4 Secrets to Mental Toughness for Weight Loss

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.

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.