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With over 25% of Davidson students playing on a varsity athletic team, the soundscape of a sports practice is widely familiar to many students. Life at Davidson is hard enough, but combined with the extreme pressure of competing at a division 1 level, and the constant noise at practice, simply living our lives becomes deafening. I play lacrosse, and will discuss both the sounds heard, and unheard, at practice along with the noise athletes create in our own heads while playing. I explore how the mind tries to tune out background noise to focus, and how this intensifies the constant noise in our minds. As athletes, we are strive for a happy balance between myopic focus and environmental awareness, and it is quite possible that the key to this balance comes from sound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Human beings long for silence. We drive ourselves mad longing for a sense of peace in a world filled with unwanted noise, searching for quiet that can calm our frantic minds. On the rare occasions that we are able escape the cacophony of car horns, pedestrian chatter, bird song, and text-tones, odds are that silence still evades us. Environments that are considered quiet, without the \u201ckeynote sounds\u201d of modern society, are actually filled with noise: the hum of the air conditioner, the sound of our own breath, and the soft whirl of wind hitting the window are sounds that are almost inescapable. Further, in places that lack obvious noise there is an even more intrusive \u201cmental chatter\u201d that inundates the stillness of our minds, a time when our own thoughts become so glaringly loud that silence seems unattainable. As a college athlete, I know all about the annoyance and frustration that an overabundance of noise can bring to my life. One of the biggest distractions I face during a game or practice is unwelcome noise, whether that be from the cheers from the crowd, the other team\u2019s insults, or the constant shouts of negative thoughts from my own head. As athletes we are taught at a young age to block all of these things out, to create a self-made inner silence in a world of chaos and disturbance. This past year, however, I have learned that this coveted silence is not everything, and that it can be detrimental not only to my performance as an athlete but my life in general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Typically, during lacrosse practice I hear little more than the obvious sounds around me – my teammates talking through plays, my coach giving instructions, and the occasional ball hitting the pipe. After being sidelined with an ACL injury though, unable to participate in practice, I have had a lot of time to sit and listen. There was not much else to do, so I threw all of my energy into hearing as many sounds as possible at practice. At first, I was skeptical as to how many sounds I would actually hear, but I found that there are a myriad of sounds that I had been blocking out all these months at practice. To start, there was the wind. It rustled through leaves, softly brushed the back of my neck, and flicked through pages of our playbook quietly. Then, there was the intermittent sound of track boys running by. They run in packs of four or five and their feet clapped the track harshly as they shuffled past me, slowly coming in and out of earshot as they proceed on their lap. I could hear their broken breath, and as they heaved in, trying to get their heart rate down, their breath hit the back of their throats jaggedly. I also focused on the sounds coming from my teammates. There was, of course, lots of talking and shouting from down the field. Words I couldn\u2019t make out all the time, but almost always I could hear the urgency behind the words. Feet stomped the turf angrily, scuffing up plastic bits as their toes dragged. When the ball hit the pocket of their sticks, there was a sharp pat. The balls collided with the tough strings and the strings gave in to the hit. There were painful grunts as my teammates hit each other, and as one player\u2019s stick slapped the waist of another there was a dull thud that reverberated into the air. These once-ignored noises have without a doubt been occurring all year, but this was the first time I had truly taken notice of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One theory behind my inability to hear all of this background noise during practice is that of inattentional deafness. This theory states that when focusing on an intense visual or mental task, we unintentionally become deaf to the extraneous sounds around us. Inattentional deafness could explain, for example, why your friend doesn\u2019t respond to you while he is texting on his phone \u2013 he is not ignoring you, but rather simply cannot hear you. As athletes, inattentional deafness seems to be the key to blocking out distraction. Interestingly, it creates a positive feedback loop where the act of fully focusing on the lacrosse game causes us to filter out any noise that could potentially pull our focus away in the future. Many athletes refer to this phenomenon as getting \u201cin the zone\u201d, where one\u2019s focus is so absolutely acute the mind cannot process anything going on around it. When I was younger, I believed that blocking out sound around me would create a more conducive environment for athletic success. In the past few years, however, I have realized that this self-made deafness is not as useful as I once believed. As Science Daily explained, inattentional deafness \u201chas more serious implications in situations such as the operating theatre where a surgeon concentrating on their work might not hear the equipment beeping\u201d (“Why Focusing on a Visual Task”). Clearly, the stakes in a lacrosse game are a lot lower than those in an operating room, but the point remains the same. While I am focusing on a play, my natural ability to block out sound around me could lead me to, for example, ignore my coach giving me vital instruction from the sideline, or my teammate telling me where to run. This deafness, while temporarily helpful, can actually be very detrimental to our success as athletes by hindering our ability to communicate with those around us. In the case of lacrosse, it is important to actively listen to and process more sound on the field than most players currently do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another possible reason as to why I\nhad never heard all of this background noise during practice before is the\noverwhelming \u2018mental noise\u2019 or \u2018mental chatter\u2019 that I hear every day. When I\nrefer to \u2018mental chatter\u2019, I am talking about to the constant stream of thought\nthat can pull an athlete\u2019s attention away from their sport. It is an inner\ndialogue that feeds doubt, negativity, and insecurity to the brain, playing\nwith one\u2019s focus. Most people have experienced deafening thoughts of anxiety\ntelling them they aren\u2019t good enough. \nThese thoughts can drown out anything going. As an athlete, this \u2018mental chatter\u2019 is\namplified to the maximum. There is a certain preoccupation involved in the way\nan athlete approaches their negative performance \u2013 we obsess over every\nmistake, breaking each moment down into seconds, deciding what we did wrong and\nhow we could have done better. This stream of negativity, while not actually physical\nsound, is far louder than the people talking around us, the whistle of the\nreferee, the crowd cheering off the field, and especially the small sounds like\nthe wind in the leaves. This sound, the sound of self-doubt, is perhaps the\nbiggest obstacle an athlete has to overcome in their path to success. To\neffectively block out mental noise is challenging at best, especially when one\nis trying to continue to process physical noise around them. It is entirely\npossible that I missed all those background sounds simply because I was too\nfocused on my own thoughts, a problem that my coach actually worked to address\nthis year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This past year, my coach placed a\nlot of emphasis on something called EQ, which stands for \u2018emotional\nintelligence\u2019. Back in August, she had Dr. Izzy Justice, who specializes in\nemotional intelligence, come and talk to the team about what it means to be\nsmart with our emotions. According to Dr. Justice, out of two teams who are\nevenly matched physically, the team with the higher EQ would come out on top.\nThus, my coach launched a mission to make us the emotionally smarter team on\nthe field. A key part of this is in our routine before practice, where we work\nto silence our \u2018mental chatter\u2019 while halting our natural inattentional\ndeafness. We do this by selecting something we call our \u201cmacrofocus\u201d, or a\nkeynote sound that we hear as we step onto the field. Sometimes, it\u2019s the chirp\nof a bird, a distant siren, or echo of a voice in the stadium. We take deep\nbreaths and focus on that sound, using it to situate ourselves in the context\nof lacrosse practice. These sounds we hear only at the field are meant to draw\nourselves away from the classroom, the library, or Commons. As we focus on the\nchirping birds and the pace of our breath, the world outside the field melts\naway, our mental noise bows in quiet reverence, and we prepare to give\none-hundred percent of minds to practice. Its effectiveness is remarkable, the\ndeep breathing is able to bring silence to our minds while we continue to\nprocess the little sounds going on around us. The introduction of this\ntradition was at first met with laughter, but as the weeks progressed and we\nfound ourselves more prepared for practice each day, it\u2019s a custom that we\nfinally embraced and look forward to each day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ultimately, the question of how\nathletes should handle noise is a personal one and should be up to the athletes\nthemselves. Unwanted noise is both annoying and incredibly distracting in most\nareas of life, but especially in sports. After all, the opposing team doesn\u2019t \u201cboo\u201d\nbefore a foul shot for no reason \u2013 the sound they make is meant to distract the\nshooter enough to miss the shot. Too much noise in competition can win or lose\ngames — the team with sharper focus no doubt has the upper hand. Additionally,\ntoo much mental noise in competition can wreck a team entirely, the athlete\nwith the stronger mind will almost always come out on top. That creates an\ninteresting challenge for athletes and coaches alike, where no longer is just\nthe physical body being tested but also the mind. Too often athletes revert to\nusing inattentional deafness to block out any distractions, but this has its\nconsequences. The unselective way in which inattentional deafness ignores sound\nallows for the possibility to miss vital auditory information on the field.\nBlocking out sound also gives the athlete little to hear except for the voice\nin his own head, the voice that is telling him he won\u2019t succeed. Thus, the way\nEQ doctors approach sound seems to be the most effective way for athletes to\nhandle the pressure of testing themselves every day. Honing focus in on the\nsounds of practice combined with deep breathing to lessen mental noise\nsuccessfully prepares athletes for competition. Noise does not have to be a\nburden on the field, if used correctly, it can be the distinguishing factor\nbetween winning and losing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Works Cited<\/p>\n\n\n\n
University College London. “Why focusing\non a visual task will make us deaf to our surroundings: Concentrating attention on a\nvisual task can render you momentarily ‘deaf’ to sounds at normal levels.”\nScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 December 2015. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<www.sciencedaily.com\/releases\/2015\/12\/151208184335.htm>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n