Choose To Make Your Life An Upward Spiral

Why do some people win all the time while others constantly lose?

The lives of some spiral out of control, and for others it spirals into unimaginable success.

Today we're covering why this is a choice, the specifics of what an upward spiral is and looks like, and the process of reversing a downward spiral into an upward spiral.

Why is this a choice?

To answer this we need to understand inertia, i.e., the tendency for a body at rest to stay at rest, and for a body in motion to stay in motion.

Your life has inertia, and every separate aspect has its own momentum.

The good news is that momentum in any aspect of life is subject to your control and influence.

Every aspect of your life is either anabolic or catabolic, it's growing or shrinking. What determines this is the actions you take in relation to the domain.

For example, the domain of fitness and muscle building would literally and figuratively be anabolic given the individual trained, ate and slept. The magnitude of the momentum in this domain is a result of the quality of the actions, e.g., how long you slept, how much protein and calories you ate, and the quality of training.

The quality of the anabolic activities vs. catabolic ones when measured over time is what determines the direction of momentum.

The direction of your momentum is a choice because it's a function of your daily actions.

What does an upward spiral look like?

Most people can think of several examples of downward spirals that have happened to people they know, or even companies they've worked at.

You've seen just as many upward spirals, but you may not have noticed them. This is because positive and negative, upward and downward are all subjective. There are no upward or downward spirals from the perspective of the universe, only spirals. An upward spiral is only a direction you'd like to go towards.

Selecting the areas of your life you'd like to grow and shrink are equally important to getting to where you want to go.

Winning in a domain requires you to be catabolic in certain domains, and anabolic in others. A highly neglected domain is the mind.

In a study, scientists made a healthy rat fight an incapacitated one. They fixed the fight so the healthy rat was bound to win. The interesting part is in the subsequent fights the rat that had just won kept winning even thought it was fighting even matchups.

This displays a phenomenon that isn't much talked about in society. The more you win, the more likely you are to win in the future. However, losing will make you more prone to losing again in the future.

Winning spikes testosterone, making the winners compete and take more risks. On the other hand, losing spikes cortisol (stress hormone) and causes you to become risk-averse.

Winning and being high on a power hierarchy makes you healthier, but if you're losing and low on the power hierarchy you'll get sick more often and die early.

Winning is part of an upward spiral. It makes your environment and mindset conducive to winning again in the future.

This brings us to a concept popularized by Alex Hormozi & Dr. Kashey: Winners have more ways to reward themselves.

Self-perception and what you perceive in your environment is extremely important to winning. A winner perceives 5 wins along the way whereas the loser is ignorant to those and only sees the finish line.

Using a fitness example for this: A winner can win with every set (every rep even), it's a win to hit a new highest amount of reps, or weight. It's a win to do a clean set even with good technique. Each exercise is a win for him because he knows what the effects will look like. The loser only sees getting through the workout he found online as a win. If he's anything short of that he lost.

The winner can feel good about himself even if he did only half his workout, the loser cannot.

For video editing, the winner can find wins in endless ways: when he gets the colours just right, when he nails the pacing, getting the audio right, etc... While the loser only sees the finished product as a win.

Upward spirals are the alignment of your beliefs, practices, and environment toward success in a certain area (positive momentum).

Find the wins along the way towards your goal. Find the wins in the daily actions. The more wins you find and complete the more your self-perception switches to that of a winner.

Your mind, hormones, and practices all work in concert.

The last piece of the puzzle to creating an upward spiral for a domain is the environment.

If fitness is your goal, make friends at the gym, or go with someone you already know. Hang out with other people who are trying to hit their protein and calorie goals.

In video editing, you can hang out with others who are interested, or more practically change your content diet. Submerse yourself in the educational space online of the people who've achieved the success you aspire to.

Can you change a downward spiral to an upward one?

Imagine you're driving a car and need to U-turn. The fastest possible U-turn is all based on your current speed: If you already have lots of momentum away from where you want to go you need to decelerate before you can reverse the momentum.

It takes work to decelerate and then accelerate in the opposite direction. Yes, you can reverse a spiral you're in, but it takes deliberate work.

Spirals in your life are the result of momentum and an environment which accelerates that momentum. This can be accelerating upward and downward.

The two parts to that definition are: 1) Momentum (positive or negative) 2) An environment that increases the momentum.

A typical example of a downward spiral is with drugs, but it can happen in any area. This is downward assuming we hold the perspective that drugs are negative (maybe you aspire to be a crackhead).

The first time someone tries drugs is when the negative momentum starts. It doesn't necessarily mean they're in a downward spiral, but they meet one of the conditions. As they try more drugs and do them on a regular cadence they've increased their negative momentum. Relative to their old lifestyle their momentum is accelerating in that direction. The spiral starts when their environment becomes conducive to drugs. If they make drug friends and see these people regularly their momentum will only become more negative. Moving in with people like this is the next nail in the coffin, and is how you end up in a crack house.

There is nuance to that and all drugs are not equal, but the concept holds for all of them. It's safe to say most people reading this started downward spiralling towards more alcohol consumption when you became 'drug friends' with other drinkers. Alcohol is socially accepted, but that happens with opioids and any other drug too.

The highest leverage lever you can pull to reverse a spiral is changing your environment. Using the alcohol example, changing your environment could mean cutting off your drinking friends, moving to live on your own, etc... You could also try to brute force your momentum back simply by deciding not to drink, but we've all seen many people try and fail a version of this. A part of the reason it's difficult to quit that way is because their environment still has all the cues for their bad habits. It's socially acceptable (even expected) to indulge in the practice they're trying to quit.

No matter how fucked your situation is: there is always a best move on the chess board. People are often self-defeating because of the beliefs they hold about the world. When you're in a bad situation you might not believe in what's going to get you out, but it's worthwhile to test anyway.

Be a scientist in your own life and test different hypotheses. People are often solely philosophers and deal only in theory for the basis of their convictions.

If you only deal in theory as the basis of your beliefs it typically leads to a narrow and unmalleable thought pattern. Your assumptions of what is true rule out other plausibilities making it nearly impossible to see outside your self-imposed tunnel vision.