When The Stress Takes Over and Floods The Mind

When French gymnast Mélanie de Jesus dos Santos lined up on the runway of the vault at the Paris Olympics, you could see the stress across her face. By that point of the competition Jesus dos Santos committed three major fouls on her floor, balance beam, and bar routines. Her self-confidence diminished and became a contagion ravaging through her four teammates as they each wore the same mask of stress on their faces as they lined up on the vault runway.

The gymnast’s coaches tried encouraging and challenging the young gymnasts. Even the home crowd Parisians collectively tried lifting their spirits. Nothing could stop the flood of stress overtaking the young athletes.

As a coach watching your athletes suffer in a cesspool of doubt is among the worst and most frustrating feelings. You know there’s nothing you can say that can save them from their doubts in the moment, but you still try. You know no matter what you say will be drowned out by their inside chatter. As coaches, what can we do to prepare athletes to suppress those voices of self-doubt? How can we help them focus on the task at hand instead of their stress-induced environment? Is there any hope we can offer in our words and actions, or do we sit back and watch them go down in flames?

When Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast ever, dropped out of Olympic competition in the 2020(1) Tokyo Olympics due to an emotional block and the “twisties,” it took her two years to step foot back in a gym. But when she returned she admitted she’d “take one step forward, and five steps back.” As soon as she’d experience another bout of doubt, she’d pack her bags and leave the gym. It wasn’t until her coach helped her reasses her mental zone she realized that she didn’t have to train for the Olympics. “How about we just get your skills back,” Biles coach suggested.

By focusing on the bite sized pieces of a goal, we can help athletes (friends, family, coworkers, etc.) come back to a central point of focus for their event (routine, job, etc.). Think of it as channel locks, where huge ships make their way through tiny canals. The goal is to get from one large body of water to another, but instead of forcing the ship through the canal, engineers use a series of channel locks, flooding one small area of the vessel with water before opening the next channel until the boat rises. When the boat rises they flood that channel, then the next and so on all the way down a series of channels. Without the channel locks the captain of the ships would have to focus on too many small little tasks to ensure the ship is avoiding other vessels and lower water levels in the canal.

When coaching my high school athletes I often find myself lost in the vast expanse of the ocean explaining physics and all the small technicalities of sprinting only to look up and see confused teenage faces staring back at me. In these scenarios, I’m the captain of a ship trying to force a ship down a canal all at once instead of using one channel lock at a time. “Just get your hips from this point to this point faster than everyone else,” I say to them and the channel lock in their mind usually is filled with better understanding. After that when they ask me how to get their hips from point A to B faster than everyone else is when their I know their ships are ready to take on more information—or more water if you will.

The key is priming the athlete for the smaller bits of the main objective. But even as they rise, one level at a time they need to be reminded that they won’t win the competition all at once. It takes a series of steps. And once one step is executed, whether poorly or well, the canal locks behind the ship can’t be reopened. Keep the lock closed so it doesn’t affect your next move. But, if they can commit themselves to one bite-sized move at a time, methodically attacking each small piece of the overall objective, the process can work and before they realize it they’re already taking on the larger challenge at hand.

Unfortunately Mélanie de Jesus de Santos and her French teammates couldn’t turn the flood of stress into a series of channel locks. They drowned in the a flood of stress and failed to make the finals. But even this can be a lesson for them and for us moving forward. What’s happened is over, and all we can do is learn from it. Ruminating on a bad performance never helps.

During Team USA’s performance at the 2024 Paris Olympics Simone Biles tweaked her calf muscle and the world held its breath. Was this going to be a repeat of last year? Would she stick it out? Biles taped her ankle and refocused. She flooded one canal of the objective at a time and helped Team USA secure a spot in the team finals. So to recap, here’s how we can regain our focus and help others regain their focus:

• Identify the main objective.

• Take one small bite-sized piece of the objective at a time.

• When faced with setbacks, flood one “channel” of your mind at time instead of the whole objective at once.

What do you do when facing a flood of stress? What techniques help you and others overcome stressful situations?

Also, this is my first full-post on the Substack app. How does it look on your end?