Sports psychology assignment 2

Stress is normally perceived as a negative emotion that may massively impact your life. This can
sometimes be true but there is also another side to stress, stress is categorised into two different
groups which are eustress and distress.Distress is known as the negative side of stress. How people
determine stress is about how overwhelmed someone is with a situation and whether they are still
able to take control of the situation. Eustress is known as the positive type of stress, this is where
you strive being in a team environment surrounded with stress because of how much everyone
wants to achieve great things.

There are a number of things that could result in someone becoming stressed but the situation does
not determine how stressed an individual is as everyone deals with
stress differently.

External things could include things like:

● Life events
● The environment that you are in
● Day to day hassles
● Negative people around you
Internal things that could cause stress may include:
● Not having enough sleep
● Self critical
● Type A personality
● An illness
Anxiety:

A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about a situation with an outcome in which the individual
is uncertain. Strong concern to do something because you are unsure of what events are going to
take place. While some people endure a state of adrenaline during the competition, if you allow the
rush of adrenaline to become anxiety and negative thoughts take over, this can negatively impact
your ability to perform to the best of your standards. Anxiety can be caused by just the smallest of
things as people tend to work themselves up over things that don't mean anything major in the
grand scheme of things. Anxiety reflects the psychological and physiological state of an individual
and how they cope in different situations. In contrast, the term trait anxiety refers to a trait of
personality, describing individual differences related to a tendency to present state anxiety.

Stress:

Within sports there are many situations that may result in an individual to become stressed, things
such as:the sport you participate in could allow you to develop stress. However, some people will
benefit from playing sports as it will allow them to have a clear mind for the duration in which they
are involved in the sport. Although people does use sports as a
way of clearing their mind of stress, this may also not work all the
time because for example, if they are involved in an event which
has a crowd then they may feel symptoms of stress begin to
creep in as they will feel pressured by the people watching and
judging their performance.
Arousal:

Arousal is the psychological and physiological state of being awoken or of sense organs stimulated to
a point of perception. Drive theory is the relationship between arousal and performance. There is a
positive relationship between Increase in arousal in comparison to the increase in performance of a
player. The quality of the player depends on their skill and technique within regards to a certain
sport however, each performance usually varies meaning that a player may perform worse one
game compared to another. The inverted U proposes that sporting performance improves as arousal
levels increase but that there is a threshold point. Any increase at all in arousal beyond the threshold
point will worsen performance. Catastrophe Theory is when the athlete is experiencing high levels of
cognitive state anxiety as arousal rises towards the athletes threshold. This will mean that the
athlete will experience a dramatic decrease in performance levels. This theory does also rely on the
need for both arousal and cognitive anxiety to achieve optimal performance.

Inverted U theory

Inverted U theory says performance is at it’s best when arousal

levels are medium which is also called the optimal arousal zone. It
also says performance is poor when arousal levels are too low or
too high caused by over arousal and under arousal.This theory is
better than Drive theory because it also takes into account other
levels of arousal and their effect on performance.

Drive theory

This theory says as arousal levels increase the performance levels

increase. The negative to this theory is it doesn’t take into account
over or under arousal levels. It also believes arousal affects
performance differently between elite and non-elite athletes. It says
as experts arousal levels increase there is an increase in their
performance this is because their skill is well grooved whereas for
novices as their arousal levels increase then their performance levels
decrease as they don’t have well grooved skills.

Catastrophe Theory

This theory explains that when arousal reaches a maximum point

performance suddenly drops. This is different to Inverted U theory as
they believe performance decreases slowly when arousal is high. The
sudden drop has been referred to as choking where performance
levels decrease suddenly after performance levels are high.