Stress hormones
Upon sensing some form of imminent danger, our brain sends signals for glands to produce hormones such as adrenaline and noradrenaline to speed up our heart rate to provide more blood, and the respiratory rate to provide more oxygen to our muscles that assist in the motor response.
Cortisol secretion supplies glucose spikes to our brain to optimize mental processes such as attention, and to our muscles under a self-regulating system but decreases and stabilizes as exposure to similar situations continues due to the habituation effect. If we are exposed to a prolonged period of stress, cortisol can impair our brain, specifically the hippocampus which hinders the normal assimilation of novelty and its storage in memory.
Distress and eustress
Any change that requires adaptation generates both positive and negative stress. Although stress has a reputation for being harmful it often generates our impulse to act. A certain degree of stress is essential to promote alertness in skiing because without it boredom can set in due to lack of stimuli. This is what is considered eustress or positive stress. It is recognized as a healthy stress since it strengthens our physical and mental energy as well as our motivation to face new challenges.
On the opposite side there is distress or negative stress, which occurs when the activities to be performed generate constant anxious worries affecting our performance and health. Distress decreases psychophysical vulnerability while eustress increases it.
Stress is a continuous phenomenon in which we may go from a state of alternation between eustress-distress and its levels can be moderate or severe depending on our interaction with the environment. We may suffer from distress when the demands of the environment are greater than our own resources; while we tend to experience eustress when the requirements are high but do not exceed our capabilities, so we feel motivated to act by generating the necessary energy to face the challenging condition.
Since it is impossible to completely eliminate stress in skiing, the ideal would be to keep it at eustress levels using it as a motivating force and, at the same time, preventing it from becoming an inhibiting mechanism.
Stress and attention
Stressful situations influence our attention, changing or altering it, given that any threatening signal shifts our attention towards the situation itself. Several studies prove that the level of stress collaborates in the focus of our attention on the task to be performed but only up to a certain point considered as maximum performance, after which it begins to decrease if stress increases.
The effect of stress on attention highlights the following:
- The restriction of attention to the essential aspects of the situation discarding those irrelevant.
- Alteration of control in terms of decreased power to discriminate what is relevant.
- The decrease in the ability to concentrate producing both attentional limitation and an increase in distractibility.
Stress and learning
To undertake or learn new things we need tranquility, which is the same as having a low level of stress, in this way we do not react to the novelty but act proactively to its assimilation. We cannot learn if we are worried or nervous, that is to say, if we are ‘stressed’.
Stress-generating events can arise, on certain occasions, in the normal transition of our learning progression such as moving to a more complicated terrain, taking a new lift, skiing a different snow type, or descending a crowded slope. Also, if the instructor or coach gives us too many instructions, this will generate stress because our working memory becomes saturated with information and our performance will decline.
The following are normal and abnormal responses to a significantly stressful skiing experience (adapted from Sarason & Sarason):
Normal responses:
- Feeling strong emotions after the event.
- Opposing thinking about the event by using some form of denial.
- Having unwanted and intrusive thoughts about the event.
- Mild and/or temporary physical symptoms: exhaustion, headache, stomach upset, and others.
Abnormal responses:
- Feeling excessive preoccupation with intense emotions (e.g., fear, sadness, anger).
- Extreme resistance to thinking about the event.
- Having persistent, upsetting images and thoughts that interfere with decision making.
- Strong and persistent organic reactions: continuous headaches, chronic stomach pain, marked exhaustion, and others.
- Long-term problems in motivation to return to skiing.
Generally, depending on the skier’s personality and the degree of stress generated by the situation, these abnormal reactions tend to dissipate after the stressors are overcome by repeated exposure to stressful scenarios.
Psychology professors Irvin and Barbara Sarason argue that, in certain personality types, different ways of denying the reality of a stressful context are observed:
- Denying information that is provided: “No one told me anything about it.”
- Denying information about a threat: “Nobody told me there was anything to worry about”.
- Deny personal relevance: “It doesn’t apply to me”.
- Deny emergency: “There is no need to rush.
- Deny vulnerability: “It doesn’t matter what happens, it can’t happen to me.
- Deny emotion: “I’m not afraid”.
- Deny the importance of the emotion: “I’m afraid but there’s no reason to feel this way”.
It can be assumed that there are three general reactions to stress:
- The explosive skier will respond with overreactions since he is irritated by any situation that doesn’t unfold as he intends. He is generally a perfectionist, impatient, ambitious, and always skis in a hurry and in pursuit of his goals but suffers from frustration stress if he doesn’t achieve them.
- The implosive skier is the one who ‘explodes’ inward. He is introverted, sensitive, and obsessive. He reacts through false calm without externalizing his displeasure. Because he does not vent his worries, he is prone to chronic stress. He is passive and often feels dissatisfaction and frustration.
- The balanced skier is someone who is somewhere in between. He is prudent and reacts calmly.
When going through a stressful circumstance, it is normal to experience the following:
- Anxiety: we want the situation to pass quickly.
- Generalized fear: of hurting ourselves or others, of not being able to control ourselves.
- Anger: not having the ability to overcome/control the situation.
- Disorganization: not knowing how to organize our own skiing.
- Feeling of helplessness: wanting to overcome/control the situation but not being able to.
- Feeling of loneliness: facing reality in isolation and helplessness.
- Hopelessness: the situation cannot be overcome/controlled.
- Worry: what will happen if we do not overcome/control it.
- Uncertainty: when we will be able to overcome/control it.
In coping with stressful situations, it is beneficial to keep in mind the positive experiences that are generated:
- Experience in facing new or similar challenges.
- Recognition of cooperation and empathy with others in the same situation.
- Development of tolerance to difficulties.
- Recognition of the effort made to adapt.
- Development of self-knowledge.
- The positive aspect of facing stressful situations is the development of resilience, that is, our ability to emerge stronger from adverse situations.
