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Optimizing Mental Performance
We would like to welcome you to our Optimizing Mental Performance Blog. Our goal is to provide education, tips, and strategies and inform parents of the content we are teaching to our student-athletes in our newly formed mental performance workshops this year.
Over the summer, we were able to solidify a partnership with For the Players to provide expertise in the area of athlete wellness and to develop a series of workshops that will help equip our student-athletes to manage self-doubt, fear, anxiety, pressure, and other factors that impact performance. Throughout each sports season, our teams will have the opportunity to attend eight mental performance workshops on a bi-weekly basis. Topics will be as follows:
Back
- Workshop 1: Making friends with feelings to improve your game
- Workshop 2: Building skills to manage emotions to optimize wellbeing
- Workshop 3: Strategies for building confidence and a growth mindset
- Workshop 4: Developing your performance blueprint for managing pressure and anxiety (Part 1)
- Workshop 5: Developing your performance blueprint for managing pressure and anxiety (Part 2)
- Workshop 6: How to develop a healthy inner coach
- Workshop 7: Protect your energy and manage your time
- Workshop 8: Building resilience and athlete identity
We are so excited to provide these workshops for our student-athletes and coaches and look forward to using this blog to better communicate with parents on the environment we are creating to build optimal well-being and performance for all of our student-athletes.
Making Friends with Your Feelings to Improve Your Game
Today’s student-athletes face an array of pressures—ranging from the global pandemic, and the constant presence of social media, to the increasing professionalization of youth sports. These pressures can create overwhelming expectations that impact overall well-being and performance. In addition, the athletic culture often glorifies stoicism and a win-at-all-cost mentality leading athletes to suppress both physical and emotional pain. This tendency towards emotional suppression can have serious consequences.
What is Emotional Suppression?
Emotional suppression involves pushing away feelings to try to control one's emotions. Initially, this might seem effective, but over time, suppressed emotions often resurface unpredictably, leading to a lack of emotional control. This suppression can cause athletes to become unaware of their emotional states which can then impact their ability to respond to their emotional needs and put them at risk for feeling more down or anxious over time.
Costs of Emotional Suppression
Research shows that ongoing emotional suppression can lead to:
- Increased Risk of Emotional Injury: This includes emotional numbing, depression, and anxiety.
- Loss of Important Information: Emotions can provide valuable insights. By ignoring them, athletes miss opportunities to adjust their performance and seek timely support from coaches.
- Inopportune Emotional Outbursts: Suppressed emotions may erupt at unexpected moments, leading to a loss of control.
Examples:
- Kevin Love: Experienced a panic attack during an NBA game.
- Simone Biles: Decided to withdraw from the Tokyo Olympics to prioritize her mental health.
Suppressing emotions can lead to a cycle of feeling helpless, which often prompts further suppression in an attempt to regain control.
Impacts on Performance
When athletes continuously suppress their emotions, performance can be negatively affected in several ways:
- Unexpected Anxiety: Difficult to manage when it arises.
- Hyperarousal Physiologically: Leads to increased physical stress.
- Distraction: Emotional turmoil can detract from focus and performance.
- Overtraining: Athletes might push themselves excessively to control emotions.
- Burnout: Symptoms may go unnoticed until it's too late.
- Missed Opportunities for Feedback: Lack of emotional awareness can prevent athletes from collaborating effectively with coaches.
The Rationale for Building Emotional Awareness
Just as an athlete addresses a physical injury by consulting a doctor and/or athletic trainer, emotional awareness should be approached similarly. By recognizing and naming emotions, athletes can:
- Gain Relief: Accurate naming of emotions can alleviate distress.
- Identify Needs: Awareness helps athletes understand their own needs and seek appropriate support.
- Access Support: Being emotionally aware enables timely communication and support from coaches and facilitates collaboration around making necessary adjustments.
- Prevent Emotional Disruptions: Reduces the likelihood of emotions interfering with performance at crucial moments.
The Role of Coaches, Parents, and Teachers
As influencers in an athlete’s life, coaches, parents, and teachers need to be mindful of the messages they send regarding emotional expression. The language and behavior used can either encourage emotional suppression or promote healthy emotional awareness. Recognizing that emotions are an inherent part of being human, creating an environment that supports emotional awareness and management can contribute to improved performance and overall well-being. Sometimes when people experience intense emotions, our reaction can be to lean away and invalidate the emotional reaction, which escalates the emotion “You’re overreacting, why are you so angry.” One concept that can be useful is to lean in and validate the person (“It makes sense you’re angry”) which can actually help diffuse the emotion and lead to good discussion around how to then solve the problem.
Conclusion
The first step towards improved performance and well-being is building emotional awareness. Just as with physical injuries, acknowledging and addressing emotional signals allows athletes to make proactive changes, access necessary support, and ultimately achieve their best performance. Creating a culture where emotions are acknowledged and managed effectively can lead to enhanced performance in all areas of life.
