Perched at the pinnacle of achievement, Olympians have trained their entire lives to reach their goal of standing on the winner鈥檚 podium. Not only do Olympic athletes tone their bodies into near perfection; they hone their minds as well.
鈥淎 winner鈥檚 brain is not about a quick fix. You have to nurture your brain and take care of it,鈥 said psychologist Jeff Brown, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and coauthor of 鈥: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success.鈥
鈥淵ou have to feed it good fats, like omega-3鈥檚. Your brain is the 3 pounds that you don鈥檛 want to lose,鈥 said Brown, who is the sports psychologist for the Boston Marathon.
鈥淵ou have to move it 鈥 brain function improves if you鈥檙e moving. That鈥檚 one of the best things that you can do for your brain,鈥 he said. 鈥淎nd you have to sleep it 鈥 sleep is critical to memory consolidation and learning.鈥
Mental strength, focus and resilience don鈥檛 come without effort, even to the world鈥檚 top athletes. Researchers have studied Olympians for decades and found they share some common traits, habits and qualities that you too can use to develop a winner鈥檚 mindset.
View stress as positive
Many Olympians, especially the extremely successful ones, view stress as a challenge instead of something they should fear, said sports psychologist Dan Gould, former director of the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports and professor emeritus of kinesiology at Michigan State University.
鈥淲e call it a stress mindset, or your worldview of stress,鈥 said Gould, who has consulted for the US Olympic Committee and the United States Tennis Association. He has studied Olympians for decades.
鈥淩esearch on high-level swimmers in England, who were all capable, found the swimmers who performed best viewed stress as more facilitative versus debilitative,鈥 he said.
鈥淎ny elite athlete knows there鈥檚 going to be pressure, and top athletes have learned to view it as a challenge, either by trial and error or by working on mental training such as staying in the present. That has a lot of implications for everybody,鈥 Gould said.
A famous looked at how people viewed stress and found the risk of premature death rose by 43% for people who viewed stress negatively. Those who viewed stress as a positive had the lowest risk of death of anyone in the study, even lower than people reporting very little stress.
鈥淭he researchers concluded that it wasn鈥檛 stress that was killing people. It was the combination of stress and the belief that stress is harmful,鈥 psychologist Kelly McGonigal
鈥淭he researchers estimated that over the eight years they conducted their study, 182,000 Americans may have died prematurely because they believed that stress was harming their health,鈥 said McGonigal, who discussed the study in her book 鈥: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It.鈥
Learn to bounce back
Many of the most mentally tough and resilient athletes have a history of overcoming adversity in their past, Gould said. It can be a hardship, illness or even a loved one dying.
鈥淚t鈥檚 really hard to build resilience unless you鈥檝e been challenged,鈥 Gould said. 鈥淚f I protected you during your whole life and never let you figure things out for yourself, you鈥檙e bound to be stressed when you hit an obstacle.鈥
Simone Biles is a good example of an athlete who faced very public adversity and bounced back, Brown said. She pulled out of team finals in the 2020 Tokyo Games due to the 鈥渢wisties,鈥 when her brain and body stopped seamlessly communicating as they had done in countless nearly perfect routines in practice.
鈥淎nyone can get overwhelmed,鈥 Brown said. 鈥淩esilience is the piece of us that allows us to get up every time we鈥檙e knocked down. I think Simone has shown she really handles stress well and is a lot more resilient than people who never ran into that wall.鈥
The connection between adversity and peak mental performance is so strong, in fact, that today鈥檚 sports performance coaches use 鈥減ressure training鈥 to help their athletes prepare for competition, Gould said.
鈥淲ith the athlete鈥檚 permission, the trainer ratchets up the pressure, almost like I鈥檓 giving you the disease of fear and then letting your antibodies build up psychologically,鈥 Gould said. 鈥淭he trainer then puts the athlete into increasingly more challenging situations where they need to trigger those antibodies.鈥
The goal: to practice all the ways a mental or physical performance can go wrong and then fix them, Brown said.
鈥淪crewing up on purpose develops an inner voice that can immediately say 鈥極K, I鈥檝e made this mistake before. Here鈥檚 how to fix it.鈥 In highly functioning athletes, the ability to bounce back has to be just as good as the ability to perform,鈥 he said.
Banish self-doubt
There is no room for doubt in the minds of Olympic athletes, according to Gould.
鈥淭hey have to believe they鈥檙e capable of performing well or they have already given the competition the advantage,鈥 he said. 鈥淭hey have to go into the event with complete confidence.鈥
Olympians often feel supremely self-assured because they have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours practicing their performance and learning from failures along the way.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 what the brain requires to do well, because you鈥檙e creating those neuronal pathways that allow you to be precise. It鈥檚 sort of a muscle memory for the brain,鈥 Brown said.
There are a number of tools athletes 鈥 and their coaches 鈥 can use to develop mental resilience such as self-talk, imagery, visualization and mindfulness, experts say.
鈥淥lympians do mindfulness training, where they try not to judge or worry, but just stay in the present moment,鈥 Gould said. 鈥淭hey might have certain self-talk phrases, like 鈥楾rust my training,鈥 or 鈥業鈥檝e been in these tough situations before, follow the plan.鈥
Another tool is visualization, Gould said. Olympic skiers walk the course, planning out their moves, then hone those to perfection in practice before visualizing that flawless performance just before the event.
鈥淵ou teach yourself to believe that due to repetition and always improving within yourself 鈥 not against the competition, but within yourself,鈥 he said.
Regulate your emotions
Emotional regulation is as important as physical or mental preparation, Gould said.
鈥淎ll of us have a set of emotions we feel are important for us to perform our best: I鈥檓 confident, but not overconfident. I鈥檓 anxious, but it鈥檚 a good anxiety. Maybe I鈥檓 a little fearful, but it鈥檚 not overwhelming,鈥 he said.
鈥淭here鈥檚 an optimal mixture of those emotions that allows you to perform at your peak, but you need a thermostat 鈥 a way to dial those emotions up or down when necessary.鈥
A tried-and-true technique to calm oneself is centered on deep breathing, Gould said, but there are other tactics that can be just as effective. Some athletes put a rubber band on their wrist, and snap it when they want to recenter themselves, which is a form of grounding, he said.
He recalls studying one of the women鈥檚 summer Olympic soccer teams, in which players came up with code words to help each other regulate their emotional thermostats.
鈥淭he team came up with the words fire and ice,鈥 Gould said. 鈥淧layers would yell to other players 鈥楩ire!鈥 if they thought the team needed to get more emotionally charged. When a player was in danger of getting a penalty, they would yell 鈥業ce!鈥 to calm them down.鈥
Practice until it鈥檚 routine
Not only do prime athletes practice until the physical skill becomes almost an innate physical response, but they often have specific rituals they do before each event, experts say.
鈥淩outines are really important,鈥 Gould said. 鈥淭hey might warm up the same way, they might always imagine themselves doing the event perfectly, some even tell jokes until 60 seconds before the event.
鈥淎thletes who perform well, especially under pressure, stick to their routine. Athletes who don鈥檛 perform well, for some reason, deviate from that routine,鈥 he said.
It鈥檚 not just physical readiness that needs a routine, Gould added. Performance coaches will often help athletes prepare for any emergencies or delays that might occur before a performance.
鈥淲hat鈥檚 your stretch routine? In other words, if there is a delay because of weather, how do you hold your focus or come back to it? What鈥檚 your shrink routine? If there was a traffic jam and you showed up late to the venue, for instance, how would you prepare in a shorter period of time?
鈥淚n that case, the athlete might stretch on the bus. If they usually do seven exercises, here are the three I need to do for sure,鈥 Gould explained. 鈥淎nd then they鈥檒l do things to say calm, such as deep breathing and certain self-talk phrases.鈥
Stay focused on the process
Top performers can鈥檛 afford to be distracted when it鈥檚 time for the big event. Again, it鈥檚 important to identify any triggers you might face and experience those during practice until they fade into the background.
鈥淎thletes have to be prepared for distractions such as crowd noise, someone laughing, even a joke told nearby,鈥 Gould said. 鈥淲e鈥檒l introduce distractions during training, such as crazy loud noises over the loudspeakers, to allow them to practice staying focused and emotionally regulated.鈥
Some people call that 鈥渂eing in the zone,鈥 where everything but the task at hand disappears.
鈥淲hen you are facing one of the most important events of your life, top athletes don鈥檛 focus on the outcome, they focus on the process needed to reach their goal,鈥 Gould said.
For example, an Olympic swimmer would focus on the techniques needed to finish in world record time, such as the number of strokes and the position of their arms in the water.
鈥淚鈥檓 not saying they鈥檙e not competitive, but when the stress is hitting, they focus on what they can control, which is process they need to accomplish to reach that goal.鈥
