Eric Potterat

They can be an article of clothing that just starts to tell you, hey, I'm ready to perform.

I think another technique that there's about eight to 10 that we unpack that we've learned from the best performers.

Another one that's extremely important and low hanging fruit as it were would be breathing.

We know that when human beings get into high pressure, high performance situation, let's call that leverage.

We know that when human beings are in leverage or high performance, high pressure situations, the breathing rates change.

They become very rapid and shallow.

In fact, they range from about 16 to 22 breaths a minute.

One of the ways to reverse engineer that we see the top performers practicing is they get their breathing rates to about six breaths a minute.

So an easy way to think about that is a four second inhale, just a natural pause at the top of that inhalation, and then roughly a six second exhale.

So it's a little bit longer of an exhale.

And that obviously is 10 seconds and that's about six breaths a minute.

So that is a very quick way to physically and mentally be able to perform very, very well.

Yeah, it actually reverses the human stress response.

Back to your initial question of my definition of mental toughness is the ability to control the human stress response when we're stressed or put another way, when we're not practicing mental toughness.

There's something called vasoconstriction.

Muscles get tense, the veins and arteries constrict, blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up.

Those are the physical symptoms, if you will.

The mental effects are what we call executive functions, our ability to problem solve, the ability to think clearly on our feet.

Those really go by the wayside under pressure.

The fastest way to reverse that is this theory of fours, four seconds in, four to six seconds out for roughly four minutes.