The goal of such exercises is to teach people to pay nonjudgmental attention to exactly what they’re feeling in the moment. That means that if they get a cramp during a run, rather than thinking, “Ow! This hurts!” they think, “I have a strong pain in my side.”
“You’re not trying to change [the stressor],” Paulus says. “You’re just paying attention to it. And that paying attention has a profound effect on how the brain naturally adjusts itself to down-regulate emotions.” By monitoring your feelings without judgment, his theory goes, you achieve detachment from them, which allows you to soldier through difficult moments without letting discomfort disrupt your focus.
To put the mindfulness training tool to the test, in 2011, Paulus and colleague Douglas C. Johnson performed a before-and-after study on a group of more than 200 Marine recruits going through pre-deployment training. Paulus gave the recruits the restricted-breathing stress test before the program began. Then half the platoons received 20 hours of M-fit classroom instruction over about two months, while the other half stuck to an ordinary training regimen. At the end of the training period, the subjects performed the restricted-breathing test again. The recruits in the M-fit group displayed brain-scan patterns strikingly similar to those Paulus had seen in the SEALs and Nyad, suggesting the trained recruits had gotten better at anticipating stress and staying calm while facing it.
“What we’re seeing is that [the training] actually changes how the brain processes information,” says pain specialist Gary Kaplan, founder of the Kaplan Center for Integrative Medicine, who is familiar with Paulus’ work. “We have information coming in, and the more present in the moment we are, the more we can interpret it realistically.”
