Encouraging Competition

I believe competition is a good thing. I feel like, in the past, I have had most success in teaching life lessons with swimmers that compete and correlate their training with their competitions. It was one of those things that I was told as a young coach by my father. "Swimming is Objective, it is a time on the watch. When you make the connection between working hard and improvement when they are young they look forward to training. It is something that they can actually see, as the time on the watch gets faster."

A few weekends ago I watched the documentary, "Happy." It is a look into the study of happiness. Films are bias, so I always take these things and analyze with my own thoughts. One thing that I took from the film though was a Ph. D from Baylor who talked about the release of Dopamine. I remember this from my psychology class a little bit. The more happy someone is, the more dopamine is released in the brain. With time, the release of dopamine slows down, and can lead to diseases like Parkinson's. So they were encouraging doing activities to help keep dopamine releasing quicker. The doctor mentioned that aerobic exercise helped the release of dopamine, but so does competition. He concluded by saying that the best way to keep dopamine being released quickly is obviously physical sports as they have aerobic exercise and competition.

Competition though has led to many with low self-esteem and unhappiness. If competition in itself does help release dopamine, and thus make people more happy. What is the cause of the inverse result? My belief, is that it is the emphasis of winning and losing by the culture. An over emphasis over comparison at the young ages. Competition in itself has a stress of winning and losing, but we have magnified it by our attention to awards, recognition, and comparison to others.

Is there fun in competition? I believe so. Winning and Losing is a single result, not the competing itself. How many times have you played a board game and lost? Or played a card game and lost? Does this weigh on you and taken critically by your friends and parents? Normally not, so you just play again and enjoy yourself. No awards, no ranking, no comparison; just a fleeting sense of loss or victory.

What can emphasis on the result lead to? A slippery slope sometimes. I was also very much into poker when I was young, and I learned about poker. It helped, that right as I was interested poker it had become more main stream, and there was a lot of knowledge being put out on television shows. There is a phrase in poker referred to as being "On Tilt." This is when a poker player takes a loss so personally that they start doing dumb plays that they normally would not have done, and it becomes a slippery slope that can last for days, weeks, months, or years. That one bad hand stays on the mind, and then the next bad play is caused by the previous bad play, and then the next bad play is caused by the two last bad plays are still on the mind. This becomes the overwhelming increase of negativity that burdens you. This isn't just a poker symptom, but a symptom that can overtake anyone who competes.

Competition is a good thing neurologically as it helps the release of dopamine. This release of dopamine can lead to happiness, that I stress to my athletes and many times on this blog. Don't shelter your young swimmers from competition, but see it as an opportunity to compete and increase their happiness in a physical activity. Protect them from our culture that wants to put these heavy burdens on young athletes, and allow them to grow and enjoy themselves. As they grow older they will make higher goals that will be used to push them higher, and the competitions as just another opportunity to try to achieve those goals.