Symptoms of anxiety when performing under pressure
Some skiers tend to perform favorably under pressure but, when it is high, performance becomes less predictable. For the athlete, performing under pressure is the most common cause of stress in competition. It is generated by a factor, or set of factors, that increase the perception of the value of performing well. Those skiers who have a degree of control over a challenging situation and manage their anxiety symptoms see them as facilitators of performance. On the other hand, those who perceive that they are not in control of the situation interpret their anxiety symptoms negatively, which directly influences their expectations of goal achievement.
Psychological block under pressure is a phenomenon in which performance is diminished due to intense anxiety. It often happens that the stress is such that movements cannot be completed properly because we are trying too hard.
Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist, suggests that the ability to execute a fine motor skill is affected by the pressure of the situation because our self-consciousness leads to making a conscious effort to perform an action already mastered and which should be executed, in normal situations, automatically. In these cases, it could be considered that we have unlearned how to execute the technique. This unpleasant psychological state is generated as a reaction to the interpretation that executing under pressure is a threat.
Characteristics of anxiogenic states
When skiing, anxiety has a significant effect on our psychological, physiological, and behavioral performance. Under this emotion, cognitive characteristics are observed including thoughts, ideas, or images of threat or imminent danger. It is our mental component determined by negative expectations about self-evaluation and successful performance. These are mental filters that prevent our objective interpretation about the reality of the situation because it influences our way of paying attention. We perceive ourselves as vulnerable in the face of a threatening environment in which we have little control.
Other visible features of the cognitive characteristics of anxiety are:
- Feeling of confusion.
- Reduced concentration.
- Indecisiveness.
- Lack of confidence.
- Defeatist internal dialogue.
- Images of failure.
- Fear.
- Inability to follow instructions.
- Difficulty to concentrate.
- Feeling of weakness.
In the physiological or somatic characteristics, we observe the following symptoms, which normalize once the alarm situation that triggered the state of anxiety has ceased.
- Increased functioning of the autonomic nervous system in terms of amplified respiratory and heart rate.
- Muscle tension (especially in neck and shoulders).
- Inhibited posture.
- Perspiration (especially hands and feet).
- Need to urinate.
- Visceral agitation.
- Dry mouth.
- Trembling.
- Choking sensation.
- Difficulty to control movements.
- Visual and vocal distortion.
Motor or behavioral characteristics include direct symptoms such as nervousness, agitation, palpitations, restricted motor skills, introversion or unusual extroversion characteristics such as sustained conversation; and indirect symptoms, almost without voluntary control, such as protective, escape or avoidance responses, restlessness or constant mobility.
Skiing anxiety-related aspects
The spatial anxiety and the fear of getting lost reduce our uptake of references to maintain orientation in a ski resort because the stress generated by these emotions lower our ability to memorize spatial locations. Fear of getting lost causes us to tend not to ski beyond familiar trails, which negatively impacts our confidence and motivation to explore new ones.
Anxiety and balance. Our balance control is the result of the integration of physical and psychological factors. We exhibit different reactions to feeling anxious when our stability is threatened by unstable surfaces. Both anxiety and fear of falling affect our postural control as they modify our balance control strategies, which can lead to reduced performance, especially the recurrent fear of falling as it is a stressor.
Anxiety generated by immediate gratification. Another facet of anxiety is immediate gratification, or the cult of immediacy, i.e. the loss of the ability to wait, which is also observed on the ski slopes. If we suffer this type of anxiety, we have lost the perspective of listening to our inner rhythm and the recognition that skiing can also be done calmly and quietly.
Anxiety caused by self-demand. Just as the culture of immediacy causes anxiety, so does self-demand. When we become overly critical of our performance, we judge ourselves unjustifiably harshly. In this way we restrict our margin for error to such an extent that our own demand, which should be taken as a quality, ceases to be a quality and becomes an impediment to the achievement of our goals.
Self-demanding without moderation leads us to anxiety, stress, and frustration. The option is to replace self-demanding with self-efficacy, that is, a healthy level of demand. To avoid limiting self-demanding, we should seek balance by paying attention to the effectiveness of our achievements, to the well-being of our skiing, and to valuing ourselves by accepting that, if we make mistakes, there will always be opportunities to improve, bearing in mind that failure is not making mistakes but not turning them into experience.
Anxiety and attention. It is considered that anxiety is associated with our inability to disengage from the processing of distractors related to the threat and/or the increased distraction produced by irrelevant stimuli of the threatening situation. In an anxiogenic state, we would quickly orient our attention to anxiety-inducing stimuli and disengage from them more slowly. If we experience a high level of anxiety, we are prone to exhibit an attention-avoidance behavior, i.e., at first we will quickly orient our attention towards the threatening situation, which then transforms into an avoidance behavior to mitigate the negative emotional impact it generates. Some authors postulate that the problem does not lie in the speed of attentional capture of the threat but in disengaging it.
Anxiety and personality. Anxiety can be a personality trait, i.e., the propensity to manifest anxious states on a regular basis, or it can appear as an emotional reaction to a specific situation (anxiogenic situation). It is thought that exhibiting a pessimistic profile may present feelings of loss of control as these are a characteristic of our personality. In error making, we may attribute the causes to the loss of ability and to our own insecurity so that our expectations of improvement will decrease, generating negative feelings associated with anxiety.
Anxiety and decision. During a state of anxiety, it is more difficult to make appropriate decisions because it disturbs the way we think. The amygdala is considered the center of our emotional brain and the filter to the prefrontal cortex, the area where executive functions for decisional processes take place. When experiencing anxiety, the amygdala becomes congested and therefore the executive functions (our decisions) or the process of new learnings is interfered.
Anxious thinking tends to disorganize our behavior, rendering it difficult to make decisions about the actions to be taken. It is generated by the propensity to anticipate situations that can produce damage, orienting negative opinions towards these imaginary situations. This type of thinking, if it increases in intensity, can lead us to paralysis in which we are prevented from acting. In this case, anxiety as a defensive mechanism ceases to be functional and becomes harmful. When we decide to act by focusing our attention on our future motor behavior, then anxiety tends to decrease as we concentrate on the relevant stimuli of the action we are about to undertake.
