If you’ve ever attended a Tony Robbins event, or ever read a personal development book or blog, you’ve probably heard variations of “happiness/passion/confidence/enthusiasm/willpower/etc. is like a muscle.”
Whenever a personal development guru talks about passion, enthusiasm, or even happiness, there is usually a clear directive that if you aren’t feeling these emotions, you can build them consciously with effort and practice–just like you can build a muscle. By training one’s emotions in this way, you can have more of the desired emotional experience.
Along with this, there is also usually the understanding that bigger is better–that more passion, more enthusiasm, more confidence, and more happiness is always, in every context, better than the alternative.
I call this idea “emotional bodybuilding.” Like physical bodybuilding, the conscious inflation of one’s emotions without limit or regard for other factors tends to lead to strong negative side-effects, leading us farther and farther away from the freedom and connection we are seeking by doing so.
The History of Bodybuilding and the Inflation of Self
Physical bodybuilding emerged out of the 1900’s physical culture movement, and rapidly became about maximizing muscle size at any cost. Physical Culture was the name for the modern exercise movement. Physical culture was the first real modern exercise that wasn’t explicitly for sporting purposes, emerging out of industrial society where for the first time, people did not have to use their bodies much for either finding or growing food.
Exercises like pushups, pullups, isometrics, and various calisthenics were sold in mail-order courses before the postal service made shipping of exercise equipment feasible, and before the modern gym was created. Most courses were aimed at young men, had chapters on sunlight, morality, and modest but holistic living, and advocated for a variety of movements as well as running and playing several sports. (For fascinating examples of such mail-order courses, check out the great website Sandow & the Golden Age of Iron Men.) Strongmen of the 1900’s competed in carnivals and at fairs, showing off their hand-balancing skills and amazing full-body strength feats, bending railroad spikes and tearing phone books in half with their bare hands.
Most early 20th century strongmen would be considered puny by today’s NFL standards, and tiny, soft dwarfs by modern bodybuilding standards. Here is a comparison–Charles Atlas in the 1920’s on the left (the ideal physique of the strongman of the age) vs. Ronnie Coleman of the late 20th century on the right. But very few bodybuilders or NFL linemen could actually pull off the feats of strength of the strongmen either, which often included a combination of strength, agility, and endurance, as well as a little stage magic, utilizing trickery and good leverage.
Later, lightweight exercise equipment was developed: chest expanders built of steel and other strange devices. Towards the late 20th century, weights became wide-spread enough to create a subculture of bodybuilders and weightlifters, popularized in movies like Pumping Iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the 1970’s when Pumping Iron came out, jogging and aerobics were the most popular forms of exercise, and the ideal man was a thin, tight-pants wearing rocker. In the movie, there is a scene where all these enormous bodybuilders are eating breakfast at a restaurant, ordering whole steaks and a dozen eggs each, and the people around them have these shocked and confused looks on their faces. Bodybuilders were clearly seen as freaks of nature at the time. Nowadays, while few men aspire to be as enormous as Ronnie Coleman, every men’s magazine has on the cover a man with larger, more defined muscles than Charles Atlas, with clearly defined and hairless washboard abdominals–a physique greatly influenced by bodybuilding workout methods and bodybuilding’s influence on culture.
Bodybuilding, originating from the wholistic physical cultural movement, has come to specialize in muscular size, maximizing just one variable in an ecology of health and fitness. The reason why every athlete doesn’t look like Ronnie Coleman is because enormous muscular size is actually quite useless for most human activities. Bodybuilding is the equivalent of driving a monster truck to the grocery store–it’s far too much power and size for the task, and obviously there to maximize attention through maximizing size.
The reason I went into so much detail about the history of bodybuilding is because of the prevalence of the emotional bodybuilding metaphor in personal development. Bodybuilding should rightly be viewed as a cancerous growth that once represented health but has degraded so far into drug use, narcissism, and excess that now is it commonplace for bodybuilders to have heart failure on stage due to the extreme dieting pre-competition. Metaphors of building muscular size without due respect to other factors of wholistic health and fitness will fall prey to similar errors of imbalance.
Specifically, maximizing muscular size is a direct example of inflating the self. We tend to identify with our bodies, so the larger and stronger our bodies, the larger and stronger are our selves. By cultivating this ego (self) inflation, we hope to gain some kind of liberation, some existential freedom…but this quest actually sends us in the opposite direction, alienating us even more from others by increasing our difference, our freakiness, our separation.
A Movement Towards Wholeness
Many modern fitness experts on the cutting edge like Scott Sonnon, Pavel “Kettlebell” Tsatsouline, John Peterson, Matt Furey, and others are bringing back (or coming up with new) wholistic understandings of health, putting muscle back into it’s place within the system of balanced human functioning. Often this is done by reconnecting with the roots of the Physical Culture movement.
Similarly, a reconnection with wholeness is needed in personal development. Emotional bodybuilding–whether done through repetitive affirmations, intense visualization (the main technique in Think and Grow Rich and The Secret), “power moves” (violent, personalized body movements from Tony Robbins to shock your physiology into a fight/flight response Robbins calls “passion”), or simply “pumping yourself up”–is a way of cultivating ego inflation.
Cultivating ego inflation is another way of saying:
- training yourself to be more self-centered
- consciously working on increasing your egocentric orientation
- purposely choosing to be more selfish (not in the Ayn Rand sense, but in the common usage)
- alienating one’s self from others on purpose
Most people engaged in cultivating ego inflation do not understand that this is what they are doing. Almost everyone values being selfless, kind, and generous to some extent–especially people interested in personal development–but the very emotional bodybuilding methods of personal development work counter to these values. For example, many people claim to be both into Tony Robbins and Eckhart Tolle, which is completely contradictory when you understand that Robbins provides effective methods for inflating the ego and Tolle for dissolving it!
Cultivating ego inflation should be contrasted with developing a healthy and accurate self-concept. This is like putting muscular size back into it’s place within the ecosystem of health and fitness. Contrary to what some spiritual teachers say, I think ego (or the sense of self) is not necessarily a problem when it is at it’s proper size and functioning appropriately. Spiritual realization ideally leads to this kind of mature self-concept, as when the sense of self is seen to not have absolute permanence, one can lighten up and just be one’s ordinary, flawed self. (The best book I’ve ever seen by far on practical self-concept change is Steve Andreas’ Transforming Your Self. Some NLP background is helpful, but some beginners find it accessible.)
By contrast, most affirmations and visualizations are specifically instructed to be created such that they are false and contradict present reality! For example, if you are not feeling confident, instead of asking whether you could use more skills in some area, you are instructed to affirm again and again, “I am totally confident!” This could range from saying it in a confident tone of voice, to literally screaming this phrase again and again, depending on the level of emotional bodybuilding the personal development guru advocates.
Much better would be to affirm, “I can learn what I need to learn to be competent” or something similar, which creates the opportunity to do something, rather than just be or feel something contrary to the facts, thus amplifying inner conflict.
Emotional bodybuilding, or cultivating ego inflation, leads to similar kinds of excess and imbalance as physical bodybuilding. When we pump ourselves up, we can find a kind of false power in overpowering others. We find that we can sell anything to anyone…until they come down from their contact high. It also becomes taxing to maintain this inflation–just as more and more protein and steroids and HGH are needed to keep those enormously inflated muscles from catabolizing, we find we need more and more achievement, fame, power, coffee, and even adrenaline to keep our enormous personas inflated to the maximum.
It is a tremendous gift when inflation fails us–when we develop chronic fatigue, when our business fails, when our partner divorces us–and our bubble is popped. Like a balloon let loose, we fizzle and spurt until landing unceremoniously on the ground, humbled, ordinary again. From this place of humility, we can find wholeness again in ordinary strength, authentic emotions, and even find the right times and places for acts of conscious willpower. Life becomes much easier when we stop expending so much time, effort, and energy on inflating our bodies and emotions. We find that we can relate to all beings’ pain as well as joy. We realize health, happiness, joy and peace are our true nature, and that there is nothing we need to do or achieve in order to experience these states in an ongoing way. Ordinary moments become magical (not just the intense breakthroughs), as we mindfully enjoy each breath, each sight, each sound. Letting go of the desire for anything to be other than it is, we find that we have a natural desire to act out of compassion, and this action can flow more effortlessly than we thought possible….