Peak newsletter 🧠 | This is an excerpt from The Athletic’s weekly newsletter covering the mental side of sports. Sign up here to receive the Peak newsletter directly in your inbox.In this week’s newsletter, I asked mental performance coaches a question: What’s the smallest habit you wish players (or people, generally) would adopt that could have the biggest impact? These are my three favorite answers.1. Five to 10 minutes of quiet, alone timeAdam Bernero, the mental performance coach for the Seattle Mariners, practically begs his players to do this.“Just spend five to 10 minutes with yourself with no phone,” he tells them. “Just try to be quiet in your body and your brain.”Bernero pitched in the big leagues for parts of seven seasons. This is his eighth season as the Mariners’ mental performance coach, and in that time he’s found that players often push back if he suggests they meditate.Instead, he offers five minutes of quiet time as an easy “step one.”He tells players to put their phone in another room, find a quiet space and just sit, ideally for five to 10 minutes.“That helps with reminding yourself about your creativity, who you are, what you’re inspired by,” he said. “I just think we need that time for ourselves, and we don’t give ourselves any of it anymore.”Julie Elion, who works with some of the top golfers on the PGA Tour, did something similar with one of her athletes recently. She told him to set a timer for two minutes (“I wanted five,” she said), then put his phone down and just sit with his thoughts.“Any thought — I’m not good at this, this is bulls—, why is Julie having me do this, my back hurts — any thought at all, just notice it’s a thought,” she said. “If we have a thought that is just wasting our energy, we have to actually practice in our brain clearing the space so we can just freaking put a good golf swing on target.”