The Weather Inside Us

The same heart, two stories

Two rowers sit at the start of a race. Same crew, same training, same boat. Both hearts are going faster than they should be at rest. Both have a slightly hollow stomach and hands that want to grip harder than they need to.

One of them reads it as the engine warming up. Good. I’m ready. Here it comes. The other reads exactly the same sensations as a warning. Something’s wrong. I’m not ready. I’m going to be the one who lets them down.

Nothing in their bodies tells them apart. The difference is the story each one is telling about the body. And once the race begins, those different interpretations may shape where each rower’s attention goes — toward the work in front of them, or toward everything that might go wrong.

The last article ended on a door that sticks. You can have the skill, the right challenge, clear goals, honest feedback and a quiet hour, and still not be able to reach what you know. This article is about why. My short answer, after forty years in boats and a working life spent with people in recovery, is that the architecture is only half the building. The other half is the weather inside us.

Emotion is not the enemy

Most performance advice treats emotion as interference. Calm down. Get your head right. Don’t let it get to you. The ideal, apparently, is a person with the feelings removed.

I have never believed that, and the rowing is why. Over coffee after an early Thursday practice, two friends from the crew and I tried to work out why a sport that looks so mechanical from the outside is so emotional on the inside. The training is brutal and the sacrifice is real. Seat decisions land on old places — the not-measuring-up places most of us carry from long before we ever sat in a boat. And the belonging that comes from suffering together is as strong as anything I have known. My second wife once told me she was tired of hearing me complain about rowing. I explained that complaining is part of the sport. We quit every day and start up again the next day.

That conversation is where SportsFlow began, and its conclusion has not changed. The problem was never the emotions. It was what we did with them. How much we feel is usually in direct relationship to how much we have put in and how much we care. A crew that feels nothing has usually stopped caring about the boat.

No emotion is inherently bad. Fear points at something that matters. Frustration says an approach is not working. Doubt asks whether we are ready. The trouble starts when a signal stops being information and starts being an order.

Arousal is not a verdict

Psychologists have spent decades separating two things that feel identical from the inside: the body’s arousal, and the meaning we give it.

Richard Lazarus called the meaning-making part appraisal. Sport psychologists later built it into what they call the challenge and threat states. In a 2009 model, Marc Jones and colleagues described the same moment going two ways. When an athlete judges that their resources can meet the demand, they tend toward a challenge state. When they judge that the demand exceeds what they have, they tend toward threat. The pounding heart is common to both. What follows is not.

Real people are messier than two columns. The physical and psychological patterns vary from person to person, and most hard moments hold some of each. But the distinction is useful, and several experiments suggest the reading can be shifted. In a 2010 study, Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues told students before a practice graduate-school exam that the arousal they felt could actually help them perform. Those students scored better on the math section than students who were told nothing. In 2014 the Harvard researcher Alison Wood Brooks asked people facing karaoke, public speaking and timed math to say one sentence out loud first. Those who said I am excited performed better than those who said I am calm.

That last finding has always made me smile. Telling an anxious person to calm down asks them to drive a fast car to a dead stop. Telling them they are excited asks only for a change of lane. The body is already going fast. The question is where it is pointed.

A caution belongs here. These are real effects, but they are modest, and they are not magic words. A reframe works best when it is close enough to the truth to be believed. If you are genuinely underprepared, no sentence will turn threat into challenge, and it shouldn’t.

Where anxiety takes attention

If emotion matters to flow, it matters mostly through attention.

The psychologist Michael Eysenck and colleagues formalized this in 2007 as attentional control theory. Attention, they argued, is pulled by two systems: one we steer by our goals, and one that is grabbed by whatever seems urgent or threatening. Anxiety tips the balance toward the second. It makes it harder to filter out distractions and harder to stop scanning for danger. Interestingly, it often damages efficiency more than outcome. Anxious people frequently still get the job done. They just spend far more effort doing it.

That is what the second rower feels like from the inside. Anxiety does not usually make us forget how to row. It hands half our attention to a lookout on the bow who is scanning for every way this could go wrong, and leaves the other half to do the rowing. The boat still moves. It just takes twice the work, and flow, which needs attention whole, does not come.

Add the research from the first article, on reinvestment and explicit monitoring, and the picture is complete. Under threat, experts tend to reach for conscious control of movements that run better on their own. Fear narrows the lens; then it picks up the clipboard.

Flow does not require an empty mind. It requires attention available to the task. Every moment spent monitoring whether we are failing, how we appear, or whether we are confident enough is a moment of attention no longer fully available to what we are doing. The paradox is that trying to protect our performance can become one of the things that interrupts it.

Doubt, and the rooms where effort cannot help

I have said elsewhere that racing has never been a place of great anxiety for me. Once you have practiced something a thousand times, you learn that you can only prepare the conditions, not the outcome. The water is familiar and effort usually counts for something.

Doubt finds me somewhere else. The places it has done its best work are professional, not athletic: presenting to investors, where the result sits entirely in someone else’s hands and all I can do is present the material. On the water, if I pull harder, the hull tells me whether it mattered. In that room nothing comes back until it is over.

I have long believed that doubt can kill a performance in real time. It is not on the list of emotions I measure in SportsFlow, because I cannot measure it well. But I can watch what it does. Not all doubt is the enemy. Useful doubt asks a question and waits for an answer: am I ready for this? It sends us back to prepare. Destructive doubt asks the same question again and again, even after the work has begun, and every asking takes attention away from the work. It becomes threat appraisal on a loop.

The rooms where it bites hardest share a feature. They are the ones where effort has nowhere to go. In sport, when you are frightened, you can at least pull. In a pitch, an interview, a hard conversation, a diagnosis you are waiting on, the energy that fear produces has no task to spend itself on, so it turns inward. If you have ever been more nervous before a meeting than before a race, this is probably why.

When confidence turns rigid

It would be easy to conclude that the answer is confidence. It is part of the answer, and the challenge-and-threat research suggests why: believing you have the resources makes challenge more likely. But confidence has its own failure, and I have watched it in boats and boardrooms.

Confidence that has become certainty stops listening. The crew that “knows” it is the fastest boat on the water quits reading the water. The founder who is sure of the pitch stops hearing the question underneath the investor’s question. Real confidence is not the belief that it will go well. It is the belief that you can respond to whatever happens. One is a prediction. The other is a skill.

This is my observation more than a research finding, and I offer it that way. But it squares with everything else here. Flow needs attention that is fully on the task and still open to it. Fear closes the lens on danger. Overconfidence closes it on the plan. Either way, the hull is talking and nobody is listening.

Hold it, don’t hide it

So what do we do with the weather?

The tempting answer is to push it down. Get on with it. Don’t show it. And for a few minutes at a time, that can work. But the research on suppression is not encouraging as a way of life. In a 2003 series of studies, James Gross and Oliver John found that people who habitually suppress their emotions tend to experience less positive emotion and more negative emotion, have worse relationships and lower well-being than people who habitually reappraise. Holding a door shut is itself a job, and it runs in the background whether you notice it or not. These are findings about habitual patterns. Setting a feeling aside for a few minutes to get through a race or a meeting is a different thing, and can be perfectly sensible.

The alternative is not to wallow, and it is not to manage feelings like a project. In the book I am finishing on emotions, Keep the Signal, the word I use is hold. You let the feeling be there. You name it. You let it tell you what it has to tell you. Then you decide what to do, which is not always what it suggests.

Naming turns out to do more than it sounds like it should. In a 2007 brain-imaging study, Matthew Lieberman and colleagues found that simply putting a feeling into words — labeling an emotional image as “angry” or “afraid” — reduced activity in the amygdala, a region involved in alarm. This does not mean that naming a feeling automatically resolves it. But it suggests that putting experience into words can change how the brain responds to emotionally charged information. Several wisdom traditions have long recommended something like naming what we feel. They were not studying the amygdala, and the two are not necessarily describing the same thing, but they point in a similar direction.

That is the whole idea behind the phrase I have been using in this series: keep the signal, decline the instruction. Fear says the moment matters. That is useful. Fear also says freeze, or flee, or grip harder. You can keep the first message and decline the second.

What to make of the instruments

Because I build tools that measure people, I owe readers one more caution. It is tempting to think a watch can tell you whether you are ready. Heart rate variability, for instance, is a useful physiological signal, and I use it. But it is shaped by sleep, illness, training load, caffeine, hydration and a dozen other things. It is not a readout of your emotional state, and it is certainly not a flow detector. Instruments can tell you about the body. Only you can tell what story you are telling about it.