What we can Learn from Navy SEALs’ Training
I love to watch YouTube videos of Navy SEALs
training. No, I don’t like combat. The part that fascinates me is the
training. Many candidates start
the training but only a very small portion actually make it through without
giving up.
Since this blog is about using your mind to change
your body, I wanted to find out the mental secrets of the soldiers who
succeeded.
It took the military a while, but they finally got
psychologists and brain experts to help them find out what the successful
candidates did differently than the quitters.
4 Ways to Acquire Navy
Seals’ Mental Toughness
It turns out that there are 4 “secrets” of success in
this endeavor and they can definitely be used to help us in ours.
The four pillars of success are:
Goal Setting
Visualization
Self-Talk
Emotion control
Goal Setting
SEALS learn not only to set long-term, mid-term and
weekly goals, they set micro-goals.
The training is so strenuous that they often think only extremely
short-term: “The next 100 sit-ups”; “Make it through until breakfast”, etc.
If you have trouble with snacking, set a micro-goal
like “I can make it this next half-hour snack free”, can help enormously. Of
course, it helps to distract yourself, drink water and move, too!
Write down your long- and short-term goals. Perhaps,
long-range, you want to achieve a certain weight, muscles toned, and wear a
certain size in clothes. Short-term you might set the goal of having only
healthy foods in the house or making your own meals with fresh produce.
Using the next technique will increase your chances of
success.
Visualization
Visualization is mental rehearsal, which means you
practice in your head. You can do
this in three ways:
1) Imagine running through an activity successfully.
Picture yourself doing what you want to do in the best possible way. Do this
many, many times and your brain will learn what to do when the “real”
(unimagined) opportunity comes.
I remember in
Mark Phelps’ book how he described his mental preparation. He was a winner even
before getting into the pool. Everything was taking place the way he knew it by
heart: the diving board, the water, hand movements – he’d practiced it all
thousands of times in the pool and in his mind.
Even when water
started to enter into his goggles in a very important race. He could not see….
But Phelps had also trained this scenario in his mind. Sight would not be a
problem for him because he knew by heart how many hand movements he needed to
make until reaching the final wall. He dealt with the problem as he had
rehearsed in his mind over and over, then went on to win the race.
This is the power
of mental rehearsal.
Confront the adverse
situation in your mind numerous times and it will come naturally when you face
it in reality.
2) Watch other people successfully doing what you want
to achieve. This is called observation training. Then, close your eyes and
watch the same scene in your mind. Step into the picture or movie and
experience doing the successful activity yourself.
3) There is another way of using imagery to increase
your self-confidence and self-efficacy. Think of all the strengths and resources
you have now that you didn’t have earlier in your life. Enjoy the feeling of strength and
competency. Feeling this strength, go back through an unpleasant (no traumas
here, please) experience and change the outcome so that you feel better about
it. Go ahead, just change it so that the outcome makes you feel satisfied.
Self-Talk
There is a great possibility that positive, motivating
self-talk can override signals from the amydala. The amygdala is part of the
limbic system and its purpose is to regulate emotional reactions such as fear
and aggression and it developed prior to our neocortex (the thinking brain).
Whenever in
peril, the amygdala kicks in as the first commander; it sends signals to the
hippocampus (another part of the limbic system), which in turn releases stress
hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline; they prepare our body for the fight
or flight response. Thus, all the
energy available is hijacked and directed to the feet for running or to the
hands for fighting the imminent danger.
According to a new study, giving yourself advice and
encouragement in the second-person before an upcoming task may actually boost
your performance more than first-person self-talk.
Researchers also asked 135 students to write down
advice to themselves in relation to exercising more often in the next two
weeks. Those who wrote in the second-person, again, reported a more positive
attitude toward the task and even planned to do more exercise than the students
who referred to themselves in first-person. (This study was published online in the European
Journal of Social Psychology on June 23, 2014.)
Emotion control
This is more of a
physical exercise. It focuses on breathing and it requires to deliberately
breathe slower as it would help counteract some of the effects of panic. When
you panic, you take faster, shorter breaths, which is a forerunner of
hyperventilation.
Two ways of breathing
Long exhales
mimic the process of relaxation within the body.
Long inhales provide much more oxygen to the brain which results in better cognition processes.
Long inhales provide much more oxygen to the brain which results in better cognition processes.
4X4 breathing
Breathe in,
slowly, counting to four.
Breathe out
slowly, counting to four.
Repeat until calm
The Lengthened
Exhalation
My favorite way
to relax myself is to let the body inhale of it’s own accord and then lengthen
the exhalation gently. Breathe out slowly and as long as it is comfortable.
Don’t force. Just follow the breath.
Why shouldn’t we use the same techniques of mental toughness that successful warriors use? We don’t have to plow into combat; we just need to harness the power of our minds.
