How Athletes Hack Their Minds To Achieve Their Goals AND Stop Sabotaging Themselves

We wouldn’t blame you if you thought hacking your own mind so you stopped sabotaging yourself (and started achieving your goals as an athlete), sounded a little crazy. It IS a little bit crazy. But with the Habit Loop, it’s much easier than you may think.

Hacking your mind to prevent self-sabotage is possible only because we are much more machine than we probably realise; and like all machines, we follow rules.

Rules that once you understand, can be bent, manipulated and exploited so you can win.

In fact, the majority of our behaviours and decisions are habitual, rather than something we consider as conscious.

It’s often been said by top-performers that your success is underpinned by your habits and your routines. The more consistent you are, the more success you realise.

The habits you establish, and the habits you don’t, end up determining how you spend your time, and at the end of the day, time is all you have. What you choose to do with your time is the only thing in your control. Ultimately, time spent well is the best way for you to achieve the goals you’ve set yourself.

So back to habits. Even the most disheveled, disorientated and disorganized athlete relies on habits to keep their life going.

The way you brush your teeth? A habit.

Your drive to work? A habit.

How you eat? A habit.

How you put your training gear on? A habit.

Your pre-game warm up? A habit.

You get my put.

Each day, your habits are providing the fuel for everything you do, even if you don’t realise it.

In this blog post, we’re going to leverage the power of habits, taking a concept from the book “The Power of Habit“, by Charles Duhigg.

Using his ‘Habit Loop’, I’m going to teach you how to hack your mind to start to implement behaviours you want into your routine, and get rid of behaviours you don’t.

Introducing The Habit Loop: The Fuel That Drives You — Even If You’d Never Realised It.

Charles Duhigg isn’t alone in his assessment of habits. Another critically acclaimed Author (and athlete) James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits agrees that all our habits essentially, follow the same framework known as the 3R’s:

1. Reminder (the initial trigger/cue). 
2. Response (the behavior/action/response). 
3. Reward (the outcome of the behaviour). 

Here is an example:

• Your phone’s alarm goes off to get up for an early training session (cue/reminder). This is the reminder that initiates the behavior. The alarm acts as a the cue. It’s the prompt that starts the habitual behavior. But it’s cold and you’re tired.
• You roll over, turn it off, tell yourself you’ll train in the afternoon, and go back to sleep for an extra hour and a half (routine). This is the actual behavior. When your phone goes off, you know that means you’ll have to get out of bed, even though you’re tired, and get to work.
• Because you’ve turned it off, you get to go back to sleep (reward). This is the reward, you get extra sleep. But obviously, this reward comes with downside. You’ve missed your session. You’re already going to be playing catch up.

Each day, this habit loop repeats itself, Across all the different triggers and cues in your life, your go-to responses and pre-determined rewards rule your life.

Which isn’t always a good thing.

Identifying Your Positive & Negative Habit Loops

Now that you have an example of how habits control your life, you’re in the driver’s seat to engineer them so they serve you, not hold you back. Instead of your habits sabotaging your goals for your athletic career, they can be manipulated to serve you, instead. This sounds simple, because it really is. Here is why:

Because our cues/triggers won’t really change (hunger, waking up, fatigue etc), it means that the only thing we have to manipulate is how we respond to them. And, because our reward is always that — something we can feel good about, the only thing you ever need to control is how you respond and take action to the cues/triggers in your life.

Let’s evaluate a negative habit.

Trigger = You’re in the gym and you miss the last two reps of your back squat. Your coach tells you to rack it early. 

Response = You drops your head, your self-talk becomes negative, and you get frustrated. You get emotional.

Reward = You’re now almost guaranteed to get attention. By losing your cool, your coach feels like they have to diffuse the situation, find something else to blame (like your big night out, your lack of nutrition, or any other factor) in order to get you back on track. You get a kick of dopamine as your failed set is justified and validated.

Now, let’s flip it.

Trigger = You’re in the gym and you miss the last two reps of your back squat. Your coach tells you to rack it early. 

Response = You maintain your calm and listen to the Coaches’ feedback. You stay big and tall with your body language. You remind yourself that even the best in the world miss reps, miss shots, or miss opportunities. You take a deep, releasing breath and associate that exhalation with letting it all go. You take your rest and prepare for the next set. This time, you know what to focus on.  

Reward = You’re in a good headspace. You’re able to focus. You nail the next set. You get a much bigger kick of dopamine as your successful set, and management of failure is validated.

What a difference your response can make to a certain trigger and what an effect it can have on the reward or outcome.

The takeaway: Everything we do on a daily basis is driven by the “habit loop” of trigger, response, and reward. 

Notice that the only thing we changed here was the response? Notice that we focused on what we COULD control, not what we couldn’t?

Everything else stayed the same. This is the simplest and easiest way to leverage the way our brains create and follow habits. The trigger was the same (the missed reps) and the reward was the same (dopamine hit in the brain).

And while this is just one example, the same approach can be applied to any situation that results in you sabotaging your own ambitions and goals.

HOMEWORK:

Use existing routines to build new ones by following this simple 3-step process:

1. Identify the habit (your response) you want to change. 
2. Identify the trigger, response, and reward. 
3. Adjust the response to something positive that yields the same reward.

Apply this concept to all your decisions in your life. Notice how everything can be distilled to this three-step-process? This is the trick we use to hack our athletes minds and get them to do things they don’t want to do.

Need our help? Reach out to us using the contact form on our website and we’ll be in touch.