Brain Censors and Heat Waves

What is biofeedback and how does it apply to sport?
by Dr. Adrienne Leslie-Toogood

There is something called an ideal performance state or zone of optimal functioning. In general, this means that there is a certain place when athletes, coaches and other people tend to perform their best. Other people may have heard about this as the concept of a flow state (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990). And it seems to be a balance between the demands of the task at hand, your preparation, belief in your ability to be successful and your general level of anxiety. Although it is very different for everyone, there is a point when you can become too anxious or stressed, which will negatively impact performance. Almost every person can think of a time when anxiety negatively impacted performance.

Interestingly, what we tell ourselves about certain competitions can have a big impact on our level of anxiety or arousal. If we are going to a more important competition or if we are competing at a new level, we have a tendency to get more aroused.

But how do we know when we are calm? How do we know what stresses us out? How can we tell if we know how to calm ourselves down?

If we think of how often we practice technical, physical, and tactical elements for a competition, it just makes sense to spend a bit of time practicing how we want to think and feel on that important competitive date.

Did you know that you can actually gather information on how your body reacts to stress? There is technology available that can help you learn about your body’s reaction to stress. This is often referred to as neuro- (Demos, 2005)) or bio-feedback (Schwartz, 1995). And really, it is a tool that helps you learn about your body, so that you are able to gain an increased awareness and as a result alter this more readily on your own.

What is biofeedback? Biofeedback is a tool that provides you with information on your physiology. It provides you with information on various bodily systems; targeting those systems that we know play a role in activation, arousal, anxiety and stress. By looking at this information we can learn how your body is at rest, how it responds to being activated and how quickly it recovers from this activation. It can also help us to learn which systems you might choose to target if you wanted to learn to calm yourself more quickly.

So what systems can you gather information on? Thought Technology sells equipment that involves connecting you to several sensors and electrodes that will be able to pick up responses from your body. This is non-invasive. That is, they sit on the surface of your skin. You can look at areas such as rate of respiration, heart rate, heart rate variability, skin conductance (sweat), skin temperature, EMG (muscle tension), and EEG (brain waves).

How does this apply to sport? Biofeedback equipment can be used to help an athlete learn to manage their calming response, but can also assist them in gaining confidence in their ability to recover after something takes them away from their ideal performance state. Imagine the confidence an athlete will have in their ability refocus, if they have received tangible feedback and data that has told them they do indeed know how to recover after experiencing a stressor.

In addition to computer-based equipment, there are portable devices available to monitor almost all of the above responses. Some of the devices used in sport include the EmWave (by HeartMath), which monitors respiration and heart rate variability, the Myotrac which monitors muscle tension, and the GSR2 (by Mind Growth) which monitors skin conductance.

Take some time to explore these concepts and think about how you might be able to incorporate this into training with your athletes.

References

Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience'. New York: Harper and Row

Demos, J. (2005). Getting started with neurofeedback. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Schwartz, M. S. & Associates (1995). Biofeedback: A practitioner’s guide. New York: Guilford Press.

 

Dr. Adrienne Leslie-Toogood is a licensed psychologist and the Director of Sport Psychology at the Canadian Sport Centre Manitoba.  She has worked with athletes and coaches in both the United States and Canada.  With respect to research, she has presented at numerous International conferences and published in both peer-reviewed journals and edited books.

Also, have you worked with a sport psychology consultant that you feel did a fabulous job?  If so, please consider nominating them for the Jim Henderson Dedicated Service Provider Award in Health and Performance Psychology.  Visit the Canadian Sport Center website for more information, or contact Dr. Adrienne Leslie-Toogood (