4 Secrets of Mental Toughness

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 upsizing your life (while and after decluttering), 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.

Or perhaps your long-term goal is to have the garage so cleaned out and organized that you can actually park your car there! A short-term goal could be the right side of the garage. A micro-goal would be decluttering one square meter of the floor.

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.

How to Improve Concentration AND Fitness

Focused Work AND Exercise, Every Day!

Lots of us are really tired at the end of a workday.  That is one of the reasons that we plop down on the couch and the only other exercise we get is pressing the buttons on the remote and lifting our hand from snack to mouth.

One way to get your exercise and stretching in daily and improve the quality of your work at the same time is the Concentration Enhancement Method.  That’s a big name for a simple technique!

How long can you concentrate optimally?

Current researchers make a case that the average attention span of American adults has dropped and it is limited to 20, 10, or even five minutes.  Concentration is also increased if a person is able to perform the task fluently, compared to a person who has difficulty performing the task, or to the same person when he or she is just learning the task. Fatigue, hunger, noise, and emotional stress reduce the time focused on the task. “Common estimates for sustained attention to a freely chosen task range from about five minutes for a two-year-old child, to a maximum of around 20 minutes in older children and adults” (Source:Wikipedia).  

Now here is the cool part. What you do in your break time makes all the difference.

Exercise increases mental sharpness, memory, and concentration according to a Harvard Men’s Health Watch in 2013. “Exercise stimulates brain regions that are involved in memory function to release a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Only the brain can make it, and (especially) with regular exercise”, the greater the intensity, the more likely BDNF production will increase.  (Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, 2008)

(In recent years studies have demonstrated that engaging in intermittent fasting and/or caloric restriction can likely increase a person’s lifespan and general health. One way intermittent fasting and caloric restriction help is by increasing the amount of BDNF signaling within the brain.)

In addition to improving concentration and overall brain functioning, the effects of physical activity may be linked to preventing a range of cognitive and neurological disorders, including Alzheimer's disease and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. (Mary Carmichael, "Newsweek")

The Concentration Enhancement Method

1) Figure out how long your Deep Work block is going to be. You might have to build up your focus “muscle”.  Try for 20 minutes with no interruptions (set a timer) and then 25, and then 30, etc. One Italian even named this method Pomodoro (tomato) Technique because his timer was shaped like a tomato! His concentration unit was 25 minutes. You might work for 50 minutes and then rest for 10.

You allow yourself NO distractions – no phone, no Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or any other time waster (but they are great for after hours!). Plan what you want to get done in your designated time period. Set your timer and GO!

2) Work intensely on One Main Thing, your intent being to finish it off during this work unit.

3) When the timer goes off, you take an Active-Break. Take a walk, get some water, and do some physical activity.  Don’t take a break in front of your computer—your brain won’t get the pause it needs. Depending on your Concentration Unit, you’ll take a break between 5-10 minutes.  Studies have shown that 10 minutes are enough. If you take longer breaks, it’s hard to buckle down and concentrate again.

4) Try for at least four to five of these intense work/break units before you take a longer break.

5) Improve Work Quality and Get Fit at the Same Time!!

Here are some short exercise videos from YouTube, which you can do as your Power Pause:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR1AWOp6t30

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSGR805EOUc

One or more of the breaks could be used for Office Yoga:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzkfOKkIteA

With this yoga break, you even have time for a toilet experience afterward:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xbCfTHz3mU

By the time you go home after work, you’ve done your exercise and stretching. It’s happened before that people have felt less tired after a workday built up in this way. Some even walk or bike to and from work as their energy increases. But that’s (calorie-less) icing on the cake.

Give it a try.

Let me know your experiences with this method. :-D

Piles of Stuff and No Place to Walk!

Piles of Stuff – Don’t walk by them and don’t add to them

I don’t know how long you can live with accumulating stuff before you, suddenly and inexplicably, have a complete crap meltdown.

Every few months you manage to get on top of things; the piles of stuff get cleared away and boxes of crap are sorted through and organized. The feeling is euphoric, but it’s bittersweet because it is generally short-lived.

Do you have a drawer of doom, which is full of junk. You rarely open it except to add yet another „I don’t know where to put this“ item.  But then, when you chuck it all?  That’s when you realize you have thrown your marriage/birth/ certificate or passport away.

Perhaps you enjoy filing your documents in the fruit bowl to keep the bananas happy.

What about that beautiful kitchen table you’ve not seen for eight years. “It all started when the kids began school” you stammer.

Or do you have kitchen shelves that seem to accumulate stuff?  Nobody owns up when you scream out  „Whose dildo is this?!“  Do you just flip out and start chucking stuff everywhere while shouting about how you can’t live in such a pigsty anymore?  Then do you just get over it and carry on until the next episode?

Or what about the kitchen cutlery drawer, that has pretty much everything that you can’t be bothered to put in a proper place? Or probably don’t even have a proper place.

Is there a path to your bed or do the kids just crawl over piles to get to theirs. Does your laundry never find its way into the closet or dresser because they are overfilled?

Does your garage or office proudly contain 20 years of scrap paper, color-coded and in chronological order?  Is everything a highly organized junk pile?

Have you moved from place to place with a pile of things you don’t want, simply because you can’t figure out what to do with them that wasn’t somehow going to just get it off into landfill?

Do you seek out storage baskets wherever you shop? You’re not sure how you accumulated SO much junk but it multiples each time you buy yet another storage box. It must be some kind of voodoo.

You could blame the wretchedness on guests - years of tidying up for them aka sweeping random stuff off the floor and surfaces into less visible areas and bins.  Everyone’s house looks about the same except the frantic two hours before the relations from abroad come to stay. You could reduce the number of friends and relatives, or get them way too drunk to notice while they’re still on the doorstep.

Do you swear that the demons of your lives gets together while you’re asleep and begins an assault on any unsuspecting areas that are clutter-free.  Perhaps your reaction is exactly the same. *Turns over Community Chest card and opens wine bottle*

STOP!!

If you’ve had ‘de-clutter room by room’ on your ‘to do’ list since January and haven’t done anything, listen up. We’re in this together.

You know the saying: "The easiest way to organize your stuff is to get rid of most of it”.

Here are some ideas to help you get on your way to a clutter-less (who needs completely clutter-free?!) life:

- Have a Toy Blitz. Take toys that aren’t used anymore to a charity.

- Divide and Conquer! Separate your stuff into several piles. Piles of things to keep, things to sell, things to dispose of, and things to give away (that is the most fun pile to create). Find a home for the things you keep, designate a date for your yard/garage sale, dump the junk, and present the “gifts”.

- Like most things you own, you never know their true monetary value until you try to sell them. Try to sell something that you spent a bunch of money on and see what people are willing to pay for it. This is really worth considering before you trade your hard-earned cash for something new! How wealthy would you be if you hadn’t bought all this stuff in the first place?!  (I’m really giving my own self a lecture here…)

Americans are hoarders: There are now more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than Starbucks and McDonalds combined. Roughly a quarter of garages are too full of stuff to hold a car. The average home has $7,000 worth of unused belongings.

A new app called Stuffstr is designed to help you declutter, whether you’re on a Marie Kondo inspired purge (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3OXvQZe7g8 or  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1-HMMX_NR8&t=322s ) or just starting to feel guilty about everything you own that’s going to waste.

The app is designed to automatically add online purchases to your personal inventory as soon as you buy them, and products can also be added later. When you realize you’re not using something, with a swipe, the app will give you options to give it away. You can notify family and friends that it’s available, find the nearest place to donate it, or get a recommendation for a service like Give Back Box, which will give you a free shipping label and let you leave donations on your front step

Create Your Best Self - Finding Joy Through Self-Transformation

Creating Your BEST SELF

Life is not about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself.

I heard this sentence on a Body Pump video and there is much truth in it.

“You do something that you could never have imagined yourself doing, become something you could never have imagined yourself becoming, and, ultimately, live a life greater than you could have ever imagined yourself living.”

~Dr. Judith Wright

Even the smallest positive efforts transform us in some way, pushing us forward on the personal journey and nurturing the next level of self-awareness and growth.

Personal transformation can propel you from living a better life to living a spectacular life.  Science is beginning to show how purposeful development of our own potential can bring us farther than we ourselves thought possible. Until relatively recently, the traditional understanding was that we are bound to the brains we were born with. We presumed that the brain was unchangeable rather than dynamic and that we needed to accept our cerebral boundaries.

But an overwhelming body of new scientific research—especially in the area of neuroscience—has done away with these assumptions. This research has discovered neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to develop new neural pathways based on experience and learning, meaning that we can use our malleable minds to grow and develop as human beings. It’s quite thrilling.

What kind of transformation leads to spectacular living?

No matter how happy we are, we often sense there is more to our lives. We feel the soft call of our unfulfilled potential.  Once we go out searching for our as yet unreached potential, we often find that there is no limit, no end point. We go beyond our own potential!

Change is significant, incremental improvement in a person’s life, but it’s not transformation, which is a much larger scale. According to Dr. Judith Wright, there are six phases in transformational change: Yearning, Engaging, Revelating, Liberating, Rematrixing, and Dedicating.

Yearning is a desire. You know there is more to you under the surface. We’ve learned to brush away these yearnings because they are unsettling and disturb the status quo. Learn to listen to these desires – allow yourself to feel the hunger.

Engaging means the spontaneous, in-the-moment responses to the urges generated by our deeper yearning.

Relevating is a process in which both the awareness of yourself and your possibilities is heightened and you also learn to reveal yourself more fully. You begin to be aware of mistaken beliefs and limited thinking that have been holding you back.

Liberating means doing something contrary to those limiting beliefs that you discovered in the Revelating phase. This involves confronting your fears and driving through them.

Doing this again and again helps build new neural pathways which Dr. Wright calls Rematrixing. Doing something new is great, but only by making those liberating moves intentionally and often, do you transform.

The final phase is Dedicating which means making a lifelong commitment to conscious sustained, intentional action towards your own transformation. This is an ongoing process that is very personal to each individual.

Let’s go for it!

Your Daily Sleep Well Journal

Sleep Well Journal

Many, many people have morning rituals, routines to help them get a delightful and effective start of the day.  And many have an evening routine, which helps them ease into a soothing sleep.

First, set a Evening-Ritual-reminder on your phone.  Mine reminds me to begin my Wind-Down at about 9:30. You can put your digital devices on charge and lay out your things for tomorrow. Prepare all you can now for a smooth beginning in the morning.

(If you like to use the computer or phone before bed, there is an app called FLUX, where you can set the time and no blue light will come through. Blue light makes your brain believe the sun is still up). https://justgetflux.com/

Gratitude

What in your life makes you thankful? Even if today was less than optimal, what about your life, other people, material treasures, enriching relationships lead to feelings of gratefulness?  Write down some of the successes, accomplishments and magic moments from your day. Write around the rims of the page if needed!

1)__________________________________________________________

2)__________________________________________________________

3)__________________________________________________________

4)__________________________________________________________

5)__________________________________________________________

Add to your Success List

What happened today that made you feel good or successful? What worked out well?  What people were pleasant to be around?  What made you laugh?  Did you receive appreciation from someone?

1)__________________________________________________________

2)__________________________________________________________

3)__________________________________________________________

4)__________________________________________________________

5)__________________________________________________________

How have I improved myself or learned something relevant for my life today?

___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

Tomorrow Sneak-Peek

What is The One Thing, the Most Important Thing, you want to work on and/or finish tomorrow?

___________________________________________________________

Visualize yourself working on this all-important task. See yourself in your mind’s eye how you focus on the work and bring the task to its desired conclusion.

Which self-help book, article or blog are you reading at the moment? How many minutes are you planning to spend reading or listening to these tomorrow?

reading___________________________ planned reading time__________

Before Bed Stretch

Our bodies have to sit a lot of the time.  On top of that, we sit crunched over at the shoulders and head.  Now is the time for a soft stretch to ease out the kinks before sleep.

You might have your own routine or you can be guided through a seated or lying stretch using DVDs or YouTube. It would theoretically be better to do without any electrical/digital equipment during the last half hour before sleep yet, hey, it should be what’s pleasant for you.

Sleep Inducing Time

Time for reading a book or story which lets you get lost in it.  Nothing exciting here -- perhaps a bit of well-written fiction. Some people enjoy audio books at this phase or a lovely guided meditation for sleep. A study in England has found that reading for just six minutes can reduce stress levels 68%.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/5070874/Reading-can-help-reduce-stress.html

I turn on my fan, which gives a soft “white-noise” from it (I live in a noisy area). Some people listen to waves, babbling brooks or relaxation music. One more round of gentle gratitude and off you float to dreamland.

Getting ready for sleep is extremely important.  Some lucky people get into bed and fall asleep like a stone.  Others, if they don’t take careful steps to prevent it, ruminate for hours or wake up during the night worrying. 

Sleep well.  Sweet dreams…

Here is a checklist to help keep you on track:

Evening Ritual	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
Begin when the reminder sounds
Prepare for tomorrow
Gratitude
Success Journaling
Happy Questions
Sneak-Peek list
dim the lights
Sneak-Peek visualization
Soft Stretching
Sleep inducing reading
zzzzzzz…

© Linda Langeheine 2017