Is stress really the enemy in sports performance?

What are the first things that come to mind when you think of stress and performance?

For me... Stress is a bad thing for performance.

I think this is what all traditional sport psychology theories suggest and in all honesty there is hard evidence to back up these theories. Theories such as inverted U and catastrophe all suggest that as our stress/ anxiety level increases our performance decreases, with explanation to the importance and relationships between other factors like somatic and cognitive anxiety. But is stress really the enemy??

New science into the field of stress suggests... NO not necessarily!!

If we can somehow train our brains to see stress as a helpful response then our performances can become less affected by stress.

The first study was conducted by Keller, Litzelman et al. (2012) and looked at the public death records over a period of 10 years, in order to try and establish reasons for death and whether the way participants thought about stress had an impact. They found that 43% of people who experienced high levels of stress were more likely to die, but what's interesting about the next finding is that, this is only true if the participants viewed stress as a negative thing. Those who viewed stress as helpful were at one of the lowest risks. Now although this has no relation to sports performance, you can see why i had to share this...

This next study was conducted at Harvard university by Jamieson et al. (2012) used the social stress test to see whether the way participants viewed stress affected their performance, he used participants who'd been trained to see stressful situations as helpful and as a way of their body rising to the task ahead and put them in a stress situation to see how they reacted. The findings of this study are very interesting, not only did the participants perform better on the task, but their body's reacted differently... normally under a stressful situation, we expect our heart rate to increase, sweaty palms, increased breathing rate and butterflies in our stomach or feeling of nausea, but in this experiment Jamieson found that the particpants who'd learned to see stress as a helpful response, their blood vessels actually remained relaxed even though heart rate, breathing rate etc all increased this allowed more oxygen to be pumped around the body and maintained an all round healthier state for the body to be in. So not only did they perform better, but they managed to completely change the bodies normal physical response to stress... WHAT!!

So after reading about this i was so intregued by what i had learnt that i wanted to put in into action ASAP. Now i currently play cricket for Staffordshire University and we had our varsity match coming up, which is always one of those days, everyone packs themselves into the sports hall and shouts abuse and chants for their team, so quite a stressful event for those playing in it.

So in the few weeks before this match i tried to put these techniques and actions into practise, saying to myself "if i'm nervous, this is my body telling me i'm ready" and probably the most influential one for me was " stress is my friend", i have no idea why this one worked but as soon as i said this to myself, i felt prepared for the next ball. I also mentioned this type of technique to my team-mates, especially my opening partner who is a very good cricketer but can become very nervous.

On the day of varsity i did all of the above, kept everything the same in terms of preparation and although we eventually lost a very close match with two balls to go. I couldn't believe the difference... normally i get very nervous before my first ball, so many things going around in my head " where's my first run coming from?, what if i get out first ball?" etc, but i didn't feel any of that, but instead felt ready and mentally prepared to rise to the occasion and i was actually able to enjoy the moment (playing in front of an audience). Now this just didn't affect me but also my opening partner, who actually finished 37* in the match, he told me instead of nerves and anxiety he felt excited and in a state of mind that whatever happens, instead of getting himself down, he'll be able to move on and accept the outcome.

So in answer to the question 'Is stress the enemy in sports performance'. I'd say NO stress doesn't have to be the enemy, if you change the way your brain perceives the stressful situation, then you can change your body's response. It may not necessarily improve performance due to the amount of stimuli's, but it certainly limits the effect that stress has on performance.

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