From Marilia Coutinho, a competitive powerlifter and researcher:
There are two distinct approaches to achieving the “special maximum strength” observed in certain meets: the extreme stress-driven performance, with a lot of screaming, hitting and other means of enhancing alertness and stress response, and the focused approach. The latter is less common.
With the help of a more experienced and accomplished lifter, I came to adopt the focused approach about a year and a half ago. We called it the “white chair thing.” Basically, I spent the moments preceding my turn to lift facing the back of an available white plastic chair, emptying my mind. It is hard to claim this is the one or chief reason why my performance leaped to another level, I broke a couple of national and continental records and visibly improved. There were other factors involved.
After this event, however, I started systematically searching for evidence in the literature. Besides a very old article from decades ago showing competent Olympic lifters performed [more] mental rehearsal of their lifts [than] less competent ones, there was very little published material. The search brought me to martial arts techniques. . . .
I spent one year . . . learning qigong in a tai-chi-chuan program. During this one year, I was frustrated. My performance was irregular, mediocre at competitions and my injuries were a real impediment.
About three weeks after I quit tai-chi-chuan, however, I started applying some qigong techniques in weight training. The results impressed me. I want to create a self-experiment on this and record my results. . . . This might be of great help to many athletes who still believe they need a lot of stress enhancing devices to achieve good marks.
Perhaps trying self experimentation to solve my psychiatric problems might be more beneficial than I ever realized. When I come across cognitive behavior therapy techniques, therapists try to get you to write things down and solve the problem in a scientific way. That is what they want, but it’s up to you to actually do it. If I remember correctly, in seth’s self experimentation paper, the researchers who commented on his technique noted that he could have come to his discovery faster if he had discussed more of it with others, instead of just doing it mostly alone. It took him 20 years of self experimentation before writing that research paper. i have many psychiatric problems which modern doctors cannot solve or cure, but maybe self experimentation is the only way i can solve them…..
I read in a magazine that Britney Spears has bipolar disorder. She is working on a “comeback.” With all her money, she did not quit working and try to depend on money from the government for the rest of her life. Her psychiatric disorder did not stop her from continuing to be a contributing member of society and I feel that people aren’t looking down on her because she is mentally ill. I don’t know if she will gain weight on her meds, or experience other problems like that with trying psychiatry as a way to solve her mental problems, but she is so strong and seems so stabilized even though she just started this psychiatric journey. I believe once you start those psych meds, it’s gonna be really hard to stop, and perhaps you can never stop….stopping them abruptly can be dangerous to your health. I really am impressed with Britney, as she is my age, and her ability to function with her mental illness as if she were normal, has really inspired me.
Hi
Marilia has continued her self-experiment and it has been interesting to follow.
Following on from the comment by “1″ about writing things down, there are quite a lot of therapeutic techniques that simply involve writing about one’s condition. I attended a conference a couple of years ago and they were researching the effects of writing from a number of different motivational perspectives (using the states from Reversal Theory) and this was proving to be hgihly effective because one of the common aspects of mental conditions tends to be a level of ‘stuckness’ and being able to articulate different perspectives on the sistuation helps people to become ‘unstuck’. The same can be said of using art, and the 8 states of Reversal Theory have been used to create an ’8 Rooms’ technique whereby patients ‘visit’ the room that they need according to their emotional state.
Once initiated, I guess a lot of this can be thought of as self-experimentation, to some degree.