Mental Training: practice makes perfect

Mental toughness – practise, practise, practise!

Some mental tricks only work when you practise them constantly, making them trusted habits.

The previous articles described how mental tricks are reliably effective when they are associated with an instinctive reaction. By contrast, mental techniques produced by learning and by connecting a favourite stimulus with a desired reaction work only, or work best, with intensive training. There are principally two reasons for this:

Our brains can better call up information along “well-trodden” paths.
Imagine you are travelling to Paris. When you are there, you want to explain to someone at the station where you would like to go, and ask them how you can get there. Sure, you learned some French at school, maybe still understand the language well, but you haven’t spoken any French for months. It is probable that you are now standing there, “searching for words” and stumbling over them, although you also understand the French of the person giving you the information very well. Why is this?
Billions of pieces of information are stored in your cerebrum. But you don’t need all of them regularly in your everyday life. When you need a piece of information from your brain, in order to convey it by speaking, writing or behaviour, this information must first come out of your brain’s “library” (subconscious mind) and be transported into the “working memory” (conscious mind). This transportation is both chemical and electrical, as the necessary information is sent from nerve cell to nerve cell. Humans have approximately 100 billion such cells, and every nerve cell is in contact with thousands of others. Order has to be created out of the hustle and bustle of information transmission, including the fact that information frequently called up is fired through a certain sequence of nerve cells, stacked one on top of the other, and is more rapidly transported than other information. Experts call this long-term potentiation.
So, as you are standing at the station in Paris and haven’t spoken French for a long time, then in the first few hours, your French vocabulary is transported slowly, with great effort, through the untrained nerve sequences into the conscious brain. As a result, you cannot use the words you currently need, or can only use them hesitantly, although you definitely stored them in your brain once. If, by contrast, an external piece of information reaches you, the transfer process in the brain is different. For reasons of survival techniques, it is much faster, and that is why you understand what the person speaking French is telling you, due to the vocabulary you learned in the past. Regarding the call-up process, you will find, after a few hours or days in Paris, that you can speak French fluently again, and sometimes you will even call up words that you didn’t even realise you knew.

Mental tricks work in exactly the same way: constantly practising call-up is indispensable for the tricks to work swiftly and reliably even in times when you don’t need the them. Then there is a second phenomenon:

When you are under stress, the brain blocks or slows the transport of information classified as irrelevant.
This, in turn, also has to do with order in the brain. If a piece of information arises in the external world, or on the “big screen” in someone’s head, or in their body, that signals danger, then “Vegi” concentrates fully on coping with the dangerous situation. All other active information transfers in the head that “Vegi” does not classify as necessary for coping with the current danger are slowed down or even blocked until the danger is gone.
Exam nerves are a classic example of this. Firstly, someone – let’s call him Hans – learns the material necessary for the exam, for example, the geography of Switzerland. All this information is stored in the “library” in Hans’s brain. When he’s actually in the exam, though, the information must be urgently transported into the brain’s “working memory”, so that Hans can write it down or talk about it. However, if Hans feels threatened, or creates a danger (“everyone will hate me if I fail”, “I won’t be able to go to university”, “I’ll never have any money”, “my parents will be so disappointed”, etc.) on the big screen in his head, and connects this danger with his thoughts about the exam (sitting in a classroom, a piece of paper on the desk...), then, in the actual exam, faced with the classroom and the paper on the desk, “Vegi” will make it her job to focus completely on a successful getaway, or on freezing (hiding) or fighting successfully. Unfortunately, this does not guarantee that Hans will remember the name of the capital of Valais Canton. This information is not anchored in instinct and will not be classed as essential for survival (forgive me, inhabitants of Valais!), and calling up the correct answer will be blocked by “Vegi”. Only when the presumed danger is gone, Hans leaves the classroom and the piece of paper is out of his sight will “Vegi” allow information to be transported again, meaning Hans could now pass the exam with flying colours.

For example, rescue teams always do “dry runs” to ensure that certain information is called up in the best possible way, without activity or lots of considering, and to avoid a blocking reaction. Let’s take the fire brigade as an example. When we see fire, our instinct says “run!” – an impulse that would not be very expedient for extinguishing a fire or rescuing people from a burning building. That is why rescue procedures and hand grips are practised again and again without a real fire. Fire = put on protective clothing, communicate, connect the hose... This way, the actions necessary for a rescue are kept on a “well-trodden” call-up path in the brain. And as the actions are rehearsed when there is no acute danger, “Vegi” connects them with something harmless. In this way, instinctive stress reactions can be avoided, or at least delayed, in a real situation.

So, if you want to deploy your mental tricks in stressful situations, “dry runs” are indispensable.

This fourth article concludes the series about mental tricks and tips, at least for now. So, here is a quick summary of what is helpful to know in order to use mental tricks successfully:

  1. There is a part of your brain that absolutely must react to your instincts or to things you have learned.
  2. When you learn, you can almost arbitrarily connect any stimulus to any desired reaction.
  3. The more frequently you learn and practise, the more reliable the desired effect, particularly when you are under stress.
  4. You should even practise at times when you don’t need these tricks.

Have fun learning and practising! To make your daily routine easier, you can put together some tips and tricks for your own use. If you need these mental techniques for coping with highly stressful situations, then please seek out a qualified profession for support. You can find them here in Zug Canton.

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

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