“Pendulation”: Rock Your Attention Back and Forth from Fear to Focus to Express Skill Under Stress
Finding freedom, focus, accuracy, decisiveness, and fluency on the wall—even while fear shows up—is a learnable, refinable skill with deliberate practice.
There’s no need to get lost in the extremes:
Letting fear completely consume your consciousness so you miss out on genuine opportunities for discovery and learning.
Or pushing it away, “toughening up,” or showing off by “trying hard” even when terror makes you tense and rigid.
There’s no need to make a single choice about how to respond to fear when it inevitably shows up.
Just as pendulums are a staple of dynamic movement in climbing (swinging, momentum, rebalancing), they can also become a staple in the skill of emotional regulation—both on and off the wall.
In fact, pendulation, a concept from Somatic Experiencing (a trauma-informed body-based therapy), describes intentionally shifting attention back and forth between a safe or pleasant aspect of your experience and one that feels threatening or uncomfortable.
Practicing pendulation as a mental and bodily skill can directly benefit your physical experience on the wall. Over time, it increases your capacity to hold discomfort without shutting down or tensing up, while still maintaining access to curiosity, movement options, and learning.
The Pendulation Practice for Climbers
1. Begin on the ground (eyes closed or soft focus):
Find a comfortable seat or lying position.
Slow your breath.
Identify one pleasant and one unpleasant sensation, thought, or emotion.
For example:
On an inhale, you might let awareness rest on a nagging shoulder ache or an anxious thought about falling.
On an exhale, you might notice how supported your body feels on the ground, the coolness of the air, or a sense of safety in the room.
The inhale gently stimulates your sympathetic arousal (exaggerating awareness of challenge). The exhale engages your parasympathetic response (exaggerating calm or safety).
2. Add mild load: Eyes open, standing up.
Notice your balance, visual input, and environment.
Pick the same or new positive/negative anchors.
Example:
Your eyes lock onto a greasy wide pinch on a jump-start problem and you think: “I’ll never hold that.”
You also notice laughter and easygoing conversation around you, bringing a smile.
Pendulate between them with breath.
3. On the wall:
Try easy climbs first.
Practice noticing and naming your fear response (e.g., tension, negative thoughts) while intentionally anchoring back to something safe or pleasant.
Gradually increase difficulty as long as you can maintain the pendulation.
Crucially:
The goal of the drill is not sending or performing. It’s maintaining the capacity to oscillate between the negative and the positive, so that you don’t get stuck in either.
Over time, this practice builds:
Emotional flexibility.
Physiological regulation.
Mental bandwidth for creative problem solving.
Access to precision, timing, and power even under stress.
Why this works for climbers
It’s not about banishing fear. It’s about creating a system that can hold fear without collapse or panic.
Just as dynamic movement in climbing often requires rebalancing from side to side, your emotional system benefits from oscillation rather than rigidity.
You condition your nervous system to experience fear as information—not a command to freeze or muscle through.
It supports learning by keeping you open to feedback even in hard moments.
This is a real skill you can practice every session. The wall doesn’t just test your physical ability—it trains your capacity to feel, notice, and choose your response.
