X PREDISPOSITIONS PHYSICAL BEHAVIOURAL MENTAL PRESSURE COPING 1 2 3
1 Symptom - focused strategies 2 Appraisal - focused strategies 3 Situation - focused strategies
Stress: how to control it and keep your head
Symptom-focused strategies target the stress symptoms themselves and attempt to control them to manageable proportions. As emphasised in the previous section, recognising the symptoms that you experience when you are stressed and being aware of when you are experiencing them is crucial. Breaking the symptoms down into mental, physical and behavioural components is helpful in leading you to an appropriate means of controlling them.
Controlling mental symptoms
Mental symptoms, often in the form of things like doubt, worry, frustra- tion and anger, are most effectively controlled by mental relaxation. Mental relaxation can be broken down into two broad areas. Firstly, relaxation can be in the form of enjoyable activities that serve to distract you from the pressure of performing. Activities commonly cited as help- ing to take people’s mind off things include exercise, listening to music, reading, walking the dog, gardening and the like. Secondly, mental relax- ation can be of a more formal nature with the main objective being to provide your mind and body with rest.
A common form of mental relaxation is meditation, which typically com- prises concentrating on breathing and using a mantra or keyword spoken silently on each exhalation. This technique is based on the princi- ple of distracting you from negative thoughts and focusing you instead on the mantra or keyword as a means of clearing and calming your mind. I have used meditative relaxation with both business and sport performers who have experienced intense mental symptoms when under stress. They have typically learned three forms of relaxation: deep, inter- mediate and quick forms (scripts for all three forms of meditative relaxation are provided in Appendix A).
1. The deep form of meditative relaxation, typically lasting between 15–20 minutes, is generally practised sitting or lying down and with your eyes shut. You then progress through various stages as follows: G focusing on your breathing;
G focusing on saying ‘one’ silently to yourself on each breath out. G counting down from 10 to 1 on each successive breath out;
Controlling the effects of stress: symptom-focused
strategies
G focusing on saying ‘one’ to yourself; G counting up from 1 to 7 on each breath in; G opening your eyes.
2 The intermediate form of meditative relaxation is essentially a short- ened version of the deep form and is practised over approximately 5–6 minutes. It can be used as a means of composing yourself in those final hours or minutes in the run-up to that important event.
3. The quick form of meditative relaxation can be performed over a few seconds as a means of re-focusing or calming your mind in those cru- cial moments during performance. This simply involves focusing on the mantra or keyword over three or four breaths out. Executives I have worked with use this quick form of relaxation to compose them- selves before important presentations or maybe to manage any anger, frustration or other negative emotions when it is important that they are kept under tight control.
Another effective technique for dealing with mental symptoms of stress is imagery-based relaxation. The principles underlying the effectiveness of imagery-based relaxation are similar to those of meditative relaxation – it simply acts as a means of distracting you from your negative mental symptoms and focusing you instead on thoughts that calm your mind. Focusing for a few minutes or even seconds on an image of something or somewhere you find very relaxing, such as lying on a beach, soaking in a warm bath, or perhaps walking though beautiful countryside, will help to compose your troubled mind (see Appendix B for a sample imagery- based relaxation script and suggestions for developing your own).
Over to Adrian . . .
Basic breathing exercises were some of the most-used forms of relaxation for me, particularly in the ready room before a big final. If the race itself wasn’t stressful enough, we had to report to a room with our fellow finalists for half an hour before the race. Sitting there with only your own mind for company could sometimes get a little testing. I used to count and control my breathing, taking in deeper and longer breaths. This was mainly a calming technique, a by-product being that it stopped my adrenalin from kicking in too early.
You will also be able to develop your own ways of controlling the con- tent of your conscious mind. As long as you adhere to the key principles involved in first of all recognising that the thoughts filling your con- scious mind are unhelpful, and then taking a few minutes or seconds to replace them with more positive thoughts, experiment and find what works for you.
Controlling physical symptoms
Physical symptoms are those bodily reactions that can be quite unpleasant; the headache, those jelly legs, the sometimes uncomfortable muscle ten- sion, the pounding heart, that feeling of sickness, the butterflies or perhaps an empty feeling in the pit of your stomach, the sweaty palms, the voice tremor and sometimes uncontrollable muscles in your face that betray the nerves, anger or frustration you are trying so desperately to hide.
An effective technique for dealing with the physical symptoms of stress is progressive muscular relaxation (PMR). As with meditative relax- ation, PMR can be used to generate a deeply relaxed state if performed over 15–20 minutes, or a few second version will help to relax or loosen up certain muscle groups as required. PMR generally involves tensing and relaxing various muscle groups and progressing through the body in a structured manner. As with meditation, the length of the PMR can be customised to meet specific needs. The ultimate goal for performers is to derive benefit from it within a few seconds. For example, you may have seen tennis players tensing and relaxing the muscles in their forearms in between rallies – this is to quickly get rid of any unwanted tension that will impair their ‘feel’ of the ball on the racket. Again, this technique is easily applicable and transferable to business performers who want to release any unwanted physical tension before a presentation or during an important meeting (see Appendix C for a PMR script).
Over to Adrian . . .
Because I used to travel far and wide to compete, I often would find myself imagining being back at home, walking on a hillside in the Yorkshire Dales. Big, wide open spaces with lots of air to breathe. A real contrast to some of the pokey rooms I would be sitting in down in the bowels of a swimming pool, waiting to walk out for an Olympic final! This was one of my main forms of relaxation – just to spend a little time daydreaming and changing my mental focus.
Another effective way of dealing with the physical symptoms of stress is
abdominal breathing. Your breathing reflects the level of tension you carry in your body. When you are tense, your breathing usually becomes shallow and rapid, involving the upper chest area only. When you are relaxed, you breathe more fully and deeply, and from your abdomen. Learning to breathe in this way can help you alleviate the physical symp- toms of stress, and even result in a relaxed state when you become proficient at it. Appendix D shows you how to reduce tension by breath- ing from the abdomen.
Controlling behavioural symptoms
Behavioural symptoms of stress are those that are observable: nervous fidgeting or pacing, becoming quiet and withdrawn or maybe loud and outgoing, drinking excessive amounts of caffeine and alcohol, being irri- table, and many more that are too numerous to mention here. In keeping with the basic theme for this entire chapter, the key is to develop aware- ness and in this case to recognise how your behaviour changes when you are stressed. Your behavioural changes need not be dramatic, but instead quite subtle, as described earlier in this chapter. Work through your behavioural changes and identify those which are unhelpful during dif- ferent phases of your performance cycle. For example, if you drink an excessive amount of caffeine-laced coffee during periods of stress and this exacerbates your sleeping problem, then there is a pretty easy solu- tion to this particular symptom!
Over to Adrian . . .
Looking back on it, I had several approaches to dealing with my stress symptoms. I would read a book, do crosswords or listen to music – all internal things to take my mind away and be in a different place. I also moved away from nervous people. I would never be around teammates or coaches who couldn’t cope.
Over to Adrian . . .
I would use PMR mainly in the time I had between prelims and finals. At the major events, we would race the prelims in the morning and then have four or five hours’ rest before racing the final in the evening. Having swum a fast and exacting race to qualify for the final, I sometimes found myself lying on my bed thinking about the evening race and getting quite tense.
Symptom-focused strategies for controlling stress can be very effective and you should devote time and effort to practising and experimenting with the techniques described above. They will prove invaluable in those moments and minutes when stress threatens to overpower you and you need to regain your composure. However, controlling symptoms is only really effective in the short term because you never actually tackle the source of stress and so the symptoms keep returning. The remaining strategies focus, therefore, on techniques that are effective on a longer-term basis.
I will not pretend that changing negative appraisal and thinking into positive thinking is easy. And for some people who have natural tenden- cies or predispositions to look on the dark side, it can be a major challenge. The starting point is the realisation and acceptance that you have a choice about the way you think, and that you can actually alter your mode of thinking. Awareness, once again, underpins any change you wish to make. Have a look through the typical negative thought pat- terns below and note those that you engage in when under pressure:
I could always tell when my coach was really nervous before a race, because when we had the final talk before I went to report to the ready room, his behaviour gave it away. He used to screw his programme up and started talking more quickly. So in the end I used to tell him that I would see him an hour and a half
beforehand, and that would be the only time I would see him. In swimming the hardest time before the race is the half hour leading up to it. That’s when it becomes quite gladiatorial as you’re with your seven opponents in the room waiting. Your breathing becomes quicker and muscles start tensing. So I learned ways to deal with that – breathing exercises, basic meditative and muscular relaxation techniques, as I mentioned above.
One useful tool to help me cope with the competition stress came from a conversation with a sport psychologist. I was talking about how the negative voice in my head sometimes appeared to be louder than the more positive one. To get over this I visualised the bigger voice as being the diminished person and gave the small, more positive guy a megaphone!