Mental toughness means being able to influence unwanted internal processes

Mental toughness – techniques

Mental toughness means being able to influence unwanted internal processes.

I am deliberately not using the term “control” here, because you need to spend a large part of your life, and your daily routine, learning and practising mental techniques before you can reach this level. This is what many Asian monastic communities or martial artists do, for example. For your normal, day-to-day life, a targeted influence on mental process using simple tricks is enough to improve your quality of life.

For the first section, Tricks, we use the fact that the smaller, older parts of our brains – I subsume them under the term “stone-age brain” – don’t think, but merely respond to all sorts of stimuli. Consequently, it is actually really simple for us to consciously produce our own stimuli in order to obtain a desired reaction.

Where does the “stone-age brain” normally receive stimuli from, 24 hours a day?

A: The stimuli arise in the external world and reach the stone-age brain through our senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, and are then relayed electrically and chemically through our internal information paths, primarily nerve transmissions.

B: The stimuli arise through physical processes such as digestion, pain, low, normal or excessive levels of different substances such as hormones or oxygen, blood pressure, heart and muscle function and many other things. These stimuli also reach the stone-age brain electrically and chemically via nerve transmissions.

C: The stimuli arise in the cerebrum when we consciously or unconsciously but vividly imagine the stimuli mentioned under A and/or B. They are permanently transferred to the stone-age brain even from there.

First of all, just try the following simple exercises:

Exercise A – a stimulus from the external world:
  • Watch the video:
  • Goal: smiling
Exercise B – a stimulus from physical processes
  • Take up the following physical posture: stretch out your fingers. Just open your hands and don’t tense up your stretched-out fingers! Stretch out your toes in your shoes in the same way. Relax your jaw muscles and create a gap of approximately 1 cm between the upper and lower teeth. Place your stretched hands onto your abdomen and make sure that your abdomen moves as you breathe. Breathe in and out in a relaxed manner for 3-5 minutes.
  • Goal: reducing stress
Exercise C – a stimulus from imagining something in the cerebrum:
  • Wait until the next time you are really hungry. Then imagine your favourite meal vividly – what it looks like, how it smells, what it feels like when you take your first bite, what it tastes of and how it feels in your hands.
  • Goal: triggering physical reactions

Why have you very probably achieved the goal of the exercise?

The reaction to exercise A should be a smile. When a very small child smiles or laughs, most people will be charmed and will mirror the child’s behaviour.

The reaction to exercise B should be a significantly more relaxed physical posture and a decrease in stressed feelings. When you are stressed, you will definitely tense your fighting muscles (hands/arms) and your flight muscles (legs/toes), and bite your teeth together. But, when you mechanically relax the relevant muscle groups, “Vegi” is brought out of rhythm and reacts to your relaxed posture, which she classifies as “harmless”. The messenger substances on the nerve cells also change accordingly. Consequently, we feel relaxed. Additionally, when we are tense, we breathe quickly, and into the ribcage, rather than comfortably and into the abdomen. With these small exercises, you are now quite mechanically doing exactly the opposite of everything described above.

The reaction to exercise C should be a perceptible production of saliva, as well as a potentially rumbling stomach and an increase in stomach acid. “Vegi” responds to the vivid imaginings in your cerebrum and on the “big screen” in your head. This reaction takes place even though your favourite meal isn’t there to be eaten right now, and even though you know that.

Become the captain of your own ship!

As you can see from the exercises above, you can easily and reliably produce the desired reactions yourself, and thus temporarily take over command of your stone-age brain. And particularly when “Vegi”, who has the best of intentions, but is often not very familiar with the modern world, produces unwanted thoughts, feelings or physical reactions, entirely unnecessarily. For example, when you can’t sleep at night, or keep waking up, because worrying thoughts are going through your head, “Vegi” believes you are in danger due to these negative thoughts (the big screen in your head), so she responds, with the best of intentions, as in the Stone Age. If, back then, you had an unpleasant encounter with a bear in its den and now (despite your modern security door) there is still a risk that it could creep back into its den again, it is “Vegi’s” job to stop you from sleeping, however tired you are. She supplies you with a great deal of adrenaline to ensure that you are ready to fight if the bear comes back. At the same time, you need to plan intensively what you can do to defend yourself. And if you do drop off briefly, the slightest noise will wake you up again, so you can defend yourself. What would have ensured your survival in the Stone Age is sometimes rather annoying in the modern world. Although you possibly cannot solve your current, modern problem with planning, “Vegi” pushes you for hours on end to think of what you could do or could have done, or she makes sure that the smallest noise at night wakes you up in full fight mode. This is the classic situation in which you can use the mental technique to temporarily take control from “Vegi” and be able to sleep well again.

Exercise B will help somewhat with this. In the next article, I would like to present you with another option, because in addition to instinctive reactions to stimuli, we are also able to connect arbitrary stimuli to desired reactions in our cerebrums using learning processes. This takes more effort, but obtains the desired effect almost as reliably as instinctive reactions, with practice.

This article was written by Nicole Züsli (Psychologin lic. phil. I).

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