Webb’s book is fantastic Charles Chu
Another good book by a former Navy SEAL is Eric Geithens’ The Heart and the Fist. Geithens explained that it was dawn of the second day of Hell Week when they were standing on the beach at Coronado Island, with their Instructors yelling at them about how awful their lives were going to be in the near future.
And that’s when most of the SEAL trainees rang out. Right there, while Geithens was thinking, “It’s a beautiful beach. A beautiful sunrise. The water is cold, but this is where people come to take vacations.”
What Geithens does not write about is how to train your mind to stop all that anticipatory anxiety chatter, and tell yourself a different story. He gives some examples of what other guys do, like “I’m going to quit, just after the next exercise.” But he doesn’t have advice.
It turns out that cold water immersion is a standard protocol for psychological stress testing. It stand to reason that practice with cold water stress might strengthen our parasympathetic, meditative response.
That’s been my experience.
