme activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. It's dialing yourself down to in 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 why 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 overt and window,

like which is a bound of 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 overt and 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'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, you know, 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 work or you have to have an awkward conversation with your spouse or you're sat on your own in a room for, you know, at the other end of the scale, you just sat bored and your phone started, 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. 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 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 the 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 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. 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 world views and even if they have different world views after enough time, you've heard all of their world views. Like, it is without exposing yourself to books and podcasts and YouTube

and whatever else it might be traveling, 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, as at least the type of podcaster 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, you know that maybe not every single piece of art is going to be like, wow, I mean, 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 haven'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 over to the window,

like speaking to a porn star and a philosopher in the space of a week, I'm doing something like that. So yeah, that's the, uh, get your ears comfortable at being uncomfortable, perhaps that that might be the equivalent. Alright, 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? Well, you're like, right, okay, there's something to this. So I started reading a lot of different things and became a bit of a quest to try and figure out what I can do. And actually, I really 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 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 comforts. 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 Kato, who would deliberately wear things to feel shame so he could practice feeling like an idiot. What like?

And so he would, I mean, back in the day, it would have just been a different colored cloak or something like that. And we can play with that today, but I just love that idea. It's so counterintuitive. This concept of someone deliberately seeking out attention like that. And not in a way, it's not attention seeking, but it's 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 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 100 meters away. But that should give 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 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 explored the philosophy more, and now it's just something that helps me every day. I think Kato practiced walking backward through a crowd that was leaving a theatre. Did you see this one? Yeah, I've had the cynics as well. The cynic philosophers inspired the Stoics and this kind of,

I'm going to describe them as the trolls of ancient Greece, which I think is a great way. Great way to discuss this type of philosophy. Diogenes were living. Absolutely, a troll man. That wasn't it. So Alexander the Great for anyone that doesn't know this sort of the Diogenes story.geanese 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 shitting. And he lives in that. He wears 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 get out of my sunlight and just shift it under the gray out of the way. So that kind of tells you, tells you all that you really need to know. Yeah, absolutely was he was like the low key the low key of ancient Greece I suppose but um

Yes, fascinating man. I mean wearing itchy clothing. They used to do walking around barefoot purposefully Dropping things wasn't it didn't Xeno 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 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 God, the phenomenology of this crazy set of hormones rushing through

my body is terrifying, I'm a heart rate high, 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 what you're trying to get out there. 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 stosism. 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 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 that. 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 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 went and had acupuncture, which is the most extreme version of having to deal with needles when you get them in your face and you're all over your body.

So that, it feels counterintuitive and 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 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 and I think the Stoics just, you know, really started off something wonderful with this idea. What's on the anti-bucket list that you haven't done yet? Oh, it's, I'm giving blood. That's the next one. Oh, that's needles. That's serious needles. Yeah, and for some people, that's no, that's no, no bother for them. You know, a lot of people will listen to this and say, Oh, that's, that's ridiculous. No, it's very easy. But if you've got a, 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. I'm like, I'm looking forward to it, actually, it's going to be one of those, uh, those things that I kind of don't want to do it, but that's the point. So I'm looking forward to the growth that I'll experience and probably very sweaty palms as well. But I think it would be, for me, it would be spiders, snakes, stuff like I'm not, just not my bag. And you're totally right as well. With the anti-bucket 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. I've got something very wrong if I accidentally have to pick up a snake or a spider. 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 started with stoicism. What else did you study that you thought gave you a good impact? So I loved Buddhism as well. Buddhism was very helpful. There's lots of ideas. Interestingly, Stoicism and Buddhism, there's a real crossover. There's a lot of ideas that balance 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 can see. What are the similar conclusions? So, there's a focus on being present and actually living in the moment, which is something that both the Stoics and the Buddhists talk a lot about 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 you 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, develop empathy and to help you 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. 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, I've 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. How did that help?

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. You'll just hear. 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 stereicism, the impermanence. So it's lovely how they connect and I think it's very practical.

One of the main insights that 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, I know that it's uncomfortable now now but it will get better, it will get better, it will get better and yeah keeping that in mind, that's an important one. You looked at Carol Dwack's mindset as well right and you did some CBT's too. 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 can 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.

It doesn't matter what happens to you, it's what lesson you can take from it. So I think that's again a very powerful thing. Throughout all of these challenges that I started doing, having this in the back of my mind, lesson 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 kept coming back to you and it's very very helpful. Well, it reminds you as well. This won't last forever. That's impermanent right here is a lesson. I'm not in a fixed

mindset, it also helps you to dissolve the ego away. Like 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 a failure, like what's the lesson from it? Move on. So yeah, again, mindset I think coalesce is nicely with the Buddhism and the Stoicism. And then what about CBT? Because I know CBT, like some of the principles and stuff come out of Stoicism. What was this specifically from CBT

that you hadn't got from anything else? 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 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 CVT kind of golden rule is that you blast your negative thoughts with logic and you use logic to destroy the negative dialogue. 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 What was the best CBT book that you read or some of them? The best one I read it, it was actually like the CBT for dummies, that kind of really base-level introduction. I first read CBT black. Yeah, one of those. I can't remember the exact title, I can't remember the author, so I don't want to say

because obviously I like to be able to say what the author's name is because I feel that it's either the book justice. Yeah, I think it was just one of those sort of introductory books. It wasn't a particular one. It feels to me like because at the moment we've had like pop psychology, we're kicking off and storcisms kicking off and Buddhism's kicking off and stuff at the moment in the intellectual Awakening world. 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 in a monologue, the blasting our thoughts with logic, some of the insights from CBT at personally, I think, haven't been popularized as well as they should have been yet. There hasn't been a scientific communicator or a research communicator or just, you know, anyone and author that's come out and really be like, look, here's the two long didn't read of 35 years of CBT research. 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 more of that. I think a buddy is an American 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. I can't remember, I'm butchering again. But 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 kiddie fight up and make it up 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 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 easier. 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. All right, so you did hundreds and hundreds of challenges and then you sort of listed 43 in the book. What was the second one after going to the bench? Can you remember? Second one was going, um, catching a bus. So it's a little bit of an upgrade from walking to the bench. Moving back. But then, yeah. And then it compounded. And then, then it just started getting, you know, more confident and bigger and bolder things followed. What about that Welsh train station?

You learn the name of the longest word in the world? It's the longest train station in the world. Yes, Clan Vaya put Gwingi Gwngi Gwngi off we draw Bocchantisiliogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogogog I can say that was a horrible rendition of it, but it was a very small challenge, but I just loved 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.

You should learn it. Yeah, well, I'll replay that. I'll just really have to go to sleep listening to you going, boode boode boode boode boode boode boode boode boode. 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. So 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 will outlook, this continues to come out, I find social situations significantly more difficult. I find physical situations significantly more difficult.

Was there something that you discovered there? 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, you put in a stupid hat on and walking down a busy high street is, it feels, maybe you'll be hard. 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 claws and it's very, very ridiculous.

So if you wear something like that, 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 in front of thousands of people at a festival. He's not supposed to be on the table. This is just a festival and he'd love the attention. He'd love having people look at him. So for him, putting a cramp hat on and walking down a busy street, he's going to love that. He's going to have fun. He's going to have the fun. 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 and 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. When you're getting naked at some point as well, didn't you do it like a naked challenge? That was one of the worst that 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 new dispeach for a very short amount of time.

What's the lot of... How do you not do a good job of being naked? Because you feel so paranoid. And I think I did 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 for it. Are you familiar with the 100 days of rejection therapy challenge? Did you look at this? 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. People should go and check that out if you board an un-oafone 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. I suppose as someone that was suffering with panic attacks and a little bit of social anxiety as well, actually working on getting that adrenaline,

pushing that parasympathetic system as we were talking about. How did you do that? How do you summon adrenaline? 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 gonna have a lot of adrenaline in your body

and just learning how to manage that, learning how to be okay with having a adrenaline in your body because actually that feeling is very similar to a panic attack. So learning how to be okay with having a adrenaline is essentially learning how to manage almost anxiety as well. So I did lots of things, Client, I really pushed my climbing and it was the scariest route that you climbed on the scariest mountain that you went up. 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 like a technical rock climb, but very icy, it was very scary. So managing that with my friend as well, we maybe threw ourselves in a little too deep. And other things, the 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, 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 release of endorphins and you prove to yourself that you can do something very scary and the growth as well that comes with that. It's addictive. I went to the United States outdoor white water training facility a couple of years ago, and they have a huge climbing wall over 10 meter pool.

It's 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 high up, the difficulty increases, but so does the anxiety and the distraction. If you're thinking 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 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 think right okay, so where's the next handhold where am I gonna go from here and be completely unstrapped and Fall and it be fight that it was my experience Always it's all about the head the head, really. When you're right, as

soon as you're above a certain height, you really don't want to fall. There's an invisible line. There's a line that you get to and then you're like, okay, my bumhole is puckering hard. I think 10 meters is probably the, at that point, if you start going over 10 meters. 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 kind of niche type of climbing. And some of the routes he does is they're just insane. You look at them and you just think this is this is unbelievable mental control Not not only is it technical climbing, but he's like 20 meters up and you've got to be very careful how you land in the water Because you can you 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 You You can get around. Pretty scary, three meters away from the water. Yeah, 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 queueer, Fischer and Ardos, I want to know all about your queue. So the queuing one everyone loves this is 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, Q and necessarily, and there's multiple ways you can do this. You can queue in a car, which is horrible, especially if you like, we all have to put up with traffic. But when you deliberately seek it out, that's where it becomes a different thing. And you've got internal traffic. where it becomes a different thing. And you've got, in turn, a dialect.

It's very, very simple. Rush hour, and then M25, or wherever you are, you just know where it's gonna be busy, and you just go and you commit to it. And it's very, it's that dialogue that you're having with yourself. Like, what am I doing this? What's the point in this?

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 queueing is a perfect example, and any tourist attraction you just go and queue at the end and then, and you're're done queuing just leave, don't go in, 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.

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 2007, I don't intend on starting again, but yeah, I always remember thinking that I could imagine there was like a cue appreciation society and they'd wait in a cue for ages. And then at the end, they'd all like high five, like yeah, that was sick, let's go again.

And like, and just go back to the cue and start again, decide to go off. You said about sleeping on the floor, what did your misses think about the fact that you were, like the dog basically, just deciding to curl up on the floor? She's got used to me doing ridiculous things now, so it's not that unusual. Yeah, the thing is, my wife is very stoic, which is amazing, but she's been

such a rock for me, and she just does all this stuff naturally. It's so funny. She thinks like a stoic without having studied the stoic. No formal training. 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 kind of put these ideas into practice and put them into place in her life.

Whereas I have to actively seek out things to make sure that I'm keeping on top of my game. So yeah, I mean, she's just fine with it now. She just doesn't bat an eyelid. Mentally ridiculous thing. What was the most challenging one that you did sort of cognitively? In terms of fear-based or in terms of skill-based. Skill-based, yeah. It's still ongoing. It's learning Japanese hands down. It's a ridiculous challenge. It's such a hard language and it's relentless when you think you've... well, I mean, you do make progress, but then when you get to that level then suddenly it just unlocks a whole

another world of pain. And 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, initially, I didn't think for one minute I'll be able to do it. So it's that dialogue that I really love the challenge by pushing myself because When you think you can't do something and you proved yourself that you can that is a very powerful thing So that's what Japanese has been it been able to communicate And before the pandemic I found myself in Japan in this bar

and this Gacha and these two businessmen came in and the guy who is behind the bar started playing the Obo and he started playing Moon River on the Obo and it was just this very bizarre experience but because we were all communicating in Japanese and I was like, just had to sort of take a step back and think what is what has happened? Mine is fucking right here or something, yeah, exactly. 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. That's exciting. It's a really good word to use the 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 at a time is moving more quickly, like it's time's 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 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 is 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 experienced time in the moment So when you're talking about look at how fast time is're talking about, look at how fast time is moving, you actually mean, look at how fast time moved. So it's 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. 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's to do with the proportionality theory,

which I think's total bollocks, it's that basically when you've been around for 40 years, each day is only this amount of 40 years, but 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 Vandercam, and she wrote

to the Time Management Expert. And she learned that one of the key drivers of memory formation to create memory blocks is novelty and intensity. And it's one of the reasons why when you go away in 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

his actual name, but I think he did. I can tell you Reese's shoes and the way that he walked and the sound of it and the smell and everything, 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? 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, because I could see that it was actually really helping me, I carried on, and after a year I kind of achieved a lot, and it 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 something that I think it does make it more memorable, but for me it just brings in that that element of color.

Like when I was in my very anxious space, life is very black and white and everything is scary. But when you have this introduction of novelty and all of these kind of things, it brings color and introduction of novelty and all of these kind of things. It brings color 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 the adventure that could happen. So I think it's just a shift in mindset. What's the thing that you did with Everest and the marathon last year? 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 hard challenge. It's very boring. But it was, the novelty of it is something that I will look back on in lockdown.

And I will think, well, 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. Do you know your sense inside out now as well? Oh, yeah, a little bit more creaky than before. I was gonna say, yeah, that's a lot of repetitions. That's more than you'll have done in the house previously.

It, do you know what, I worked out, it's probably about a year's worth of like stare usage. I guess you've got it. You've got a lot of time to do Dundmental Rhythmic when you're spending two, two thousand flights of sales to go up and down. How many days or how long did this take you? So it was about 21 hours in total and I think I did it over eight days maybe. So I 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 was talking about it on Instagram and loads of other people was joining in as well, 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. So that was really fun. Another variation was not variation, but I ran a marathon in my garden and my garden is tiny, seven meters, it was like seven or eight meters. So I had to do like 4,000 lengths to actually hit the marathon neck, the distance. So again, that's just bizarre.

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 they think I'm insane. We had, there was a, they've got kids next door and we're just holding like signs over the fence to encourage me, which is lovely, but they just think I'm mad. fence to encourage me, which is lovely. But they just think I'm mad, they just seem like wrapping the garden. It's very bizarre. But it was fun. Again, it just brings this novelty to that experience. I'll always look back at lockdown and there's these two things, climbing Everest and running a marathon in my garden, that I would never have done before if it wasn't for the restriction.

So sometimes a restriction can actually give us creativity. The limits can actually enable us to have more creativity because we have to work around certain things. Yeah, that's a really, really good insight. I learned this from a guy called Jack Butcher who is a graphic designer, he does visualise 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 you 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, 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. 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 it. It's the podcast. Like Rogan's got like all sorts of different quirks and stuff on his show that is just like, well, look, it doesn't, like, is it fundamental to the way that the show runs? No, the same thing with this. Like, reduce down the choices, reduce the restrictions, increase the restrictions that you have,

and actually, okay, these are the parameters that you're working with. Now, what can you do? Yeah, absolutely. It's a nice way of thinking about things. You can definitely use that when you're coming up with challenges. 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 for some people, they might be too ridiculous for other people that are too easy. So I think it's trying to be creative, trying to come up with fun ideas and not having those self-imposed limits that stop us from discovering something interesting and yeah, exciting. 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? 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. 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 my ankle. It's still not properly healed. It was a bad strain or sprain. It's a very simple level of discomfort when I put my foot down. 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. That's where I mean, I'm not perfect at it. I have to say like I do, I'm not going to, I'll put my hands up. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, yeah. Oh, no, not yet. It's, um, but it's, 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. 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 in your terrified of public speaking, for when pick your piece of chaos 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. Like if you're throwing yourself off cliffs, you're taking it too far. And, but you know, 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. Yeah, and that's really been the whole point at 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, 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 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, it's crazy not to. Benjamin, thank you so much for coming on. People want to check out your stuff. Where should they go? So very active on Instagram. The handle is at do things that challenge you. I'm on Twitter, at I am Ben Aldridge website Benaldridge.com and there's a newsletter there and yeah that's pretty that's a good place to come and say hi. I love it. Cheers man. Thanks so

much. Great to chat. you