Many times I asked myself if it is better to suggest to my players to control their emotions or blurting out all the anger they feel in that moment.
What happens in the case that a player doesn’t destroy his racket and apparently block his emotions.
Are we sure that it is the best reaction, show to the world that we can control ourself?
To repress an emotion can cost a lot of energies, not only mental but physical energies.
Players don’t understand many times because they miss power without a reason, their legs are weak and they fell different from the day before.
From a study of the psychologist Roy Baumeister the following activities can burn important physical energies:
avoiding obsessive thoughts, inhibiting an emotional response to a moving film, making a series of choices that involve conflict, and trying to impress others.
“If you are too worried about doing well on a task, sometimes you will worsen your performance by loading your short-term memory with useless anxious thoughts.
Psychologist Roy Baumeister’s group has repeatedly discovered that an effort of will or self-control generates fatigue, if you have had to force yourself to do something, and you are less willing or less able to exercise self-control when a new problem arises.
The phenomenon has been called “ego depletion”.
In a typical demonstration, some volunteers are asked to repress their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film. Then, subjected to a physical energy test in which they were asked to maintain a strong grip on the subway dynamo in the face of increasing discomfort, the same volunteers showed very poor performance.
The emotional effort of the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to tolerate the pain of prolonged muscle contraction and, therefore, those who have suffered ego depletion give in sooner to the impulse to give up.
As Baumeister notes, the discovery personally made by another group that the idea of mental energy is more than just a metaphor.
The nervous system uses up something from almost every other part of the body, and strenuous mental activity appears to be particularly expensive in terms of glucose.
When the mind is engaged in cognitive reasoning or a task that requires self-control, blood glucose levels drop.
The effect is similar to that of a runner who, during a sprint, uses up a lot of glucose and stores it in the muscles.
The clear implication is that the effects of depression that could be counteracted by glucose intake, and Baumeister and colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments.” From Thinking fast and slow. By Daniel Kahneman
What is the advice? Don’t repress emotions
