Sports trader extraordinaire Matt Finnigan once said that emotions will play a big part in our success – and whether in sports betting or in life, how we condition those emotions will ultimately determine whether we’ll be successful.
Not only understanding our own emotions, but also understanding the basic principles of how human emotions are created, are important if we’re to enjoy long-term sports betting success. Only once we understand how emotions are created can we delve deeper into developing our own emotional awareness, purposefully work on creating emotions that are enhancing to our sports betting performance, and finally, also learn how to deal with performance-limiting emotions.
The Effect On Betting Results
To those sceptic about the rule of emotions in performance in sports betting, we would suggest thinking back on a time in your life when you were required to deliver a performance. This can include situations such as an important sports game, a job interview, or even an important test or exam.
Most people will likely be able to recall times when negativity, self-doubt, fatigue or even anxiety were experienced, and also other times when feelings were of a more upbeat nature, there was focus, and as a result, performance too was up to par. No matter how “in control” we may think we are of our emotions, at the end of the day, we’re all still only human. And as such, living beings with emotions necessitating management and decisive control.
Understanding The “How”
Medical and mental health professionals tell us that emotions are affects or consequences of foregoing actions, experiences, learnt attitude, etc. Essentially, they connect our minds with our bodies.
For every emotional reaction or state, there exists a definite blueprint – meaning a set of mental and physiological conditions typically associated with that particular emotion state. For example, this is what a blueprint for a confident state of emotions or confident demeanor might look like:
- I can do this. I feel confident and “up to it”.
- My muscles are relaxed and I’m holding my head up high. My breathing is regular – slow and deep, even.
Now, by contrast, consider the typical blueprint for anxiety:
- I’m either quite sure I can’t do this, or that I may find myself failing while trying my best. Mentally, I already feel drained at the mere thought of my anticipated failure.
- I feel tense, causing my muscles to feel taught and tense also. I’m probably pacing the room while taking short, shallow breaths.
But if emotions can have such a negative effect on us and certainly on performance – in our case sports betting performance – we may be tempted to wonder why we were “issued” with them in the first place. The answer to this question is simple, functional, logical, and helpful all at once: emotions are meant to mobilise us to action.
Fear, for example, will help preserve our physical safety by mobilising us to retreat, while a challenge will help mobilise us in the opposite direction, which would be to engage and pursue a positive outcome. Understanding the differences between these to mobilising responses is already a great start to understanding how every emotion experienced affects our state of being, and ultimately, which of our responses are mobilised to perform.
Why Dealing It Is Important
The reason it’s so very important to identify our emotions and also deal with them is because our state of emotion determines our response and behaviour. For example:
- Frustration and over-confidence will typically yield one or more of the following behaviours: over-betting, trying to force things by pushing to make things happen.
- Fear, nervousness, and anxiety typically lead to: not betting even when it’s as sure-fire a winning bet as sure-fire tends to get, anticipating a loss when a positive result would have been a likely outcome, etc.
We can clearly see from the above how our emotions affect our performance – also when betting on sports. And it is for this exact reason that we need to learn how to identify as well as manage our emotions when pursuing success in NZ online betting.