This is a fairly common situation for even the most experienced of climbers, as the pressure mounts on an ascent the ability to maintain that good and efficient footwork and technique is lost. There are a few climbers who can stay cool, calm and collected in the most difficult of situation, and it takes a lot to rattle there cages, however most mere mortals are blessed with healthy dose of self preservation. To a certain extent you need to train yourself to switch off or ignore this natural reaction to stressful situations or at the very lest learn how to use it to help rather than hinder your performance.
Whilst the mechanism for the stress may be different, in that being pumped may lead you to think that you are close to falling off might be the ‘stressor’, or simply being run out a long way from gear may have a similarly stressful effect. Whatever the ‘stressor’ the effects are a stimulation of what psychologist refer to as the Hypothalamus Pituitary Adrenal (HPA) axis. Often this is associated with a certain amount of worry or cognitive anxiety, and the results of the HPA axis stimulation is physiological arousal, that we often experience as somatic symptoms. These symptoms are numerous and include increase heart rate, butterflies in your stomach, sweaty palms or jittery feeling. In fact a whole raft of physiological changes that we evolved for a fight or flight response.
Modern sport psychology has look at how this can have effects on performance, and quite often this has included looking at the issue by using a climbing task as the stressor. There are two suggestion as to how that stress effects us the first is the conscious processing hypothesis, that basically says that the stress causes addition thinking load on a brain that only has a limit capacity for thought. When you reach a certain capacity you no longer make the movements automatically, instead you have to consciously think through every move, and in essence revert back to being a beginner. It is often referred to as paralyses by analysis.
A second theory is that of processing efficiency, here the hypothesis is that the additional cognitive load makes you process movement less efficiently. To compensate for the loss of movement efficiency you increase the effort you put into the task, which in climbing will lead to a vicious cycle where if you were pumped you worry and grip harder and become more pumped.
So what can you do about reducing the effects of stress? Well there are several things you can do but everyone is different, so what works for one person, simply won’t be effective for another. The first thing is that higher levels of confidence can buffer against the effects of stress. The second thing we can do is find a way to relax, as relaxing helps counter certain somatic effects of the HPA response to stress. A third strategy is using self-talk to stop and counteract the worry and cognitive anxiety.
In terms of footwork and technique sometime a mantra can help deflect the thoughts away from the stress, and towards good technique. So if you find yourself losing you footwork technique, start says “Every foot hold counts”, “Drive with my feet”, “My feet are solid”, “I am solid”. These mantras will help fortify you technique and remove the focus from the stressor!