Aaron's Status

9:23 am

I started reading “Vertical Mind: Psychological Approaches for Optimal Rock Climbing,” a book that was recommended on a climbing gifts blog list or something. I’ve read a couple chapters and so far so good.

To help me lock in what I’m reading, I’ll just briefly blog the take-aways under this tag. It’s a “solo book club!”

The take-away from the first two chapters is that climbing performance is massively psychological. There is a certain base level of strength or flexibility you need, and that will build with practice by itself, but it becomes more and more a mental game as you progress.

They introduce the “ABC(DE)” system for reprogramming your “scripts,” which are like psychological pathways. This is lifted from a psychologist named Albert Ellis.

• A: Antecedents (causes)
• B: Beliefs (about the causes)
• C: Consequences (emotionally, too)
• D: Debunk (identify irrational beliefs)
• E: Effective new beliefs replace irrational ones

The core conceit is that repetition builds “muscle memory,” which is a misnomer for actual optimized neural pathways, and that it takes a bunch of effort to establish new ones.

When we find that some of the pathways we’ve built result in negative autonomic reactions (like overgripping when fearful of falling), we use the ABCDE system to interrogate what is behind it, come up with a new thing to do, and practice it in low-stakes environments until the pathways are “burned in.”

Then we take it to the real world and do it when it counts.