Building Confidence

Most of us have been in a situation around or on horses where our confidence just vanishes. We think about all the bad things that might happen, and our heart rates skyrocket. If we let this fear take over, we find we get less and less comfortable doing what we used to do, and then it’s easy to become despondent. But conquering that fear is daunting. After all, all those things we fear might happen, right? Or, we might be frustrated because we’re afraid of something that either a) is too far-fetched to happen, or b) really is not all that bad (like being nervous about getting a clean flying change).

The Physiology of Fear

Fear has a very real physical manifestation. Our sympathetic nervous system kicks in (this is the fight/flight/freeze part of our brain), and a lot of things start to happen: our heart rate goes up, our digestive system slows down (hence dry mouth, nausea, etc.), we start to sweat, our muscles tense and sometimes quiver, and our awareness becomes heightened. We also tend to adopt a “fetal position” posture, where our shoulders collapse down and our legs come up. All of these things had a place in our survival. They help us to get ready to fight or flee whatever is threatening our survival. If we can’t fight or flee, we freeze and often go into a fetal position, which protects our delicate organs from attack.

The problem with this is that if there’s anything that is stressful or frightening, our brain automatically goes into “OMG, WE’RE GOING TO DIE!!!” mode and sets off this response. Now, we recognize intellectually that things like public speaking aren’t going to kill us; we’re not about to fight off a tiger when we speak in public. However, our brain’s automatic response is to trigger all those same systems. It’s not something we control; if we did, it wouldn’t have worked fast enough to have kept our ancestors alive. This becomes a problem as we ride. Horse looks at something? We fear it might spook, and then all of a sudden, we’re tense, our heart rate goes up, and our seat collapses. If the horse does spook, we’re more likely to fall with this posture, right? So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This can also happen with something like showing. Ever ridden a test where you realize you’re suddenly aware of every step of the horse, every movement in the warm up arena? Or maybe you find you lose a stirrup when riding a test when you don’t at home?

What to Do

So how do we combat this? First, we need to put ourselves in a situation where we can intellectually recognize that we’re safe. If your horse is extremely spooky, try riding a horse that isn’t as spooky. Afraid of cantering? Start by not even considering cantering (for the short term). Then, it’s time to hack our bodies. We can actually trick our bodies into feeling more confident by activating the parasympathetic system (which is the opposing system to the sympathetic). Deep breathing is the first defense we have. As we breathe faster, we hyperventilate, which can overload the body with oxygen (which physiologically makes us more anxious). So, breathing deeply and slowly helps our body equalize oxygen and carbon dioxide. It also stimulates the vagus nerve, which goes all the way from our brain and wraps around our stomach and goes back up toward the heart. This nerve is responsible for stimulating digestion and slowing the heart, so when we breath more deeply, we tell it to fire a little more strongly. If we can breathe in, hold the breath, and then release it over certain counts, it’s more effective for this than just breathing in and out.

Next, we combat the postural and muscular issues. The fetal position reinforces a feeling of fear as well as restricting our breathing, which makes us breathe shallower and faster (also reinforcing the feeling of fear). So, we have to go more toward the opposite. We have to aim to bring our legs back and down further than we think, and we have to open our chests in a more “proud” posture (as Maj. Lindgren used to say to his female students: “Headlights up.”). This confident, proud posture can trick our brain into thinking we’re more confident than we are. We can also work on getting our muscles to let go. That’s not so easy to just “do,” so sometimes I have people tense up on purpose really hard and then let that go. That seems to be a lot more effective than just thinking “Relax, dang it!” Most of the time, we’re not really aware of what we’re tensing, so by intentionally tensing it further, it’s easier to let it go.

Next comes the psychological element. If we’re still thinking “I can’t do this” or “X is going to happen,” we’re going to reinforce the brain to go into the sympathetic system. Instead, we’ve got to hack the brain. If we say, “X isn’t going to happen,” our brain is still thinking about X. It’s like if I say don’t think about a purple unicorn, what is the first thing that pops into your head? So, we’ve got to replace purple unicorns with something else. One thing we can do is replace “X is going to happen” with “It’s going to go beautifully.” So if we’re nervous about something like a flying change, we can replace “don’t be late behind again…” with “it’s going to be smooth and clean.” If we’re so nervous that we can’t even get that far, something I have my kids do is say out loud “I got this.” One of my very timid 6yo kids has has blossomed and conquered absolute terror over the least little thing by saying, either loudly or softly: “I got this” (of course, to which I reply “You got this,” then they say “I got this” again, and so forth until they forget what we were actually going to do…). I’ve even had some of my more fearful kids roar with me, filling the valley with echoes of primal, guttural roaring (and probably getting some really weird looks from our neighbors). The roaring amps our bodies up in a confident way, making us feel like we can conquer anything. While maybe we can’t roar at a horse show, we can practice it at home until we can just think about it at a show and replicate the feeling. Another element that can help is to find something to make you laugh. And I mean LAUGH. Raucous, guttural laughter. Laughter is incredibly powerful at chasing away fear, so if you can find something that makes you laugh, it will help enormously with feeling more confident.

After we do these things, then we go for the thing that scares us. Canter scares us? Take a deep breath, get your posture aligned out of fetal position, tense and then relax your muscles, visualize it going well, say “I got this,” (or give a little “rawr”) and go for it. Remember: Audentes fortuna iuvat, “Fortune favors the bold.”

What about the horse?

This is a topic for another post altogether, but the basic elements are the same. Horses go into their own version of fight/flight/freeze, and the physiology is very similar. Being prey animals, this looks a little different than it does for us, and the brain triggers it a lot faster than it does in us. However, just having that understanding can help us compassionately reassure our horses that no, the pole in the corner is not, in fact, going to kill us, and we can go to a safe zone to help the horse relax and go back into a confident state of mind before we ease over into the scary zone. What we don’t want to do, both for horses and humans, is punish for being afraid. This just reinforces the fear. For horses, we don’t want to take away their ability to defend themselves by fleeing or freezing, because that only leaves fighting as the last option. If we take a scared horse and put it in a position where it can’t flee, it will fight. If we force it to move when it wants to freeze, it will fight. All reasoning power goes out the window when fear moves in, so the brain will find whatever way it thinks it needs to go in order to remove individual from the life-threatening situation. If you take away options, the fear heightens, and the brain becomes more desperate. If you push it beyond all those points, the horse will shut down and go into learned helplessness, which is the state they go in when they realize there’s no chance of survival, so the brain starts to shut down and go into mindless compliance. In nature, this is so that the inevitable passing is less painful… this is a horrible way for an animal or person to live, as the body goes more or less numb and the mind becomes extremely depressed and withdrawn. This can happen when a horse is “flooded” by too many frightening stimuli all at once with no reprieve, and sadly, this is a training method some people use because because it quickly renders a horse unreactive. The problem with that is it’s not permanent: if the horse “wakes up” at all from learned helplessness, it will suddenly notice things and start reacting again.

Remember: physiologically, there’s no difference to the brain between a truly life-threatening situation and a situation that just causes stress. So to a horse, who has a lot less ability to rationalize things, this can escalate extremely quickly. Also, neither horses nor humans learn well when they’re afraid. You have to calm down the fear before either one can learn and retain information. If you don’t, you risk inadvertently pushing your horse either to fight or all the way to the point of learned helplessness. People, too, can go to that point. If someone is scared of something and doesn’t bring themselves back to a state of calm where they can learn before going after what they’re afraid of, they’ll also shut down into learned helplessness.

Avoiding Shrinking the Comfort Bubble

That’s not to say we don’t teach ourselves and our horses to accept scary things; we absolutely need to. If we always shy away from what makes us nervous or afraid, we risk shrinking our “comfort bubble.” Our comfort bubble consists of everything that we’re comfortable doing, but if we don’t keep stretching it, it will shrink, and we’ll start being nervous or afraid about things that we used to be comfortable doing. I compare it to a balloon: you can blow up the balloon, but if you don’t keep adding air to it occasionally, some leaks out until it goes back to its original size. So, we have to do things that make us a little uncertain so that we keep stretching it and growing instead of withering. However, neither do we want to stretch it too quickly, or it will pop, and we’ll go back into a sympathetic state or worse. So, the key is to challenge ourselves and our horses a little at a time, starting from a point within our comfort bubble and pushing it just enough that we have a positive experience with something that’s a little scary and can therefore learn that maybe that thing isn’t so scary. Then, we can go back to the rest of the comfort bubble to process what we learned, and then we continually repeat this process until our comfort bubble is sufficiently stretched to the point that the sympathetic system hardly ever gets triggered, and we can really enjoy our riding.

Compassion for Fear is the Answer to Building Confidence

Ultimately, understanding the physiology of fear and how to “trick” your brain into going back to a safe state is the key to building confidence and conquering fear. By understanding its nature, we can develop the tools to help it tone down or even turn off. Now, there are situations where some of that sympathetic response is handy; the heightened awareness can help us perform better, such as at a show where we might need that extra “edge” or if we are indeed in a dangerous situation. Remember: there’s a good reason it developed; if our ancestors didn’t have it, they wouldn’t have survived to produce us. However, learning to temper it in situations that do not actually threaten our survival is important for us to learn and grow so that we can enjoy our riding and achieve our goals. If we let it control us, our comfort bubble will shrink, and we’ll miss out on the things we enjoy and the things that we might enjoy. So, tell yourself “I got this,” sit tall, and go conquer the things that intimidate you; you never know how far beyond your goals you may go.