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General Climbing Discussion

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Climbing and Anxiety 1-Aug-2005 At 1:18:11 PM BadBrad Of The Isles

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Im doing a graduate diploma in Psychology and that little bit of info came from an abnormal behaviour class.
Re the interventions they can be drug or psychological. Both work for certain cases some of the time but psychological interventions generally have longer lasting benefits and lower relapse rate.
Psychological interventions for panic etc normally involve inducing the state and then using cognitive restructuirng of the experience (high excitement and panic have exactly the same physiological signs but differnet mental interpretations), gradual desensitisation/ exposure to the event/ situation/ fear causing the panic, implementing coping exercises (breathing, relaxation,mantra) etc etc.
For climbing im thinking of the number of times certain partners and myself have sketched on not rediculously hard but but definitly pumpy routes. Seems to me slight panic/ overwhelm start to develop, poor thoughts occur (man im making this hard or whatever) then performance starts to erode (miss footholds, screw up sequences, overgripping) which causes increased lactate/ hyper ventilation and as a result lower performance.
Focus on breathing slower and deeper and attention to thought processes might be useful in situations like these?