Anna Freud & your Ideal Martial Artist (pt. I)
This blog post will explore anxiety and test performance through the lens of Martial Arts competitions, specifically, it draws upon Anna Freud’s idea of Ego Defense and the setting of BJJ Competitions.
It’s that time of year where textbooks are opened in anticipation of midterms, everyone hopes for an early spring and the submission arts and grappling tournaments come to town.
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) is a form of submission grappling. BJJ competitions are commonly thought to be the measure one’s grappling talent, a test of sparring away from familiar partners, colloquially reinforced by teammates saying, “Bro, you don’t know unless you compete”.
In a sense, it is the ultimate norm-referenced test because it is a ‘simulated death match’ between two grapplers. Just reading ‘simulated death match’ is enough to give me anxiety. Competitors often talk about anxiety before tournaments and matches and how it affects their performance.
This post will operate under four a priori assumptions…
- BJJ is equal parts physical and mental;
- BJJ competitions are a test;
- BJJ competitors experience anxiety;
- Anxiety affects test performance;
- … Therefore; Anxiety affects BJJ Competition performance.
First, what exactly is BJJ? Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a popular martial art because of it’s self-defense prowess and self-reported positive impact on quality of life. It is a form of grappling that focuses on body control, joint locks and chokes. It has been described as aggressive cuddling, involuntary yoga, and, my personal favorite, an embodied chess match.
Second, what is Anxiety? The DSM-IV classifies one aspect of anxiety as, “a persistant fear of one or more social or performance situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or to possible scrutiny by others”. Two grapplers in front of a crowd are certainly acutely aware of scrutiny, yet a grappler does not experience clinical levels of anxiety.
Although recent literature indicates significant similarities between clinical and sub-clinical anxiety, a competition is an acute event-specific anxiety trigger that may have an alternative, albeit similar, mechanism.
Anna Freud, to very briefly summarize, posited that anxiety is a state of internal conflict from which people naturally attempt to move away from. This movement away from anxiety is made via Ego Defense Mechanisms. These are often subconscious mechanisms which, for better or worse, allow us to escape anxiety: repression, projection, sublimation, etc..
The Freudian notions of Ego Ideal and Ego Threat are related to anxiety and ego defense. The ego ideal can be conceptualized as one’s ideal self-image, who you want to be, and ego threat can be imagined as external factors which threaten one’s ideal self-image - thus causing anxiety.
So, in competition, a grappler experiences anxiety because of the threat to her ego ideal from performing a martial art in front of a crowd of potentially critical observers.
Now, how does anxiety affect a grappler’s performance? By loosely extrapolating from Ms. Freud we can begin to investigate. To escape the anxiety, once she is standing on the mat, she has two immediately available defense mechanisms which may mitigate ego threat in the case of a submission. These mechanisms, when engaged, will affect test performance.
i. The first is the ‘75% effort’ method or the ‘I didn’t even try’ approach. This is a phenomena by which the jiu jitero subconsciously — or perhaps knowingly — restricts her performance in the competition. An example of this may be walking with a limp towards the mat, foreshadowing an injury that will hamper her performance. This approach allows the athlete the benefit of the doubt that if she had given 100%, or even 90% effort, or if she was not injured, that she would have succeeded. This ‘what if?’ preserves her Ego Ideal.
ii. The second is the ‘110% effort’ method. This approach initially appears counter-intuitive because athletes are usually told to, “give it all you got and leave it on the field!”. However, as per the first assumption listed (BJJ is physical and mental) Jiu Jitsu is like a chess game. Each movement and technique is calculated and countered, with the loser tapping out to a check mate. The ‘110% effort’ approach is a crazy, rabid, bullrush fueled by sympathetic systems. Here, the grappler may rush forward, miscalculate and fall into a trap set by the more patient, zen grappler. This can be heard when athletes say, “I was too amped up, I needed to calm down and get in the zone”. This also preserves the ego ideal with a ‘what if?’.
Top level BJJ Athletes talk about ‘the state of no mind’ — being in the zone. An idea I relate to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow. Without a flow state anxiety sets in. Fortunately for the athlete, the competition anxiety is escaped by Freud’s defense mechanisms. I extrapolated from these to conceptualize two plausible defense mechanisms: The ‘75% effort’ and ‘110% effort’ methods. Both of these mitigate anxiety; yet both alter performance and in doing so may influence submission arts tournaments and competitions from providing a valid measure of the practitioners martial art ability.
