One of many ways that mountain biking helps participants self-confidence by gently helping you out of your comfort zone until you succeed. We see it happen all the time on some of the local experimental trails, where the trail builders like to work on features that seem tricky at first but are immensely satisfying once the right line is figured out. It takes a few attempts but after we ride that line we're pretty happy. Dopamine lights up the brain's reward systems.  It's an exhilarating feeling, figuring something out that seemed totally impossible at first.