As a mental performance coach, I work with many athletes who are experiencing stress within their sport. We focus mainly on how this stress affects sports performance.
Does the stress help them or does it hurt them?
Well, it depends.
At times stress can be helpful, especially if it leads to more training. But more often than not, stress causes athletes to underperform.
To help you get a better understanding of how stress may be affecting your performance, I’ve outlined both the helpful and hurtful ways stress impacts athletes, as well as a couple tips you can use to manage stress for yourself.
How Stress Helps Athletes
Let’s begin with the helpful side of stress.
Now I know it may seem strange to say stress is helpful. But the truth is, there can be a benefit to it, if used in a certain way. However, I will prelude this by saying you must be careful. About nine times out of ten I see stress as harmful.
It does more harm than good and the negatives far outweigh the positives.
But I want to outline the helpful side of stress, because it could be something you use to your advantage.
I was on a coaching call with a client last week who separated the stress she felt into positive stress and negative stress.
The defining factor of what she called positive stress was that it helped her focus.
She felt stressed to win, and as a result, she focused fully in the moment. In addition to the positive stress helping her focus in the moment, it also helped her focus throughout the week.
She trained hard and stuck to her routine with full focus due to the overarching stress she felt to reach her goals.
Stress is helpful when it motivates you to focus on training and improving and it motivates you to fully focus in the moment and give full effort for a game or a match.
That is the number one way stress is helpful.
The athlete I was on the call with told me that she feels stress and pressure to reach her goals. Therefore, she has a clear purpose and motivation each day. She knows what she wants and she’s working to achieve it.
Yes, there is stress present. But stress that pushes her. It drives her ambition and her work ethic. And above all else, it reminds her of the importance of being fully focused when she competes. Because being fully focused in the moment is the key to performing up to her potential and achieving what she has set out to achieve.
Something we do not see happen when stress becomes harmful.
How Stress Hurts Athletes
Stress is worry and worry is thinking – thinking about what may or may not happen.
When stress is helpful, as discussed above, it forces the athlete to focus more in the moment and to train harder. They feel stress, driven by thoughts about what may or may not happen, which then motivates them to do what they need to do to achieve the outcome they want.
In other words, they think about the future, then redirect their attention back into the moment.
When stress is harmful, this redirection of attention doesn’t happen. Your thoughts stay focused on the future.
This leads to increased anxiety.
An example is thinking about how you need to play well or else you’ll lose playing time. If you used that thought to drive your attention onto how you play your best and give full effort, it would be seen as helpful stress.
However, if you keep thinking about how you need to play well and you ruminate on the idea of losing playing time, the stress becomes hurtful.
Because you are worried about losing playing time, you will likely play tense. You may even hold yourself back and play it safe.
When you play with hurtful stress, you will underperform due to the physical symptoms of stress, along with the change in your behavior as a result of the stress itself.
But just why, exactly, does negative stress cause you to change the way you play?
How Stress Changes Your Game
A common theme I work on with athletes in mental coaching is playing it safe. Now, it’s good to play it safe at times. But what I’m referring to here is playing it safe as a result of fear which means you are holding yourself back.
When you hold yourself back, you inhibit peak performance. Not only do you inhibit peak performance, you inhibit average play.
This is where you may leave the game feeling disappointed in yourself because you held yourself back and didn’t do a whole lot during the game due to fear.
But where does this fear come from?
The fear stems from stress.
When you play with stress, you are worried about what the future will look like. What will happen by the end of the game? What will your stats look like? Will coach be mad at you?
Those thoughts of worry result in us picturing many negative consequences that could occur. When we think of negative consequences, it’s natural to then work to avoid experiencing those consequences.
Wanting to avoid mistakes and negative consequences during games is the number one cause of holding yourself back and playing it safe. If you play it safe, that’s the easiest way to protect yourself from the consequences you fear.
However, this type of timid play actually increases the chances of you making mistakes…resulting in you getting the very thing you’re afraid of.
This is why we see stress change your play. When you stress about what will happen, and then fear develops, this fear leads to a change in your play.
You go from playing aggressively to playing scared, timidly, and holding yourself back.
But we can change this.
Tips to Manage Stress in Sports
Positive stress affects your performance by redirecting attention onto the process of your game.
Negative stress affects your performance by creating fear and a need to avoid negative outcomes.
To manage stress in sports, we want to utilize positive stress while minimizing the effect negative stress has on your play.
There are three tips that will help do just that:
- Set Process Goals
- Use Breathing to Stay Present
- Trust You Can Handle the Consequences
Tip #1: Set Process Goals
When stress is helpful, your attention does not get stuck in the future. Once you think about the future and what may or may not happen, you then redirect your thoughts back onto the process.
We can leverage this idea by setting process goals ahead of time.
Process goals are targets you focus on that are 100% part of the process of your game. They are also 100% within your control.
When stress helps us play better, it forces us to focus on the process of our game: what we need to do in order to achieve the outcome we want.
When you give your full attention to the process, you drastically increase your chances of outcome success.
Here are a few simple examples of process goals:
- Give full effort
- Focus on positive thinking throughout the game
- Attack the basket
- Stay balanced at the plate and watch the ball all the way in
- Respond positively to mistakes
Process goals involve everything that goes into you playing well on a given day. There are many factors that go into you playing well, but you only want to focus on a few for the game. Don’t over do it with setting process goals.
Choose a few process goals and focus on them to keep your mind in the present and off stressful thoughts about the future.
Tip #2: Use Breathing to Stay Present
Managing stress in sports is all about managing your focus.
When you focus on what may happen, and especially when you focus on what you don’t want to have happen, stress forms.
The more you think about the future, the more stress you’ll experience.
To keep your attention in the present, turn to your breath.
Our breath is powerful. More powerful than we can even imagine. Yet, it’s such a simple bodily process it often goes overlooked. But our breathing (controlling our breathing, that is) is one of the best ways to manage stress.
What you can do is practice conscious breathing. Conscious breathing is where you focus your attention on your breath and you take nice and deep breaths.
Do this over and over, breathing deeply into your stomach and feeling your stomach expand with each inhalation.
The more you focus on your breathing and take deep breaths, the less stress you’ll experience when you play.
Tip #3: Trust You Can handle the Consequence
Stress leads to fear and fear causes you to play to avoid the thing you’re afraid of. But what if you weren’t actually that afraid of it? Well, that would be nice, but it probably sounds far fetched for you, if you are currently playing with fear.
One of the ways we can get ourselves to let go of fears, though, is by coming face to face with the perceived consequence.
No, this doesn’t mean you must necessarily experience the consequence. But you need to face it in your mind. Think about what will happen if you do experience the consequence. And most importantly, how will you handle it?
When we can get clear on how we will handle the consequences, a lot of fear, and subsequently stress, fades away.
Think about all you’re afraid of within your sport. If those things happen, how will you handle them? Can you handle them?
I know you can and you know you can. You must remind yourself that you are capable of handling anything that comes your way. If you can do this, you will reduce a lot of stress within your game.
Mental Coaching to Manage Stress
Stress in sports affects your performance in a positive and negative way.
Positive stress leads you to work harder and focus more in the moment. Negative stress, however, results in fear and leads to tense and timid play. Negative stress causes you to underperform.
To help manage stress, there are three tips you can apply:
- Set Process Goals
- Use Breathing to Stay Present
- Trust You Can Handle the Consequences
In addition to the three tips, I also offer one-on-one mental performance coaching to help you manage stress within your game.
To learn more about on-on-one coaching please fill out the form below. Or you can click here to schedule a free introductory coaching call.
Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
