Athlete's Mental Gym
Mental Skill: Stay Focused By Neutralizing Negative Thoughts
As an athlete, your negative thoughts and emotions can significantly drain your mental and physical energy, and reduce your focus and overall performance. Throughout the day, your strong desire to perform well in your sport and life can result in worry and negative thoughts that build-up until you are overloaded. You wear yourself down without knowing it, and reduce your ability to concentrate during practice and competition, and in other parts of your life.
Neutralize Negative Thoughts and Emotions
You can use a mental and physical tool to neutralize negative thoughts and emotions before you attach personal energy to them, and before you become drained and distracted. This technique is called the Power of Neutral and you can use it to neutralize your negative emotions as soon as they surface.
The Power of Neutral enables you to control and calm your heart rhythms. By doing so, your heart communicates to your mind and body that everything is OK. This enables you to focus energy on the task at hand instead of negative emotions and worries. If you feel stressed, your heart rhythms are uneven and send messages to your mind and body that something is wrong. You then respond by diverting mental and physical energy to worrying about your negative thoughts. The Power of Neutral technique can lessen or stop many anxious feelings you have and neutralize them. You should think of neutralizing as a time-out from negative thoughts during which you can step back, neutralize your emotions, and see what is going on around you with clarity.
How The “Power of Neutral” Technique Works
When you start feeling a negative emotion in your mind and body, you should:
Step One: Take a time-out by breathing slowly and deeply. Imagine the air you breathe entering and leaving through the heart area or the center of your chest.
Step Two: Try to name the negative feeling (Is it tension, worry, edgy, anxious, overwhelmed, etc?) and disengage yourself completely from that stressful feeling as you continue breathing.
Step Three: Replace the negative feeling with a positive one that is its opposite (such as replacing a tense feeling with the feeling of calm) and name that opposite feeling as you continue breathing.
Step Four: Continue the process until you have neutralized the negative emotional charge you are feeling in your mind and body, and you have replaced it with a positive one.
You can perform this technique during practice, competition, and other parts of your life because it can be done quickly. Don’t expect that you will completely neutralize negative thoughts and emotions each time. It is more important that you use this method to teach your heart and mind to know when to attach the proper amount of energy to your feelings. In short, you should always ask yourself “How much of my energy do I really want to attach to this negative feeling?” The answer will usually be “not much” and will lead you to start neutralizing its effect.
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