WHOOP Podcast - Advice from the masters of mindset: Insights from the WHOOP Podcast on mindfulness, meditation, and mental performance

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

Unlocking human performance isn’t just about tapping into the potential your body has – it’s about harnessing the power of the mind. We’re taking a look back at some of the learnings and insights we’ve covered on the WHOOP Podcast related to mental performance. In this episode, you’ll learn from some of the masters of mindset on how to improve your mindfulness, meditation, and visualization practices, including Headspace co-founder Andy Puddicombe (2:35), world-renowned sports psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr (4:38), Free Solo rock climber Alex Honnold (6:21), 2-time PGA Champion Justin Thomas (11:59), Olympic legend Michael Phelps (14:13), former Navy SEAL Mark Divine (17:11), Steve-O from Jackass (21:12), and Stanford Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman (24:37).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with top athletes, researchers, scientists, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, and we are still on a mission to unlock human performance. Quick reminder, you can use the code Will, get 15% off a WOOP membership that comes with the WOOP 4.0. And it is shipping now on demand. Supply chain issues behind us. We're getting those units out fast. Enjoy the WOOP membership. Okay. This week's episode, we're wrapping up a series on mental health by going deep on mindset. We're taking a look back at some of the learnings and insights we've covered on the WOOP podcast related to mental performance.

And a big theme is mindfulness, meditation, and visualization. We have a great collection of guests for you today, where we took some of the better learnings and sound bites to really talk about how mindfulness, meditation, mindset, all of these things have unlocked enormous potential for our guests. I've really experienced this firsthand. I've been meditating now for eight and a half years every single day. I do transidental meditation. I've talked about this on past podcasts.

But just that process of sitting with yourself and breathing and listening to your thoughts and learning how to filter your thoughts, it'll really change your life. And so I'm a big believer in it. And it's why it's probably come up so many times on these podcasts that I've hosted. But I think it's a superpower. And when you learn how to control your breathing and to really sit with your thoughts, it's something that can inspire a lot of different aspects of your life. We're going to hear that in this episode as we recap the practices of really, really interesting and powerful people.

At Whoop, we've often said that there are secrets that your body's trying to tell you. I think the same can be said for your mind. Headspace co-founder Andy Putacombe talked about that when he came on the podcast. Andy is one of the world's leading authorities on mindfulness and meditation, obviously, as a founder of Headspace. And he's really dedicated his life to it. He started meditating at the age of 10, and he eventually became a monk in the Himalayas. That's right.

How many tech CEOs and founders were one. Monk in the Himalayas. He says unlocking the power of the mind is a lifelong effort. It's a journey of a lifetime. I still think of myself as a student of mindfulness. I don't think of myself as a... It seems almost like the mindset that everyone takes on some level, right? Because... I think so. I think it's a healthy kind of mindset. Yeah. Otherwise, how do you do 30 years of retreat? You're still searching for something, right? There's actually, you might be familiar with this. there's an expression in um in buddhism especially in zen it's called beginner's mind yeah and there's that idea of just keeping alive this sort of freshness this idea you know when we sit

to meditate it's as though we've we've never done it before right we're curious we're interested it's like that first time again and it's not always easy by the way it's tricky yeah it's really difficult and most of the time we don't know what's going on in our own mind which is yeah Kind of insane because we spend all day with ourselves, but we're so busy kind of caught up in this maelstrom of thought that we don't see our minds clearly. So having that awareness, being able to sort of pull back and see the mind more clearly allows us to not only think differently or have the opportunity to choose to think differently. It also allows us to sort of transcend thought altogether where we're not even involved in the thinking. That's Andy Putacombe from episode 12 and man, even just listening to his voice. You can almost tell he's a meditator, just that there's a calmness to it.

So I highly recommend listening to that episode, whether you're in the early stages of your mindfulness journey or an experienced meditator. Now, many people associate mindfulness with getting to a calm state, but it can also take you to a really world-class performance state. And it's no surprise that so many of the world's best performers spend just as much time honing their mental strength and performance as they do their physical strength. And no one knows that better than world-renowned sports psychologist Dr. Jim Lair. Here in episode 137, he discusses how to prepare yourself mentally for any type of performance.

And again, it will sound a little strange, but the mind is the body and the body is the mind. What is true for one is true for the other. In the context of stress and pressure, the ability to execute, flawlessly in a high-stress venue means you have to learn how to control this very delicate mind-body balance. And it's probably the most important frontier of competitive athletics is learning to control that because it can be hijacked and derailed if any one of those goes off. You don't sleep.

You don't eat properly at the physical level. You're angry or upset and your chemistry changes emotionally. mentally you're focused on the outcome and you know in terms of the character dimension you don't really feel that good about yourself and you're only as good as your last performance you you identify almost solely with your score and that places undue pressure and changes levels of cortisol and other critical stress adrenal cortical hormones that actually need to be contained to perform at your rest. I like how Dr. Jim Lair here talks about not placing undue stress on your body and your mind. And I think if there's anyone who knows that phenomenally well, it's our next guest, Alex Honnold,

the legendary rock climber known for climbing El Capitan without a rope, which was truly a life or death feat. And that, of course, was the documentary Free Solo. I went deep with Alex on how he uses visualization techniques and how he's not immune to fear. Instead, he just suppresses it with preparation. Listen now. To me, the point of visualization is to prepare you for any eventualities, like any possibility that could happen while climbing. I mean, basically the point is to not be caught by surprise by anything. And so, you know, you don't want to get into a position climbing and suddenly have the thought for the first time, like, what if I fall? You know what I mean like obviously you want to have thought that through in its entirety you want to already know

that you know if your foot slips here you're going to cartwheel down the wall you're going to bounce down the wall you're going to basically explode on impact on the ground i mean it's all terrible things to think about and it's scary to think about but it's important to think about those things ahead of time so that you don't suddenly come up with them for the first time while you're in that position you know and i mean i think that if you focus only on positive visualization that's actually kind of dangerous because in a way that's like luring you into something that that could be beyond you like if anything especially with that's an interesting way of putting it like yeah you probably should especially in what you're doing you should not just have a positive visualization

because that might encourage you to do something that is beyond your means and and leads to a disaster which is what you did with with l cap and you visualized every scenario you i mean it seems like you even visualize your shoe tearing or it raining or all that stuff right totally I mean, just because that way, if any of it happens, you're never caught by surprise. You're like, oh, yeah, I've done this already, even though you haven't technically done it, but you've played it through in your mind, so nothing is a surprise. You're like, I'm ready for everything. It's amazing.

The movie is amazing. Free Solo, congratulations on that accomplishment. And of course, the movie as well. And I love listening to you talk about it because it's, you know, my general sense is that the outside world looks at you as someone who's almost got a little bit of a genetic disposition. to being able to overcome fear. Like I was reading about, you know, this sort of analysis of your amygdala, right, which is with the area of your brain that, you know, obviously is fight or flight. And this idea that maybe yours is just sort of naturally a little bit suppressed.

But in listening to you, I feel like you're so disciplined and so intentional that you've just trained, you've trained yourself to control it under a certain circumstance. Right? Which is a life or death scenario of climbing. But it's like, let me ask you this way. Are there other things in your life that might surprise people that make you fearful? Like that you realize that you have some level of fear towards. Like public speaking at some point in your life, was that something that you feared doing? Yeah. I mean, as a young person, I was horrified of public speaking. Like the idea of speaking in front of class and school was completely out of the question. And actually giving a TED Talk remains one of the scariest things I've probably ever done in my life.

Like, I was so gripped on stage that I completely skipped one of my closing paragraphs. Like, if you watch my TED Talk online, it's fully missing a paragraph that I intended to deliver, but totally lost because my brain turned a mush. Okay, well, this is a perfect transition, because I watched your TED Talk last night to prepare for this. And I was like, I think he's nervous. Like, I actually think he's nervous. And it's a beautiful thing, though, man, because it shows that with like a, a, like, a like an insane level of commitment and discipline and visualization and practice.

Like you've been able to overcome this insane thing and overcome like the mindset towards it. And it's not just that you're like, you know, some genetic unique thing. Like you do you do feel fears in other aspects of your life. But you've been so intentional, which I think is so beautiful. Yeah, no, that's totally it. It's like with the with climbing, I've been doing it full time. and trying my hardest and pushing and, you know, broadening my comfort zone, like working on every aspect of my climbing for 25 years. And then, you know, and I've learned a lot of things

about, you know, managing my fear and, you know, controlling emotion and whatever. But then when I try to apply that to something like a TED talk, you know, giving a TED talk, like, I'm not good at memorizing lines. I'm not that great at public speaking. You know, I've had a little bit of practice now, but not that much, you know, a few years worth, let's say. And you're sort of like, yeah, I have some experience, but not that much. And like, this is hard for. for me. I'm sort of like, oh, I don't have 25 years of experience and practice in this. And so when I go up on stage and try to deliver this memorized talk in front of, you know, thousands of the most respected people, you know, like people, I don't know, everyone there's

so classy. I'm like, oh, geez, you know, like, I don't want to embarrass myself in front of all these people. And I was like, oh, this is, this is pretty intense. It's pretty hardcore for me. I mean, there's such a beauty in that that you're giving a TED talk about climbing a 3,000 foot mountain that no one's ever climbed before and hell you did it without any ropes or anything. And that experience was almost less nerve-wracking to you than the actual experience of just talking about it in front of people later. Yeah, but it's all what you're good at, you know? Of course, but that's what I take away from this is like if you can just build this level of discipline and intentionality in your life around certain aspects, the, the master's

that you can have of them is quite high. I really enjoyed that episode with Alex and especially this idea of visualizing not just the positive outcome, but even all the different negative outcomes to be as prepared as possible. I took a lot from that. A common theme we've covered on the podcast is that the world's best athletes do, in fact, get nervous. Justin Thomas, the now two-time major champion, spoke about that in episode 77.

Now, when you're standing over a put like the one on 18 at the President's Cup with Tiger Woods, do you actually feel your heart rate elevated? Are you trying to bring it down? Are you just ignoring that whole concept and focused on the putt? I've never thought of it before. I'm focused on one thing and one thing only, and that's making that specific putt that I have. Will you acknowledge that you're nervous in a moment? For sure.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't understand why someone would do something if they're not. not nervous because if you're not nervous, it doesn't mean anything to you. Totally. There's definitely good nerves and bad nerves. There's a, oh my gosh, I'm so nervous. I'm scared to fail nervous. And there's like a, this is such a big moment. I can't wait to make this putt and show everybody, you know, this moment nervous.

So there's butterflies and then there's bad nerves too. But yeah, it just, it always, it makes me laugh. And honestly, it drives me crazy when some guys are like, I'm, I'm. I'm as stubborn as they come, but I don't understand how some guys can be so stubborn to say that they're not nervous teeing off Sunday at Augusta with the lead. It's like, what are you dead inside? No, it's not possible. I mean, I'm nervous teeing off anytime I go play Augusta for fun, let alone the first round

of a tournament, let alone the first round on Sunday with a lead. So there's nothing wrong with admitting you failed or didn't do well, but it's just so funny to me to hear and people are like, I'm not nervous. And I'll be the first one to admit when I get nervous, but it just sometimes are more than others. It just differs. I love how open JT is there on being nervous. And in fact, being nervous, being a sign that what you're doing is important and important to you and to own it as an opportunity. And for me, that's been a theme in talking to a lot of professional athletes.

It's that these guys aren't superhuman. They don't have some unusual response necessarily to stress. they've learned how to manage these things and in some cases manage the feeling of stress to a point of complete mastery. Perhaps there's no athlete on the planet that's been better at managing his emotions in the moment than Michael Phelps. So he shared how swimming settled his mind. So swimming, I think for me, as weird as it sounds, staring at a black line was calming

because I could kind of get lost in my own head or I could just feel like I was free in the water. So for me, even now today, when I jump into the pool, it's kind of like therapy in a way, almost, because it's the only time where my mind is completely silent and nothing is going on. I can just go on autopilot. I'm curious when you were in the pool swimming for something, how much were you thinking about the exact thing that you were doing? Zero.

Versus... Just letting it go. Like spacing out. Yeah, I just let it rip. And what would you be thinking about? It could be anything? Nothing. Empty.

Zero. It's like you're in the matrix. It's like time slows down. down. It's crazy. It's hard to put it into words exactly what it's like, but you feel your senses are heightened. It's wild. Michael Phelps is truly fascinating on his episode. He was tremendously open about his mental health struggles. He even talks about how learning to communicate his thoughts and emotions help save his life. We can pile things up and compartmentalize, and I'll be the first to admit that's not good and it's not healthy. That put me at a very dark

spot in a very uncomfortable spot for me in my life. So I would urge everybody just to communicate, however that looks. Whether it's a friend, whether it's in person, whether it's texting, whether it's writing stuff down, communicate, get stuff out in the open. That is the one biggest thing that I think really frees us up. Because the more we carry this stuff along, it just puts more and more stress and weight on us, we just start hunching over. So the more we can talk about these things, I think, and get them into the open allows

us to just be comfortable and like who we are as individuals. I used to hate who I saw in the mirror. I used to hate it. The only thing I saw was a swimmer. I didn't see anything else. I never saw myself as a human being. So now being able to see myself as a human being, it's a completely different outlook on life.

And I love myself. I like who I am. So now I've been able to accumulate a few tools to help me get through those dark times. And look, I'll be the first to admit for me going through depression and anxiety, it's not something that's just going to go away. It's a part of who I am and it'll come and go whenever it wants. And I feel like I have more things to help me get through those difficult times than I ever did before. And I think, you know, that's the only thing we can ask. That's an amazing episode of Michael Phelps, episode 171. It's not just athletes who use mindfulness and meditation to

perform at an elite level. The best of the best use meditation to excel in all aspects of their former Navy SEAL, Mark Devine, is a perfect example of that. He told us how he went from being a CPA in New York to becoming one of America's most elite warriors. He was well-versed in mindfulness meditation in Zen and says that not only led him to wanting to become a SEAL, but it also separated him from the PAC during SEAL training. And so when you start to meditate and you get control of rational, cognitive kind of left-brain aspect And you can drop into these moments of silence where you're not doing anything, right?

The yogis would call that you're perceiving mind. You're not thinking. You're not visualizing. You're not remembering. You're not dreaming. You're just sitting there meditating, I guess, right? Which is doing nothing. Well, you're doing something, but you're not actively doing anything.

You're just listening and you're searching or being quiet. And all of a sudden, that's when you can hear or sense what the gut is telling you, you've got brain and all the brain activity of the biome and your heart right and these two have a different way of communicating with you or through you and i think that's what i was you know this idea that i was a warrior it wasn't pattern recognition it was my heart my spirit telling me that's the direction to go and then the pattern recognition went to work to help me narrow that down to say, is it a seal? Is it a Marine? Is it, you know, to be an adventurer, right? There's lots of ways to be a warrior. Well, I also love just the degree to which it's clear that finding moments

of silence or finding meditation, the Zen practice, obviously, I want to come back to that, had this unbelievable impact on your life. Like, do you think you become a seal if you never learned to meditate? Absolutely not. Like, there's zero chance that I would have been a seal. I showed up at maybe seal training, everyone was a total stud, right? And I'm looking at this class, I had 185 studs on day one. And I'm like, wow, there's some badass guys. A lot of former military, like Marine Recon and even Special Forces guys trying to become seals and then a bunch of civilians like me. And so it turns out, Will, I mean, the physical stuff, I was right there. You know, I'd done the work. I was a competitive athlete. I dominated the screening test scores.

So I wasn't worried about that. But pretty much everyone had that. that, you know, I mean, some more than the others. So I immediately kind of went back to my toolkit from Zen and said, okay, you know, what's going to differentiate me? And it wasn't so much I sat down and planned this out. It's more like the skills kind of were there for me, and so I doubled down on them. I continued my Zen practice. I continued my, you know, structured breathing or controlled breathing practice and visualization. Now, visualization is something I added on during my Zen training because it really helped me concentrate. In turns out imagery is a great way, it's a great tool for concentration, but it has a lot of

other benefits too, which have been well researched in, you know, especially with sports visualization for practice, and also for manifesting kind of some sort of destiny that is desirable to you, that you really are strongly aligned with. So I use visualization in my daily practice for about a year before I got accepted into the Officer Candidate program, and I continue to use it throughout my time in seal training. We graduated with 18 guys, and I was the honor man of my class, number one graduate in my class. Congratulations. And I can tell you, thanks, it was no big deal for me because I was leveraging the skills of meditation. I find it deeply inspiring that here you have a world-class Navy SEAL talking about moments of silence and the

importance of meditation. So if that doesn't make meditation to you, you feel more accessible, it certainly should. And for those of you who were skeptical or thought it was soft, that should smooth things over. That's episode 59 with Mark Devine. Now, it may be surprising that Mark Devine as a Navy SEAL uses meditation in his daily life, but if anything surprising, it's going to be that Stevo, yes, Wild Stevo from Jackass, is a massive proponent of meditation. So here's Steve-O, episode 106. Check it out, dude. This is my meditation. I'm on 306 straight days, averaging 41 minutes per day. I know, it's funny. I could tell you're a meditator

just from talking to you. I've been meditating for six years. Nice. What kind of meditation? I do transnational meditation. You know, mantra-based, dude. mantra-based focus, clears your mind out, lets the things float in that you need to know about. It changed my life. Epic, dude. I'll take it a step further. I believe, and I know a lot of people think, oh, what a kook.

But I genuinely believe that by the virtue of a disciplined spiritual practice of meditation, twice a day without that you actually get plugged into something where the universe, conspires in your favor because we're all interconnected no matter what and and by I just think it plugs you in where like it's a big deal man it's a big deal it's a real life hack it's a superpower especially for people um who are hyper driven or have like high energy you know it helps you calm your brain. I mean most entrepreneurs I meet myself included are you know just just like shot out of a rocket in some ways and you need that to control that energy and and to shape it I think and I completely agree with you this idea that it makes you feel more connected to everything around you

and in some ways helps you kind of see the paths that you need to see there's like some kind of like synchronicity where like, you know, being a, like when I'm meditating, you know, like when I'm like sort of on my, my spiritual game, like things come together in a way. It's like, man. And another thing I do every day is a gratitude journal. I think that gratitude journal is a serious life hack that they're right in there with all the rest of it. It's amazing. I've done, I don't know, about a hundred of these podcasts now interviewing famous, successful people like yourself, athletes, everyone, and it's unbelievable the number of people that talk about a gratitude journal in their life.

It's just, I mean, it's not even like surprising that if you set aside some time every day to really focus on and focus your attention on things that you're grateful for, then, you know, you're programming your brain to be grateful. You know, you're coming from a place of gratitude. And, yeah, it's like, I mean, how many studies have there been? You know, you don't have to be Oprah to know that. I mean, if that's not a good pitch for meditation, I'm not sure what is. The idea that stevo believes meditation plugs you into the universe and it helps the universe

conspire in your favor. I love that so much. Steevo also hit on the importance of gratitude, which was a big part. of our discussion with Stanford neuroscientist, Andrew Huberman. Huberman explained how gratitude, stillness, and mindfulness can actually chemically change your brain for the better. There are a couple studies now of neuroimaging studies and what we call pet studies, positron emission tomography studies, that support the idea that a period of stillness

each day, anywhere from five to ten minutes, of just physical stillness, combined with some gratitude, creates a neurochemical signature. in us that involves dopamine release as well as serotonin and oxytocin release it's kind of like what MDMA or ecstasy is designed to do but obviously without ingesting anything right and that culmination is very powerful because it is at once this feel good feel capable feel like you can you know kick ass and take names kind of sensation gives you this feeling of possibility and yet you're happy with yourself and so I think people confuse used gratitude thinking, oh, gratitude is just going to make me want less. And when you dig in with

people who seem really hard driving, but have kept that up for many, many decades, what you find is they all have gratitude practices. Totally. They have immense. And it was for me, I thought, wow, I wish I'd known that when I was 15, because I was the kid, you know, just, I would just throw myself at things so hard and or school throw myself at it so hard. And I loved it. But there were times when I was sick, I was depleted, relationship suffered, et cetera. And when you start cultivating those practices of stillness, just physical stillness and gratitude, you come out of that short period of time of five to ten minutes, neurochemically restored. And it's really not an insignificant thing at all. I love that episode with Dr. Huberman. And if you're fascinated by the brain, I think you

should really check it out. That's episode 69. It goes beyond just understanding mindfulness and meditation, but even really touches on mental health and the certain chemicals in your brain, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, that can help you unlock a happier life. That concludes our compilation today on mindfulness, meditation, and it also concludes a month of focusing on mental health. So I hope that you all enjoyed the collection of episodes this month as much as we did recording them. I think there's a lot to take away from this. as someone who was skeptical of this stuff a decade ago and who's now been doing it every day for eight and a half years, I can only just tell you how much finding my own mindfulness practice,

which for me is Transcendental Meditation for you might be something else, just how important it's been in my life. So I'd really encourage you to try to find a way to incorporate something in your life. And I believe not only will it make you happier, but it will make you more grounded in almost everything that you do. With that, I want to just quickly recap the episodes that we hit so you can go back. We had Andy Puddacombe, episode 12, Mark Devine, the Navy Seal, episode 59, Dr. Andrew Huberman, episode 69, Justin Thomas, world-renowned golfer, episode 77, Steve-o, world-renowned jackass, episode 106, Alex Honnold, world-class rock climber, that's episode 116, Dr.

Jim Lair, obviously famous sports psychologist, episode 137, and Michael Phelps, episode 171. And if you want to check out any episode of The Whoop podcast, you can find it at whoop.com slash locker. A reminder, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership if you use the code Will, that's WI-L. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or a review. Please subscribe. You can check us out on social at Woop, at Will. Ahmed. And with that, I wish you a phenomenal week.