Would you buy a bottle of $99 pimple cream guaranteed to eliminate your blemishes 3% of the time?
I’m guessing you’d say “No, of course not.” I’m sure you could think of a ton of other things you would rather spend hard earned your money on.
Yet many of us constantly spend the equivalent of $99 of our limited energy resources on worrying about disasters that have a 3% chance of coming true.
If I asked you to write down every thought you had related to skating for a month, how much of it would be happy, positive and exciting?
Did you know that it is common for a competitive skater to report that most of their daily thoughts are negative and unhelpful? Many of them are colored with worry, doubt and/or fear.
This actually holds true for people in general. We tend to spend a lot of time worrying period.
If you stopped to think about how many times your worst fears actually came true, I would bet you would say not too many.
In fact, scientific research supports the fact that in general, what we imagine is far worse than anything that actually happens.
The cost of this constant worrying about possible disasters is high:
- It leaves you mentally and physically drained.
- It saps your energy and leaves you tired.
- Your body aches and needs more recovery time.
- Stress causes feelings of low self-esteem and low confidence
- Unhappiness with yourself leads you to underperform
The sport of skating requires you to be mentally and physically “all in” because the skills are technically difficult and physically demanding with little room for error.
Worry can lead to mental and physical fatigue, which leads to bothersome frustration. But a more serious consequence is the increased chance of errors that lead to injury.
There is a way you can comfortably let go of worry and have more energy when you need it most—on the ice.
Sometimes it feels like negative thoughts are the boss of your brain.
Anytime you have a minute to yourself, here come the worries…they shout at you endlessly throughout the day.
The negative effects are pervasive and endless:
Worry: Will I ever get this jump?
This worry actually causes you to have trouble with your jumps because your body is so tense going in to the jump.
Worry: I don’t want to end up in last place, my program won’t be ready for the competition in 2 weeks.
The only way to improve your programs is to practice them, but this worry causes you to avoid practicing your programs because you don’t want to mess up and prove that your programs are terrible.
Why do we worry?
Most of us don’t like to feel pain, physical or emotional. Over the years we have learned to avoid it at any cost.
Here is a typical pain avoidance strategy:
- Anticipate the worst-case scenario.
- Think and overthink ways to keep the worst from happening.
Here’s why this strategy doesn’t work:
- We get stuck in our head.
- The same worries keep repeating in an endless loop in our head.
- We take no action towards a solution.
Nothing we do seems to stop them. We feel stuck and doomed.
Worrying and thinking about different disaster scenarios (the “what ifs”) drain us and make us feel tired.
This probably makes us feel like we are doing something productive.
The truth is, stress and worry feel like we are taking action to solve our problems, but they are NOT actions.
Why?
Because actions can only work on real problems when they occur.
Permission to Stop Worrying
The good news is that 97% of the time, our worry is useless: a total waste of our precious energy resources.
That means our worrying over imaginary disasters is justified only 3% of the time.
Results from a study cited by Don Joseph Goewey, author of The End of Stress, Four Steps to Rewire Your Brain cited a research study in which concluded that only 3% of the time, our worry is justified.
In this study, participants were asked to write down their worries over a period of time.
Later they were asked to note which of their worries did not happen.
The researchers found that 85% of the things participants worried about never happened.
In other words, if I had 100 things I worried about in a week, only 15 of those worries actually happened.
What a relief.
The researchers then looked at how the participants felt about these 15% imagined worries that turned into real problems.
Almost 80% of the participants who faced these real problems either:
- Handled the situation better than expected.
- Felt they learned a valuable lesson from the problem and felt it was worth it.
Researchers did some of their fancy math and concluded that 97% of the imagined disasters and problems that participants in this study worried about never actually happened.
In other words, of every 100 things I worry about each week, I probably only have to deal with 3 of them?
That’s great news!
The Beginning of the End of Worry
Real action starts with a plan and involves moving forward.
- Decide to stop worrying about imaginary disasters.
- When you worry, ask yourself if this is something you can take concrete action on.
- If the answer is yes, do it.
- If the answer is no, stop worrying.
- Take the wait and see attitude. If the worst happens, then deal with it.
You will have more energy because you didn’t spend it on needless worry.
Here’s an example of how to take concrete action steps you can take instead of just worrying:
If you are worried that your program will not be ready for competition in 2 weeks, here are some real action steps you take:
What elements do you have problems with?
Practice these elements.
If you miss the flip entrance consistently coming out of the footwork?
Ask your coach/choreographer if an adjustment would be helpful.
If you consistently have trouble with the last 2 jumps in the program because you are tired?
Do things that will increase your endurance. Run your program and then do 3 timed speed laps immediately after. Or do one program plus a second run without jumps and spins back to back.
Your coach can help you come up with a plan if you ask. If you don’t have that kind of support, send us an email here at ICE.
The Final Word
I hope that reading this article has convinced you to leave that $99 bottle of worry on the shelf.
When those 3% worry worthy situations actually happen, trust that you will deal with them efficiently.
Isn’t it wonderful to know that you can say goodbye to worry with no negative consequences?
Shoot me an email and let me know some of the amazing things will do with all the energy you save by eliminating worry from your mental game toolbox?
Mental skills training can help to keep your emotions on an even keel so that you can practice and compete your best.
Start here; download “Confidence Myth Busters,” a complimentary eBook and make a change.