Below is an excerpt from my book Still Quiet Place for Athletes: Mindfulness Skills for Achieving Peak Performance and Finding Flow in Sports and in Life
Basic Concept: It’s Okay to Feel Anxious
It is common to feel nervous before a competition, overjoyed after a big win, and heartbroken after serious loss. And with practice you can learn to rest in stillness and quietness and watch as these emotional waves ebb and flow. You can learn to recognize the rapid heart rate and jitteriness before competition as signs that your body is prepared and ready. You can enjoy the postwin high and accept the postloss low as the temporary experiences that they are.
This doesn’t mean pretending you are calm or fine when you are not. Rather, the suggestion is that you hold the intense experiences of competition with kindness and curiosity, and learn to observe them from the vantage point of your still quiet essence. Mindfulness teacher Pema Chödrön invites us to explore this powerful way of relating to feelings:
The central question of a warrior’s training is not how we avoid uncertainty and fear but how we relate to discomfort. How do we practice with difficulty, with our emotions, with the unpredictable encounters of an ordinary day? (2002, 7)
Most anxiety is due to worrying about the future, the fantasy or nightmare of how we imagine the practice, tryout, or competition will go. And most depression is related to the negative scanning of past events. So when you are overwhelmed by intense feelings, breathe, feel your feet on the ground, come back into the present moment, and simply allow the feelings to be, without trying to change them, fix them, or get rid of them.
Once, when I was offering an introductory session for youths and parents, a mom raised her hand and said, “I am an anxious person, and my kids are both anxious, we struggle with severe anxiety…” As she went on and on, everyone in the room began to feel more and more anxious. When she stopped, I simply said, “You know it is okay to feel anxious? Right?”
When I said this the anxious energy in the room evaporated. The woman and her children visibly softened and relaxed. They really got that it’s okay to feel anxious, that they could accept their anxiety with kindness and curiosity. At some point in her life, she had been told or had decided that she and her kids shouldn’t be anxious, and that they needed to do something, change something, or fix something. Ever since that moment she had felt anxious about feeling anxious. My question opened the possibility of simply resting in stillness and quietness, observing the anxiety, and letting it be, without resisting it or thinking something is wrong— that is, she realized she could have anxiety without anxiety having her.
Not only is it okay to feel anxious, but it is also okay to feel stressed, depressed, excited, jealous, overjoyed, and angry. Consider what Andrew Talansky, a professional cyclist who rode in the Tour de France, says about fear:
I came to embrace fear. You might not hear athletes say it often, but we are all afraid. If you’re not, then odds are you’re not pushing yourself to your limits. I’ve come to realize that fear will never leave. Fear of failure. Fear of not achieving my goals. Fear of giving all of yourself to something and still coming up short. That’s probably my greatest fear. What I came to realize is that those fears don’t need to go away. They don’t need to be blocked out. (2016)
In my next installment I will share a specific technique for Befriending Feelings.
