The pace of today’s society encourages an attitude of immediacy, being one of the great problems that, understandably, generates anxiety.
Anxiety is a behavior that initially functions as an alarm signal in the face of a particular situation of frustration or conflict. It starts with a certain tension and, if it increases, then it disorganizes our normal mental functioning that turns into anguish until it reaches fear or panic, surpassing our organism’s capacity to balance itself.
At first anxiety manifests itself with a low level of discomfort and worry that does not become restrictive but, if it increases, we may find ourselves in a state of helplessness in which reason does not operate properly. If not managed in a timely manner, anxieties can turn into phobias, that is to say, into intense and immobilizing fears which prevent us from enjoying skiing. The causes that generate them may not look like a threat but what we feel is so authentic that we perceive it as such.
According to Hans Eysenck, anxiety is caused by a threat and corresponds to our own evaluation of a situation with respect to our self-esteem. Anxiety tends to be interpreted as an unpleasant emotional state generated by the perception of a stimulus subjectively considered as threatening and related to the appreciation of a situation, potential physical harm, insecurity, or uncertainty that affect self-esteem. It is an alarm response to a situation in which we doubt our abilities to face it, generating uncertainty.
Anxiety is usually categorized as a negative emotion but, in reality, it is an adaptive one. It becomes negative when we make an exaggerated evaluation of the threatening situation or experience a persistently high anxiogenic level. This emotional reaction can arise from an external stimulus or from subjective imagination.
Under a state of anxiety, we experience a complex picture of cognitive, emotional, and situational factors that hinder rational decision making, affecting the planning and execution of our skiing actions and it is characterized by experiencing worry, nervousness, and distrust. The intensity of anxiety refers to how anxious we are or how much anxiety we experience at any given time, which is due to individual psychological characteristics and the characteristics of the situation in which we find ourselves.
Skiing is conceived as a balanced interaction between our own resources and the demands of the environment. Anxiety emerges from the imbalance between both factors. It influences our overall performance in that it interferes with our attention and concentration abilities. The psychological vulnerability of anxiety is due to the subjective overestimation of danger and the underestimation of our own mental, affective, and technical resources.
A critical factor during skiing is paying attention to the right stimulus at the right time. Anxiety is a psychological state that affects our optimal distribution of attention as to what, where, and when to direct it. It also comes from paying attention to psychological time, i.e., thinking in anticipation of what is to come, rather than concentrating on real time. By thinking about the future, we transform anxiety into a feeling of uncertainty, a mild fear that, taken to an extreme, becomes fear about what may happen and occurs only when our mind imagines what the future may bring. If our attention is in the here and now, our actions taken in the present moment have a better chance of being successfully accomplished.
Anxiety can be appreciated as the feeling we experience when a situation promises pleasure but at the same time is threatening,or when we know we have no other possibility or no other way to act.
Skiing anxiety can be a form of anxiety that varies from hesitancy to glide, where anxiety is always present; to refusal to descend, which can lead to a phobia to the void. But, in this case, it is not the fear of open spaces that we feel but the fear of losing our control.
The concept of anxiety can be considered as a momentary emotional state (anxiety state): we become anxious in a given situation; as a personality trait (anxiety trait): we are an anxious person; or as a generator of a certain behavior: it is difficult for us to keep calm because we experience anxiety. Some authors conceive that in the anxiety state, we are prone to attend to negative stimuli selectively through an apprehensive expectation, i.e., through excessive worry.
As a personality factor, it is the degree of anxiety presented in most situations and the disposition to behave in a more or less anxious manner under stressful situations. As a temporary state, it occurs in special circumstances in which a threatening situation is perceived, which triggers anxiety but which in reality has no real relation to the actual danger.
A distinction is then made between normal anxiety as a way of coping with expected or known situations, and neurotic anxiety as the expectation of unknown and mentally represented dangers.
At the experiential level of learning, anxiety affects our attention and our memory. Under an anxiogenic state, we cannot incorporate what we are trying to learn. In addition, anxiety is one of the most important factors affecting balance learning.
A stimulus that is too intense, such as going down a demanding slope for the first time or skiing in fog, can generate anxiety. When we evaluate this situation as threatening, we provoke a stress reaction which combines stress hormones with the disturbance generated by the threat interfering with attention, i.e., we direct our attention towards it causing a cognitive dysfunction called cortical inhibition, which decreases our skiing awareness. In these cases, it is convenient to apply strategies to alleviate the anxiogenic context. Since it is not feasible to change the situations mentioned above, it is possible to concentrate on some element of our skiing to shift attention to something concrete that is developing in the present. While for us the threat still exists, we have specific tools to cope with the circumstances.
The function of anxiety
The function of anxiety as a defense mechanism is to send warning signals that are intended to prepare our response to the situation we perceive as threatening. The anxiety of worrying about a certain danger pushes us to take fewer risks and to seek safety. If it appears in isolation, it is not harmful because it helps to alarm our organism to face the context. It becomes inconvenient when facing not very intimidating situations in which there is no physical harm, generating negative reactions. It becomes detrimental if it is constantly activated because it is harmful to our organism.
Although anxiety is considered an adaptive emotion for a specific situation, if it is exaggerated or continuous it becomes a nuisance because we direct our attention to the alarm and not to the reality of the situation.
