You’re about to step on court for your first match of the national selection tournament. Getting selected to represent your country has been a lifelong dream and you have worked incredibly hard to get here. However, moments before stepping on court, your heart rate increases, your hands turn cold, you can’t feel your legs and your thoughts start racing. All signs that you’re experiencing high levels of anxiety, that in your opinion are extremely unhelpful to performance. You think you’re going to play a very poor game and make a fool of yourself, which will ruin your career as an athlete.
It is not uncommon to experience nervousness before tournaments and matches. This nervousness increases drastically if the event or match is of significant importance to you. Even professional athletes from Michael Phelps to Naomi Osaka have spoken about the role of mental health and their experiences with anxiety in sport. In an interaction back in 2021, Sachin Tendulkar admitted ‘I felt the anxiety for 10-12 years, had many sleepless nights before a game.’
We all know what anxiety feels like, however we may not be too familiar with the understanding of the concept. So let's begin by discussing what anxiety really is!
First, we need to get the idea that any anxiety is bad for us, out of our head. Anxiety tells us that something is important to us, for example, the nerves we feel before an important exam, a deciding match or when standing at the top of a tall building. This anxiety ensures we work towards achieving our goals and it keeps us safe. However, some times we feel anxiety that is unhealthy and unhelpful. This kind of anxiety interferes with our goals and makes it difficult to continue with tasks. You can identify this unhealthy anxiety by checking if:
• The threat you anticipate is imagined or highly exaggerated
• You find yourself avoiding the threat, and this stops you from living life normally
For example, it is normal to feel anxious when we see a wild animal, because it ensures we get ready to defend ourselves or avoid the interaction. However, when we feel similar anxiety upon seeing a dog and then avoid any and all interactions with dogs, it is unhealthy anxiety because the threat the dog poses in nowhere similar to threat the wild animal poses.
Over time, our body has adapted to keep us safe from danger.
When our ancestors lived in an unsafe environment with constant danger and threats around, their bodies adapted to keep them safe. This adaptation is called the fight-flight-freeze response. It kicks in when our brain perceives danger around, for example, when we see a wild animal, our bodies would respond by either fighting the animal, running away from the animal or freezing. These responses are instinctive and we react without much though. This is because a part of the brain, which we can call the old brain, developed to adapt to the dangers around. However, over the years, as environments became safer, and there weren’t as many threats to our life, from the old brain grew a new part, located behind your forehead. With this part, humans became more thoughtful and logical. However, considering this new brain developed from the old brain, it isn’t as quick to respond because it hasn’t been around for as long as the old brain has. So, in any situation, information travels to our old brain quicker than it travels to our new brain, making us respond with the fight-flight-freeze response. This ‘adaptation’ that was helpful to Stone Age humans, isn’t very helpful to us, especially if our perceived threat of danger is an important match. It could cause us to want to skip the tournament, or make our minds go blank.
When our brain detects a threat or danger, it sends messages for our body to release adrenalin to give us the energy to either run or face the challenge. We may feel a tingling sensation in our stomachs, caused when our body redirects blood away from our digestive system and towards our muscles and heart so that we can spring into action. Our breathing becomes quicker but also very shallow and our immune system is turned off. All of this makes sense when we are facing an actual threat or danger, but at times, this response gets switched on even when there isn’t a real threat. If this happens often, it is not only harmful to our performance as athletes, but also our body.
How can we intervene?
We can intervene at two levels: body and mind.
Practicing breathing, relaxation, grounding and body scan exercises that help us self-regulate, as well as challenging and replacing our unhelpful though processes are two approaches that are effective when working with anxiety. However, for changes to be sustainable, it is helpful to address anxiety at both levels.
In conclusion, as mentioned above, not all anxiety is bad, and completely eliminating all kinds of anxiety wouldn’t be the best idea since it is a protective system we have developed over time. However, when the anxiety we experience becomes debilitating and interferes with our ability to perform, working with a sport psychologist to change it into healthy anxiety by working on both mind and body is helpful and warranted.
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