Our Mind and Body’s Fail-Safe

We watched with great emotion, concern, and maybe confusion when U.S. gymnast Simone Biles decided to withdraw from her participation in the team competition at the Olympics due to mental health, and perhaps neurological concerns¹. This comes just two months after Naomi Osaka decided to withdraw from the French Open due to mental health issues regarding her participation in press conferences², and just one year after Michael Phelps co-produced The Weight of Gold, a documentary featuring himself and other elite Olympic athletes who found themselves making an ultimate sacrifice for their Olympic pursuits³.

While we all can’t be Olympic athletes, what can we learn about the limits of what our minds and bodies can handle before or during performance, and how can we move forward again if we decide to leave a performance situation?

• Mental preparation for performance takes practice but it isn’t fail-proof on performance day.

For any type of performance, our mental training is just as important as the physical training. The training part is about doing it over and over again, modifying it to make our performance better. What looks like perfection is an accumulation of repetitive practice and modification. We can use visualization techniques to make uncertainties more certain. We can build internal coaches in our minds—at times it cracks the whip, at times it encourages us, and at times it instructs us to step back and strategize. However, just prior to or at the start of a performance, it isn’t a certainty that our sensory experience and reaction to stress can be managed adequately, especially if we don’t account for something that happens. When this happens, we can do what we can to bring our stress levels down, but if it’s too high, it can trigger anxiety and even panic symptoms, which is our body’s way of telling us to stop.

• How can we reset expectations if our bodies aren’t meeting our needs for our performance?

Perfectionism is a trait of people who have a tendency to set unrealistically high expectations. However, high-level performers hone their perfectionism by meeting their expectations over increments of time with many, many hours of practice. Even then, perfectionism can lead us to believing that we have more control over the unknown than we really do. When our bodies don’t meet our demands, we can either accept where we are and make do with what we have, or we can choose to bow out, regroup and devise an alternative strategy. If the latter occurs, we may need support from others and time to regroup and start again. If you’re part of a team, try to work with them to build in a “workaround,” or an alternative that can work just as well, as it did with the U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Team⁴.

• Perfectionism and high expectations alongside physical pain amplify self-critical thoughts.

A terrific part of building an imaginary coach in our minds is that it can crack the whip and drive us to achieve at higher levels through a set of messages and thoughts. What can start as motivating thoughts that increase our arousal and motivation, can lead to self-criticism at times. Unfortunately, this self-criticism gets louder as we feel higher levels of pain. Unless we have a way to refocus our minds and soothe ourselves, our performance can suffer, which in turn can drive more self-critical thoughts. Our call for support from others, and from within ourselves, must be met with compassionate and supportive words, like, “You’ve got this!” or “You’ll be OK!” This takes a great deal of practice, and even still, the day of performance may not turn out the same exact way it has in practice.

• Being an expert in your craft doesn’t prepare you for the spotlight of success.

As humans, we have a tendency to place individuals with extraordinary talent and skill on a pedestal, perhaps as a connection to immortality. Through their performance, these individuals build an immediate mass audience that grows even further as they become indoctrinated as celebrities. The preparation for this kind of success and spotlight requires a great deal of support from others who can keep the person grounded in the reality of their “humanness." That is, they will sometimes fail just like we all do, and we have to accept this fact in them as we do for ourselves. The hope is that the person can find a respite from the pedestal that has been built for them, and find ways to be human outside of the spotlight. If you’re a “mere mortal,” it may be that you’ve built your own set of expectations for yourself that may not be possible to consistently perform to. If this is the case, try to set up and prioritize your goals for the next performance to include a minimum standard that you’d be willing to reach.

• Social anxiety builds during performance, and amplifies when there are real critics criticizing you.

Social anxiety is common in those who need to perform in front of others. One of the similarities in the stories of Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka is their active engagement in social media platforms before and during the performances. Social media extends the reach and access that people have with these performers, but it also becomes a platform for criticism. Although it is hard to tell how much of an influence it had on the pressure that these individuals felt, it seems reasonable to assume that anxiety about the performance becomes greater when feeling like you have to answer to countless others. Unsurprisingly, we see others criticizing the performer, but more interestingly, we are now seeing a rise in those who are criticizing the critics⁵. As society struggles with how to best engage with our chosen heroes and heroines, we must understand that they are real people who share similar struggles. For most of us who are not in this unusual position of being in this kind of spotlight, we can all fall victim to our own fears of humiliation, particularly when we have to perform in front of others. In these situations, our focus must be about meeting the goals of our performance over the impending criticism. This may take time, practice, perhaps some help from a mental health professional, and some physical and emotional distance from the source of criticism. If the source is yourself, then therapy may help to build those skills.

• How can we forgive ourselves when we fail or leave?

Whether we decided to fight and lose, or we decided to flee and regroup, we can begin to forgive ourselves through allowing ourselves to grieve the loss and start the process of learning how to do it again differently. Failure hurts because it can feel like a rejection and a blow to our self-esteem. We then need to feel the wide array of emotions that come from this loss through a process of grief⁶. But failure is an inevitable truth in life, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take the chance on yourself to reach your goals. Although we cannot win all of the time, because there are too many variables that cannot be controlled by any one person, we can try to see different aspects of ourselves and the situation that contributed to failed outcomes. And, while we can’t change the past, we can change how we can prepare for and execute the performance when the time comes again. Thankfully, resilience is a learned skill.⁷