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Mental toughness – tips and tricks
You can invent your own tricks in order to consciously influence your internal processes!
The previous articles , “Mental toughness – techniques” and “Mental toughness – training” described how our stone-age brains respond to all sorts of signals from the external world, our bodies and our cerebrums. As well as the instinctive reactions to certain signals described there, we can set optional signals ourselves and so teach ourselves to respond in the way we wish. When a signal not regulated by instinct is received, “Vegi” quickly asks “Willi” in the cerebrum what experience we already have with this signal, whether it means danger or maybe promises some-thing particularly enjoyable (food intake/procreation), or whether a response is even necessary at all.
Experience is learned
In principle, learning works like this: we perceive, with our senses, something in the outside world or in our bodies. Our brains decide whether what we have perceived has any significance for us. If not, the information is simply kicked out of the brain again. If we recognise a significance, we first check whether the information should be retained in the brain only for a short time in the cor-respondingly named short-term memory, or whether it should be permanently stored in the long-term memory. Information is only ever stored permanently if it can be connected with any already stored information, or if the brain categorises it as vital for survival. We know about connecting in-formation from our school days, when we had to learn something, but somehow just could not memorise it. So what do we do? We create a mnemonic: Wer «nämlich» mit «h» schreibt, ist däm-lich. Wer will schon dämlich sein? If it rhymes, so much the better – and now this information is stored in the brain!
Perceptions, then, are interconnected in the brain and what is linked there is different from per-son to person. Believe me, we can make associations between things that actually have nothing to do with each other!
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, a Russian researcher, did a famous experiment with a dog at the end of the 19th century. In the lab, a probe was put into the dog’s mouth to measure how much saliva it produced over the day. When the dog was fed, it produced more saliva due to the natural diges-tive reflex. If a bell was rung, the dog produced a normal, average amount of saliva. It is well known that you can’t eat bells. But then the researchers began to ring the bell at the same time as they put the dog’s food down in front of it. As a result, the dog created a powerful learned connection: food + bell. After a while, the dog produced as much saliva when it heard the bell, even if it didn’t get any food, as it did when it saw or smelled food.
If anyone is thinking “stupid dog” right now, then please explain to me what red high heels have to do with procreation!
However, if someone whose gestures, facial expressions and scarce clothing identify them as will-ing to procreate, is often enough presented wearing red high heels, then over time, the sight of such footwear will be enough for some people to “get in the mood”. It’s as simple as that. This type of learning is called “classical conditioning”.
Our likes and dislikes, our knowledge and convictions, are all created throughout our lives by learning. Once they have been stored, they start, with time, to work almost like reflexes, without any conscious thought. For example: what feeling do you experience when you smell cinnamon, or even imagine the smell of cinnamon? Most people connect the smell of cinnamon with Christ-mas. And depending on your previous experiences of Christmas, this will trigger either pleasant or unpleasant feelings. If Christmas was harmonious and full of love, and you made Christmas cin-namon cookies with your family when everyone was in a happy mood, then the feelings will be pleasant. However, if you were stressed every Christmas by “chasing” suitable presents, or by ar-guments during the family celebrations, by overeating or bad food, etc., then you will probably get an unpleasant feeling instead.
What you unconsciously learned at Christmas in connection with the smell of cinnamon is some-thing you can also consciously use to create a highly personalised mental trick relating to your undesired reactions.
Let’s assume that you don’t want to get worked up when one of your colleagues says something stupid at your team meeting. A mental trick won’t help you to stop your colleague spreading stu-pid ideas, but will give you better control of an unnecessarily strenuous stress reaction. To do this, you could, for example, associate the appearance and feel of your pen with something fun-ny in advance of such a situation. Do this at home in a peaceful situation, over and over: pick up your pen, perhaps always move it in the same way in your fingers, stare at it and, at the same time, think hard about something you find funny. I am deliberately not stipulating what is funny here, because that too is something very personal.
If you successfully link the sight and feel of your pen reliably with the right situation at home and with something funny, next time you’re at a meeting, pick up the pen, look at it and concentrate on the funny thing at the same time. On the one hand, it will distract you, and on the other, “Vegi” in your cerebrum will ask what is going on with the pen. If the answer is “calm and funny”, she will then trigger the corresponding emotional reactions.
When you are creating such tricks and exercises, it is important that you reliably connect the two things or situations with each other. Only in this way will the brain store them as you wish, mean-ing you can then call them up at a time when you need the connection. It is also important that you use your own personal preferences and strengths. Maybe you don’t find the pen example helpful. Maybe you react more reliably to mental pictures, or to sounds, or to smells, like in the Christmas example. And maybe you don’t want to relax by smiling in a stressful situation, but ra-ther by imagining a battle that you won, or the safety of withdrawing internally to a place that you associate with security. Try it out and find the most effective tricks!
“The goal of mental training lies in placing yourself in a psychological situation that enables you to develop your own realistic, possible solution under any conceivable circumstances.”
(Hans Eberspächer, Mentales Training, Copress Sport 2004)
This quote points to another important factor: the prerequisite for effective mental techniques is practising the exercises. Even when you successfully store the connection you deliberately creat-ed in your brain, you will probably not be able to call it up in situations where it should work with-out constant practice. In the next article, you will learn more details about the important process of “calling up” something reliably from the brain.
This article was written by Nicole Züsli (Psychologin lic. phil. I).
