The Takeaway on Extraordinary Experiences
Key Points:
1. Life is a series of pushing yourself, recovering, and then improving - whether climbing a mountain and adapting to high altitude, or finishing a hectic work project where you pushed out of your comfort zone - the same principles apply.
2. By working when we need to work and resting when we need to rest, we can push ourselves to the edge of our potential and truly experience what life has to offer.
“The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.”
Remember at the beginning of this module when I told you about climbing the volcano in the middle of the night and seeing the stars? Well, that successful summit almost didn’t happen.
Just a few days before, my team was training on the mountain when suddenly the temperature dropped, clouds blocked the sun, and the atmospheric pressure fell. As a result, we all developed altitude sickness. We decided to get off the mountain as quickly as possible.
Descending a mountain while nauseous, dizzy, and with a blinding headache is not easy or fun. I measured my blood oxygen saturation at 66%. When healthy humans are at rest at sea level, blood oxygen levels are expected to be at 99 to 100%. When athletes are in competition, their levels can drop as low as 85%. People who are having lung or heart problems may also experience low levels, and any value below 85% usually triggers a visit to the emergency room. So, to put it mildly, we were having a hard time.
A few hours later, we were all safely back at our lodge at the base of the mountain to rest and recover. As physiologists, we measure ourselves constantly, and we had brought equipment with us to track our health and performance. Over the next few days, we noticed interesting changes in our bodies after that brutal experience: they started to adapt. We built new red blood cells and our hemoglobin levels jumped. Our muscles healed and we felt stronger. Our VO2 max (a technical term for maximal aerobic capacity or maximum endurance capacity) increased, which meant that our entire oxygen transport system (responsible for taking oxygen out of the air and transferring it into our muscles and brain) improved dramatically.
The physical, mental, and emotional struggle we experienced in low oxygen just a few days before had stimulated our bodies and brains to change—for the better and fast. And that adaptation happened while we were resting after the training climb. We trained hard, we rested, and then we got better.
A few days later when we attempted the summit for the last time, our bodies were able to handle the atmospheric pressure changes, the cold, the physical strain of climbing up ice, and the mental stress of pushing ourselves to the limit. All of this set the stage for the extraordinary experience of being the closest humans to the stars!
By doing less, we accomplished more and experienced the limits of what life has to offer when we paused to see the universe unfold above our heads. At its most fundamental, that is what this program is about. I hope that I have helped you slow down so that you can experience all the wonder, joy, and awe that life has to offer.
Today’s Call to Action: Start, Stop, Continue
Congratulations, you’re completed the Embrace the Extraordinary module! Do you have any habits or routines that you’d like to start to help you get into a gamma brainwave state and enter into flow and peak experience? Use the Start, Stop, Continue exercise on page 36 of the Rest, Refocus, Recharge Workbook.
Today’s Bonus Video & Podcast
As a thank you, click Here for a bonus video of Greg discussing radical authenticity. To close off the module on Embracing the Extraordinary, check out this podcast with motivational speaker Chris Norton Here for an incredibly inspirational story of how he defied the odds and turned his life around after a horrible football injury.
The information and advice provided in this program is intended to assist you with improving your performance, as well as your general health. It is not intended and should not be used in place of advice from your own physician or for treatment or diagnosis of any specific health issue. By participating in this program you acknowledge that undertaking any new health, diet and/or exercise regime involves certain inherent risks, that you assume such risks, and that you release Wells Performance Inc. from any responsibility or claim relating to such participation.