Staying Sharp: Getting and Staying in the Zone

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One way experts help athletes control the jitters is by teaching them to take command of the interior monologue that psychologists call self-talk. This is the endless conversation that we all have with ourselves, processing events as they pass before our eyes. The average person speaks to himself at a rate of 300 to 1,000 words a minute. According to Trevor Moawad, director of mental conditioning for IMG Academies, a leading sports-training facility, that means that for a tennis player competing in a typical 2-hr. match, only about 40 min. are spent on the court contesting points, leaving an hour and 20 min. between points with little to do but talk to oneself. Positive chatter can help the athlete stay focused, but if the conversation strays into fears of failing, then the self-talk can become counterproductive.

"You can't stop those negative thoughts from coming," says Michael Johnson, "especially when you enter an arena or when you see your competitors walk by. The only way to stop those thoughts is to replace them with something else." For Johnson, the substitute images and words were all about the race ahead. "If you're going to replace them, you might as well replace them with something that's going to help you," he says. He liked to visualize the upcoming race, concentrating on the start, the weakest part of his race, and thinking about himself shooting off the blocks like a bullet.

Aynsley Smith, director of the sports-medicine research center at the Mayo Clinic, gives her athletes a more tangible system of thought swapping. "I tell them that self-talk exists on three channels: positive, negative and escape. You try to be on the positive channel as much as you can while you're training or competing, but when the negative thoughts start coming, it's the speed of the transition that counts. I give them a clicker pen and tell them to just click over from the negative to the positive channel." If the anxiety doesn't go away, says Smith, then it's time to switch to the escape channel. That's for thoughts about how the athlete's role model would react. How would Joe DiMaggio get over the disappointment? What would the Babe do?

Smith, who works with ice-hockey players, finds that biofeedback techniques are particularly effective for controlling jitters. Most athletes are skilled at visual imagery, and when shown monitors that display their anxiety levels as a graph or chart, they quickly learn to corral their nervousness and keep it from interfering with the smooth flow of their practiced skills. "I tell people they need to try to get back to doing rather than thinking," says Simons.

Relaxation techniques like deep breathing are also good for helping athletes quiet the mental chatter long enough for their bodies to perform. "You have to help them realize that 'I have to get out of my own way,'" says Simons. "Relaxing can help them imagine competing, getting in their own groove, feeling it, tasting it, reminding them of that feeling of flow."

For Michael Johnson, who competed in three Olympic Games over a span of a dozen years, avoiding a slump was mostly a matter of staying in control. "The first thing an athlete has to realize is that you are always in control," he says. "And you need to maintain that control." Control, that is, of both the body and the mind.