The emotional cost of investing in loss

You have to temporarily get worse to reach a higher peak of performance later. ⁠

This concept, called investing in loss, is described in the book The Art of Learning by 8-time national chess champion and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt Josh Waitzkin:

"The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety."

This idea sounds appealing and straightforward enough when progress is steady, but the emotional impact of applying it when your performance has plateaued and you must accept a temporary dip to develop new capacities or refine your skills is much harder to navigate.

For example, if your body hurts all the time and you feel super stiff, the solution is to back off heavy lifts, drop strength volume, and do a ton of movement work.

The *idea* of feeling and moving better is appealing, but when you start losing some fitness and don't get the emotional high of hitting it hard in the gym, your brain will concoct compelling stories to convince you to alter your path to meet your emotional needs.

For many of us, it's tempting to reduce these mental narratives and impulses to the cognitive domain. We tell ourselves that if we think better thoughts, consistency would be easy. And while managing our internal narrative is helpful, it's not a panacea.

We all have emotional needs and reactions that influence our thoughts and impulses, just as our thoughts affect our emotional state. So, learning to manage both sides of the equation (thoughts & feelings) is far more effective than only relying on one.

The solution is simple, but not easy: learn to identify and experience emotions before reacting.

Emotions lose much of their hold over us as soon as we accept and acknowledge them. By doing so, we create mental space between impulse and reaction, allowing us to decide on the best course of action without resorting to repression or rationalizing counterproductive behavior that helps us feel better in the moment.

How overthinking impacts performance

When you're under pressure, thinking too much can make you worse.

In motor learning and cognitive science, this is called explicit monitoring. It's a shift from intuitive execution to conscious control. Under fatigue or evaluation, people start trying to manage every detail of their performance, analyzing each movement or decision instead of letting practiced habits take over.

Dual-process theory, made famous by Dr. Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains how this occurs. Our "System 1" is fast, automatic, and intuitive. Our "System 2" is slow, deliberate, and analytical. When stress rises, uncertainty pulls attention from the automatic to the deliberate. You stop trusting your training and start trying to consciously "make it happen."

This cognitive interference reliably predicts choking under pressure. Skilled golfers miss easy putts when they start thinking about their form. Experienced shooters tighten up when they begin monitoring every shot. In both cases, attention that should be directed toward the external task (reading the environment, feeling the movement) gets hijacked by internal commentary.

The same pattern appears in SOF selection. Candidates who have trained well but start overthinking under fatigue often perform below their capabilities. They waste limited mental energy trying to consciously control what should already be automatic, like how they move, breathe, or react. The more they analyze, the more they tighten up.

The antidote is internal trust built through repetition. Conscious practice builds the foundation of automatic, reflexive performance, where you can be in flow. In a practice setting, you train with awareness and precision under increasingly realistic levels of stress so that, when it matters, you can let go. Through practice, you earn a sense of "been there, done that, figured it out before." Deliberate practice refines the pattern, and stress inoculation teaches you to rely on it.

When the pressure ramps up, your body won't wait for your conscious mind to catch up. It will do what it has rehearsed.

Breathing affects your ability to display your fitness

How you breathe, especially at higher intensities, significantly affects your ability to display your fitness.

If your movement is restricted, your ventilatory capacity (how much air you move on each breath) can be severely affected. In some cases, by upwards of 30%.

Regardless of the degree of impairment, it's not just that you have less fuel (oxygen), but you also have an equivalent amount of more waste products (CO2) clogging the works.

This two-pronged inefficiency crushes people at higher intensities who otherwise seem and feel quite fit at lower intensities. Their legs and arms feel heavy, their heart rate spikes (more than a similarly fit person), they feel panicky and have reduced cognitive control, and they lose control of their breathing.

How well you move plays a significant role in these feedback loops because postural and breathing limitations reciprocally reinforce each other. You can't breathe well because your ribcage is in a poor position and is being crushed by overly active musculature, and your muscles can't relax/feel tight because you can't breathe effectively, so they continue to compensate.

This relationship explains why these folks almost always present with similar postural limitations: flat upper back, significant anterior pelvic tilt, and tight pecs/lats/traps/anterior neck (all secondary breathing muscles).

There are several ways to assess breathing inefficiencies objectively (we discuss them in our book or at the link below), but it's rarely necessary because:

1 - It's obvious when someone doesn't move well.
2 - The solution (movement work) should always be part of your daily routine, even when you feel good.

Movement work (see examples at the link below) is boring, tedious, and feels redundant and unimportant when you're not in pain. It's also the cost of maintaining your ability to display your athletic potential. If you don't do it, it's just a matter of time before breathing or some other compensatory limitation inhibits your performance, regardless of (and because of) how hard you train.

Toughness isn't numbness

Toughness isn't the absence of emotion. It's the ability to feel everything and still function.

In stress physiology, the goal isn't to eliminate the stress response but to regulate it. When you face a threat or a challenge, your sympathetic system kicks into gear: your heart rate rises, breathing quickens, and muscles prime for action.

The consequence of that activation is the product of your opinion. You could experience it as an uncontrollable upwelling of anxiety and paralysis, or you could view it as your body and mind ramping up the tools that you need to get the job done. Either one will be true, depending on what you believe and how you've trained.

The most capable special operators aren't those who stay locked in fight-or-flight mode. They're the ones who can move between activation and recovery. In other words, they have a high regulatory range. They can remain calm enough to think, decide, and adapt while their bodies surge with adrenaline. When the challenge is past, they can shift into deep recovery. They adapt faster and come back stronger.

Through the lens of polyvagal theory, this balance is the ability to shift fluidly between sympathetic arousal and parasympathetic control. So, resilience comes from flexibility, not rigidity. You can't suppress all emotion and expect to stay sharp. Numbness blunts awareness, and awareness is key to adaptability and survival.

This is what separates composure from suppression. One builds capacity; the other builds fragility. Emotional regulation enables you to experience the full spectrum of stress without being consumed by it, so you can utilize the energy, rather than be ruled by it.