Overcoming Fight-or-Flight Issues: Part 2

In my last post you learned that three actions can help you regulate your sympathetic response (fight-or-flight) to threat so that your performance is less likely to decline.? These steps include an awareness to those physiological changes that affect your performance, acknowledging that your performance decline is the result of these changes, and taking the appropriate steps to lower sympathetic activity.?

My research found that very few golfers are aware of internal changes occurring in their body.? If this is you, then the best way to know if your being affected is when you are playing at a level that doesn’t match your practice performance. ?However, learning the signs of sympathetic activity can stop the performance decline before it happens.? Even better is knowing when your performance might decline before hand.?

If you track your performance over time, you’ll notice patterns will emerge that help you predict when your performance might take a nose dive. Do you experience first tee jitters?? Does your performance falter later in the round or on the back nine?? Do environmental conditions affect how well you perform.? Things like wind, rain, cold, heat and humidity have been known to lower golfers’ performances.?

The same is true for course design.? Do you experience difficulty hitting over water or when certain hazards are present in specific locations on the hole, like water or out-of-bounds on the right?? Are you affected by the types of players in your group (slow players, poorer golfers, golfers who talk a lot, better players?)? This is why a complete game analysis is important if you hope to play well on any given day.?

Now sympathetic nervous activity doesn’t go from controlled to a state of panic instantly.? It could, but you might it a bad shot or two which causes you frustration, which leads to a further decline in your performance and your performance spirals down the rest of the round.? And not all sympathetic nervous activity is a bad thing.? Some golfers find they need to be stressed to play their best.?

My research found that fit golfers who exercise need greater sympathetic nervous activity if they hope to perform well.? The fitter they are, the more activation they require.? On the other hand, the performance of unfit golfers who do little to no exercise decline with any increase in their sympathetic nervous system activity.? Where do you fit in??

What matters even more is that you know what steps to take to regulate sympathetic activity at the time or just prior to it lowering your performance. If you review my last post, you will find those physiological changes that affect performance.? Targeting those changes using techniques that reverse those changes will help you regain your performance or stop it’s decline before it happens.? In my next post I’ll offer some tips for regulating your physiology so you experience very little if any declines in your performance.