With the Rio Olympics seeing some sterling performances from UK athletes – like cyclists Jason Kenny and Laura Trott, many are asking how the athletes can do so well and how they maintain focus in such trying conditions.
And, over the years, the ‘support teams’ for individual athletes have grown beyond just having a coach. Now there are physiotherapists, masseurs and sports psychologists among others who are all there to help the athletes perform at their peak when the occasion demands it.
But sport is not only a physical thing. While it requires the body to be in peak condition, the mind has to be right too. And this is where hypnotherapy can play an important role. It allows the mind to focus and to ignore outside distractions.
To a large extent, what sets the very best in the world apart from the rest is the ability to shut out all distractions and narrow the focus of attention until all else around effectively disappears.
Take Jason Kenny’s victory in the keirin event which saw two false starts, for example. But Kenny’s mental strength allowed him to focus, ignore the distractions, and secure his historic sixth gold medal.
“Teaching people to enter a sports trance improves performance and encourages what we call the state of ‘flow’, or being ‘in the zone’, where everything seems easy and you feel a wonderful, dream-like inevitability of success,” says hypnotherapist Mark Tyrell.
When someone is in trance, they become less aware of sounds around them and, the deeper the trance, the less they will notice, allowing them to focus fully on the task or event at hand.
This is achieved in clinical hypnotherapy which, says the National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH), is the application of hypnotic techniques in such a way as to bring about therapeutic changes by activating the inner resources of a person in order to achieve realistic goals.
In a session with a hypnotherapist, they will first establish the goal and then, using a range of different techniques, relax the person, making them comfortable before working with them towards achieving the goal.
“After a session you may feel uplifted, lighter and very relaxed. Often change is very subtle, as your hypnotherapist will be working with you subconscious mind, and you may just notice a very positive shift in how you are feeling,” says the NCH.
This process can help people achieve more than they thought possible. For instance, says Tyrell, it used to be widely believed that to run a mile in less than four minutes was just not humanly possible. Belief stopped people breaking through it.
“Then in 1954 Roger Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes. And so – suddenly – the sub-four-minute mile moved into the realms of the possible. This sweeping away of limiting beliefs is known as the Bannister effect, and holds good for all areas of life, not just sports,” he said.
If you want to improve your self-belief, focus or frame of mind and achieve greater things, contact an NCH-registered therapist near you by clicking here.