Positive Feedback Loop

Hello, world 👋

This article is likely going to be my first ever “blog post”. So in a ceremonial fashion I am going to spend one paragraph writing about the motivation behind this.

I have recently noticed that the energy expenditure numbers, tracked by my smartwatch, have been down-trending. I have “complained” to my better half about it at least twice. When I complain about something too much, I tend to get bitter very quickly, so I decided to actually read about it. One of the facts that I learned is that “fitness improves economy of movement”, meaning that as I become a better and stronger cyclist, I am able to ride for longer, faster whilst burning less energy per unit of activity. From a very lazy and slightly bitter lens to the world, it’s terrible because it means I’d need to actually work out more. To be honest, I both hate and love that. But right now, after a weird and chaotic day at work, I am hating it a bit more.

Let’s rephrase that a little in a simpler way. As you get into the habit of regular exercising, you’ll progressively need to do more exercising, just to get the same output in energy expenditure. Exercising has a self-reinforcing mechanism.

When something has a self-reinforcing mechanism, the actual mechanic that drives it is called a Positive Feedback Loop. This concept exists in multiple disciplines. It drives cool phenomenons.

Positive Feedback Loop 🔄

In a lifestyle context, a positive feedback loop can drive addiction. Any kind of addiction. Alcohol, gaming, cannabis, coffee..etc. In a psychology context, it can be a contributing force to panic attacks. In a weather context, a big enough bushfire can generate its own weather, including lightnings and thunderstorms that in turn generate more fires. I am fairly sure this happened in Australia a few years ago. This loop thing is cool isn’t it.

Most of these things “sound” bad, but are they really, Positive Feedback Loop sounds kinda bad, but is it actually, or is it actually the monkey brain that we all have, that always tends to recognise the “bad” things easier 🙂.

Of course, lest not forget, we learned thousand of years ago from Socrates that nothing is intrinsically good nor bad. Positive Feedback Loop operates in similar manner. It an underlying force of nature. Don’t think too much about the good and bad of it, just take advantage of it.

On the other side of the imaginary good-bad spectrum, Positive Feedback Loop is also the mechanic that underlies the concept of Compound Interest in the realm of investing. Within the fitness context, which is what I am writing about, I will just call the concept “move more”, as in everyone should move more. Not only that you’ll get better at moving around, you’ll also be physically and psychologically conditioned in different ways to move more, and that the initial momentum needed to move, gets less and less over time. Moving gets easier over time.

Isn’t it a bit cool how something as negatively sounding as “addiction”, when explored thoughtfully, can also be leveraged to build wealth, and to improve personal fitness?

The question now is how. How does one gets aboard the PFL train, that can be quite difficult to stop. That’s for another day. As a person with self-diagnosed ADHD, I do have a bit of personal experience with addiction 🙂, and a lot of what I learned from that is applicable in the topic of how to “enter” this cool loop we are talking about. But also as a person with self-diagnosed ADHD, I am also incredibly lazy. So I will stop writing right this very moment.