Change the Narrative: “7 Ways To Overcome Mental Plateaus”

Hello Kodrosphere. I hope all is well in your world. If you're listening to this in the moment, it is Saturday and once a month I come to you for Change the Narrative: Mental Fitness for Athletes. We'll give everyone a moment to come in and make themselves comfortable. It's always a pleasure to be with you during this time. If this is your first time listening or joining in this space, my name is Dr. Cherise Johnson. I'm a licensed clinical mental health therapist and a mental fitness coach. And here On Change the Narrative, we get into mental fitness for athletes, discussing topics that impact the intersection of your performance and your mental health.

And I'm excited about what I have to share with you today. As you come through, as always, I encourage you to say hello to someone who might be listening. It's a great way to make connections and continue to share this particular. All of the amazing providers that will be here, specifically talking about personal development and growth. In particular, I want to name two people that are coming up later for those of you that are specifically geared around mind-body. 30, Kristen Grimes will be on talking about nourish with intent, and at 1:00, Garrett will be on talking about sports psych.

Of course, there are others, but those are two in particular that I wanted to highlight. Today I want to focus on seven ways to overcome mental plateaus and I always want you to keep in mind that we look at things from a neurobiological dynamic. We don't ever want to symptom check or talk about one area of your body without including who you are as a whole because what's happening in your brain is going to impact what's happening in your body and what's happening in your body is a direct result of what is happening in your mind.

I often love to start you off with a question for reflection. So something that I want you to consider is at this current season in your life, maybe within the last two weeks, what have you noticed about the connection between your mental state and your physical actions? There are inevitably moments where we feel stagnant or stuck, where we hit a mental plateau, where we're doing the things that we've always done and feel like things aren't having the same level of impact, whether that means a plateau around your motivation.

It could be a plateau around the kind of progress that you want to make towards your goals or a combination of all the things. So if you see yourself hit that moment, here are seven things that you can do. One, make sure that you consider some level of intensity variation. A lot of times as athletes or people who are into high performance activity, you can be so hyper focused on accomplishing your goals. that as a result of that, there's too much grind and there's too much press. Adding stress to a stressful life, which we'll talk about a little bit later, is not always the key.

You want some level of intensity variation. One of the things that I see a lot in people that I'm working with who are working towards performance goals and wanting to show up well is they struggle with slowing down to speed up. In other words, there will be moments in your life where in order for you to see the progress that you need, you need to backtrack and get back to the basics activity and make sure that every day is not hitting at the same level. The body responds to variety. So plateaus can often come from over intensified actions with no level of break.

Which brings me to recovery and overtraining. I cannot say enough about how important it is for you to make sure that you are taking time off both physically and mentally. So even on the days you are taking a break from overtraining, we want to make sure that you are also allowing your mind to slow down and to refuel. There is a big difference between, I want to add that as well, rest and recovery. There are active recovery days where you may do some type of kind of cross-training activity, but also I want you to consider days of full recovery where you're allowing all of those muscle tears, that lactic acid that builds up when you're trying to build muscle or when you're increasing pace or working towards a new goal to come back down.

Overtraining is a key aspect that will land you into both a mental and physical plateau. And what we want to avoid is you getting frustrated and then pulling back altogether on what you need in order to be successful. Number three, it's important to plan and monitor in two ways. Number one, are your goals attainable? Or have you set goals that might be attainable, but the pace at which you're expecting yourself to meet those goals is unrealistic? That's a side note for you to work on outside of here.

What are your goals that you're currently working on when it comes to your athletic performance? And are you giving yourself adequate time in order to meet those goals? Well, how do you know it's adequate time? One, your body will tell you. And two, you're going to be able to meet those goals at a specific pace without being frustrated, without being down on yourself, or without doing something that may harm yourself. If you're noticing a lot of overuse injuries, that likely means that you are overtraining, not getting enough recovery, and that you're not monitoring your goals well in terms of how attainable they are.

The other aspect that you want to plan and monitor is You want to plan time to focus on what's the degree of your internal dialogue, what's the health of your internal dialogue, and monitor what are you saying to yourself while training, while running, working on reps, working to adopt a new skill, working on being consistent. How are you speaking to yourself? in a little bit of engagement for those of you that are here, I want you to rate yourself one to five. One meaning you've noticed your internal dialogue is not very healthy at all when you're working on performance type actions.

And five meaning your kind of mental acuity and how you're speaking to yourself has been really great and healthy. So if you're comfortable, invitation to rate yourself one to five. This is a very simple way that you can also monitor yourself on your everyday life of what's your internal dialogue like. I'm gonna rate myself and I would say I'm hanging out at about a four, which is great. Something that you can do on a daily basis is take 60 seconds max to really notice that and track it. Maybe you place it on a little calendar, you can place it on your phone, whatever it looks like so that you can also see the trajectory of what does it look like to monitor and to make sure that you're planning to focus on what is happening for me mentally.

What am I saying to myself? Intentionality is key. Number four. Explore new forms of activity. Certain temperaments of individuals, and I see this a lot in high performers, can get very stuck on this is what I do, this is what has always worked for me, and I don't want to do anything else. Variety is the spice of life in every way. So making sure that you're exploring new forms of activity that helps create some of that variety to the body that we talked about, but it also will help wake up your mental status.

It gives you something new to work towards instead of over-training and over-executing in areas that you are already comfortable with. Get used to that line between ease, effort, and being a little uncomfortable. But recognizing that learning something new is a great way to wake up the brain and to wake up the body. Number five, incorporate complementary training efforts. And I want to mention four just briefly. Meditation, meditation, meditation, meditation. The number of athletes that sleep on meditation is significant.

Those that finally stop sleeping on meditation realize, wow, that took me to another level mentally that I did not anticipate. When you meditate, you're not looking for this major feeling in the moment, although you may have that. You're more centered around how your brain structure, if you could see on here, these little red lines in the brain are synapses. They're ways that your brain links up this is what we believe with this is what we do. So they're a way of creating and integrating a new mind-body connection that allows you to be more resilient, to have a greater capacity when things become challenging, both and physically, and all you have to do is take that five to ten minutes.

There's also a lot of meditations that are centered around athletes or high performance motivation, anxiety, staying calm, trusting in your body, those types of things. Yoga. Yoga can be another beneficial dynamic. It's forcing you to slow down. And the thing about yoga that helps with mind and body is your focus is on the mat. It's not on the comparison. It's not on what you're doing versus other people, which can be a highly high dynamic for a lot of athletes, but it allows you to really center in and recognize that little small strength you gain in strengthening your body in a lot of different ways.

I'll also add just from a biological aspect that doing something like yoga or Pilates is also helpful for making sure that you're strengthening those very small muscles that help carry those bigger muscles. And that's a huge aspect because injuries and mental plateaus often go hand in hand. And then visualization, making time to sit back, lay back, whatever it is that's comfortable for you and actually visualizing yourself doing the things that you want to do. For example, there's one person who's on right now who says, I'm having a hard time following my program because I always want to do more.

When it comes to making progress, less is always more. You want to find that moderate amount of being consistent and then letting your body when it's ready to do more and that is a mental aspect because you may find that you're trying to do more and you're trying to operate at a level that may not be sustainable. Number six, nutrition and hydration. Nutrition and hydration absolutely impacts your mindset. If you are not nourishing yourself enough to match your peak performance or what you're putting out in terms of your athletic intensity, you're going to find that you're down, you're going to find that you bonk, that you're not able to show up in the ways that you want.

Then that impacts your mentality because you start getting frustrated and going, what's wrong with me? A few weeks ago I could do this. Last summer I could do this. What's different? I always encourage you in those moments to step back and notice what's happening with your nutrition and your hydration because we also know that your gut microbiome impacts your mood. So not only are you getting enough, but are you getting enough of the right kind of nutrients to help support a healthy gut microbiome, which is going to improve your mood and improve your motivation.

So as an athlete or someone who is highly athletic, what you eat matters. It matters for all of us, but specifically it is with you. Here's how you'll know. You know the difference between how you feel going into a specific workout when you have adequate carbs and proteins and fats in a complex manner that you're taking in and then you'll notice here's what it looks like when you're on vacation or off-season and you're trying to just do whatever and then you come back. You'll notice that things feel very different and very stagnant so pay attention to what your body is trying to tell you and then this is big, evaluate your mental stress.

High performers, individuals who are athletes at all different levels, you are phenomenal in what you do when you're on your game. But you don't always do a really great job acknowledging your mental stress. And mental stress will exhaust you and exhaust your body biologically even more than physical stress. I want you to take inventory. This is not something that you necessarily have to share, but just an encouragement to you. What are my mental stressors right now? Can you be honest with yourself?

Part of mental fitness for an athlete is making sure that your self-awareness is high and that you're acknowledging, even though you may be showing up in one way when it comes to your day-to-day routines, that if you step back and you take a look, you can also acknowledge that there are some underlying mental stressors that are going on in your mind. And the next time we'll meet, we'll talk about how to address those mental stressors. Let me go through and give one through seven again without commentary in case you missed any.

Seven ways to overcome mental plateaus. Number one, intensity variation. Number two, recovery and overtraining. Number three, planning and monitoring. Number four, explore new forms of activity. Number five, incorporate complementary training efforts. Number six, nutrition and hydration. And number seven, evaluate your mental stress. Take this, listen back however you need to, identify which of the seven you need to work on and remember that you can't necessarily work on three or four things all at once.

There might be one or two that stand out to you that you can work together organically and stack on, here's something that I wanna incorporate. and find one simple action step that you can take from what we discussed and really focus on it and then notice the difference. That being said, thank you again for taking the time to show up for Change the Narrative. I look forward to seeing you soon. But until then, go be great.