Earlier studies suggested that tension as well as overall athletic performance were related by a curve shaped roughly like an upside-down U. This appears to be no longer the case. A more realistic shape for the curve relating performance to stress is shown below.

This particular sort of curve is typically known as| a catastrophe curve. What this means is that at low levels of stress athletic performance should improve with a rise in stress up, to a certain critical point. At this stage (point B) the athlete begins to perceive that the demands of the situation are |more than his/her ability to meet them.

Anxiety occurs, and the athletic performance suddenly and dramatically fails. After such failure the original level of performance is only able to be regained if stress levels are considerably reduced (to point A). This sort of phenomenon is very common in sport performance situations. Once an athlete starts to “go over the top”, it is very difficult to get him/her back up to a high level of performance.

Catastrophe curves like the one shown above usually occur as a result of opposing forces, and recent work suggests that this one is no exception. In competition these two forces are the desire to compete and succeed, and the fear of losing or failing.

Under normal circumstances the activation system “amplifier” is fine-tuned by the athlete to meet the needs of their situation. However, when athletes become anxious this fine-tuning is lost—in their anxiety they fiddle about with all the knobs, and so greatly distort their own performance.

There are several discussions about how much effect the physiological response related with anxiety has upon mental performance. However, there seems less doubt about its importance for physical performance, as any football coach who has witnessed the sustained speed at which a typical playoff or final is played will no doubt testify.

In addition, it appears that the distortion produced by excessive physiological arousal is most clear in skills requiring fine control or touch, this can be extremely critical for tactical athletes.

The basic implication of this pretty clear: to keep up peak performance in the face of anxiety an athletes must use their mental strength and either cut anxiety or increase the “strength” of the activation system.

The “activation system”, can be thought of all the internal and external factors that might cause stress and how the athlete interprets, i.e. the activation pattern of the information-processing system.

In order to perform difficult skills with accuracy and ease, the athlete must clearly “process” a vast amount of information about the environment and their orientation within it.

To do this, the athlete must first perceive the relevant cues, and then use them to make decisions about proper courses of action, “program” these decisions into responses, and finally send these responses to the muscles.

Obviously, different situations mean each of these processes will varying in degrees, so that the activation pattern necessary to achieve peak performance will differ from sport to sport, and from skill to skill within a sport.

For example, speed of perception will be very important when making a shot during a game of basketball, but much less so when performing a free-throw. In fact, the stressors and the activation pattern is itself an over-simplification, since each of the three major cognitive processes which we have distinguished:

• Perception

• Decision-making

• Action (is itself made up of a number of sub-processes)

For example, decision-making requires information to be stored in memory, transformed into likely consequences, and recalled—all before the information is passed on for programming.

The important feature of the model shown in the stressors and the activation pattern is that it represents the availability of each process by its elevation above the base plane.

Fortunately, our brains are very flexible about how they divide the resources at their disposal to each of these processes, so we are able to cope adequately with a great number of diverse situations.

However, this flexibility is also our greatest weakness, for it means that the activation pattern required for a given situation can also be easily distorted by outside influences such as pressure from parents or coach, as well as internal influences like personality factors, anxiety and other negative mood states. The research literature suggests that the cognitive anxiety which is present for some time before an important event disrupts these activation patterns by:

• Reducing the overall capacity of the system—pushing all the “process towers” down

• Depressing the availability of some processes more than others.

On the other hand, it suggests that the physiological arousal that occurs immediately before performance tends to “turn up the volume controls” on all the output signals to the muscles. Thus errors which are due to problems in picking up the right cues or in making decisions about those cues are likely to occur several days before a big event, because errors due to output failures are much more likely to happen on the day.

As mentioned earlier, the solution for such distortion is either to build some sort of mental barrier to protect the processes by blocking anxiety, or to strengthen the resilience of the required activation pattern to such an extent that it cannot be easily distorted by anxiety; this in effect is mental strength.

A mental strength coach can greatly influence this latter remedy, and at least partly influence the former.

Next week we’ll look at how to overcome stress and anxiety problems.

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