I wanted to share this somwhere without making a new thread so I ended up here. It might not give much help, but it's an interesting read. I presume stress and being nervous is not far from the same. Although the guy is talking about other things, it believe the base factor itself can be linked to situations in table tennis.
http://www.businessinsider.com/100-...oo-much-stress-results-in-poor-performance-34
The interesting part:
"Stress changes your perceptions – Research on stress shows that a little bit of stress (called arousal in psychology terms) can help you perform a task, because it heightens awareness. Too much stress, however, degrades performance. Two psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dodson first postulated this arousal/performance relationship, and hence it has been called the “Yerkes-Dodson law” for over a century.
Arousal helps up to a point – The law states that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases. Research on the law shows that the amount of stress/arousal that is optimal depends on how difficult the task is. Difficult tasks require less arousal to reach optimal performance, and will start to break down if the arousal level is too high. Simpler tasks require more arousal and don’t fall off as fast.
Tunnel vision — When arousal first goes up then there is an energizing effect, as the person is paying attention. But as the stress increases there are negative effects. Attention gets unfocused, people have trouble remembering, problem solving degrades and “tunnel vision” sets in. Tunnel vision is where you keep doing the same task over and over even though it isn’t working.
Glucocorticoids — More recent research has shown a similar curve when studying the presence of glucocorticoids. These are the hormones that are released when we experience stress, so the Yerkes-Dodson law appears to have direct physical evidence.
Maximum frustration — As I tried to use the web page to find a doctor I kept getting errors, and typical of someone under stress, I kept doing the same task over and over even though it wasn’t working (tunnel vision). At one point I was crying tears of frustration, cursing over the lack of usability of the web site, and upset that I could not just find the name and address of a clinic we could go to.
Patient care, not computer care – I finally turned away from the computer, got my daughter some Tylenol, gave her warm washcloths to hold against her ear, and got us both calmed down. Then I found a clinic at the website (where we went later that day, only to have them say she was fine. By the way, our insurance didn’t work and we had to pay cash after all — i.e., I didn’t need the web site). My daughter is better, and I didn’t even have to cancel the client meeting."
Now how can we use this and learn from it? Could be several things and I'm no mental expert. But if your game is going bad, you should try to be aware of your stress/arousal level while playing, and then find ways to calm it back down to a suiting level for good performance. Now finding out how to do this is probably the hard part, but should not be impossible. This is when Timeouts can be truly valuable if you know how to, but maybe can't manage it within a few seconds between points.
Maybe close your eyes, think about something calming, blank space, or thinking about the ball I don't know, can be very individual on what works. Try different things until you find out what works for you. But bare in mind, that the stress levels can be different from time to time, if you try one thing on one stress level, it might not work identically if it's a slightly different stress..?Or so I think.
Any input/opinions from others would be nice! It's a tricky matter lol.
Edit: Also
Mental training is super important. Personally, when i'm in the "zone", my game becomes more consistent. My basic strokes don't cost me unforced errors, which is super important for modern defenders. Mental strength is a real advantage, no doubt about it.
You could say, that when you are in the "zone" your mental concentration and arousal/stress level are perfectly balanced and no tunnel vision involved therefore resulting a clear mind giving you good reflexes/reactions when sending the ball back.
But controlling and staying in such a zone can be very difficult if you loose your pace for maybe just a couple points if you don't have a very strong mind. Because these things happends even to the best.
When I watched Xu Xin to day (at the Chinese open final) he kept putting a lot of flicks outside, and he was like "what" putting up his regular expression, sometimes smiling with that "what" expression, not understanding (or just not happy with what he knew he did wrong? which would be a big difference) what he did wrong and then did it wrong for at least a few more times. His perception of the ball was slightly off. and I don't think this was the plastic balls fault.
He might have been trapped by the "Tunnel vision" a few times there. and didn't get properly into his game. but what do I know. Highly speculative content here. :v
