Psych 101
Psych 101
In the previous book, we broke down what fuels the athlete in their endeavors. Now it’s time to explore and master the most complex tool in every athlete’s arsenal: the mind.
Psychology
To really look at the brain or the mind, humans developed the study of behaviors and the mind, psychology. To clarify, the brain is the organ that ‘holds’ the mind. The mind is essentially who we are as people, the total of our thoughts, emotions, and the impetus for our actions.
In the study of the mind, there are multiple branches of study breaking down the aspects of humanity into sub-disciplines. These include psychological health, human development, sports, the inner workings of our thoughts and behaviors, and the clinical, or medical, study of how our minds work.
Just like the nutritional and dietary sciences discussed in the first ‘The Perfect Athlete’, psychology is a relatively new field of study. The biggest breakthroughs in this discipline have predominantly been made in the last 100 to 150 years. Prior to that, there have been a variety of attempts and theories associated with the human
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psyche dating back to ancient Greece. Many of the behavioral analyzes of those times are remarkably accurate, minus the more modern ties to medicine and accurate anatomical study we have today. They explored the same categories we still research today, like nature vs. nurture and how memories work and help define us as we grow.
The topic is, of course, extremely complicated and many of the concepts and themes in psychology require doctorate level education to understand. We could fill several volumes on the subject before ever getting to the point. So, for the sake of this book, we only need to touch on the parts of the mind that are important to developing and honing your athletic performance. We’ll leave you to your own devices if you want to dive further into other realms of human existence!
On that note, we will appropriate the four primary goals of psychology to our own ends!
To Describe - This is used to establish general descriptions of behaviors to establish laws or rules applicable to the human mind. A perfect, and very great example of a rule laid out by Ivan Pavlov is the theory of classical conditioning and ‘learning laws’. For Pavlov, it involved dogs and food, and trained expectations. For athletes, this helps us understand the reasoning behind repetition and training. The more we repeat an activity, the better our muscles become at that activity. The same goes for conditioning our bodies through diet to become more efficient machines.
In relation to our mental discipline and control, this applies even more. It’s through the disciplining and conditioning of the mind that we gain mastery over the rest of our faculties. You might relate this to getting that one extra ‘rep’ in at the end of a set of squats, or forcing your legs to keep sprinting for that final twenty feet of your run. Every aspect of our training is linked and dependent on each other, but none matter so much as the mind.
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To Explain - Next, psychology aims to give reasons for the descriptions and laws about behaviors. Understanding why you react the way you do to certain exercises is crucial to gaining better mastery of them. Exploring and finding explanations for your performance leads to solutions to problems like plateauing, or stagnating, in your run times, or weight limits. Hopefully, you’ve already seen this in action as you’ve tweaked your diet and perfected your nutrient intake. It’s basically cause and effect.
We’ll use this to outline why we succeed, why we fail, and how to maintain it or fix it.
To Predict - Patterns and reasoning help foretell how certain conditions might cause a person to behave or react. This is most implemented toward trying to prevent mental illness and predict psychological distress in patients prone to depression and other adverse conditions. Knowing what to look for when treating someone in distress helps identify and sometimes prevent issues before they become a bigger problem.
Athletes can benefit from this process by keeping track of their food intake, output, sleep, and other factors that define performance. When you have consistent data, you can better anticipate what you will need, how you will compete, and make moves to prevent injuries, mistakes, and even extrapolate your rate of improvement on the opposite side of things.
To Change - Ultimately, the goal of research is to understand and then apply that knowledge for a result. In cases of anxiety, for example, this can mean facing fears, meditation techniques, or sometimes chemical treatment to help change the mind’s condition for better function.
In your routine and athletic practice, you can apply it to every alteration you make toward bettering yourself.
Describe your current state and where you want to get to. Explain why you are at the level you are. Predict and plan for where you
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want to be. Then you can use all the information to create a solution to get there. Easy, right?
Human Nature
It is very important to note the fundamental drives that exist in us from an early age, if not from birth. You could call these instincts, or basic needs, or any other term relating to driving motives for our behavior and desires.
Fight or Flight Response - Our bodies react to the perceptions of threats and fear in defense and as a warning for us to act. The ‘symptoms’ are all stress responses triggered by our sympathetic nervous system, like sweating, fright, elevated heart beat, etc.
There are many other baser drives and needs, but we will address them as needed in relation to how they affect your sporting performance. What is important to note here is that those impulses and desires become very prominent on the field in competition.
Sporting events and competitions have a way of stripping down some of the structures we have established in culture and society on top of human nature. We have evolved and developed to supersede and cover up some of our instincts with comforts. In competition, we divest ourselves of some of these strictures and get back to basics.
Raw emotions can come to the surface more easily in the thrill of a sport from our passion for it and the excitement of the moment. A focus close to the single-mindedness of the ancient hunter consumes us when we sprint down the field toward the goal or race for the finish line.
Key elements of these baser drives have led to some interesting observations about aspects of sports that come from our behaviors, and also facilitate our instinctual actions, as well.
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Conflict. All sports have an intrinsic challenge built into them, against yourself or others.
Cooperation. Whether you have a team to play with, support members like trainers and coaches, you must cooperate with others to successfully compete and hopefully win. Even the aspect of competing against an opponent requires cooperation with them to agree to play the game.
Preferences. It is human to have unique likes and dislikes. This applies to sports, why we love some and hate others, and why we are good at some and not others.
Nonverbal communication. Humans will always find a way to communicate. Non-verbal communication is very subtle and very important to all humans. We read gestures and use small nuances in movement and behavior to understand our environment and each other. Affiliation and loyalty. Just like a tribal mentality for mutual survival, a team provides a sense of identity and camaraderie.
Territoriality. This is a close cousin to the last point. Drawing lines of competition and rivalry promotes raised stakes and a higher value to the proceedings. As long as your hatred for an opposing team doesn’t get out of hand.
(Furley 2018)
Entertainment - Sports are, in essence, entertainment, and humans have an inherent need to entertain themselves. Sports have been created and played in every society in some capacity, dating back thousands of years.
Sport has always been a form of entertainment, but also achievement and prowess.
Raising the bar is more than just a cultural phenomenon.
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Spectacle is a part of our nature, and as sports developed into a pastime, seeing the best of the best perform and compete only raises the value and interest of the thing. There is a fine line between sports and sports entertainment. Namely, that difference is the audience: who the sport is played for, and what, like money, ratings, etc. Athleticism is for the competitor.
The aspect of sports becoming a viable career move for athletes inevitably brings the concept of money into things. And having an audience only increases the energy and excitement, and creates a bond of team loyalty that can improve the athlete’s mood and performance.
Logically, the next step is sponsors, marketing, and products to expand the brand. While this may cheapen the sport for the athletes in some ways, remove some of the purism of it, there wouldn’t be the advancement we’ve seen in sports over the last hundred years, and more so in the last thirty, without the funding that teams, sponsors and endorsements provide.
It is also important to note that entertaining can hold a lot of value. Just consider your own love of the sport you play. Part of that love comes from your enjoyment and indulgence in the sport and the activities necessary to train for it, and sharing it with others.
And what athlete would mind getting a huge paycheck for wearing a pair of shoes?
You will have to decide how far you want to go down that road as an athlete.
Self Teachers
One of the key attributes built into almost every human, but particularly into the ambitious and active nature of the athletically inclined, is the ability and drive to learn new things. We are all extremely curious from an early age to learn everything about
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everything, but there seems to be a spark in athletes that sets this tendency at a higher level.
Mastery of any skill does not promote acquiescence, but it promotes even more of a desire to perfect those skills, or branch off into new realms of mastery. You may notice that many athletes, including yourself, are prone to attempting any sport they can try, and are often absorbed in multiple active hobbies at the very least.
Our desire to explore new activities comes from our curiosity and motivation to grow.
As much as we love to learn, we love to teach and share. Especially where sports are concerned. We all want to learn how to kick a ball, or teach someone how to throw a perfect spiral.
Some topics we will cover as we train our minds will include:
Kinesiology and movement. We can move, like to move, and try new ways of moving.
Testing the limits of your body and how it works can teach you a lot about what you are capable of.
Drive, motivation, both to compete and to learn.
Seeking knowledge and improvement. Learning to learn better and studying will increase your game by leaps and bounds. A better bigger mind leads to a better bigger skill set and discipline.
Self regulation. Full control over all of your faculties, mind, and body is the only way to master yourself and improve.
Art of Mindfulness
The act or art of being mindful is basically a state of being aware, noticing what is around you. More importantly, it encompasses what you are feeling, body and mind, analyzing your overall state, and deciding on how to proceed with that information.
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Another way to consider mindfulness is being aware of moment to moment experiences. This extends to physical conditions, emotions, decisions, sensations, and thoughts around a moment.
For our purposes, mindfulness is the start of the conversation about the real mind-muscle connection you will need to train to get to the next level of performance.
Mindfulness techniques improve health in various ways, helping us to focus on healing, lowering blood pressure, managing stress, and analyzing where we need to make changes. This might include meditation, a calming hobby, active recovery like yoga or Tai Chi, or sensory deprivation, putting down the phone, closing your eyes and simply being quiet for a time.
Other methods of employing mindfulness can be indulging in a hobby, like art or music. This is what is referred to as ‘mindfulness therapy’. Essentially, it involves doing a task that requires nothing specific of you but gives you something procedural or soothing to do. The idea is to find something that is subjective and has no right or wrong end result, like sculpting.
Active athletic methods of mindfulness can help too. Tai Chi, yoga, or static stretching can provide movement or light strain on your muscles to distract you from your busy brain. This extends to your workouts as well. Focusing intensely on the movement of your muscles in motion and each exercise you are doing will give you a bigger appreciation for your work and you may find your results are much better.
The preferred result is what many call enlightenment. Ultimately, this just means reaching a better state than the one you started in. It could also be viewed literally as a lightening of the load of your thoughts and worries.
Through the practice of mindfulness, you will learn more about yourself. This will lead to controlling more of your faculties and should also help you learn to be kind to yourself as you meet your needs.
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Competitiveness
Some people consider competitiveness a personality trait, while others consider it an instinctual nature in all of us. Regardless of how it exists in us, it really is basically a human behavior, and it is at the core of this book, in a way.
You couldn’t have sports without it.
Alignment - To begin with, competitiveness is neither good nor bad. According to psychological study, it is neutral. (“Competitiveness” 2013) What we do with it can become beneficial or harmful. Much of that depends on context.
Second, psychology and the study of human behavior also addresses competition in terms of our survival, but we will not touch on that aspect of it as often, except to show where many scientists believe our need to compete comes from.
Personality Traits
Competition can have powerful effects on our personalities and behaviors. Competitiveness can have positive and negative results.
Self-worth through comparison - Watch out for overtly comparing yourself to others. Competing is one thing, but it can quickly turn into harming your self- esteem. Competing against yourself helps curb the tendency to compare yourself negatively to others. Base your self-esteem on your own goals and achievements, not those of a community or group.Intelligence-based competition - Striving to become better and learn more is a very healthy form of competition. Using sound evidence and statistics can help you set realistic goals.
Matching skill levels - Typically, it is most beneficial to work alongside your peers, and others at your level.
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This promotes a mutual state of growth and practice. However, don’t be afraid to step up to a challenge. Audience driven - Performing competitively for an audience has many benefits. The energy of the crowd can be exhilarating and encouraging. Be careful that this glory does not become your only reason to compete. The worst/best - Both ends of the spectrum of ability can encourage competitiveness. If you are last, you may have to work harder to move up. If you are the best, you can always try to beat your best times.
Knowing when not to compete - Finding an activity that you can simply enjoy may free you up to better yourself in the activities that do matter. When nothing is on the line, you don’t have to compete against others, just yourself. It doesn’t always have to be high stakes.
With the essentials of psychology laid out, now we can get a little more specific to the psychology of sports and athletes.
