There is no plateau. Either keep the pressure on or allow weakness to enter. These are the choices.
Metaphor: airplane. Keep the enjoined running or glide. Glide sounds fun until you realize that glide means go down. Maybe the plane loses altitude slowly, or maybe it glides like a rock. If you want to get somewhere, though, power on and careful navigation.
The metaphor is misleading, though. It’s not a matter of adding energy on the one hand and a void of energy on the other. In life, it’s a tide. Either you are consistently adding energy to your life or sloth and decay seeps in.
Maybe the better metaphor is a leaky boat: if you aren’t pumping all the time the leaks will sink you.
Whatever. There is no point to going to extremes with metaphors, or to seeking analogies in physics and the idea of entropy. Figures of speech illustrate. They don’t prove.
Either I run every day or weakness (of mind) seeps in and starts to poison my resolve. Weakness seeps into my muscles, too. But it’s 99% the mental weakness that I care about.
Same thing in life. I’m up at 5:30 am now because the household has started to join me at being awake at 6:30 am so if I want time to read and write, I need to get up early.
How do I train my mind to resist weakness and the subtle (but plausible! and persuasive!) self-talk that tells me to not do?
First. Recognize it. The thoughts that tell me to not do something are the dangerous thoughts. The thoughts to do something are my friends. Yes, be careful to not overdo. That’s my primary flaw at the moment. I need to find the balance so I don’t have a giant traffic jam of things in my life. Throughput. Get that.
Example. Running. The brain says don’t overtrain. Be careful! Listen, brain. I’m so far from overtraining that we are in different time zones. Doing 4 miles instead of 6 is not a prudent guard against overtraining. It’s laziness. It’s weakness entering the body.
Second. Reject weakness when recognized and train yourself. Don’t just resist temptation. Counterbalance it with positive counteraction. The brain concedes a 10k and you pace it off? It says “well if your route leaves you a little ways from home you can just walk back because you did your 10k, after all.” Fuck you, brain. Run it out. All the way.
Don’t resist evil with absence of evil. Resist evil with good. Positive barometric pressure in your thoughts will keep weakness at bay.
It’s true in physical conditioning and it’s true with peace of mind. Anderson would say “it’s easy to do but it’s hard to keep doing.” So true, for mindset, for everything.
The Carpenter: “pray without ceasing.” So true. If you look at prayer as a mindset thing (as I do) the path is clear: keep talking to God. By keeping that conversation going, you don’t leave a void in your head for destructive self-talk.
And for me, the easiest way to keep talking to God is to appreciate everything around me. Gratitude.