Getting away from the quicksand

On The previous post, I spoke about falling into a whirlpool of negative thoughts during training (and daily life). As you may remember, it ended without a practical solution.

On those moments you need a lifehack, some sort of a reset button like the ones you push on computers when they´re not responding to your inputs. Some technique that helps the athlete get rid of the useless thoughts of what happened in the past, and brings him or her back to the present moment.

Ana Sátila, an specialist in focusing on what to do 

A while ago, I was reading about mindfulness, and I picked up some ideas that can help us in those moments, both in training and getting ready for racing.

1. Focus your sight at some point 5 cm in front of your eyes (like crossing them). By doing that, it gets hard to think about anything. 
2. Observe what's in our immediate surroundings, from our left to the right, examining the details. Color of the things, maybe what is written somewhere... this gets you in state of alert, focusing on what can happen on the surroundings. Survival instinct.
3. Focus on our own breathing pattern. Deep, relaxed... This could be the most obvious and typical technique, but it's not less efective for that reason.

And that should do the trick! After going through these techniques, the thinking downward spiral stops. The more you do it, the sooner you are back into the present moment. Besides, with practicing, you'll start doing it without even noticing. You stop being somewhere else and back to what you are doing.

And I think that it has one more benefit. The attentional control is a synchronizer between the information gathering, the decision-making and the response execution. The more focused we are on the present moment, the better these three systems will work, and the better they'll coordinate, helping the athlete jump into auto-pilot mode. The feeling that I'm not thinking what I am doing, I'm just doing it. Where everything just flows.