1. Introducción

Axiety in high performance athletes study cover a large space in the literature in Sports Psychology (R. Martens, 1977, 1983, Y. Hanin, 1989, C. D. Spielberger, 1989).

The importance lies in the impact that negative emotional states have on performance in competition and training. Most of the failures in competencies are explained by problems due to anxiety management. (Márquez, 1992, R. S. Lazarus, (2000) J. Hammermeister, and D. Burton (2001).

Any human circumstance can be impregnated with a certain level of anxiety. Sports competition situation, where the result and the consequences derived from it, can determine the present and future as a sport professional (contracts, social assessment, continuity, self-esteem, etc.), generate anxiety states in the organism that must be controlled. The majority of athletes, when they have to face a competition, they feel to a greater or lesser degree a state of nervousness, which may appear even days before the competition itself, and which influences sports performance.

Anxiety in sports activity is particularly wide due to the fact that here, the person has a considerable history of physical and neuropsychological load in training sessions and competition, constantly being subjected to the action of the most varied interpersonal and environmental influences ( Straub, 1978). But regardless of the positive or negative meaning that a certain stimulus may have, there are some characteristic situations that contribute to transforming a stimulus into an anxiety situation.

2. Anxiety concept

Anxiety is a negative emotional statement that includes feelings of nervousness, worry and apprehension, related with the organism activation. Anxiety has a component of thinking (for example, worry and apprehension) called cognitive anxiety, and a component of somatic anxiety, which constitutes the degree of perceived physical activation. Anxiety is considered a permanent factor or trait of personality. This is the degree of anxiety that an individual generally presents in most situations. It is the latent disposition to behave in a more or less anxious way under stressful situations.

Anxiety is also considered a temporary state, that evoked by special circumstances, and refers to the subjective feelings of tension that an individual experiences in certain circumstances perceived as threatening, unrelated to the true present danger.

Because of it, in competitive sport, the person with high trait anxiety is generally more likely to experience higher anxiety-state feelings than the person with low trait anxiety level. This situation dependes on how the individual interprets particular competitives circumstances. Its interpretation will be influenced by various factors such as previous experiences, ability training in stress management.

3. Afecction learned

Anxiety is natural phenomenon. Anxiety is common in all animal. Is something essential for their survival and there is nothing strange about it. Why, then, is it so perplexing when over-experienced? It is, overall, a pure natural phenomenon.

It is a purely automatic and conditioned response, vitally important for survival. A powerfull substance called adrenaline is released into the blood stream. The release of this substance allows an immediate response in multiple organs. The muscles tense, the blood moves to them and the liver fills this blood with sugar so that they can operate with more force. Breathing is deeper and there is more oxygen in the blood.

This amazing reaction has always been called the "fly or fight" reaction. It tones our bodies so that we can run faster than we normally could, or we can stay and fight with more strength than we normally would. All mammals have it, and therefore also humans.

The second you detect or feel danger, this reaction starts. Nothing has to be done consciously. It is an instantaneous reaction of setting in motion all the systems that allows us to respond to the dangers of our environment. All of that is fine if our bodies have learned the right lessons. What if wrong lessons have been learned? What if our bodies have learned over the years that some things might be dangerous that other people would not consider dangerous at all? Obviously, the reaction start in inadequate moments and in incoveniente situations.

Humans have supplementary dificulty.  We can think in more complex ways. There is also a different concept of danger than animals. For you and I, shooting a penalty in a soccer final could be a dangerous situations, and, as we can think beforehand, the very thought of having to shoot that penalty at another time can induce an adrenaline reaction.

Some people, and some animal, are more nervous than others. "Fly or Fly" reaction is triggered more easily and more often. Animal experiments have shown that if an animal is stressed it will produce more adrenaline, thus being more exposed to anxiety, so that if you or I are naturally nervous, or if we are stressed, these learned reactions will occur more often and can be intrusive, so we will develop anxiety symptoms.

This make us go back to the starting point. The powerful, and seemingly inexplicable, sensations that an impatient person experiences in certain situations are in fact easily explained. They are a natural phenomenon of the natural world, it has nothing to do with being unable to handle the situation, and it only partly has to do with the stress of modern life. What that person experience is justa an exagerationg of a reaction that we all experience, a reaction that also all animals experiments. It is nothing to be scared of, and since it is a "learned" reaction, it can also be "unlearned" if you approach it appropriately.

4. Anxiety development

Simply because the body of an athlete has been learning to be anxious, perhaps for years. It is an unconscious act and you do not realize it. The body performs many unconscious actions and the release of adrenaline is one of them. There is no way that when the tennis game approaches you can control sweating, or stop stomach discomfort. And there is only one reason: the realise of adrenaline is natural. We need adrenaline. When we need it, we need it fast. Its production is physiological, normal, a natural and immediate response to a stress situation.  it is vita in the right amountsl, but in excess it is destructive.

5, Mental and physical attention

Its the mental perception of anxiety that disturb you, but a state of anxiety is more than that, it is also a serious state of physical discomfort, sweaty palms, trembling hands, and many other purely physical symptoms. To really understan anxiety, you need to understan the close relationship between mind and body, because a state of anxiety is a psychological and physical affection.

Anxiety  caused by a stressful situation is, therefore, a mixture of the physical and the psychological. This is the key, not only to understand it but to defeat or control it. For example, when are facing a competitive stress situation like the last point of the last set of a tennis match; in this situation a fairly high level of anxiety is reached, physical symptoms such as sweating begin to be felt and only because the body has automatically produced it.

People do not have voluntary control above our autonomic nervous system, which, in turn, controls all these body functions that are working  all the time without us noticing their action. The problem for an athlete in a stressful situation is that things get a little out of control, they get out of control, and instead of being automatic and silent, this part of our nervous system begins to produce sensations that we do not like, sensations that we have learned as stressors.

The adrenal gland is the part of the automatic nervous system. It may surprise you a little, but the glands react to the nervous stimulus and there is nothing strange in the way our adrenal gland reacts. Adrenaline is one of the chemical transmitters of the autonomic nervous system, and the adrenal gland, located just above the kidney, produces the substance called epinephrine and releases it into the bloodstream in response to stimulation by a nerve from the brain.

So when the athlete analizes a dangerous situation, the gland will release adrenaline. Using the bloodstream to distribute adrenaline, the body is capable of estimulating all different organs at the same time, producing a mass reaction.

6. Process by which symptoms occur

When you are facing an stressful situation , the reaction explained above occurs, where adrenaline is released into the bloodstream and makes us feel very bad. We learn to fear these symptoms that we associate with a particular situation (basketball free kick shot in a tie situation at the last minute) and we enter a vicious circle if we are not able to control these situations.

Let's see this vicious circle where we can enter:

An example will be given to understand well the next graphic:

That athlete who was about to launch the free kick in a stressful situation as it is with the equalized result within the last minute. This pitcher knows he can't miss the game. This pressure, the athlete understand it as an stressful situation, that has been learned. Then the body automatically releases adrenaline into the bloodstream which will cause anxiety symptoms such as sweating, tremors of the hands and legs, etc. This player fears the appearance of these symptoms, so when they appear, what they do is worsen which will cause a decrease in performance or will cause that player to not have the adequate concentration to carry out that shot, which will cause the free kick to fail.

7. Síntomas generales de la ansiedad

Below you will see a series of examples of the main symptoms that can be triggered by a competitive stress situation (only examples of symptoms that athletes may have felt in stressful situations will be cited, and not people with excessive anxiety):

Muscle tension, stomach aches and pains, respiratory difficulties, diarrhea and urination, excessive fatigue, trepidation, slight dizziness, palpitations and stomach discomfort.

No athlete feels all of these symptoms at once, but sometimes one symptom can trigger another. Thus the fact that, when a symptom is overcome, it can overcome more, since many symptoms are caused by the same physical factors.

8.  Anxieties manifestation in competition

Precompetitive anxiety is a negative state thar occurs during the 24 hours prior to a competition. Precompetitive anxiety results from an imbalance between perceived abilities and the demands of the sports environment. When perceived demands are balanced with perceived capabilities, an optimal state of (alertness / vigilance) is experienced. Precompetitive anxiety results when the athlete's skill and ability are not perceived as equivalent to that of the opponent.

There are five factor that interfere in precompetitive anxiety:

PHYSICAL SYMPTOMS: digestive complaints, tremors, etc.

FEELINGS OF DISABILITY: feeling of not being prepared, that something is wrong.

FEAR OF FAILURE: to be defeated, to delay, to not meet expectations.

ABSENCE OF CONTROL: bad luck.

GUILT: damaging the opponent, playing dirty, cheating, etc.

Regarding personal-situational factors, there are some characteristic situations that affect a stimulus in an anxiety situation; These include: changes in the usual situation, insufficient or erroneous information, overload in the processing channels, importance of the event, imminence of the stimulus, lack of ability to control the situation, self-esteem, etc.

Regarding the perception of the rival, this section could be related to precompetitive anxiety. When an athlete knows the rival he is going to play against, from that moment his concern begins if he knows that he/she is superior to him/her. You are not relaxed so you will have many concerns that will decrease your performance noticeably.

Regarding the audience, the influence of the presence of other people can influence the performance of the subject. The first works date from 1898 and were carried out by an American psychologist named Triplett . They are also the first investigation of experimental social psychology. This sector of study was first called "social facilitation" because researchers thought that co-presence favored performance. T ripplet had effectively shown that a child performed better in the presence of passive bystanders than just if they were no bystanders.

Research has continued to this day, and today the theory wants the presence of other people to raise the number of dominant responses. This has the consequence that a subject obtains better results if the task is well dominated, that is, the dominant responses are good responses, and less good results if the task is poorly controlled, that is, the dominant responses are bad responses.

Spectators are not passive in sports. The team that plays abroad experiences strong pressure from the public. The stress experienced by the players will thus be high. To combat this pressure, a technique was developed more than twenty years ago: it is a modeled training that consists of reproducing during training the conditions of the future match, making a model. For players this stress situation that produced a state of anxiety could gradually be overcome until they get used to the point of not perceiving the situation as stressful.

9. Conclusions

Anxiety state could be triggered by some event that causes stress on the competitor. Anxiety is often felt in stressful situations. Anxiety feelings can be triggered by the adrenaline. Adrenalines is a natural substance. Adrenaline reaction is learnt; becauso of this, we can teach our bodies to produce less adrenalines.

Anxiety has a mental state and a phisical state; and this one establish a vicious circle.

The state of anxiety produces physical symptoms and understanding how those symptoms occur make you overcome it more easily. Almost all symptoms are caused by having too much adrenaline in the bloodstream.

Muscular tension is usually the phisical reason why you feel bad.