Your Brain Is Working While You Sleep

The best tactical idea I ever had for a race came in the shower at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

I'd been grinding on the same problem for weeks -- a final turn entry that wasn't working, no matter how many times I ran it on ice or in my head during those 2am visualization loops where I'd replay every lane change and passing angle until my eyes burned. Film sessions, conversations w/ my coach, hours of obsessive analysis. Nothing.

Then one morning I'm standing under hot water thinking about nothing in particular and the move just appeared. A different entry point I'd never consciously considered. Fully formed, like someone had slid it under the door while I wasn't looking.

I tried it the next day and it worked.

I didn't understand the science at 19, but I understood the feeling. My brain was chewing on skating problems whether I asked it to or not. Driving to the rink, eating dinner at the cafeteria in Colorado Springs, lying in bed staring at the ceiling after a bad training day -- something was always running in the background.

Neuroscientists call it the Default Mode Network -- the brain activity that kicks in when you stop focusing on a task. Your conscious mind steps away and a different kind of processing takes over, reorganizing information & testing connections your focused mind was too busy to explore. The shower, the long drive, the half-asleep state at 11pm -- not interruptions to thinking but a different form of it.

During peak training my entire life was pointed at one target. Every conversation, every film session, every painful interval on the ice was adding data to the same problem -- how to get faster, how to read the pack better, how to shave hundredths off transition times already measured in blinks. So when my conscious mind stepped away, the background processor had material to work w/ and a clear direction to aim at.

That's the part that matters. The quality of what surfaces when you step away depends on the quality of what you've been feeding your mind while you're engaged. The background processor needs material. Specific material, pointed at a specific target.

What happens when you stop aiming it?

The flip side -- and this is the part I wish someone had explained to me during the years after I retired.

When you don't have a clear target, the background processor doesn't shut off. It fills itself w/ whatever is lying around. Old arguments you replay w/ better comebacks that will never get used. Embarrassing moments from six yrs ago your body still flinches at. Catastrophic scenarios about things you can't control, running on a loop bc the machinery has nothing else to chew on.

I went through a stretch after retiring where I'd wake up at 3am and my brain would be grinding on nothing. Not solving anything, not building toward anything, just cycling through anxiety & regret & the low hum of purposelessness that comes when a mind built for obsessive focus has nothing to focus on. Same processing power, same relentless engine, zero direction.

Most of us have been there at some point -- maybe not from retiring from sport, but from a job transition or a relationship ending or just a stretch where the target got blurry and the mental machinery kept running anyway.

My dad used to do something that drove me crazy at the time but makes more sense now. Before bed he'd say "think about the 1500 tomorrow" or "think about the relay exchange." Not "think about skating." Not "think about getting better." A specific problem, named clearly, right before the conscious mind shut down for the night.

Now I do a version of the same thing. Before I step away from something I'm wrestling w/ -- a business decision, a keynote I'm building, a conversation I need to have -- I try to state the problem as precisely as I can. Sometimes out loud, sometimes written down. Then I let it go & do something else entirely.

The key is the letting go part. Constant conscious attention seems to interfere w/ the process -- like standing over someone's shoulder while they're trying to work. The background processor needs you to leave the room.

More often than not, something shows up. Not always a fully formed answer, but a direction, a reframe, a way of seeing the problem that wasn't available when I was staring straight at it.

That move I found in the shower at the OTC wasn't some magical accident. It was months of deliberate loading -- thousands of laps, hundreds of film sessions, a mind so saturated w/ the problem it kept working even when I stopped.

The shower just happened to be the moment my conscious mind finally shut up long enough to listen.

I think about my dad saying "think about the 1500 tomorrow" and it's funny how the simplest instructions are sometimes the ones that stick w/ you across decades. He probably doesn't even remember saying it.

I write about this kind of thing in Hard Pivot -- how performance actually works from the inside, not the clean version.

You can also learn more about my speaking and advisory work or read what Hard Pivot means.

--AAO