INNER GAME NOTES
A weekly letter on the inner game of pressure — for executives and athletes who want mental discipline, not hacks. Written by a CBH practitioner with an MSc in Psychology who works with elite athletes.
Talking to yourself by name - and what it does to your performance
INNER GAME NOTES Talking to yourself by name - and what it does to your performance In 2014, Ethan Kross and colleagues at the University of Michigan gave people a task designed to be unpleasant: five minutes to prepare a speech about why they were qualified for their dream job, to be delivered to judges. Half prepared by talking themselves through it in the first person, and half prepared as"you" or by their own name. The name group reported less anxiety before the speech, were rated as...
Sleep loss takes your judgment of sleep loss first.
INNER GAME NOTES Sleep loss takes your judgment of sleep loss first. *First of all, sorry about the slight delay with this week's issue. If you read the burnout issue a few weeks ago, this is its sleep-specific sibling. In 2011, Cheri Mah and colleagues at Stanford asked the men's basketball team to extend their sleep to ten hours a night for five to seven weeks. Free-throw accuracy improved by nine percent, and three-point accuracy improved by the same margin. Sprint times fell, reaction...
Anxiety and excitement create the same response. How you label it decides the performance.
INNER GAME NOTES Anxiety and excitement create the same response. How you label it decides the performance. In 2010, Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues at Harvard gave students one sentence before a practice GRE. The sentence said that the arousal they felt, the faster heart and the tightness, would help them do well. Nothing else changed. The group that heard it outscored the control group on the math section that day, and when the researchers checked the students' real GRE results one to three...
CBT Works. CBT Plus Hypnosis Works Better.
INNER GAME NOTES CBT Works. CBT Plus Hypnosis Works Better. Performance anxiety is one of the most common problems high performers bring to psychologists - and one of the most treatable. The best-evidenced approach is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Less well known is that a growing body of research points to a stronger option: CBT combined with clinical hypnosis. The evidence for the combination now spans three decades. A meta-analysis of 18 controlled studies found that clients...
Burnout You Can Sleep Through
INNER GAME NOTES Burnout you can sleep through + Why rest won't reset you An apology first: this letter went quiet for a few months while I built the practice it writes about. Weekly from here on. There's a kind of burnout that never shows up on your wearable. Your HRV looks fine. Your sleep score is acceptable. You did the weekend hike; the watch was pleased with you. Your doctor asked how you're feeling, and you said “a bit tired,” because there's nothing diagnosable to report. And yet. The...
Self-hypnosis: what it actually is
THE NUMINAL RESET How Self-Hypnosis Calms the Nervous System & Reprograms the Subconscious Self-hypnosis: what it actually is When I tell people I teach self-hypnosis as part of the work, two reactions come up reliably. The first is curiosity. Interesting — how do I do that? The second is wariness. I don't want to be hypnotized. I want to stay in control. The wariness is based on a misunderstanding that's worth resolving, because the skill underneath is one of the most useful tools high...
A weekly letter on the inner game of pressure — for executives and athletes who want mental discipline, not hacks. Written by a CBH practitioner with an MSc in Psychology who works with elite athletes.