WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE BRAIN?

First of all, none of this is happening consciously. You aren’t making a choice to shift your focus, it just happens. Why? Sports psychology offers us some clues.

“When our brains get caught up in thoughts from the past…or thoughts of the future…it creates a stress response, and we can’t use the part of the brain that keeps us engaged in the moment.” Dr Kristen Race, PhD

You might be familiar with the 'pink elephant' effect. If someone says "don't think about a pink elephant," it becomes the exact thing you mind focuses. on. Similarly, once your mindset shifts to what's next, it’s like that pink elephant that you can’t ignore. You become distracted from what is important: fencing your game.

HOW TO DEAL WITH THIS SCENARIO

Ultimately this is about training your brain to stay focused on the moment. We will talk about meditation and mindfulness, which are excellent methods for doing just that, in future articles.

However, I’ll give you a practical example of how I dealt with this, which may not work for everyone but was extremely helpful for me.

The shift in focus would often happen to me at specific scores in the bout. For example when I had scored 8 touches (and we were given a one minute break) or when I reached 13 (and the win really felt close).

For a period of time, I experimented with ignoring the score completely. I would avoid looking at the scoreboard unless absolutely necessary. I did this because I felt it was very rare that the score should ever affect what I needed to do in that individual touch. It could only distract me, and shift my mindset to think about something in the future. Doing this helped me stayed mentally in the moment to the point where sometimes I would win the bout and not even realize it!

One important safety mechanism I also put in place was ensuring that there was someone at the strip to check that score was correct. This was usually my coach or a teammate who could tell the referee if an error was made with the score.

The bottom line is you can’t enjoy the future until you finish with the present.

How do you stay present?