7 Tips To Manage Race Day Anxiety | Head Games
Nailing your training but flopping your races?
Anxiety may be affecting your performance. In this article, Sports Psychologist Dr. Andrew Lewis will help you fix it.
Riders often experience a marked difference between their training sessions in which they are calm and on point, as opposed to a race where their headspace is nowhere, muscles are tight and it feels like everything is freezing up. Some attribute this to normal pre-competition nerves. Others feel totally overwhelmed and may even fail to start or finish the race. As it happens, anxiety is an integral part of sport but an athlete’s ability to control ‘the nerves’ can be very beneficial (or detrimental) to their performance.
The right level of anxiety will improve performance. By design, those pre-competition nerves keep you sharp and prepared. However, too much anxiety before a race can ruin your performance. If you experience things like difficulty in making decisions, irritation, negative focus, negative self-talk, digestive problems and a dip in confidence, then your anxiety level is likely too high and detrimental to performance.
Understanding Anxiety
Anxiety is part of being human and needs to be correctly understood in order to manage it. One of the ways anxiety presents is the ‘fight or flight’ response to a threat. This is when our minds and bodies are getting ready to deal with real or apparent danger. Chemicals such as adrenaline start flowing to the parts of the body that require extra energy in dealing with this threat. The body responds to the mind’s interpretation of these events in multiple ways. A rapid heartbeat and fast breathing allow for increased blood and oxygen flow. Sweating cools the body down. Even nausea, which is the result of blood flowing from the digestive areas up to the ‘engine room’ of the heart and lungs. We sharpen our attention and focus on the activity.
The fight or flight response has helped us from time immemorial, protecting us from danger. It is who we are as human beings and should be used to our advantage to harness the performance response. That is done by managing how we look at the challenge. You should embrace and manage the anxiety of a race rather seeing it as a threat.
How to manage sports performance anxiety
1. Focus on the present, NOT the end result. Being in the present prevents you from overthinking your race. Stop thinking about what could happen. Bring yourself back to the here and the now by allowing your five senses to take in what is currently happening. What do you see, hear, touch, taste and smell? Take it all in. Focus on what is right in front of you as opposed to where you might place at the finish line.
2. Trust the process. If you have prepared as best as possible for the race, trust in that preparation, take confidence from that preparation and learn to enjoy the actual race.
3. Calm yourself. Catch your mind when it starts ‘racing’ and calm yourself. One method is to breathe deeply through your nose and out through your mouth. Do this until you feel more comfortable. The more you practice this, the more you can develop the skill of regulating the adrenaline response of your racing heartbeat and overly shallow breathing. This activity highlights the brain-body connection in that when you are anxious the brain calls out for more oxygen. By breathing deeply, the brain gets the heart to calm down and the lungs work more efficiently which will calm things down.
4. Reframe negative and distorted thoughts. Identifying some of the negative labels, expectations and irrational beliefs that fill your head before or during a competition is a way of starting this process. You might believe that you are not a good climber, but with a realistic and holistic mindset, you can see that you have many other strengths. Doing a mental assessment of your strengths allows you to explore other qualities in you that will help you perform in a race. Replacing negative beliefs with positive, realistic beliefs and thoughts is central to ensuring performance flow.
5. Remind yourself of successes. Paging or scanning through your collection of accomplishments and even watching previous triumphs allows you to remember these successes and will nudge you away from fixating on the negative, anxiety-driving performances.
6. Talking to someone such as a coach, friend or family member also allows you to process your anxiety and helps put things into perspective. This support system often reminds us of our positive accomplishments. Seeing a sports psychologist also assists in processing and managing too much anxiety.
7. Develop a pre-race routine. For some riders, social situations such as a competition and what others think of you, can also be anxiety-driving. For example, just before a competition worrying about who will be at your competition to watch you compete may cause you to be distracted and place undue pressure on you. A pre-competition routine that helps you to relax, focus and concentrate on your riding and not on worrying about what others will think of you, is useful. This routine includes things like visualizing yourself performing well or listening to music that makes you feel relaxed. Stretching, a mobility routine and focusing on your current state will also allow you to embrace the anxiety, which works to your advantage.
The bottom line
Recognizing that anxiety allows opportunity can help reframe your thinking, feelings and behavior. Adopting a constructive and creative mindset will allow you to explore and experience flow both when training and racing.
| IMAGES: Gary Perkin, Pexels, Red Bull, Rob Ward |
Dr Andrew Lewis is a Health Professions Council of South Africa (SA) and Health and Care Professions Council (UK) registered Educational Psychologist with rooms in Stellenbosch and Somerset West.