iStock

Ever wish you had a switch you could just turn whenever you needed to be focused and productive?

While getting in the zone is something we all hope and strive for — whether it’s at work, at home, at school — it’s critically important for athletes.

In episode three of TED’s podcast “Good Sport,” host Jody Avirgan speaks to NBA All-Star Steph Curry and sports psychologist Dr. Nicole Detling to find out about getting there. Read an excerpt below, and listen to the entire episode here.

Jody Avirgan, host of “Good Sport” podcast: In sports, there’s a lot of talk about a magical place called THE ZONE.

You probably know it. It’s that place where everything clicks, where no matter the weather or the crowd or the sweat in your eyes, nothing can break your focus. Where you just do everything perfectly, you sink every shot and nothing can stop you. Steph, do you believe in the zone?

Steph Curry, Golden State Warriors point guard and nine-time NBA All-Star: I do believe in the zone, because it’s the one time that everything kind of goes on autopilot. And there’s just synergy with everything that you’re trying to do. Even your intentions are then validated by the atmosphere around you. Where it seems like everything else is going right at the same time, you kind of get lost in that moment. But here’s the thing about “the zone” — almost by definition, it’s special and fleeting and you can’t force it.

You can’t control any of that. It’s just for me, when it goes away, it’s the reflection on the feeling you just had. I think it’s just a natural experience.

I don’t think you can train yourself to appreciate it more than just you naturally do. ‘Cause if you do, then you start to distract yourself from what’s actually happening.

Jody: So you heard it directly from Steph Curry. Nice as it is when you find yourself in the zone, obsessing over getting there — and listen, there’s a lot of obsessing about the zone — will get in the way of what you’re trying to do.

Enter Dr. Nicole Detling, an expert on the mental side of the game. She’s a sports psychologist who’s worked with Olympic skiers and skaters, pro baseball and football and soccer players, college gymnasts — athletes at the very top of their sports.

As she starts to work with athletes, she tries to shift their thinking. She tells them to not think about the feeling they’re trying to capture but instead to work on building a solid and reliable skill.

That skill is mental resilience, which means being able to find whatever version of calm and focus you can, even when things aren’t going your way. It’s not elusive or magical; it’s a habit.

Dr. Nicole Detling, sports psychologist: We have these thinking processes and patterns and skills that we’re teaching people to eventually get it to automate. So it’s an automatic process. Rather than having to turn on that mindset, you become that mindset.

Jody: So much of mental resilience is realizing that everything isn’t going to go perfectly. I’ve worked on that. I’ve worked on — and here’s one of my favorite cliches — getting comfortable being uncomfortable.

The good news, Dr. Detling says, is that you can train for that.

Nicole: Some of the things that we’ve done with some of the skiing Olympians that I’ve worked with is we’ve not waxed their skis and they’ve had to train with unwaxed skis. Same with speed skating — you know that your blades aren’t quite as sharp as you would want them to be. Train that way, train with forgetting there’s a little tiny little tear in your suit. Train without your goggles.

That’s why a lot of teams will pipe in crowd noise so they can’t hear during training sessions. Because at the end of the day, we all want to show up and feel great but yet there will be days — sometimes the biggest competition of your life — and you show up feeling like crap. If you’ve trained feeling like crap, then you know you can compete feeling like crap.

Everyone — yes, everyone, not just sports fans — can learn something from listening to the “Good Sport” podcast, from how to debate better (sportscaster-style!) to how stadiums could be built more equitably. Discover more about yourself and the world around you as host Jody Avirgan talks to star athletes and eye-opening experts, including psychologists, journalists, economists and more. Listen here, or wherever you stream your podcasts.

Watch Jody’s personal intro to the episode — and also catch the episode itself — in this YouTube video: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hayley Caldwell is a copywriter on the Audience Development team at TED.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

iStock

Love picking up new skills that can enrich your daily life? If so, TED Courses is for you — it was created with all you forever learners and self-improvers in mind and taught by some of your favorite TED speakers. Neuroscientist and bestselling author Lisa Genova is the instructor for a course called “How to boost your brain + memory.” Go here to find out about it, and also read her advice below on common types of forgetting. 

To be human is to forget things. But you’ve probably wondered: “When is forgetting normal, and when is it not?”

Here are four examples:

1. Forgetting where you parked

Not remembering where you parked because you didn’t pay attention is normal and different than what happens with Alzheimer’s.

If you have Alzheimer’s, let’s say you park in a mall garage and shop for an hour. When you return to the parking garage, you’re not wondering if you parked on level three or level four, you’re thinking, “I don’t remember how I got here.” Or you’re standing in front of your car, but you don’t recognize it as yours.

2. Forgetting a person’s name or movie title

Having a word stuck on the tip of your tongue — that oh-what’s-their-name phenomenon called blocking — is normal and does not mean you have Alzheimer’s.

This is one of the most common experiences of memory retrieval failure. You’re trying to come up with a word and most often a proper noun, such as a person’s name or a movie title. You know you know this word, but you cannot retrieve it on demand.

Yet with that said, failure to retrieve words can also be an early sign of Alzheimer’s. So how can you know whether it’s an ordinary tip-of-the-tongue moment or a symptom of dementia? If it’s Alzheimer’s, you’re blocking on dozens of words a day. And instead of blanking primarily on proper nouns, people with Alzheimer’s will regularly forget common nouns such as pen, spoon, bicycle.

3. Forgetting where you put your keys or other objects

Losing track of where you left your keys is normal, and it’s probably just a result of your not paying attention to them.

But losing your keys and finding them in a place that keys shouldn’t be (like the refrigerator or microwave), or finding them and wondering who they belong to or what they’re used for is not normal. These could be symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

4. Forgetting how to do an activity like making coffee

This one has to do with your muscle memory, which is remarkably stable over time — we tend to remember how to do what we’ve learned to do, especially when it’s an activity we perform routinely.

So if you go to make a cup of coffee and don’t remember how to work the machine or you’re doing laundry but can’t remember how to use the washer or you’re stumped by any other tasks you’ve long known how to do and regularly do, this may be a sign of Alzheimer’s.

However, forgetting doesn’t always have to be due to Alzheimer’s. It could be due to mild cognitive impairment (which doesn’t necessarily progress to Alzheimer’s), a B-12 deficiency or not enough sleep, to name a few causes. Just as you do with your heart health or reproductive health, I encourage you to be in conversation with your doctor about your memory and realize you have a lot of agency over your brain health.

Interested in finding out more about how your memory works (and when it doesn’t)? Sign up now for Lisa Genova’s on brain and memory. And while you’re at it, check out our other TED Courses from some of your most loved speakers and learn more skills to boost your life. Among them: Podcast host Manoush Zomorodi offers insights in “how to reimagine your career”; writers Charlie Jane Anders and Wanuri Kahiu teach “how to nurture your imagination”; and educator and author Julie Lythcott-Haims tells you “how to become your best adult self.” 

Watch her TED Talk now: 

…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Genova is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Still Alice, Left Neglected, Love Anthony, Inside the O’Briens and Every Note Played. Still Alice was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin and Kristen Stewart. She graduated valedictorian from Bates College with a degree in biopsychology and holds a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard University. Genova travels worldwide speaking about the neurological diseases that she writes about and has appeared on The Dr. Oz Show, Today, PBS NewsHour, CNN and NPR. Her TED Talk — called “What You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s” — has been viewed more than five million times to date. Her newest book is a New York Times bestseller and her first work of nonfiction.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Ori Toor

Have you ever woken up in the morning — or even in the middle of the night — only to find that your body is already in full-blown, heart-racing fight-or-flight mode?

Panic attacks are surprisingly common; at least one-third of us will experience one at some point in our lives, according to Cindy Aaronson PhD, a clinical psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. While symptoms vary from person to person,  they can include a pounding heart, shortness of breath, light-headedness, sweating, trembling, nausea, tingling or numbness in the fingers and toes, and an overwhelming sense of impending doom.

Despite how terrifying and memorable panic attacks can be, they are not inherently dangerous.

For many people, these alarming sensations — which can mimic those of a heart attack or other serious medical condition — are accompanied by a conviction that they are about to die. For others, says Aaronson, there’s a sensation of “unreality,” where time and perception become scrambled. “Sounds sound different — you feel like you’re in a tunnel and things are far away; colors seem different. People sometimes describe it as an out-of-body experience,” she says. “They feel like they’re going to lose control and go crazy.”

It’s no surprise, then, that many people in the grips of a panic attack show up at the emergency room believing that they are having a heart attack or suffocating. But despite how terrifying and memorable these episodes can be, they are not inherently dangerous, says Justin Feinstein PhD, a clinical neuropsychologist and director of the Float Clinic and Research Center at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Instead, panic attacks are a manifestation of the brain and body being out of sync, he explains.“It’s a normal physiological fear response happening at a totally inappropriate time.”

Here’s what happens in your body during a panic attack

Even though psychiatrists have been investigating just what panic is since the mid-to-late 1800s, the term “panic disorder” didn’t appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980. Experts still aren’t sure precisely what underlies this disordered brain-body connection.

“Sometimes panic might start in your body itself, and then create processes within your brain. Other times, your brain could initiate the entire onset of a panic attack, which then manifests itself in your body,” says Feinstein. In some cases, genetics or changes in brain function may be at play. In others, stress is a factor.

Panic attacks begin with something that causes your heart to race — it could even be caused by something as innocuous as a jolt of caffeine.

But once an attack is triggered, the cascade of physiological responses in the body is fairly universal. Typically, it begins with something that causes your heart to race. This might be a stimulus in the environment — perhaps a sound or a scent that you associate with a traumatic event — or even something as innocuous as a jolt of caffeine. In a panic attack, the racing heart sets off a danger alarm in your brain and sends your body’s fear response into overdrive.

Your amygdala — a pair of almond-sized nerve bundles buried in the deep brain that plays a key role in processing emotions — sends a distress signal to your hypothalamus — a tiny command center that sits atop the brainstem and coordinates involuntary bodily functions such as breathing, blood pressure and heartbeat. Your hypothalamus fires messages via the autonomic nervous system to the adrenal glands, prompting them to flood your bloodstream with hormones including adrenaline and cortisol. These chemical messengers engage your body’s survival reflexes and ready it to take defensive action.

Your pupils dilate, and your mind becomes laser focused. Your breathing rate increases, allowing your body to take in extra oxygen. Cellular metabolism shifts to maximize the amount of glucose available to the brain and muscles. Your blood is diverted away from non-essential regions like your fingers, toes and stomach and towards the major muscles of the arms and legs — steeling them to either fight off a threat or flee the scene.

Panic attacks typically peak and subside within 10 or 15 minutes, and there are a handful of solid techniques that can help you ride them out.

That, in a nutshell, captures the traditional scientific thinking about panic attack. “The amygdala has always sort of been viewed as the fear epicenter,” says Feinstein.

However, recent work from his lab suggests that other structures in the deep brain may also be involved. Specifically, the insular cortex and a part of the brain stem called the “nucleus of the solitary tract” — regions that together receive and map signals from the heart, lungs and bloodstream. Feinstein’s team found that these areas generate fear impulses even in people who have been missing an amygdala due to a rare brain injury, suggesting that panic may often begin here in other people, too.

So, how can we hit the brakes?

To be classed as a panic attack, symptoms must come on rapidly, or within a few minutes, says Aaronson. And there’s good news: Attacks typically peak and subside within 10 or 15 minutes, and there are a handful of solid techniques that can help you ride them out.

Chief among those is recognizing your experience as a panic attack and not a more serious medical crisis, and gently reminding yourself that there’s nothing physically unsafe about it. “Just knowing what it is helps people,” says Aaronson. Just to be sure, double-check that you’re not experiencing any heart-attack specific symptoms such as pressure in the chest or pain that builds or radiates into the arm or jaw.

Once you’ve ruled those out, remember: Panic always passes, and focusing on that belief can send it on its way.

Of course, this is easier said than done when you feel like you’re suffocating or losing control. “It takes practice,” says Aaronson. “But the more you do it, the better you get at doing it.”

You might tell yourself: “Everything my body is doing right now is designed to keep me safe and protect me.”

If you can, find a quiet spot where you can talk yourself through why you’re feeling what you’re feeling.

For example, you might tell yourself: “I’m feeling light-headed because my blood is being redirected to my limbs. I’m breathing hard because my body is responding in an evolutionarily honed way to adrenaline. Everything my body is doing right now is designed to keep me safe and protect me.”

When you do this, you’re inviting another region of the brain into the conversation — the frontal cortex. This area is positioned just behind the forehead, which is responsible for conscious thought, judgement and problem solving. Bringing a sense of curiosity and analysis to the way you observe these sensations can help you to underline that they are just transient physical processes moving through you.

The other major tool in your toolbox is your breath. “Most people breathe on average from 12 to 20 breaths a minute. And when you’re hyperventilating, you’re easily doubling that,” says Feinstein.

He recommends trying to gradually slow your breathing to between five and 10 breaths per minute, and aiming to make your exhales longer than your inhales. This simple technique engages a parasympathetic response — fight-or-flight’s calming cousin, also referred to as “rest-and-digest.” Try doing this simple exercise from Judson Brewer, psychiatrist, neuroscientist and director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center in Providence, Rhode Island.

This kind of deep breathing stimulates the vagus nerve — the longest nerve in the body, which runs through regions including the digestive system and diaphragm, and feeds directly into the brainstem’s nucleus of the solitary tract. It carries signals and sensory information from and to the brain, and regulates functions including heart rate, breathing rate and digestion.

“Ultimately, panic attacks are just fear of fear,” says clinical psychiatrist Cindy Aaronson, PhD.

Interestingly, your vagus nerve is a two-way street. By breathing in a slow, controlled manner, you send a powerful signal to your brain that you are relaxed and there is nothing to fear. In turn, this stimulates certain parts of the heart muscle and helps to steady the pulse.

When practiced regularly, longer-term practices such as mindfulness meditation, which are usually built around a core of breathing techniques, can help people quash attacks before they take hold, says Feinstein. “[Mindfulness] teaches people a new association with their visceral experiences,” he explains. Focusing intently on your breath and heartbeat in a relaxed setting can help you shake off any reflexive jump to panic when they speed up in everyday life.

Therapy can help too. Aaronson’s group found that cognitive behavioral therapy, which is designed to gradually help you modify your behavioral responses to life events, can strengthen the neural connections between the frontal cortex and the amygdala. This makes panic sufferers more adept at talking themselves down off the ledge.

“Ultimately, panic attacks are just fear of fear,” says Aaronson. In the US alone, at least 1 in 10 Americans experiences a panic attack in any given year — the same number as fall ill during a bad flu season — so if you find yourself having one, know that you have plenty of company.

And just as your body responds to the flu virus by igniting a fever, it can sometimes respond to fear by firing up a panic attack. But with a little help and a few key techniques in your arsenal, you can take the wind out of panic’s sails. “If [you’re] not afraid of it, then who cares if it happens?” says Aaronson. “It passes.”

Watch Dr. Aaronson’s TED-Ed Animation on panic attacks now: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ceri Perkins is an NYC-based writer and editor who covers the environment, science, nature and human behavior. Her work appears in BBC Earth, Physics World, The Guardian, How it Works and more. Find her on Twitter @pepperjayperk.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Alice Mollon

If your brain is a heaving mess of work and life to-dos, find some focus with these straightforward steps from Ryder Carroll, creator of the Bullet Journal.

Do you ever feel like your mind is one big, infinitely scrolling, incredibly cluttered to-do list? And are you always struggling to keep it updated, remember what’s on it, readjust its priorities, and delete what no longer serves you?

Brooklyn-based product designer Ryder Carroll suggests his solution to this problem: keeping a journal. “We have to externalize our thoughts to declutter our mind,” he says. “Holding thoughts in your mind is like trying to grasp water — it’s nearly impossible. But by writing down our thoughts, we can capture them clearly so we can work with them later.”

Growing up, Carroll was easily distracted, tugged in every direction by anything and everything. He says, “As a kid, my biggest problem was focusing on way too many things at the same time … As an adult, that’s just known as being busy. But being busy doesn’t mean you’re being productive. A lot of times, being busy just means you’re in a state of being functionally overwhelmed.”

Sound familiar?

What ended up helping Carroll cope was writing in a paper journal. With it, he says, he can easily see his goals, aspirations and concerns; map out ways to tackle them; and understand how he’s spending his time and his energy. Carroll is the creator of the Bullet Journal — a hyper-organized note-taking system you may have seen on social media — but he says you don’t have to follow that particular method to achieve peace-of-mind via pen (or pencil) and paper.

To start decluttering your mind of its endless to-do lists, follow these steps:

1. Create a mental inventory. Carroll says, “Write down the things that you need to do, the things that you should be doing, and the things that you want to do.”

2. Consider why you’re doing each of these things. “You don’t have to dive down some existential rabbit hole,” he says — just be mindful of why you’re doing the things you do. “We burden ourselves with unnecessary responsibilities all the time,” says Carroll. “We’re so distracted by all the things we should be doing and could be doing, but we completely forget to ask ourselves … ‘‘Do I even want to be doing those things?’”

3. For every item on your list, ask two questions: “Is it vital?” and “Does it matter to me or someone I love?” Carroll says, “If your answer is no to both of those, you’ve just identified a distraction, and you can cross it off your list. For every item you cross off your list, you’re becoming less and less distracted.”

4. Take what’s left, and divvy it up. By now, your inventory will consist of vital things (such as paying bills and shopping for groceries) and things that matter. Of the latter, Carroll recommends taking anything that matters but you haven’t done yet (or you’ve made little headway with) and breaking it into small, actionable projects.

For example, “If you want to learn to cook, don’t start by tackling an incredibly complicated meal for six people,” he says. “Even if you don’t make a total mess, the experience will have been so unpleasant that you run the risk of ruining your curiosity about cooking altogether.” Small projects, according to Carroll, “allow us to cultivate our curiosities and help them grow, maybe even help some of them blossom into full-fledged passions.” With cooking, begin by mastering a few simple, tested recipes that use ingredients and techniques you’re familiar with.

Each small project should involve “a clearly defined list of actions and tasks,” says Carroll, and they should take you less than a month to complete. He says, “If you estimate your project will take more than a month, that’s fine. Just break it into smaller projects,” he says. Your projects do not have to be tied to passions or major interests — it can be anything you want to explore further.

5. Spend time every day — even if it’s just five minutes — revising your inventory. “We have to dedicate ourselves to a habit of keeping that map updated with all the new things that we discover,” says Carroll. “If we don’t, our map becomes inaccurate, and we start to go off course. We drift, and all of a sudden, distractions start leaking back into our lives.” And when it turns out that something that mattered to you no longer does, just cross it out and let it go.

“Unfortunately, time is not a renewable resource,” says Carroll, author of The Bullet Journal Method. “It’s our responsibility to take the time to identify the things that interest us and figure out ways to pursue them.” Use your journal to note down your new interests, and come up with small projects to try them out. “This practice will provide you with you a lot of personal data,” he adds, “and that data can provide profound insights into your life: what have you tried, what have you not tried, what should you do more of, what’s working, what’s not.”

Watch his TEDxYale talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hailey Reissman is the editorial coordinator at TEDx.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.