Adventure leads us all to learn about ourselves and our capacity for discomfort. I want to focus a bit on how best to harness science to learn about ourselves before we head off for these wilderness lessons. Before doing so, I offer a little perspective.

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• Quantify yourself: In 2007, Wired magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly founded what is now considered a movement—the quantified self or QS for short. They popularized self-study just as Ebbinghaus did in the late 19th century, but with the advent of wearable devices, logging your own data became easy. Since the start of the QS movement, countless discussion groups, local meet-ups, international conferences and such emerged to support enthusiasts. Coming back to adventure, the QS movement offers us adventurers something quite amazing. We can learn about our body and mind under stress at home! Just putting yourself through physical stress is not enough; we learn more if we measure ourselves while coping with them. Combined, the simulated environment with the QS approach to data logging your body's responses helps us learn how we respond to extremes. Adventurers from years past could only learn about their responses to stress by experiencing those stresses first-hand. If you want to feel confident in your adventurous pursuits, quantify your responses and learn from the results.

streess

• Stress generally refers to two things: the psychological perception of pressure, on the one hand, and the body's response to it, on the other, which involves multiple systems, from metabolism to muscles to memory. Through hormonal signaling, the perception of danger sets off an automatic response system, known as the fight-or-flight response, that prepares all animals to meet a challenge or flee from it. A stressful event —whether an external phenomenon like the sudden appearance of a snake on your path or an internal event like fear of losing your job when the boss yells at you—triggers a cascade of hormones, including adrenaline and cortisol, that surge through the body, speeding heartbeat and the circulation of blood, mobilizing fat and sugar for fast energy, focusing attention, preparing muscles for action, and more. It generally takes some time for the body to calm down after the stress response has been triggered.

Lifesaving as the stress response is, it was meant to solve short-term, life-threatening problems, not extended difficulties such as daily traffic jams or marital problems. Prolonged or repeated arousal of the stress response, a characteristic of modern life, can have harmful physical and psychological effects, including heart disease and depression.

Over the last few decades, a rising tide of studies has demonstrated the value of regularly engaging in activities that blunt the stress response, from meditation to yoga to strenuous physical activity. Since the stress response begins in the brain with the perception of stress, researchers are now looking into what may be a most basic, and effective, way to defuse stress—by changing perception of certain types of situations so that they are not seen as stressful in the first place. Studies show that helping people see certain experiences—such as final exams—as demanding rather than dire, protects them from the negative effects of stress while delivering its positive effects, especially focused attention and speedier information processing. Changing the stress mindset not only minimizes the effects of stress, studies show, it enhances performance and productivity.

How to Get Motivated

• Motivation is literally the desire to do things. It's the difference between waking up before dawn to pound the pavement and lazing around the house all day. It's the crucial element in setting and attaining goals—and research shows you can influence your own levels of motivation and self-control. So figure out what you want, power through the pain period, and start being who you want to be.

Focus on the process: Goal setting leads many to focus solely on the outcome, but that end-point only comes once. A more productive approach is to also monitor the process to achieve the desired goal. Consider the following example. You desire to run a marathon in a certain time—say four hours—and you know that most people who run at that speed must complete several runs of at least 20 miles at a similar pace prior to running the race. Furthermore, those same accomplished four-hour marathon runners consistently run distances of 10 kilometers and five kilometers at a much faster pace. Those intermediate runs allow for smaller, more proximal steps to evaluate progress toward the goal. Still, those runs are not enough; they still focus you upon some outcome. A more global process of preparing for the marathon allows you many successes and failures along the way. A marathon training program may take you one year. During that year, you break down the preparation to a set of activities such as running, lifting, stretching, and resting such that if you complied with all the scheduled events, you would be well prepared for the event. A process-monitoring approach allows you to focus on many steps toward your goal. Each step can be gauged with respect to quality and success. Thus, in 12 months, you may have over 100 activities checked off and rated. A successful outcome is more likely to happen if you have greater compliance with a proven program than if you simply check your performance during intermediate attempts (such as a 10K race performance during your marathon preparation). Process lapses can be corrected; setbacks in interim achievement checks often stand as grim reminders of your potential for failure.