In the winter, SFD runs unmounted and mounted theory education.
While I was working on this year's theory plan, I ran across this, which was a
class we ran several winters ago. I brushed it up a bit, added a few
transitions (forgive some of the abruptness, remember, this was originally a
class, so some of those rough transitions were actually discussion moments),
and voile, a blog post. It's a bit technical, so my geekiness comes out loud
and clear. Feel free to skip to the end if you just want a plan. But if
understanding WHY is important to you, get a fresh cup of Joe and enjoy.
Frustration, in my opinion, is the rider’s
Elephant-in-the-room. It is the cause of
unhappy training rides, tears, and over-correcting. I hold to the idea that no one rides badly on
purpose. I also know that ambition’s ugly shadow will always be frustration,
and only Peter Pan has been able to escape his shadow. Show me an ambitious
dressage rider, and I’ll show you a rider who deals with frustration. To quote
Antonio Banderas, “Expectation is the mother of all frustration. “
Since frustration is clearly a downside of performance-based
activities, and with so much research available when I researched about
performance anxiety, I was a bit surprised that when I started researching for
this class I didn’t find a lot. I found
lots of definitions, lots of examples, so it’s clearly a problem – enough of a
problem that Amazon advertises “frustration-free packaging.” But not much about what is going on in our
brains, and on a few plans to combat frustration. So I asked Kelsey for help,
and between her, my experiences, and some careful internet digging, this is
what I came up with.
So here’s the official definition: Frustration is a feeling of annoyance that occurs when something doesn't go as you expect. Frustration comes from the Latin frustrationem, "a deception or a disappointment." (http://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/frustration).
Ironically, I found information about frustration was on the internet Pokemon encyclopedia. I never knew Pokemon had such an organized following, but then I doubt gamers know we spend hours making circles in the sand and get excited about a score that wouldn’t be passing in grade school. But I digress (again).
Turns out in Pokeomn, “frustration” is the name of a fight move. I love this line under “Effects” on the web page == “Frustration inflicts damage and has no secondary effect.”
It goes on to describe this complicated mathematical formula that quantifies the power of frustration based on one factor – friendship. In that game, the higher the friendship score, the lower the power generated by the frustration fight move. So even in the video world, emotions, specifically friend-trust in this case, have an effect on the power of frustration.the lower the power generated by the frustration fight move. So even in the video world, emotions, specifically friend-trust in this case, have an effect on the power of frustration.
Leaving the land of video games and entering neuroscience, let’s
look at what happens to our brains when we are frustrated. For starters,
emotions in general are hard-wired into the subcortical nuclei, which brain
researchers call the “animal brain” as it is so similar to that of lower
mammals.
In Animals in Translation, Grandin and Johnson write:
"We humans tend to think of emotions as dangerous forces that need to be
strictly controlled by reason and logic. But that's not how the brain works. In
the brain logic and reason are never separate from emotion. Even nonsense syllables
have an emotional charge, either positive or negative. Nothing is
neutral."
In Pankseep's Affective Neuroscience, he explains that
there "is good biological evidence for at least seven innate emotional
systems…." The list, slightly modified for clarity of definitions to
non-brain-science nerds, is as follows:
Seeking
(anticipation, desire)
Rage (frustration, body surface irritation, restraint, indignation)
Fear (pain, threat, foreboding)
Panic/loss (separation distress, social loss, grief, loneliness)
Play (rough-and tumble carefree play, joy)
Mating (copulation—who and when)
Care (maternal nurturance)
Just to make things harder, these emotional systems kick in BEFORE neuro impulses hit the logic centers of
our brain. In other words, we can’t change the fact that we become frustrated. It’s part of our wiring. So quit feeling guilty about being frustrated.
It’s as much a part of our dna as your height and hair color. But we can control what we do about
frustration, so that is where we have to focus.
But there is one really scary thing in that list – that
frustration is listed as a component of rage.
Also quite interesting is that when neuroscientists study rage, they
find the paths in the brain parallel the trajectory of the fear system.
Certain stimuli trigger frustration/rage in the “animal brain” –
things that restrict freedom of movement or access to resources. Easiest way to trigger frustration and rage
in a baby is to hold the arms down. Even
our horses feel frustration when we limit their freedom of movement. But since we are human, we get the added
advantage of our “logical brain” creating even more triggers than we
instinctually have.
So here’s the technical list of how the brain is impacted by
rage/frustration:
Areas of the frontal cortex containing
reward-relevance neurons influence RAGE circuitry.
Frontal eye fields are impacted, drawn to especially prominent objects in the
environment. (doesn’t this remind you of the tense horse looking for something
to spook at?)
The orbitoinsular cortex—where a multitude of senses converge including pain
and perhaps hearing—may provide specific sounds direct access to RAGE
circuitry. In humans, these sounds may include, for example, an angry
voice.
The nucleus of the solitary tract, which collects information via the vagus
nerve that is probably related to processes such as heart rate and blood
pressure, inputs to RAGE circuitry.
If I lost you with that list, here’ the Cliff Notes -- once the
brain has started down the frustration path, the neurons fire in such a way to
look for other frustrating things. No
real shocker there. Once the path is started, the brain has 3 options – follow
the path to rage, jump to the parallel ‘fear’ path, or interrupt the path.
As trainers, of course we want to get off the frustration path, so
we have to be interrupt the path. Since
frustration triggers increase heart rate, blood pressure and muscular blood
flow, it will impact our ability to control our aids, significantly reducing
our effectiveness as riders. So we need
to get off the path, and we’ll discuss how in a minute. But first let me
convince you that you need to get off the path, even though, as trainers, that
seems like the opposite of what we have come to believe is “good training.”
This, of course, go against common horsemanship. We have all heard
that stopping when things aren’t going well is a bad training decision (letting
the horse get away with it). But letting
things build is a worse training decision.
Horses learn by repetition, so if you take a walk break when it isn’t
working, then go back with a better neuro-brain path firing and do GOOD
repetitions 10 times, that is going to do more good in long-term training than
one time pushing through the frustration and risking a really, really negative
experience that you then have to fix.
Plus, since I showed earlier that frustration comes from the
animal center of your brain, the logic center of your brain can start the
cascade, but once it gets going, the neuropathway stays pretty much in the
animal brain. It doesn’t check in with the logic centers of your brain. So your
logical brain is saying “this isn’t working, we should do something else” but
your animal center of your brain keeps hitting repeat, and it’s like an ink
line that your brain keeps going over and over, making the line thicker and
deeper. Breaking that line is easy when
it is one ink line thick. When it is wide and dark as if it were made with a
paintbrush, it’s much harder to break.
I also want to point out again that this brain cascade bypasses
logical thought. Think of the rider who
is clearly frustrated, and then hits her horse. Would that person hit a horse
under normal situations? Of course not. Did she plan to hit a horse? Nope. But
her brain’s wiring, in frustration/rage cycle, made that hit without checking
with the logic sensors of the brain.
Often, ironically, with the logic center of her brain going “yea, that’s
not going to work.” So then she gets to
feel guilt and shame as well.
Why does the brain do this? Because thinking is slow, and a
million years ago, when a human was physically
trapped by something trying to eat him, quick, strong, frustrated and rage-induced
reactions kept him, and therefore our species, alive.
A simplified way to look at neuropathways is my ink line analogy from earlier. If you
draw a line in ink, it’s a line. But if you keep drawing that same line, over
and over again, the line gets thicker and darker. Brain paths work that way too. If one fires
once in a while, it’s just a thinly-followed pathway. But if the brain goes over the same
neuro-path pattern over and over again, it becomes a well-worn path. This is how we develop habits.
Like a habit, breaking the path when the path is still a thin line
is much easier than breaking the cycle once your has rigidly gone over it and
over it and over it in the last 10 minutes. But in order to break that pattern
while it is still a thin line and before frustration has become a habit, we
have to recognize the signs of the line being drawn in the first place. Which isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Common signs:
Tone of your
self-talk
Emotional build
up
Sudden change
in heart rate/body temp
Just to make this even more difficult, remember that the
neuropathway for frustration/rage are in the animal brain. So your horse is
wired to feel frustration, and make that jump from frustration to fear (flight
behavior) or frustration to rage (fight behavior).
Then there’s an added phenomenon that happens in the natural word –
synchronization. It makes fireflies
blink in the same pattern, and in herds, when one herd member goes on alert,
they all do. They do it because the heart rates sync. This happens with humans
too – In Spain, they did a study using heart rate monitors on fire walkers. The
heart rate of the fire walker and their friends/relatives who were observing
synched. Onlookers who didn’t know the walker, their heart rate didn’t line
up.
Same thing happens to horses and humans. According to a 2009 study at the Swedish
University of Agricultural Sciences, again using heart rate monitors, showed
synchronization. When riders were told
that an umbrella would open at a particular part of their path, their heart
rates went up in anticipation. And so
did the horse’s heart rates, despite the fact that the umbrella didn’t
open.
As horsemen we know this, we talk about horses ‘sensing our fear.’
Turns out it is real. Think about a fearful student getting on a steady
schoolmaster, and the schoolmaster soothing the rider. So it works both ways.
Now remember that raised heart rate is one of the physical signs
of both fear and frustration. So once we
get on that cycle, not only is our brain wanting to stay on that cycle, our
mount’s brains do too, and they are encouraging us to stay there as well.
So our best tool to prevent frustration buildup becomes technique
called “prepared but flexible.” To be
prepared but flexible, we need to not only recognize frustration, we need to
know what triggers frustration in us.
Getting back to Pokeman for just a moment, another interesting
component of “frustration” as a fight move, characters don’t come with
“frustration”—it is a learned move.
Think back to your competition career. First season, everyone is just
happy to be there, and wow, I even got a ribbon!. Second year, yea, not so
much. Your expectations, based on your education, have raised the bar, and
increased your tendency to be frustrated.
As the old adage goes, forewarned is forearmed, so let’s look at
common frustration triggers:
Restricted
motion
Lack of access
to resources
Deadlines
Fatigue
Outside
stressors
Expectations
Performance
anxiety
When I look at the internet for tools to help frustration, it
gives me lots and lots of sorta-but-not-really-helpful advice, from “take a
deep breath” to “change your expectations.”
I don’t want to change my expectations, since that may lower my results,
and let’s face it, I want a productive training session and a high score.
So my personal, keep-the-red-hair-in-check method for staying out
of the frustration neuro cycle is to first look at my goals and decide how easily
those goals could lead to frustration. Then I plan 2-4 different paths to reach that
goal. I set up several check-points to
see if I’m on the best path – in a training session, that will be a walk break.
In a show plan, I’ll re-think the plan mid season to see if unforeseen elements
have derailed my plan. But having a plan to flex my plans helps me feel less
restricted, literally or proverbially.
In other words, plan the work, plan to adjust the plan, work the plan,
adjust the plan, lather, rinse repeat.
So, like any skill, we have to practice it. Pick some goals, make
a list of plans, routinely check for physical signs that the brain is getting frustrated,
and adjust often.
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