Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game stimulates the grey matter and lights up those neurons. And I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 56, we're going to look at how to remember what you need to remember under pressure. So let's get into it. So what do we mean about remembering what we need to remember under pressure. Well, we've all had that sinking feeling, haven't we? We've been sitting in a classroom or sitting in an exam hall and all that calculus or that physics we've been studying or the history, that specific date that we need to know, it's gone. It was there before you went into the test. You knew you'd studied it. You'd sat there that morning and you'd gone through the paper and you sit down with a pencil in your hand. The question comes up and it's gone. It's a horrible feeling. It's that, Oh my Lord, what do I do? Holy crap, what do I do now?
How do I get out of this? And the harder you try to remember, the less you remember. That blank feeling filling, that empty, solid feeling in your stomach, the pit of your stomach where you're going, all that work, all that study, it's for nothing. You get here, you get that opportunity to write it down, the thing that you've been rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing, and it's gone. And then all of a sudden, the exam's over, you walk out of the room and it's back. And it's so incredibly frustrating, isn't it? That moment where you think, why wasn't that in my head 10 minutes ago? Well, the reality was it was inside your head. Let's look at it because that's not only a issue when you're doing exams at school, let's think about it from a sporting performance perspective. What What happens when you're in the middle of a routine or in a major competition and your brain does exactly that same with those skills that you know or the sequence that you've been practising and your mind goes blank? All of a sudden, you're sitting there not in front of a teacher anymore and a couple of students, but maybe a thousand or hundreds of thousands of people watching you.
That blank moment where, What do I do next? What happens when that's happened and I need to think? I know how to do this? Why is it not inside my head at the moment? Why can I not logically process this and perform? It's a horrible feeling. If you've ever been there, you'll know this. This will be sounding incredibly familiar to you. You've probably still got that sinking feeling in your stomach when you think about that moment when you're standing there and everyone's looking at you and your brain has gone blank. It's done the Harry Houdini. Everything inside there, it's hidden. You can't see it anymore. What happens there? It can create a neurological point of reference, a significant neurological point of reference. That every single time when you think about performance, that pops into your head. That negative, that sinking feeling. If it's happened to you at some point in your performance, you'll get that same sense, that same sinking feeling in your stomach, probably the cold chill through your body, and you'll probably start to see in your mind what you saw at that time. That auditorium that looked big suddenly became ginormous. You'll have that same sense right now if you've ever been in that place.
Our brain does a great job of remembering those really painful or very emotional moments. That significant neurological point of reference could shift your memory recall process. From a future performance perspective, when you go out to perform, it could be the only that you start to see inside your head. We know what that's going to do is influence the way that you perform. If you go out there and you think about something negative or you think about something that could significantly go wrong for you, you're not thinking about performing the way you need to perform. So from that alone, from that whole cranial space perspective, it's going to take up way too much of your brain. But it has a much deeper, a much more sinister way of influencing your performance than just taking up head space. Even just the thought of it happening, if it's never happened to you in the past, but even now that you're listening to this and you have that thought of what could happen, you start to shift what your thought processes are in your brain. Your imagination kicks in and go, But what if that's me? What if that happens to me?
What if I forget that something? What if I go out to perform and I can't remember how to do that? Your brain will create and create. Your imagination will kick in and it'll become so incredibly scary that you then create a neurological point of reference for performance. But it can be. It can be an issue. It can do something to your performance and to your future performance that you have little control over unless you gain control over those thoughts. The anxiety that can be caused by this completely derailed and debilitating for an athlete. It can inhibit skill development and career progress. I've seen in so many athletes where we've come along and I've worked backwards, unpacked their performance issues right the way back to a fear, a unrealistic, intangible fear, something that their brain has created such an imagination of that it stopped them dead in their tracks. So even the thought of such things can create an active imagination that can trigger consistent memory fails. So why does our brain do this to us? Why on earth would this thing that's so incredibly powerful create such an evil thing in our performance? Well, quite simply, really, it's a self-preservation process.
At times of stress, our brain disregards those things that it deems to be of less importance to us. It's a survival mechanism. It's whatever's immediately necessary for us to survive at this point, it will remember. Everything else, it's gone. Unless your brain deems you're remembering that routine at that specific point, or that skill, or that calculus, or that physics answer, your brain will deem that as completely irrelevant at that moment and not worth sparing the neurons for. So you won't remember it. Not until after the event or after the exam and you walk outside and go, Okay, cool. Let's switch it back on now. Oh, look, you remember all those things again. So if it's not something that is incredibly important to your survival at that point, your brain can disregard it. Despite you consciously thinking otherwise, despite you pleading with your brain to remember it, it won't allow those thoughts, those connexions to be active. It's a simple step to survival process. What's the solution to this? You'd think the solution would be to improve your memory by training the skills more frequently by making them more front of thought, right? Well, actually, that's wrong.
Let me explain something to you about our memory. The human memory is not designed to remember everything that we do. It doesn't recall like a film or like a recorder every second that we interact, what we see, what we hear, what we feel. It doesn't happen like that. What our brain does, it takes key significant points in time. The Reality is the memory is specifically designed to only remember key things that could influence our future options. What I mean by this is our memory is only designed to remember key information that could influence relevant and significant things that we could be doing in the future. Almost like snapshots. If we do something and our brain goes, You know what? I could possibly need that in the future. Let me take a snapshot of that and put it in our memory. Those key things are what we recall when we go to make decisions going forward. When we go to jump in a car, what our brain remembers is significant points in time where we've learned to drive, we've had significant exposures on the road. And there, what things to remember? We don't remember every single time we get in a car or every second we're in a car, every turn we've ever made.
Only remember key things that could influence our decision making going forward. We have two main forms of memory. That's fluid and crystallised. Fluid is our working memory. It's vivid, it's detailed, and it's transient. Only around for a very short period of time, and it allows us to do things on the go. So take parts of information that we've just witnessed, parts of things that we've remembered, and parts of things that we've heard somewhere along the line, and we can amalgamate those to deal with the current situation. Operation, but it is very transient. We don't have access to it all the time. We recall it for a specific purpose, and it goes back either into our crystallised memories or into the ether where we don't necessarily need it. It's just there and there at the time. We probably remember stuff like that where somebody says something to you and you've got to remember it. Then once you've remembered it, it's gone. You no longer need it anymore. So your brain goes, gone, out the way. Then there's crystallised memory. This is our long-term memory. This is formed as part of our neurological points of reference and can also be used as fluid memory processing.
It can be accessed by a fluid memory when we're making decisions, but it will go straight back to that point in our memory that's been crystallised. This memory is what we rely on when we are making our choices, recalling information and self-protection. It's our problem-solving evolving process. Our fluid accesses and then disregards. Our crystallised is what it says. It's crystallised. It is what it is. It's not manoeuvrable, it's not changeable. It's just that memory. This is also the memory we use when we're competing our routines or doing our exams, that crystallised memory that our short term or fluid memory can access. This is also why our fluid and crystallised memory are both different in purpose and different in structure. Did you know you can better embed our memories if you study them the night before? The act of sleeping helps convert that fluid memory into a crystallised memory. And that is why I get my clients, all my clients, to do their journaling at night before they go to sleep, and also do their key visualisation before they go to sleep. When you put something into your memory at night and then you sleep on it, it allows that to become crystallised.
Did you also know if you get up first thing in the morning and you cram for that exam, you actually turn some of that crystallised memory back into fluid memory that you then run the risk of losing access to. Those of you who get up and print up your answers that you think are going to be in the exam and you cram them on the bus on the way to school, the likelihood is you got more chance of forgetting them than if you hadn't done anything that morning. Just something to consider because I I knew that when I was at school. I wish I'd known. I was that kid sitting on the bus reading through my homework thinking, I think this is going to be in it, this is going to be in it. I'm going to remember it, I'm going to remember it. I'm getting into the exam and it's gone. So what can we actively do to better prepare our memory to be more robust and more reliable for us so we don't get out there to perform and do the Harry Houdini memory tricks. There must be a process that we can go through to utilise this awesome organ we have inside our head that allows us to remember such key structural things so detailed and then make it more accessible for us.
Well, there are a couple of key strategies necessary here. One of them is relevance. Our crystallised memory is designed to remember important and relevant information, right? If we're going to do something in the future, if it deems it to be some relevance to us and some key importance, it will allow us to crystallise it. Building relevance to what we're doing will allow our brain to give it more importance, to give it that value and more chance of us being able to remember it. Making the routines both important, adding position and emotions to it, and more relevant by having it to look, this leads into something. If I do this routine, it's going to allow me to do these new skills after. So there's a relevance to it and there's also an importance to it. Our brain will upgrade that memory and help us better crystallise it. It's given it significant value. We also want to make memorable memories. When Uncle Jeff dressed as a chicken at Auntie Beth's wedding, it quickly became the only thing we remembered about that weekend. This is because it stood out as something completely unique, something completely different. If we can do the same with skills, we do the same with routines, it makes it a memorable memory.
Again, more likely to be able to be recalled when we need it. Every single time I think about a wedding, I don't necessarily think about who got married. I think about Uncle Jeff dressed as a chicken. That is important for us to make sure that we are giving not only relevance, but also making them more memorable. Now, when my son was going through his early stages of taekwondo training and doing his gradings, he had to perform martial arts patterns These were anything from 6 to 26 skills long, and there was, I think, 8 to 10 of them. He had to remember these skills not only in order and sequence, but also in the distinct differences in the way that the skills were performed, dependent on what pattern he was performing at the time. Now, that's a lot for anybody to be able to remember, that multiple number of skills, multiple different kinds of formats of those skills. So we had to come up with a way that it worked specifically for him. Now, he's a very visual, tactile young guy, so we worked very heavily with visualisation. What I asked him to do initially was to give each one of these routines or Pumsets, they're called, a different colour.
He color-coded each one. And then I asked him, why was that coloured purple? Or why was that one coloured red? Or why was that one coloured yellow? So he gave relevance to him. That one's coloured red because of this, this, this, and this, or that's a purple one because of this skill that I do in it. So he knew what the colour relevance was. So they had a value to it, and it also had a relevance to it. So then when he visualised it and he was doing a red routine, the mats were red in his head. The uniform, the gee he was wearing was red. His hair was red. So everything that he could see was red. So as he visualised from a disassociated and then associated perspectives. He only saw this red routine, and vice versa when he was doing the purple, the green, the yellow, the blue, whatever it was, the mats, the uniform, his hair, everything was that specific colour. In his mind, we've made that routine a memorable memory. There was one of the routines he really struggled with, and I got him to do it in his head in a Mickey Mouse outfit.
When he was doing the skills, he He saw himself doing the skills, but he was dressed as Mickey Mouse. When he came to perform those skills, those routines, and he got to the really difficult one, he had a smile on his face, he could see he was comfortable and calm, and he went straight through the 26 skills. So creating memorable memories is incredibly important if we want to be able to recall something specifically, something that's quite in-depth, detailed, and has unique little idiosyncrasies to it. The third part to making these routines more recallable is consistency in memory. Like anything, Quality of embed equals quality of recall. It's important that the embed with the same specific key strategies each and every time, the same detail each and every time in the same way, in the same process. The more consistent we are in embedding the message, the more consistent we are in recalling the message with those given triggers. When I asked my son to embed the root routine, he would say the name of the routine out loud, and then to say, Pumse 1, read. That became the trigger. So when he got to stand up and they'd say, We're going to do Pumse 1, he'd say, Pumse 1, read.
So it was a trigger in his mind to trigger what he saw, what he heard, what he thought, and how it processed. It enabled him to have more active triggers, specific triggers, to recall that memory. We know it was relevant to him. We knew that once he'd finish that routine, he could move on to the next one and keep, continue upgrading. He's now a third damn black belt, so the system worked specifically well for him. He knew how to embed it, he knew how to recall it, and he knew the relevance to it. So what have we covered in this brief podcast on recalling memory? Well, the loss of memory at key moments, such as exams and performances, can be traumatic. We know our memory is not geared to remember everything it's seen and heard and done. Instead, it's geared to remember key relevant information that could influence our future. Loss of memory at key times can create an emotional memory that our brain tries to protect us against, and so can create fears around performance from that exposure that could have a massive influence on how we approach future performances. We have learned about fluid and crystallised memory, and how one is here and then gone, and the other is formed through relevance, through importance, and through the thought of being able to be used in future to make future decisions.
And they are formed through crystallisation that happens predominantly when we're asleep. The solution is consistent, relevant, and memorable memories. When we look back at this very important information, we know That what's going through our head is important. We know what we need to train. Our coaches tell us all the time, this is a key thing. When you go out and you perform, you need to be able to perform this. We know we need to perform them. We also know our emotions can get in the way. Our imagination can create such a block that our brain does the Harry Houdini, and we forget everything. I hope this podcast has given you something positive to think about and given you some key strategies so that you don't forget what you need to know. Until the next episode of Brain in the Game, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
