Hello and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is like a fidget spinner for your mind. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 66, we're going to look at four key skills for overcoming mental fatigue.
But before we do that, those more astute of you have noticed that I haven't been on the podcast for the last few months now. I've taken some time out and I've been trying to be really productive and get a lot of things done, but the reality was that most of it was I wanted to have some balance back in my world, I wanted to spend some time with my family and my kids over Christmas and the start of the school year. So we've done that and some other key cool things have been going on. I'm super excited that I've written and we're producing at the moment, an online training programme and that's going to be for a lot of athletes who are looking for key skillsets, just dipping in, fixing key problems and gaining key strategies. So that's going to be recorded and it'll be put up online some time before the end of this year, so I'm super excited about that. So stay tuned, I'll give you some more information.
I've just written a new book that again, will be out in the next few months and it's been really super exciting to do that and sit down and spend the time to take all that IP out of my head and put it into a format that people can read and understand, for athletes.
And the other thing is I've been spending some time re-educating myself, constantly wanting to grow and do things differently, and that's been through working with some really unique clients and having really unique strategies for some very specific problems. And I've built some strategies that I'll share over the next few podcasts with you guys on dealing with things that are a little bit left field, things that don't normally come up but still nonetheless cause an issue for performers.
But here I am, I'm back on the podcast, I'm really excited. I've got 15 things that I want to get through in a very short period of time on the podcast to share with you guys, and so I'm looking forward to doing that this year.
So let's get back to what we want to talk about today, which is the four key skills to overcoming mental fatigue. Now, fatigue we know when we're physically fatigued, when we go and do a training session or we've had a hard competition or game and your body just feels heavy, it feels fatigued, it feels sore, it feels like we can't get up out of our chair. So they're the normal things that most of us would associate with fatigue. Being tired, not being able to physically do what you would have done before the event. Yet we know that's a shortlived thing, whether it be through plunge pools, massages or just plain old time out, we know our body will recover quite quickly. The fitter we are, the quicker it recovers. And we know that through the experiences we've had.
What about mental fatigue? Is it the same thing? Is it the same kind of symptoms? Or is it something completely different? The reality of it is, it's the same cause we put our mind through what we would call physical activity for the body. Mental fatigue is the same process as physical fatigue. We exert our mental capacity, our thinking process, our problem solving to the point where we become fatigued. The difference is the way that we manage physical fatigue versus the way we manage mental fatigue has to be different also. The other difference is the time it takes to recover physical fatigue. Once we start to put our physical muscles through the exercise, they're already starting to regenerate and recuperate. So by the time we've finished our exercise, it's started to heal. Mentally, which also incorporates emotionally, can take some significant time for us to overcome. And that, in part, is because of our emotions.
So let's look at some of the key things that go on when we get mentally fatigued. Some of those can be foggy or being clouded in our mind, not being able to make decisions, things appearing to be greater than they really are. The 'mountain out of a molehill' is a typical thing that we say. It could also be just feeling completely overwhelmed; narrowing our focus down to try and focus on one thing to get done and we just can't get it done. It's not being able to collect all the relevant data so that we can make decisions based on fact, not emotions. It can be performance anxiety. And this is one I see so frequently where an athlete knows exactly what they should be doing, yet under pressure it's gone out of our mind. We can't remember in that moment what we're supposed to do or how we're supposed to do it. So that could be a start of a routine, I've seen that as a gymnast myself. Many times I've seen athletes stand there, the competition starts and they just stand there and get a vacant look on their face of, 'Oh my Lord, I don't know what to do from this point forward'. And that panic overrides everything else. And then they get into that moment of, I've just got to do something. Well, that can obviously lead to a poor performance, but it can also lead to significant injuries. I've seen athletes chuck skills purely and simply because they'd forgot what they're supposed to do and end up with quite significant injuries.
The other thing too is, it could come down to skill loss, or the perception of skill loss I should say. Athletes have a skill that they've worked on for a long time. They've been able to perform that skill consistently. Then all of a sudden they get mental fatigued and they can't perform that skill and they'll tell their coaches, 'I've lost that skill'. There's a whole podcast we can go into that, where actually that skill is still locked away inside your brain and it's just purely, simply patterns and triggers. But the perception is that we lose skills when we're mentally fatigued. We get poor motivation. And that's a little bit of the lag from the physical where we find it physically hard to get up and do stuff, physically difficult for us to go out and do the normal four, five am training we've been doing prior to being fatigued. And now your trying to drag yourself out, trying to keep focus, trying to not look for the negatives or look for an exit strategy. And that leads us into the discipline, the poor discipline. And that comes down to and we see again, many, many athletes when they're mentally fatigued, end up with a poor attitude or again, the perception of a poor attitude. So there's some of the more common symptoms of mental fatigue.
So what are we trying to achieve? What do we want to go out there and do? If they're the kind of things that are holding us back or causing us roadblocks and speed humps in the way of our progress, then clearly we want to not be mentally fatigued. However, how do we do that? How do we manage our mental output? We know that when we're physically working hard, we get a pain and we think, 'Can I push past this or can't I? Is this the end as far as I can go? Or have I got a little bit more left in me?' It's not as tangible when we talk about mental pragmatics or the mental cognition of our brain. What we can achieve and what we can't achieve is still a little bit of dark matter when we talk about this kind of concept. And everybody, physically, is unique. What one person can mentally process and endure stress and fatigue, others may not. So it is such a unique aspect. We want to be able to manage that and in order to manage that we need to know how it works.
The bottom line is that we want to get complete control. We want to make sure that the outcomes that we're striving for we have a method or a strategy or at least a reality to be able to achieve that. So we want to take back control from our emotions and put it back into a system. We want to have good decision-making and problem-solving skills. And that means we want to make sure that when things occur that we can actually deal with them or we can come up with a strategy that allows us to continue to move forward. We want to be able to collect and process incoming and outgoing data and we want to do that in a factual manner. We want to make sure that we get all the information in so that we can problem-solve, we can build strategies based on reliable data. We want to make sure also that it's facts, not just emotions. We want to have that consistency and continuity with confidence. We want to go out there and perform every time trusting that we know what we need to know and we're prepared and we're in process and everything that we've trained ends up on the competition floor or on the pitch or on the rink or whatever it is and we want to be self-motivated and disciplined.
So if we look at all the possible symptoms, the causes to that is mental fatigue. So when we look at the solutions of what we want, we want to obviously manage mental fatigue better. So there are four skillsets I want to walk you through today. Some of those are awareness processes for you to be aware of how the brain works and more specifically how YOUR brain works. Some of those are understanding the mechanics of managing that and some of them are skills you can go out and you can apply. There are templates I'll give you the downloads for so you can go and build your strategy.
So number one is know who's doing the work. Now, what I mean is I don't mean is it you, the athlete or the coach or the parent or the organisation. I'm talking about within your own brain. I want to paint a picture for you. Now this is not geographically correct but it's process correct: the prefrontal cortex. A part of our brain at the front is our problem solver. It's a high end decision maker. It's the part of the brain that's the most evolved within the evolution of the human brain. It's phenomenal at what it does. It's allowed us as a species to be where we are and in order to do that, yes, it has a great ability to problem solve, to create strategies, to think laterally, to create scientific outcomes based on details and data. But it's highly, highly expensive when it comes to output. So let's put it in a racing car context. It's like the Formula One of all vehicles. Yes, it's got a great performance but man, you've got to constantly be fuelling up all the time because it is incredibly depleting of our resources within our brain.
The subconscious, the flipside to the conscious part of our brain. That part of our brain isn't so expensive in running costs. It isn't so good at processing, creating strategies. In fact, it doesn't. All it does is it does what we tell it to do without question, without process, without compartmentalisation. You give it something to do subconsciously and it will do it. Good, bad and ugly. So if we give something that's a productive outcome, a productive strategy and we've embedded that, then our brain, when in subconscious mode, will process that.
You often hear of athletes talking about being in the flow and not having to think and it being easy. Well, that's subconscious processing. Of course, as an athlete that's exactly where we want to be. We want to make sure that we're performing the vast majority of what we do subconsciously. Also the interesting fact to this is our subconscious moves three times faster than our conscious and that is because it has less to do, it just does. It doesn't have to think or process.
So we've got the boss sitting in the front office making all the big decisions. The CEO of the corporation building the strategies, having the big picture. Then we've got the workers in the subconscious who go out and apply what the people around the boardroom tell us to apply. So if we think about that as a visual context inside our brain, we know the boss is good at his job but very slow. We know the workers are incredibly fast but not great thinkers.
From a performance perspective. When we look at sustainability and performance we want to take as much work off the boss's table and give it to the workers as possible so that when things occur that are maybe left field or there's a play happening in front of you and you have to think at the time, then you want to have a completely clear desk for the boss to do the best work they do. If the boss is trying to manage everything and also problem solve then that's where we end up with that cloudy inability to think, be able to process and we become overwhelmed. So if we think about that as an image inside your mind at the moment, how much of your performance is being handled by the prefrontal cortex, the boss, and how much is being handled by the subconscious in the flow workers? The reality to this is the vast majority of us spend too much time in our prefrontal cortex, in the details, trying to control every moment by forcing it to happen there and then. We do that by keeping as much on the bosses table, being able to manage there and then we should do, which is in the subconscious.
How do we correct this? We've talked in the past quite a lot about visualisation. Now, this is a familiarity. If we get the boss to create the best outcome, the best routine, the best performance, the best options for you to go and do what you do in that competitive environment and then embed it into our brains, it becomes familiar. Then that will naturally permeate into our subconscious as a strategy, as a process, as a blueprint, as a neurological point of reference. They will end up in our subconscious and will be in the flow, not thinking about what we're doing, just doing what we're doing.
Then we want to make sure that we have a strategy of a clear desk for the boss to make decisions based on what they need to know at that point. So we need to create a hierarchy, right? If I'm doing this skill, if I'm doing this event, what is the likelihood of things being able to come at me that I need to make decisions on? Is there a specific kind of play? Is that a performance I need to be at this level? Whatever it is. What does a boss need to do to get the outcome? When we think about an athlete in competition, what often happens is when they've been training, they get quite familiar, quite comfortable, quite confident about their performance. Come game day, they change the concept in their mind, they change the value of what they're doing. They turn around and say, 'Because today is such a big day, I need to win, or we need to be selected, or whatever it is. No longer am I going to trust what I know, I'm going to re-evaluate everything, so everything is in my subconscious. I'm going to drag it out of there and put it back on the boss's table.'
This is why in competition, often you see athletes become overwhelmed or not perform the way they've done in their training. There's no point in being a champion of the training hall and then crashing out when you get to the opportunity to perform it. So number one is for you to recognise we want to push as much of our performance to subconscious. And we do that through, those of you who see my videos, we use ball exercises to create an activity in the prefrontal cortex and then go through the routine. So we push it into our subconscious. Or the visualisation strategies, those of you have downloaded that template of mine will see there's a vast number of different styles and strategies to visualisation. When we utilise those effectively, we're creating a familiarity of what we want, not what we don't want.
So that's step number one. Understanding who's working for you and who's doing what job and who's the most effective.
Step two is where are you operating from. Now I want you again to create an image inside your mind. I will put these images on our website, go to smartmind.com or you can go to our SmartMind Facebook page and I'll put these images up there in the next few days for you to have a look at. But at the moment I want you to create an image inside your mind of three parallel lines. And in the middle version, I want you to think about the carrot and the stick. What do I mean by this? This is a motivation analogy, it allows you to better understand where you're operating from. In our society, we're very geared and educated – in part that's through schooling and our parenting – to operate from a carrot and stick perspective. If you do this, you'll get that. That's the carrot side. If you don't do this, we are going to punish you. That's the stick side. So we're constantly either running to something or running away from something. And that constant movement, although short term can get great outcomes, long term is incredibly mentally fatiguing. If you're constantly chasing something or in fear of getting punished for something, it's very difficult for you to focus on the details. When we get overwhelmed in that place, we slide down to the bottom level, which is survival mode.
Now when we're in survival mode, we don't care about tomorrow, we don't even really care about yesterday, we don't care about in ten minutes time. We just don't want to be where we are right now and we'll do anything we possibly can to get out. This is like the bumper cars or the dodgem cars at the fairground. We just keep bumping off something and landing somewhere else we don't want to be, just not to be where we were just a minute ago. So when we're in survival mode, and if you're in survival mode or you know somebody in survival mode, there's no point in saying to them, "Let's strategise for a bigger picture tomorrow," because they're not interested. All they're interested in doing is not being here right now. And we need to get them back into a little bit of control. So we need to move up the process into carrot and stick again. Okay, you want to do that? What do you need to do to get what you want? So needs versus wants. Wants being emotional, needs being action. What actions do you need to take to get something that you want? Something that's just initially one or two steps away. Or we don't want to be where we are, so where do we want to be? So we know what the away from is and we know what the towards is, a little bit better. So moving somebody out of that survival mode is incredibly important and incredibly structured. We need to make sure we do that in a very controlled manner. But we've already identified that carrot and stick isn't where we want to be because it's not sustainable. So where do we want to be? We want to operate from a mindset of purpose. Now, you can put this into whatever context in your world that works. If we're going to look at a performance perspective, an athlete perspective, their purpose is to be the best them. To be either an Olympic champion, world champion, state champion, or just a champion of their own skillset, whatever that be for them, that's their purpose. When we operate from something or a place like that, then we have something to buy into. We have something to either gauge and reward or to recalibrate and re-adjust. So living in a purpose driven mindset allows us to have sustainability.
When things don't go right in that world, then we can slide back down to the carrot and stick to get past that moment, knowing that we're going straight back up into the mindset of purpose. So ask yourself that: what is your purpose? As an athlete, what is it you want to achieve? Where are you trying to go? What's your bigger purpose? If it's not just to become national champion this year or be selected for the next Olympics, whatever it is, what's the bigger purpose for you? And then that want, what do I want? We feed back in with the needs. What do I need to do to get what I want? What's the steps I need to take to get to where I want?
Athletes are very prone to – and everybody really, we look at business and look at personal lives – of peaks and valleys. Getting really, really highs and then getting really, really lows. Most athletes are incredibly familiar with living that life of it being 'hero or zero'. We need to change our language around that. We need to change our bigger picture perspective on that. And the way that we can do that is talk about peaks and plateaus.
So if our peak is number ten, and then we know that after number ten, we fall off the other end and we go flying down the other side, and we don't have the opportunity to climb again until we've hit the bottom, that's really unproductive. That takes much too much time. And again, going back to the concept of this podcast, it's incredibly mentally and emotionally fatiguing. So if ten is the peak, what if I said to you we get to nine and we create a plateau almost like a rock climber, harnessing off with a carabiner halfway up the mountain, so if they slide, they only slide back down to that last carabiner. So if we have a better, more structured, more purpose-driven process, just before we get to that point where it's the point of no return and we tip over the edge, let's consolidate and go, "Right, let's lock it off here, let's learn what we need to learn, create a stable platform and grow again." So we bypass that whole dropping down the valley of the other side and having to climb back up again. Change your vocabulary around from peaks and valleys to being peaks and plateaus. Let me control the peak. Let me control the plateau so I can control the growth. It's where we want to make sure that we get continual growth and sustainability. That structured approach allows us to know what's coming, or at least control what we can control and let go of what we can't control.
So being in that stage of purpose, carrot and stick or survival again, ask yourself: where are you operating from right now? Are you in survival and you're listening to this thinking, 'I just want to get out'. Cool. Knowing that will know that you need to step up into the carrot and stick. Okay. If I want something, what do I need to do to get it? I know I don't want to be here. I know I don't want to be here anymore. The carrot is: what can I set myself to move forward? If you're in the carrot and stick world: what do I need to do to get to purpose? Well, I need to know what my purpose is. I need to identify what the big objective is for me. Why am I doing this?
And that's our most important question: why am I doing this? Why am I in this world of elite performance? And if you're in that purpose world, how do we maintain and sustain that? Well, the reality of that is, it's just a structure. We want to make sure that we've got calibration points. We've got points where we reward. So we get that serotonin dopamine mix that makes us go, let's do that again! We want to make sure that our big end objective is meaningful, it's purposeful, and we can connect to it. There's no point in saying, I want to live on star number 72, knowing that no one's ever been there. We want to make sure that if we're going to strive for star number 72, we've got a plan to get there. Make it realistic and reliable so that we can hold ourselves account to that.
The third aspect we want to focus on is emotions versus mechanics. Now, when we think about mental fatigue, the vast majority of times that we get ourselves into that place is because our emotions run away with us and our fear of consequence. What if it goes wrong? What if I can't perform? What if I don't get selected? And our emotions build and build and build. And again, that's in part why we lose clarity on taking action, because we're in fear of what can go wrong.
So again, I'm going to ask you to make an image inside your mind, and we're going to have a seesaw this time. On one end of the seesaw is emotion. On the other end of the seesaw is mechanics. When our emotions rise too high, our mechanics, or our processes, fall off the other end. And then when they fall off, the emotions rise even higher. It's like when you're sitting on a seesaw, all of a sudden somebody drops off one side, you come crashing down. You can't control that. We want to make sure that we have balance, and we have balance by managing the mechanics, or the pragmatics, with the emotions or the wants. So if you want something, you emotionally want to perform the way that you really want to perform. You want to go out there and get selected for the next trial. You want to go out there and have the game of your life instead of increasing the emotions, and go: but what if I can't? Or what's the big consequences here if it does or doesn't work. Ask yourself: let me increase the mechanics, what do I need to do to get what I want?
There's a flipside to that too. Sometimes we can become too mechanical, too robotic, and we lose motivation to do what we do. We go: oh yeah, it's just another training session, just another comp. So what? I don't really want to be there. I guess I have to turn up. That's when we do increase the emotion, we look at, why are we doing this? What's my big outcome? What's the emotional buy-in here? So we're constantly – it's not a set and forget – we're constantly balancing between the mechanics and pragmatics, and the emotions and the wants. So the wants and emotions are really heavy, but they're also really motivating and driving. We want to make sure that mechanics are structured and reliable, replicable and something you have complete and utter control over.
So that seesaw in your mind must always be balancing. And it's assessing where you are. And again, we want to make sure that the majority of our actions are subconscious so the boss can look at, okay, do I need more emotion here or do I need more mechanics here? Let me control this. I'm going into game day where the emotions always rise, so I need to be more pragmatic. I need to have a clearer, more concise, more reliable system so that I balance those emotions so that makes sense.
Number one, we were looking at the boss and the subconscious.
Number two was purpose, care and survival.
And number three was balancing those emotions and the mechanics.
That leads us to the last thing, which is number four, which is our roles. And when I talk about this, I say if you're a sports car, like an F1 car, and you had your foot flat to the floor all the time, what would happen? If you're on a racetrack for some period of time, you will probably be able to keep it on track. However, if you have constantly got it flat to the floor, at some point something's going to break, you're going to crash, or you're going to run out of fuel. One of those three things, if not all of those things will occur unless you have balance as an athlete. We're no different. We need to make sure that we've got our on time, we've got our off time, and we have a growth time. So on our templates, one of the things we talk about is a non-athlete, the student and the performer.
And I'll say to my clients, which one of those is the easiest one to do? And every one will say, without a doubt, it's a non-athlete. When I'm at home, my feet up watching daytime TV and eating my biscuit. Well, the reality is that may appear to be the easiest thing to do, but not many athletes do it. And there's a reason for that, because we don't value it. The easiest thing to do is perform because all you've got to do is rock up and do what you already know. You've only got to perform the things that you've already done in training. So the easiest thing to do is to perform. The second easiest thing to do is be in student mode. And that's when we go training. So that we know that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to push boundaries, it's okay to try new things, it's okay to ask questions, it's okay to have things that you have initially thought you were going to do and then go, I changed my mind. That's all okay, that's what training is for. It's for refining, it's exploratory, it's to allow you to be comfortable with what you know so that when you do go to perform, all of that mindset of processing doesn't have to be there.
We talked about this in previous podcasts where if you go out to perform as a student, you stay problem solving and looking for boundaries and not focusing or trusting you know what you need to know. So when we perform, we need to be in the performer mode. That's not as a student, that's not looking to make mistakes or being okay with that. It's looking to go, just do what I need to do, then I'll process it after.
So that leaves us at number three, which was the non-athlete. This typically is the hardest thing for an athlete to do because there's little tangibility to it. Taking time out, taking a step down from the high octane world of performing or being in the student mode to being in the off mode is such a critical skillset to learn. It also allows us to better manage and reduce the impact of mental fatigue if you don't take time out. And time out doesn't mean laying on the sofa thinking, 'Oh my Lordy, what happens if...?" It means doing stuff for you that makes you feel good, that allows you to be not the student, but to be you. That's going to reduce the cortisol in our brain, take us out of the fight-or-flight mode and allow us to better balance the cortisol with the serotonin.
So actually, the four stages of managing mental fatigue are more about your awareness of where your mindset is, what aspects of your brain you're using and how to control the balance of that.
So we started off by looking at who is doing the work. Is it the boss at his busy desk or is it the workers and their productivity? Just do do do. We want to make sure that the boss has little to do so he can concentrate on quality and make sure the vast majority of the work is done by the workers.
Number two, where are you operating from? Are you in survival mode and you just want to get out? Are you in carrot and stick and it's short term, constantly chasing your tail? Or are you 'at purpose' where it is for a greater purpose? So self motivating.
Emotions versus mechanics, that seesaw. We want to make sure that if it's emotional, if it's an emotional situation, like a competition, we increase the pragmatics. If things are getting a little bit stale and cold, then we increase the heat of the emotions.
And number four, non athlete, student athlete and performer, making sure you understand what role you're in at what time. Because they each have both an output but also an input. They need fuel to operate and each one of those has a different fuel requirement.
So the last thing I'm going to leave you with is one more image inside your mind. And that image is of a snowball sitting on top of a snowy hill. Ask yourself, what happens when that snowball goes down the hill. It picks up momentum, it picks up snow, so it grows and soon it becomes an entity all of its own, where it's moving so fast, it's going in a direction. That's how we want our performance to be.
What tends to happen is that snowball on top of the hill, people try and force it and they apply pressure and they change the shape of that nice round snowball to be flat. It's still got all the elements in it, but it's now flat and won't roll down that hill. So every step becomes: picking it up, flipping it over, picking it up, flipping it over. That's hard, that's demoralising and that's fatiguing. So we want to make sure that the pressure we apply to that snowball is making that snowball do what it does best in that role. The motivation, or the pressure we apply, needs to be in the right direction, not just forcing it to happen.
I hope you've enjoyed this return back to Brain in the Game podcast. It's been really good fun for me to offload what's going on inside my brain. I'll get back into doing these podcasts nice and frequently and I'll keep you updated on the online training, the books and all these cool things that I've been working on in the off time. So until next time, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle and I'm the mind coach.
