Is stress and anxiety really a weakness?
How can your witnesses capitalise on the methods used by elite sportspeople to prepare for cross-examination?
What are high-stress situations?
Most of us are aware of the role that performance psychology plays in elite sport, but fewer of us probably consider its application to other high-stress situations, such as business, theatre or medical fields.
Thomas Cunningham-Fahie has worked across several “performance domains”, including sport, business and the arts. “While each of those domains have their unique challenges and contexts, there are underlying concepts that stay connected across all of them,” he explains.
Motivation is motivation. Confidence is confidence. Nerves are nerves. Burnout is burnout. Perfectionism is perfectionism. It's all the same construct across all of those different domains, even if the demands of the environment might be different.
When it comes to high-stress environments, giving evidence as a witness and being subject to rigorous cross-examination by an experienced barrister is undoubtedly high on the scale of experiences in life that are likely to cause some nerves and anticipation.
Is stress really a weakness?
Cunningham-Fahie says the first thing to understand is that “all emotions serve a purpose” in other words, his role as a psychologist is never to eradicate the feelings associated with stressful situations but to find a way to use them effectively.
Because these emotions feel bad, we have an instinctive response to try to eliminate them and stop them,” he says. “Actually what we should be trying to do is accept them. Then, if we can move beyond acceptance, we want to be able to appreciate that they're really helpful.
There's lots of research out there to show that athletes who view stress as a good sign, perform better. And can even perform better than athletes who are less stress than them, but view their stress as negative.
How can stress be channelled positively?
Cunningham-Fahie distinguishes between what is known as “facilitative anxiety”, which aids performance and “debilitative anxiety”, which hinders it. The difference is that the individual is able to rationalise when anxiety is preparing them to perform and regards it positively, in contrast to someone who receives anxious feelings negatively and consequently allows those feelings to impair their performance.
Symptoms of anxiety breakdown into the following three types, and these are the reasons why stress and anxiety can get in the way of our performance:
(i) Somatic
Somatic anxiety is revealed through physical symptoms, such as butterflies in your stomach, mouth going dry, heart rate increasing, breathing becoming more shallow, and sweating.
(ii) Cognitive
Cognitive symptoms are mental symptoms, like worrying, finding it difficult to concentrate.
(iii) Behavioural
People behave differently, so they may be more aggressive, more defensive or more shy than they would be outside of that situation.
“If you're a business leader who's feeling stress and or pressure, you might begin behaving in an unhelpful way. You might be a little rasher, you might be a little bit more frantic. You might be less clear and concise with your communication when you're speaking with people. You might make decisions or pursue courses of action that aren't quite right because of your stress.”
For witnesses, the disadvantage of some of these symptoms may be that they come across as symptoms of deceit. Blushing, for example, may be received as lying. But if they can harness the feelings of anxiety and regard them helpful for keeping them in the zone, the likelihood is the physical symptoms will be less pronounced.
“When we're anxious, we pay attention to the thing that is making us anxious, and our concentration will be heightened. [For example,] if you're giving witness testimony, [you] will be very in the moment,” Cunningham-Fahie explains.
“If you were taking it to the extremes on the other side, and you were blasé or you didn't really care, there's a chance that you might not be as switched on, and there may be things that you might miss, or things that you might not be paying attention to.”
How can witnesses thrive in high stress situations?
The five things that Cunningham-Fahie highlights that witnesses should to be aware of and harness in high stress situations are:
- Performance is likely to invite some nerves and anxiety. Accepting this will enable them to benefit from the extra focus that adrenaline provides.
- Use anxiety management techniques, such as breathing techniques to keep calm.
- Have a clear picture of what good performance looks like and visualise the outcome they want to achieve.
- ‘If then planning’: think about what they can control irrespective of the context around them, and have an idea of what they might do if the original plan doesn’t work out.
- Adopt a challenge versus threat state. This involves looking at the thing that makes them anxious as a challenge that they are going to succeed at, rather than a threat that may harm or defeat them.
Cunningham-Fahie says there will always be people who find it easier to cope in stressful situations that others. Everyone, however, is able to learn the skills to minimise the disruption that stress and anxiety cause. The most important thing is to understand the role that anxiety is playing and then how to use that emption to your benefit.
Thomas Cunningham-Fahie is a performance psychologist and founder at Succession Sports.