Atomic elements of mental performance

In recent decades, science has made groundbreaking advances in our understanding of the brain. Today, we can observe brain activity in real-time down to the cellular level. These insights not only improve our ability to detect and treat diseases earlier but also enable advanced connections between information technology and neuroscience.

Despite these advances, the human brain remains an enormously complex structure, perhaps the most complex in the universe. Every new discovery not only confirms our expanded understanding but also the immense complexity and demands of our nervous system. These limits become particularly evident when our behavior does not meet our expectations.

In sports, our brain performs extraordinary feats. Athletic activities are fast, dynamic, and unpredictable – mentally, they are among the most demanding challenges for the human brain. Sport is the controlled experience of extreme situations, both physically and mentally. The further we push these boundaries, the greater the demands on our nervous system.

While all sports share fundamental mental challenges, they vary significantly from discipline to discipline. The differences range from individual to team sports and from activities with extremely short to very long durations. There is currently no official classification of sports by their specific mental demands, but such a system would be extremely useful. It would enable athletes to specifically train those mental skills that can make the difference in their particular competitive situations.

We can characterize each sport by four central features that require different mental strengths: (1) concentration ability in the moment, (2) interaction with team members, opponents, or the environment, (3) the duration of the effort, and (4) the level of discomfort to be managed. Let’s take a closer look at these features in the next step.

What do sports like tennis, table tennis, darts, billiards, and golf have in common? They do not forgive mistakes. A single poorly executed shot or throw can significantly diminish the chances of winning. This is particularly evident in high diving, where athletes must do everything right in just a few seconds from the jump to the water entry. But even in sports that generally have a higher error tolerance, there are decisive moments – like the penalty kick in soccer or the finish in a sprint.

In these critical moments, it is essential that the athlete is fully focused and not distracted. Success in such disciplines requires the ability to consistently and precisely focus attention on the task at hand. Our attention works like a spotlight that illuminates certain things and leaves others in the shadow. This intense focus is crucial for peak performance. It must be precisely directed at the task ahead and immune to distractions. Mastering this is by no means easy. The challenge often becomes apparent when athletes cannot perform their usual skills in crucial moments. Nevertheless, these peak performances in critical moments can provide decisive advantages and pave the way to extraordinary successes.

Sport involves a variety of interactions that encompass both physical and mental extreme experiences. These head-to-head comparisons with other athletes or teams and the resulting physical exertions trigger a wide range of emotions. This is further intensified by interactions with external spectators. However, the reality in sports proves to be far more complex than the simple assumption that positive emotions are good and negative emotions are bad. Robazza and Bortoli (2003) found that a large proportion of emotions, including nervousness, calmness, tension, and relaxation, can be both performance-enhancing and performance-impairing. Interestingly, traditionally positive emotions were rated as dysfunctional in 39% of cases, while negative emotions were considered functional in 42% of cases.

Particularly, physical exertion contributes to a variety of emotions. From the brain’s perspective, the body is a source of sensory inputs. In an unbalanced “body budget,” as is often the case in sports, the brain seeks explanations and uses emotion concepts to give meaning to internal sensations and external perceptions. From a sore muscle or accelerated breathing to the concept of exhaustion – emotions are constructed by the brain and do not always reflect the actual state of the body.

For athletes, it is therefore important to become architects of these experiences. This requires focusing on the pure experience and developing emotional intelligence to effectively construct the most useful emotion in every situation. It’s not about suppressing emotions but maintaining a healthy distance between perception and reaction. Athletes learn to perceive their bodies without immediately judging them. Pain and shortness of breath thus become neutral sources of information, not emotionally charged warning signals. High-performance athletes view emotions in all their facets as an important part of reality, pay attention to them, but do not let them control them. The emotional playing field remains open.

Sport is characterized by a wide range of diverse influences. Especially in sports like surfing or ski jumping, where conditions are constantly changing and there is a strong dependence on the environment, it is necessary to quickly adapt to new situations. Often, many sports are decided in the last minutes, whether through the dynamics of fast-paced games like basketball and ice hockey or the drama of overtime in soccer. There is also the long duration of some disciplines, such as long-distance triathlon or ultramarathons, as well as multi-day stage races that constantly present new challenges.

This requires a high degree of cognitive flexibility to meet the changing demands. Athletes must regularly regulate their attention by focusing on relevant goals and filtering out distractions (selective attention), maintaining focus over long periods (sustained attention), looking out for new important goals (situational attention), and shifting or dividing focus between multiple goals (divided attention).

The best athletes do not rely on a single strategy. They have flexible and adaptive mechanisms, switching between different approaches depending on the situation’s demands. They tune into their bodies in crucial moments and use other times to “switch off the brain” through automated actions. It’s as if they save mental energy until they really need to go deep mentally.

The primary goal of evolution is risk avoidance to increase our chances of survival. These fundamental programs of our nervous system are so effective that they are hardwired into our “hardware.” They are the inner voices that warn us: “This far and no further.”

Athletic peak performance is an extreme experience and often more of a mental than a physical challenge. Any task lasting longer than about 30 seconds requires decisions – conscious or unconscious – about how intensely to exert oneself and when. Endurance sports and strength training, for example, challenge us to fight against the growing urge to stop. Whatever our absolute physical limits are, something must prevent us from getting too close to them. Hard physical limits do exist, but no athlete ever reaches them because the purely psychological limit of perceived effort is always reached first. The limits we experience as exhaustion and fatigue during high-intensity aerobic activities are not a result of failing muscles but are imposed by the brain as a built-in safety system.

For endurance athletes, pain is inevitable, and dealing with it is closely linked to their performance. The central role is played by effort. It is not just a by-product of physiological stress that slows us down or stops us but the direct cause of it. The subjective feeling of effort determines more accurately than any physiological measurement how long one can maintain performance.

Physiological studies show that the interpretation of these signals by the brain is crucial. Elite athletes can use their physical reserves much more effectively, or rather: get closer to their physical limits. They decouple sensations of pain and effort from emotional reactions to them. The key is the ability to resist the instincts that tell them to slow down, ease up, or quit. In a way, endurance sports are not a game of mind over muscles but more a game of mind over the nervous system over muscles.

All sports present specific mental challenges that can vary in nature and intensity. A simple overview of a selection of sports highlighting different mental demands shows that some disciplines have particularly high demands in certain areas while being less demanding in others. Other sports, however, consistently have high mental demands in all categories. It is advisable to critically examine this classification and adapt it to one’s own sport, even at the level of a single sporting discipline. This overview does not claim to be complete but serves to illustrate the differences between sports and provide characteristic examples.

Of practical importance – and this is particularly important to me – is that this methodological approach allows for the systematic analysis of the mental demands of a sport. Specific focus areas and action recommendations for the practice of this sport can be derived from this. The categories particularly relevant to a specific sport should be trained with priority and regularity. This is the starting point for individualized mental training, where the potential for peak athletic performance lies. This is not fundamentally different from physical training, where there are also different sport-specific focal points. At the professional level, however, an athlete can also benefit significantly from improving their abilities in all areas. But as a starting point: “first things first.”

The brain plays a crucial role in sports, but not in the simplified way often portrayed in self-help books. The knowledge or belief that one’s limits are purely mental does not make them any less real during the moment of competition. Skills such as attention regulation, cognitive flexibility, and handling emotions and discomfort must be trained long before the actual competition. Critical to this are the specificity of mental training—targeted training of specific skills, continuity—regular and progressive training, consistency—coherent integration into physical training, and the individuality of training—adapting to the athlete’s specific requirements. Studies have shown that combining physical and mental training in a form of hybrid training yields significantly better results.

However, the process requires the selective exercise of necessary mental skills within a formal framework, independent of physical training sessions. Meditation-based approaches are particularly suitable here, aiming to improve psychological skills such as attention, awareness, and emotional control. Numerous studies in recent years have confirmed the potential of these techniques and provided remarkable insights into how our brain functions. It is therefore no surprise that many athletes have integrated meditation techniques firmly into their daily routines. Through such exercises, athletes learn to focus, observe their thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, and develop new response patterns. With increasing practice, these skills become more deeply embedded in the anatomy and function of the nervous system, turning into stable abilities available at critical moments.

The good news is: Mental skills can be improved specifically and purposefully for each sport. But as with everything, one must actively work on it.