Fear and Anger
Fear is a natural human response to certain known life situations. If it wasn’t for this emotion, people would have probably vanished from the Earth’s surface. Only fear makes us keep our senses alert. A lot of human inventions were made just because we had been afraid of something. Simply put, human technologies have been evolving also thanks to the fear one feels.
Fear is an unpleasant emotion, which can be seen as a protective mechanism with positive effects. Causes of fear change with a person’s development. First, they are afraid of the dark, later of exams at school, sport, work and family, solitude and of death in the old age.
Fear is our reaction to danger, for example concerning my opponent I’m falling behind. Human imagination plays the most substantial role in this. Our brain is the most powerful of our body parts and if we dwell on negative or bad feelings, we will be tied up by them and will never achieve our longed-for goal in sport. It works also the other way round. Not for nothing do we say that whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.
Long-term expressions of fear are slowly worsening our physical and psychological functions. There are various methods to get rid of fear. We sometimes try to chase the fear away by fear itself, e.g. after a strong punch in the face at a competition, we try to participate in further fighting matches right after that because they bear a high probability of physical contact.
Anger also belongs to the three basic emotions in life of a sports person. We sometimes aim our anger towards our opponent; towards a mistaken referee at other times; we should target it towards itself primarily. If I inveigh against other people after a lost match and I do not admit my own mistakes and failures, my personality of a sports person is on the wane. Only the strongest sports people are able to admit their mistake and to subsequently draw consequences.
There are three breaking points.
The first one is followed both by a slowdown after conceding a point, or it can also have positive effects and induce a healthy eagerness in the sports person.
The second one is a situation when healthy sports anger turns into a self-harming feeling, which a person might not be able to handle. The important things are losing their meaning, social bonds are getting disrupted; one destroys things and cannot cope with sports situations.
The third breaking point is a state that occurs during important fighting matches, e.g. at the finals of an important competition or a championship nomination match. These moments may induce both healthy anger and aggressiveness, or fear from failure and sheepishness. That’s why it is important to invoke similar situations through model trainings, where we can at least partially get prepared for such moments.
