Building Psychological Resilience Can Improve Your Game
The following is adapted from The NeuFit Method by Garrett Salpeter.
The ability to stay cool under pressure is key to optimal nervous system health. Whether you’re a basketball player at the free-throw line with a championship game at stake or a business executive on the cusp of a game-changing deal, it’s also a valuable skill. Everyone can benefit in some area of their life from keeping a level head. Some people even specialize in it.
Special Forces operators like Green Berets and Navy SEALs — who endure months of grueling training to condition their nervous systems for life-threatening situations — are examples of a population with extremely high levels of psychological resilience. At the other end of the spectrum, many monks who spend their lives in meditation can also reach extraordinary degrees of mental resilience.
Though their methods and goals are different, both special operations soldiers and monks train themselves to handle scenarios that would trigger a stress response in the average person. That is, they develop the capacity to meet high-stakes challenges and psychological events without shifting into fight-or-flight mode.
You can develop your own psychological resilience, too, and you don’t even need extreme training to do it.
What Role Does Psychological Resilience Play in Your Game?
Most people don’t experience the types of situations a monk or a special operations soldier deals with on a regular basis, but we all face stressors and challenges. Whether you’re an athlete, a business professional, a musician, a surgeon, a parent, or anything else, we all need to perform under pressure.
Psychological resilience is what allows us to perform despite the stress of a situation. It keeps our body under control: hands steady, mind focused, and coordination precise. The ability to handle stress neurologically is also a key component of overall fitness for everyone.
When we build psychological resilience, we also build our capacity to take on greater levels of challenge while remaining healthy and fit over the long term. We can perform and compete more effectively because we’re able to keep a cool head.
Breathing for Stronger Psychological Resilience
Now that you know the benefits of psychological resilience, how can you increase yours?
One approach that anyone can take is to use breath training to build psychological resilience. The way a person breathes plays a major role in nervous system function and in the body’s stress response.
Through the simple practice of nose breathing — especially during exercise, when it’s most challenging — we can train the nervous system to handle increasing levels of stress while remaining in a healthier, parasympathetic-dominant state.
Imagine, for example, that someone takes a twenty-minute run. If they’re practicing good posture, breathing in and out through the nose, and focusing on slowing down the breath while they’re running, they’re essentially teaching the body to stay calm in the face of stress. Even though their heart rate is increasing and they’re challenging the body’s energy systems, their nervous system doesn’t shift as significantly into fight-or-flight mode to meet the challenge.
The simple act of intentionally overriding the impulse to breathe through the mouth during exercise is one of the best ways to build resilience, both physical and psychological.
A Neurological Approach to Building Psychological Resilience
In addition to breath training, you can also take a neurological approach to building psychological resilience.
At NeuFit, a rehab and fitness-focused company and clinic, two of the primary ways we help clients build this capacity are through controlling the breath and using a device called the Neubie, which stands for Neuro-Bio-Electric Stimulator. This device uses direct electrical current to stimulate the brain and nervous system and re-educate the muscles for recovery and growth.
When using the Neubie during a rehab or training session, there are times when we raise the power levels to the point where they push clients outside their comfort zone. In the face of discomfort, the lower and more primitive parts of their brains start to panic, and most people naturally want to stop or quit.
However, if we can coach people to breathe and move through the current, an amazing thing starts to happen: they adapt to the current instead of fighting against it. Each time this happens, clients learn that they’re capable of handling more challenges than they previously thought.
Over time, this process leads to positive neurological adaptations, including greater psychological resilience.
Commit to Building Your Resilience
As you can probably tell from looking at a special operations soldier or monk, building psychological resilience doesn’t happen overnight. These people devote much of their lives to building a strong body and mind. But by starting the process of building psychological resilience now, you can make major improvements over time.
Take an approach that combines both neurological and breath training, and you can learn to push your body and mind further, leading to better performance.
Given enough time and commitment to your training, whether you’re stepping up to the free-throw line or an important business presentation, you won’t even break a sweat.
For more advice on rehab and fitness, you can find The NeuFit Method on Amazon.
Garrett Salpeter combined training in neuroscience and engineering to start NeuFit, a company at the nexus of neurology and fitness, dedicated to treating athletes and patients in the realization of fitness goals, effective rehabilitation, and improved overall health. He is the host of The NeuFit Undercurrent, a podcast for patients and practitioners interested in learning more about neurology’s role in recovery and performance. Garrett and his team have worked with thousands of patients recovering from neurological impairments, chronic pain, and sports injuries, including professional athletes, sports teams, and universities. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and their two daughters.
