Medals analogy

The "medals analogy" is one of the key analogies we use at OptimalWork to explain the various levels by which challenges are embraced and growth is undertaken. The original medals analogy was coined by Dr. Guy Meadows, and we have adapted the analogy (with one significant change!) for our purposes.

Guy Meadows' Analogy Applied to Sleep

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In The Sleep Book: How to Sleep Well Every Night, Dr. Guy Meadows presents a novel approach to insomnia that is founded on the tenets of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

The book introduces what Dr. Meadows calls "The Olympic Podium of Night-Time Activity" to describe the different levels of success that one can have when trying to get a good night's sleep.

According to this schema, if you're able stay in bed all night, no matter how awake or upset you are, you get a medal. On the other hand, if you're having trouble sleeping and then get out of bed, trying to distract yourself from the frustration that comes with staying awake, you don't get a medal.

Guy Meadows' Gold Medal

"The gold medal goes to you when you are lying in bed asleep, as this is when you conserve the most energy and get rest."

In other words, you get the gold medal when you've successfully conquered insomnia for the night. Since sleeplessness is the "symptom" that you are trying to conquer, we can think of the gold medal as being awarded for no symptoms.

Guy Meadows' Silver Medal

"The silver medal is given when you are lying in bed with your eyes closed in a state of quiet wakefulness, while waiting for sleep to come.

"Here you accept the fact that you are awake and are willing to ‘watch’ and ‘welcome’ any of your wanted or unwanted thoughts, memories, images or sensations that arise in your mind and body moment by moment. You take the position of a peaceful bystander who watches over your internal world without judgment or comment.

"You recognize that paradoxically the key to sleeping is having an accepting and relaxed attitude towards being awake at night."

The silver medal, therefore, involves perfect acceptance of sleeplessness. You may be awake, but you're completely willing to remain awake, welcoming whatever thoughts and feelings come with it. (As Dr. Meadows describes above, the willingness to be awake is crucial for anyone struggling with insomnia!) We can thus think of the silver medal as symptoms with acceptance (or without frustration).

Guy Meadows' Bronze Medal

"The bronze medal also goes to lying in bed awake, except in this state there’s less acceptance and more struggle, anxiety, frustration and resignation. Here your unwillingness to experience wakefulness or any of the thoughts and sensations that present themselves begins to amplify your insomnia."

The bronze medal is what you get for "white-knuckling" the experience of trying to sleep. You don't give up trying to sleep, but you're frustrated, tossing and turning. Unpleasant thoughts occur to you — usually about the fact that you can't sleep! We can think of the bronze medal as symptoms plus frustration (i.e., without acceptance).

Aiming for Silver

The key to Guy Meadows' analogy is that you never aim for gold. Instead, his lesson is to aim for silver and to practice full acceptance of unpleasant thoughts and emotions in the midst of a challenging situation.

This model is particularly helpful for people who are struggling with sleep — which, like flow, cannot be forced. We can set the stage as well as we can for flow or sleep to happen, but there's no button we can press, no specific choice we can make, that can immediately and unfailingly propel us into those mental states.

At OptimalWork, however, we started to encounter some limitations when trying to apply this model more broadly. Below, we present our updated model.

The OptimalWork Medals Analogy

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Our updated medals analogy describes

There are three degrees of willingness you can have for the sounding of your alarm. You could tolerate it, accept it, or love it. If you’ve been avoiding everything that causes anxiety, learning to tolerate the alarm is a significant first step. But with a bit of mindfulness, you can learn to accept it fully; and with some reframing, you can even come to love it.

We can describe these three levels of willingness with an analogy, which I borrow and adapt from Guy Meadows.

At the end of each day, you can look back at your day, and ask yourself: Did I give in to avoidance while my alarm was sounding? If you did, that’s OK; you can improve by resolving how to approach similar challenges the next day.

But if you didn’t give in to avoidance while your alarm sounded, you can give yourself a medal for that day. You can win one of three medals: bronze, silver, or gold. These different medals are three degrees of willingness.

You get a bronze medal if you merely tolerated your anxiety while persisting through it without giving in to any avoidance of triggers. That’s already a great achievement! The essence of the bronze medal is “challenge.” To win it, you must embrace the challenge of approaching a trigger, even though it feels uncomfortable or even dangerous - at least at first.

You get a silver medal if you used mindfulness of the alarm to welcome the sensations, at least occasionally during the day. Silver means you’re still challenging yourself to approach and not avoid triggers; but it adds the element of mindfulness to it.

You get a gold medal if you were able to flip the feeling of anxiety into one of excitement and energy. You do this by learning to utilize the adrenaline to stretch your performance, to attain higher goals. You would still be approaching triggers and accepting your alarm, as in silver; but gold adds the element of reframing.

Sometimes people can aim directly for gold by reframing adrenaline as energy waiting to be used. Others achieve the same progress in steps, first mastering the skills of the bronze medal, and then mastering the skills of the silver medal, until they are ready to master attaining gold.

In the next section, we’ll dive deeper into the bronze approach, and you’ll learn different strategies for approaching different kinds of triggers. These strategies will serve as a foundation for making solid progress.

The Bronze Medal

The bronze medal is symptoms + frustration.