High Res is a website and app that the Australian Defence Force (ADF) use to equip their ‘personnel with the knowledge and skills to maintain peak performance under difficult conditions and in hazardous environments’.
I was directed to it by one of my colleagues, who has connections to the military.
Here is the blurb from the front page
“Sometimes referred to as mental or emotional fitness, resilience is about your capacity to deal with life’s challenges and stressful situations.
Just like when you go to a gym for your physical fitness, you can do the same by training and building your resilience fitness. This helps you develop coping mechanisms so you can endure the tough times and bounce back quickly.
Based on SMART (Self Management and Resilience Training), this website along with the companion app is like your virtual gym, a place for you to practice techniques that will help keep you resilient.”
This explanation resonates strongly with me as someone with an interest in Mental Fitness.
Broadly speaking there are two things you can do on the website/ app.
- Develop an action plan which is really about reflecting on what you want from life, setting some goals and then picking tools that might help in achieving those goals.
- Practice using psychological tools for managing troublesome physical reactions, thoughts, behaviours and emotions. This is the ‘gym’ part where you get introduced and can practice different things like controlled breathing, grounding, distraction, defusing anger, problem solving and thought challenging.
The tools are presented very neatly on the website. You can access them without having to set up an account. In fact, you can access all the content for free.
Whilst the website and app were developed for current and past ADF personnel, and some of the videos and examples have a strong military theme, all the tools are relevant for anyone looking to develop a good set of psychological coping strategies.
I won’t go so far as to say that being a university student is like being in battle, but aspects of the university experience are psychologically and emotionally challenging (e.g. exams, placements) and the High Res website is a great place to learn some psychological techniques to perform under pressure.