The Thermostat in Your Brain: Pushing Past Your Limits with Nick Thompson (#276)

Speaker 2 We all hit walls in work, in life, in our own minds. But what if those walls aren't real?

Speaker 2 What if fatigue, fear, and even failure are less about our limits and more about what we believe our limits to be?

Speaker 2 How can we push past our mental limits and see what's really possible?

Speaker 3 Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Toman and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists.

Speaker 3 Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better.

Speaker 2 Today I'm excited to be with Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and author of The Running Ground.

Speaker 2 Nick has led two of the most respected media brands in the world, first as editor-in-chief of Wired and now as CEO of The Atlantic.

Speaker 2 He's also an accomplished marathoner and ultra-marathoner who spent years exploring how the mind shapes effort and what pushing past limits on the road can teach us about persistence and life itself.

Speaker 2 Nick, welcome to Three Takeaways.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm so happy to be here, Lynn. Thanks for inviting me on.

Speaker 3 It is my pleasure.

Speaker 2 Nick, I loved your book. I honestly didn't know what to expect, but I really did.
I love how you turn a physical act into life lessons.

Speaker 1 Great. That was the goal.
The goal is that there's something in there for everyone, not just runners.

Speaker 2 You've written a lot about endurance and how our brains sometimes slow us down long before our bodies truly need to, that fatigue can be a kind of protective illusion. How did you discover that?

Speaker 2 And how does that change the way you think about limits and potential?

Speaker 1 It's a theory that has been circulating in the running world for 10, 15 years. And the idea is that if you look at how fatigue works in running, there's some peculiar things, right?

Speaker 1 One is that at the end of a race, all your pain kind of goes away. All these things that have been nagging you disappear.

Speaker 1 And then you finish the race and the sort of the very strange pain you had in your hamstring might be gone. Secondly, there have been some interesting studies where you take athletes and

Speaker 1 you explain that they have a hard task or you put them in a room where and you tell them that task will get harder, like the temperature will go up.

Speaker 1 And then they will kind of feel more pain even when they've done the exact same amount of work as runners or cyclists in a control experiment.

Speaker 1 And then for me, what happens is I'll go and run a race and I'm running a marathon and like weird things hurt. Like my shoulder hurts.
There's no reason your shoulder should hurt in a marathon.

Speaker 1 And so the way the theory works is that a lot of pain, not all pain, there's legitimate pain. You like you step on a rock, you stub your toe.
Like I broke a toenail in my last race.

Speaker 1 That was like real pain. But a lot of pain is just your brain looking at the task at hand, looking at where you are physiologically.
What is your body temperature? What is your heart rate?

Speaker 1 how many miles do you have to go, how fast are you running, is this a scary pace, and then determining whether it fears you're going to lose homeostasis, whether you're going to reach an unstable spot.

Speaker 1 And if it does fear that, then it starts sending pain signals and it tries to send pain signals to like the weakest part of your body.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's your digestive system, maybe it's your shoulder, maybe it's your knee. And so that's what pain like moves around your body as you're running.
So that's the theory.

Speaker 1 The second part of your question, how do you prepare?

Speaker 1 One of the things I do is I think of the brain as like a thermostat running all these measures about basically if you cross a certain threshold, should Nick hurt?

Speaker 1 And then the trick is to take all those like component parts and to stress them in different ways so that the way they're being stressed in a marathon or an ultra isn't new.

Speaker 1 So for example, I will go and run 20 miles without drinking water.

Speaker 1 And that will train my brain to understand the kind of the dehydration level I'll reach in a marathon where I'm going 26 miles but drinking water. I will go and I'll run hard down a mountain.

Speaker 1 I had this experience the other day where I had like a pounding headache and I was like, you know what, I'm going to go run six miles with this pounding headache, not because I'm a lunatic or an addict, but because I realized that I'm going to have a pounding headache at the end of an ultra race.

Speaker 1 And if I've run these six miles with the pounding headache, maybe it'll be more familiar and maybe the brain's thermostat will be set a little bit higher and I'll be able to keep going.

Speaker 1 And so that's the way I think about it. It doesn't mean like even when you figure it out and even when you train this way, it doesn't mean that you can go and run a two-hour marathon.

Speaker 1 It It just gives you a different way of coping with the pain you get.

Speaker 2 You're describing pain as mostly a mental process.

Speaker 2 What does that reveal about how much of struggle in work or life happens in our minds?

Speaker 1 It suggests that more of it happens in our minds than we think or are comfortable thinking. And that the thing that prevents us sometimes from doing stuff is more fear than actual physical realities.

Speaker 1 And I get some of the fear is good, right? You You don't want to be completely fearless because then you like cross the street when it says don't walk and eventually you get run over, right?

Speaker 1 And so the fear exists for reasons. If you're not afraid, you get eaten by bears.
And so you have to learn to balance it and measure it.

Speaker 1 But I do think as a general principle, it does mean that a lot of what we think of as our limits or like our lack of capacity is more a fear signal than a true reality.

Speaker 2 Nick, you returned to hard training and competitive running in middle age, and you beat your best time from when you were a young man as a middle-aged man, something that surprised even you.

Speaker 2 How did that happen and how did that change the way you think about improvement and aging?

Speaker 1 Yeah, so it happened when I was 44. I ran my fastest marathon and then at 46,

Speaker 1 I ran probably my best race. It was when I set the American record in the 50K.

Speaker 1 And then at 50, so earlier this spring, I ran maybe also my best race. I ran the world leading time for my age in the 50 mile.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the simple answers are: I got some coaches. I got these elite coaches who really figured out my psychology.
They got me to eat a better diet, you know, drink beet juice.

Speaker 1 Like not, don't just avoid bad foods, but seek out the healthiest ones. They had me running better structured workouts.
They had me running a little more per week. That was part of it.

Speaker 1 Some of it was I had had a mental block about going really fast.

Speaker 1 I had run 10 years of marathons at all the same time, two hours, 43 minutes, you know, two hours, 42, 44, 45, but just about the same time. And I had a mental block about going faster.

Speaker 1 I didn't think I could. I think that was tied up into the fact that I had run my first one and then I'd gotten quite sick and then I'd run another one.

Speaker 1 And so it was a way it was breaking through that mental block. And then I also think it was partly about My father died and running was a way to mourn him and understand him.

Speaker 1 He had been a man who always sort of taught ambition and setting bigger goals and also a man who, you know, set a lot of counterexamples for my life.

Speaker 1 And so those factors combined led me to run much faster.

Speaker 1 There is a really good lesson that extends well beyond running, which is that if you have a challenge, right, you have a thing that you want to be better at and age is making you worse at it, right?

Speaker 1 Like maybe it's your memory, maybe it's your deadlift, right? Maybe it's the way you play chess. Who knows? Maybe it's tennis.

Speaker 1 You can use age and wisdom and you can use new skills to get better at it and to counter it. Like time is a moving sidewalk that moves us backwards.

Speaker 1 But if we're smart and we can walk forward on that faster than we go to climb. And so my favorite example of this is my mother who 77 years old this summer and we're hanging out at her house.

Speaker 1 And she says, oh, you know, my reflexes are terrible and they're getting worse by the day. And I don't know, they're just going to keep getting worse.
I was like, mom, no,

Speaker 1 if you're worried about your reflexes, improve your reflexes. And so we go out on the porch and I like toss her tennis balls and bounce them and like make her step to the side.

Speaker 1 And the point I was trying to make to her her is whatever you're worried about. Yeah, of course, you're 77, there's like a, your reflexes are going to get worse.
My reflexes are getting worse too.

Speaker 1 But if it's something you care about and something you don't want to lose, you can push back against the forces of time.

Speaker 2 You write about those rare moments when focus itself becomes freedom, when the effort feels effortless and everything clicks. How do you reach that flow state in work and life?

Speaker 1 Oh, man. I wish I knew, right? Because part of what makes it so magical is that you don't exactly know when you're going to reach it.
So in running, it's very easy to describe, right?

Speaker 1 Like, or not easy, but I don't reach it that many times a year, but you go out and you run like 12 miles or 14 miles.

Speaker 1 And every time your watch beeps to say you've run a mile, you're like a few seconds faster than you thought.

Speaker 1 Like there's like a red line you can cross in running where once you start crossing it, hydrogen ions start to build up, like sort of bad stuff starts to accumulate.

Speaker 1 But if you can like really train your fitness, you can run like right on the edge of that line. Right.

Speaker 1 And so technically, like sports physiologists call it your lactic acid threshold or your lactic threshold. And like for me, when I'm fit, it's like five minutes and 50 seconds per mile.

Speaker 1 And so if I'm out there and I'm running like a 552, a 553, you can go out there and just feel like you can run forever, right? And it feels so good because you're going fast and it's great.

Speaker 1 And it's like particularly nice that it's like kind of a blustery day or it's like a little

Speaker 1 cold.

Speaker 1 Or, you know, you're out in a beautiful place like you're out on a country road and you can just reach this amazing flow state and there's also a flow state you can reach in work where you can get it in writing you know there are times when i was writing this book took five years to write this book because i've got this job as ceo and it wasn't really spending that much time writing it but where i would start to write and like you just you didn't want it to ever stop right like oh my god i'm getting so much done it's so great it's so great and then eventually it stops you like oh man now i've got writer's block i'm confused i just wrote something terrible i know exactly how to reach it i know i'm more likely to reach it in the morning i know i'm more likely to reach it when it's quiet.

Speaker 1 I kind of know like a few things I can do that increase the odds that I reach it.

Speaker 1 But, you know, sometimes when you're running, I'm like, I'm going to go run 12 miles and I'm going to reach that flow state.

Speaker 1 You go out and you run that first mile and you're like, oh, God, I feel sick of my stomach. So it's not an on-off button.

Speaker 2 As a boy, you wanted to run like an adult. Now you want to run like a child.

Speaker 1 I like that you like that sentence. That's great.

Speaker 2 I love that sentence. What does that reveal about rediscovering joy and wonder as we age?

Speaker 1 It's like one of these incredible things where when we're young, we like, we want the wisdom of the old person. When we're old, we want the joy of the youthful person.

Speaker 1 And it's great to try to, you know, there are different stages in life. You have to behave differently.
You have different responsibilities, but to be able to pull things, you know?

Speaker 1 So when I was young, I wanted to like. I wanted to be strong.
I wanted to like, I wanted to grow into my body. I wasn't as tall as I am now.
I wasn't as strong as I was at my peak.

Speaker 1 Like I wanted wanted to like grow, right? I wanted to be a man. And now as I'm old, I want to like recapture some of the joy that I had as a young runner, right?

Speaker 1 Like the joy of the discovery, like the first time I ran up a mountain, what that felt like. The joy of running when I was six or seven years old.
And so I capture and hold on to those memories.

Speaker 1 And my kids, I'm hoping we're making those memories. Like we're going and we're running together.
They're having a beautiful time. They're learning about speed.
They're learning about effort.

Speaker 1 They're learning about training. And I hope they hold those memories when they're old.
And when they, like my 11-year-old son and I went and we, I guess we walked to the gym and then we ran home.

Speaker 1 We worked out for an hour lifting weights and doing stuff. And then he like just ran home.
It was so beautiful. Like running, he runs so quickly, so gracefully.

Speaker 1 You can tell he enjoys it, just like running through the streets of Brooklyn. And I hope he holds on to that when he's like, when he's 50.

Speaker 2 How do you hold on to that? How do you rediscover that childlike joy?

Speaker 1 You know, sometimes it just comes to you. There are places that are cemented in my memory, places where I had like beautiful runs when I was a kid.

Speaker 1 And they're mostly in New England, but they're not all. I grew up in Boston.
I went to Andover. So like the Andover Bird Sanctuary.

Speaker 1 So if I'm ever in an environment that like reminds me of the Andover Bird Sanctuary, you know, with the leaves, the rolling hills, the streams, like that tight turn, like kind of steep downhill, the up with the pond on the left.

Speaker 1 You know, and like you can kind of trigger those memories running up Kinsman Mountain up in Franconia Notch.

Speaker 1 If I go out and I run in the White Mountains, like I remember the beautiful summers of doing that when I run in Acadia National Park, right? So it's partly like place and scent and feeling.

Speaker 1 So those trigger these memories. And they're probably like memories that are buried deep that I can't remember from places where I had amazing runs that

Speaker 1 I'll rediscover at some point. When I go out, it's less strong out in California.

Speaker 1 My running was like less positive when I was in college, but sometimes I'll go out there and I'll go into like a eucalyptus grove and I'll just be like, wow, this is amazing. So it's partly about

Speaker 1 place and sensory and like Proustian memories and, you know, the Madeline triggering like like the memory of your mother or the memory of these runs. So it's partly that.

Speaker 1 And then it's also partly just forcing it, right? Like when I'm stressed, like, okay, just release, right?

Speaker 1 Forget about, like, forget about, like, even if I'm running, like I'm running down Canal Street and I'm stressed, I try to transpose myself into the end over bird sanctuary.

Speaker 2 Before I ask for the three takeaways, the three life lessons you'd like to leave the audience with today, is there anything else you'd like to mention?

Speaker 2 Nick, what should I have asked you that I did not?

Speaker 1 You should ask me what the title of the book means.

Speaker 2 Okay, what does the title of the book mean?

Speaker 1 The book is about running and life and my father. And for a long time, the book was called Run for Your Life, which is fine, right? It's like, it's cute, but it's pretty generic.

Speaker 1 Any single runner could write their memoir and have it be called Run for Your Life. And, you know, I was discouraged for

Speaker 1 years that that was the best I could come up with. And I tried to find others.
And I was up in the Catskills and I had on my wall a print that my father had given me as payback for a loan.

Speaker 1 Part of the book is about my father's descent into madness and physical irresponsibility. And it's a quote from Maximus of Tyr, the Roman philosopher, that was turned into a print by Ben Shawn.

Speaker 1 And in it, it's just this wonderful paragraph about finding love and meaning in objects. that we sort of consider God but aren't.

Speaker 1 And it says, you know, yearning for the knowledge of him and in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in this world after his nature, just as happens to earthly lovers.

Speaker 1 To them the most beautiful sight will be the actual lineaments of the beloved.

Speaker 1 But for remembrance's sake, they will be happy in the sight of a lyre, a little spear, a chair, perhaps, or a running ground, or anything in the world that wakens the memory of the beloved.

Speaker 1 Why should I further examine and pass judgment about images? Let men know what is divine, let them know. That is all.

Speaker 1 The Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of fetus, an Egyptian by pain-worshipped animals, another man by a river, another by fire. I have no anger for their divergences.

Speaker 1 Only let them know, let them love, let them remember.

Speaker 1 And I had looked at that and I had had it on my wall and I had never noticed that like one of the things it talks about is a running ground, you know, an old Greek track.

Speaker 1 And so I saw that and I was like, my God, there's the title. And so that's why it's called the running ground.

Speaker 2 That is a beautiful quote. Nick, what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today?

Speaker 1 I do think that the thing we talked about with pain is extremely important. I do think remembering that pain can be an illusion.

Speaker 1 I do think that the simplicity of running is a really beautiful thing.

Speaker 1 And that even if you're not a runner, even if you're just, like you like to walk or even if you go out in a wheelchair, one of the things that you can do is just go out and meditate.

Speaker 1 Go run a mile or half a mile or around the block and like just think about what you smell or what you hear or what you see, just one at a time.

Speaker 1 And then I guess the third thing is the sometimes focus, sometimes lock in, and sometimes dissociate and just think you're a child.

Speaker 1 And I think that's a really good strategy for, you know, when things get hard in life.

Speaker 2 Nick, thank you for joining Three Takeaways today and for your wonderful book, The Running Ground. I loved it.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm so glad. Thank you so much, Lynn.
It was an absolute pleasure to talk. And thank you for being so kind about the book.

Speaker 3 If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out.

Speaker 3 If you're interested, you can also sign up for the Three Takeaways newsletter at 3takeaways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes.

Speaker 3 You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways.
Thanks for listening.