Efficient Coping Behavior in Sport: What Disturbs Our Equanimity and How to Gain It Back

Every athlete has to achieve permanent victories on the «domestic front» of coping with difficulties and self-overcoming if he or she wants to win the sport competitions regularly. Extreme muscle loading, excitement, anxiety, and stress become a habitual routine for many athletes. It is an important applied goal of sport psychology to transfer their skills to other people who need them, for example to workers who perform under pressure or different people who set goals and have to achieve them. Current paper is devoted to research what ways and resources are selected by professional athletes of different sports and ages to cope successfully with stress and negative emotions. We consider what is the difference between coping with stress and maintaining the equanimity. It describes the variety of methods and strategies that can improve the efficiency of the athlete’s performance make him or her more resistant and «tough». Also the problem of experience is solved: how athletes learn to cope with difficulties, how they choose the best way to behave, which resources reinforce them.

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