As the gaming industry gets more and more competitive, players face more challenges on a daily basis. Our ability to handle stressful situations is what can ensure our success, and most importantly, our ability to enjoy gaming when competing. My name is Blink, I'm a coach and content creator, with the goal of helping you improve at gaming, applying neuroscience and psychology. And in this video, I'm going to help you fix nervousness and anxiety using several techniques backed up by scientific research. So before we cover what are the things you can do to avoid and fix an anxiety, I want to go over what are the actual cognitive impairments of experiencing an anxiety. In other words, what are the aspects of your brain performance that are getting worse due to an anxiety and nervousness? In the following study published by Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, the authors investigated what are the actual interactions between an anxiety and cognition. An anxiety impacted both verbal and spatial processes as described by correlations between an anxiety and performance. However, an anxiety doesn't just impair working memory. In the following study, the authors highlight a bunch of other domains where an anxiety impacts your performance. Attention and control. Anxious patients suffer from debilitating intrusive thoughts and feelings as well as disregulated attention mechanisms, for example, destructibility, impaired concentration, etc. These symptoms have been linked to attentional bias for threat. This means you will have a hard time concentrating on tasks that require you to focus on several streams of information and multitask. Your decision making is also compromised, becoming more conservative and harm-avoidant. In gambling tasks where the probabilities are known, an anxiety can increase risk-avoidant decision making and lead to more conservative gambles, which is bound to decrease your winning due to bias decision making towards more safe decisions. An anxiety has also been shown to induce premature responding, in other words, respond before all the options are presented. Spatial navigation is also affected, an anxiety might prioritize fast and easy navigation away from threats, but impaired navigation which is unrelated to threats. In conclusion, an anxiety can be good in situations where you need to avoid threat, but being anxious during the whole ranked game or even part of it can be detrimental to your decision making an executive function, thus we should look for ways to minimize its effects and control it. An anxiety during competitive games has a deep cause for most people, and that's something everyone has to treat independently, as it's very specific for each person. I will focus during this video on several things you can do to treat the symptoms of an anxiety and maximize your cognitive performance during ranked games by remaining more calm and focused. But before we continue guys, quick note here, I'm not a professional psychologist and I don't want you to use this video as a replacement for therapy. If you have diagnosed an anxiety disorder, you should be attending therapy with your psychologist. Again, we are just going to superficially use some psychological techniques to reduce your anxiety symptoms and regain control during ranked games. So let's cover several techniques that we can use to treat an anxiety symptoms. CBT or Cochnative Behavioral Therapy is a short-term goal-oriented treatment that takes a practical approach to problem solving. Its goal is to change patterns of thinking or behavior that are behind people's difficulties and so change the way we feel. Basically, changing our thoughts to change our feelings. CBT doesn't focus on previous events and unresolved traumas. It allows you to change how we behave in specific situations. This means it doesn't matter if you're someone who has always struggled with an anxiety or nervousness, with CBT you can actually bypass that and ignore the root cause and directly treat or minimize the symptoms. CBT focuses on addressing what thoughts and mental patterns you have for specific experiences so that you can change your negative mind chatter to a positive one. For that, we are going to do the following steps. Thought Tracking Taking notes on what is your mental chatter and see where it comes from. Essentially, writing down the negative thoughts that you have during an anxiety. It is only when we write them that we can start to change them. Now you will see how. Unraveling if those thoughts are actually true or not. Find logical contradictions to the underlying assumptions your mind created. Restructure your thought pattern. Once you've identified the thoughts that you hold, you can begin to explore how those thoughts took root and why you came to believe them. When you discover a belief that is destructive or harmful, you can begin to challenge it. The next step is thought stopping. Visualizing or verbalizing a stop message in the brain or taking a deep breath and getting out of this mental pattern. This step is meant after you've already tracked your negative thoughts and started to understand that they are actually not true. Basically, you have to catch yourself and stop the negative stream of thoughts once it begins to occur. Relax the breathing. Bringing all your attention to your breath and changing it. This step is to be done right after you've stopped the negative mind chatter. Now it's time to address the physiological state that you are in. We need to tell the body that there is no threat and that an anxiety is not needed right now. To do so, bring your attention to your breath. If it's going too fast, begin to slow it down by having deep and long breaths. This will signal the body that everything is fine and that there is no threat. Affirmations and visualization. Guess what? The same way you have created negative mental patterns by constantly repeating to yourself negative thoughts, you can reverse and generate the process and create positive mental patterns by repeating positive thoughts. Sounds crazy but there is scientific research to support this idea. In the following study, they allocated volunteers with general and anxiety disorder into three groups, in which all practiced some sort of either visual or verbal positive thought repeating, when experiencing worry for five weeks. All three groups experience a significant reduction in worry and an anxiety during stressful situations. Both verbal and visual positive thoughts can be used to effectively counter worry, so I recommend you use whichever you find you are more comfortable with. I personally feel like my brain runs more verbally than visually, but this is very dependent on the individual, so you choose the one that suits you best or maybe a mix of both. There is also MRI brain scans suggesting that certain neural pathways are increased when people practice self-affirmation tasks. In order to apply positive affirmations, first find powerful positive affirmations that can counter the negative ones and write them down. Then sit for 5-10 minutes a day and repeat those positive affirmations. You can even repeat them before you begin a ranked game. At the end of each week evaluate how this is working and if you need to add new ones. I will list here some examples. Meditation If you've been around in this channel for some time, you know that I talk frequently about meditation. The health benefits and boosting performance it provides makes it a perfect daily practice for any competitive gamer out there. Meditation has been gaining a lot of attention recently due to more and more scientific research proving its effectiveness. In this meta analysis of 39 studies grouping a total of 1140 participants receiving mindfulness based therapy, it was found that meditation is effective for improving anxiety and mood symptoms. In the following randomized control trial, the researchers put the participants into an eight-week intervention practicing different mindfulness techniques. All of them showed significant reduction in an anxiety, but the mindfulness based stress reduction program showed the greatest reduction. Mindfulness based stress reduction is an eight-week evidence based program that offers mindfulness training to assist people with stress and anxiety, depression and pain. But by the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in the 1970s, MBSR uses a combination of mindfulness, meditation and exploration of patterns and behavior, thinking, feeling and action. If you want to learn meditation, I highly recommend you to check my dedicated video on meditation. But if you're already somewhat familiar with it and just want to learn some stress reduction techniques for meditation, here are some guided audios from the UC San Diego Center of Mindfulness. Combining these three techniques, you should significantly reduce your anxiety and nervousness for competitive games and overall have a more positive experience. If you have any questions or just want to chat about your experience with an anxiety, feel free to head over to my discord. The link is in the description. In order to not make this video very long, I will be doing a part 2 where I will cover several supplements and notropics that you can use to help you reduce an anxiety as well as some nutritional advice. Alright guys, that's going to be it for this one. I really hope that you found this information helpful. Let me know in the comments if there's something that has also helped you overcome an anxiety and I'll see you on the next one.