Anxiety In Sport Essay

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Meditation Reduces Sport Performance Anxiety and Enhances Sport Performance
High anxiety levels are a common part of athletes lives. These anxiety levels are typically caused by the sport being played, and is likely that ineffective performance plays a crucial role in the outcome. Athletes with higher levels of performance anxiety seem to ‘choke’, in other words get nervous about playing/performing in front of a crowd, or simply become anxious due to the stress put on the individual to perform well. Some anxiety may also come from dwelling on past performances, and remembering the feelings and thoughts they felt, rather than focusing on the here and now. Finding ways to minimize the stress and anxiety of athletes would help calm the athletes, …show more content…

Mindfulness meditation is a type of meditation that “has also been associated with enhanced activation in brain regions involved in attention, perception, memory, and empathy, suggesting that it may, in fact, contribute to higher levels of psychosocial functioning.”(Marks, 2008. pp.216) Mindfulness-based stress reduction has been studied as a treatment for many types of anxiety experienced through an athletes’ performance. “The potential implications for human performance are profound: Neural correlates data indicate significant enhancements in areas that facilitate attentional control, emotion-regulation, and the perception of others’ actions and intentions.”(Marks, 2008) In other words, mental skills are needed for an athlete to have effective training and performance increases. Training mental skills, or meditation relating to sport psychology has a focus on personal goal-setting, positive self-talk, imagery, and pre-competition behavioral routines. All the focuses above involve attempts to control emotional responses so the athlete can concentrate on being more productive on their personal athletic performance. A study of mindfulness practice or meditation for anxiety-induced performance disruption (“choking”) or focal hand dystonia among golfers would be an ideal way to test this

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