Relations Between Daily Events, Coping Strategies and Health During a British Army Ski Expedition Across Antarctica

Abstract

Expedition teams operating in Polar environments are exposed to a range of environmental, psychological, and social challenges. How a person responds to these demands has implications for their physical and psychological health. In this study, we examined relations between the daily events encountered, coping strategies used, and markers of physical and psychological health in a team of six British Army soldiers (one serving and five reservists) completing a 68-day ski-traverse of the Antarctic continent. In general, daily reports indicated a largely adaptive response to the expedition. There were fluctuations in the events encountered, coping strategies used, and experiences of physical and psychological health throughout the endeavor. Reported daily events and coping strategies explained variability in the positive and negative fluctuations of physical and psychological health. Findings from this study can inform health decision-making of groups operating in Polar environments and others living and working under similar constraints.

Mental skills in the armed forces: A scoping review.

“…Mental skills have been cited to include skills, such as imagery, goal setting, self-talk, and relaxation techniques as those most common (Arvinen-Barrow et al, 2015; Birrer & Morgan, 2010), but also include energy management, attention and thought management, performance routines, self-confidence, and cognitive restructuring (Anton et al, 2017; Clark & Williamon, 2011). Beyond some of these more typical considerations of mental skills as primarily implemented for optimization, mental skills have also been cited to include more regulatory skills, or advanced skills, such as emotion regulation, automaticity, coping strategies, activation, and positive reframing (Arthur et al, 2017; Smith et al, 2021). Mental skills have demonstrated success within athletic populations, performing artists, business professionals, police force officers, and military personnel (Anton et al, 2017).…”

Profiles of resilient psychosocial function during three isolated ski expeditions in the High Arctic

“…These observations suggest that a more nuanced understanding of positive and negative events, and how Polar expeditioners manage them, should take account of these in‐expedition experiences rather than rely only on whole‐expedition ratings. Recent research adopting systematic intensive sampling approaches offers a growing body of empirical evidence on variations in physical, psychological, and social parameters that have been anecdotally reported in blogs and journals (e.g., daily questionnaires (Anton‐Solanas et al., 2016; Blackadder‐Weinstein et al., 2019; Pedlar et al., 2007; Smith, 2018; Smith et al., 2021). An important insight from this emerging literature is that an individual's capacity to quickly recover or maintain function across these different parameters when exposed to expedition demands is a critical factor in the successful pursuit of expeditionary goals (Smith et al., 2021).…”

“…From a methodological perspective, prior studies relevant to the present work have typically relied on week‐to‐week or month‐to‐month assessment intervals. With the exception of a small number of studies (e.g., Kahn & Leon, 1994; Smith et al., 2021), earlier work may have failed to capture important individual and team variability and, crucial to the study of resilient function, relevant situational changes in network node responses when operating under persistent demand. With the above limitations in mind, scholars lack a complete understanding of intra‐(and inter‐) individual variations in adaptation, and what a resilient function network might look like in Polar expedition and other extreme environment contexts.…”

“…Although prior conceptual work has discussed resilience in the context of extreme expedition activities (e.g., Suedfeld, 2001Suedfeld, , 2012, there has been, to date, limited empirical work examining resilience in these settings. Studies that have considered dynamism in variables that are contextually relevant for extreme expeditions (e.g., Smith et al, 2021) are instructive, but this and other work is not grounded within a resilience framework. There has also been very little examination of interrelationships between different markers of function that Kalisch et al (2019) and others suggest would function as a dynamic, interconnected, and interdependent resilience network under conditions of stress.…”

“…From a methodological perspective, prior studies relevant to the present work have typically relied on weekto-week or month-to-month assessment intervals. With the exception of a small number of studies (e.g., Kahn & Leon, 1994;Smith et al, 2021) Although the dynamics of resilient function have not received a great deal of attention in extreme environments (e.g., in Polar settings), findings from prior studies provide insight into so-called 'resilience factors' (Bartone et al, 2018;Bögemann et al, 2022).…”