Fighting the Tape
When we stop fighting ourselves, that is where the magic happens.
I remember when we had our first child. It was 17 years ago, we were living in Brooklyn, and early on he was not a great sleeper.
I used to walk him around Park Slope and Prospect Park on my chest in the Baby Bjorn for hours so he would sleep. It was kinda like rucking lol.
You’d think that would have helped me get into pretty good shape, and maybe it helped to a degree, but for the most part I was not getting healthier.
I was in this pattern of taking three steps forward and two steps back and sometimes two steps forward and four steps back.
Even though I was doing one really healthy thing, I was doing other things like drinking too much, smoking, and eating too much half fried chicken pork fried rice from the Chinese delivery joint on 5th Avenue.
I was acting in opposite directions simultaneously. I was working against myself and going nowhere as a result.
I was fighting the tape.
Fighting the Tape
If you do not follow markets, you might not be aware of the term Fighting the Tape.
I think of it now as a good metaphor, because I am seeing a ton of it in the stock market presently. There is so much negativity in the world and many market participants are extremely negative on stocks.
Professional and retail investors alike are shorting the indices (betting on them to go down) or they are way underinvested.
My pal JC tells me that the amount of money in money markets and therefore not in stocks is approaching $6 trillion and that another $73B came into cash just last week!
These are historic money flows and yet the market is rising.
When the market is going up like crazy and just keeps going up and investors are way underinvested or even trying to bet against the market.
That is Fighting the Tape.
I see it in real-time on Stocktwits, the largest stock market social network in the world. Here’s a string of negative messages I just screenshotted off the site after searching for about two seconds.
Holism
Every part of the human body and every aspect of the human experience is intricately intertwined.
You can’t separate any one part out. It is impossible to try to isolate one system in any human or animal without context of the larger system.
We like to think about it all neatly compartmentalizable and we talk about things like the nervous system or emotions or blood pressure or behavior but it's all interconnected.
Here is but one example. The respiratory, circulatory, and muscular systems interoperate in a glorious inseparable choreography. We breathe Oxygen into our lungs where it is passed along to the blood which carries it to the muscles that use it to move our bodies. Glorious inseparable choreography.
I touched on this in last week’s newsletter post called 20 Timeless Truths of Health and Wellbeing,
This is holism and we are all holists by nature.
How we eat affects how we sleep. How we sleep affects how we feel. How we feel affects how we perform. Etc etc ad infinitum.
So we want to get all the parts of us moving in the same direction.
Laying Down the Gloves
Just as I see a lot of people fighting the tape now in the stock market, I see the exact same thing going on with people’s health and wellbeing.
I know it when I see it because I went through it myself as I mentioned above.
People are working out like crazy but then they are drinking too much and/or smoking too much pot. They’re doing tons of cardio and then eating garbage.
Two steps forward, two steps back. They are fighting the tape.
It’s a process and it takes time, but we want to get as many systems as possible that make up the one whole that is you, moving in the same direction.
It might take years. I’m still working on my sleep for example and will continue to do so well into 2024 - but that is where the magic happens gradually over time - when we lay down the gloves and stop fighting the tape.
I am running a Workshop Series called Crushing 2024 & Beyond that begins in December. It will be excellent. If you have made false starts or yoyo’d in your health journey but you want to succeed this time around, this is for you.
Keep us posted on potential sleep solutions.