The Frustration of Frustration

The McLetter
November 4, 2023

The road to where you want to be and where you are now is paved with frustration.

If you care about something and want to succeed, you know the frustration that comes when things don't go your way.

Maybe you're not getting enough playing time. Maybe the coach gave you a chance but you messed up big. You thought to yourself: "So stupid! How could I miss that shot! I was wide open!"

Sometimes the frustration will be so great, the thought of quitting will enter your mind.

A frustrated practice session can lead to you chucking the sport object (For me, a basketball) into the darkest, deepest corner of your closet in hopes of never seeing it again (only to pick it up and practice again tomorrow).

Frustration is a hard thing to deal with.

Moreover, It's a hard thing to cope with.

People see that you are frustrated and they tell you not to be.

They tell you: “it's ok” or “don’t worry about it”.

But when you try to explain to them your frustration, people don't understand. They can't empathize with why you care so much or why you can't just let it roll off your back.

Maybe you even think to yourself, "why am I so hard on myself."

You know that if this were one of your friends you would tell them not to be so hard on themselves.

So why are you so hard on ourselves?

Why is it that when things don't go your way, you get so frustrated?

The Wrong Way to Deal With Frustration

One thing that frustration leads us to do (unfortunately) is quit.

This type of quitting may be a physical action (walking out of the gym, coming off the field, turning off your Xbox, etc.) but it occurs because of what’s happening in our mental.

When you decide to physically leave the gym after a frustrating workout, it's because you already made the mental choice to do so.

The physical decision flows afterwards.

As a former college basketball player, my early career was plagued by moments where frustration got the best of me.

There were times when I would be playing bad, the ref would be making bad calls and the coach would be yelling at me.

Although it was still early in the game, my mental switch would shut off and I would start to make even more physical errors (turn the ball over, miss wide open shots and eventually request to come out of the game).

You know frustration is not an enjoyable experience.

It's makes your head feel hot, and the world feels like it's caving in on you.

Sometimes, you think the best thing to do when frustration hits is quit.

The easiest way to handle frustration, is to take yourself out of the environment causing the frustration entirely (i.e., walk out of the gym).

But choosing the easy route does not allow us to unlock deeper levels of concentration and focus.

One of the first steps in obtaining a flow state experience is by embracing the process of struggle.

If you mentally quit every time the going gets tough, then you make the easy decision and deny yourself the opportunity to reach a deeper, more immersive experience in your chosen passion.

The Right Way To Handle Frustration

Later on in my basketball player, I would schedule hour long workouts for myself throughout the week.

These hour long workouts were meant to be slightly out of my comfort zone and were focused on making shots.

If I did not make shots, I would not go to the next drill.

So even though the workouts were supposed to be an hour long, they would sometimes go 30 minutes (I was cash money) and other times go 90 minutes (I was shooting bricks).

But, I always made the promise to myself that I would finish the workout no matter how frustrated I would get.

Because I didn't have the option of quitting, I had to dial in.

I had to figure out how to increase my concentration and focus.

Sometimes this meant I had to slow down my workouts and go through the mechanics.

This would narrow my focus on the fundamentals of my form and understand my craft on a deeper level.

By simply not giving myself a way out of a workout, my brain had to get creative in order to make shots and finish it.

It had to struggle and figure out ways to play well and I would use frustration as a signal to do so.

This is the hard path, but it's the rewarding path.

When you choose the path of embracing frustration, you condition your brain to embrace these painful moments.

By design, your brain is made to seek pleasure. When the workout is done, and your subconscious is analyzing these workouts it will seek to remove those moments of pain from your next workout.

How can it remove those moments of pain if you make that commitment to finishing through?

By making you better and more adapted to handle that activity.

AKA skills go up.

Putting It All Together

So how can you can take action on embracing frustration?

1. Make a mental commitment to finish whatever you are doing to the fullest. If you're best that day is just showing up and being in the gym for an hour, do that. Don't leave a second earlier.

2. Learn to become conscious of your frustration and use it as a signal to embrace it. Most of life is becoming conscious of your mistakes and creating gameplans around them. Simply by recognizing your frustration, you are realizing that it is an issue. The path to embracing frustration will require you to take on pain in the short-run, in order to live a life of joy in the long-run. This requires your brain to know what it's sacrificing. It must consciously know that the pain of embracing frustration in those moments, is for the joy of living on the other side of it in the future. And oh boy is there joy in doing so!

3. Breath through frustration and relax. The best way to handle frustration, after recognizing it, is by breathing. The natural breathing frequency (aka resonance frequency) is a 4 second inhale and 6 second exhale. Your goal is always to be as immersed in an activity as possible. Your goal is to enter flow. Frustration (or struggle as Steven Kotler refers to it in his book The Art of Impossible) is the first stage in what he calls “The Flow Cycle”. Thus, acknowledge your frustration and breathe through it.

4. Help someone else out with their frustration. This may not apply if you're practicing by yourself, but if you're in a game environment, team practice or partner workout, you can apply this strategy. If you are frustrated and you see someone else is frustrated, relieve them of their frustration by encouraging them and pushing them to keep going. The action of telling someone this will make you want to be consistent with your words and thus, your actions will follow suit.

That's all for this. Appreciate you reading through and I hope you received some value from this. Feel free to let me know what you liked and didn’t like from this week’s edition.

If you want to learn more about topics life Self-Mastery, Self-Improvement and Flow, you can find me on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@JustMattMc

Matt Mc