The Neurophysiology of Performance with Dr. Simon Marshall PhD | Koopcast Episode 75

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the KoopCast is a special one because i am coming to you live from the adventure van i'm out on the road right now but i still record podcasts on the road hope you guys enjoy it this podcast is with none other than simon marshall who's a sports psychologist and i had his wife leslie patterson on on the KoopCast just a few weeks ago we had an incredibly hilarious and really honestly practical conversation all about sports psychology i really appreciated talking to simon he is one of those very funny yet down to earth and practical practitioners in the space which all too often get weeded and clutter up with woo-woo type practitioners i think you guys will really enjoy this conversation i really enjoyed it and i'm going to get right out of the way here's my conversation with simon marshall i always feel that when i talk to really highly specialized people especially people who deal with anything with the brain it's it gets really complicated because like the brain is this mysterious

organ that we really like we really don't know very well and it's got a lot of allure to it and you know half the people that that tune in are really fascinated by the brain and the other half get tuned out just because it gets so freaking complicated overwhelming yeah it's overwhelming is is a really good word and so since we're going to spend a little bit of time like talking about some of some like really technical like neurophysiology stuff let's start with the basics like i kind of feel like this is going back to college like freshman level anatomy and physiology for the brain let's kind of start with that and then we can then we can dive into how sports performance actually works in the brain sure sure i mean and we can keep it you know uh we will keep it very sort of light and hopefully unjargony um i'm gonna use that by the way unjargony yeah yeah that's not a word it should be de-jargonized um now we can we can start so how do you want to do the the start and uh let's do it now you just want to just roll it okay let's do it now so well one of the one of the i think the most fascinating things about the human brain for me is that over the last probably 30 to 50 years which might seem a lot in terms of science terms but in terms of what we've known and how we've studied this human brain it's a very short period of time and one of the things that we've learned and this is the caveat to anything that you read about brain training uh or this new device that you put

electrodes on your head and suddenly you can become an nfl player well you know don't get me started on some of the kind of the dubious claims but but one of the the myths that we've dispelled well we've dispelled the number of myths one of which is that the notion of left people are left-brained right-brained and we're using all of our brains the majority of the time so that's one thing oh you're artistic you must be what right-handed or left-handed i forget which you know that um so that's one sort of area that's been sort of frustrates certainly neuroscientists and the other is that we've conflated structure with function so in other words one of the old beliefs and and both in pseudoscience like phrenology remember the the bus of the head and this part of your head is this and but even in a scientific terms that has more science behind it the notion that there are particular locate physical coordinates in your head that are responsible for job a b and c and we know that that's not true either most parts of our brain have this wonderful sort of symbiotic relationship with other parts and so the brain is really best thought of as yes it's uh an organ and in in in my famous uh favorite woody allen quote it's my second favorite organ for most people my brain um is that it's it's a series of networks and algorithms that's really the best way to describe it so all of the things that even our the what we think of as our mind these sort of abstract thoughts and feelings that kind of swirl they don't feel necessarily physical but they're sort of in our

some abstract space in our heads they're all properties emergent properties of of brain and central nervous system physiology so neuroscientists don't really separate mind and body mind is part of the body it's just that one is an emergent property of the other and it's very hard to sort of measure it uh when it comes to things like abstract ideas or concepts so function and structure uh get confused a lot and we are guilty of doing this as well and we point this out in our book is that whenever you hear that an author or um some scientists are trying to use a metaphor to explain what the brain does and how it plays tricks on so they'll often talk about structure like oh there's the prefrontal cortex that does that or the limbic system that does that that we do but in actual fact the small print is far more complicated than that so that's the sort of the the little caveat to the you know the simplistic metaphor that many of us use but it's prevalent though right i mean like you said everybody tries to use these different metaphors for different areas of the brain when we talk about sports performance though what are the key ones that we're going to focus in on yeah so the parts and the nice thing is that your brain doesn't care whether you're in a sport environment or not it just knows that you're in an environment that probably at some level poses some threat to you it could be a physical threat uh because i don't want to hurt for nine hours uh in the mountains uh it could be a

purely a psychological threat that you're worried about being last or being left behind or not being strong enough relative to other people so your brain's mechanisms for figuring out what is threatening are really quite primordial and and unsophisticated they don't they can't separate nuanced of like well it's a it's a c race versus an a race no your your brain is like listen listen dude human am i going to get eaten or not okay we're good is there an opportunity to shag or not okay no okay we're good so what's left over so what's left over is i don't want to feel humiliated embarrassed or shown to be inadequate in front of other people those three things humiliation embarrassment and inadequacy and the and mother nature has actually given the human brain uh like mechanisms to kick and scream against the likelihood of those situating anticipating those situations happening and millennia ago that would have meant death because you're ostracized from your troop and you have to fend for yourself both in security and foraging for food and so you probably would die if you if you did get ostracized but now you know the we we you you aren't and so but your brain of course doesn't know that and so all of that those sort of feelings and thoughts we don't want come from a fairly no uh coincidence a fairly reptilian primordial place in our heads as well right in the center your human brain is just like a tree if you cut it uh in in a sort of a lateral plane

and you count the rings on a tree to how old it is the the parts in the middle are the oldest parts of our brain and so the newest parts are the wrinkly stuff on the outside um and so the the structure and function of the deep parts of our brain the limbic system is one of those carry quite prehistoric survival mechanisms for when we were literally just you know some some uh nervous system and some muscles trying to get food and stop being used as a toy for somebody else um so that unfortunately that wiring system that we call our chimp brain or your limbic system about the size of an avocado right in the center where all of our urges cravings all of our emotions come from is pretty much on genetic lockdown there's not much we can do to change how that is uh we can change the parent of it which is your frontal cortex what we call your professor brain uh so that you don't offend people all the time and just steal everything or hump anything that moves all the other things that make us good responsible human you know citizens um but many people do have a limbic system that is a very highly agitated or very on high alert all the time because of the way the structures and that makes some people's lives really miserable so some people do have if you have chronic anxiety for example we've had depression structures in your limbic system in that part of your brain are just wired slightly differently and you can make your life experience not just of sport but of anything where there's a potential to be humiliated embarrassed or inadequate it it you know blows it all out of proportion to

the actual threat i think a lot of i think a lot of people listening right now are completely identifying with these areas of humiliation embarrassment and inadequacy inadequacy because they you know i mean those are normal responses especially in an athletic environment and to kind of explore this a little bit more i'm gonna start at the end of what a typical scientist or what it's what a typical athletic journey would be and i actually think this is probably what you're gonna say is the wrong place to start but we're gonna do it here we're gonna do it here anyway and this is in competition right because everybody wants to fix their psychology for a competition that is typically the end goal of it all and why i think it's the wrong way to start is because we typically think about it right before the competition in terms of how do i fortify my sports psychology in order to gain the extra last one percent of whatever but specific to what you were just mentioning in this in these areas of humiliation embarrassment and inadequacy those tend to be accentuated during the times of competition and so especially especially especially and so what about competition actually does this and what happens on a on like a neurophysiology level to accentuate those qualities a lot lots of things in fact most of this happens in milliseconds before our sleepy frontal cortex smart brains have even had a

chance to figure out wait what what was happening but it's just a race wait why am i needing to go to the toilet for the seventh time yes and why does my why does my stomach the morning of a race saying why do i do this to myself this is there's nothing fun about this or why did bill talk me into this effing race i'm never doing this again or what psychologists call thoughts of escape you know those thoughts that you have in the first 20 minutes what am i doing here i've got no business being here get me out of here can i get a flat tire can i fake an injury you know all the some of the sabotaging thinking that that that goes on or maybe i'm just being a bit too about me my own no there are a lot of people that are curling up in the corner right now because they've done the exact same thing so we're all the same so so here one really interesting lesson from the psychological research is that the as a goal as a human goal is to try and get rid of negativity or be as positive as possible without any negative gnawing away sort of demons or anxious is it's not only futile because we've never met anyone who's able to do it right and if they are they have say they've done it they're either lying or they're on psychotropic medication because they have the same ingredients as that i was born with and we know a little bit about the sort of neurochemical soup in our heads and how it responds to different situations so i always find you know people who claim to not feel x or y a little bit you know with a little bit of suspicion there are some people who who are

that we can talk about those folks in a moment um if you wish but yeah so but but i but i do think in its essence one of the struggles is recognizing you haven't got to win the negative thinking fight the negative thinking battle the really good athletes what they actually do is they learn to compete hand in hand with all the things that make them scared of being humiliated or will i look stupid embarrassment am i doing it right or obviously inadequacy am i good enough so those three questions all athletes regardless of whether you're winning an olympic medal or you're doing a an endurance run for the first time you're human you have a human brain it's still equipped to react the same way right and you're not going to do this to reach this magical nirvana state where everything is positive no you're not the good athletes learn to jump ahead so the metaphor i like to give this is often a metaphor they use in psychotherapy so imagine that you're standing on a hillside and you're watching a battle rage beneath you think of a sort of a really like brave hearty medieval type broad swords and blood and gore battle and on one side there's all of the parts of you in your head thoughts and feelings of how you want to be or how you wished you were and on the other is all the stuff like the real mess that it actually is your life right so all the things and you're watching this battle and we spend our lives

buying another self-help book to sharpen that sword or give them a bigger bigger shield or give them a bit more an advantage or wait till they're sleeping and then attack them or whatever the you know the metaphor you like to use and and because that is so difficult to do one of the reasons is that we don't have as much control over what we think and feel as we thought thoughts pop into your head i can create thoughts in your head without you even if you don't want them i can give them to you and force you to think about them by just saying certain things so we can't do that so the good athletes and this is actually the good stress managers in general what we learn or we teach them is turning away from the battle skills so in other words instead of watching this battle rage beneath you you're going to say i'm what i'm going to do is get you to look in the opposite direction you can still hear the battle behind you and that they'll be fighting for probably the rest of your life but they'll still be here when you come back the same old gripes the same old moaning but wouldn't it be nice just for an hour that we could leave all that behind us and be be somebody else or not have that for the moment or we kind of put it in a box and we drag it along with us but i've tried to muffle the sounds and the clang of swords as much as possible so all of the techniques that really seem to be much more effective this isn't just now for sport this is actually now uh showing to be the case in psychotherapy is the turning away from the battle versus trying to fight and win the battle seems to be critical so this is the distinction between a what we call a control model of thinking

which is a lot of what cognitive behavior therapy is i'm trying to think of all your the ways that we are irrational and replace negative with positive and there i'm not putting cbt and those just in that in that bucket but that's a lot of what we try and do a lot certainly the self-help world is that when really some of the more successful approaches one of them is called acceptance and commitment therapy is to saying we're all we've all got sort of a front of peanut galleries in our heads but you know what we just have to learn to be better at jumping hand in hand with it so come on annoying racist grandmother who's at thanksgiving a metaphor for that for that ugly thought that you just kind of like we have to love her we have to have a round but god i'm gonna you know so this is the way that we actually start to be better and then when you when you talk to elite athletes that typifies how they've been able to meet these goals they've become better at becoming friends with the enemy versus trying to beat the enemy so while all the mess is going on they learn to work in concert with it it's kind of what you're saying that's exactly right or to learn how to it's like the parent who's tuned out the toddler doing this every you know and if you if you don't have kids and you're around parents who have kids and they're like do you not see that the child wants your attention and that the parent has been amazing skill at just being out oh let's tune them out right so that's where we'd like to get to with our the thoughts that we have that say

you're not good enough you're too fat you we don't deserve a coach look at you everyone's quicker than you why don't you do something you're actually good at you've been all of the nonsense that our chimp brains try to tell us all well-meaning because what does it want us to do it just wants us to not be humiliated embarrassed or shown to be so it's going to try every guilt trip in the book to get us to say you know what i could do it another day i'll put it off until later that's what it's trying to do okay so you mentioned how the elite athletes that you work with and we can also say maybe maybe elite athletes in general have learned these skills right that's the end goal and that's why i was saying earlier that we're probably starting at the wrong place but i like the picture that it painted how do athletes get there because there's all of the there's all of these things out there and some of them are psychobabble and some of them are not of how you can become more compassionate and you can disassociate from these feelings and all of the meditative rooms and things like that there's there's a lot for athletes to kind of like weed through they recognize that their head can be a shit show come race day i mean they know it they know it but they don't know how to get to the place where they're good with the shit show happening and they can still perform so what do you take athletes through what do you have yeah yeah that's a great question and this is one of the big paradox uh paradoxes in psychology in general we're trying to use the problem to fix the problem do you don't see why that creates a sort of weird conflict of interest right right so this

organ this three pound lump that makes some of my life miserable on a saturday morning because in two hours i know i've got to go out there and deliver on some capacity or something that i'm scared of and yet at the same time i'm trying to read how this thing that's causing me all this angst is also supposed to suddenly fix itself and magically make all that stuff go away so the reason that most of the techniques that work they're actually slights of hand metaphorically speaking they're kind of like they're they're tricks they play they leverage biology that we have based on the different how different parts of our brain are actually functioning so some parts of our brain work very very quickly lightning speed like our chimp brain is one of those right so within sort of uh 500 milliseconds half a second adrenaline is or if we think or detect something that's you know i see sally you know quick runner at the race oh my god i didn't think sally was going to be here oh my god so now i'm just obviously racing for seconds again you know and all i've done is i've seen i'm having a conversation with jane and i see sally out the corner of my eye and within without me thinking sally's here so therefore i'm going to be this oh my god i do not half a second adrenaline is already coursing through my veins and setting off there's a whole set of other reactions orchestrated by this thing called our hpa axis in our heads to set off hormones and neurotransmitters to get our nervous system

on high alert or ready for the showdown with sally right and of course when our real brain catches up our frontal are the real you our professor brain the wrinkly frontal cortex that says oh but sally's the love she's love she's really sweet you know she trains hard as well right uh chimp is saying doesn't matter she can show you to be not as good as everybody else so you need to crush annihilate sally at all well hang on a minute but i'm a nice person this is the two brain fights right so we get in these discussions often they're at a subconscious level all the time and so what we have to do the first sort of guiding principle is again it's based on the assumption that might seem it's easy to say but it but it might actually sound uh um controversial mind is the same as body your mind what you think and feel is a emergent property of your physiology of your nervous system activity so if your if your nervous system your sympathetic nervous system part of your autonomic nervous system that controls alertness and arousal and get ready for itness cortisol and adrenaline um if that's going to change how you feel and think uh so hormones and neurotransmitters can directly change and influence what you words appear in your head thoughts and so ground zero is if i only try and say i should not say ground zero if all or if all i try and get you to do is to talk you

off a ledge i'm strong i'm confident i'm beautiful i know i can i know i can right the mirror self-help bullshit that doesn't work the reason it doesn't work is because the the the part of your brain that's been governed to give you those urges to get away to leave to why are you doing this are far more in fact it's five times quicker and five times stronger than the brain that is trying to say yes but yes but it's a fight that you're never going to win right so we have to try and for any technique to work we have to try and calm our body down and that's easier said than done right so as most athletes now it's become you know if there was a year of of mental training for athletes last year it would have been the year of of meditation right or headspace or and so and when when we talk about meditation for athletes one you get the eye roll like oh please no you're going to talk to me oh my god meditate really i have to listen to enya and join a drumming circle fuck that i you know i mean give me something doc that i can you know it's just for athletes they're usually more action-oriented like physical things so just lying on the bed when i'm already anxious or nervous which makes lying on the bed trying to concentrate even harder it's really impossible so so for athletes to saying do i have to have four years of tantric yoga training uh if i want to get a handle on these demons that are telling me to not do be an ultra runner no you don't and so what we do is we say well let's take

some of the principles that meditation is teaching and really the essence of it is called passive attention training and passive attention training is simply i use the metaphor of a firework display wouldn't it be great if our thoughts and feelings were like watching a firework display as the big explosions in the air of think this feel this uh but within seconds it's vaporized and before another one has come up and i don't get a chance for the for that firework to say aren't aren't i amazing my colors come with me down the hole of negativity and i'll show you how shit you really are come on i'm so right so that's the way that most of us our relationships with our thoughts and feelings are at the moment they are suggestions that pop up in our head for often for no reason whatsoever um or someone has said something or i noticed something and we follow them voluntarily down a hole that makes us feel negative and miserable and all of the other self-doubt we have and so if i could only say i see you but not today or i see you and can we talk about this when we get back i've just got this this this three-hour race to do and then we'll get into the what you're worried about so that's the relationship that we we kind of want to have have with it so we start with breath work and eye work the two portals to our nervous system that we can control i can control what i look at and i can control the type of breath

that i do and breathing and are your your eyesight and your breath are intimately connected neurologically to threat detection centers in the brain so ground zero is control i mean we've known this for some time of course you know the michael phelps comes onto the deck he did you know hoodie and headphones control your ears and your eyes we've known that if i can stem the tide of sensory input that my brain is going to process five times quicker than my thinking rational brain i need to run with blinkers on or with ear defenders so i don't get that reaction starts to cascade but i can actually be a little bit even more proactive by not just running interference on stuff i can actively calm those threat detection centers down and there's some really now good research some of which is coming out of a guy called andrew schuberman he's a neuroscientist at stanford has done some work on eye tracking and breath work that both quickly and rapidly impact autonomic nervous system which changes our dopamine serotonin cortisol adrenaline this like constellation of our neurological soup that makes us feel good and makes us feel motivated so you're basically saying that i'm going to go back maybe like 10 minutes we can remember back that far from a neurochemical standpoint we almost don't stand a chance because of this stand a chance because of the speed of the chemical reactions that happen as you mentioned

500 milliseconds half a second all these you know hormones and things are getting dumped all these chemicals are getting dumped on our bodies we don't have a chance to control that dump but the mechanism to help to to help control what how you react to that chemical job are behaviors that you're reinforcing and training somehow and you're and you're reinforcing the the eyes and the ears that is that's exactly right and so one of the things that we can do for example and some of the research is still new on this so one of the the the pieces in our limbic system in our chimp brain is called the amygdala you might have heard of the amygdala in fact we got two of them so amygdala is plural technically a little arm and shape devices that work a little bit like satellite dishes on our heads that are scanning the skies for incoming threats to jason right or incoming threats to simon this is what alex honnold has none of if anybody's watched re-solo i will talk about why alex doesn't we love you alex but go ahead we do we do so so basically this your amygdala which is responsible for think of your amygdala as having a sensitivity from like zero to ten right zero is i have to literally punch my amygdala for it to say oh what's up boys are things are things gonna get bad what i didn't notice right these would be like mma fighters right mma fight well yeah or sensation seekers in general okay uh divers parachutists cliff jump you know whatever those people who have a right and their amygdala are literally not literally

metaphorically speaking encased in a wetsuit right they they don't feel right uh the same way the threshold for triggering that reaction now take someone who's the exact opposite end of the spectrum most the tiniest puff of wind on their amygdala metaphorical wind of course um which is what really post-traumatic stress is post-traumatic stress is amygdala hypersensitivity syndrome essentially so your amygdala has been either through trauma or through genetics or through a combination of other uh sort of exogenous insults you know too many drugs and all kinds of stuff um uh can either make this part of our brain really wetsuited or very sensitive and we're all born and even in fact i will say so for example a really interesting fact is the level of circulating cortisol in your mother's um uh blood while in while you're in utero has an impact on the the sensitivity of your amygdala that you're born with so if your mom during her pregnancy was under a tremendous amount of physical or emotional stress and there was a lot of circulating cortisol your amygdala as a as a fetus and then as a as um an embryo then a fetus and growing into a baby is actually you're going to be primed you're going to come out of the womb like as though the world is about to attack you right because you that's the environment that you've so there are there are some environmental things obviously how you're nurtured

and how you've been you know grown up and so on but we all so for example if you have high levels of what we call trait anxiety so you kind of you just you just a bit more anxious than a than your you run hot generally you just things are a bit more anxious than other people that you know of you think of your amygdala is probably a little bit more sensitive so how races or big training sessions feel to you how scary they feel are kind of probably be more exaggerated compared to the if if alex honnold was actually a runner uh you know he'd be like the probably on the start line look like the chillest dude you ever met totally um and they've just you know some people have uh you know won the amygdala sensitivity lottery for some things i will say not to speak to alex at all this isn't including him but people who have very uh insensitive amygdalas are usually also at much higher risk for substance abuse and infidelity and and that's partly because of it's a reflection is also about dopamine what i need to feel like alive or pleasure or anticipate excitement you know you can't have it both ways you can have a dull amygdala i don't feel fear but i also need more to feel a rush so those people are usually a little bit more in these sense so so don't marry a base jumper if you can i was about to say don't marry an endurance athlete that's the same category of people you're talking about right well endurance athletes uh endurance athletes seem to be a little bit different they they are

certainly the research that we do have uh they they do have a little bit more neuroticism and anxiety and they're not and the sport doesn't make them like that the sport attracts that right so we've at least we've we've kind of sorted out the the temporal pathway now of that but but it's certainly to my knowledge that endurance sport endurance athletes aren't necessarily sensation seekers or because i because that would be inconsistent with being generally more anxious but okay so we're gonna we're gonna back back to training again right we started at the end we started the competition you briefly touched on it some of the initial skills that you work on with athletes are with vision and and with sound or with breathing sorry i don't know why he keeps saying sound with vision with breathing there's this notion in training and i come from a like a classical physiology type of background and so i think about training in terms of the amount of dose i need the amount of training dose in miles or intensity or some combination of those two to achieve some sort of physiological response i need to lift 40 pounds because i lifted 30 pounds last week something like that athletes will oftentimes think of like building a psychological skill set in that same way i need to do something first what's logical to do first and then what's logical to do second is that even the way that we should be thinking about it though it is with a caveat so the is part is that your brain responds to the principle of overload just like your body does in fact that's a key principle of brain development generally i have to

stress tax and strain in order to grow denser thicker larger right that's the concept of neuroplasticity in the brain i mean that is other elements about how the the the pathways or the network of neurons fire and so on but in general it does your brain responds very well to being strained and stressed and in fact if you don't do it deliberately your brain will bludgeon you until you do do it and so you you'll know this as being bored for example so when you're bored you're like nothing seems to entertain you but you don't know quite what it is this is really your brain saying i need some stimulation i need some overload uh so your brain loves novelty one of the the functions of our one of the ways that we know that we can entice the brain to do things is give it a reward but mess with the human about when they get the reward right so we give them a reward like intermittently or we call a intermittent reinforcement schedule in psych terms so they think like a slot machine right so the the way that you can make the dopamine neurons in the human brain go absolutely loopy is ask them to pull a lever and there's a chance that they could come away with nothing something or a lot right and you don't know what you're going to get when you pull that lever your brain is that's like you know dopamine porn in your head right that sort of environment so this is why we're often many of us are are literally addicted to uncertainty when

there's an outcome that could be really favorable um now uh in in sport of course what particularly in endurance sport we have often the opposite that what they often say is the best athletes are those that can tolerate boredom the most right so now there might be no novelty but i have to survive six of my my easy long sunday run and i have to be out there for five hours or six hours and there's only so many podcasts or bloody things i can listen to so your brain will struggle a lot more simply because that it doesn't really it likes to stay occupied unless you can get we talk about the computer brain the one that runs our autopilots so but you've heard of being in flow state or something this this sort of weird nebulous concept that you can be in this total immersion in a task that you lose all sense of time and and you just like oh my god where did it go and i was just immersed in it so there are there are some circumstances where the the stars align and you even if you're doing something for a long time it doesn't feel that way but but most of us in endurance sport that isn't the case uh because one of the things that stops us feeling getting in flow is having a noxious stimulus right so in other words something hurts right it's hard to being a flow state when you're in pain or discount a lot of discomfort um and so that's one of the challenges of doing finding that special place in in endurance sport but brass tacks you want if you want to start with vision and with breath right if you were to i hate

to do this because i hate people asking me this question these like universal questions that everybody should apply to and we know how individual and nuanced it is and you can give all your caveats to this piece of advice now but if you were just to say listen if everybody could just do these things to start out with we would be in great shape okay i'll give you i'll give you two or i'll give you three you can give me 10 if you want to okay the first one which is actually about breath so um as you as uh your some of your listeners may know um you we all have a a huge band of muscle that is at the base of our thoracic cavity called the diaphragm it is muscle and we can voluntarily control it it's also under involuntary control that's why it keeps us it helps us expand our chest cavity when we're asleep but we can also i can deliberately change the tempo the pace or the depth of my breathing right and that's it's because of a nerve a phrenic nerve which is going from my bed uh base of my uh top of my neck to my diaphragm like helping regulate how quickly it contracts and so on now the good news and this is the where the mother nature hack part of the breath work comes in is there's about 200 neurons that sit on your brain stem top of your brain stem that control uh the what we call the psi response the s-i-g-h you know when we go like that we've just done something that's really hard or difficult and it's over we're like oh thank god that's over i've been doing that now that i've

been recording my audiobook i did that like 100 times today so that that's an innate mechanism that humans were born animals were born with it as well um that activates 200 around 200 neurons to sends a message to our threat detection centers to calm down and to our diaphragm to to to lower the the tempo and the depth of our breathing so that's what happens physiologically so we can reverse engineer that process as well so if i can somehow manipulate my diaphragm then the phrenic nerve is also gonna hopefully tell the 200 neurons hey we're good we've we've just done a uh we feel in that psi state that's something i feel relaxed and calm now something's over so the physiologic sigh breath is a form of breathing that helps maximize that reaction to calm you down quite quickly so angie schuberman from the stamp lab talks about this quite extensively they've got a randomized control trial actually running about this particular breath compared to other breaths for lowering biomarkers of stress and also some subjective stuff and so what what that looks like is it's two a physiologic sigh breath to activate these 200 neurons is two stacked nasal inhales i know try saying that i mean what a ridiculous nasal inhales so you're breathing through your nose one on top of the other yeah right you're then holding that breath for the length of time that you did the tube

nasal inhales and then you're breathing out through your mouth for double the length of the inhale so this is what it looks like if you are going to use show your video i can see you jason but your listeners might not see me youtube version yeah okay so it sounds like this so that's just one physiologic sigh breath now that works within seconds to calm threat detection centers down in your brain i defy anyone to try and not notice they might not necessarily equate the feelings the sensations they get after that breath with automatic calmness because we've become highly habituated to sensations that our brain gives us and so i think that that means this when it doesn't but in essence that you are getting a physiologic neurological relaxation response by doing that now there's a law there seems to be some law of diminishing returns on this if you do it more than three times you don't seem to get as much of a bet or you don't seem to get any additional benefit so what we say to athletes and anybody who's going into environments that are pretty nerve-wracking or stressful when you've got like a minute to go you're standing stage left or someone's doing the introduction before you go on and give your talk or it's just that you know you're waiting for your date

to arrive or whatever it happens to be stepping onto the before the gun goes off if you do that breath routine two to three times you will your your a parasympathetic nervous system your brake pedal for your the part of your for the activation alert in the system is going to calm you down and immediately remember it's hard to have an anxious thinking and feeling brain inside a relaxed body so that just doing that alone you'll start to feel better and this is something we should be teaching elementary school children uh instead of the use your words jimmy we need to be saying use your breath jimmy right learn how jane learn how to before you calm down because otherwise you're just speaking to a an agitated chimp and obviously kids are all chimp so they're just going to be screaming and whatever they want urges cravings you're going to hear all of it so having them calm down gives us a better chance of talking to someone in a sensible way anybody who's agitated the last thing we want to do well the first thing we want to do is get them less agitated so that we can then talk to them we're the same so if we're going to do any sort of mantra or physical like a positive thinking or i'm going to do this little routine that makes me feel good if i'm doing it in a relaxed body it's going to have a much better chance of working so the breath physiologic side breath is one another wait wait wait before you go on i'm gonna let i'm gonna let you continue but i i i would be remissed because

my woo-woo bullshit detector went off just a little bit and i'm sure you've heard this before yeah yeah what is physiologically significant about these two features of that exercise the first one nose versus mouth because those breathing is all the rage now as you know and the second one the timing what are the physiological significances of those two of those two actions that they're they're great questions i don't actually know if even the respiratory physiologists or the neuroscientists who study respiratory physiologists know the reason right so one of that we do know though for example the different areas in our brain that control like generally the rhythmic part of our breathing that you know i know that an exhale has to follow an inhale right and there's a different part of our brain that regulates i need to breathe in and then i need to breathe out and i need to do that over and over again but there's another section of our brain another part of our brain that controls unrhythmic breathing right so why do why does our brain have to have a capacity ability to learn how to breathe on or out of sequence or just like not have a straightforward it's because we talk as and we breathe at the same time so if all we had was this sort of this uh pre-bot complex the part of our brain that regulates the rhythmic breathing we wouldn't be able to talk we'd be having to so there are there isn't there's probably something connected to the different oversight of the types of breath and when we try and dysregulate it by i'm i was expecting a longer

uh you know an exhale to come then and it didn't that could be one reason the the reason that the some of the physiologists i should say the neuroscientists give about the nasal inhales and this may be again um a stretch of the physiology but the metaphor that's often used is that so as you know obviously when when you breathe the little the alveoli will inflate uh uh and there's a surface tension to those alveoli this is and again i'm not claiming this to be fact i'm saying this is the defense of the two stack nasal inhales so just as you would do blowing up a party balloon a kid's balloon and you blow into it and that it's really hard to get it you know you get it a little bit and then you break that surface tension and then it suddenly goes so the argument and and again the stretch receptors in alveoli membranes i don't know whether they just like a balloon i'm sure yeah uh so the anyway so one of the one of the theories about it is that you actually get uh the alveoli is uh um you can inflate your you'll get better gas exchange bigger lung volume by doing a one inhale on top of the other whether that is physiologic there's a good biological pathway to support that who knows but what i will say and this is where it comes back to where i sit which is function is key for athletes like okay what if i don't if we don't necessarily we want to understand mechanism that's the obviously the holy grail because then we can start to manipulate control

and predict and so on but if we don't we just know that listen are there any downsides to doing this are there any negative side effects we don't know okay you could do some you know there are some contexts of course where you're doing rapid hyperventilation breathing or breath holding and doing underwater whatever we know some of those but if you're an endurance athlete overlanding you're trying to calm your nervous system down focusing on a pattern whether it's a box breath or a physiologic sigh or whim hot well actually not whim hot because i'll probably do the opposite uh to calm or to activate our parasympathetic nervous system down we don't know what exact form that looks like that's why one of the shuberman lab what they're doing is they're testing the physiologic side breath compared to a box breath a standard four four four four you know whole breath so who knows but i think it's an exciting time uh it's interesting because every single week i get asked about all these different breathing techniques and i kind of take the same approach you do is like wow we really don't know the physiological consequences of this breath versus that breath but we can see some of the outcomes of them we just don't know what's in the middle right we know the action we don't know the middle but we know the outcome so anyway thank you for entertaining that i know there are people that are listening out there passing passing out of placebo as well is really absolutely is really difficult right and part of psychology this is why psychologists get a little bit frustrated by placebo being seen particularly among physiologists as being the sort of thing you're trying to avoid

whereas psychologists will be saying well listen placebo is a demonstrate demonstrable effect that it has on a whole but now i'm sure mechanisms important but we can also use that to our advantage right 100 okay so you got the breath i cut you off that was the first one second one right second one is about coming out of visual neuroscience which is uh the rather awkward phrase called a self-generated optic flow and it's based on the principle that at the back of our eyes there's a as a layer as an epithelial layer of cells about three uh it's called the neural retina it's about three uh like width of a credit card thick uh that really is brain tissue so basically your eyes uh is it's a fairly late stage evolutionary role for eyes to sense objects right uh what what eyes were originally designed to do even if that's a phrase that isn't sort of set off lots of alarm bells for you know the caveats to all this but eyes really are about detecting or knowing how to put the body into a system of alertness or relaxation right or to sense dark light cycles right all of our is synchronizing our our body's clot to um to rhythms that go with light and dark so so our eyes play quite a key role in telling your brain and body whether i need to get ready to run fight hide be chill and so on and the and there's a direct connection between the neural retina and some of these threat to sex and centers in our brain and what

what the visual neuroscience community has found and is that when you are going to when you get a level of alertness or agitation so this is all sympathetic nervous system cortisol adrenaline other neurotransmitters and hormones start ramping up our attentional field narrows they call it we foveate we get narrow now and that's just so for good reason right i'm paying attention i need to this is important and that's a normal reaction when it goes off the deep end we know it as you know uh uh uh paralysis and stage fright and and you know fight or flight response but it's a normal reaction that we want um so and our eyes tend to and when we force our eyes to narrow to foveate it also starts this alertness response so obviously when we are nervous or too stressed or we want to not feel uh as anxious our eyes play a critical role what we look at and so what happens is that when you are out in in time and space in the real world outside and you're walking or just you're sort of moving through time and space naturally the natural pattern for the human eye is to wander to scan the horizon now it's not as clean as left to right left to right because you're obviously looking up and down but generally our eyes are scanning our environment and for good evolution uh evolutionary reasons right like now we're not getting hit by a car but then looking out for predators peripheral vision and so on

but there's a state that our brain seems to have a lower level of when i say agitation so all the indicators of that alert response seem to just level off or reduce when we switch when we go from sort of a portrait mode to landscape mode of vision and so this principle is behind as a whole um uh a technique now for helping people uh overcome trauma uh like ptsd is called emdr therapy eye movement desensitization reprocessing and it's basically capitalizing on in in a nutshell the fact that if i can purposefully train my eyes uh to scan horizons i mean again there's there's there's there's a the small print about how it works and why it works is a lot more complicated than that but in essence that's what i'm doing so for athletes what we say is that why does make going for a run make us feel better or why does doing any exercise feel better well there's some reasons we know now like brain body temperature and brain temperature and all these other reasons why exercise generally affects our mood but one of the newer interesting is this mechanism between our neural retina and our threat detection centers is that we we because when we're inside and feeling stressed we're probably a bit have a vision or focus like this and when we go outside or forced to we switch to panoramic and that activates a set of neural

circuits that help our brain calm down so this is the way the where this the rubber hits the road for this uh is to say okay i've got something that i'm nervous about or i'm stressed about and it might seem the simplest piece of advice to just you know why don't you just go off and walk for five minutes or something or just yes that works but while you're doing that don't take your phone with you or try not to just you know be looking down at your feet what i would like you to do is you'd like to walk just pay attention on on actually looking at your surroundings right and so that seems to and again some of this research some of the experimental evidence is still fairly new we've got evidence now in mice uh that their threat detection centers their visual system that calms them down so there's a good reason to suggest that that may be the case in humans as well so controlling your eyes is a is a critical piece and not just blinkering yourself but making sure that you've got some good horizon scanning sort of uh emotions in your prep these seem so simple and that's what people are going to think right now they're like okay you're telling me that this specific breath technique you're going to have to remind me on the vocabulary the double stack breath what is it again yeah it's well it's called a physiologic sigh breath physiologic physically no no the the two inhales with two stacked nasal inhales so just breathing twice through your nose thank you two stacked nasal inhales and scanning the horizon yeah are two of the fundamental things that people should start with well i the reason i say that is

because these aren't hacks the hat the word hack it may be for you as well makes my hair stand on the back of my i don't like the phrase i'm with you by so these are inbuilt mother nature whatever you want to call it they're mechanisms that the human brain and body already has to help us manage stress right we just don't use them often volitionally we we actually you know we could do but we don't nearly as much as we could to help us react or respond to stress or cope with stress a bit more and so it certainly doesn't uh it's not the be all and end all uh but if you want the if you want a good soil to work in to grow your seeds of being calm and confident you gotta focus start you gotta start focusing on relaxing the body enough so this stuff stick the other stuff sticks well it's almost like you're taking an evolutionary biology perspective first let's work on those things first and then we can work on all the other things absolutely absolutely yeah yeah that's so interesting okay so now we're going to go back to the beginning which was the end if people are keeping track i'm losing track now too yeah this is something that is really specific to endurance events and more specific to ultra endurance events there's a lot of space right a lot of space and you mentioned earlier a couple of things is one that the best endurance athletes are the best ones that are being bored they can deal with that space they can deal with all that time they can just handle it better but there's a lot of there's

a lot of space and i used to say doubt but i'm not now i'm going to use some words that that came up earlier in the conversation there's a lot of space for humiliation embarrassment and inadequacy or the or perceived of any of those three for athletes to kind of go through throughout the course of a race and i see this all the time in ultra marathons where an athlete comes into mile 60 mile 70 mile 80 of 100 mile run yeah and physically they're they're pretty beat up by that time i mean they've run 60 or 70 or 80 miles like that takes a physical toll but they're not nearly on the level where they should be dropping out yeah somehow they're erroneously extrapolating how they feel right then to how they are going to feel in another 20 miles and say no i just can't do it i can't do it there's not like i've like i've been internalizing this right for all this time i'm going to be you know that much more humiliated embarrassed or feel much more inadequate between mile 80 and mile 100 and they kind of choose to quit and it is the quintessential mental dnf yeah and it happens all of the time what like what is out there to prevent that from happening because i have to resort to physicality where i kick people out of the aid stations in order to battle it so i'm looking for like a selfish reason for some tools that i can use that's a great that's a great example um so there's a couple things firstly just about what's happening and then what to do about it so obviously when you're

left alone for long periods of time most of our thoughts because we're we've been endowed with a very powerful prefrontal cortex and we have one of the few species that can time travel in our own heads right we can think about situations that are in the future have never happened or in the past um and so when we don't have competing we don't have a lot of we don't have a busy environment to distract us or to pull us out of that we tend to retreat especially if and we we in our book we talk about having a default sort of a tent what we call an attentional style things like think of it like you got four tv channels only four cnn fox news whatever think of four channels and you we all have the one that we is our happy channel the place that we like to be in and that and that usually they they vary on a function of internal external so some people like to be in their own heads some people outside their own heads and then broad and narrow so that creates a four little quadrant so if i i'm a broad internal my channel is what we call broad internal so i when i get stressed or nervous i go in my own head and i strategize i problem solve i you know try and i don't get focused on one specific thing the broad part that i get focused on the broad part right so i'm all over the place which is a good skill to have but under pressure or stress that becomes your undoing now someone who is a narrow external person sorry to use these confusing phrases here so now when they get

stressed they go outside of their own head and they see and they focus in on a one particular detail right this is the kind of the deer in the headlights uh but it's the also we know the channel that is most conducive to doing well in elite sport right especially if you have to react to things so this is more applicable to ball sport athletes than than sort of just monotony you know sort of monotonic you know monotonous uh uh um closed motor pattern um so anyway we get we we start this the perfect storm to worry and think is like an endure is an ultra right this is like if you couldn't create a better set of circumstances and then you add in some level of predisposition to worry or anxious like anxiety or neuroticism and it's the perfect storm for getting sucked away on this like downward spiral of negative thought and in fact we now know what's happening in the brain why that happens and what things are actually can help like um like counter that tendency to get lost or caught up in the the red firework that's telling pick me to go and think why your life is pointless right or whatever it happens to me or why this is a stupid thing that you've chosen rather than just let it fade in the next one so that becomes managing that process like what i'm focusing on in the moment as a function of time becomes really critical um and again it's it's no it's no uh um

uh no coincidence that the the place the last place you need to be is inside your own head so what we say is we need to get you out of your own head as much as possible so you give yourself little mental games or targets or things that you can do when you're running and we typically do this like mile you know or time from hour four to five this is your little mental game that you play right it might be an eye target game and so you pick out of things in the are 300 200 to 400 yards in the distance and you run towards them and as you're running towards them you're counting things that you're getting more acuity of it's a tree and now i can now i can some close enough to see there are actually five branches and the leaves are some so you're like you're trying to figure out what you're but you're running towards something and then you do that again that is a simple technique to get me out of my own head right because there's i'm having to pay attention to something it's like when you this is why running doing anything in the presence of other people you do you perform better and this is a one of the most robust psychological findings it's called the social facilitation effect it was first demonstrated in the 1800s by a guy who studied cyclists actually a guy called norman triplet uh but it's since been replicated that in the presence of someone else doing the same thing you will do better right so now you're saying well hang on a minute okay in cycling i i can draft of course but what about side by side and i have to wind a fishing reel in and who can wind in the most

line in in the 30 seconds i wind in more line if i'm doing it with somebody else so the brain the human brain is wired to be faster more efficient more gutsy more persistence when you are in the presence of so this is the nature of competition right so spending a lot of time on your own with nobody else around with an anxious disposition it's the perfect effing storm to get lost into the the lone sock in the dryer which is your nagging thought that you can't get rid of right so find things to occupy yourself with if there is someone who's running a similar pace have a conversation even if it's just for a minute or two talk to a marshal or someone on the course who's helping any chance you can get to pull yourself out your own head if you are a an over cogitator and worrier that will be very helpful one of the things that i give my athletes to do and it's all of those examples are perfect ones and i've heard a lot of sports psychologists they come up with their own little games but the one anchor point that i think is extreme that is extremely important with these is to to pick a moment in time or a moment during the race that you're going to do it don't let the athlete choose where to do it you're gonna say listen you're gonna do this at mile 70 and you might be guessing when they actually need to go through that exercise but what just what i found in practice and you can you know you can espouse on this

however you want to is if they're left to their own devices the sock in the in the in the in the dryer as you mentioned will just keep going and it'll never and it'll never stop yeah they might need it at mile 65 versus mile 75 and you said it was really 70 or whatever it is and you're off by whatever great but the fact is is they did it and you gave them a deliberate point to do whatever activity to get out of their own head yeah that's you're exactly right so rumination or having the tendency to get stuck on particular patterns of thinking is also one of the good predictors of depression and other mental health issues so it's a good reason to try and avoid getting stuck into that process generally um but any chance that you get to run some interference on that process is going to is going to help right so any any and again there's no there's no uh special uh book about you know what the thing is there's nothing special about you know thumb tapping or talking or fucking counting leaves or stop signs or whatever it doesn't matter but it's just really running interference on effort perception and our sense of time and that's going to help everybody out there that is going to pay somebody this summer for a race is now like you know in their little conniving minds coming up with the most absurd ridiculous games to play with their runner when they get there i'm pacing some people for some 200 mile races this summer and now that's this has got my wheels well it's funny because one

of one of the things that we do with ultra runners especially or actually uh or um iron man or or people who do more than one iron man at once you know um they one of the things is with your crew or your support crew if you're lucky to have support crew is that you talk through the kinds of feedback you want when right so you're pre-planning the things and so i need you to be i need you to be a drill sergeant here so when i am moaning that i've had enough i need you to say get the back out there you've got and i also know that when i'm gonna hurt myself because i'm in a bad way and i want to get back out there you are able to step in and how to do so you have to have that conversation ahead of time and the reason to go back to your point why you should never let your brain figure out what to do when it wants is because you're using the problem to try and fix the problem the thing that's giving you the most angst now it's the last thing that you want to rely on to tell you would now be a good time to change right so having a little bit more of a plan so we'll have for our particularly for athletes who are doing events that last at least four hours we'll we'll have a a piece of paper with their psychological game plan it's like by either time or distance this is what you're going to be focusing on for this segment then this then this then this yeah and as you know that's usually the last or the least considered point usually people are focused on their splits how fast am i running how you know what's my bike split going to be in a triathlon things like that

they're focused on their nutrition i'm going to take a gel at minute 43 and then two blocks at minute you know 57 and they get down to that little level of that like level of precision that is you know not at all material but then they leave off all of these other cues from their race plan that they should actually have and i look at those things i'm like there's a big chunk of this missing in fact all this stuff like the order of priority that you just put all this stuff on it needs to be reversed like you're gonna fit if you don't have your nutrition program figured out by now you shouldn't have to write it down on on a piece of paper you should have it dialed like you should be telling your crew this is how i want you to react in these types of situations yeah absolutely no i i agree wholeheartedly and that's also just consistent with having a good sort of process focus right that all the things that are gonna sort of help um yeah but i mean it's uh it's a it's a it's a challenge uh but i the thing is that amazes me the most with athletes is how and coaches how much of their sport that they still attribute not still that they attribute to the role of what you think and feel yet how little effort they devote to getting better at it and again there's nothing you know if you think of your head just like you would a muscle you have to you know principle of overload and specificity it's still the kind of similar process to getting better at it this is why the the adage is that you cannot learn mental toughness you have to earn it that's the no amount of reading that you can

intellectualize what you could do but you get better at it by doing it that's the oval it's like trying to think your way to fitness right you can't do it i love the analogy think your way to fitness i'm gonna use that uh you you can't do it so how many times are you doing a training session in a month where you look at it and say i can't do this i don't know who the this my coach thinks i am i can't do this like it's it's scary right i'm not talking about this is gonna hurt but i definitely know i can do it i'm talking about i don't think i can even finish this what are you talking about so we like to put athletes in that situation at least once every two weeks because what we're doing is the way that the human brain eventually draws a new line in the sand of what's possible and we know for example again one of the most robust finding in psychology is the biggest driver of confidence is success if i've done something and i've pulled it off that's the the most potent it blows everything else out the water for what makes you more confident so i if i'm having i've got an athlete who is self-belief issue or they're not that confident i'm looking to give them quick wins on feeling successful in every single session so you have to use these these tools like and here's a session that is designed for you to not have be successful in fact it's designed for you to fail but you know that that's the goal so then you go in with thinking you become less obsessed with pacing or you know the zone i'm in

and it's about persistence i stuck it out i committed to do a third of it and i got to the third and i thought no i'll do a more i do more than i thought i could i'll go to a half and then i'll turn around are you doing things to get yourself out of your comfort zone and that's the way that you learn to improve your ability at it because you just have to do it more often yeah i love that man i love that philosophy of designing things that you know cannot be achieved and but you start out with the goal saying listen this is designed for failure and by not failing or by failing you're gonna actually succeed right well it's funny because we do you know anybody who spent any time in the gym knows that occasionally we'll do reps to failure right it's a it's a part and we don't think of it like oh my god if i can't do this one period and i think i'm a why don't we use that in our endurance training sometimes we do but we should be doing that far far more often uh so yeah there's a whole other there's a guy called sam mccora um if you haven't heard of him he's a researcher in effort perception alex hutchinson in his endure book quotes him a lot he's at university of bologna now just some fantastic new exciting research on that's still somewhat contentious admittedly but about how the brain processes effort related cues or discomfort and all of the inputs that go into that little algorithm that before it spits out into our own heads as a perceived exertion rating

there's a whole other set of things that go in like how long do i have to put up with this for right that calculation happening in milliseconds of your brain is doing without you even being aware of it if you deny your brain that piece of information most people's brains shit the bed how long what are we doing today for the run oh just follow me how long are we going to be out oh well i don't know could be 30 minutes could be three hours oh my god like what no system malfunction right i need to know where we so so this this sort of information is really important so we can use that to advantage we can do deceit pacing studies and we can manipulate or deliberately give athletes sessions where they don't know how long they're going to be out there for all good uh um uh efforts to to develop uh um your ability to tolerate discomfort in the future those though that research i've just been digging into that last like nine months or so where they they've blinded athletes to a component of what they're doing whether it's speed or power or you know whatever or they blind them to the end point or they falsify the information those those studies are they're like hilarious to read and also kind of sad because you know like how bad the people feel that are actually doing the trials they're like god i know i'm doing 300 watts or i know i'm doing six minute pace and it says i'm only doing six minutes and 30 seconds a mile or something like that it's just so torturous to read or how angry you get if you if you are if you're asked to do you know eight four hundreds and then somewhere you finish

them and everything the last one you want to finish on a high note they say oh no we actually need two more yeah two more and you just you want to like punch somebody right or in cycling it might be the same in running as well oh you got someone on the side of the road you're almost there it's the the summit is just around the corner and the summit could be 50 yards from where they said you want to go back and like murder that person right because you're so mad because the brain is like freaking out so good all right so we're gonna leave it there man that was great this is a great conversation um before we let you go though where can people find you and more about your coaching in the book yeah so they can find us on i coach with my wife leslie patterson so they on our on our website which is braveheartcoach.com braveheartcoach.com and there is information about our coaching and also our book on there and we've also got something on there we call a smog test which is just a little uh people can fill out to tell us about the training and we have a free no strings chat with them about you know training they're doing and tips to how to improve it uh so we love talking to athletes it's information for us to help us build our data bank of things that we've heard or things that might work or so we're always looking for that i appreciate you coming on this was honestly one of my favorite conversations not only because it's an interesting topic but also we got to use the word shag and a few four-letter words mixed in there so i always appreciate it i know i feel i apologize

it could have been worse it could have been leslie my my listeners are used to it by now and i always get the caveat at the beginning so it's all good man appreciate your time my pleasure thanks for having me on jason all right folks there you go much thanks to simon for coming on the podcast today really appreciate that conversation i really did have a lot of fun with that that was pretty hilarious i hope you the listeners enjoyed it if you did enjoy it go ahead and give this podcast a rating or review on apple podcast that really helps me out a lot you can check out simon and leslie's coaching and the links and the show notes they're all there appreciate the heck out of each and every one of the listeners and as always we will see all of you out on the trails you