THE POWER OF OVERCOMING

This post is a longer one from my Substack, which is focused on exercise psychology from a depth psychology perspective. Feel free to subscribe if you like this particular angle.

One of the most potent psychological benefits of exercise (and often sport) that stays with people and contributes to their persistence is the experience of overcoming – doing something they never thought themselves capable of. There’s nothing quite so elating as reaching the top of the proverbial hill and realising you’ve finally achieved it – yes, that thing you never in your wildest dreams thought would happen.

Once you’ve crossed that threshold, in some sense there’s no going back. You may cease the activity at some point in the future, allowing physical capacity to lapse to a degree, but this doesn’t matter; the act of overcoming has already catalysed a psychological change that spills into other areas. That experience of overcoming what felt like an impossible barrier leaves people with a sense of possibility, a newfound willingness to try, to contend in the face of future challenges or endeavours. “If I can run a 5k, what else can I do?” or “I managed that, perhaps I can manage this.”

The sense of competence gained from overcoming is encouraging and a little addictive, because it is underpinned by fundamentally rewarding brain chemistry. The dopaminergic sense of promise experienced during the ascent – the process of knowingly contending – and then the opioid sense of reward once you reach the apex and finally “arrive” at the promised place is intrinsically pleasurable.

But there’s a deeper meaning to it beyond positive feelings. Mythologically speaking it is an example of the classic hero’s journey – voluntarily risking failure and discomfort to endure the slog of improvement against the so-called “odds” (as far as our minds are concerned, anyway), only to come out transformed. You’re defeating the adversary within – this isn’t just an external barrier, but an internal adversary in the form of self-doubt, self-criticism and dysfunctional beliefs. What follows from that is a growing tendency to question automatic ideas of “I won’t be able to do that”, and ultimately a transformation of one’s approach to challenges.

So, it’s clear to me that it’s deeply beneficial to try to deliberately overcome self-imposed views of self and your ability, in the form of attempting challenging activities or endeavours that take your interest. As Carl Jung once said: “Where your fear is, there is your task.”

Of course, knowing your genuine limits is essential. This isn’t a utopian “anyone can do anything” message, because unfortunately that is not true. We’re all limited by genetics in what we can ultimately achieve when it comes to physical performance ceilings, and many have incurred objectively restricting injuries or illnesses, or perhaps aged beyond the “critical period” in which skill levels of the upper echelons (e.g. Olympics) need to be developed. However, we still don’t know how far we can progress with most things, and to find out is an adventure.

Yet… the lack of confidence in one’s ability to try or succeed at something – the very thing that makes the overcoming quite so impactful – is also one of the barriers that stop people trying in the first place. Maybe that lack of confidence comes from a pre-existing habit of avoiding challenges, learned helplessness, or perhaps one holds the echoes of the past voices of critical others, feeling ashamed for not being good at things in the beginning. Equally it might be that you’re too perfectionist and you don’t tolerate anything less than the best.

If this is you, your situation demands a different attitude. But what is that and how do we get to it?

First it helps to reflect on some realities. To do this I will share a couple of quotes from Carl Jung’s Red Book which I will break down statement by statement:

“If no outer adventure happens to you, then no inner adventure happens to you either. The part that you take over from the devil – joy, that is – leads you into adventure. In this way you will find your lower as well as your upper limits. It is necessary for you to know your limits. If you do not know them, you run into the artificial barriers of your imagination and the expectations of your fellow men. But your life will not take kindly to being hemmed in by artificial barriers. Life wants to jump over such barriers and you will fall out with yourself. These barriers are not your real limits, but arbitrary limitations that do unnecessary violence to you. Therefore try to find your real limits. One never knows them in advance, but one sees and understands them only when one reaches them.” (p. 263)

What the idea of outer adventure being necessary for inner adventure suggests to me is that we must act differently externally to get a different internal result. In the same way that our ideas and beliefs can keep us stuck in the same old patterns of behaviour, our behavioural patterns can likewise trap us in the same psychological space. Nothing new is being generated. Sometimes we have to do what I call “act as if” – act as if you have a chance to create a different outcome. Your thoughts aren’t necessarily going to support it, but you don’t need them to. This is part of “psychological flexibility” – acting according to values, rather than being rigidly governed by thoughts. So the question becomes: “how would you act if you believed you had a genuine chance at achieving this?”

Jung’s documenting of various devil figures is far too complex for this post, but one surface-level interpretation of mine in relation to this post is that we often respond to our hopes and desires as if they are somehow devilish. “That’s a silly idea/pie in the sky/I could never do that”. We disparage our own interests, especially if they haven’t been supported in the past. We treat our own random curiosities and desires as “frivolous” or “silly”, and instead do what our superegos suggest we “should.” But the imperative is to take a hold of the experience of curiosity from its place in the psyche considered outlawed or “devilish”, and instead pursue the thing in the spirit of living your life instead of someone else’s.

To interrupt the above quote with another relevant to the point I have just made:

“It is no small matter to acknowledge one’s yearning. For this many need to make a particular effort at honesty. All too many do not want to know where their yearning is, because it would seem to them impossible or too distressing. And yet yearning is the way of life. If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you. So you do not live your life but an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life.” (The Red Book, p. 249)

As for finding our limits, a couple of years ago I was chatting to one of my students about running, and she said: “I could never do that”. My response was: “I dare you.” I meant every bit of that - she had no physical limitations that prohibited her from running, even if just for 10 seconds, and I would love for her to test that idea and bump up against her current actual limits, to allow her genuine potential to emerge rather than being blocked by an artificial barrier of her imagination. Of course this depends on the individual being actually interested - there is little point in trying something that ignites nothing in you whatsoever. However, before you decide that, it’s worth pulling back the veil to find out if there is a banished curiosity hiding behind the defensive wall of “I could never do that” or declaration of disinterest.

And when Jung suggests we will fall out with ourselves if we don’t find our genuine limits, this is true in that it means frustrating the natural inclination within us to grow and explore in alignment with what organically chimes with us and compels our attention. Jung believed this was part of “individuation”, the process of becoming who you genuinely are over the course of your life. It means pursuing things that naturally ignite your curiosity and bring you joy and personal meaning, and doing so in spite of the barriers. Research on relevant constructs across various areas of psychology suggests not doing this is associated with a number of undesirable mental health outcomes.

Below is one of my favourite quotes from the Red Book to further hammer this point home:

“We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life.” (p. 236-237)

Trees grow to their full capacity given the environment, because they do not have our self-conscious minds that formulate low-resolution and defensive conceptions of self that ultimately serve as psychological prisons. Trees just grow, as they are meant to, following their own pattern. If something gets in their way, they grow around it. The task for us is to let genuine reality limit our growth and what we do, as opposed to arbitrary mental barriers. It’s about getting to grips with the reality that our minds are prediction machines, yet we can never know the future or what our limits truly are without experiencing them directly, as discussed in a previous post.

These realities in my view are key to developing the right attitudes for taking on a task in which you doubt yourself. Of utmost importance is the recognition that there is inherent value in meaningfully and persistently attempting something that feels interesting and adventurous to you, independent of the end result. Even if you “fail” to achieve your ultimate aim (e.g. lifting a specific weight or sprinting a certain time), you can say “I gave that a serious go and failed at the exact goal I set, but I tolerated that failure, treated my own interest as of importance and had the courage to risk failure and discomfort.” If you can even declare the fact of not hitting the prescribed goal as “failure” in such a straightforward way….

The bottom line is that an awful lot of good should come out of trying anyway. The mythological undertone to that is not being prematurely beaten by a foe, not just being told.

There are many success stories of this amongst people I have worked with but I’d like to use an example from my own exercise activities. I struggled for a long, long time to be able to do pull-ups. What enabled me to finally get them and to keep progressing was the act of betting on myself, in the presence of self-doubt and other psychological barriers, because if something was going to stop me I wanted it to be reality, not my own mind. Unnecessary failure of your own doing is not a great situation to be in. I have no idea how much further I can progress with them, but there’s beauty in that. I’m just going to keep going, keep adding weight and trying new variations, and see where I get to. So if you like the idea of trying something like that yet you just have zero confidence whatsoever or even highly critical internal voices that say “it’s ridiculous to even consider it”, I challenge you to find out the extent to which you can act that belief out of existence. Ironically this also gives the activity in question a deeper meaning beyond your exercise goals, so motivation becomes less of a problem too.

You might read this and think I’m encouraging you to make an enemy of your unhelpful thoughts and feelings, particularly with the use of the word “adversary.” They are adversarial as far as the meaning of “adversarial” means obstructive to the creative process of transformation and renewal - psychological processes that oppose change (even good change). But they need not be treated as things you need to get rid of. Rather, you can consider them as sparring partners that you can use to make you better. After all, the real accomplishment comes from doing things in which these psychic forces make their presence known.

So my message to you is… you can do more than you think, and when faced with something you think you can’t do, the key is to find out what you can do.

Chloe

Psychology of Movement