Mental health is a big topic these days! Around 33% of people report feeling extremely stressed, 77% have stress that affects their physical health, and 73% have stress that affects their mental health. Assume you’re worried about a scenario at work or home. You can’t stop thinking about the problem. You may not be able to sleep, and it makes it hard to pay attention to anything else. Meanwhile, you have an athletic event coming up.
You continue to train, but it is challenging to stay focused, and you need to be more relaxed. On game day, your performance could be better. What began as a work or home occurrence became a mental stressor, affecting your sports performance. This sequence of events is frequent but does not have to be your standard.
Mindfulness may assist in reducing stress and improving your athletic performance, regardless of what happens outside the gym or on the field.
STRESS’ EFFECT ON ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE
A stressor is any stimulus or event that disrupts homeostatic homeostasis. Mild stress can help you do better at work and boost your immune system, but too much tension could have the opposite effect. To effectively manage stress, you must first understand what pressure is, where it comes from, and how it affects athletic performance.
Stress can be either mental or physical, and it is classified as either positive (known as eustress) or negative (known as distress). Eustress motivates us to make a positive change or work toward a goal. In contrast, despair can hold us back psychologically and physically.
Everyone is unique! What constitutes excellent or negative stress varies from person to person, depending on our experience with an event. A coach yelling in your face may force one athlete to shut down, but your teammate may witness the same occurrence and be inspired to perform better. It is critical to understand that every workout places stress on the body and that stress is required to promote athletic performance.
But if the training is excessively severe or produces damage, the eustress stimulus becomes distressed. Finding sources of eustress and distress is a personal process that you should pursue to become more aware of what you require to prosper in your sport and life. It couldn’t be “all in your mind.”
When most individuals talk about stress, they refer to what is known as psychological or mental stress. When you are distressed, your homeostasis is disrupted, and your body will react quickly to restore balance. Your body will respond similarly, whether you’re under mental pressure (such as standing on the mound preparing to throw the game-winning pitch) or physical stress (such as fleeing a hungry bear). So, how can psychological anxiety affect athletic performance? Your brain emits a signal to your body, telling it there is danger!
In both circumstances, the sympathetic nervous system is triggered. Your body enters “fight or flight” mode to protect itself from the perceived threat. The heart and breathing rates speed up, blood rushes to the body’s most essential organs, and digestion and reproduction are put on “hold” so that all of the body’s energy can be used to get away from danger.
If you’re upset sometimes, your body will return to homeostasis, and you’ll feel better quickly; this response allows us to exit a potentially fatal situation with everything we have. This is excellent if you are in physical danger, but if the source of stress is mental, it may make completing the work more challenging. Chronic emotional discomfort, on the other hand, can make you more vulnerable to sickness and harm.
Stressors are unavoidable, but the good news is that you can teach yourself to respond to stressors more effectively daily. If a mental threat shows up as a physical response, knowing how to handle mental pressures better can help you decrease these stressors’ negative material impact. One method to accomplish this is to practice mindfulness.
How does mindfulness improve athletic performance and reduce stress?
Mindfulness is a state of mind that you get by focusing on the present moment and calmly noticing and accepting your feelings, thoughts, and body sensations. According to the findings of a meta-analysis of 209 studies on mindfulness-based therapy, including a daily mindfulness practice can help you reduce stress, anxiety, and depression, which can have severe consequences for athletes. The term “functional athletic behavior” is used by sports psychologists to characterize an athlete’s capacity to perform at their physical best while preserving the ability to focus on the immediate performance signals, such as focusing on and hitting or kicking the ball at peak performance. Even though there haven’t been many studies on how mindfulness therapies affect sports performance, early results suggest that practicing mindfulness every day may help improve performance.
TRYING STRESS RELIEF AND MINDFULNESS TECHNIQUES
Browse the following stress-reduction and mindfulness techniques and try the one that appeals most to you. Try one of these strategies first thing in the morning, before practice, or whenever suits you best.
You are exercising your breathing. Breathing exercises will assist you in narrowing your attentional focus and promoting convergent thinking, or the capacity to arrive at a single well-defined answer to a problem. Give this a shot! Inhale while counting to seven, exhale to seven, inhale to six, exhale while counting to six, and repeat from seven to one. If you lose count or become distracted, start over at 7. Repeat as needed.
Meditation. Consider meditation to be a mental spring cleaning. Meditation entails focusing your mind, and there are numerous methods for doing so. Active meditation teaches you to pay attention to your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations and what you see, hear, feel, smell, or taste while doing an activity.
Stretching and self-myofascial release. Stretching and foam rolling are forms of physical therapy that can help reduce the effects of stress on your muscles by letting tight, overactive muscles relax and lengthen so they can work better.
Developing a continuous mindfulness practice, like any new behavior, takes time but is well worth the effort.
BEYOND THE GYM OR THE FIELD
Mindfulness and stress reduction are not just for sports. Everyone faces pressures regularly, so there’s strong reason to embrace these routines for improved physical and emotional well-being.
Outside of the gym, the benefits of lowering stress and becoming more mindful may include being able to focus on the task, being more present with friends and family, having better physical health, and being able to deal with stressful situations without getting mentally or physically overwhelmed.
Finally, we state:
Stressors are unavoidable, yet they are not insurmountable. If you balance out your training with mindfulness and stress-reduction techniques every day, you may be able to deal with life’s most stressful situations and still perform at your best.