Anxious Before A Big Adventure? Try This Mindset Technique

In this episode, I explore a dead-simple mindset technique a mountaineer can use to manage stress and nerves in the lead-up to a challenging expedition.

Episode Transcript:

[0:00] All right, hello, hello, ladies and gentlemen. So in today's episode, we are talking through a dead simple mindset strategy you can use if you're getting a little bit anxious or nervous before a big expedition.

[0:13] Now, getting nervous before a challenging adventure is normal. We all go through it, whether it's just a big challenging day hike or all the way up to the biggest mountain you've ever done in your life. We all get a little bit of nerves before we're stepping outside our comfort zone. It is part and parcel of just stepping into a unique challenge, which is physically demanding, but also out in nature, which is unpredictable. And it's totally normal to get a little bit nervous.

[0:43] But all too often, and especially if we are stepping into something that is outside our comfort zone, that we've been building up to for months, that is something that is uniquely challenging, all too often, those nerves can start to morph into something that's just a little bit more overwhelming. Instead of just having that, you know, good nerves, it begins to kind of take over our thoughts day after day. It goes from that excitement to like, I'm getting more anxious. We can go to bed at night and we can just lie there and the thoughts are just going over, over, over our head. We start catastrophizing. We start thinking about all these things. We start thinking about what happens if things go wrong, how are we going to tell everyone this and that and all that. It can absolutely get in the way of our sleep and it can affect us in so many different ways. And these nerves and this stress can build and build and build.

[1:34] Now, not only does this suck, not only can this disrupt our sleep, make put us in a bad mood and just ruin this last little period before an adventure where you should be excited and ready to go, but you're just going the other way. In the worst case scenario, this can actually get so bad that we can end up convincing ourselves that our adventure, our climb, our trek, or whatever we're doing is going to be a failure before we even start. And the tricky thing with this, as we talked about on this podcast before, what we think mentally can often affect us physically. And if we are convinced that things are going to be super hard, they're going to be challenging, they're going to be grueling, it can end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

[2:18] So to prevent this, doing a little bit of work on your mindset in the big lead

[2:22] up to an adventure can be very, very useful. Now, there are a thousand different things you can do here, a thousand different techniques and strategies and approaches which can help manage nerves and anxiety and do mental preparation before a trip. We've talked about some on the podcast before, but today I just want to share with you a really, really, really simple technique which doesn't require any effort, doesn't require any planning, doesn't require any know-how. It's so simple, but it can be incredibly powerful.

[2:52] This technique is called a brain dump. Now, if you haven't heard of this before, it's super simple. All you're going to do is get out a pen and a piece of paper. Now, you can do this on like a computer or a phone or whatever it may be, but it is much more effective if you're physically writing it. But if you don't have that option, you know, typing it down. That's fine. What you're going to do is you're going to put a timer on for like five to 10 minutes. And what you're going to do, start the timer and you just start writing. And what you're going to write is just every single thought that is in your head, whatever's going through your head. You can literally write, hey, I've got a trip coming up. I'm getting nervous. My legs are shaking, this and that. I thought about this and thought about that. Just ramble onto the paper until the time stops. That's it. Now, the writing itself, it does not have to make sense. This is like a stream of consciousness of just whatever's in your head. Some people may have nice, clear, concise sentences, and you actually know what's going through your head. Some people, it may just be absolute gibberish, and you're just from half a sentence to half a sentence to half a sentence of all these different thoughts going around. That's fine. Your handwriting itself doesn't have to be readable. You don't have to take the time to actually make it readable. It doesn't have to be pretty, doesn't have to make sense, doesn't have to be logical, doesn't have to have punctuation, anything like that. You're just writing a stream of consciousness from your head onto paper.

[4:18] It is the act of just transferring all those kind of half-formed thoughts that are swirling around your head with no kind of conclusion or no whatever, and transferring it from your head to paper, that is the technique. Literally five to ten minutes of this. It may sound simple, but I promise you, when you do this, you can just finish up feeling like a huge weight is off your shoulders. Your mind can feel so much clearer in some situations you can kind of sort of just clear your head and be like cool that's done with nerves a little bit less i can fall asleep great, in other situations by the time you've actually written things down you can be like all right cool i had all these half-formed thoughts in my head i couldn't actually pin anything down but now i've actually written it down i've actually self-recognized okay there's this one or two things that is just stressing me out now i know what i can work on or whatever it is And there's a lot of benefits coming out of this.

[5:18] Afterwards, you can just feel so much better, whether it's helping you fall

[5:22] asleep, whether it's reducing stress, helping you focus on other things, so many useful things. Now, I often recommend my clients use this either at night, just before bed in the lead up to when they head away. If they're getting those nerves just five minutes before getting into bed, just clearing their head there. This can be really, really useful just to stop you lying in bed with those racing thoughts and help you sleep a little bit better. I often recommend people use this if they're going through like a stressful period of work because sometimes if you're dealing with end of work stress before you go away and you've got that building up but it just be really really tough and it all builds off each other and sometimes just the end of a work day you're just doing this so you can kind of clear your head before you actually go home or whenever and also on top of that I often recommend people actually do this on their adventures bring it with you bring a pen and paper with you on the plane if you're going up on the mountain and it's practical to bring bring of notepad and pen. And use this when you're actually out on the mountain or when you're traveling or whatever it may be. In all honesty, you can apply this in so many different situations in your life, but it can be super, super, super useful. But if you do have a big adventure leading up and you feel like those nerves are building up and you just don't know what to do, you do not have strategies that you've done before, you don't have other things that are effective and you don't have anything to fall back on, give this a go. It is probably one of the most simple things you can do, but it can just be so effective, so satisfying, and just so useful.

[6:46] That's my challenge to you. And even if you don't feel nervous, do it anyway. It's a really, really cool technique.

[6:54] So with that being said, I'm going to wrap things up here. Last thing I will mention, as I always mention on this podcast, if you are a mountaineer and you are interested in the best physical and mental preparation you can do for your adventures and you're interested in learning a little bit about what we do at Summit Strength, I would love to chat with you. Through our programs, not only we didn't nail down your training and make sure you're absolutely honing in on your strength and your cardio and your recovery mobility and all of that, we also do put a big emphasis into the education side of things. We go into mental strength and mindset quite a bit. We touch on nutrition, recovery, a bunch of other things. We make sure we're filling in all those different gaps to really, really fill out your preparation and get you in the best spot possible. If you did want to learn a little bit more about what we do, you can go to summitstrength.com.au slash Mountaineer. Now on that page, there's a big video which talks a lot about our program. And if it sounds like something you want to explore a little bit more, there's a link on that page. You can book a free call with our team and we can have a bit of a chat, learn about you, your mountaineering, your goals, your situation, and see if we might be able to help you out. So if you want to learn more, go to summitstrength.com.au slash Mountaineer and we can take it from there. So with that being said, thank you so much for listening. Hope you've enjoyed it. Hope you got a bit out of it and we'll talk to you soon.

Want to get
fit, strong and resilient
for your mountaineering adventures?

Check out
​The Online Summit Program