Athletes and stress

A. It isn’t easy being a professional athlete. Not only are the physical demands greater than most people could handle, athletes also face intense psychological pressure during competition. This is something that British tennis player Emma Raducanu wrote about on social media following her withdrawal from the 2021 Wimbledon tournament. Though the young player had been doing well in the tournament, she began having difficulty regulating her breathing and heart rate during a match, which she later attributed to ’the accumulation of the excitement and the buzz’.

B. For athletes, some level of performance stress is almost unavoidable. But there are many different factors that dictate just how people’s minds and bodies respond to stressful events. Typically, stress is the result of an exchange between two factors: demands and resources. An athlete may feel stressed about an event if they feel the demands on them are greater than they can handle. These demands include the high level of physical and mental effort required to succeed, and also the
athlete’s concerns about the difficulty of the event, their chance of succeeding, and any potential dangers such as injury. Resources, on the other hand, are a person’s ability to cope with these demands. These include factors such as the competitor’s degree of confidence, how much they believe they can control the situation’s outcome, and whether they’re looking forward to the event or not.

C. Each new demand or change in circumstances affects whether a person responds positively or negatively to stress. Typically, the more resources a person feels they have in handling the situation, the more positive their stress response. This positive stress response is called a challenge state. But should the person feel there are too many demands placed on them, the more likely they are to experience a negative stress response -known as a threat state. Research shows that the challenge
states lead to good performance, while threat states lead to poorer performance. So, in Emma Raducanu’s case, a much larger audience, higher expectations and facing a more skilful opponent, may all have led her to feel there were greater demands being placed on her at Wimbledon -but she didn’t have the resources to
tackle them. This led to her experiencing a threat response.

D. Our challenge and threat responses essentially influence how our body responds to stressful situations, as both affect the production of adrenaline and cortisol-also known as ‘stress hormones’. During a challenge state, adrenaline increases the amount of blood pumped from the heart and expands the blood vessels, which allows more energy to be delivered to the muscles and brain. This increase of blood and decrease of pressure in the blood vessels has been consistently related to superior sport performance in everything from cricket batting, to golf putting and football penalty taking. But during a threat state, cortisol inhibits the positive effect of adrenaline, resulting in tighter blood vessels, higher blood pressure, slower psychological responses, and a faster heart rate. In short, a threat state makes people more anxious -they make worse decisions and perform more poorly. In tennis players, cortisol has been associated with more unsuccessful serves and greater anxiety.

E. That said, anxiety is also a common experience for athletes when they’re under pressure. Anxiety can increase heart rate and perspiration, cause heart palpitations,
muscle tremors and shortness of breath, as well as headaches, nausea, stomach pain, weakness and a desire to escape in more extreme cases. Anxiety can also reduce concentration and self-control and cause overthinking. The intensity with which a person experiences anxiety depends on the demands and resources they have. Anxiety may also manifest itself in the form of excitement or nervousness depending on the stress response. Negative stress responses can be damaging to
both physical and mental health -and repeated episodes of anxiety coupled with negative responses can increase risk of heart disease and depression.

F. But there are many ways athletes can ensure they respond positively under pressure. Positive stress responses can be promoted through the language that they and others – such as coaches or parents – use. Psychologists can also help athletes change how they see their physiological responses – such as helping them see a higher heart rate as excitement, rather than nerves. Developing psychological skills, such as visualisation, can also help decrease physiological responses to threat. Visualisation may involve the athlete recreating a mental picture of a time when they performed well, or picturing themselves doing well in the future. This can help create a feeling of control over the stressful event. Recreating competitive pressure during training can also help athletes learn how to deal with stress. An example of this might be scoring athletes against their peers to create a sense of competition. This would increase the demands which players experience compared to a normal training session, while still allowing them to practise coping with stress.

An inquiry into the existence of the gifted child

Let us start by looking at a modern ‘genius’, Maryam Mirzakhani, who died at the early age of 40. She was the only woman to win the Fields Medal the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize. It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those ‘gifted’ children, those who have an extraordinary ability in a specific sphere of activity or knowledge. But look closer and a different story emerges. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She went to a highly selective girls’ school but maths wasn’t her interest -reading was. She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on. As for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he’d learned. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her and she was hooked.

In adult life it is clear that she was curious, excited by what she did and also resolute in the face of setbacks. One of her comments sums it up. ‘Of course, the most rewarding part is the “Alia” moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new … But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight.’ That trail took her to the heights of original research into mathematics.

Is her background unusual? Apparently not. Most Nobel prize winners were unexceptional in childhood. Einstein was slow to talk as a baby. Ile failed the general part of the entry test to Zurich Polytechnic – though they let him in because of high physics and maths scores. Ile struggled at work initially, but he kept plugging away and eventually rewrote the laws of Newtonian mechanics with his theory of relativity. 

There has been a considerable amount of research on high performance over the last century that suggests it goes way beyond tested intelligence. On top of that, research is clear that brains are flexible, new neural pathways can be created, and IQ isn’t fixed. For example, just because you can read stories with hundreds of pages at the age of five doesn’t mean you will still be ahead of your contemporaries in your teens. While the jury is out on giftedness being innate and other factors potentially making the difference, what is certain is that the
behaviours associated with high levels of performance are replicable and most can be taught even traits such as curiosity.

According to my colleague Prof Deborah Eyre, with whom I’ve collaborated on the book Great Minds and How to Crow Them, the latest neuroscience and psychological research suggests most individuals can reach levels of performance associated in school with the gifted and talented. However, they must be taught the right attitudes and approaches to their learning and develop the attributes of high performers-curiosity, persistence and hard work, for example an approach Eyre calls ‘high performance learning’. Critically, they need the right support in developing those approaches at home as well as at school.

Prof Anders Ericsson, an eminent education psychologist at Florida State University, US, is the co-author of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. After research going back to 1980 into diverse achievements, from music to memory to sport, he doesn’t think unique and innate talents are at the heart of performance. Deliberate practice, that stretches you every step of the way, and around 10,000 hours of it, is what produces the goods. It’s not a magic number the highest performers move on to doing a whole lot more, of course. Ericsson’s memory research is particularly interesting because random students, trained in memory techniques for the study, went on to outperform others thought to have innately superior memories those who you might call gifted.

But it is perhaps the work of Benjamin Bloom, another distinguished American educationist working in the 1980s, that gives the most pause for thought. Bloom’s team looked at a group of extraordinarily high achieving people in disciplines as varied as ballet, swimming, piano, tennis, maths, sculpture and neurology. He found a pattern of parents encouraging and supporting their children, often in areas they enjoyed themselves. Bloom’s outstanding people had worked very hard and consistently at something they had become hooked on when at a young age, and their parents all emerged as having strong work ethics themselves.

Eyre says we know how high performers learn. From that she has developed a high performing learning approach. She is working on this with a group of schools, both in Britain and abroad. Some spin-off research, which looked in detail at 24 of the 3,000 children being studied who were succeeding despite difficult circumstances, found something remarkable. Half were getting free school meals because of poverty, more than half were living with a single parent, and four in five were living in disadvantaged areas. Interviews uncovered strong evidence of an adult or adults in the child’s life who valued and supported education, either in the immediate or extended family or in the child’s wider community. Children talked about the need to work hard at school, to listen in class and keep trying. Let us end with Einstein, the epitome of a genius. He clearly had curiosity, character and determination. He struggled against rejection in early life but was undeterred. Did he think he was a genius or even gifted? He once wrote: ‘It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. Most people say it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.’