How performers can use stress to develop an edge over competitors

Sport at any level can provide a rewarding experience, filled with joy and success. However, due to the unpredictable nature of sport along with other factors, it can also be viewed as an extremely stressful environment if the correct resources and strategies are not used. Therefore, this blog will provide an overview of the ‘stress experience’ and highlight what makes an event ‘stressful’ before giving advice and techniques which can help reinterpret this stress. Implementing these techniques should ultimately give you an edge over your competitors who may succumb to stress that you don’t even realise is there!

What is Stress?

When you ask people “what is stress?” the majority of them will say something along the lines of, stress is a negative emotion that everyone experiences in their life. I’m sure for many of you this resonates, and you would give a similar response, especially if you’ve had a stressful experience recently! Stress can be defined as “an ongoing process that involves individuals transacting with their environments, making appraisals of the situations they find themselves in, and endeavouring to cope with any issues that may arise” (1). This simply means that individuals will constantly consider the event (stressor) that has occurred, the environment they are in and their ability to cope with the event when determining whether the event is stressful to them. Therefore, stress in itself is neither positive nor negative but rather it is how we interpret the stress that determines how our bodies and mind ultimately respond. There will be more on how this occurs later.

Everyone who has played sport to any level will have experienced a stressful situation, whether it be finding yourself behind in a game, you’ve taken a fall on an apparatus, or you’ve had a disagreement with a coach. But believe it or not if responded to in the correct way, these ‘stressful’ events can result in improved performance through increased effort focus (2). Continue reading to find out how this can be achieved.

WHAT TYPE OF EVENTS INFLUENCE ME?

The stressors that may impact on an individual during sport vary in type, dimension and property. This means there are many aspects within your environment that could be percieved as stressful and lead to decreased performance. The first step to overcoming this and being able to thrive under this stress is to be aware of some of the types of stressors and where they originate from. This has been shown to be more influential than focusing on the duration of the stress (3). Furthermore, research has also discovered that both elite and non-elite athletes will experience a similar number of stressors with the demands being common across both. However as may be expected there are a few demands that are unique to each group (4). Therefore, whatever level you are competing at, increasing your knowledge of these different types of stressors will be beneficial to help tackle the stress of sport and hopefully can be used to your advantage!

No matter how the demands of the stressor differ, they can all be categorised into one of the three types described below.

1. Competitive Stressors

Definition: “the environmental demands associated primarily and directly with competitive performance” (5)

No matter what sport you partake in, such examples of these stressors include:

• your opponents
• injury
• having expectations from both yourself and external sources (e.g. coach or parent)
• preparation
  • feeling inadequately prepared for compeition is a major stressor for both elite and non-elite athletes (5)

2. Organisational Stressors

Definition: “the environmental demands associated primarily and directly with the organisation within which you are operating” (6)

No matter what sport you partake in, such examples of these stressors include:

• facilities and equipment
• your individual role within the wider team
• cohesion and behaviour of those surrounding you (5)
• coach, umpire/judge and spectator behaviour

3. Personal Stressors

Definition: “the environmental demands associated primarily and directly with personal ‘nonsporting’ life events” (6)

These are slightly different stressors as all individuals are likely to experience events in their life that cause stress, examples of these include:

• academic commitments (student athletes)
• personal life relationships
• distressing life events

As you can see there are multiple stressors spreading across all domains of life that may impact on individuals’ sport performance. However, understanding where such stressors occur would enable you and your coach to work on removing stressors that can be removed, or use the stressors to elicit a positive stress response.

HAVE A GO AT IDENTIFYING WHAT ‘TYPE’ OF STRESSORS THESE ARE:

1. You turn up to training and find that all of the equipment that you need is not there ready for you.

2. You’re finding it hard to concentrate because you are worried about an argument you had with your friend.

3. It’s competition day and the girl who beat you in this competition last year is competing against you again.

Answers at the end of the blog.

HOW DOES THE STRESS AFFECT ME?

Stress is an extremely personal response to particular events, therefore a situation that you perceive to be stressful may not impact another person at all (8). This is partially due to stress being a result of an imbalance between the demands placed on an individual and their resources available to cope with these demands. The Transactional theory of stress and coping (11) identifies two processes, cognitive appraisal and coping, as critical mediators of stressful person-environment relationships and their immediate and long-term outcomes (9).This means that for an event to be classified as ‘stressful’ the individual first goes through a process of appraisal. Appraisal refers to the meaning individuals give to a particular situation and is the sense of importance ie that something is at stake (10). We will look at this process in more detail next.

WHAT DO THE EXPERTS SAY?

According to the Transactional Theory of Stress and Coping (11) it is the appraisal of a situation that determines if an individual perceives it as stressful, rather than the situation itself being stressful (8). This model proposes that appraisal occurs in two stages.

1. Primary Appraisal – this occurs first and refers to the evaluation the individual makes about how significant the demand is (12)
2. Secondary Appraisal – following this, individuals then evaluate what can be done to overcome the stress (9)

Depending on how an event is appraised you will respond in different ways – this is our response.

When appraisal results in you determining an event as stressful there are many ways you can respond, a few I’m sure you recognise:

1. Psychological response, examples – doubt, worry, poor memory recall, frustration
2. Physiological response, examples – muscle tensions, pounding heart
3. Behavioural response, examples – fidgeting, pacing, becoming quiet, being withdrawn

However, just like our appraisal of the stress, the way we respond to stress is also highly individual with no two people responding in the same way.

HOW CAN I COPE BETTER WITH STRESS?

You are now more knowledgeable about what stress is and about the process you go through that determines whether an event is stressful. So now the blog will delve into some strategies that you can implement to help you cope better with those stressful situations that arise during sport competition or even training. Coping refers to your cognitive and behavioural efforts to manage the internal and external demands of the person-environment transaction.

According to research there are two ways we can deal with the stressor; one is focusing on the object that is causing distress (problem-focused coping) and the other is through regulating your emotion (emotion-focused coping) (9). Through investigation it appears that the environment you are in may require a different style of coping that would foster the best outcome (13).

For situations that are controllable   –>    problem- focused coping is ideal

For situations that are uncontrollable     –>    emotion-focused coping is ideal

When it comes to sport performance there is a mixture of both controllable aspects (e.g. adequate preparation) and uncontrollable aspects (e.g. opponent and umpire behaviour). Therefore, it is necessary for most sports individuals to have coping skills that cover both aspects. Furthermore, a review of stress management techniques found that 96% of stress interventions positively altered the stress experience and 77% had beneficial effect on performance across a multiple of sports (14).

Problem-Focused Coping Strategies

These coping strategies focus on modifying the stressor to avoid or minimise its impact (13).

1. Reducing the stressor:

One intervention is simply to reduce the cause of the stress. This has been shown beneficial for sporting performance however can prove difficult as there will always be stress apparent that cannot be reduce without major effort.

There are multiple ways in which this can be done, these include:

• providing clear and consistent role clarity within your team
• ensuring optimal preparation time before compeition
• increasing effort level in training and competition

Emotion-Focused Coping Strategies

These coping strategies aim to teach individuals how to reduce the negative emotional responses associated with stress (15)

1. Modifying appraisals:

Changing how we interpret the effects of stressors can be adaptive in order to reduce the impact they have on our performance. One such technique that has been used extensively in research is Positive Self-Talk (16).

If your self-talk is generally negative during sport, you may be perceiving events as more stressful than they need to be, creating unnecessary stress. Therefore, altering these negative thoughts and replacing them with positive and encouraging thoughts is beneficial.

To combat this these techniques can help: (17)

• Aware: first you need to be aware that this is occurring, so make yourself be more aware of what you are saying to yourself during sport.
• Change: next you need to start to alter this negativity. One way this can be achieved is through ‘thought-stopping’; this is used when you hear negative thoughts in your head, to stop this you can use trigger words, such as “STOP”.
• Replace: then you need to replace these negative statements with more positive ones such as replacing “this is too hard I can’t do it” with “this is challenging but if I put effort in, I will achieve it”

However, despite it being beneficial to remove some stressors, stress in sport is vital as it can provide the foundations on which to grow and better performance (18). It is more the way you cope with this stress that determines if you remain successful or succumb to the stress and see a decline in performance. Furthermore, being able to thrive under stress is not only important for sporting domain but all life domains as it is highly likely that stress will impact on you at some point. As a result, this blog hopes to not only give insight into how stress can impact sport but also how you can control the stress experience across your wider life as well.

Quiz Answers:

1 = Organisational Stressor

2 = Personal Stressor

3 = Competitive Stressor

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References

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