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Stay hyper focused on the present and achieve a flow state with your work. Do this for a prolonged period of time and you can accomplish great things. But, ev
by Dowwie 9y ago
Stay hyper focused on the present and achieve a flow state with your work. Do this for a prolonged period of time and you can accomplish great things. But, eventually you'll return to reality and find that your main skill to cope with anxiety is impractical in that it requires complete, devoted focus on a task at hand -- essentially putting issues on the back burner but never really taking them off.
It seems like Phelps had his moment of reckoning with his back burner issues in 2012 but he seems to have developed more emotional skills to deal with them. Good for him!
- zxcmx 9y agoYep, and for the millions of people who can't statistically be outliers we have to figure out how to live with being normal. That means living with not being rich or famous or actually being particularly good at anything on a global scale. Phelps was supported by a society that brought him burritos and clean towels and factory workers who made swimming caps and if he has stuff to teach all of us regular people about depression I think that's good to hear.
- shoover 9y agoInteresting connection to apply flow to this issue and point out drawbacks from not reckoning with the things not focused on. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about applying flow to much more than one’s main skill, such as personal relationships and free time. The back burner should be maintained using the primary skill of achieving flow state. Sertillanges is another writer who wrote about setting the stage for focused work, and for him maintaining health in basic life areas (diet, exercise, spiritual exercise) was a given to support the main work.