The Mind-Body Connection of Living in Your 20s

Why did you make the decision to party all weekend and wake up in a gutter on Sunday morning? Did it make you late on Monday? Oops. Adults like to dismiss these mistakes by saying that our (I say that like 21 isn’t considered an adult, but you know what I mean) brains haven’t fully developed yet, so our decision making is impaired. If that is the case, then why are ‘adults’ giving us the responsibility to feed ourselves, fight for human rights and work dead-end jobs only to feel like a failure of any of the affirms ruined things worry you and cause you to struggle? The disjunct between how you feel and the cloud of emotions in your head can be described as the mind-body connection, which actually has tons to do with how well we can connect our feelings in the lived experience with our perception of the future--all of which have profound physical impacts from our youth and that opportunity.

Jump to:

• The MindxBody Connection

• Living Examples: Is a CEOs Physical Fitness and Indicator of Their Success?

The MindxBody Connection

Starting out, I had an experiential anvil fall on my head—I’m gonna be waking up, sitting, and commuting to work for the foreseeable rest of my life. Holy freaking Pitt!

I didn’t realize I needed an ample dose of Jay’s therapy until I read this: “they feel like fakes because they managed to get good jobs yet cannot calm themselves down at work” (112). The feeling of dead-endlessness and restlessness at the possibility of life passing you by is something they no one tells you about when starting on your first day, but it’s natural! Heck, you probably got your hopes up with every single internship and job application that you sent off to a different possibility. Your future could have looked any which way and now you’re being expected to chuck all of your eggs into a single belief basket and go all in? That feeling is unrealistic, especially when you’ve been told your whole life to cast a wide net. Really corporate America? Really?

If you begin to feel this way at all, I recommend Jay’s suggestions on how to cope, because I know how much they would have helped me. Once you graduate and are swimming around in your 20s, you should be offering your brain different fastest of life to see what it does with them. I think of it like going to Five Guys, the burger chain:

You walk in and head straight to the counter where you place your order. Returning to your table, you grab a scoop full of peanuts and your milkshake with the Masahiro cherry sitting on top. Quickly cracking your peanuts, you’ve finished them. Either you get up for more and risk spoiling your food, or you can learn how to tie the stem of the cherry in your mouth, or opt for option number three—making helmets for straws with your peanut shells. Each of these options, while potentially obtuse present an opportunity for your brain to show you what it can do. You might find that in those peanut shells is an idea for a fabric texture, or a helmet design. Let your mind play with your options and believe in yourself enough to see where it takes you.

Being in the office at your nine-to-five can feel akin to taking a racehorse, chopping off its legs and asking it to eat hay all day. I went from managing two organizations, six classes, a thesis, dating and going to the gym daily to now being expected to sit at s desk and respond to emails as they come in. That’s not what I was trained for, or expecting really! My previous job experience consisted of companies attempting to woo me with swag and internship projects, but now it feels like the world has forgotten me as soon as they plopped me at my desk! By mom, see you after school!

Sometimes the days can get exhausting, especially at the beginning. I police what I talk about so I can mitigate which parts of my personality are considered professional. I will have no ability to stray from these people for the foreseeable future without risking livelihood or survival I want this job. I want to grow, so I change.

Yet, “every day, I feel like I’m going to get fired” (119). I have never had a job like this before. I’ve never been fired! What does that even mean? Do I get a nice large lump sum when they let me go? Severance package? But nobody told me that living in the feeling of fear starting out is “right where [you] need to be. Twenty something’s who don’t feel anxious and incompetent at work are usually overconfident or underemployed” (119).

But that anxiety doesn’t help things when you’re zipping around during your first week, attempting to absorb and remember everything. You’re bound to make mistakes. As some wise person said, “the art of being wise is knowing what to overlook” (121). And believe me, sometimes there can be a lot to overlook.

On my third day of work, I was moving too quickly wanting to go home. I hadn’t yet learned or become aware of the cultural practice of removing edits from worked item drafts before sending them up the chain of command. To me, common sense said that leaving revisions would allow the higher ups to read my thought process and understand the changes. That’s how a professor would have seen it. Show your work, they say. Welp, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“You cannot do that.” “I already sent it. I won’t do it next time.” Crap. Staring at a problem that you can’t fix and feeling the heat of shame and embarrassment rise in your face really has a way of breaking you down. I went home and cried. Three days on the job and I felt like it was over. Confidence was shit. How could I, Miss-Fancy-Degree have missed that?

Okay, let’s backtrack a little here. Was an email the worst thing? Was a coworker’s reaction the worst? Was the mistake even that bad? No, not really, but when you’ve been trying so hard to do things right, the world can feel cruel.

The next morning, I got into work terrified of myself and what I would find when I opened Outlook. Sure enough, there, at the top of my inbox was a response to the mistake email. “Looks good. Thanks!” When I tell you I about died right on the spot. All of the worrying probably couldn’t have been helped, but hearing that I needed a perpetual perspective shift absolutely could have. And moving forward, that will be my first piece of advice to myself and you. Allow yourself the grace of understanding that most mistakes are for your learning. Reading this blog now is growth to save you later on.

That experience is what Jay calls a “growth mindset”, or the perception that people actively change by accepting that failure is an opportunity to get better, exhibit greater resiliency and move toward success. She gives the proof of this concept by comparing it to spending 10,000 hours toward mastery (aka 416 days or five years on the job). You are going to suck at your job in the beginning. It is likely that you’ll suck at it for a while. But that sucking is absolutely not an excuse to stop trying.

Feeling better about sucking doesn’t come from packing your bags and giving up. It comes from investing in the suck until the suck sucks less. I’m not going to lie to you—for the first three weeks of living on my own and working, I cried probably 2-3 times per week. I was lonely and the days were long. I grew unmotivated, stagnant, unmotivated, and overworked. My health was crap. But it sucked to suck, so I got myself to work each day with a smile on my face and got through it. How? You might ask. I used my lowest low to reevaluate. I decided to reach up from my low to new heights, higher than my childhood dreams and set goals so lofty that they reframed and reprogrammed my struggle, inspiring me to get back at it. This is a psychological truth, apparently as well: “increased goal setting in the twenties led to greater purpose, mastery, agency and well-being in the thirties” (134). Swap notes with the besties, feel it out. Regroup, then get back to work smarter.

T’s Takeaways

I’m terrified of missing moments—moments of love, happiness, friendship, growth, time. I had been living with what Jay diagnoses as the “Present Bias” aka discounting the future of tomorrow for the rewards of today (145). Jay’s advice directly contradicts something that another self-help author, Oliver Burkeman says in Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. Burkeman says to live every second for the current moment, because you only have a limited time, less than 4,000 hours, to do so. Slow down, he says, and stop spending every moment living for the next. But I think that both their trains are converging at the same station of thought: you need to enjoy the process that leads you toward the goals that over aim where you’ll go, so that once you reach a circumstance to reflect, no minute will have felt wasted.

So, write the last sentence first. Jay says to decrease the distance between you and your dreams is to make them concrete. I say but the largest chunk of life that you can. You are exactly where you’re supposed to be. Take the tools at your disposal and write the book of your life, then write another one and another. Never stop living toward the next moment now! Yuh have no idea the things that will turn out for you, but you can sure as hell make them with your dreams. You don’t know which obstacles you’ll stub your toes on, but without walking through some darkness, you’ll never open the fridge of opportunities unless you open it.

Living Examples: Is a CEOs Physical Fitness and Indicator of Their Success?

Why is it that all of the rich successful CEOs look spry and active? For some, working out might be the only way to release enough stress to cope. For others, like Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, staying active is an essential part of their brand.

When considering the mindxbody connection, I took a side route to ask the question as to why so many of our society's 'most successful' people are actually in tremendous shape. Let's see what each of them has to say about it, along with fun paparazzi pictures of them looking out of it while working out.

Mark Zuckerburg

According to GQ, Facebook's CEO runs three times per week. Zuckerburg believes that “Staying in shape is very important. Doing anything well requires energy, and you just have a lot more energy when you’re fit." Greater energy to leverage, greater results. We see you, big guy.

Image: The Guardian

Another note from Mr. Zuckerburg: Stay Hydrated.

Image: BBC

Elon Musk

Some days, you might wish that the work wasn't so hard. For some incredibly successful CEOs, working out just really isn't the key to their success. Take Elon, for example.

“To be totally frank, I wouldn’t exercise at all if I could,” Musk said. “I prefer not to exercise.”

Image: Reuters

Jack Dorsey, Ex-Twitter CEO

On perhaps the less extreme, some CEOs take wholistic approaches to maintaining their physicality.

According to the Podcast "Ben Greenfield Fitness, he starts the day with a hydrotherapy routine, where he alternates between sitting in a 220-degree sauna for 15 minutes and a 37-degree ice bath for 2 minutes. He does this cycle three times. For exercise, he walks to work and also regularly does a 7-minute high-intensity interval training workout."

Image: East-Westicism - Jack Dorsey

No seriously, why do they have these insane routines?

In my opinion, the fitness craze among high-performing CEOs represents the personality that they've crafted. Stress and high intensity seem to live hand-in-hand for these specific gentlemen, so I think that the endurance of running companies has simply forced them to ask intensity from their bodies.

While the goal of this section was a humorous relief from the impending doom of your thirties, I think that the opportunities of one's youth might be a great place to start when building a strong mindxbody connection for later. Teaching your body to manage stress in a way that is sustainable, supportive and freeing can be incredibly vital to success.