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Study: Stress-management counseling improves recruits’ performance

A study by a retired Navy captain found that Navy recruits graduated boot camp at higher rates when they received 45 minutes of stress-management counseling each week, and those recruits do just as well when they go to the fleet.

Reg Williams, a nursing and psychiatry professor at the University of Michigan who retired in 2004 after 36 years as a Navy nurse, said 86 percent of the more than 500 Navy recruits who went through a pilot stress management intervention program at Naval Station Great Lakes, Ill., graduated from boot camp. Less than 75 percent of a comparably sized control group graduated.

Two years after finishing boot camp, recruits who received “stress management intervention” were 1 percent more likely to be in the Navy than were members of the control group.

The study seemed to debunk the idea that recruits who made it through boot camp in a harder, less-sensitive era developed a mental toughness that those in today’s military don’t have.

“Yelling at people, calling them names, breaking them down, that is not effective,” Williams said. Stress management intervention “doesn’t mean soft. People interpret that if you are helping a person learn, you are being soft on them.

“You are taking a 19-year-old and expecting them to learn how to manage a stressful condition on their own,” he said.

The study — BOOTSTRAP, or Boot Camp Survival Training for Recruits — was conducted over a 28-month period starting in 2001.

During the study, a division of about 80 sailors was given weekly sessions in how to connect socially with each other, how to emotionally deal with dressing downs that inevitably come from their recruit division commanders and how to pretend that a loved one is waiting for them at the end of Battle Stations in order to make it through the last exhausting hours.

The sessions, conducted in groups of about 15 recruits, were held in the recruits’ barracks for about an hour each Wednesday night to minimize the effect on recruits’ busy daytime training schedules.

Williams said the program’s effects are not limited to helping recruits graduate boot camp — they also create a better sense of teamwork and unit cohesion in sailors that will serve them well as they go into the fleet, particularly during wartime.

“[Many recruits in study groups] really didn’t understand what it meant to be a team player,” he said. “We gave them strategies of how to work as a team. One thing we know about wartime is it’s the teamwork that keeps people safe.”

If the test program was implemented for every boot camp recruit, the Navy could save more than $18 million per year now spent to recruit and train replacements for those who leave the Navy early because they fail to adjust to boot camp’s stresses, Williams said.

It would cost a little more than $1.4 million to implement the program for every recruit, according to the study, which was published in a 2007 edition of Military Medicine.

The project was funded by a $450,000 grant from the TriService Nursing Research Program, which is funded by the Defense Department.

Williams said the Navy has begun to incorporate some of the lessons from the study in the way it trains recruits.

“All the services can benefit. [Military recruits] are under a lot more stress than the average American out there doing their job.”