Sport psychology 1: Anxiety

As I was surfin the netwave I stumbled upon something that is rather useful in my oppinion. Found it on

sportstrainingblog.com 

One way to keep track of how anxiety may be affecting your performance is to monitor your self-talk. Self talk is the thoughts and beliefs that you have about yourself. It can bring you up or drag you down. It can be a distraction or it can help you focus on an aspect of your game plan or technique.

Consider the difference between feeling anxious and thinking “oh no, I’m nervous, I’m not sure if I can do this” and “I feel anxious, but that’s normal, it means my body and mind are ready”.

Now try to absorb yourself in a different way of thinking and a new set of beliefs. Start by challenging some of those old thoughts.

Ask yourself:

• Does my anxiety sometimes drag me down?
• Do I worry that I’m not good enough?
• Do I focus on the negative or blow things out of proportion sometimes?
• Would a different way of thinking help me perform better?
• What happened last time I worried about this?
• Was it better than I thought it would be?
• What is the evidence for and against my worried thoughts?
• What is the likelihood that my fears will come true?

Focus in specifically on whatever you need to feel less anxious about and what specifically you need to say to yourself to achieve a positive frame of mind

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Here are some examples of helpful self-talk. Chose the ones that relate to you and spend some time repeating them in your mind:

• I have trained hard.
• I am strong.
• All I can expect of myself is to do my best at this point in time.
• I can only expect what is reasonable.
• I am improving all the time.
• There’s lots of evidence that I’m a highly skilled athlete.
• My body is recovering well.
• I can find the way to beat my competitors.
• I have strengths they lack.
• I can push through the pain. I feel a need to add a thought here, that even tho pain is never good, it sometime is a part of the game. It is highly important you make the difference between just noise and real pain. For instance a fall in football, tennis or even running can cause a sudden burst of pain... Usually it passes very fast doe to adrenaline and mostly the pain is temporary. You have to push through it! But never push through a constant pain, that might be an indication of injury. That is my view.

Now, take a moment to bring to mind the memory of a time you performed well.

A very good article and some great lines I can relate too. Interesting also, as I can use this when I analyse yesterdays competition.