Anxiety & Visualization

I use a drill that I call the chalk outline drill, and I force you to be able to manipulate your brain space related to what you're doing. So maybe you have like a real issue with like lower back on deadlifts, but literally nothing else. And your back never hurts. We can approach that from a neurology perspective. And look, you've had so many hippocampal memories associated with this part of your sensory motor cortex that we have substance pe just kind of slip into this motor pattern now because it's happened so many times. So what I've want you to do is make this chalk outline and envision the lower back portion of your chalk outline in a calming purple or blue and allow yourself to disengage feelings of vigilance, aggression, pain, or whatever negative you have pent up in that low back. Then open your eyes, get ready and perform a successful deadlift, and then do it again back and forth until that pain degrades.

Now, we're later related to anxiety that you mentioned.

For you. Like, how would you define where anxiety actually comes from? And I think about this honestly because one thing that I talked with a guy named Dr. Peter Martone about several podcasts ago was he said that he'll relax himself and fall asleep a lot faster if he avoids future processing and thinks instead back to things that have happened in, in the past as almost the way to kind of like shift a lot of activity in the frontal cortex. I suppose, away from that and away from dwelling upon the future. Making me kind of wonder, your whole take on anxiety and future processing, you ever thought about that?

100%. So we don't have a center in our brain for the future. The most sophisticated anticipatory center we have is probably the hypothalamus with like anticipatory insulin secretion and stuff like that. And we're looking at like minutes to hours, hours tops. You know what I mean? It's funny, when we talk about the best coaches like that are just known they're planning one to two, maybe three, four years tops in advance, our ability as a human brain to go into the future is frankly trash. But our ability to be present is quite good. So if you look at anxiety from like a philosophical perspective, a psychology first perspective, I would say it's putting too much blood flow to future processing using centers that we don't have available for that. And if I was to look at it from a neurological perspective, I would describe it electrically like I just did a few minutes ago, being surplus electricity into unnecessary places in your brain. But we're always coming back to the concept of white noise or sacrificing electricity and blood flow to the key brain areas for it being turned on and inappropriate one.

So what do you do about that? Like, obviously, like golfing has a great deal of potential for anxiety or panic to cause issues. You know, I do a lot of bow hunting and you know, shooting in archery. They talk a lot about, like the, the, you know, the target panic issue where you're, you're anxious. Right before you do a, you know, like a high risk or, or very, very important activity. What are your thoughts on, on management of anxiety and panic based on what you just described?

The first thing I would tell anybody is recognize it's never going away. It's a good thing. And even the best athletes on the planet, the best businessmen on the planet, signing the biggest deals still experience it. And just being at peace with that sometimes, sometimes gives people a lot of like, support because it's easy to believe that like, oh, you know, like the Walter Paytons of the world, they were never anxious. Like, they just did what they did and they're tough, blah, blah, blah. And that's, that's an appropriate mindset to have. But I promise you, every single great athlete and businessman ever felt just as nervous, if not more nervous than you did. The difference was they had strategies and what I call buoys of objectivity to hang onto when they're in the ocean of anxiety, drowning, and they were just able to survive. So when you have these anxious moments, the first thing you need to do is re engage with the world around you from your five senses. Anxiety often has to do with losing touch, especially like that term I just mentioned is a golf term. It's losing touch of how hard these fine motor skills things are happening. Or we talk about it in wrestling too. Did you push someone so far that it actually negated the setup of what you were trying to do? The concept of touch goes a long way in every single sport, across everything. So if you lose mindfulness, your five senses, your ability to interact with the world around you, you're inherently going to lose vision, peripheral vision, and behavioral decisions. And the five senses are a little triangle if will in their ability to function. So being aware and accepting, being mindful and present are the two easiest concepts to chase after if you want to do something like maybe pull out a few arm hairs or just lightly and gently stroke your hand and give yourself a light sensation. I talk about the world's smallest violin. Rubbing your thumb nail over the little fingerprint ridges of your index finger and force yourself to feel that, you know, it's gonna bring you to present, because that future driven perception is certainly what's driven an anxiety.

How do you tackle the idea of, like, you know, visualization and motor imagery? And I've come across a ton of really interesting research lately on, you know, kind of like those old, what was it like, the psychosomatic books, like the. Like the Inner Game of Golf or the Inner Game of tennis, where you could actually improve your stroke or improve your performance by using mental imagery. And, you know, as we all know, probably most notably with the story of Michael Phelps, the swimmer, getting the point where we could visualize, like, the individual drops of water coming off his goggles. You know, you. You say that we have a very difficult time future processing or imagining what would happen in the future. I imagine that's a little bit different than visualizing what it is that you want to accomplish or an ideal performance metric. So how do you deal with visualization? Is that something that you think is actually useful?

100%. The research proves it is. And there's a balance between spatial ability, that's the skill to participate in visualizations, and the quality of the visualization drill itself. You need to be skillful enough. So when we look at what that is on simplest terms, it's like Rubik's cubes. It's like, can you do it in your head? Do you know what to do next? Can you see in 3D? If we go from white to red or whatever's on the other side, spatial abilities as a skill, and it's like most rudimentary sense, it's, how can you manipulate these things in 3D in your head? Now, when you add that to Michael Phelps's visualization drill that we just talked about, you're actually decreasing the need to anticipate in the future because you're seeing right here in the present what you believe is about to happen. Because we understand that faith and belief are inherently actually tied to reality. You would love to believe that there's no research behind faith, prayer and hugs, but there is very legitimate research behind all three of those things we've seen. So not only are you using an actual tangible skill, you're actually able to process something that's about to happen better and get ready for it better because you have inherent belief that it's about to happen.

So from a practical standpoint, how do you use visualization or use it with your athletes or your clients?

So right away, 100% no matter what. You're starting a spatial skill training regime and that's separate from visualization. In my head, I think of visualization as being your sports specific training and spatial skills are your gpp. So every single day, no matter what, you're into some type of spatial game that challenges your ability to manipulate scenes in 3D in your head. Then we're going to do some sports psychology like work conversing, getting to know your athlete self and create specific visualizations that help you deal with the negative performance related things that can pop up on the field. So it's maybe you realize that you just get fast and aggressive in periods of time where you don't need to be. We're going to practice a visualization drill that involves speeding up and slowing down time. So maybe you see the drop of water come really slowly off Michael Phelps's goggle and then once it leaves the goggles, back to real time. So there's a dual training modality that I kind of bring to the table when we talk about training an athlete's brain.

You ever use visualization? I guess, I guess for like a non high performance athlete, let's say the average person, like going to the gym, hitting the weights, you know, just, just pursuing better health and fitness in general. From preventive standpoint, anything that you would use with visualization when it comes to, to those type of folks who might think this is just for the pro athletes.

Yeah, I use a drill that I call the chalk outline drill and I force you to be able to manipulate your brain space related to what you're doing. So maybe you have like a real issue with like lower back on deadlifts, but literally nothing else in your back never hurts. We can approach that from a neurology perspective. And look, you've had so many hippocampal memories associated with this part of your sensory motor cortex that we have Substance P. Just kind of slip into this motor pattern now because it's happened so many times. So what I want you to do is make this chalk outline and envision the lower back portion of your chalk outline in a calming purple or blue and allow yourself to disengage feelings of vigilance, aggression, pain or whatever negative you have pent up in that low back. Then open your eyes, get ready and perform a successful deadlift and then do it again back and forth until that pain degrades.

Interesting. You know, part of the performance piece that you hear thrown around a lot that I'm sure you've come across is this idea of getting into the flow state. Do you work with that much as far as like, practical ways to increase someone's ability to be able to get into flow state?

Yeah, it's fun for me because you have to reverse engineer it. Where the research ends on flow state is the different flow states for different people in different sports. I've kind of come to my own categorization of we have dopamine and norepinephrine driven flow states for individuals. Some rare people do both, but people are usually one or the other. The type of person where it's like having your best friend there and the euphoria of your friends and I made it, that ignites the ultimate performances in you. And we see these people are anticipatory in nature, just like dopamine tends to be. But we also see people that function under the I need to get punched in the face first and then I'm amazing mindset. These are the norepinephrine people because when we look at like Adderall, like drug studies, we see norepinephrine always comes to the party late. And that's because it's a consistent constituent of dopaminergic activation. So what we're really looking at is some people slip into flow state because slip into is actually the terminology they use in the research because that's what happens. Some people slip into flow state as things are beginning and the environment related to it causes it to them. And some people attain flow state after that's already begun and they've stabilized. And norepinephrine as a neurotransmitter has to do with focus. These tend to be your somewhat aggressive, stoic face. Very kind of goal oriented individuals. Where the dopamine people tend to be the types of carefree, fun loving flow state individuals.

Yeah, oh, I'm totally norepinephrine. Like for me to get into the flow state, I'd be in a lot of pain, under a lot of pressure, or having been engaged in the activity for at least like 15 to 20 minutes before I really get into that alpha state where everything started to feel easy. Is that pretty typical for a norepi?

100%. You see this, like, whether it's baseball, football or golf, this is the guy that needs to strike out once to hit a home run. The guy that needs to bogey the first hole, the guy that needs to have a shit first half so he can bounce back and have a killer second, third and fourth halves. And then, you know there's pros and cons to everything, right? So we see the norepinephrine people tend to have less control over their flow state because they're typically restricted responding to something that needs to happen. Whereas we see dopamine people oftentimes have work capacity and behavior efficiency issues like, oh, that, that could have been a layup, but you went in for a slam dunk from eight feet out when you just didn't need to. You needed to take a bunch of caffeine and get all hyped up and get crazy sweaty just to actually ignite what you need to do. You know, all these different things play into the strategies that you nutritionally training wise and psychologically need to employ, even supplement wise.