Feeling the fear and do it anyway
Dr Mark Bawden is out in Vancouver with the Short Track Speed Skating team. This is the third article he has produced whilst out at the Games.
Battling with the two fear systems in performance
The Olympics has begun with two very different poignant emotions. The first is one of extreme sadness due to the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili the 21 year old Georgian athlete who tragically lost his life during a practice run whilst training to compete in the luge. The news has been a stark reminder that we are all human and that there is an element of danger to these sports at the highest level. The second dominant emotion that we have experienced was one of inspiration at having experienced the opening ceremony. It was a truly jaw dropping occasion that at times felt breath taking. During K.D Lang’s outstanding closing version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallalujah you could see the tears welling in the eyes around you. It felt like we were all on the dawn of something very special.
The evening had an extra sense of poignancy due to the minutes silence in memory of the Georgian athlete who had lost his life in pursuit of his dream earlier that day. In that minute everyone had a sense of what is to be human and to re-connect with what’s important to them as a person and as an athlete.
As human beings we have two distinctly different fear systems that we confront in our Worlds. The first is an innate response that is designed to keep us alive. This is the FIGHT , FLIGHT, FREEZE response. It has been part of our psychological makeup since reptilian times and has one purpose – to keep us alive. Anyone who has experienced the feeling of freezing before an abseil or bungee jump will understand how powerful that fear response can be. It is our psychological alarm system and it is designed to scan for threats in our environment in order to protect us. This response can feel involuntary and hard to control. This is because it relies on a super system that by-passes the logical part of our brain and presses the emotional panic button. If you have ever had the feeling of ‘going blank’ when faced with a crisis, you will understand the feeling of being emotionally hijacked. In the case of the bungee jump most people understand that they are actually safe and that this is not a genuine threat to their life yet the brain is ‘confused’ as it recognises the threat and it triggers our fear response anyway.
The second fear system is more complex and linked more closely to how we have developed and learnt through our experience in the modern world. This is the fear of being judged negatively. This is the fear response you feel before making a speech, going into an interview or performing in sport. This fear response has the same outcome as the fear of death response, but is easier to re-wire and educate our brains to re-interpret. We can put ourselves in situations where we fear judgement and experience positive outcomes and acclimatise to the experience. Slowly our brains begin to learn that we are safe in this environment and therefore we are able to access logic. One of the biggest challenges around public speaking is that people don’t get much opportunity to practice it. And thus, when we are thrown into a public speaking situation we tend to have an extreme physiological reaction. This is fear is being driven by our need to protect our ego. Ask any best man 15 mins before his speech and he will be able to describe this fear response quite accurately!
The psychology of our brains when experiencing fear is fascinating. In most sports the dominant fear system that athletes have to contend with is our learnt response to the fear of being judged negatively. This can be managed by helping performers to use logic over emotion, to control their physiological responses, to keep performance in perspective and to learn to stay focused on themselves and their processes. The first fear system usually plays less of a role in most sports as the threat of death isn’t usually directly present. However, as a result of yesterdays sad events it would seem that athletes may need to also contend with another form of fear that is much more innate and harder to control, our very need to survive.
