Anxiety and Arousal

If you wish to define it properly, anxiety is a natural reaction to threatening stimuli in an individual’s immediate environment. It can take the form of either mental (known as cognitive) anxiety, such as negative thoughts, or bodily (somatic) anxiety, such as sweaty hands, elevated heart rate and high blood pressure. The theory behind this is a very simple one: THOUGHTS control your EMOTIONS, which affect your ACTIONS.

THOUGHTS

EMOTIONS

ACTIONS

If you are experiencing negative thoughts (such as “I’m going to lose/ he’s better than me”) then this has a negative effect on your emotions and can make you feel down or overly nervous. In turn this will have a negative effect on your actions and result in poor performance. In contrast to this, if the opposite is true then it can have an uplifting effect on performance. Thoughts like “I’m going to win” make you feel confident and can enhance your performance.

It would also appear to be a two-way street: bodily anxiety can actually affect your mental state. For example, if you interpret feelings of nervousness as being negative (rather than just normal) this can lead to negative thoughts. It is important to encourage the fighter to enjoy this feeling – to relish the intensity – as they are doing something extraordinary and beyond the mundane 9 to 5 existence that most people experience. I ask my clients to imagine the most bored they have ever been, and compare it to how they feel on the day of the fight. If they replied that they preferred being bored I would question whether they should really be fighting!

Arousal levels

To put into as simple terms as possible, anxiety is a tool used by the mind to prepare the body for flight or fight. As you become more anxious, your arousal (‘awakeness’/alertness) levels increase accordingly. To a certain point this is advantageous. If you think of arousal as being on a continuous line from deep sleep at one end, to being manic and out of control on the other end, then there will be a point in between the two that represents the optimum or ideal arousal state, commonly referred to as ‘the zone’. This is where mental and bodily anxiety is at the ideal level, which also has a knock-on effect for confidence, concentration and other factors.

Deep sleep - Sleep - Drowsy awake - Relaxed wakefulness - Highly charged - Over aroused

‘THE ZONE’

If you are optimally aroused then you will be in control of your anxiety levels. Obviously you need a certain amount of arousal to perform properly, too little and you will be too relaxed and not alert enough to respond to external cues (such as someone trying to hit you!). Too much arousal and you will be too focused on internal thoughts- you will consciously process your actions rather than letting them ‘flow’ automatically. Either could have a devastating effect on your performance.

Controlling anxiety

Anxiety would seem to have an effect on arousal, but this is a complex relationship and one which we still know relatively little about. We do know that some tried and tested techniques to control anxiety do have a very important enhancing effect on performance. Therefore, it is vital for a fighter to be able to control both their mental and bodily anxiety in order to keep their anxiety levels to as close to optimum as possible.

This is an area that would be identified in the initial stages of the consultation by the sport psychologist from all possible sources of information about the fighter. We’d look at questionnaires, performance profiling, and conduct informal interviews with the fighter, their coaches, and even other fighters or family members. Video of previous performances is another very useful aid. Once these areas have been highlighted by the available information, it is the sport psychologist’s task (in conjunction with the client and their coach) to target these areas by developing and implementing suitable ‘interventions’.

Interventions

A number of interventions are available, but to give a specific example, I will use details of a client I worked with recently (with their kind permission of course!). My client was found to be suffering from both mental anxiety (negative thoughts) and bodily anxiety (wasting energy by pacing around) on the day of competitions. Both of these were found to be having a negative effect on their performance.

To overcome this, we came up with interventions to reduce mental anxiety. These interventions were:

· Imagery (Visualising the fight in a positive way)

· Goal-setting

· A pre-competition plan

· Specific pre-performance routine

· Self-talk (affirming positive thoughts)

· Simulation training (reproducing competition conditions prior to the event)

· Positive feedback from the coach.

Some of these interventions also overlapped other areas we had highlighted for improvement, such as confidence and concentration. The theory behind the ‘mental’ interventions is to ‘re-programme’ the mind from negative to positive thoughts, and reassure the client that these negative thoughts are merely the mind playing tricks on you. With practice these tricks can be overcome. It was also to make sure that they were mentally ‘organised’ by the day of competition and left very little to chance.

To reduce the physical effects of the anxiety we worked on:

· Breathing exercises (centering)

· ‘Biofeedback’: feeding back information about bodily processes; in this case heart rate, in order to reduce it to a more relaxed level.

The theory behind using these physical interventions is to relax the body to a more manageable state (but not too relaxed!) on the basis that you cannot be relaxed and anxious at the same time. With practice,e the fighter can work out what is the best level of arousal for them. Simulation training (mock fights) is an excellent tool for practising these interventions in a realistic but safe environment.

It should be noted that these interventions cannot just be applied on the day of a competition. With the example I used above, it took about 6 weeks of intervention with my client to achieve a ‘competition-ready’ effect. It is vitally important that these areas are identified and worked on in plenty of time to be of use. Just for the record, the client mentioned above won the fight in question (their first MMA fight) by TKO in two minutes and twenty seconds of the first round, testament to their preparation.

James Barraclough is a sports psychologist from Manchester who works with MMA fighters. If you have any questions relating to his articles or sports psychology in general, you can email him on [email protected]

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