Liz Tucker

We spoke to Liz Tucker, stress counsellor, co-founder of ‘Be Happy Be Healthy’ and regular health and well-being contributor to radio and television about stress management and performance. This is what she said:

Stress can burn huge amounts of our energy. If we don’t manage it, we won’t perform at our best. Whether stress comes from emotional problems or overload at work, it will compete for the ‘energy’ we might rather use for training and racing. If you have unresolved problems, your mind and body will treat those as a priority and leave you depleted before you even start swimming, cycling or running.

Unfortunately we can’t simply remove stress from our lives, although many people mistakenly think we can. However, we can manage it.

One technique is to use time spent doing sport to mull over problems – for example, during a long, slow run in the park. This is fine, as long as you’re not looking for peak performance during the exercise. But if we want to fully focus for a race or an intense training session, we need a different approach: compartmentalisation.

Our brains hate inaction. If we’re facing a problem, our brains will constantly pester us to take some action towards solving that problem. The trick therefore is to tell yourself that you will deal with the problem, or take the next action in tackling the problem, at a specific time and place. It may help to write this down. With a clear action step committed to, the brain can relax and allow you to focus on sport.

One feature of many problems is that they require you to make a decision. People under stress often worry constantly about their ‘problem’ but don’t take the decisions that are needed. To reduce this worry we need to define the next action. This needn’t necessarily mean taking the decision but could be, for example, committing to spending some time finding out more information.

Another source of stress is multiple demands on our time – work, family, friends, hobbies and projects. This at times is unavoidable. Some people try to cope by juggling all the necessary tasks in a frenzy of multi-tasking but really this is a ridiculous concept. Your attention to any one thing becomes too diluted and the stress levels rise.

The solution is to isolate the actions needed for each of these activities and focus on one at a time.

Liz Tucker talked to Simon Griffiths.

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