Emotions and sports performance are interdependent factors. Learning to conquer your emotions can greatly affect your athletic performance. In the following article, we discuss how maintaining an emotional journal can help you regulate emotions and use them to your advantage.
What is an emotional journal?
An emotional journal is a book where you regularly vent your feelings and thoughts to understand them more clearly. It is a process of managing your mental health or dealing with any traumatic life events.
In the case of sports, it is vital to understand that the relationship between your performance and your emotions is almost reciprocal. This is primarily because any sporting event can trigger intense emotions – joy, anger, sadness or frustration. An emotion journal recognizes this relationship and helps you manage it well.
Let’s understand this a bit deeper-
Our brains stress from open loops and intrusive thoughts. For example, if you are anxious about a game, your brain will try and push away the thought. This often starts a tug of war between the thoughts and your emotional response. When you push away the thought, it leaves you with incomplete emotional processing.
You need to give yourself time to process these emotions. You will often find yourself pushing these emotions away or dwelling on them at a later date. Creating a structured space can help you focus on these emotions and devise ways to manage them. That’s where emotional journaling comes into the picture. It can help you manage the rollercoaster of emotions in a much more organised manner.
How to begin writing an emotional journal
Recognize that emotions are normal, and all that you feel is normal. Begin writing your emotional journal with this attitude. Here are the steps and tips that you can follow to make the most of your emotional journal:
Be consistent
Take time every day at a fixed place and hour to write down your feelings. It helps make journaling a habit, and makes it easy to regulate emotions.
Be unfiltered
A journal does not follow any structure. Write as you please, and whatever feels right. Remember, a journal is like a private space for you to share your feelings, without the fear of any judgement. Do not worry about language or punctuations, and just let your ideas flow freely.
Choose your people
A journal is a private space for you. Choose the people who can view your journal. If you do not want to share certain parts, show them specific details of your journal.
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How does journaling facilitate emotional regulation?
Every emotion has the potential to make or break athletic performance. Observing and identifying these emotions through an emotional journal helps you manage them. It helps you shape your personality, set boundaries and focus on improving your performance. Some effective methods of emotional regulation include:
Situation Selection
Modify your emotions by selecting the situations you wish to engage in. For example, if you identify the stress a tournament has on your body, you may choose to skip it and avoid reaggravating an injury. Goal setting has a vital role in situation selection, and helps you make wise choices to advance your athletic career.
Situation Modification
Selecting the situations you wish to engage with, gives you control over your emotions and how you react to the situation. This provides you more control over the situation. It allows you to define your response and use the situation to your advantage.
Attentional Deployment
With more control over your emotions, you can now focus your energy on the right areas of the game. This eludes a certain sense of familiarity and confidence which can impact the overall performance.
Cognitive Change
The more you reinforce an action, it gradually becomes a habit. It helps regulate emotions and focus on the game and your performance. For example, despite gaining a lead in the early part of a match, the athlete can decide to maintain consistent and high intensity by telling themselves that they have the whole game to play.
Response Modulation
Engaging in self-talk can help alter emotions by shifting an athlete’s focus to their thoughts. It puts attention on the appraisal of their emotions and evokes a desired response. For example, an athlete who learns to control their frustration in difficult situations will gradually reach a natural state of their desired emotion in such situations.
Studies have for long suggested that high intensity of positive functional emotions and lower intensity of negative functional emotions are linked to perceived peak performance. Positive functional emotions help you get through tough and critical phases with ease. When an individual regulates their emotions optimally, they contribute greatly to the team and its performance.
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