Photo by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay
Whether you are an athlete or not, you too can benefit from the psychological tools used by athletes to reach peak performance.
Sports psychologists have spent years developing reliable techniques that are ready for you to use to increase confidence, reduce stress, and contextualize competition – and these can be applied to many different areas of a person’s life.
The field of sports psychology has grown tremendously in recent years, with well-developed and thoroughly researched psychological intervention strategies emerging. Initially intended to improve athlete well-being and increase athletic performance, the general principles of these psychological techniques can be used off the playing field and outside the sporting arena.
You don’t need to be wearing shoulder pads and a uniform to benefit from these sports psychology tools. Keep reading to learn how you can integrate these into your day-to-day life.
Goal Setting, Planning
It may not be a concept that is exclusive to sports psychology, but goal setting and planning show up as staples in almost every athlete’s psychological toolbox.
Initially, most acknowledge that one of the main functions of goal-setting is to shape future behavior.
Indeed, behavior change is important in many areas of life – but behavior only represents one of the three important considerations in the Model of Attitudes (also referred to as the ABC model of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy).
Anxiety and stress about new situations often come from fear of the unknown.
Confidence is typically abundant in a comfortable situation, and the opposite is true when doing something new and unfamiliar. Most athletes carry out very specific, detailed, though-out warm-ups before competitions and games.
Setting goals with specific guidelines, as well as taking the time to plan and prepare for your day, week, or event, is a proven method for putting yourself in a good headspace to perform at your best.
Reduce the number of unknown variables in a situation and watch your stress and anxiety about the future disappear.
Arousal Regulation
Do you need to amp yourself up before going into an important meeting, or would you benefit from breathing exercises to help you relax instead?
Finding your optimal level of arousal is one of the best ways to ensure you perform at your best during stressful or otherwise important situations.
Being too relaxed can be just as bad as being overly hyper. The Inverted U Hypothesis demonstrates the fine line between doing too much and doing too little. Increased arousal leads to increased performance – but only to a certain point.
Arousal level is low on the left side of the curve, meaning the individual is too relaxed. Consequently, performance is sub-optimal. Arousal level is too high on the ride side of the curve, and so performance also suffers.
Most people struggle with being overly aroused before a stressful event, needing desperately to relax their nerves to a point where they can be themselves and execute properly.
There’s nothing more frustrating than stumbling on your words in a job interview because you can feel your heart beating faster than it normally would.
One easily implemented strategy for arousal regulation is breathwork. This can be paired with some of the other techniques listed here (imagery, self-talk), and there are many different exercises for controlling breathing patterns in an attempt to reduce stress and anxiety.
Boxed Breathing is a simple activity where an individual looks to control their breathing pattern in a rhythmic fashion.
Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds. Whether it be with 3 second or 6-second intervals, the important part of the exercise is that your breathing is becoming rhythmic, as this focus will take your attention away from whichever stressful situation you find approaching.
Being forced to focus on breath not only helps you relax physiologically but can serve as an easy distraction to the oftentimes negative thoughts that cross our minds before meaningful events.
Self-Talk & Thought Management
You can be your own greatest ally or your own worst enemy, depending on which thoughts you allow to run your headspace.
Self-talk consists of the words and phrases you say to yourself, whether it be speaking out
loud when nobody else is around or the silent dialogue that occurs in your mind when you’re alone.
Negative self-talk is inevitable for most people and this represents a serious obstacle before an important event. “They’re going to hate your speech,” “your boss won’t give you that raise
you’re about to ask for,” “there’s no way this date will go well.”
Getting out of your own way can mean preventing or dealing with negative self-talk as soon as it happens.
As soon as a negative thought enters the mind, try to immediately replace the negative thought with a positive one.
Likewise, you can try to counter the negative thought with logic or an argument.
It’s important to recognize how many top performers still battle with negative self-talk on a regular basis. That knowledge, paired with a few basic strategies for dealing with the inevitability of your mind being mean to yourself, can be applied in a variety of sports, business, academic, and life settings.
Imagery/Visualization
Athletes close their eyes and are transported to game-time, where they are able to envision themselves performing specific techniques, and succeeding in difficult scenarios against skilled opponents.
Imagery, defined as a type of simulation or mental rehearsal, helps athletes improve technical understanding, increase motivation, improve focus, review strategy, and much more.
The Analytic Model of Imagery identifies 5 main functions of imagery. These are most often applied to athletic and sport contexts, but the categories are broad enough to be implemented in situations such as public speaking engagements, job interviews, dates, and important meetings.
The two main categories of this model are cognitive and motivational, and are further divided as follows:
Cognitive – General: strategies, routines, plans.
Cognitive – Specific: skills, techniques, and sequences.
Motivational – Specific: situation-specific goals (ex. winning a gold medal, getting your dream job).
Motivational – General Arousal: feelings of arousal, stress, energy, and focus.
Motivational -General Mastery: feelings of confidence, control, and mental toughness.
With a little bit of thought and adaptation, you can use all of these categories to envision a successful job interview, date, or public speaking engagement. The more comfortable and aware you are of all possible outcomes in a situation, the more prepared you will be when the event comes around.
Put It All Together
You don’t need to be an athlete to benefit from these sports psychology tools.
And that principle can be applied to a lot of things in life. It doesn’t matter if you’re not an athlete – there is a lot that you can learn about performance from studying sports psychologists. Likewise, there is a lot you can learn from the top CEOs of the world, even if you have no interest in ever running a company.
Test out some of these sports psychology tools in your everyday life and keep your eyes peeled – you never know when you’ll find something worth learning, using, and eventually sharing.
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