If you are a regular here at ConsummateAthlete.com, you know we love referencing Greg Lehman’s ‘cup’ metaphor for stress and injury. Simply put, it’s the idea that as humans we have a certain capacity for stressors (the cup) and that if too many stressors are poured into the cup, well that cup can overflow and may result in injury or illness. The hopeful message of this analogy is that there are many ways to feel better, not just by ‘fixing’ your knee but also by improving your health via sleep, rest, social aspects etc.
Importantly ‘Stress’ isn’t always horrible things—sometimes, life just gets too busy or overwhelming in positive directions. Imagine juggling a new promotion at work while planning a wedding and adopting a dog and moving into a new apartment while training for Leadville, for example. All of those things are generally good (one assumes), but all happening at once can be a lot. And something is likely going to have to give. Often, that comes in the form of injury or illness if we don’t catch it early enough.
For some people, the cup metaphor doesn’t quite hit home. After all, if it overflows, is it such a big deal? It’s just water, you can always refill. And you’re not entirely sure what is spilling out, anyway.
So, if you scoff at an overfilled cup and don’t think it’s a big deal, maybe this visual will help. Imagine you’re moving, and all of your belongings are piled in the back of a truck. You’re heading for a low bridge that the would have to pass under. On the truck bed, there is a large sofa that has been placed sideways, so that it’s sticking out to either side. At a glance, you think, ‘Oh no, sofa is making it too wide to get through the bridge.’
And so the truck is stopped at the bridge, because of this sofa. This one singular thing.
But once the sofa is turned and the truck starts to head through the bridge, it immediately gets stuck. That’s because in addition to having the sofa sticking out on the sides, the truck was piled so high that it was also much too tall for the little bridge! The driver spent all of this time rearranging the one piece of furniture that had been sticking out to the side, causing the most obvious problem. But in doing that, he completely ignored the fact that even if the sofa was fixed, the truck still wouldn’t fit under the bridge.
When we feel like our moving truck is over-packed (AKA, our cup is overflowing), we tend to fixate on the most obvious, glaring part that we can fix, or at least, obsess about. This is easy, right? It’s the big fight we had with a partner, the huge new stressor at work, the one project that we’re behind on, the injury we’re in the midst of rehabbing. But as we focus on that—the sideways sofa, if you will—we ignore the fact that we also have this huge pile of other stuff that’s causing issues as well. It’s just that those issues aren’t quite as obvious. Those are things like the tiny niggle in the knee, the lower hours of sleep, the small projects that you’re also balancing at work, the school play you’re helping your kids with, et cetera. We can fix the big problem—turn the sofa in the right direction—but the other stuff will still be piled on. The big thing may have overloaded the truck or overfilled the cup, whichever metaphor you prefer, but it could only do so because you were already close to full!
Most of the time, you can’t just unload the truck and leave some stuff on the side of the road, to continue torturing this metaphor. We can’t ditch the pet, the kids, or the job. We can’t just wish for an injury or illness to disappear. Maybe we can get rid of some unnecessary stuff in our lives (boxes off the moving truck, if you will). Maybe we can rearrange things to be more efficient, and to gain back some room. But if we keep trying to drive through that bridge with the truck piled as high as it is now, something is going to get damaged or fall off, and it might be something we don’t want to lose.
This metaphor works for me because (in addition to growing up by a railroad trestle with a 11′ height and watching A LOT of trucks get stuck under it), it’s a bit more tidy than the cup metaphor. In the cup metaphor, it’s all liquid going in and it can be hard to think about what could come out to stop the overflow. This moving truck piled with boxes and furniture feels more tangible, like I’m able to label each box with what it contains, and move them around like some kind of weird mental Tetris game. It lets me visualize leaving specific things behind, not just pouring out a few tablespoons from my cup. And when thinking about new projects, it lets me picture adding those boxes to the pile, and assessing how they fit.
So, if the cup metaphor doesn’t seem quite right for you, consider thinking about your whole life in terms of a moving truck going through a tunnel. How high is yours piled? Is there anything you can leave at the curb?
