Mental Toughness And The Point of Adaptation
A Key Ingredient For How Successful People Think
Talents, skills and attributes. The Triad of success. Which is most important? This topic could be argued for days, but suffice it to say, once you get to a certain level, it is usually the underlying attributes that become the game changers.
Speaking of the game changing attributes, one of the best of course, is Mental Toughness. Simply put, this type of toughness usually develops by doing tough things. And doing tough things means you give yourself reasons to keep going instead of excuses for quitting. In essence, you train yourself to be a winner.
So the question is how? How do we become mentally tough? One great way to do this is from a technique I call the Point of Adaptation.
This is developed from my studies of what is known as Sensory Adaptation. Sensory adaptation is the “phenomenon that occurs when the sensory receptors become exposed to stimuli for a prolonged period. Depending on the stimulus, receptors may increase or decrease their ability to respond, and will develop an enhanced or diminished sensitivity to the stimulus.1
The cool thing is that we have all experienced sensory adaptation, and it occurs, as the name implies, with all of our senses. For instance, your pupils dilate when you enter a darker room in order to allow more light to hit the retina, but within five minutes, they have adapted and return to normal size. Additionally, its also the reason someone who smokes can’t smell the smoke on their clothes, but everyone around them can. With food, it is why the 10th bite of cheesecake is not as intense as the first bite. With temperatrue, it’s why the freezing swimming pool is not so cold after being in it for 20 minutes. It is even is seen with stimulants such as caffeine or certain drugs, where your receptors adapt, and eventually you need more and more to reach the prior level of stimulation.
The point of this is to say that our mental toughness can be trained in the same way our senses are trained, which occurs via adaptation. At first, doing hard things can be difficult, but if you allow your mind, like your senses to adapt to the situation, you will eventually raise your standards and what use to be diffiuclt will now be a walk in the park.
Here is a practical example of how to train this attribute and eventually adapt to new levels of toughness:
Step 1: take a cold shower. And for this specific exercise, I the water to be so cold it literally takes your breath away.
Step 2: Time yourself for 60 seconds and have all your focus be on the key word “adaptation.” As you do, the first 5-10 seconds are going to be brutal, your will lose your breath. Your heart rate will increase. But hold your position and enter the zone of calming your mind to the point of embracing the cold. As you do, your senses and your mind will enter the point of adaptation where you are in control instead of the temperature of the water and it will no longer feel cold.
This is such a strong technique because it can be extrapolated and applied to any area of life. The next time you are on rep #10 of squats or lunges, and everything in your body is telling you to quit, you will think of that cold shower, and you will press on, reaching that point of adaptation to where you find it within yourself to get two more reps.
You will then apply it to finances and reach a point of adaptation to where you set up and automatic investment into the S&P 500. The pain of saving and investing will become second nature.
You will apply it to the office party where all the undisciplined people are gorging on donuts and cookies but you are mentally tough to ignore all that food because you have new goals and a new normal of mental toughness.
Eventually as you continue to train yourself to persevere instead of to quit, you will reach new levels of what you adapt to. The old levels of pain or difficulty will make you laugh and you will take on bigger and better challenges. All because you have adapted to new levels of mental toughness.
https://sciencing.com/examples-sensory-adaptation-14224.html