“one thought” principle may be hard-wired into our brains because research shows that
the working memory system which regulates conscious awareness (see Logie, 1999) is
fragile and limited in duration (unless extensive practice occurs; see also Chapter 6).
Third, as we indicated earlier in the chapter, research on the phenomenology of peak
performance states (e.g., Jackson, 1995) indicates that athletes’ minds are focused
optimally when there is no difference between what they are thinking about and what
they are doing. By implication, sport performers tend to concentrate most effectively
when they direct their mental spotlight (recall our earlier discussion of various metaphors
of attention) at actions that are specific, relevant and, above all, under their own control.
Fourth, research shows that athletes tend to lose their concentration when they pay
attention to events and experiences that are in the future, out of their control, or otherwise
irrelevant to the task at hand (Moran, 1996). We shall return to this issue in the next
section. The final principle of effective concentration acknowledges the potentially
disruptive influence of emotions such as anxiety. In particular, anxiety impairs
concentration systems in several distinctive ways. For example, it overloads working
memory with worries (or cognitive anxiety; see Chapter 3). In addition, it tends to restrict
the beam of one’s mental spotlight and also shifts its focus onto self-referential stimuli.
Interestingly, Baumeister (1984) invoked this principle in attempting to explain the
psychological mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of choking under pressure (see
Chapter 3). Briefly, he postulated that anxiety causes people to monitor their own skills
excessively, thereby leading to a sudden deterioration of performance. Anxiety also
precipitates task-irrelevant information processing. Thus Janelle, Singer and Williams
(1999) discovered that anxious drivers who participated in a motor-racing simulation
were especially likely to attend to irrelevant cues. Another way in which anxiety affects
sport performance is by its influence on the direction of athletes’ attentional focus. In
particular, anxiety may encourage them to dwell on real or imagined personal weaknesses
(self-focused attention) and on potential threats in the environment, thereby inducing a
state of “hypervigilance”. Interestingly, Liao and Masters (2002) suggested that anxiety
hampers performance paradoxically by inducing performers to rely too much on explicit
conscious control of their skills. It is clear, therefore, that anxiety affects the content,
direction and width of athletes’ concentration beam (see also Janelle, 2002; Moran, Byrne
and McGlade, 2002).
In summary, at least five principles govern either the maintenance or loss of an
optimal focus for athletes. But why do sport performers lose their concentration in the
first place?
Why do athletes lose their concentration?As we learned from Figure 4.2, when people focus on factors that are either irrelevant to
the job at hand or beyond their control, they lose concentration and their performance
deteriorates. However, psychologists believe that concentration is never really “lost”—
but merely re-directed at some target that is irrelevant to the task at hand. For example,
have you ever had the experience of realising suddenly that you have been reading the
same sentence in a book over and over again without any understanding simply because
your mind was “miles away”? If so, then you have distracted yourself by allowing a
Sport and exercise psychology: A critical introduction 108