Sporting events have always been important in people's lives. People can meet their fitness, emotional, and entertainment needs by attending these activities. People who participate in sports always strive for the best results possible. Athletes are well aware that they must be in peak physical shape to compete at their best. As a result, both elite and collegiate athletes partake in rigorous training regimens to improve their stamina and agility. They have put in a lot of preparation time to develop their skills. Physical health and experience, however, are not the only requirements for achieving the highest results. Psychological conditions have a direct effect on an athlete's skill standard. Individuals' success is influenced by two neurological states: attention and fear. They collaborate and affect one another, resulting in either bad or positive results. The aim of this paper is to look at how concentration and fear affect a person's motor skills. It will concentrate on the relationship between concentration and fear in order to demonstrate how the two interact to affect athletes' success.
Human success has long been viewed as requiring a high level of attention. Attention has been seen to have a significant impact on results in sport psychology studies (Ashley, 2019). Attention is characterized as a state of alertness and consideration for the production and preservation of optimum sensitivity and response readiness. It is a finite resource that often necessitates the biased selection of data from specific spatial locations (Ashley, 2019). An individual's focus moves along two lines when participating in sports. The distance is the first dimension, and the orientation is the second. An individual will “shift his/her concentration of attention along each of these dimensions in response to the changing demands of performance situations" in most circumstances. Athletes' tendency to pay attention selectively contributes to outstanding results. Expert athletes are distinguished from novices by their selective focus, according to studies. Experts may execute demanding focus operations, in which they filter out information that isn't required for the task at hand to be completed. In goal-directed tasks, focused emphasis is necessary to achieve high levels of success (Ashley, 2019). The athlete's success suffers when his or her concentration is diverted from the focused activity. Athletes can enhance their success by developing and optimizing concentrated attention. Elite athletes should be taught how to monitor their concentration and increase their overall success in sports.
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Anxiety is a disorder that affects all people and causes them to become more conscious of their surroundings and motivated. Anxiety is described as a feeling of dread and emotional tension in anticipation of a situation (Fullagar et al., 2016). The definitions of fear and arousal are frequently confused in the sports setting, making it impossible to distinguish one from another. Arousal is associated with fear, activation, emotion, and psyched-up in sport psychology studies. As a result, when discussing athletic events, the words fear and arousal are used interchangeably. Behavioral, emotional, and biochemical tests can also be used to assess anxiety (Fullagar et al., 2016). The level of discomfort encountered by the athlete can be measured using behavioral interventions.
The athlete's behavior can be attributed to the fundamental activation constructs discovered. The effect of fear on focus is used to assess the level of anxiety in cognitive measures. As mental pressure becomes so high, the self-regulation mechanism is inhibited, causing the athlete's self-focused attention to deteriorating. Physiological tests may be used to track physical changes that result as anxiety levels rise or fall (Fullagar et al., 2016). The autonomic nervous system activates and controls the body's neuronal function and peripheral organs. When an athlete experiences elevated arousal levels, physical changes such as pupil dilation, respiratory elevation, pupil dilation, and accelerated heart rate occur. There is a connection between athletes' performance in athletic competitions and their concentration and anxiety levels. Owing to deterioration in the athlete's capacity to transfer focus fluidly, excessive anxiety is marked by disintegrated or distracting attention (Fullagar et al., 2016). A variety of hypotheses and concepts explains the association between concentration and fear during sports performances.
The inverted U hypothesis demonstrates how emotional arousal affects personal performance. Yerkes and Dodson established this theory in 1908, and it is based on the idea that an athlete must have a certain amount of arousal to compete at their best (Ashley, 2019). Arousal is a physiological, emotional, and behavioral state that ranges from a state of sleep to high anticipation. The athlete's level of arousal affects his or her success in sports. The inverted U theory asserts that optimum output is attained when the athlete's arousal level is maximum. This ideal level of emotional stimulation is usually somewhere in the middle of under-arousal and over-arousal (Ashley, 2019). Moderate arousal speeds are suitable for optimum athletic efficiency. When emotional arousal levels rise above the optimum level, the athlete's success begins to suffer. When a competitor hits a point of over-arousal, their output begins to deteriorate until it is deficient.
The inverted-U theory applies to a situation in a certain way depending on the difficulty of the task. The inverted-U model of Yerkes and Dodson shows that the task's uncertainty influences where the curve is placed on the x-axis. When a task is easy, the arousal curve is skewed to the higher end of the range. This suggests that an athlete's performance in simple activities involves a high degree of arousal (Fullagar et al., 2016). When the job is complicated, though, the curve is biased towards the lower end of the arousal spectrum. Dynamic activities necessitate lower arousal thresholds for optimum output. The athlete's talent level is more critical in deciding the result in such sports.
In conclusion, this paper aimed to address concentration and anxiety with sports success. Both attention and fear affect an athlete's success. The discussions in this paper show that better concentration and arousal management will help an athlete perform better. To enhance results, the competitor must be able to concentrate his energy and regulate his anxiety. Relaxation, self-talk, restructuring, and imagination are examples of cognitive mechanisms used to hold arousal and increase focus. It started by recognizing the relevance of sports to humanity and psychological influences in achieving peak success. The paper described concentration as athletes' alertness and fear as a state of heightened apprehension. Anxiety has an effect on concentration, which impacts individual athlete results, according to the study. The researchers then explored a series of experiments that demonstrate how the two factors affect efficiency. Yerkes and Dodson's Inverted U hypothesis and the region of optimum operating theory are two of them. According to the findings of these experiments, while low arousal causes poor performance, high arousal causes poor performance as well. And when arousal is at its peak will the optimum results be achieved. The paper concluded that focusing concentration and dealing with anxiety are critical to an individual's optimum success. It included a variety of tactics for dealing with athletes' attention and anxiety issues. Athletes can better control their anxiety and direct their efforts by following these techniques, resulting in the highest results during athletic events.
References
Ashley, K. (2019). Emotions Directing Your Performance. Web.
Fullagar, C.J., Knight, P.A., & Heather, S.S. (2016). Challenge/Skill Balance, Flow, and Performance Anxiety. Applied Psychology, 62 (2), 236-259.
