Managing anxiety in sports

SYDNEY – The final lecture in the five-day seminar arranged by Basketball New South Wales (BNSW) for visiting La Salle head coach Juno Sauler and assistant coaches Allan Caidic and Jun Limpot was about performance psychology in sports and it was a topic that was a fitting climax to the series of eye-opening discussions.

Gerard Faure Brac was the speaker who explained that his work as a sports psychologist at the New South Wales Institute of Sport (NSWIS) is focused on performance enhancement and addressing mental health issues. He admitted that the presence of a sports psychologist is often intimidating to athletes who think the shrinks are out to spot dysfunctional behavior.

Brac was a former tennis and Aussie rules player. He quit competitive sports because of a knee injury and became a physical education teacher later to specialize in sports psychology. At NSWIS, he deals with individual basketball players among athletes in other sports. Since NSWIS has no basketball team of its own, Brac said he works strictly with individuals.

“The two sides to sports psychology are performance enhancement and mental health,” he said. “The first involves mental skills, strategies to overcome setbacks and obstacles, physiological control, behavioral management and goal setting while the second looks into depression, anxiety, psychoses, eating disorders, relationships and communication. The key is to focus on performance. We see mental stress as an obstacle. We know that every athlete has stress and anxiety, that’s normal. We can’t eliminate stress and anxiety but we can manage both so as not to affect an athlete’s performance. In fact, our role is to enhance the athlete’s ability to perform.”

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Brac said when faced with a threatening situation, the natural reaction of a person is to fight or take flight. Either way, the situation is stressful. If an athlete is under pressure, he strives to overcome the stress. The first thing that happens is the release of adrenaline which causes the heart beat to increase and in turn, breathing becomes shallow and quicker then nausea or a headache comes followed by tense muscles, seating and thoughts racing across the mind. “It’s the stress response cycle,” he continued. “Stress is cumulative. For instance, if you wake up late for work, you become stressed as you try to rush to the office. Encountering traffic along the way builds up more stress. For an athlete, it could come to a point where his performance is adversely affected. That’s where I come in, to manage his breathing, the tension of his muscles and the thoughts racing in his mind.”

Brac said he highly recommends athletes to do breathing at least 10 times a day of about 30 seconds each. “Survey shows that 95 percent of elite athletes who perform poorly trace it to tense muscles,” he said. “This is where progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is critical. The three processes are awareness where you use PMR, scan and release. You mentally scan the body looking for tension points. You go into the tension areas then you breathe out and release the tension.”

Brac said because the brain is a thinking machine, it continuously conjures visions of how things are, were and will be. “Thoughts of worrying are normal,” he said. “The idea is to take stress out of worrying. Meditation is one form of trying to relax and I think it’s fantastic. It requires complete focus on just one thing. Thoughts lead to feelings which lead to action then to thoughts again in what I call a cognitive triad. If you think negative, you won’t feel good and you won’t play well. You reverse the trend and you think good, you feel good and you play good.”

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In the hierarchy of thoughts, Brac said the good must preoccupy the mind more than the bad. “It’s a mindfulness-based theory of acceptance and commitment,” he said. “As for breathing, I strongly advise for athletes to do it before stretching and going out to play. It’s deep controlled breathe in without sighing. You drop your shoulders on exhalation and release your muscles, be aware of the tension flowing out of your body.”

Brac said every situation has its best thing to think about. “You zero in on the technical aspects of whatever you need to be focusing on right now,” he said. “And you must focus on your breathing. In taking a free throw, you keep in mind the technical aspects like bending the knees or snapping the wrist. Then, you breathe in and out slowly, without pressure.” The mental side of sports is just as important as the physical side.

The seminar was the first of its kind conducted by NSWIS which provides facilities, services and sports programs to elite and emerging athletes across the Australian state. BNSW CEO Danny Martinez and Asia Pacific director Ding de Villa broached the idea of holding a seminar as a way to broaden the NSWIS scope and to share its expertise with athletes and coaches from other countries. Among the topics in the seminar were strength and conditioning for high-performance athletes, career education, performance analysis, physiotherapy and medical screening, building capacity of coaching, high performance learning in coaching, testing against core physical competency benchmarks, coaching philosophy, biomechanics landing assessment, understanding teams through vision and values and performance psychology.

“The seminar was very productive,” said one of the visitors. “But we’re not sure if it’s something that will give rise to a Part 2. It’s possible that there’s nothing much more to learn from NSWIS so that another trip in the near future may not be necessary. What’s the next step? Perhaps, one option would be to choose which of the speakers could be invited to lecture in Manila or which of the topics were relevant so that they could form part of a new curriculum when they offer the seminar again.”