Mental Preparedness for the Rest of Us

Interviewer: Being mentally prepared is crucial, not just for athletes, but for anyone looking to improve their focus, resilience, and overall mental health. Today, we dive into some of the techniques and strategies that can help anyone get mentally ready for life's everyday challenges.

Joining us today is Dr. Jason Hunziker, the Division Chief of Adult Psychiatry at Huntsman Mental Health Institute and a consulting psychiatrist with the Utah Jazz.

What is Mental Preparedness?

Now, Dr. Hunziker, let's start by just kind of explaining what is mental preparedness. I mean, I know what preparedness means when I'm getting ready to go out on a camping trip or something like that, but I really am not quite sure what it means when we're talking mental.

Dr. Hunziker: Mental preparedness, again, I think we can generalize this, but let's focus on sports for the moment. But it is getting prepared. It's like getting prepared for a camping trip, but you think about all those things that you need to do to be ready to perform the task that you're about to perform.

And then you want to learn all of those skills or practice all of those skills that you need to be ready to do that job. So things like confidence, resilience, focus, motivation, stress management, all of those things that are required to accomplish the goal of being an elite athlete or being a guy that runs a bank or whatever. You need to have those skills and be ready to do the job that you're about to do.

Interviewer: So you just listed quite a few of those kinds of, I guess, skills or things to be prepared. What do you think are some of the bullet point ones that would be the most important for anyone, not just athletes, to really kind of focus on? What are those?

Dr. Hunziker: I think the main features of being mentally prepared are things like setting realistic goals. Everybody needs those goals, and you want to make sure that they're goals that you can achieve, not goals that are going to trip you up and then put you in a position where you won't be successful.

Visualization Techniques

I think visualization is another really important piece of being mentally prepared. Mentally rehearsing everything, mindfulness techniques and strategies, and then developing what you're going to do when things don't go the way you have already prepared to do it, I think, are super important.

Interviewer: A plan for if disappointment occurs, rather than just blindly saying that it's going to work out or whatever?

Dr. Hunziker: You want to make sure that you take into account every possible thing that could go wrong so that you can have a workaround, so when it does happen, it doesn't throw you off your game. You just kind of roll with it and you're ready to reflectively respond to whatever that situation is.

Interviewer: I guess when I hear about visualizing, I think a lot about sports analogies, you see the sports movie, "Vision the ball going into the cup," and you think about that, etc. What does that look like for someone who's just maybe stressed about a day of work, or having to go to the DMV, or whatever stress comes our way?

Dr. Hunziker: Well, let me give you a personal example. I'm doing this podcast today and that kind of freaks me out sometimes when I think about talking in front of people. Am I going to know enough, or am I going to answer the questions the right way?

So what I did beforehand was imagine just having a conversation, imagine what kind of questions would come my way, and then how I would respond to those.

What would happen if the microphone didn't work? What would happen if my headphones didn't work? And then trying to work through all of those different scenarios so that I felt calm when I came to actually do the presentation.

And the very same thing happens with athletes when they do vision all of these things and they get mentally ready for the job at hand.

Understand that nobody is perfect and that we're all going to make mistakes. We may say something the wrong way or do something the wrong way, but that doesn't change the fact that we did our best to get prepared to do it. And part of that is visualizing how we're going to get there.

Benefits of Mental Preparedness

Interviewer: What kinds of benefits can a person find in their daily life, in their anxiety levels, stress, etc., as they start to maybe be more mentally prepared on a day-to-day basis?

Dr. Hunziker: So I'll share with you a few stats from sports. They've done a lot of studies on these different processes, either visualization or mental preparedness before events. What they're finding in certain studies was a 45% improvement in performance level over just practicing alone or just doing mental preparedness alone, but doing both together. That's a huge improvement in your ability to function.

So can you imagine if you had a big presentation to give at work, and not only did you mentally prepare for it, but then you got up and you did it in front of your friends and you did all of this prep? You're going to get in there and you're going to blow everybody away because you're going to be so prepared that the anxiety drops.

You lose that worry about, "What are they going to think of me? Am I going to stumble over my words?" because you've done it over and over, both mentally and physically, and you're ready to get up and just do what you need to do.

And again, we come back to that you don't have to be perfect, right? This is giving it your best. And if you really put the time in, the expectation is you're going to give your best and it's going to turn out to be the way you need it to.

Building Resilience Through Mental Preparedness

Interviewer: You mentioned the idea of resilience. How can being mentally prepared help someone build resilience?

Dr. Hunziker: Resilience is really hard for all of us because we always recall all of those bad things that happened to us. And so when we go into new situations, we want to bring those back and say, "Well, last time I was here, I did this," or, "Last time I was here, I did that."

And so that's why it is so important to use some of these other strategies to view this going a different way so that you can gain that resilience. You can learn from those setbacks that you had, and then change that negative narrative from, "This is what happened to me last time, so it's inevitable," to, "This is a new challenge for me and I'm going to conquer this. This is another opportunity where I get to see what I can do, knowing that last time I did this, it didn't work out."

And then, of course, it comes back to we've got to practice all those coping skills. We're talking to our families, we're getting support from our friends, and we're journaling about how we're feeling during this process as we're preparing. All of it helps us get ready and be more resilient when these stressors arise.

Mental Preparedness First Steps for Beginners

Interviewer: Now, say someone is listening and they've never really tried any of these techniques out before. We've listed some of them, but what is a good first step for someone who would like to find themselves, not just in sports, but in any-day situations, performing better mentally? What's a good first step they can take?

Dr. Hunziker: Again, these things seem like they're huge, but they're really not that difficult to practice at home. Visualization is one of the steps that I think people can do quite easily at home. You just literally go into a quiet space and then you start visualizing, and you use your imagination.

You want to pay attention to everything. You want to pay attention to, "What am I wearing? What is the room like? Is it cold? Is it warm? Where am I standing in the room? How do I feel that day? What does it smell like?" and all of these different things. And you play this over and over in your mind.

Then you can introduce some of those negative things. "What happens if this and this and this happen?" But then you come back to, "Here is how I'm going to respond." And then you see yourself again doing all of these great things and being at the top of your game and not at the bottom, and you're functioning on all cylinders.

We do this multiple times. This isn't like we do it once and we're good. We have to keep doing this. Just like we would practice . . . if you're going to shoot free throws, you're going to be up shooting free throws and you're going to keep shooting free throws. This is the same thing. Visualization does the same thing. You have to do that.

Mindfulness

Another technique that a lot of people love to do is mindfulness or meditation. And again, that's a nice way to clear your mind and quiet everything.

And when we say quiet, that doesn't mean you don't have thought. It just means that when you have thoughts that you're not comfortable with, you just allow them to happen. We just let them kind of float by like they're a cloud and we're watching them move along.

We don't label them, we don't name them, and we don't put any value on them. We just let them go so that we can focus on those things that we're really trying to focus on.

The brain is really good, but it tends to really focus on one thing and one thing only. And so if we stay with the one thing that we know is going to get in our way, then that's what's going to happen. We're going to live whatever that is.

I was reading something the other day when we were talking about this, and it hit home with me because I'm a terrible golfer. But you go out on the golf course, you see the water off to your right, and you're getting ready to hit the ball and in your brain, you're saying, "Don't hit it in the water. Don't hit it in the water. Don't hit it in the water." And sure enough, it doesn't matter where you put your feet, or where you position your shoulders, that ball is going in the water because that's the last thing your brain hears.

Instead of saying that, you say, "I want to hit it right to the pin. I'm going to hit it 10 feet to the right of the pin." And then you swing, and invariably it goes in the direction your brain is telling it to go.

And so these kinds of techniques, the visualization, the mindfulness, those things help you get prepared to be in the right frame of mind to do those things, just like it would be going to work and giving your presentation, or doing whatever else you have, doing a talk show on the radio. You have to be prepared for those things.