Motorcycling and Emotional Equilibrium

Our psychological needs as human beings are complex. Emotional equilibrium requires a balance of stimulation and relaxation. Depending on our temperament, maintaining such balance can be a delicate and precarious affair, requiring much precise, active management. Or, for the more fortunate, balance can be easy, elastic and resilient, with wide margins in both directions before swings become problematic.

Regardless of how sensitive we are to over-stimulation and under-stimulation, life will push us out of balance. We need methods for correcting excesses and deficiencies to regulate our level of arousal and avoid the opposing extremes of frenzy and malaise. We need recreation.

Recreation is a fluid concept. For someone frazzled by too many demands and exhausted by a plethora of events and interactions—even when these have been enjoyable—recreation may take a quiet, passive, withdrawn form. Ever feel like you need to just sit and stare for a day in uninterrupted silence?

On the other hand, when a person’s recent experience has been dominated by restrictions and boredom (think “cabin fever”), recreation would involve excitement, challenging activities and boisterous socializing. What would restore vitality in the stifled person would drain the overwhelmed person’s few remaining reserves.

Usually, our personalities and typical circumstances make us more vulnerable to one extreme or the other, but everyone has to contend with both, at least occasionally. Recreation might be defined as that which restores our equilibrium in whichever direction is needed. It literally re-creates a state wherein we feel like our best self—a creature with energy and interests, ready to engage the world in meaningful, vigorous and pleasurable ways. It refreshes our perspectives on self, others and life itself, allowing for creative problem solving, deeper connections and heartfelt joy.

Recreation is the oil in our psychological machinery. Without it, the mania or drudgery of daily life becomes unsustainable; things eventually grind to a halt or overheat and explode. I see it all the time in my practice as a clinical psychologist. For varying reasons, people develop the unrealistic self-expectation that they should somehow be able to run without oil.

At one end of the spectrum, there are those who race frantically through never-ending lists of duties and obligations, pausing briefly here and there to collapse into fitful sleep. At the other end, there are those whose days drone on monotonously at a snail’s pace, without any spark of drive—they may sleepwalk for years.

The former group “has no time” for recreation, as though it were a luxury they cannot afford as busy people with more important things to cross off their lists. The latter group may have plenty of time, but can’t locate any desire within themselves to fuel a pursuit. Again, recreation isn’t taken seriously as a need; from the lethargic perspective, it looks like something that would only deplete them further, rather than invigorating their souls.

When we go a long time without eating, we get hungrier and hungrier for a while, but then hunger fades. Our proficiency and energy level continue to decline with waning blood sugar, but our appetite has despaired of gratification and shut down—until we take that first bite of food! Then we suddenly feel ravenous as our appetite returns with a vengeance.

The same is true of our natural longing for equilibrium, and by extension, recreation. If we neglect this need long enough, we eventually cease to wish for it. We may even forget what recreation was actually like. Balance becomes a remote abstraction, seemingly irrelevant in our present existence.

It’s all too easy to settle into a familiar rut, whether it’s a frenetic or a tedious one. And the more time we spend in it, the deeper it gets. The solution is regular, deliberate interruption of such insidious trends. Just as it’s easy to put off periodic oil changes, we can procrastinate the routine maintenance needed to keep our psyches in good working order.

I’ve marveled in this column before about how motorcycling offers such a wide variety of experiences that our involvement in it can offset deficits in either peace or adventure. I won’t repeat all the possible variations here, but think for a moment of the ways you’ve used some aspect of our beloved avocation to help calm yourself down when you were agitated—a long, relaxing solo ride through pastureland, for example, or a weekend spent perfecting your bike in the isolated sanctuary of your garage.

Now think about times you’ve used some element of your motorcycling life to launch yourself out of the doldrums. Maybe you signed up for a track day or joined your buddies on an impromptu ride to a scenic destination...in bad weather! Motorcycling can easily serve to get our heart rates higher or lower, depending on what we need.

If recreation is the oil that keeps our psychological parts from cannibalizing themselves, good habits make up the flywheel that keeps us from lurching violently through cycles of acceleration and deceleration. Smooth running requires that we not allow the swings in our arousal level to gather too much momentum. Or, in better keeping with the flywheel analogy, we need to engage regularly in practices that maintain the momentum of our own self-regulation.

Obviously, basics such as healthy and consistent patterns of sleeping, eating and exercising are part of the overall picture here, like pie-slice sections of that flywheel. But have you thought of your involvement in motorcycling as something similar? Given how it can contribute to the re-creation of our psychological equilibrium, we should be scheduling it into our routines, just like meals or trips to the gym, whether we feel the need or not.

In addition to all the holiday-related commotion, I had a knee injury and two minor surgeries between Thanksgiving and Christmas, each of which precluded getting on a bike, among other activities. So, as of this writing, I’ve gone an extraordinarily long time without a single ride, and now winter weather will throw up additional hurdles to getting back in the saddle. I need help recovering from both the intense over-stimulation and intense under-stimulation of the past two months. And yet, what I feel is an eerie numbness in place of my usual desire to ride. It has gone unfed for too long.

I’ve been here before. It’s a rarity, but not completely unprecedented. Unimaginable as this would normally be, I may have to really push myself to get out on a bike again, now that I’m finally healed enough to allow it. Within the first minute, though, I know from past experience that a dramatic change will occur. My dormant enthusiasm will reawaken and rush back into its familiar place, like life-giving air filling a vacuum. And I’ll wonder how I could have possibly survived so long without oxygen.

Or oil.

Dr. Mark Barnes is a Clinical Psychologist. He completed his internship at The Cambridge Hospital of Harvard Medical School and has been in private practice since 1992 in Knoxville, TN. He owns both dirt and street bikes, “cross-trains” on a pair of vintage PWCs, and has written extensively for MCN since 1996.