When a person disappointed or feel can not cope any situation, his anxiety and urosal level increases rapidly . The Anxiety and the aurosal effects the player psychologically; decrease the concentration, feel panic and, the player can not focus his/her concentration to the game. When the anxiety and aurosal level increase, there are two steps for showing an effective performance;
Watch and identify the changes on aurosal.
Control and manage the personal aurosal.
There is a useful model that explain the relationship between the anxiety/aurosal and the performance is Reverse-U. Although there are some discussions on this model, it is a useful model to explanation, and it is continuing to pointing control aurosal level to continue players performance at middle sitution. When the aurosal is at low levels, it decreases the performance. Similarly, if it is at high levels the performance is affected negatively also. Therefore, it is important that following the aurosal level and keep the aurosal level at middle situation for players. This status is shown on the figure.
Figure 1.1 When the performance is at maximum level, aurosal is at middle level, to relationship between the Aurosal/anxiety levels and performance.
The first step to controlling aursal and anxiety is recognizing them. Some players sweat, dry mouth, breathe rapidly, or quicken heartbeat, when try to experience anxiety and aurosal. Some also get excited, feel tension on hands, on shoulders and on neck or feel the need to go to the toilet. All this sensations are real situations that have considered by all sport players.
The sensations are result of a fight or get away mechanism that rect to intensive things. There is a unique responsibilities that innate by the human.
Sport players also have an ability to react situations which they encounter. The famous proffessional golf player Davis Love said that “When i feel an disturbance in my stomach, I understand that my body will react to an important thing and so I interpret again this feeling to use it my situation.
The techniques to controlling aurosal and anxiety, would be in many forms. The Progressive relaxation, the breathing exercises, the pozitive self-talk, the goal setting and the imagine in mind are the five popular learnable-controlled methods. As result of work done, it come out that these tachniques are effective methods to increasing confidence, relaxation, easying on focussing, and improve the performance.
Every sport branch would brings out a high level aurosal situations. For example, a penalty kick in an important football match, free throw in the last seconds in a basketball match or doing a clutch putt for golfers may more compellive the other times. The proffesional players follow the coercive elements and they increase their relax or increase their tension consciously according to the situation. One way to do this is rating the tension from 1 to 5 ( 1- Very low level tension, 2- Low level tension, 3- Middle Level tension, 4- High level tension, 5- Very high level tension etc…)
Try on your shoulders or leg to before your performance to keep your tension in the middle of the Reverse-U model.
Consciously and systematically controlling the tension on every part of body is an effective practice method.
Researches:
Bunker, L. K. (2006). Golf: Sport Psychology Challenges. In J. Dosil (ed.).The Sport Psychologist’s Handbook (305-307). England: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Balague, G. (2005). Anxiety: From Pumped to Panicked. In S. Murphy (ed.). The Sport Psychology Handbook (80-81) United States: Human Kinetics.
Ersin Bayramkaya
Clinical Psychologist
