The Psychology of Risk and Fear: How to Know When to Go

00:02.65
Steve
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete podcast where our mission is to elevate and inspire all mountain athletes through education and celebration. My name is Steve House and I will be your host today along with Alyssa Clark. We are thrilled to bring another one of our coaches to the podcast, Alexa Hasman.
Alexa has been coaching ultra running since 2008 and holds a master’s in exercise science as well as a masters in sports psychology along with several UESCA certifications and is an accomplished ultra runner in her own right. In this episode we are briefly shifting gears away from the physiology of mountaineering to focus on the psychology of risk taking and fear. The mental component of mountaineering is as important if not more important than the physical. As I wrote in Training for the New Alpinism I said that it’s 80% mental and 20% physical. Well today Alexa is here to help you to perform your mental best. Thanks for joining us today, Alexa.

01:22.78
Alexa Hasman
Thanks for having me.

01:25.16
Alyssa
I think we’ve been looking forward to this episode for a while. I think it’s going to be great to have you on.

01:32.44
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, I’m excited to talk about all things risk taking and fear.

01:38.44
Alyssa
Woohoo. So before we dig into our main topics of mental preparation, overcoming fear, dealing with doubt and the psychology of risk taking, I’d love to hear more about your background, Alexa and then what drew you into focusing on the mind of an athlete.

01:57.62
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I grew up around psychology and my mom is a therapist so it was always a discussion in our household and something that always fascinated me when I went to college for a Bachelor’s in Psychology. Knowing I wanted to work with athletes but not knowing how to exactly tie that in quite yet. I’ve been coaching for a really long time and as I started to see that the psychology aspect was just as important as the physiological aspect I decided to go back to school and pursue learning a little bit more about that side of things and how I could help my athletes perform on the mental side as well as the physical side.

02:43.00
S
So how do you help your athletes prepare mentally, just run us through like what are some of the tools and your toolbox I mean we talk a lot on this podcast about what physical preparation looks like and we talk about things like setting a baseline, setting zones like it all seems very tangible compared to sports psychology.

03:09.47
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, and I think that’s why sports psychology can be a little bit intimidating because there isn’t anything, you can’t see, it doesn’t show up green on your Training Peaks. You know what? I mean it’s not something that you can see physically. Some of the tools that we use are going to be visualization and breathing techniques. Of course it’s going to be very dependent on what the athlete is dealing with, whether it’s fear, overcoming an injury, just preparing for a big race or preparing for a big event. Anything like that. The tools are going to be a little bit different but there’s a lot of tools that we can use that are really relevant to each of the issues that they’re dealing with.

03:54.84
S
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I would like to hear more about how you help your athletes prepare specifically for a race or a big event. What are some of the things that you do and I can perhaps share some of the things that I learned at least anecdotally.

04:12.39
Alexa Hasman
Yeah for race preparation I really like visualization. So really spending time focusing on visualizing the positive aspects of the race. But also the negative aspects of the race or the event. It’s really important to visualize. How am I going to tackle this situation when it’s not going well just so that we can remain calm when things do go wrong during a race or an event. I also like to do visual preparation so having them hang stuff around their houses on their mirrors elevation maps with little cues that tell them stuff like hey when I get to this climb I’m going to tell myself this or I’m going to reward myself with this. So giving little mental cues that sort of break down the race and give them something to look forward to are two of my really big ones. Then breathing techniques because there is a level of anxiety and fear going into any event and so controlling that I mean it’s important to have that anxiety and that fear because without it there would be I think the performance would be a little different. I can’t imagine going into a race not being anxious, right? That would be odd, but it’s about controlling that anxiety and controlling that fear and using it to our advantage rather than letting it sort of take away from our performance.

05:40.13
Steve
Yeah, that makes so much sense. I mean mankind has such a history of this. In my readings I remember discovering that the samurai would meditate on their own deaths in all the different ways that they might die from like being slain in battle to falling off a roof to dying of old age and in alpinism I know that there was perhaps overly so but there was often this kind of talking about and thinking about the things that could go wrong that could kill you. There’s a famous British Alpinist who once wrote in one of his articles that before every big climb you have to just write yourself off.

06:36.90
Steve
That’s almost an extreme like fatalistic viewpoint right? He just had to say no I’m not coming back from this and that’s how he let go of his fear. Letting go of the expectation that he would actually live like that’s one way to do it right? It’s hard to be afraid of life after the climb if you don’t believe there will be one that’s probably you know, not a healthy mechanism to say the least. But I think it does illustrate that.

07:09.73
Steve
People have been searching for something like this for a long time and trying to figure out where this balance is.

07:18.43
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, absolutely and with that a lot of the studies with fear and mountaineering talk about how with the psychology of it. The mountaineers have to embrace the fear and make it sort of like their friend. And so that’s a big aspect of dealing with the fear out there on the mountain is having it become more of like a part of them and creating this transformational process with the fear and using it.

07:47.14
Alyssa
That makes a lot of sense and I think that goes back to the point of visualizing. I get a question a lot of the time do you visualize and I always say yes, but probably not in the way that you think. Most people visualize finish lines. They visualize, I’m going to feel so strong on this climb, I’m going to do this so well and the trick is that you can almost negatively affect yourself if you have only visualized everything going right. As you just touched on and so you have to visualize, like my coach spends a lot of time where it’s like okay, you’re going to spend the next week like 15 to 20 minutes a day minimum thinking about things going badly and how you’re going to deal with them. That was a huge game changer for my running because I went from visualizing the glory to visualizing the hard work. And visualizing how I was going to work through what went badly and then I was less surprised when it happened. Also I think something we often do is we visualize, even if we’re working on visualizing negative thoughts, we don’t visualize negative things happening until much further in the race where you’re like yeah of course I feel badly at mile a hundred of two hundred miles, but what if you feel badly at mile 20 and that happens.

09:10.14
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, it absolutely does and preparing for that so that when you’re in that situation and that sort of panic comes over you if you’ve had that background of visualizing it. You’re able to calm yourself down and deal with that situation a little bit better than you would be if you went into it. You’re like hey I’m imagining myself crossing this finish line and I’m winning and I’m doing so strong and all this stuff. Imagine mile twenty like where it’s hurting and it doesn’t feel good. How am I gonna handle that when that situation happens because it will inevitably be in mountaineering and in any sort of mountain sport. You’re going to hit a low spot. How am I gonna deal with that? How am I going to stay calm? It’s never going to look exactly like how you visualize it. But at least we’ll give you the tools to say I’m going to breathe. I’m going to take this one step at a time and I’m going to figure it out and I’m going to adapt to the situation.

10:13.16
S
I feel like this would be a good moment to bring ourselves back to the two main subjects which are risk-taking and fear and I want to come back to fear. But I think we should revisit and dive into and maybe start with risk taking because that’s the behavior that leads us into the fear right? So maybe we should do this in sort of chronological order. If you will, Alexa I would like to hear from you a little bit about what you’ve learned in the academic studies and work that you’ve done personally in your development about risk taking behaviors in athletes.

11:34.73
Alexa Hasman
So risk taking is a trait that we all inhabit. Mountaineering and extreme sports people more than others. Mountaineering obviously requires a level of risk and adventure seeking and we found that in this population. The participants in the sport usually consider this experience and the risk-taking as part of a life-affirming experience in a way of personal growth and that’s why mountaineering and extreme sports participants do what they do. Risk taking is part of what helps them feel fulfilled and achieve personal growth. So that’s what we’re seeing in the studies is that psychologically, mountaineering people experience risk taking as part of fulfilling sort of what they feel like they need to do.

12:33.85
S
It reminds me of the Viktor Fankl quote “suffering ceases to be suffering when it finds meaning.” One of my favorite books of all time and the search for meaning that perfectly sums it up I think anecdotally.

12:40.11
Alexa Hasman
Wow.

12:49.37
S
I would say something quite similar like you know the risk taking inherent in mountaineering. You know there’s often been this conjecture well would it still be worthwhile if there wasn’t risk involved. Well if there wasn’t risk involved, It wouldn’t be the activity that it is. That would help us to realize personal growth.

13:11.67
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, absolutely and I think a lot of people presume that these extreme sports and mountaineering that people don’t experience fear or emotions like that the same you know there’s a lot of talk about the brain activity of climbers and stuff like that being different but that’s not necessarily true. I think that fear and risk taking or at least what the science says is, that’s the why behind what we do what we do instead of it being we don’t have that fear. Fear is what drives us to do what we do and that’s sort of what puts us on that mountain right? It’s that level of fear and risk taking.

13:58.42
Alyssa
I was actually listening to a podcast the other day and it was something that they were actually in an argument over. Can it be a true adventure if there isn’t some risk involved and someone was saying oh you can have an adventure in your backyard and the other person was saying but if there isn’t a risk of falling off the monkey bars like is it a true adventure? I thought it was a really interesting question to think about and the mindset of it. But I’d be curious to pose this question to you Steve. Do you feel that in some way and this might be why the willingness to kind of overcome risk because you’ve done many trips and pursued things that people would consider quite risky or dangerous. Do you feel like there’s almost some kind of higher calling that this is what you’re meant to do and that somehow that maybe surpasses the level of risk? Or I’d just be curious how you manage the risk in your mind and why it is worth it to you.

15:13.11
S
Yes but I would reframe the question and I would say it’s not a higher calling. It’s just who I am, it’s how I am in this world and for me to not do these things that I’ve done and honestly like it’s also a moment in time right? That’s the other thing people have to realize yes I did insanely dangerous things in my climbing career. But that was a long time ago and like I don’t do those things anymore and I have literally zero drive to do anything even remotely like that. I’m almost the other way like I’m becoming the paranoid dad now that you know is worried about people driving too fast on the highway. So I still think there is truly value in transformational pursuit of adventure and yourself and I think I would absolutely side with the person in the argument that believes that risk is a fundamental requirement of that. And I would also say this is just how I have to show up and to suppress that is to suppress who I actually am. I wouldn’t call it a higher calling. It’s just hey this is how I was. I think this is actually one of the points I wanted to make today. I think that managing risk is very healthy in the sense that it teaches you a lot about the mountains and teaches you generally a lot about who you actually are, not some imaginary version of yourself that is in a fairy tale book, a superhero comic book. But who you actually are, which is incredibly powerful.

17:18.40
S
And incredibly strong and with incredible endurance and also somebody who is really uncomfortable twenty miles into a two hundred mile race sometimes you are all of those things and we are our flaws as well as our strengths. For a lot of us I think that it’s important and transformational to come to accept our flaws and to come to accept that’s part of who we are. That’s part of what makes us the way we are and we don’t have to be perfect. You know it goes back to self-love right? Like you have to be able to love yourself and if you can’t forgive yourself of your flaws then you can’t accomplish that. If you can’t accomplish that you know through adventuring then there are surely other avenues. Probably meditation, probably therapy, probably lots of other other things. But I think that it’s probably one of the most widely available and probably one of the most widely used ways of you know self-actualization and self-realization.

18:26.93
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, it exactly goes back to that life-affirming. You know that’s why people take the risks and also one of the key personality traits that’s different with people that participate in risk taking behaviors is that they are more motivated by personal achievement rather than compared to the normal population. It’s a personal inward achievement that is more motivating to them than most people right? So it’s not that they’re not doing it for external reasons, they’re doing it to learn more about themselves and figure out who they are and really understand themselves from a really deep level.

19:16.80
Alyssa
And it makes a lot of sense. I’d be curious to know just where humility comes into this because I think there’s an element of risk taking that perhaps is perceived as defiance in a way. Where you’re defying limits, where you’re going after in many ways I mean with what we do. The question is whether mother nature will allow us to do this. You know? Are we pushing the limits of mother nature’s edges too much? Are we pushing our own limits too much? How do you both think that humility comes into play and that kind of old mindset of conquering mountains that used to be such an important part and and quite frankly, a part of colonialism and such. There’s that drive and how we think of it with humility playing in.

20:17.16
Alexa Hasman
I think the best way we can deal with that is knowing that we’re mortal right? Like the mountain isn’t going to care what’s going to happen out there to us and so using that humility that we are just a human out there taking these risks right? We have to be humble knowing that in the end the mountain sort of drives what happens.

20:42.30
S
I also think it’s really important to understand the difference between risk taking and achieving something over risk. When you’re actually taking risks, you sometimes don’t succeed, you sometimes turn around. Because you decide this is too dangerous or I think I’m going to die or my partner will die or I will get injured or my partner will get injured if I continue along this path. So it’s important to understand from an outside view. Clearly from an inside view which I think most people have, this is actually a process like engaging with risk. I’ve had plenty of days where I’ve gone out and started to lead up a hard pitch and backed off. That’s happened lots of times and I’ve also had days where I didn’t feel I needed to and I led the pitch and I think that that’s a big piece of what people get out of the experience. I would be curious to hear how this works with runners. It becomes like you’re trying to measure the weight of something, the weight of yourself, your centeredness and by balancing on this edge. You can sense it really finely, really acutely, really sensitively and then you can say like oh yeah, this is not the day or this is the day. That’s what gives me humility is that I I have to bring humility to that moment because if I bring arrogance to that moment I’ll kill myself so you have to have humility. And that humility is going to carry back into the rest of your life.

22:43.60
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, absolutely.

22:46.99
Alyssa
I think that’s such a really profound thing to hear. I’m just kind of absorbing that. I think that is true and I’m not saying that trail running doesn’t have its risks but I do think that’s a big difference. The difference is I’m probably not going to die like you could. But when we go out on a trail run, you’re probably not going to die and so in many ways I think it’s almost harder to make that decision. I think it’s easier to just say oh you know today is not the day, we’re not going to do it. We’re going to grab a cup of hot chocolate and go inside. I think the trick is that you have to decide. For me, I actually remember the moment because it happened this year where I realized, well it happened last year, and then it really solidified this year, was that there was a moment I was running the Pinhoti trail which is three hundred and fifty miles. I was trying to set a new FKT. And I was in really deep pain. I mean my shins were killing me. I was so tired, I had been running for over two hundred miles, but my desire to succeed and to fulfill who I am was so strong that it did not matter how much pain I was in. It did not matter how tired I was and there was like this switch flipped where I went from screaming in pain getting shoes put on my feet to running. Mountaineering I think is a much more acute moment in many ways where it’s like I will die if I don’t make this move or you know make this good decision, whereas trail running, it’s more like here is the moment where I go from almost saving yourself or thinking you know everyone has DNFs. Everyone has things to stop. It’s more trying to fulfill what I might be capable of and it took realizing that I was tired of sabotaging myself and tired of letting go, letting go into that moment or like letting that moment win. I wanted to take that but it is deep humility where it’s like I was so bare in that moment and everything was taken away from me and I was so raw.To be able to make the decision to keep going and I think that’s kind of an interesting difference where it’s like I’m not going to die. But, also it almost feels like it is life or death at that moment to me because it’s like becoming who I’m supposed to be. Sorry that was a long story.

26:01.46
S
No, don’t apologize, that was amazing and I think it’s true but I would say let’s not overblow the risk of mountaineering. Not every decision is life and death. A lot of them are just like oh I fell down and hurt my ankle real bad.

26:16.48
Alyssa
Fair.

26:18.43
S
But I would argue that the risk to her runners is far worse. It’s a social humiliation. Oh she DNF’d and didn’t win. That’s worse for me if I was on an expedition and I didn’t go climbing, I just didn’t talk to anybody when I went home. Nobody had any idea what happened or what didn’t happen, only me and so that risk I think, especially for known runners or runners trying to build you know a career is immense and that pressure is immense and that risk is huge.

27:04.50
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, and especially because if you do push through something you do risk damaging your ability to run in the future. So you have to sort of in that situation decide whether this is going to be worth it. Long term or in the next three months is this finish line worth not being able to do this sport in the near future or potentially long term? Sometimes you know personal achievement that drive for that is more powerful than the need to preserve our bodies and sometimes it’s not.

27:48.26
Alyssa
So I’d be curious, Alexa, how in psychology is it differentiated social risk versus physical risk I guess.

28:02.99
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, well so in psychology we have this innate need to socially thrive because in the beginning of time you know if you didn’t fit into the the social community around you didn’t have the resources or you could be killed right? So we have this innate thing inside of us that says that we need to socially conform. So that pressure is extreme and so social risk sort of can drive us also in that achievement right? It’s similar to that physical risk. It’s also risk taking right? But it’s just looking at the risk taking in a different way. It’s conforming to the social norms and taking a risk of like hey am I going to ruin my reputation? Are people talking about me? Are people going to be saying I’m a horrible athlete? Whatever that may be to you that is social risk taking for that person and so some people may experience risk taking stronger in that social aspect and some might experience it more in the physical aspect. But either way to that person, it presents a danger and a fear to them right? So no matter what that risk is valid to that person.

29:25.93
S
And I think engaging in any of these forms of risk helps people to develop high pain tolerance for lack of a better word. I tie risk tolerance to a high tolerance for discomfort and you know I think that you touched on it already Alyssa, but this is a double-edged sword. On one hand you can achieve great things, but on the other hand you know you actually both touched on it. You could damage yourself and you could not be able to run in the future. I know climbers who are metabolically and medically completely messed up because they starved themselves for so long to stay light and various other such stories exist within climbing. They had an extreme self-control to live on a couple of potatoes a year for a number of years, but they ultimately damaged their bodies that now don’t function. So you have to be a little careful with this ability that we develop. You can use this for self-control, but you can also use it to override the pain of being out of alignment in some way whether that’s mentally or physically.

30:55.20
Alexa Hasman
Yeah.

30:56.11
Alyssa
Yeah, and sorry I’m going off on tangents, but this came to mind. Being able to manage risk or even being drawn to meet risk because I think if we anecdotally look at the people who are pursuing mountaineering or the extremes of sports, we often think of them as almost outsiders or kind of misfits in a way. I mean there’s almost pride in being that way and do you think that there’s an element of personality type that also causes or can cause a disjointedness with society and relating to other people? I sometimes find that when I come back from a really hard race or I feel like I’ve had this experience, I have a hard time relating to other people. It’s like I don’t understand how to come back or be a part of society. I’d just be curious about whether that is something that you inherently have, maybe if you have this personality trait or is that like a nature versus nurture kind of thing.

32:12.13
Alexa Hasman
Well, it’s both like we definitely have those personality traits right? And that’s what makes us who we are and it puts us in situations. However, people don’t necessarily have those personality traits and pursue the things that we do right? So that would be on the nurture side of things. So, yes, we have different personality types that sort of drive us to do these sports and that would be extroversion to some extent, neuroticism, risk taking, adventure seeking all of those things are personality traits that are really common in the extreme sports world that aren’t as common in the other athletic endeavors or non-athletes out there. So that’s what sort of separates us psychologically. But then it’s also how we use those out in the field right? So people could have that personality trait and they could utilize it or I don’t know some other thing that’s not adventure seeking and that could fulfill that personality need. We just choose to do it in the mountains and that’s how we deal with our personality.

33:24.37
S
I remember that it dawned on me when I was in my mid 20s that basically the narrative that all the men, mostly men and a few women had around their lives was something along the lines of if I hadn’t found climbing I would have been a drug dealer. I would have been a criminal. I would have been in a gang. I would have you know and I was kind of looking at one point, I kind of looked around like wait, all these people are coming from these really fringe places and I felt like I came from a quote unquote normal middle class upbringing and I was like wow this is really a fringe community. I’ve talked to different people like Yvon Chouinard or Royal Robbins when he was alive and you talk about the characters around climbing even longer ago like in the fifties. I mean these people were basically what we would call homeless people now like we would call them misfits. Yes, they were climbing and they were achieving but to the outside and to the rest of the world they were kind of no good losers. You talk to Yvon Chouinard, he used to live in a trash incinerator that he cleaned out. He spent another summer living off of dented cans of cat food that he bought at the damaged can goods store. This is a guy who has achieved incredible things in his lifetime but this is who he was. He didn’t have money for a car. He was hitchhiking back to California and got thrown in jail and spent nights in jail. These are the people that are engaging in these behaviors. These are also the same people that are building a company like Patagonia. So I think there’s a connection honestly between these behaviors in climbing and I think there’s an entrepreneurial side too.

35:46.72
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, I think it’s like extremism in everything that we do. We take everything to that top level because we’re always trying to achieve that personal achievement. That’s our ultimate goal and entrepreneurship does that for us and so do mountains right? In both ways we’re achieving personally there and that’s what is our driving force.

36:13.28
S
I spent some time guiding in the Tetons and I was guiding there one summer. I think it was the summer of two thousand or two thousand and one. One of these characters that was working for Exum Mountain guides at the time was a climber named Chuck Pratt. Chuck was one of the best, you know there’s Pratt crack named after him. He did all kinds of incredible free climbing feats back in the fifties that are still considered hard routes today and he would teach the basic climbing courses. He would teach people how to tie into the knot, how to tie into the rope with a figure eight and basically blend the very basic thing. He used to entertain himself. He had these funny little quizzes that he would make up for people. I remember working with him one day and I would always get a kick out of his questions. One day he said which of the four first ascensionists of the North American wall is not a millionaire today? I mean these people just started climbing that morning like they have no idea what any of these words mean right? But I’m doing it in my head like okay you know North America wall, first ascent was Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robbins, Tom Frost and Chuck Pratt. Well obviously it’s Chuck Pratt, he’s the only one who’s not a millionaire today. I think it is something about these personalities too that they can be channeled correctly.

37:34.29
Alyssa
That’s insane.

37:44.42
S
Be successful too and not that that is predetermined, but I think this sort of tolerance for pain, discomfort and hard work. These are the same things that make people successful in lots of different ways. Lots of different walks of life.

38:01.50
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, absolutely.

38:03.10
Alyssa
Interesting, well I think that we should switch a little bit of gears and go along to risk’s good old friend fear, and talk about fear for a little bit. Alexa I’d love to hear what fear is and how we differentiate fear we should listen to versus fear that we should rationalize. As we just heard Steve was saying that there were sometimes where he took the lead and it went great and there was sometimes that you backed off. I’d love to hear more of the science behind fear itself.

38:43.79
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, so fear is a completely natural response to a perceived threat right? So when we experience fear that emotion triggers the sympathetic nervous system which releases hormones of Norepinephrine and Epinephrine. And those sort of put our body into a fight or flight response. So that’s what we experience with you know, sweaty palms, those sort of typical fear responses and everyone experiences fear differently. Some people seek this out and a lot can happen when we expand fear, we can freeze up. We’re more likely to get ourselves hurt or in dangerous situations. So we can also make rash decisions and fear can be limiting for a lot of athletes.

39:42.90
Alexa Hasman
Fear stops them from starting or going past a certain point, especially if they experience a catastrophic or traumatic event. It can be hard to come back from that or even just like an injury. To push past that fear, determining whether we should or not, that’s really up to that individual situation right? We can’t determine well once we hit this sort of fear response, that’s when we need to stop and back out right? It’s going to take time to get used to dealing with the fear. And look at it rationally or as rationally as we can in this situation and say hey is this going to be something that’s going to be detrimental in the future or is it not? How are we going to rationalize it right? Is this thing that I’m experiencing catastrophic? Or is it not catastrophic because no matter what our body is going to experience that fear response because our hormones are being triggered. So how do we use that fear and how do we determine whether it’s life threatening or not or potentially body damaging and that’s gonna be sort of assessing the situation and going from there.

40:52.76
S
When I was teaching basic mountaineering courses back in the 90s we used to sum it up by telling people there are three steps in the process of evaluating risk. First of all, what is the chance I’m going to fall, second what is the consequence of falling, and third how honestly did I answer questions one and two. I think that a simple three step kind of mnemonic or memory trick can be applied to a huge range of situations.
Understand if the fear is something that you should rationalize or whether rationalizing a way like okay I’m not going to fall. So even though it’s death if I do fall I’m not going to fall and so I can cross here.

41:46.92
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, and I think that is one of the big things, staying calm in that moment right? Learning to control that fear is one of the biggest aspects of that because if we have this experience of a fear and we cannot control it, it can put us in a very dangerous situation. So like I said you could freeze up. You could be just putting yourself in a really bad situation. So using fear to determine the situation is going to be really important. And calming down using breathing to assess the situation. Asking yourself, is this a moment where I’m just really scared and I can get past it or is this a moment where it’s like I’m really scared because this is a real perceived threat to my well-being.

42:40.32
S
I’ve written and talked about this a lot in the past, but I did quite a bit of meditation and meditation courses and meditation practice when I was climbing actively. I did two things that I think helped with what you bring up Alexa. One is a key lesson of meditation. There are 3 layers to a moment as it was explained to me. There’s the initial experience. There’s your awareness of the experience. And then there’s a third one which is your story about the experience that comes later but as it pertains to what we’re talking about. Meditation allowed me to stretch that moment in time out. The interval between the experience and the awareness of the experience and essentially slow that down is how my experience of it was and simultaneously the mechanism I would actually use was breath. Breathe into that moment to sort of stretch it out and it would be a big belly inhale and exhale sometimes multiples. It’s very much the same process when you’ve been sitting in meditation for a long time and you’ve been through all kinds of physical discomfort and your legs are numb. All of those things and then somehow, something happens and you just feel rooted and grounded and powerful. You know you’re having this kind of experience and that’s the kind of experience I was essentially channeling in those moments. It’s this whole experience of stretching time or slowing time. Breathing into it or creating a space where I can make a decision where I can choose my reaction. Rather than have my reaction be chosen for me like oh I’m scared this is happening. My foot slipped. My gear is bad. I think this slope may avalanche. What is my next Step? What am I going to do now? Choosing that, not just like reacting.

45:08.30
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, absolutely and breathing helps us to calm down that sympathetic nervous system which is what controls that hormone response and that fear response. So breathing is really important in those situations and slowing down and assessing what’s going on.

45:27.72
S
My climbing partners used to actually kind of make fun of me for that. They would say, oh we can tell when it gets hard up there because we can hear you breathing from down here.

45:36.20
Alexa Hasman
Well, you were doing it right though.

45:39.72
S
Ah, yeah, well I mean I was also the one leading the hard pitches. So yeah I was doing it right.

45:49.55
Alyssa
So one last thing I’ll touch on with this and then maybe a little bit about doubt and then wrap it up. But people talk a lot about that gut feeling where it’s like you think something’s going to happen. Or they say I listened to my gut and that was the right call or maybe it wasn’t but I’d be curious if there is a psychological component of what that gut feeling is. If you’d like to go first, Alexa and then to Steve and talk about a moment where you listened to your gut and it was correct. And maybe a moment where you should have gone. Alexa if you want to go first.

46:28.60
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, definitely. It’s intuition and that’s your body perceiving a threat that you’re not necessarily aware of right? and so there’s a body’s response to our environment and. We don’t always know why we have that fear response but that’s sort of what that intuition is. Our body is experiencing a fear response for a reason, we’re not sure why our body knows, but we don’t know why right? That is why we experience that sort of gut feeling and that’s our intuition telling us hey something isn’t right right now.

47:07.91
S
Yeah I concur and I would say that it actually falls into the category of the third layer of the experience which is the story you’re telling yourself. And I don’t mean to say that you can control the story or change the story. Your experience of this intuition is the story and in that sense I mean every story has a context. The context of this story is the layer of experience of the moment which in this case is intuition. Is this the context of what you’re going to do? Are you feeling this? You’re about to launch onto a big dangerous climb. Are you feeling this and you’re about to run a race? Are you going to go skiing and the avalanche conditions are a little sketchy? It sort of goes back to those three questions. What are the chances of something happening? What are the consequences? And how honestly did I answer those? Often I think intuition is your signal that something is wrong on number three that you’re maybe not listening to and not telling yourself the truth. Because, something is out of alignment and this is where I think I just see so many parallels between meditation practice and mountain sports. Your job is to be present and to understand and to experience as much of what is in front of you and around you. When you’re in the moment climbing, running, sleeping as you can and that’s basically all that meditation teaches us to do.

49:23.19
Alyssa
I think that’s wise words so going off of that, the last thing I want to touch on is taking this and I think that oftentimes fear is spurred by doubt. So how does an athlete deal with doubt? And with doubt there’s kind of two parts. There’s doubt that comes from perhaps improper training where you know you really shouldn’t be out there because you maybe aren’t ready yet or haven’t put in the work. Then I think probably the more common one is athletes dealing with a lack of self-efficacy where they’re doubting themselves because there is a lack of confidence or almost a big fear of failure. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on doubt and then how do we deal with that.

50:26.14
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, so doubt is completely natural and some studies have actually shown that it’s beneficial to our performance because the athlete perceives they have to try harder in that performance situation. So it can be beneficial. However, having self-confidence is more beneficial to performance because the athlete feels confident in what they are doing. So doubt can go either way, but it is a totally normal and completely natural thing to be feeling again. It would be just like with fear, I think doubt is one of those emotions and feelings that we have that would be sort of odd to not feel before we go into a performance. So there’s a few really good ways that athletes can deal with doubt. One of my favorite ways to deal with these negative thoughts when we’re dealing with doubt is to just put a full stop on it and literally tell ourselves when we’re having that thought, like I can’t do this climb, I can’t continue. Stop and then say something positive. So yes, this looks really hard, but I’ve done this. I’ve trained for this. Reframing it in a positive way or like I’m not trained enough to do this. Stop, I remember when I did my last training run or my last training climb I’m completely ready for this. So it’s stopping those negative thoughts and putting a positive affirmation in place of it. That’s going to be beneficial when dealing with doubt.

52:41.81
S
Yeah I think the moment of doubt on a climb is literally like the most precious moment of the whole experience. You know when you’re an athlete, this comes back to being an uphill athlete and what uphill athletes do. We are uphill athletes in a sense that it’s at that moment of doubt and it’s also at that moment of realization that we’re going to overcome it and Alexa you just gave us the tools to help us overcome it but people need to know that’s completely normal and everybody has that. My mechanism for that is to do something that slows the time down enough that I make the decision to continue. Whatever that is. There are sometimes hundreds of those moments you know little ones but there’s almost always one big one where it’s really just totally hanging in the balance and you know this is to me one of the lessons I learned when I was in my twenties. I had the great luck and honor to climb with almost exclusively climbing partners who are a lot older than I was. They’re all at least one generation older than I was and this is something that I noticed they did. When we got to that moment of doubt they would stop and address the problem. So in climbing it was often like okay, let’s get out the stove. Let’s brew up and at first you’re like wait like we’re going to make and drink tea? You’ve got to be kidding me? Everything’s going wrong. It’s like no, let’s slow it down. Let’s make sure we’re hydrated. We haven’t eaten. It’s going to get dark. Anyway, we have headlamps, let’s collect ourselves. Let’s slow it down and then we’re going to make a decision and that’s how the good decisions were made. You choose your response. And this is so important in so many ways of life. In so many areas of life where you just need to create a little space so you can choose consciously and wisely. And hopefully it’s the right response and you know that’s what overcoming doubt is about. Also trusting and knowing that gives you self-confidence and self-efficacy. When you know that whatever happens goes wrong, that you’re going to be able to make the right decision because that’s what you do. I think for me honestly, I’ve noticed in my speaking as a 52 year old, but there was a period in my life where I loved that so much I would go out of my way to create it subconsciously. In all ways of my life because I thrived in that kind of crisis. So I wanted to have a crisis all the time and now I realize I can leverage my strength in crises. I’m good at managing crises. But I don’t want to be in crisis all the time and I don’t want those around me to be in crisis all the time. So then you learn to again make a conscious choice. This is just to say that it’s not like a straight line from beginning to end right? This is the path of life and it’s crooked and winding and you compensate or over compensate. You backtrack, you reconsider, you do things differently.

56:27.63
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, and it all sort of ties together right? Doubt ties into fear, fear ties into risk taking, and all of it inevitably ties into our need to achieve and to have that self- discovery and that personal achievement and affirmation in our life.

56:48.83
S
And I say that achievement isn’t an achievement for anyone again. It’s just us showing up as who we are and before the achievement people didn’t see us for that because we hadn’t done it.
You know I was no different the day before I climbed Nanga Parbat than I was the day after but the day after people saw me completely differently.

57:12.19
Alexa Hasman
Yeah, it’s that inward achievement.

57:15.67
Alyssa
That’s a really funny sensation. I’ve been there a couple times like now everyone sees me? I’m the same person. I’m just older looking, probably lost some weight. But yeah, everyone sees you differently. It’s a very strange thing.

57:38.00
S
Well, there’s a big important difference between who you know you are and who other people think you are. It’s part of the process of realizing that it doesn’t matter what other people think you are, you’re just going to show up as you show up and be who you are and you have agency to empower and strengthen and build resilience. You will manifest those things and you know probably change the world for the better if you do it.

58:12.29
Alyssa
Well with that and what Alexa said, that was a beautiful wrap up of connecting all of the pieces. So thank you for that. Any last things you’d like to touch on in this podcast?

58:26.12
Alexa Hasman
I think that just knowing that mental training is like we sort of said in the beginning, just as important as that physical aspect. So reiterating the fact that athletes really need to spend time focusing on those mental skills to help them overcome obstacles and also just to overall improve their performance. It’s not only just dealing with fear and risk taking but also just being the best athlete that we can be through not only our physical abilities, but through our mental abilities as well.

58:58.84
S
I would add that the way you do that is by training physically because a physical journey is what takes you on the mental journey. You can’t have the mental journey on the couch. You have to go out and you have to strive and you have to train, you have to climb, you have to run. That’s what takes you on the mental journey. Your body takes you there and so you know this is so core to Uphill Athlete and what we all do in all our sports whether they are snow sports or rock climbing or alpinism or ultra running. It doesn’t matter like adventure racing etc. These are all just pretexts for going on a mental journey and coming back as someone different and someone transformed. I think that we should be proud as a community that we are undertaking bold and brave and transformational journeys in our lives like we are making our lives. We’re building our lives around these kinds of heroic journeys and that’s really something cool and I think we should really all be proud of that.

01:00:05.42
Alexa Hasman
Absolutely.

01:00:09.12
Alyssa
I agree. Well on that note, thank you both so much. This has been so much fun to dig into this and I’m sure we will have many more episodes touching on mental coaching and the mental component of sports. So look out for that. Thank you for listening to the Uphill Athlete podcast.

01:00:42.58
Alyssa
It really helps us if you rate, review and subscribe on any of the major podcast platforms. You can also check out our training plans, coaching and we have a couple of training groups starting up in January you can see all of that at uphillathlete.com.

01:01:01.12
S
Once again I just wanted to say thank you Alexa for your work as a coach at Uphill Athlete, your writing and for being on podcast. Thank you so much.

01:01:10.34
Alexa Hasman
Thank you so much for having me. It was my pleasure.

01:01:17.60
S
It’s not just one, but a community together. We are Uphill Athlete. Today’s Uphill Athlete podcast was produced by Alyssa Clark. Our mixing engineer is Tim McClain and our theme song was written and produced by Chase Clark. We’d love to hear from you so write to us at coach@ uphillathlete.com. I’m your host Steve House. Go simply, climb, ski and run. We thank you for listening.