- Level: AS and A Level
- Subject: Physical Education (Sport & Coaching)
- Word count: 1986
Describe arousal, anxiety and stress including their causes. Explain effects on performance.
Extracts from this document...
Introduction
Describe arousal, anxiety and stress including their causes. (P3) Explain effects on performance. (M2) Arousal Arousal is the amount of mental energy or preparedness a person has prior to performance. Being aroused has different effects on the body and mind being aroused will make you fell mentally excites, have an increased pulse, blood pressure and temperature. Sweating is likely to occur as having butterfly's in your stomach your focus will increase as you set yourself into the zone you are playing in. There are different levels of arousal under aroused, optimum arousal and over arousal. Being under aroused gives you a slow RT your attention span and concentration goes broad and you have slow reaction and stimuli. Being over aroused will lead to being highly excited, having a decrease in motor control leading to poor execution of skills. Attention span becomes narrow giving tunnel vision and making poor decisions. Optimum arousal makes the athlete physically and mentally prepares for action, making them make good decision and execute skills accurately the athlete will also have a quick RT. Optimum levels of arousal are affected by how difficult or intellectual a sport is, how much cognitive energy it requires, and how much endurance and persistence the sport/task needs. ...read more.
Middle
Stress is anything that can cause a person react invariably, however each person responds differently to stress. There are many causes of stress within athletes. Such as injury, mental fatigue, when it is thought that what is being asked of an athlete is beyond their perceived abilities, when too much is asked of the athlete in too short a space of time when unnecessary obstacles are put in the way of achieving goals. Some of these things are intrinsic and some possibly less are extrinsic. It is these factors, which cause most stress in elite athletes. There are two types of stress these are known as Eustress and Distress. Eustress is known as the better stress, the stress which provides us mental and physical energy which leads us in a direction to move forward and get things done. It also provides us with a sense of fulfilment and happiness when being challenged mentally or physically. For a footballer Eustress can be felt in an international game when they are singing the national anthem with a stadium full of 70,000 fans chanting it with them, this can provide the footballers great fulfilment knowing and having that feeling of all of those people behind them to do well. ...read more.
Conclusion
Behavioural symptoms Behavioural responses to stress occur when an individual carries out actions to either make them feel like it is helping them cope with stress or makes them feel more relaxed and comfortable. Symptoms are: * Talking, eating and walking quickly * Interrupting conversations * Increased smoking, drinking and eating. * Fidgeting * Lethargy * Moodiness * Grudge bearing * Accidents and clumsiness * Poor personal presentation * Nervous habits For an athlete they can carry out behavioural stress symptoms even within a game, for an example if a referee gives a unjustifiable penalty against a defender, this defender could become moody and angry towards the referee, and they even may bear a grudge against this referee for further matches, which will make the player even more stressed because before every game if the player knows that same referee if refereeing their game they are going to link it back to that incident. Sports performers can even take up bad eating patterns whereby they are so stressed they cannot find the right time to eat, therefore they begin to lose muscle mass and weight and start to become lethargic and are unable to perform to their best ability. ?? ?? ?? ?? BTEC National Sport Level 3 Abbie O'Brien ...read more.
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Here's what a teacher thought of this essay
4 star(s)
With the inclusion of 'catastrophe theory', this would be a strong merit piece of work! :)
Marked by teacher Lindsay Taverner 08/02/2012
