Podcast transcript
Stress and sport performance
Professor Russell Hoye
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Transcript
- Russell Hoye
Welcome to Sport Unpacked, a regular podcast that explores issues in sport and the views of researchers at La Trobe University. I'm Professor Russell Hoye, Director of La Trobe Sport, your host, and my guests today are Felicity Childs, a recent graduate from the Masters of Counselling Psychology and Dr Paul O’Halloran, Senior Lecturer and Psychologist from the School of Public Health here at La Trobe University. Our topic today is stress and its relationship to sport performance and we’re going to explore questions such as, what is stress and how does it affect athletes, how can athletes manage stress, what sort of support do athletes need to manage stress, and how can we conduct effective studies of stress amongst athletes? Welcome, Felicity and Paul.
Stress is often cited in the media as being linked to athletic performance. Can you clarify to us what is stress and how does it manifest?
- Paul O’Halloran
Well, stress can be thought of on multiple levels. Some people conceptualise stress as a physiological response, so you’re confronted with a stressor and there’s activation of the flight or fight response, the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. Other people conceptualise stress as an event in the environment, major changes that we encounter in our lives, and these include good things, and not so good things that happen to us. Things like, getting married, losing a job, changing courses, moving house, changing sports or sporting teams, and there’s no doubt that change is inherently stressful. However, the problem with this view of stress is it ignores how we perceive events. As a result, many people now conceptualise stress as an interaction between all of these things, and suggest that we only become stressed when the environmental demands exceed our perceived ability to cope.
So there’s no doubt that stress can have considerable impact on our functioning. You can often tell that people are stressed by changes in their behaviour. Some people will eat more, some people will smoke more, some people will drink more, some people will sleep less. Many people withdraw from their usual activities. And it can also have a considerable impact on our ability to concentrate. Recent studies have suggested that when you’re particularly stressed, your concentration levels are comparable to someone who has a blood alcohol reading of .05. And there’s very strong evidence that stress impacts on our immune system functioning. So there’s an increased risk of upper respiratory tract infections when we’re stressed over a long period, and in some people stress can even manifest in depression.
- Russell Hoye
So in terms of athletic performance, stress about ... that might manifest from the perceived anxiety about performance. Is that one of the key things that drives stress in athletes?
- Paul O’Halloran
Yes, it can be about being dropped from the team, it can be about injuries and how are the athlete’s going to cope with injuries.
- Russell Hoye
Okay, so are there different forms of stress? Can it be negative and positive for athletes?
- Paul O’Halloran
Absolutely. So stress is a natural part of modern life. It’s impossible to avoid it and there’s certainly an argument that a little bit of stress is a good thing. It can motivate people. It can motivate athletes to train harder, it can motivate athletes to prepare better for competition, make sure that everything’s right. Better preparation tends to lead to better performances. However, chronic stress experienced at high levels, can have a considerable negative effect on an athlete’s wellbeing and certainly their performance, for those very reasons that we were talking about before. You know, the effect on behaviour, sleep, and concentration.
- Russell Hoye
Can we equate stress with that often-used term in sport, like choking or poor performance or manifest in poor off-field behaviour amongst athletes?
- Paul O’Halloran
Well, based on my experience, working with athletes as a sports psychologist, and from what research tells us, it depends on a few factors, such as how stressed the athlete is, what are their coping resources – do they tend to have a lot of social support around them, and that can come from friends, family, even within the football club or an athletic club etc. And certainly a very important one is the individual differences, their personality and mental toughness. So some athletes I've worked with are able to overcome incredible stresses in their lives. They might have lost a family member as recently as a week ago and they’re able to come out the very next week and perform at their optimal level. They’re able to block everything out. Whilst others, who are not so mentally tough, carry even the most minor worries through to their performance, and this can lead to choking and periods of poor performance. And there’s no doubt that chronic stress and worry, can, and I emphasise can, lead some people to engage in problematic behaviour such as substance abuse and gambling to distract them from the stress.
- Russell Hoye
There was that famous case of Greg Norman admitting that towards the end of a tournament, I think it was the ’86 Golf Masters in the US, where he admitted to choking. Now, would that have been a symptom of him over-thinking or being far too stressed to be able to perform at his usual level?
- Paul O’Halloran
It certainly can be. And what it can be too is that often, and you see this in golf and you see this in tennis, when an athlete shifts from a process focus to an outcome focus, they starting thinking, I've almost got this, yeah, and then they start thinking the outcome, they’re no longer concentrating on what they have to do at that very point in time and then the thoughts of self-doubt come in. They creep in, the athlete becomes extremely stressed, and they choke.
- Russell Hoye
A lot of what we see in the media focuses on stress amongst adult-aged athletes. Has there been much work to investigate stress amongst younger athletes, under the ages of 18.
- Felicity Childs
Yes, Russ, there’s actually a reasonable body of work that investigates adolescents in sport. In a variety of sports, we have studied in golf, basketball, rowing, tennis, swimming, etc, so there’s quite a lot. But predominantly these studies are cross-sectional in design and what we mean by cross-sectional is that is where it is examined at one point in time. A scan of the literature showed me that really there’s just a modest amount of studies that investigate stress in adolescent sport using a prospective design and that means that it’s looking at it across the season, or it might be across a set amount of training time, it might be two months, or maybe six months. And an advantage of this is that it actually allows the assessments to look at the demands as they change and the experiences of athletes as they move through a season of their sport.
- Russell Hoye
Are they different sources of stress for a younger athlete compared to an older athlete, do you think?
- Felicity Childs
Look, I think they come from different circumstances. I mean, often they might be having their ... as an adolescent, they’re involved in a lot of personal change and growth and you know, socially, physically, their demands on their body as they’re growing, so I think those sets of circumstances differentiate them from the adult ones. Also too, they generally would be at school, so there are timetables and pressures for that sort of thing, so there’s a lot of learning about time management, and I suppose it’s a process of involving themselves in a sport, maybe not so much with a view to a wonderful outcome of being a professional athlete, although for many I think that is the case these days.
- Russell Hoye
Now, Felicity, you’ve recently completed a study of stress in TAC Cup footballers. Why did that topic appeal to you?
- Felicity Childs
Yeah, good question. Look, I met with Paul to look at topics for my thesis and I was interested in doing something in sport, particularly in AFL. I really enjoy AFL. That would be my favourite sport, and we were looking at a range of topics and I did actually have a contact who put me in to meet with a manager from a TAC Cup club, and I didn’t really know very much about this, but through these meetings, I learned a lot about the facets of the TAC Cup. Primarily it involves 15 and 16 and 17-year-old boys who are very keen on trying to make their way to become a professional AFL footballer. And the TAC Cup is the main feeding ground for the AFL, or as it’s also known, the AFL nursery. And some of the other things that I learnt was that most of these boys, they’re undertaking their senior levels in schooling, they also ... it’s extremely competitive to get a Guernsey in the club, so when you do, there’s still a lot of other things that you need to be able to manage, which is, three times a week there’s training, plus there’s often school football, match days, plus you might be doing your VCE. What was also particularly interesting was the narrowness of the opportunity to actually play AFL football with only a couple, generally, from each TAC Cup club that actually get listed on the draft. It doesn’t mean they’re going to get drafted, but they’re actually, you know, very small amount.
So, with all of that, and going back and talking about this with Paul, we found that this looked like a really interesting environment to explore.
- Russell Hoye
It seems like it’s almost the perfect storm for a stressful situation for a 16-year-old boy. He’s got time pressures for study, he’s got this expectation or aspiration to want to play AFL football, they’ve got time pressures of playing club, perhaps school and then representative football, so clearly it seems like a really intensive period where stress would be a major factor in determining their outcomes for selection to be an AFL footballer, so in terms of understanding that space, what were your aims that you were going to study?
- Felicity Childs
Look, the aims were really ... it was an exploratory study and looking at the demands and experiences of a team across a season of football, just to gauge as much as we could as to what might be happening for these boys. As you say, a very intense and dynamic time. But given this football development period for them, is really crucial to their future prospects. It was thought that perhaps stress might be an issue for these adolescent footballers. Given all of that, it seemed worthwhile to assess how stressed these players would be, and we did that at four points across the football season. And we also wanted to look at if the stress levels altered. Another aim was to examine if players that had more of a hardy disposition, you know, a reasonably good level of resilience, perceived circumstances to be a little less stressful than others, so we’re looking at that sort of personality-type aspect along with stress. We felt that that was important – not just to look at stress, but if there was a personality factor that might influence that. And then we also wanted to look at, what actually were they concerned about? What were some of the issues for them? And did those issues change along the way of the season? So these were also evaluated across the season at four different points in time. So quite a lot of data that we tried to bring together, just to see what was happening for these fairly driven young boys, yeah.
- Russell Hoye
So how did you go about collecting the data? It seems like a fairly complex study and also a very sensitive area for these young men as they’re trying to reach an aspirational goal. So how did you go about collecting your data and answering your questions?
- Felicity Childs
Paul and I did do a fair bit of research as to different scales that might be appropriate for this adolescent group, so it was important to look at scales that would be measuring what we were attempting to measure, but also would be relatively brief. You know, it is quite an art to get adolescents to spend twenty minutes, and that’s what the questionnaire package ended up being, about twenty minutes of time, four times during their football season. We didn’t want it to be like seemingly another onerous task that they had to fit in, so that was a consideration. We were trying to manage what could be a problem with adherence to actually filling out the forms, which does happen quite a lot with a number of studies, and the scales that we ended up choosing were the Perceived Stress Scale by Cohen, which is a fourteen-item scale, and that’s measuring perceived stress. That’s a relatively brief one, self-report. And we also used a hardiness scale, which was an eighteen-item questionnaire, so what we were also looking at was the correlations between stress and hardiness. And to examine the concerns, Paul and I looked at some of the current literature in football and other sports, to try and devise some kind of rough indicator of the sorts of concerns that they had, and what we did with that, we also asked them about ... to be consistent in the past months, you know, what were you concerned about? We also allowed them to put in the issue that was of most concern, so they had eleven to choose from, and they also rated those eleven on a like-it scale, so a four-point like-it scale’s from, you know, not much of a problem, to very substantial. So again, we’re trying to gauge just the levels of these sorts of things and whether they changed.
- Russell Hoye
And that concept of hardiness, can that be equated to something like mental toughness, or other terminology that is used to describe footballers’ or athletes’ abilities? Was that a general sort of way of articulating what hardness might be seen to be?
- Paul O’Halloran
It’s a little bit different to mental toughness. I like to think of mental toughness as being the ability to concentrate under any circumstance, also the ability to be able to maintain fairly high levels of self-efficacy, self-confidence, to maintain your determination at all points in time. So those really specific performance things, I equate to mental toughness, whereas hardiness is more like a general personality disposition and it has three components – challenge, commitment and control. So people who are said to be hardy typically approach potentially stressful things as a challenge rather than a threat. They potentially see things within their control, so they’re less likely to get stressed as a result of that, and they’re more likely to be committed to the things that they do in life. And they consider those things to be important. As a result of that, that’s also thought to lead to lower levels of stress.
- Russell Hoye
And that seems to equate to what you could describe as being a really good performing elite athlete to have those three traits and be able to handle potentially stressful situations and tense game times and challenging opponents. If they’re able to be hardy, they’re more likely to perform at their best.
- Paul O’Halloran
It’s certainly very helpful. No doubt.
- Russell Hoye
Okay, so what were some of your key findings from your study?
- Paul O’Halloran
So in terms of how high stress levels were across the season, the findings showed that on average the footballers were experiencing moderate levels of stress at each of the assessment points. So we were initially a bit surprised by this. They were high but we were surprised that they were not even higher again. Following up on what you were saying before, Russ, that if adolescence is such a tough time as it is, let alone that you throw these boys into a situation where they are being viewed at scouts and their future is on the line in terms of football. But another way of getting an indicator of how stressed people were is to examine what percentage of the group had scores above the average. When we did this, almost half the group could be classified as highly stressed, during assessments that were taken mid-season and end of season, the peak periods of playing football.
In terms of changes in stress over time, stress scores remained relatively consistent across the season. They were moderately high at all assessments, pre-season, mid-season, end of season and post-season. There was one noticeable shift however. Stress was moderately larger at the mid-season assessment relative to the assessment at pre-season, so there was a bit of an increase there.
With respect to the relationship between stress and hardiness, consistent with expectations, there was a moderate negative relationship at all assessment points. This means that there is a tendency for the boys who were more hardy in personality to have lower stress scores. At one point during the end of season assessment, this correlation reached as high as negative .7, which is a very high correlation. The highest a correlation can be is negative 1, or positive 1, so a negative .7 is a high correlation.
Now as mentioned earlier, hardiness is made up of a number of sub-components, the three Cs, commitment, challenge and control. So we wanted to see the particular relationship between these sub-components of hardiness and stress. And consistent with expectations, commitment and control had an inverse relationship with stress. So the more committed you were with respect to what you do in life, including your football, and believe that what you do is important, there’s a tendency to be lower in stress. Likewise, for the boys who felt more in control of the things that happened to them in life, including what happens to them on the football field, they tended to be lower in stress as well. But the one thing that surprised us a little bit, was contrary to what we anticipated, there was no relationship between being stressed and whether people viewed change in the environment as a challenge or a threat.
- Russell Hoye
So, they seem like a really innovative or new set of findings that other studies haven’t highlighted before. What are the implications for the findings for how we should think about how we manage stressful situations for athletes, such as these young footballers?
- Felicity Childs
I think even though it was, to put it into context, it was a relatively small sample, you know, we only had fourteen that participated over the four assessment points and it was from one club. But I think it does give an indication that generally the players were dealing with a moderate, and at times, quite a high level of stress, seemed like, as Paul was saying, the peak times of the football season, mid-season and end of season, particularly when they knew that were being evaluated by not only the club manager, whose job it is actually to recommend players to clubs, but also by AFL draft selectors, the games are taped, all of that monitoring goes on. So I guess those sorts of tensions and some strain perhaps develops from mid-season onwards, because it becomes the really fiery end of the season. But I think it certainly has implications for clubs perhaps to engage a sports psychologist to monitor the players as they go through their season, really try to track if there are players who are a little bit vulnerable to too much stress. I know that the Perceived Stress Scale that we used, that has been recommended in the literature as being a scale that is very good for that kind of area. So that was another reason that we incorporated that one. And I think also from the findings, we did find that there were some really salient issues, internal pressure, which was on the list of concerns as expectations to perform. So their own expectation, that went through the season as being a really highly rated issue. Also too was balancing other commitments and things like, towards, right at the end, VCE exams. But things like being selection issues, and performance being evaluated by others. So I think probably from that we could say that there is scope to have some education, maybe that’s with a sports psychologist, or just some programs that assist the players manage all these extra demands and look at perhaps how they are viewing their performances from the outset, is that unrealistic?
- Paul O’Halloran
Also I think it would useful to have some stress management programs for the players where they’re taught about things like prioritising, you know, effective time management, particularly for adolescents who are trying to juggle their football, with relationships, both friends and more intimate relationships and then they’ve also got all the pressures from school and everything. So I think time management skills are really important. And also, the ability to be able to relax, so even teaching athlete’s relaxation techniques and things so they can sleep better when they’re stressed is really useful.
- Russell Hoye
That sort of brings me to probably the hardest question. It seems you can provide quite a lot of resources and support for athletes to learn to cope with stress. Can you teach them to be hardy? Is that an innate ability which they bring to their world, or is that something they can develop over time, do you think?
- Paul O’Halloran
This is a very good question and there would be debate in the literature over that. Many people consider hardiness to be a personality trait, and with most personality traits, you would argue that you can’t really teach that. You either have it or you don’t. So people are either extroverts or they’re introverts. You can’t really teach someone to be an extrovert. However, in saying that, I don’t think these things are fixed and you can certainly improve it. So it would be very difficult to take someone who has very, very low levels of challenge, commitment and control, and make them extremely hardy. Yet I think you could take someone who is a very low level and improve those levels so they are able to cope better with stress.
- Russell Hoye
Okay. My final question is, where are you going to take this research next? What’s the next bit of research that you think is required in the area?
- Felicity Childs
Well, look, I think there is scope to investigate a little bit more wider with the TAC Cup clubs and I mean, given that there are a number of clubs within Victoria, it would be interesting I think to look at comparing two clubs, to see perhaps, was there a particular football environment that maybe moderated some of these results or had some sort of influence? You know, is there some learnings about the support structures that one club has compared to another one? Again, it could be interesting to compare two clubs, one maybe that’s a metro club, so the one that I was at was a metro club, compared to a country club. Different type of footballers, different type of social background etc. So I think that would be interesting. And also too, to look at other scales that measure resiliency, not just hardiness, a bit of a broader scope of the mental toughness. So I think that would be worthwhile as well.
- Paul O’Halloran
As Felicity said before, we only had fourteen footballers who we followed throughout the whole season and it’s possible that those fourteen particular footballers weren’t representative of all TAC Cup footballers. In fact, it’s quite possible that the people who volunteered to be in our study were the ones who coped better with stress, and were less stressed. And yet, that seems a reasonable assumption I think. So it would be really nice to get a larger group, so that we are actually capturing the people who would be extremely stressed because I think we missed out on some of those in the study.
- Felicity Childs
There was actually one or two players who didn’t participate because they said they had so much going on in their lives that this was just going to add to their stress, so I think that just encapsulates what they are going through.
- Paul O’Halloran
I also think that it would be useful to follow up with some qualitative research, where we actually interviewed players about some of their stressors and how they deal with them. I think that would be a really interesting avenue for further research as well.
- Russell Hoye
Great. That’s it for today. My thanks to Felicity Childs, a recent graduate from the Masters of Counselling Psychology and Dr Paul O’Halloran, Senior Lecturer and Psychologist from the School of Public Health here at La Trobe University. Thanks also to Matt Smith from the Digital Media Team for his great production. You can also follow us on Twitter, @RussHoye. You can find a copy of this podcast on the La Trobe University website under the news tab and also at www.latrobe.edu.au/cssi.
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