Enhancing Your Adaptability
How to build awareness and prepare your nervous system to handle adversity
Adapting to the demands of your environment is a cornerstone of high performance. Doing it seamlessly and effectively is a skill that takes practice, but is certainly worth developing. It might seem obvious as to why adaptability is important, but imagine how far a rigid and inflexible mindset would get you? Think of the coach who refuses to change their gameplan, or an athlete who refuses any help and feedback about how to improve, or perhaps a CEO who is unwilling to modify their strategy despite diminishing earning year over year. They might say things like:
I’ve been here before and this is exactly what we did last time.
This is the way I’ve always trained.
It’s just the market, we’ll bounce back.
Sure, certain approaches may have worked well in the past and were appropriate for the situation. But who’s to say they’re always the right approach? “Don’t Plan A harder” is a phrase commonly shared among firefighters. In other words, know when to shift to Plan B. This is especially important in environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) such as war zones, big wave surfing, big mountain or backcountry skiing, or even white water rafting. But adaptability is important outside of these endeavors too. Teams that can better adapt to their opponents tactics will likely be more successful. Running, swimming, and cycling all require individuals to adjust (read: adapt) their output to properly pace themselves throughout a race. Similarly, C-Suite execs may need to reorganize their strategy year in and year out to stay ahead of the curve and avoid stagnation.
These are just a handful of examples. In each case, however, being adaptable begins with external and internal awareness. This means recognizing the situation around you and making the appropriate internal adjustments to meet those needs.
The Science of Adaptability
The nervous system is the body’s built in “adaptor.” The parasympathetic nervous system is like the body’s internal braking system, slowing it down and allowing it to rest and reset. The sympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, is its internal accelerator, energizing the body and preparing us to meet the challenges we are presented.
Together, these two systems exist to help match our internal systems to the external world. Accelerating and braking, back and forth, attempting to balance and prepare the body for the situation at hand.
The challenging part is that these processes typically occur outside our conscious awareness. That is, it can be difficult to recognize these processes happening in “real time.” We usually don’t recognize that we are hyped up or feeling sluggish until we’ve arrived at such a state. This can be detrimental when it comes to performance, as too much sympathetic activation can hurt decision making processes and damage attentional capacity. Too much parasympathetic activity might leave you feeling too relaxed, and despite a comfortable lead over your opponent, result in an unwanted outcome.
To adapt and continue to perform at a high level, individuals have to be able to recognize what’s happening externally in their environment and internally in their body. One of the most effective ways to do this is through mindfulness.
Amy Baltzell and Joshua Summers define mindfulness as “being aware of what’s happening in the present moment… It is the simple awareness of what is unfolding in real time, right now, just as it is.” In other words, to be mindful is to consciously recognize the sensations that you encounter.
Mindfulness can be practiced in a variety of informal ways. An example might be paying attention to the sensations you experience while brushing your teeth, washing the dishes, or while taking a walk around the neighborhood. This is a simple practice that affords one the opportunity to practice shifting their attention to various aspects of your environment, developing awareness of their surroundings. A consistent mindfulness practice can help minimize mind wandering too, strengthening your ability to recognize when the mind has drifted away and gently bringing it back.
“Mindfulness is being aware of what’s happening in the present moment… It is the simple awareness of what is unfolding in real time, right now, just as it is.”
This type of mindfulness, sometimes referred to as “open monitoring”, can help increase external awareness and and one’s ability to hold a gentle focus on various stimuli, two skills that are beneficial in sport.
More formal practices typically ask you to bring your attention to a particular part of the body. Meditation, for example, often encourages you to focus on your breath while allowing thoughts and sensations to simply come and go. Other practices such as yoga, progressive muscle relaxation (PMR), or body scans use the physical body as the focal point. These “focused attention” practices can help increase awareness of physical and emotional states by giving yourself an opportunity to discover what stress, anxiety, or even excitement feels like in the body. By labeling certain thoughts, emotions, or physical feelings, you better equip yourself to handle them and make the appropriate adjustments. With time, you might find yourself saying “Hm, I’m notice that I’m feeling a bit anxious,” which prompts you to take a few deep breaths to relax. Ideally, you can gain familiarity with a variety of sensations and emotional states so that you can adjusting your internal state to match the external world occurs not only faster, but also more effectively.
Mindfulness can also have a positive impact on the nervous system. Recent research has shown that mindfulness meditation is associated with increases in heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is the variability in the amount of time between heart beats. When we exhale, we activate the parasympathetic nervous system and our heart rate decreases. When we inhale, we activate the sympathetic nervous system and our heart rate increases. These increases and decreases in heart rate result in subtle differences in the amount of time between heart beats. However, HRV also serves as a “score” for how balanced the nervous system is and represents the body’s “readiness” score. Low HRV is typically associated with heightened levels of stress, fatigue, or poor sleep (e.g., the two branches of the nervous system are out of whack). These symptoms can make processing, evaluating, and decision making—all processes that help individuals adapt in real time—much more difficult. Slow and focused breathing that characterizes mindful meditation and activates the parasympathetic system is what increases HRV, according to Firstbeat.
To be clear, high HRV does not equal higher adaptability. But higher HRV does mean a nervous system that is more rested and prepared to face challenges, think critically, and execute. This is a much more favorable than a mind-body system that is suffering from stress, fatigue, fatigued, and has difficulty with the internal processing needed to effectively adapt on the fly. As University of Miami researcher and professor, Amishi Jha likes to say, mindfulness is a way of developing “presilience” so that the mind and body are better able to adapt in the face of adversity.
In sum:
The nervous system works to ready the body’s internal systems to meet the needs of our external environments, but this is often done outside our conscious awareness.
Mindfulness can promote enhanced awareness of external stimuli and internal states as well as enhance HRV.
High HRV: associated with higher parasympathetic activity, which means a body/mind that is more rested and prepared to think critically and make decisions under stress.
Low HRV: associated with higher sympathetic activity, which usually stems from ongoing stressors such as poor sleep, poor nutrition, sickness, or anxiety.
Mindfulness is a form of “presilience” that helps prepare the mind and body to face challenges and adapt to meet the demands of the performance environment.
Resources
If you want to check out some more tools on mindfulness here’s what I’d recommend:
Books:
Practices: