Injuries: The Importance of 'Zooming Out'

When it comes to managing injuries - and other setbacks - in your running or cycling, it is tempting to focus on the immediate problem. However, by looking at the bigger picture you are more likely to ensure the more effective - longer-term - management of the problem, as Matt Fitzgerald explains.

Few people in history have made more money on the stock market than Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett. It might surprise you, then, to learn that Buffett advises other investors not to watch the stock market too closely. 

Why? Two reasons. The first is that broader trends in the market contain more information and less noise than short-term volatility, so you’re likely to make better decisions if you focus on the former versus the latter. 

RELATED: You’re Probably Not Injured: Re-thinking How We Manage Athletic Pain

The second reason to avoid watching your stocks too closely is that it’s an emotional roller coaster. In a year that sees your portfolio grow by 10 percent, there might be dozens of individual trading days in which it moves in the opposite direction. If your eyes are always on the market, you’re likely to experience quite a bit of emotional volatility, fretting whenever the market dips despite the positive trendline. It’s a well-known fact that emotional volatility leads to bad judgment, which in this case could compound the poor decision-making associated with intensive monitoring.

Knowing this, smart investors like Warren Buffet zoom out, maintaining a broad perspective on the market and allowing other investors to lose their shirts with emotion-driven, noise-based decisions.

I see the same psychology play out in athletes. An example is Ruth, a runner I know who’s been struggling with hip pain. Mild in the beginning (as these things so often are), the pain steadily intensified to the point where Ruth had no choice but to stop running. On the day she made this decision she was despondent, unable to think or talk about anything else. But her mood rebounded the following day when, to her surprise and delight, she was able to walk and hop on two feet with minimal discomfort. 

RELATED: Top 10 Recovery Tips for Runners

“I think I might have dodged a bullet!” she told me, grinning like a lottery winner.

I should mention that Ruth’s hip issue was not an isolated incident but was preceded by foot pain, shin pain, knee pain, and so on. The real problem, in my view, was not hip pain per se but a recurring pattern of pain-related training disruptions. But Ruth didn’t see this. As far as she was concerned, her problem went away when her hip pain diminished, so she went right back to training the way she had when the pain emerged, giddy with relief.

Where Ruth saw only isolated trees, each symbolizing a distinct pain episode that she reacted to without reference to any broader pattern, I saw a forest representing a broad pattern of pain episodes with a single underlying cause. From my perspective, Ruth’s inability to contextualize her pain episodes doomed her to persist in the reactive, emotional behaviors that caused her to keep getting hurt.

Psychologists refer to Ruth's narrow perspective on challenges (seeing trees instead of forest) as low-level construal, and to the broader perspective I prefer (seeing forest instead of trees) as high-level construal. In urgent situations demanding quick action, low-level construal can be quite useful, but when managing ongoing challenges like investing and avoiding sports injuries, we’re much better off leaning on high-level construal.

RELATED: How Durable Is Your Body?

A 2015 study by researchers at Ohio State University found that subjects were more likely to accept and act upon negative feedback if they were prompted beforehand to see the bigger picture. Ruth’s athletic pain wasn’t so different from this—a kind of negative feedback from her body, letting her know that something wasn’t quite right—but she lacked the big-picture perspective required to enact behavioral changes that would not only help her overcome her current pain episode but also reduce the likelihood of future setbacks.

RELATED: Is Running Bad for Your Knees?

High-level construal comes easily to some athletes and not-so-easily to others. Those in the latter group can take comfort in knowing that zooming out to see the bigger picture is a trainable skill. Each problem or challenge you encounter in your athletic journey is an opportunity to practice this skill. Instead of just labeling the problem in a reactive way (e.g., “hip pain”), contextualize it instead. Is the problem truly isolated or part of a broader pattern? Is the problem novel, or have you experienced things like it before, and if so, what did you learn from those prior incidents? Did the problem strike out of nowhere or were there indications that it was coming? Have things been going well for you aside from this problem or is it a small part of a bigger off-track period in your training? Asking yourself these questions will help you achieve a certain cognitive and emotional distance from the problem or challenge, enabling you to manage it better.

I’m hopeful that Ruth will learn to zoom out and make fewer emotion-driven, noise-based decisions in her training. In the meantime, I encourage you to move in the same direction. Warren Buffett would be proud.