The daily training, the quest for continuous improvement, the attempt to beat your personal best at every opportunity. Even sports can sometimes become a source of stress and anxiety instead of a break from daily life. Any training whether hard or easy always represents stress to counteract. You may not know it, but the reason a good training program allows you to improve is because it constitutes a set of continuous, calibrated stimuli that aim to elicit adaptive responses from your body.
Stress can be defined as a general adaptation syndrome (SGA) to reestablish a new internal balance (homeostasis) following stressors (stressors). Alterations in internal balance can occur at the endocrine, humoral, organic, and biological levels. Stress is the body’s response in adapting to whatever demands, both physiological and psychological, it is subjected to. It is the way your body responds to a stimulus from outside.
Stress, in this sense, has a distinctly positive connotation. The problem arises when the stressor (the stressful agent) becomes of particular intensity and especially persists over time. In this condition your body may become unable to react positively to stimuli coming from outside and suffer negative consequences.
The stress response your body adopts can be divided into three stages:
The first phase is thealarm phase. The organism recognizes a different situation and responds through a series of both behavioral and physical changes. Attention level rises, heart rate and blood pressure go up. You may even come to feel a general state of agitation.
Instead, in a second phase, you must activate yourself to produce a direct response to the stressor. This requires physical and emotional involvement on your part that is sure to involve a high expenditure of energy.
In the third stage if you have not been able to counteract the stressors you can get to the point ofexhaustion. The inability to generate an effective organic response.
What happens to you at this point? On an emotional level you become much more agitated and sensitive, you feel a sense of overwhelm and an inability to overcome a situation. All this can lead you to a lack of self-esteem or even depression. On a physical level you may suffer from headaches, bowel disorders, muscle tension and even insomnia. Behaviorally you may also suffer from worry, forgetfulness, inability to concentrate, increased nervousness behaviors or eating disorders.
Your stress levels, as we have seen, depend on both the intensity and duration of the stressor. The effects are not the same for everyone because this is where individual coping skills come into play. It is easier to cope with difficulties and fatigue if the stress is of limited duration in time(acute). On the contrary, it produces all the negative effects seen earlier if it becomes chronic and lingers.
Stress in sport
In your daily life, what can be the stressors related to the world of sports? This affects both professional and amateur athletes.
You can deal with external stressors related to the environment in which you have to compete. Adverse weather conditions or even open water swimming in special conditions (very cold water, waves, currents, etc.)
There are stressors related to deprivation of some of your basic needs such as sleep, hydration and/or nutrition.
One of the most common is definitely the stress that results from the ‘.
performance anxiety
. Whether related to lack of performance improvement or more specifically related to failure in major competitions.
Finally, you must also take into account social stressors such as conflicts with opponents, teammates, coaches, family etc. or character for all the difficulties related to the organizational aspects of the season or competitive career.
How does each athlete experience the stress of competition? If you can handle pressure well you experience an eustress (positive) situation where you feel pressure but in the right way. This increases concentration and motivation to do well. If instead of managing you suffer the situation you experience a condition of distress (negative) characterized by nervousness, anxiety and discomfort. In this case it will be very likely that your race will not end successfully.
You have to find the right balance between stress and concentration. If you are low in stress your sports performance will be poor. On the contrary, if you feel very stressed, your sports performance will be just as poor. Only if you as an athlete feel involved in the right way then your sports performance will be of the desired level.
In summary, stress is our body’s response to an external stimulus. It is an indication of an imbalance between the effort required by the external stimulus and your ability to adapt. Not all stresses that come from the outside are harmful and should be eliminated because they allow you to use and make the best use of individual abilities to achieve goals.
The flow
There is a state of optimal mental and physical activation that leads you to achieve the best possible performance. This condition is called flow state. Within this state you achieve maximum concentration and are not influenced by negative thoughts. All your energy is devoted to performance.
In psychology, flow (in English flow), or agonistic trance is a state of consciousness in which you are completely immersed in an activity. Flow produces a sense of euphoria, ability to control the situation, performance at the edge of possibility, and the ability to make the right choice at the right time every time. Crucially, focus on the “here” and “now” and have a strong motivation behind your activity.
If these conditions occur, it is called peak performance. Here’s what you need to do if you want to achieve excellent performance through the flow state (Garfield and Bennett, 1984):
1. Mental relaxation (sense of calm, high degree of concentration)
2. Physical relaxation (muscle looseness, fluidity and confidence of movement)
3. Confidence and optimism (positive attitude, sense of control even in dangerous situations)
4. Focus in the present (absence of thoughts related to the past or future)
5. High level of psychophysical energy (joy, physical charge, high energy resources)
6. Extraordinary awareness (high attention to one’s body and environment)
7. Situation control (automatic execution)
8. Sense of isolation (detachment from the external environment, complete access to one’s own abilities)
Writing it down is certainly easy. Starting tomorrow it’s your turn to put it into practice!
(Main image credits: kues on DepositPhotos.com)