Performance Psychology

Troy, A. S., et al. (2017). Cognitive Reappraisal and Acceptance: Effects on Emotion, Physiology, and Perceived Cognitive Costs. Emotion, 18(1), 58–74. Published in the peer-reviewed APA journal Emotion, the study used a within-subjects experimental design across two samples totaling 142 participants. Participants were exposed to sad film clips as an emotion induction and then instructed to deploy either cognitive reappraisal (reframing the meaning of the stimulus) or acceptance (engaging with feelings nonjudgmentally without attempting to control them). The researchers measured subjective negative and positive emotions, physiological responses (skin conductance level, an indicator of sympathetic arousal), and perceived effort, difficulty, and success. The key finding was that reappraisal produced significantly larger decreases in negative emotion and larger increases in positive emotion than acceptance, both during the stressor and during recovery. Acceptance was perceived as less difficult to deploy and showed a smaller dampening of skin conductance in one sample. The study concludes that reappraisal and acceptance are both effective but for different reasons, with reappraisal being the stronger short-term strategy for changing the subjective emotional experience. The full open-access article is available via PubMed Central (PMC6188704).

What this study confirms is something I have lived enough to trust. The body does not distinguish between a real threat and a rehearsed one. When I carried a difficult emotional situation into the gym on Saturday, my nervous system was responding to two stressors at once, the situation itself and my continued rehearsal of it. Reappraisal, reframing the meaning of where I was and what I could control, was the intervention that broke the loop. The study's finding that reappraisal produced larger decreases in negative emotion during the recovery period is significant, because recovery is where the next set is decided. If the nervous system does not return toward baseline between sets, the second and third efforts are being drawn from a depleted account. The researchers also noted that acceptance, while easier to deploy, was less effective at changing the subjective emotional experience in the short term. This matches my observation that simply accepting the feeling without restructuring the meaning does not free the energy. I had to tell myself to get my shit together, not as a dismissal, but as a reorganization of where my attention and my physiology were being spent.

On Saturday, I walked into the gym carrying a difficult emotional situation. I could feel the weight of it in my chest and in the way my shoulders were set. I had to tap into my PhD training and remember that I could not change what was out there while I was in here, and that the problem was out there, not on the platform with me. I told myself to let go of what I could not control, and I reminded myself that the unconscious mind cannot distinguish between what is actually happening and what I am merely thinking deeply about. That reframing lowered my heart rate and blood pressure, and the energy that had been going into a defensive response became available for the workout. On Monday, chest and shoulder day, I did not have to rebuild the discipline from scratch. I only had to remember what I had practiced on Saturday, and the reframing carried me through. This is the compounding effect the study's recovery-period finding implies. Each time you successfully reappraise, you are not only regulating the current moment, you are rehearsing a return-to-baseline pattern that becomes faster and more automatic. The coach has reinforced this from the beginning, that the work we do under load is also the work we do on our own nervous system. Reframing is one of the load-bearing skills.

Troy, A. S., Brunner, A., Shallcross, A. J., Friedman, R., & Jones, M. C. (2017). Cognitive reappraisal and acceptance: Effects on emotion, physiology, and perceived cognitive costs. Emotion, 18(1), 58–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000371

When people talk about exercise, they often focus on motivation. This study shows that confidence may be just as important. Neupert et al. (2009) studied older adults who completed a strength training program. The researchers wanted to know why some people continued exercising after the program ended while others stopped. The results showed that older adults who developed stronger exercise self efficacy were more likely to continue exercising months later. Self efficacy means believing you can complete a specific task, even when it becomes difficult. The study also found that confidence and exercise affected each other. Exercise helped people become more confident, and that confidence helped them continue exercising (Neupert et al., 2009).

This research connects directly to my bodybuilding journey after 50. I did not need to feel completely confident before I began. I needed to begin so I could build confidence. Every workout I complete gives me new evidence that I can continue. Every meal I prepare, every weight I increase, and every difficult day I finish teaches my brain that I am capable. My confidence is not based on pretending this journey will be easy. It is based on doing the work and seeing what happens. Neupert et al. (2009) found that the beliefs people developed while exercising helped predict whether they continued later. This means that every completed workout can become more than physical progress. It can become proof that I am someone who keeps going.

Many people over 50 believe they need to become motivated before they can change. I believe the order is often reversed. We act first, we collect evidence, and then our confidence grows. You do not have to believe you can complete the whole journey today. You only need enough belief to complete the next useful action. My mission is not simply to build muscle. I want to show people that age does not remove our ability to learn, change, and become stronger. Research indicates that exercise self efficacy is connected to continued exercise among older adults, but it does not prove that confidence alone controls every outcome (Neupert et al., 2009). Our health, available time, support, knowledge, and resources also matter. Confidence does not replace the work, it grows because we repeatedly do the work.

Neupert, S. D., Lachman, M. E., & Whitbourne, S. B. (2009). Exercise self-efficacy and control beliefs predict exercise behavior after an exercise intervention for older adults. Journal of Aging and Physical Activity, 17(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1123/japa.17.1.1 Open access article: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3740728/

This paper asks a simple question. Does your willpower work like a muscle? For many years, scientists believed that self-control is a kind of energy inside you. Every time you resist a temptation, solve a hard problem, or push through something difficult, you use up some of that energy. This is called ego depletion. The idea is that after you use your willpower on one hard task, you have less left over for the next hard task, at least for a little while. The researchers, Baumeister et al., spent over ten years testing this idea and found something powerful. First, using self-control does tire you out for a short time, much like your legs get tired after a hard workout. Second, and this is the important part, willpower gets stronger the more you use it. Just like a muscle grows when you train it and rest it, your self-control grows stronger when you practice it over and over. The authors also looked at real-life proof outside the laboratory. They found that judges make worse parole decisions late in the day when they are tired. Hospital workers skip handwashing more often near the end of a long shift. Students score lower on tests taken late in the afternoon. All of these examples show that willpower runs low with overuse, but the good news is that consistent practice builds it back up stronger over time.

Baumeister et al. (2018) revisited a theory the authors introduced two decades earlier, in Baumeister et al. (1994) and Baumeister and Heatherton (1996), and tested whether the strength model of self-regulation still held up against ten more years of research and criticism. The core mechanism has two working parts. Energy and motivation are not the same thing. Energy is the resource you spend during effortful activity, while motivation is your desire to spend it. When you exert self-control on one task, you do not run completely empty, you conserve your remaining resource, which explains why performance dips instead of disappearing entirely on a following task, a process Muraven et al. (2006) called conservation. The training effect is the part that matters most for anyone trying to build discipline. Meta-analyses by Friese et al. (2017) and by Beames et al. (2017) confirmed that regular exercise of self-control in one area of life improves self-control performance in other areas, the same overload-and-adaptation pattern seen in physical training. The authors also addressed a serious challenge to their theory. A large multi-lab replication by Hagger et al. (2016) failed to find the ego-depletion effect, and a meta-analysis by Carter et al. (2015) suggested the true effect size might be close to zero. Baumeister and colleagues argued that both critiques relied on flawed methods and selectively discarded published data, and they countered with hundreds of published findings plus consistent real-world evidence from parole decisions (Danziger et al., 2011), hospital hygiene compliance (Dai et al., 2015), and standardized test performance (Sievertsen et al., 2016). One additional finding deserves attention because it connects directly to the last dossier on positive illusions. Job et al. (2010) found that a person's belief about whether willpower is limited changes how quickly that person actually depletes, meaning mindset interacts with the physical resource but, according to Baumeister and colleagues' own replication, does not replace it (Vohs et al., 2012). Self-control, in other words, is a real and finite resource that responds to honest, repeated training, not a story you tell yourself.

Every competitor who has ever stepped on a stage knows the feeling this study describes before they ever read a single page of research. There are days when the alarm goes off at four in the morning and getting out of bed feels like the hardest rep of the entire day. There are nights when the fridge is calling my name after a long shift and holding the line on my diet takes more out of me than the workout did. What this research confirms is something I already learned the hard way. Willpower runs out. It is not unlimited, and pretending otherwise sets you up to fail. But here is the part that changed how I think about discipline entirely. The same exertion that tires out my self-control today is the exact thing that makes it stronger tomorrow, provided I keep showing up and keep recovering, exactly the same principle that builds muscle in the gym. I do not wake up one morning suddenly disciplined. I build that discipline one uncomfortable rep at a time, one skipped dessert at a time, one hard choice at a time, and each one adds a little more capacity for the next hard choice. This is also why I do not load every temptation onto myself in a single day. The research on judges making worse choices later in their shift lines up with what I feel by dinner time after a full day of resisting food I did not plan to eat. I protect my willpower the same way I protect my joints, with planning and with rest, not with the false belief that I can grind through everything at full strength forever. Age over 50 does not exempt me from any of this. If anything, it raises the stakes, because recovery takes longer and the margin for error gets smaller. But the science backs up exactly what my training has taught me on the platform and in the kitchen. Discipline is not a personality trait you either have or do not have. It is a muscle. Train it, rest it, and it grows. Neglect it, or ask too much of it without recovery, and it fails you, the same as any other muscle in your body. That is the whole game, and it is available to anyone willing to put in the reps, no matter what year they were born.

Baumeister et al. (2018). The strength model of self-regulation: Conclusions from the second decade of willpower research. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 141–145. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617716946

This paper asks a big question: Is it good to believe things about yourself that are not completely true if those beliefs make you feel better? Some psychologists believed that people who think, "I'm better than most people," "I can control almost anything," or "Everything will work out for me," are happier because these positive thoughts help them feel confident. The authors of this paper disagreed. They looked closely at all of the research and found that there was not enough evidence to prove that believing unrealistic things makes people mentally healthier. They found that many of the studies were weak, had problems, or did not really show what the original researchers claimed. The authors said that being mentally healthy is probably not about fooling yourself. Instead, it is better to understand yourself honestly. You can still believe in yourself, but your confidence should be based on what is actually true. In other words: It is good to believe you can improve. It is not good to pretend you are already better than you really are. Real confidence comes from knowing your strengths, knowing your weaknesses, and working to get better every day.

Colvin and Block (1994) did something important that most people skip: they went back and actually read the studies that were being cited as proof that positive illusions make people healthier. What they found was that the evidence was weak, inconsistent, and often didn't prove what researchers claimed it proved. The original argument — by Taylor and Brown in 1988 — was that people who hold slightly inflated views of themselves, believe they have more control than they do, and are unrealistically optimistic are mentally healthier than people who see things more accurately. This became widely accepted and repeated. Colvin and Block pushed back. They showed that the studies used to support this claim had serious methodological problems: poor comparison groups, lab conditions that don't reflect real life, and outcomes that measured only momentary mood rather than long-term mental health. What struck me most was their core argument: adaptive functioning requires accurate perception of cause and effect. If you distort reality consistently, the world eventually corrects you — and that correction can be destabilizing when it comes.

When I started this bodybuilding journey after 50, I realized something important that applies to all of us. A lot of people say the key is to believe you're already great. They tell you to think you're stronger than you are, more disciplined than you are, or that everything will work out no matter what. It sounds motivating, but the research doesn't fully support that idea. One paper reviewed the evidence and found there wasn't enough proof that unrealistic positive thinking actually leads to better mental health or better outcomes. Instead, the authors argued that confidence should come from seeing yourself honestly and building on that truth. That's exactly how I'm approaching this competition. I'm not telling myself I'm already a champion. I'm not pretending this is easy because I'm over 50. I'm not ignoring my weaknesses. I know where I struggle. I know there are days when I'm tired, sore, and questioning whether I can do this. But I also know something else. Every workout I finish, every meal I stick to, every morning I get up when I don't feel like it gives me evidence that I'm becoming better than I was yesterday. That's where my confidence comes from. Real confidence isn't lying to yourself. It's keeping promises to yourself over and over again until you don't need motivation anymore because you've built trust in yourself. Your body doesn't care what you believe. It responds to what you do. That's the lesson I hope to share throughout this journey. Whether your goal is bodybuilding, losing weight, starting a business, or becoming a better parent, don't build your confidence on wishful thinking. Build it on action. Build it on consistency. Build it on the small decisions nobody sees. One day you'll look back and realize you didn't become confident first. You became confident because you kept showing up when it was hard. That's a confidence nobody can take away from you.

Colvin, C. R., & Block, J. (1994). Do positive illusions foster mental health? An examination of the Taylor and Brown formulation. Psychological Bulletin, 116(1), 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.116.1.3