Performance Psychology Pro Tips

“You have to be in control of yourself before you can control your performance.”
—Ken Ravizza

The Summer 2025 edition of The Mobility Forum included an article describing the functional impact of mental health concerns on performance. It drew a connection between the effects of fatigue, stress, and mood on direct and measurable outputs of performance. If you have not read that article, I would recommend you do so. However, as the saying goes, knowing is half the battle. So what about the other half? This article presents specific methods for addressing negative mental health effects on performance.

Addressing Fatigue and Stress for Yourself

Most Airmen have experienced fatigue and stress at some point over their career. This article is not intended to tell you how to recognize such symptoms, but instead to describe methods for managing them. Hopefully, you have heard some of these before.

Crew rest is a staple of aviation culture that seeks to provide the opportunity to recover from long duty hours and prepare for upcoming periods of high cognitive and physical demand once we re-enter the flight deck. Although crew rest is an important process for managing fatigue, aircrew oftentimes find themselves struggling to sleep despite being on crew rest. Crew rest assumes a relatively high degree of sleep efficiency, the proportion of time spent actually sleeping compared to the time in bed attempting to sleep (chronically low sleep efficiency is the actual definition of insomnia). When aircrew find themselves tired, it is most likely due to poor sleep efficiency. You can improve your sleep efficiency by looking at how you fall asleep. The typical adult’s process for going to sleep involves lying down in bed (maybe practicing some sleep hygiene strategies beforehand, such as a cool, dark, comfortable bedroom or avoidance of caffeine), closing their eyes, and hoping they fall asleep. If they do not fall asleep, there is usually some variation of trying even harder to fall asleep, invariably waking themselves up and worsening their sleep efficiency.

Sleep occurs when three specific processes align: circadian rhythms, sleep pressure, and the relaxation response. Circadian rhythms are the internal rest-activity patterns that typically anchor around wake time and light exposure. Sleep drive is the need to sleep that builds following a period of wakefulness. Upon waking, the brain begins monitoring how long it has been awake, resulting in increasingly strong pressure to fall asleep. A good night’s sleep resets that system so it is ready to go for the next day. If it has been too short a time since the last sleep (for example, a midday nap), there will not be enough pressure to get to sleep the next time. On the flip side, strong sleep pressure has been found to override nearly all other motivations, regardless of the goals or values of the individual (increasing the value of tactical naps). Finally, if it is the right time of day and proper sleep pressure is present, the relaxation response cues the body to fall asleep. For most humans, lying down on a soft bed under a warm blanket in a dark room is relaxing enough to get us to sleep most of the time. However, when that does not work, directly activating the relaxation response is key (becoming anxious that you will not be able to sleep will not help). Here are some ways to activate the relaxation response:

• Slow, deep, steady breathing
• Picturing a relaxing place in your mind’s eye
• Practicing a “body scan” or other mindfulness activity
• Doing something sleep-inducing before getting into bed (reading an article about sleep, perhaps)
  • Note: it is usually recommended to avoid all but two activities in bed to avoid conditioning your brain that the bed is for something other than sleep.

The Summer 2025 Mobility Forum article also identified stress and anxiety as disruptive to high performance. Entire textbooks exist to address these concerns, and it would be outside of this article’s scope to attempt to highlight every option (a good read for anybody interested: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky). Instead, this article will focus on a psychological and a physiological strategy. Psychologically, stress and worry result from responses to thoughts that could consist of fears, anxieties, or other undesirable states. In other words, your brain can respond to thoughts as if they are real. Victor Frankl, a famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, stated that, “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” Consider this scenario: you are sitting in a chair and feeling your heart elevate, your palms start to sweat, your stomach tightens, and your thoughts begin racing… What is happening, where am I, what should I do next? According to Frankl, your interpretation of the situation will influence your response and ultimately your performance. Given the exact same set of stimuli described above, you could recognize anxiety or excitement, both of which provide different behavioral responses that could improve or harm performance. Physiologically, you can orient your brain toward different states, meaning that relaxation responses not only calm the body but also slow down the brain. If you find yourself reacting to stress and worry at unmanageable levels, try a physiological sigh:

• Deep inhale through the nose
• Short, rapid inhale through the nose
• Slow exhale through the mouth

Addressing Fatigue and Stress in Others

Most of us trust the operational risk management (ORM) process and the feedback presented by others. However, it is possible that someone in the midst of a series of stressors or a period of poor sleep does not recognize their internal state. It is incredibly important to recognize the signs of a distressed person prior to assuming their ORM responses are accurate. Ideally, you will know your crew well enough to understand their typical baseline behaviors and create a comfortable environment for them to speak openly regarding any stresses they may be experiencing. However, this statement presents three problems: (1) What happens if you have never met them before? (2) What exactly do you look for to determine a “typical baseline?” and (3) How do you create an environment that encourages disclosure of personal information?

I have not known my crew long enough to know what is and is not normal.

Some typical signs of difficulty managing fatigue are relatively well known: bags under the eyes, slow to respond, and generally just “looking” tired. Stress is somewhat similar in that humans tend to become preoccupied with internal events. Likewise, a stressed person can struggle to maintain focus, be slow to respond, or “look” stressed. The “fight, flight, freeze” response is also known to occur emotionally. Stressed individuals can be irritable, impatient, or give up seemingly simple tasks relatively easily.

How do I figure out a “typical baseline” for someone?

One strategy for learning someone else’s typical baseline is to understand the differences among verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal communication. Verbal communication is exactly what it sounds like: the words the person chooses to communicate. Word choice, general topics of interest, and ways to describe internal and external experiences are ways in which verbal communication can indicate their state of mind. Nonverbals account for a considerable amount of communication between individuals. Facial expressions, level of eye contact, body language, and hand gestures all play into nonverbal communication. Finally, paraverbal communication refers to the ways in which humans produce speech. Rate of speech, tone, and volume can express the internal state of an individual despite similar choices of words. Paying attention to the sum of all three forms of communication can indicate an individual’s typical physical and emotional state and provide indications of deviations from that baseline.

How do I encourage the sharing of personal information and increase ORM accuracy?

The ORM process cannot work if someone does not feel comfortable expressing their internal state. Although the process most often works as intended, there are salient past examples when it did not. Several barriers to effective ORM exist, such as the hierarchical nature of military work, pressure to perform the mission, and unit safety culture. In essence, aircrew are asking each other to be vulnerable in front of others to ensure mission safety and success. Vulnerability and openness can be difficult to encourage, given some of the above barriers. One strategy to encourage openness is to demonstrate it before asking. Humans tend to be socially reciprocal creatures, having spent much of our evolutionary development learning to “fit in.” Take advantage of that fact by generating a culture of openness early in the teambuilding process.

Ultimately, stress and anxiety are considered both states and traits of human functioning. Just because someone said they felt alert and oriented during the brief does not mean they feel the same when stepping onto the plane, during taxi, or any other mission phase. ORM should not stop once the worksheet has been signed. Monitoring each other’s performance level is critical to developing an overall trait of high performance.

Knowing When to Seek Professional Medical Care

Let me reiterate the same closing section as the Summer 2025 article, because I think it is important:

“Taking a moment to address the elephant in the room, I am aware of the concerns that aircrews have about reaching out to mental health professionals. As an aviation psychologist, I understand there are downstream effects of potential grounding for months at a time. I further recognize that a mental health clinic can seem like a ‘Black Box’—where someone walks in, and it is unclear what will happen when they walk out. It is not my job to convince you about what to do with your life. It is not my job to drag you into treatment against your will. It is my job to provide you with the information and transparency to make an informed decision for yourself. This article addresses the potential risks to performance with non-clinical concerns associated with changes in mental health. The simple fact is that nearly all humans have performed effectively without optimized capabilities. The problem comes when our brains start to associate ‘effective’ with ‘safe,’ and we stop mitigating risk (this mindset is the ‘I have driven drunk before and did not die, so I can do it again’ effect). If you or someone you know is or has been struggling with mental health concerns, consider ways to mitigate the risk. As a provider, we talk about seeking specialty mental health treatment as being similar to seeking care for a hurt foot. There is a point that you know it is hurt, and if you know you need help, then you should seek it quickly. It might just be a sprain (low mood) that needs a bit of ice and rest (chaplain or social support). However, if you keep running on it (ignoring the pain), it is susceptible to worsened outcomes. Once it worsens, you will be forced to take more drastic measures to maintain your career and life. Please know there are scientifically supported methods supporting the ‘Black Box’ of mental health treatment, and the goal is to keep/return you to flying in a safe and, hopefully, more resilient manner. If medical care is still unpalatable, social, spiritual, and organizational systems are available to support you. No matter what the problem, the answer is always asking for help.”