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Chapter 1: What mental strategies do extreme athletes use to perform under pressure?
Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. Elite athletes, of course, spend a lot of time training their bodies for super strength, endurance, coordination, precision. But what about their brains? Can psychology help athletes achieve peak performance? That's what we're diving into today, the mental side of sports.
We have psychologist Dr. Jessica Bartley, who works with the world's top athletes as the senior director of psychological services for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Welcome, Jessica.
Nice to be here. Thank you.
Chapter 2: How does Alex Honnold balance mental and physical aspects of climbing?
And we have an athlete whose life depends on getting his mind right before he does his thing. You might have caught him scaling a skyscraper live on TV earlier this year.
American Alex Honnold reached for the top this weekend, climbing a 101-story skyscraper in Taipei without ropes or protective gear.
Alex Honnold, professional climber and host of the Planet Visionaries podcast. Alex, welcome to Science Friday.
Thanks for having me.
Okay. It's easy to fixate on the physical side of climbing, I think because it looks so miraculous to, you know, schlubs like me, but how much of your sport is mental?
I don't know. I sometimes say it's kind of 50-50.
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Chapter 3: What role does fear play in climbing and how do athletes manage it?
I mean, especially if you include the mental side, if that includes technique and sort of execution, like how you climb. But certainly there's a big component to managing fear and there's a lot that goes into it. So, I mean, I think climbing more than most sports has a big psychological component.
Yes. I mean, Jessica, do you work with athletes like Alex?
Yeah, I mean, at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. So that's going to be U.S. soccer, U.S. badminton, like you name the sport, it kind of falls under our portfolio.
Chapter 4: How do Olympic athletes handle performance anxiety?
Climbing is now an Olympic sport, so technically you should be working with climbers now.
Exactly, we do, we do. They're based out of Salt Lake. There's some here in Colorado with us. But yeah, we've got a lot of different sports, and we have become really like a standard in most of the athletes' support systems.
I mean, Alex, do you have a mental trainer?
No. I mean, to be fair, climbing has only very recently become an Olympic sport. And it's always historically been quite a fringe activity. And so there wasn't a lot of even athletic training.
Chapter 5: What psychological techniques help athletes improve their performance?
I mean, that's beginning to change. And there's definitely a lot more support for climbing now than there was when I started. But hardly anybody has any kind of mental coaching, let alone physical. You know, it's all up and coming.
Well, what do you do for yourself then? I mean, how do you train yourself to do this sport?
Well, personally, it's just been practice over time. I mean, I've been climbing basically five days a week for 30 years. So you just, you know, it's a lot of practice. But I've also read a lot of books about, you know, peak performance.
Chapter 6: How does visualization impact an athlete's performance?
And, you know, basically I read a ton of self-help type, like anything around performance and, you know, living your best life, all those kinds of things. And then you try to pick up, you know, one useful lesson per book you read, basically.
Give me one specific example of a useful lesson, a technique that you use to overcome fear or stay locked in or whatever it is.
I mean, as a climber, you kind of develop all the things that you're used to using. I mean, you get scared and then you take a deep breath. You compose yourself. You kind of pull it back together. I mean, with climbing specifically, there's a high degree of rationalism that goes into it, just trying to evaluate, am I actually in danger? Is it appropriate to be scared right now?
Should I be scared or not?
Chapter 7: What are the implications of medication for athletes during competition?
things like that. I mean, I don't know if that applies to all sports, but the thing with climbing is that you often are actually in danger. And so there are times when, when you should back down, you should bail, you know, the weather is turning and like you are actually in a bad situation. And so you should act on your fear.
And then there are other times where your fear is unfounded and you should ignore it and you should just, you know, achieve or whatever.
So Jessica, is this jogging any thoughts for you?
Oh, for sure. I mean, because I think it's a lot of what I'm doing is also trying to not let the mind get in the way of how you've trained physically, because a lot of times it can be our biggest enemy in the way we're interpreting a situation, thinking about a situation. So I think exactly like Alex is saying is, you know, Is this a danger or is it not?
Chapter 8: How can lessons from elite athletes apply to everyday challenges?
I mean, there's lots of sports that there's higher risk, they're higher risk sports. There's others where you just have to kind of work through it a bit and understand, you know, how do you let those physical skills, what you've trained your body to do kind of come through at their best.
I think that's interesting because I feel like for most sports, you're helping people sort of unlock, like just always try your absolute hardest. And then there are a few sports where you definitely don't want to try your hardest sometimes because you will die or you will be grievously injured. The thing is that climbing is always scary at some level.
You know, it's like you could always get hurt. And so untangling when that fear is well-founded and when it's actually helping you stay safe is one of the key lessons, I think, from climbing.
That's really interesting. You have to be able to disentangle what's a real valid fear that you should listen to from maybe just your body's natural response from being up thousands of feet into the air with no rope. So how do you do that?
Well, I think the rational mind comes into play to some extent where you're sort of like, well, am I actually in danger? Have I practiced this? Am I prepared for this? Is the weather or conditions stable? Is the medium, is the rock quality high enough? Because sometimes you are actually in danger of breaking a hold and falling to your death.
And if the rock quality is low, then you probably should be a lot more careful and you have a reason to be scared. So I think being rational about it and sort of understanding where your fear is coming from is the first step. And then ideally you make a sort of well-informed decision as to whether or not you want to push forward in the face of, you know, push through your fear or not.
Jessica, I mean, are there specific exercises that you do with athletes or meditation or hypnosis? Like what tools do you use to help athletes figure out when to push?
Breaking the headline, you hypnotize Olympians into performing at a higher level.
Yeah, right? No, I mean, it's really specific to the athlete. It's specific to the sport. You're looking at all the circumstances. As Alex is saying is, am I actually in danger? And I think that that's really important. I mean, one of the things that I fall back on a lot is imagery and visualization.
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