Are you aware that athletes face not only physical challenges but also mental challenges? Approximately 35% of elite athletes undergo mental health issues in their life. Most of the athletic identities suffer major self-esteem and identity crisis soon after their athletic retirement. Athletic identity can become such an emphasis that everything begins to revolve around that role. Their dis-proportional identity has detrimental effects on mental health, personal relationships, growth, and functioning. Mental health issues like stress, depression, social anxiety, and burnout result in limited performance followed by constant failure and criticism.
What is Flow State?
Flow state is all about being “in the zone”. You feel your best and perform your best in the flow state. In the flow state, your brainwave state is alpha-theta. Gamma waves also occur, binding together ideas and memories from distant regions of the brain with experience and new stimuli, resulting in creativity. Elite athletes use focus state to boost confidence and clutch state boosts the efforts and concentration during important moments in the performance. The Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex needs to be shot off during sports performance allowing all the attention to go to the part we use without micromanagement. This results in quick reactions and uninterrupted productivity.
How Meditation and Neurofeedback help Athletes enhance their game
Abhinav Bindra was one of the elite athletes who won the Gold medal in the air rifle event at the Beijing Olympics, 2008. He used Neurofeedback training for staying calm and enhancing his game. He was the first Indian Olympic gold champion.
Neurofeedback not only helps in solving mental health disorders but also helps healthy people to perform better in their personal and professional lives. It accelerates brain activity control, improves work productivity, and sharpens memory functions. New brain wave patterns are formed during brain training as the brain responds to the cues given. This helps in building new neural pathways. Neurofeedback forces you to course-correct on a wrong turn. Thus, elite athletes use Neurofeedback for performance efficiency.
Mental fitness for athletes is very necessary. Meditation alone is an amazing addition to training an athlete’s mind. Athletes feel energized and their concentration improves. Meditation enhances brain function capacity, neural activity, and circulatory blood flow, resulting in improved attention and focus of elite athletes. Thus, meditation helps in improving sleep patterns, reduces recovery time, enhanced endurance, and improved the sense of identity, self, and body. Thus, neurofeedback and meditation help in solving mental health issues and enhance the performance of athletes.
So, overcome distractions and mental health issues in a short span by choosing Neuphony. We can help you stay focused and productive with the best meditation techniques. We provide real-time feedback the second time you lose your attention making your brain muscles work out and improve your attention span. Not only this, but our mobile application also provides insights on how your brain behaved during meditation and how it trained your brain to reach that state naturally. Choose Neuphony today and you’ll never regret your decision.
References – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3580050/ https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/621991 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.638369/full