FRUSTRATION – tolerance in the sports parlance deals with the athlete’s capacity for stress-tolerance and ego-strength that contributes to the athlete’s performance in accordance with the individual athletes’ biological and psychological factors which also contributes to the individual athletes’ stress capacity.
Exemplified by a hyper-anxious athlete, he presents a unique problem where his contribution in the team is endangered sometimes by too much drive and dedication because he burns himself out psychologically prior to actual competitions that makes it his own adversary.
The hyper-anxious or “psyched out athlete,” differs from other problem athletes because motivating him is not a problem; rather, the problem will be always to aid him in setting pace that will prove most beneficial in terms of his future performances.
Stress is a human characteristic of anxiety, where anxiety is generally considered to be a fundamental human reaction which is essential, and its counterpart found throughout the animal kingdom. Reactions towards anxiety are communicated by the environmental cues based upon past experiences, through selective perception gradually emerged by positive and negative experiences.
Two general responses to these environmental cues are typically either to fight or escape. Although there are degrees of human behaviour between these two extremes, one or the other will always be evident. For example in a basketball game or any other sport where a player reacts under stresses which results into a brawl, foul play, etc.
The words, fight or escape, may be too emotionally loaded to represent what the individual athlete actually feels, but, subjectively, when we are placed in a stressful situation, we say to ourselves that we are tense, uneasy, or ill at ease; because we don’t often admit that actually we feel dread or fear.
In our culture, the psyched out athlete experiences such feelings and reactions because we often fail to stress the psychological values which follow the honest, subjective admission, “Boy, am I scared”, because too often a useless value has been expressed by an attempt to teach young athletes that it is unmasculine to admit “fear”.
However, it doesn’t mean that such admission of fright leads to the deterioration of behaviour or athletic performance. Because, when it is treated intelligently by parents, coaches, trainers, etc. it can be a valuable insight and lead to a lessening of unreasonable fear or anxiety.