What cricket can teach us about the mind's experience of time – and how to deal with anxiety
If one side’s bowlers cannot capture all ten wickets in one day, they must toil on into the next.
- If one side’s bowlers cannot capture all ten wickets in one day, they must toil on into the next.
- Each of the five test matches in this series last for a maximum of five days.
- Australia’s men’s team won their first Ashes Test with only minutes to go in the final session of the fifth day.
- To reach these overarching goals, we must experience short periods of extreme pressure and anxiety.
The ABC of time
- This is followed by our attention being snatched from us to focus on a real or imagined threat.
- In cognitive behavioural therapy, this is captured in the alarm-beliefs-coping model of anxiety (ABC).
- Their beliefs (B) about whether the upcoming ball is a threat or not lead to an initial anxiety wave.
- Research has found that each ABC process literally activates a different part of the brain.
Taking control of time
- We also try to help the athlete cope by figuring out what level of control they have over various actions.
- Bowlers, for example, only have control until they release the ball.
- Batters, meanwhile, have very little control since they have to react to the bowling, ball by ball.
- A CRT-based thought pattern would be: “I can control the fact that I need milk (X), but I cannot control the shop’s milk stock (Y)”.
- The most helpful process here is accepting that you only have some control, then using CRT to allocate efforts accordingly.