How To Enjoy Sports Without Suffering From The Results?
Sport has been, for millennia, one of the most important human experiences for millions of people. It is not simply entertainment or a way to live in the present through fun; In many cases it acquires a practically spiritual dimension, both for people who experience sport as individuals (whether watching it or participating directly in it) and for societies in general, which project their identities, their values, their fights, etc.
Now, just because we put our emotions into play every time we experience sporting events does not mean that we cannot enjoy them due to experiences such as fear of defeat, stress or the obsession with trying to control what happens on the field of play. In this article we will talk precisely about it, focusing on athletes: How can we enjoy sports without tormenting ourselves thinking about the results?
In sport there is always, to a greater or lesser extent, a tension between what we know we are capable of doing, and what we want to achieve. This is one of the pillars of competition dynamics, which can be based on the interest in competing against oneself, competing with another person or another team, or both at the same time (this last option is the one that occurs most frequently , in practice).
This tension means that sport is always associated with stress and a certain level of anxiety It is not a bad thing in itself, far from it; It is the product of the set of biological and psychological adaptations that allow us to face new challenges and solve them (without limiting ourselves to always applying the same strategies and techniques), and it is also a good part of what makes us interested in sport in the first place.
If sporting events did not have that ability to put us in “alert mode”, they would produce more than indifference. They would not have the capacity to stimulate us physically and intellectually since at the end of the day every sport is based on a series of arbitrary rules.
Thus, only with what we already know about sport, we can conclude that these practices do not provide us with a simple and unvarnished form of pleasure and well-being, comparable to the consumption of sugar: it makes us feel good, but at the same time Sometimes, it makes us feel a little bad, because anxiety and stress are not pleasant. That’s the fun: It is a type of complex experience, capable of being linked to all types of emotional processes through which we experience life.
How to enjoy sport without giving in to the desire to suffer?
Now, it is one thing to feel a certain tension and stimulating discomfort, and another is to turn sport into something to which we hold on just to escape fear. Fear to fail fear of making it clear that we are not as skilled as we thought, fear of reaching the conclusion that hundreds of hours of training have been of no use…
If we enter into those toxic emotional dynamics, the time we dedicate to sport will not only not bring us anything good, but will be a cause of psychological exhaustion which will make us more vulnerable to psychopathologies: insomnia, phobias, generalized anxiety, depression, etc.
To avoid this, it is very important to find a balance between emotional involvement and the ability to analyze what happens to you from a healthy distance. That is to say: we must learn to motivate ourselves, but without linking all our self-esteem and self-concept to the objective result of a match or a sports competition. We must know and feel that we are more than an athlete; are a human being who has chosen sport as one of his ways to promote his personal development and self-realization
The key is the state of flow
The state of flow is the concept that describes that psychologically healthy and stimulating balance between the difficulty of a task and the set of skills and abilities that we put in place in the here and now to solve that challenge. It is an experience that occurs when our consciousness fits perfectly into the needs that the situation poses to us ; We are absorbed in what is happening.
But although it may seem contradictory, to be in a state of flow in sport it is necessary that we first learn to distance ourselves from it; That way we will be able to play without carrying obsessive thoughts about failure, catastrophic predictions about what will happen (which are a factory of anticipatory anxiety), limiting beliefs that violate our self-esteem and attribute to us everything bad that happens. It happens on the field of play (whether or not it is our responsibility).
In other words, to enjoy sport we must be aware of the importance it has for us, but without fusing our identity as people with our identity as sports machines (oriented only to offer results). This will allow us to both perform better and learn from our mistakes since looking back and analyzing ourselves will not cause us great emotional pain.
Some tips to achieve this:
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In UPAD Psychology and Coaching We have extensive experience both in the field of psychotherapy and in sports psychology and the training of athletes. We intervene in processes such as stress management, improving attention focus management, self-motivation, time management in training routines, detection and neutralization of limiting beliefs, and more. In addition, we offer our services in person and also online through video call sessions.
