The first time we took our children to a hotel, my daughter looked all around, then went straight for the dresser drawers. She opened and closed the drawers a few times, looked around again, then ran to the closet sliding door. There were all kinds of things in that room she had not seen before. Later in the car she undoubtedly reflected on the experience and to this day basically understands what a hotel is.
Finding your niche is the dominant theme of how we are built. Although the world has more dimensions than one hotel room, we have the potential to see the world with multiple lenses, and those lenses. We have found that there are four basic lenses, each of which occur at different intensities. Each of those intensities or lenses can be trained.
Because my daughter had never been in a hotel room, she was excited, which was evident in her behavior. Excitability is the primary training intensity on which the other three are built. That is because new information can only be taken in at a certain threshold of excitability. An extreme form of excitability would be a time you were in or nearly in a car accident. Your senses were so heightened that you might remember the whole event in slow motion years later.
Weight training is the primary way we suggest training excitability. Keep in mind that the importance of having excitability goes far beyond having well formed muscles. Excitability would be enhanced in any adventurous/potentially dangerous situation; the actual experience of the excitant automatically activates the first-responder element of the immune system, as well as every other system that exists in your body. In the context of how we use the word excitability, it is a summary of one of the four modes or physiologies.
The excitability is the eyes wide open, and for my daughter the drawers were what stood out. For another person something else would have stood out, and ones niche develops largely based on the particular thing they find interesting. Whatever the thing is, it is mandatory that we are able to focus on one thing at a higher resolution. In this context we are using vision as an example, but we could have used hearing as well. The point is that she was able to focus on the drawer. Focus is the second of the four training intensities. More on all of these intensities later, but for now suffice it to say that because of the prevalence of electronic devices, many people focus for way to many hours per day, and as you learn more you might agree that this is a form of improper training that will always have problematic consequences. So it might be that your training schedule requires focus, but it might be limited to one or two hours per day.
The reason we mention excitability and focus together is that you can start to get an idea that we naturally map our environment, which means we need to be able to see the shape of the whole globe/country/etc, as well the shape of the individual pieces. A person who has trained focus excessively will have great difficulty seeing a greater context of things. Their view of reality will be distorted in the same way their physiology will be distorted, as will their ability to find their most suitable niche. A person whose excitability dominates will have all kinds of grand ideas without being able to work out the details, making the execution of their ideas impossible.
Mapping a room while in the room is a basic skill, but whenever dealing with more complex or puzzling situations, we make sense of them over days, years, or decades. Much of the processing, or making sense, of what we encounter, occurs while it is quiet. The third physiology we call endurance, and it is epitomized by distance road running. Anytime you are doing a repetitive task, you should switch over to autopilot. Running is a perfect scenario because you are wide awake without having to pay attention to the environment, which allows you to process all the memories stored in your subconscious. The reason they are on your mind in the first place is precisely that they have not been processed. The icing on the cake is that because running is relatively intense, your body produces chemicals like serotonin and endorphins that actively block out pain and fears, which allows you to be much more creative. Imagine if you finally have time to think and clear your head, and at that point you start to think, “did I leave the oven on?”, etc. Fear makes creativity impossible, and this state of mind is specific to endurance.
Endurance should be part of everyones training schedule. Having this system functioning will make your life so much more enjoyable and productive. Your immune system needs the endurance anytime you get sick for the more prolonged battle.
For now just consider that we are designed to wear different hats at different times. The fourth hat would be the hat of a monk, which represents your ability to be awake with minimal stimulation. Things like prayer and meditation would clearly be under the umbrella of the monk hat.
Imagine the piece of mind and motivation we would have knowing that your training schedule determines your physiology. To introduce this concept, imagine for a second you were on vacation, and during the vacation you did some reading, some hiking, some relaxing, etc. Now, think of yourself as a car, and during the exercise maybe you are giving the car more gas, and when relaxing you were refilling the tanks. In this scenario, there is some reasonable proportion of higher intensity and lower intensity activities. You would not sprint all day. You would now sleep all day.
But what would happen if you did sprint all day? The engine might get tired, but because you don’t rest, you might keep pouring fuel into the engine. The engine might slow down due to fatigue, yet you continue to pour fuel into the engine. At that point, the body would have to find a way to divert that excess fuel, and you could think of that diversion, whether it be in the form of throwing up or diabetes or weight gain, as a feature of the design as opposed to a flaw in the design. The powerful concept is that the design itself is good and someone watching some kid running a lawnmower or something into the ground would tell the kid to use it properly to it doesn’t break.
