Essay On Anxiety And Anxiety In Sport

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Arousal and anxiety are two correlated psychological constructs that have been proven to effect sporting performance. Although anxiety and arousal is a widespread obstacle there isn’t one distinct theory, the most popular being Drive theory, the Inverted-U hypothesis (Landers & Arent, 2001), Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF)(Hanin1980) and finally the Catastrophe model. These theories can be applied to athletes at any standard of sport i.e. a Sunday league footballer or a Premier league footballer. Throughout this assignment, I will discuss these theories and compare them in regards of the effect of anxiety and arousal on sports performance. The concept of anxiety can be traced back to the classical Greek period(McReynolds,1975). Aubrey Lewis (1970) has defined anxiety “as an emotional state “. Anxiety can be broken down into two sections, somatic anxiety (physical symptoms) and cognitive anxiety (mental component).These two components can vary from to person judging on their mental nervous system. There are a few factors that cause pre-competitive anxiety such as: the fear of losing, the fear of getting hurt or not knowing whether or not you will start in a match. These are the two components of anxiety, somatic anxiety is associated with the physical symptoms such as sweating, increased muscle…show more content…
This theory states that different levels of cognitive and somatic anxiety effect performance. Somatic anxiety isn’t exactly harmful to performance but it can be related to catastrophic events when cognitive anxiety is high (Hardy & Fazey, 1987). If an athlete has high somatic and cognitive anxiety and these both continue to increase the athlete is due to choke and performance will drop to a very low level (falling off a cliff). Yet if cognitive anxiety levels are low then somatic anxiety can have a slightly positive effect on performance (Krane,

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