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"Psyching Up" and Calming Down: Anxiety in Sport

This document discusses anxiety in athletes and sport performance. It explains that anxiety has cognitive, somatic, and behavioral components. Athletes can experience anxiety before and during competition due to worries about performance, feelings of tension, and restlessness. While anxiety prepares the body for emergency response, too much can negatively impact an athlete's performance. The document suggests interviewing athletes to understand how they personally experience and cope with competitive anxiety.

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Enrique Duclayan III
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170 views3 pages

"Psyching Up" and Calming Down: Anxiety in Sport

This document discusses anxiety in athletes and sport performance. It explains that anxiety has cognitive, somatic, and behavioral components. Athletes can experience anxiety before and during competition due to worries about performance, feelings of tension, and restlessness. While anxiety prepares the body for emergency response, too much can negatively impact an athlete's performance. The document suggests interviewing athletes to understand how they personally experience and cope with competitive anxiety.

Uploaded by

Enrique Duclayan III
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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“PSYCHING UP” AND CALMING DOWN: ANXIETY IN SPORT

INTRODUCTION

Competitive sport can make even the world’s most successful athlete feel nervous. For example, the
quotations above bear eloquent testimony to the anxiety experienced by such seasoned performers as
the six-times world champion snooker player Steve Davis (when performing at the Crucible in Sheffield)
and the world top-ten golfer Pádraig Harrington (when playing for Europe in the 2002 Ryder Cup match
against the United States) in pressure situations

There are two sorts of player: those who are quite placid people…who need an adrenaline flow to get
them up for it, and so find nerves a real help. And then there are those who are naturally hyper for
whom that additional flow may not be such a good thing. When I look at players now, I can see who fits
into which category and then their ability to cope depends on whether they can either bring themselves
up or take themselves down, (cited in Selvey, 1998, p. 2; italics mine)

Similar sentiments were expressed by Sam Torrance, the captain of the victorious European golf team
before the 2002 Ryder Cup, when he urged his players to use their nervous energy effectively (see quote
at the beginning of this chapter). Given the importance of anxiety control in sport, how can athletes
manage to calm themselves down before or during a competition?
ANXIETY IN ATHLETES

According to Onions (1996), the term anxiety is derived from the Latin word angere, meaning “to
choke”. This Latin root is interesting because choking under pressure is widespread in sport .

Buckworth and Dishman (2002) who defined anxiety as a state of “worry, apprehension, or tension that
often occurs in the absence of real or obvious danger”

COMPONENTS OF ANXIETY: COGNITIVE, SOMATIC AND BEHAVIOURAL

Most psychologists regard anxiety as a multidimensional construct with at least three dimensions or
components: mental (or “cognitive”), physical (or “somatic”) and behavioural (Gould et al., 2002).

COGNITIVE ANXIETY involves worrying or having negative expectations about some impending situation
or performance and engaging in task-irrelevant thinking as a consequence.

SOMATIC ANXIETY refers to the physical manifestation of anxiety and may be defined as “one’s
perception of the physiological-affective elements of the anxiety experience, that is, indications of
autonomic arousal and unpleasant feeling states such as nervousness and tension” (Morris et al)

BEHAVIOURAL In this domain, indices of anxiety include tense facial expressions, changes in
communication patterns (e.g., unusually rapid speech delivery) and agitation and restlessness (Gould et
al., 2002).

First, factor analyses of self-report state anxiety scales tend to reveal a multidimensional rather than a
unidimensional structure.

Second, there are grounds for believing that cognitive and somatic anxiety emanate from different types
of pre-competitive patterns.
ANXIETY, FEAR AND AROUSAL

anxiety is similar to a fear in some ways. To explain, anxiety is elicited whenever people interpret a
particular person, event or situation as posing a threat to them in some way. This perception of threat
may be based on realistic or imaginary fears—although the distinction between these two factors is
often blurred in everyday life.

In psychology, the term “arousal” refers to a type of bodily energy which primes or prepares us for
emergency action. For example, when we are threatened physically, our body’s sympathetic nervous
system prepares us either to confront the source of danger or to run away from it.

BOX 1: EXPLORING THE MEANING OF ANXIETY TO ATHLETES

The purpose of this exercise is to explore what performance anxiety means to athletes and to
investigate how they cope with it. In order to complete this exercise, you will need to interview three
competitive athletes—preferably from different sports. Before you begin, however, please ensure that
these participants have been informed about the purpose of the study and have consented to have t heir
views recorded and analyzed. Ask them the following questions:

• What does the word “anxiety” mean to you? Do you think that it is helpful or harmful to your
performance?
• On a scale of 0 (meaning “not at all important”) to 5 (meaning “extremely important”), how
important do you think that the ability to control anxiety is for successful performance in your sport?
• Do you prefer to be “psyched up” or calm before a competitive event in your sport? Why? Please
explain.
• What things make you anxious before a competition? How do these factors affect your
performance? Explain.
• What things make you anxious during a competition? How do these factors affect your
performance? Explain.
• What techniques do you use, if any, to cope with anxiety in your sport? Where did you learn these
techniques?

Analysis:
Do the athletes differ in their understanding of anxiety? If so, are these differences related to the
sports that they play? From the athletes’ experiences, what factors make them anxious before and/or
during competition? Do the athletes use any specific techniques to cope with anxiety? If so, where did
they learn these techniques?

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