Adrenaline: Boom or Bust

Yesterday, I was reading a Horse & Hound article entitled “Adrenaline and how to use it.”  In the article, sport psychologist Charlie Unwin talks about the adrenaline that is produced when riding cross country.  The article goes on to comment how important our interpretation of the adrenalin rush is in determining our experience.  The foundational psychological principles that underlie this assertion are extraordinarily helpful to understand for any rider who is struggling with strong emotion.  So much so, that I devote a significant amount of time to this topic in my sport psychology clinics and seminars.

All emotions involve physiological arousal, a behavioral reaction, and a cognitive appraisal.  This is important to understand because we can actively use each of these components of emotion to change our emotional experience.  Strategies like systematic desensitization use the physiological state of relaxation to influence emotional reactions such as fear and anxiety as they relate to specific situations.  Actors engage in emotion-linked behaviors to access emotional states in preparation for roles.  We can can challenge our cognitive appraisals of emotional reactions in our riding in order to shift our emotional experience.

The adrenalin example is a good one.  If we interpret the rush of adrenaline as “I am afraid,” fear will dominate our resulting emotional experience.  If we interpret the rush of adrenaline as ” I am excited,” excitement will dominate our emotional experience.  The reason that this works is because the physiological arousal in emotional experience is reasonably non-specific.  Think about the physical experience of anxiety (increased heart rate, faster shorter breaths, butterflies in the stomach, etc.).  Now think about the physical experience of excitement.  Note the similarities.

Decades of research have been devoted to demonstrating how non-specific physiological arousal can influence our emotional experiences ranging from anxiety to anger to sexual attraction.  The reader that is interested in a more in-depth exploration of this phenomenon is encouraged to read about excitation transfer in emotion.  For our purposes, it is enough to know that how we interpret our physiological arousal impacts our emotional experience.

So here is the deal,  the next time your are experiencing strong emotion in your riding that is interfering with your performance, stop – take a breath – ask yourself if there is more than one explanation for what you are feeling.  Specifically, is there a potentially (at least partial) positive explanation that fits your circumstances.  The example of anxiety and excitement as you enter the arena is often a useful one, given that most competitors are legitimately excited as well as anxious when competing. The simple acknowledgement that there is more to our experience than the initial negative appraisal is often enough to profoundly shift our experience for the good.

One word of caution, it won’t work to lie to yourself.  Just as making self-affirmations we don’t believe will not change how we feel about ourselves, making up a positive explanation for our physiological arousal that we don’t believe will also fail to produce change.  But don’t despair, in those cases we just need to take a different approach to managing our emotions.