An inexhaustible topic of any mental training is certainly the emotions that the athlete experiences before, during and after the competition. Athletes can experience a whole “range of emotions within a game: create the fear of not fulfilling their own expectations, hopes, anger, frustration to pride and relief.
One of the tasks of a sports psychologist is to train athletes on different emotion strategies, provide them with a detailed presentation of the advantages or disadvantages of each strategy and allow them the freedom to choose which strategies ultimately pay off.
When we ask athletes which one of the emotion management strategies they use, the most frequent answer is that they ignore emotions “move them away from themselves” or they simply do not want to deal with them. Perhaps the best explanation for the ineffectiveness of ignoring or suppressing emotions was presented by the mindfulness of researcher Shinzen Young, who presented emotional suffering in the form of the equation: SUFFERING = PAIN x RESISTANCE
The equation shows that the emotional pain we feel (e.g. frustration or anger) is not a problem in itself as much as our resistance (e.g. anger at the injustice of the situation) accompanied by self-criticism (I shouldn’t feel that way) that makes suffering more intense and ultimately harder to tolerate.
How do we transfer this equation into the context of sport? Imagine a tennis player who, after numerous changes and numerous points receives a light ball from his opponent, but instead of scoring, he misses the ball and loses an important point. The natural emotion that arises in such a situation is anger, making it inevitable and no matter how hard one tries not to feel it, it is present.
But is the athlete present while the anger is taking place? Can an athlete be self-aware: an observer of anger? Is he aware of which part of the body anger uses to exist? Is the athlete aware of the onset of anger in his own body before anger becomes much more difficult to “control”? Can an athlete become aware of thoughts or a voice of self-criticism directed at himself while feeling anger? The idea of mindfulness lies right in these questions, so can we look at the emotion of anger as at the person we look at, observe and decide what to do with it, or does it decide what will happen to us? Can we look at anger without condemning and without resisting the fact that it is present and yet transient like a cloud passing over the sun at times. Can an athlete be aware of the fact that in moments of intense emotion such as anger there are two people: anger and a background observer of anger without which anger could not even exist? Can an athlete be aware of fear but also of the choice that despite the fear he decides to live according to his own values (e.g. take responsibility and make the last shot in the match)? In other words, Young’s equation conveys the following: pain (emotional pain) is inevitable, but resisting suffering is a choice. If there is no resistance to pain, suffering disappears and only pain remains (a natural human emotion that we all feel).