Flow State: Quiet The Lizard

The Lizard Brain (the oldest part of our 3-part brain) is in charge of survival instincts and basic primal instinctual shit like fucking and breathing and meeting our needs. It’s called Lizard Brain because dinosaurs invented this part (the brain stem, cerebellum and basal ganglia) and they were big lizards who were super good at survival except for, obviously, in the face of asteroids which tbh doesn’t feel fair to shade them for sleeping on the prospect of intergalactic impact damage on that scale and subsequent nuclear winters. Anyway, survival instincts are great and have a ton of utility but if you’re just LARPing survival in a packraft with an ATB mounted to the bow on a class IV rapid several hundreds miles from cell service FREEZING UP or panicing is not cute and like, actually, kinda counterintuitive to the whole survival thing.

So the next time you wanna drop in on something real big with commitment and no run-out and it’s exciting but you’re also spooked do this…

Part One: Breath—for the last 30 seconds you’ve been holding your breath or hyperventilating. STOP IT.

Part Two: Focus—game face, bro. See what’s immediately in front of you and nothing else. The rest is noise.

Part Three: Act—duuuuuuuuuuuuuude DON’T THINK JUST MOVE GO SEND DROP NOW ACT ACT ACT STOP THIIIIINKING!