Eliminating Anxiety for Peak Performance

Setting goals, concentration and imagery are basic mental strength skills which are crucial in sports and personal performance.

However, what does an athlete do exactly whenever worry and anxiety find their way into your thoughts at and during a competition and jeopardize their performance?

Symptoms of nervousness; things like sweaty hands, rushing heart, edginess, tight muscles, doubts, worry as well as trouble concentrating tend to be typical experiences for a lot of sports athletes.  However, they are particularly disturbing right before and especially during competition. Make no doubt about it, this stress and anxiety WILL have a detrimental impact on overall performance.

And so, what can an athlete do?

Change Your Perception

When I have discussed anxiousness previously, it had been emphasized that on occasion, stress and anxiety may harm performance, but not necessarily all the time. Sadly, it’s often the case that when an athlete experiences anxiety, or nervousness before a competition, he or she automatically thinks, “oh no, I am nervous…this is not good…this is going to end badly.”

Being nervous and stress should not necessarily be an “oh no” occurrence, as anxiety doesn’t always hurt performance. In fact, various theories help us understand the relationship between anxiety and performance and suggest that anxiety can actually help performance—up to a point.

Think about it from a useful standpoint. Haven’t you found that occasionally a little nervousness or anxiousness gets you primed to compete?

Of course you have.

And maybe it’s all in how we label the emotion.  If we didn’t have words to describe the feeling we would simply acknowledge that we have “a funny feeling.”  Interesting, if you took away the label of anxiety or nervousness and just compared the feeling of the energy, the location of it and the size it, I bet it would almost the exact same as excitement.

Here’s a quick tip, when you begin to get those pre-competition emotion such as anxious or nervousness just reframe it and call it excitement, i.e. “Wow…I’m really feeling excited about this match.” This simple reframe will work wonders!

OK…back to the main issue…

The increased emotions before a competition boost in arousal before and can elevate your heart rate and raise your body temperature, helping your body’s physiological systems get ready for the event. So, be careful in “labeling” any apprehension you experience as damaging and something you need to abolish.

Instead, realize that of what you are experiencing and change your point of view regarding anxiety and its role on performance.

See ‘anxiety’ as something that can help improve your performance and take the necessary steps to keep control of it…I have had much success with athletes and tactical athletes simply reframing/relabeling the feeling to “excitement.” After all, only good things are going to happen when we’re excited right?

Establish Your Most Favorable Anxiety Levels

If you’re going to continue to label the emotion as anxiety, then….

If some anxiety and nervous seems to help performance (at times), but too much anxiety hurts performance, what are you supposed to do?

How much nervousness is the right amount?

The answer…it depends on you.

That is, the best possible anxiety levels are individualized; some athletes have peak performance with a little anxiety, others with modest anxiety and still others with elevated anxiety levels. Think back on your past competitive experiences and begin to access which level you perform best under.

Think back to before your peak performances and take note on how nervous or anxious were you? What were you specifically thinking about and feeling? Now go back to your inferior performances and do the same.   Write them down…just don’t think about them.    You can even at a point score, i.e. very nervous = 5, great performance = 5. This will give you a comparison. You’ll then be able to see patterns emerging that connect certain levels of nervousness to levels of performances.   Now, using mental training, think about duplicating or modeling the exact and identical level of energy (anxiety) that produced the best results.  As opposed to thinking “oh no” when experiencing pre-competition anxiety.

You will need to exercise your mental strength and learn, practice and implement these anxiety management skills regularly. The mental strength skills to manage anxiety are fairly basic and easy to understand, but they are hard to put into implement effectively, especially when they needed the most.

Think about this…how many time do you still see an elite level athletes tensing up and missing a critical field goal, a shot on goal or overthrowing a ball in the baseball game?

Yup…it happens to the best of them.

What Type Are You?

If you’re more prone to be overwhelmed by the physical symptoms of anxiety (as described above), your pre-competition agenda should be to focus on calming your body using techniques like:  controlled breathing, mild massage, stretching, affirmations (mantras), moving around, dynamic warm-ups to stay lose and relaxed.

If you’re more affected but the mental anxiety…the ‘monkey talk’, then your primary focus should be to calm the mind.  Successful skills include; focusing on functional and process goals, use positive self-talk, meditation, listen to music and remind yourself of past successes. The key here is to distract yourself and not think about the “what if’s” and being worried and staying calm and focused.

There is a powerful method that does involve ‘outcome’ visualization.  It’s been found that when an athlete, or any person, is anxious about a particular situation, they are seeing the end results as something they DON’T want, i.e. tripping in a race, not making the shot, etc.

When this comes up an easy method to reverse this is to see yourself a few minutes after successfully completing the task at hand.  Actually visualize yourself seeing the successful completion of the event.  Then come back to ‘now’ and see if you’re still anxious.  If not, give your attention to process that will make this goal a reality.

An important note is that these mental strength skills and techniques must be practiced regularly. Practice them during your training sessions by intentionally setting up situations that will increase your anxiety.  This will present you with a great opportunity to practice your energy (anxiety) management skills.

Understanding The Fundamental Causes of Anxiety

While it is important and critical to have skills to deal with stress sand anxiety, it is likewise, if not more important to look for and identify the “whys” behind nervousness. Why are you more nervous today than you were before the game last week? What’s going on?  Self observation and questioning are crucial in understand how you and why you respond the way you do.

Various research studies have pointed out that the greater the importance of the event, the more pumped-up your anxiety will become. It’s worth noting that the importance is decided by you and no one else. This is why you’ll generally feel greater anxiety before the state championship or regional championship game than you will before a pre-season and apparently “meaningless” competition. In addition, the greater the uncertainty about the event, i.e. who will be there, who’s my competition, etc, the more elevated your anxiety will be.

I know, you’re thinking, “of course there is uncertainty, that the nature of the beast.  There is always uncertainty around who’s going to win” Sure, but you are able to control this uncertainty…the uncertainty in you mind. You need to recognize that while the outcome of an event is uncertain and is completely out of your control.  You can however, control 100% of your performance!

So focusing on the outcome of the game (what you can’t control) instead of on the things you can control (your performance) will, most likely, increase your anxiety. To manage pre-competition anxiety, it will be advantageous to focus on the controllable all aspects of your personal performance…to focus on what you need to do to perform at your best.

The athlete that is focused on controlling of his/her own skills and capabilities will be the one who wins the majority of the time.

Now you have some more mental strength tools to do your best and keep your nerves under control, now go use them and achieve peak personal performance.

What are some of your favorite techniques for eliminating anxiety?  Let me know in the comments below.

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