Why being fired up before competition isn’t always a surefire way to be your best.
By Molly Rettig
We were 30 minutes away from the big championship game, and the girls on my college soccer team were pounding the locker-room walls, bouncing off the floor, and shattering the air with pump-up lyrics. In the midst of a lackluster calf stretch, I stifled a yawn. What was wrong with me?
Sports psychologists would diagnose me with low “arousal levels.” Don’t blush: It’s not as erotic as it sounds. In sports science, arousal is a measure of how activated your organs and your nervous system are. Your own arousal rolls along a continuum from sleep (the low end) to an unhealthy hypersensitivity (the high end). When you get nervous or stoked before a race, game, or presentation, that’s arousal. And everyone’s levels are different
The physical symptoms—accelerated heart rate, sweaty palms, or shaky limbs—start in your brain: You respond to stimuli in the environment, like a mass start at a race, and feel excitement or tension. The excitement ripples through your autonomic nervous system (your body’s control center) and triggers the release of adrenaline into your bloodstream, which manifests in those physical symptoms psychologists also call your “emotional temperature,” a name meant to reflect the powerful impact of individual emotion on performance.
How does arousal help? It causes “attentional narrowing,” which means you can avoid distractions like close competitors, a cold storm, or a crowd of obnoxious fans and focus on the task at hand. Because arousal narrows your scope, lower levels are favorable for sports that require a big-picture focus, such as golf or long-distance running. Likewise, sports with a narrower focus require more arousal. How else could you hit that on-the-buzzer basket from half-court?
“When I’m on the wall, I don’t really hear anything,” says Paige Claassen, a 19-year-old sport climber who competes internationally. Under the right level of arousal, she converts the excitement of climbing competitions into focus. But she also knows that overarousal (which you experience as anxiety) hurts her performance, like the first 18 times she tried to climb Zulu, a high-ranking (5.14a) climbing route outside Rifle, Colorado. “I would get near the top and forget my sequence, because I’d be so nervous,” Paige says. “Even though I had done the moves many times and had them memorized, I would forget, mess it up, and then fall.” By last June she finally figured out how to reign in her arousal, and now she counts the route up Zulu as her hardest one yet.
If overarousal and underarousal both impair performance, what is the perfect amount? There is no magic level for everyone, says Ben Conmy, a Las Vegas-based performance consultant. Conmy, an English soccer player turned sports psychologist, works with athletes, executives, and performers to help them reach their IZOF, short for individual zone of optimal functioning.
“Some people need to be ready to run through a brick wall. Other people are brilliant when they are incredibly relaxed,” Conmy says—easing my guilt about yawning. “We have a misconception that everyone should be so fired up, but that’s just not the case.” Instead of trying to force an unnatural high, Conmy says you should learn what level of arousal works best for you. “Try to isolate your past performance history. Where did you hit that euphoric moment where you felt all-powerful?” After a great training session, write down what you enjoyed about it. Were your muscles relaxed from resting the day before? Was your breathing in sync with your stride or pedal stroke? Did you pop an energy snack every 30 minutes? Try to replicate these conditions to calibrate the right level for you and your sport of the moment, and you might end up yawning at the start of a championship game, too.
Nature vs. Nurture
So you figured out what helps induce your individual zone of optimal functioning, or your IZOF. But how do you ensure that you’ll reach it on the big day? “You wake up one morning and you feel sluggish, but you know you’re running a marathon—clearly that’s not ideal,” says sports psychologist Ben Conmy.
One way to control your arousal is with a pre-competition routine. “When I do individual sports, my arousal will be higher,” says Christine Sanchez, a former Division I college swimmer and current triathlete who is finishing her PhD in sports psychology at Florida State University. Too much anxiety in the pool means a rushed stroke and less distance per stroke. “You’re spinning your wheels and going nowhere,” she says. So at swim meets Christine tries to tone down her arousal: “Before swimming, I chill out, lay down on my towel, and listen to my iPod. I almost block out what’s happening.”
But optimal arousal varies by sport as well as by person. Team sports make Christine less nervous, so her routine is different. “With rowing I have to get to a higher level. I need to be hanging out with my girls on my boat, pepping each other up, and feeding off each other’s energy.” If you follow the same routine every time, you won’t be as easily distracted by an anomaly, like a side ache or storm clouds.
It’s one thing to be motivated at the beginning of a competition, but how do you maintain good levels throughout, say, a half-Ironman? “You need to have some strategies in your backpack,” Christine says. One such strategy is self-talk. Make a list of motivational statements or quotes that inspire you. No matter how cliché it seems, this quote will be comforting and uplifting if you hit the wall. Words that are task relevant can also be clutch. “I think spin when I’m biking. You’re cueing your body to do the movement you need to execute instead of focusing on the fact that somebody just passed you or you have a huge blister on your foot,” says Christine. Lastly, repeating affirmations can boost your arousal. “Remind yourself how hard you’ve worked to get here,” she says, “and remind yourself about your strengths, like I always do better in Mile X!”
When all else fails, and you’re cursing experts of arousal control, just try to distract yourself. Christine describes an 18-mile out-and-back race when people started passing her on the return stretch. She began cheering on and high-fiving her competitors. “I was amazed at how much better I was running. It became a game. I’d get to an empty space and think, What am I gonna say next?”
Different triggers motivate—or intimidate. Why does Christine zone out? Why do some people listen to heavy-metal music and drink Red Bull? Because we learn to regulate our anxiety and excitement in a productive way for the task at hand. And while being able to control your arousal is positive, you should also enjoy the feeling: Your neurons are warning you that something fun is about to happen.
