Before Germany buried Brazil in their semi-final, Brazilian captain Thiago Silva was confident his team would hold up under pressure because they had top sports psychologist Regina Brandão helping them relax. Brandão has a degree in sports psychology, as well as a PhD in sports science, from Unicamp in São Paulo. The important thing, said Silva repeatedly, was to put the players at ease. "If we are not at ease, things won't happen the way we want them to." Even star player Neymar had expressed his confidence in Brandão and felt her methods would benefit the rest of us. "It is not only us in football who are surrounded by emotion every day and need psychologists. I think it could do every person good, to make one more relaxed."
Each player was apparently given a battery of psychological tests to evaluate their emotional reactions in different situations. They were presented with different stimuli, such as smiley faces or frowns, and their reactions were analysed and manipulated. The aim was to harmonise their responses, to put them "at ease on the pitch".
Brazil came out tranquil enough. Samba bands celebrated every glossy Brazilian pass, as the partisan crowd cheered them on in the Mineirão Stadium. But then strange holes began to appear in their game plan. Thomas Müller, left utterly unmarked at a corner, struck, followed by Miroslav Klose, then Toni Kroos – twice. And the faces of the Brazilian players, psychologically groomed though they were, went through the gamut of emotions from shock to fear, and from fear to horrified despair. Under the German attack, they blundered about in a haze of mildness and lost 7-1.
Marcus Trescothick, who left two England cricket tours because of stress. Photograph: Nick Potts
I have seen this spiral of terror many times on the faces of the sportsmen I have studied over the years, while researching and writing books on pressure. Fear is endemic in professional sport, because it is a test of nerve and courage. It is not simply a contest of physical skill. If it were, outcomes would be predictable: the most technically accomplished players, the ones who practised the most and honed their skills the most, would always win. But this is not the case. Some of our most naturally gifted sportsmen have crumpled under pressure, lost control and squandered their abilities. Anyone can play well when there is no pressure. But as the emotional temperature rises during a sporting contest in front of millions of spectators, those who are unable to withstand fear and panic are brutally exposed.
The England World Cup football squad had a slew of people helping with their psychological welfare, most prominently psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters, of whom manager Roy Hodgson said: "It is not just any psychologist. It is Dr Steve Peters, who is a very famous man in that area." Yet England came away with their worst performance since 1958. Previous attempts to offer psychological assistance to England players, for example from Graham Taylor's team shrink Dr John Gardner, were met with incredulity by some of the squad back in the 1990s. One anonymous player was quoted as saying: "I couldn't see much in it myself. Quite honestly I'd rather relax and have a sleep on the afternoon of the match than have someone trying to instil confidence in me." A classroom exercise he found particularly bizarre required Lee Sharpe, the England winger, to stand before the rest of the team, keeping the ball up while counting backwards in multiples of five.
A battery of sports psychological techniques aim to damp down the powerful emotions that sport unleashes. Calm breathing, use of mental imagery known as visuo-motor behaviour rehearsal (VMBR), and progressive muscle relaxation are employed to focus the mind and instil relaxed thoughts. Positive self-talk and mental warmups are among the more popular "coping strategies". Then there are the psychological questionnaires – rafts of them – to differentiate between introversion and extroversion, aggression and submission. These are meant to help coaches "get a handle" on the players in their charge.
England's cricketers have been folding at the crease recently. The abject surrender of wickets in Sydney earlier this year led to only the third 5-0 whitewash in 132 years of Ashes history. They even crashed out to Sri Lanka in the one-day internationals, and on the penultimate ball of the match.
Questions about psychological weakness had already surfaced. Several England cricketers had fallen prey to "stress-related" conditions during recent series that forced them to come home: Marcus Trescothick from the 2005-6 India tour and the 2006-7 Ashes tour of Australia, left-arm spinner and Jonathan Trott from England's recent Ashes debacle.
Wayne Rooney can't hide his despair after England bow out of the World Cup. Photograph: Laurentvu/Taamalah/Sipa/Rex
In common with most professional sports squads, England cricketers also have a team psychologist, Dr Mark Bawden, head of sports psychology at the English Institute of Sport. Bawden became an academic and specialist adviser after a nervous tremor – the yips – curtailed his own cricketing career. His company, Metaphorics Performance Consultants, uses the stock-in-trade methods of psychological profiling, mental rehearsal, visualisation and hypnosis, as well as a "colour-based tool to characterise people", and concepts such as "staying in the bubble" and TCUP (Think Clearly Under Pressure) to try to help England cricketers withstand the pressures of their jobs. Unfortunately for Trescothick and Trott, these psychological strategies did not help.
When I started writing sports psychology books in the 70s, most players wanted to "psyche up" by banging their heads on the locker-room door. Any talk of whale song, emotional profiling or relaxation techniques was met with bewilderment and extreme suspicion. But that old attitude has been largely overtaken by a panoply of so-called scientific techniques to reduce the "stress" of the whole occasion.
Calming sports psychology, designed to relax and soothe players before they go out on the pitch, is now a burgeoning business, part of the lucrative and unregulated "stress management" industry, with 15m websites and more than two million accredited practitioners in the UK alone offering calming advice and remedies to the rest of us. Just the sort of thing Neymar would recommend.
But all that "stress management" has mysteriously failed to manage our "stress", to judge from our £15bn annual sickness-absence bill. Last year a government study examined 58,700 fit notes issued to 25,000 patients between October 2011 and January 2013 and found that 35% were given for "mild to moderate mental health disorders" – "stress", depression and anxiety. The survey found that such disorders "are a growing cause of sickness absence".
This mushrooming therapeutic "stress" business was investigated in my book The Truth About Stress, which presented 440 pages of evidence showing that normal emotions such as "nerves" and performance anxiety are being pathologised by a powerful industry marketing sedating drugs, strategies and expertise. People are warned to watch out for "signs" and "symptoms", and made afraid of their normal reactions to pressure and problems. They therefore become convinced that they are experiencing the symptoms of mental illness when they are not, and go in search of treatments that cannot possibly cure them.
The emotion of defeat overcomes Brazil's David Luiz. Photograph: Xinhua News Agency/Rex
We in Britain are market leaders in "stress management" – the fashionable theory that the way to deal with unpleasant emotions is to try to avoid them altogether or to calm down by artificial means. The public are constantly warned that if they experience "symptoms" of worry or tension, their health is in danger. They may die of a heart attack or a stroke. This in turn causes widespread public anxiety and hypervigilance, as people look out for signs and symptoms of the dreaded "stress" in their bodies.
We may expect this emotional hypervigilance to be particularly disastrous for anyone working in fields such as the armed forces, the emergency services and professional sport, where psychological pressure is part of the job. In the case of spectator sport, this pressure is deliberately and publicly applied in order to see who can cope with it and who cannot. The results are then analysed in detail on the back pages of newspapers.
The pattern of pressure in sport is fairly predictable. Players are pitted against those with equivalent skills in order to produce knife-edge exchanges, and these increase in intensity as the match progresses. Time-limits ratchet up the tension. As the win/lose crisis comes closer and closer, competition stiffens and emotions run high. Fear of winning, fear of losing, fear of the unknown, fear of exposure and fear of failure all combine in the player's mind. He can feel his fight-or-flight mechanism changing his physiological responses, and his nerves stretching to breaking point. Depending upon his temperament and resilience, he will either master this level of emotion or capitulate and make mistakes. The latter is called "choking" or "losing your bottle", and every sport has its own folklore on the subject. Golfers call it "taking the gas"; tennis players call it "the elbow".
Arguably, there has never been a more efficient laboratory for psychological testing of the human mind than spectator sport. And those who step into sport's pressure cooker had better prepare themselves to be mentally implacable, and use the best psychological training they can find.
Rather than stress management, beleaguered sportsmen need traditional psychological training designed to increase their mental resilience. Called inurement or character training, it exposes the individual to fear and tension so that these can be mastered and understood. By exposure to challenges and extreme situations, the trainee has his emotions tempered. Such training has been common to all ages and cultures since the Romans and Spartans. Churchill's "lion-hearted nation" could not have endured the last war, or the Blitz, without inurement training. It comes naturally to children, who will often give themselves dares whether their anxious parents like it or not. Inurement by exposure lies at the heart of most of our leisure activities. By doing risky things, we are toughening ourselves up for a dangerous world. Conversely, by avoiding nerves and tension and by desperately trying to manage our levels of arousal, we increase our fear and fall prey to phobias.
Perhaps, for sports performers, banging their heads on the locker room door wasn't such a bad idea after all. The same could be said of Sir Alex Ferguson's hairdrying tirades for Manchester United. At least the players were more scared of him than any "stress" they would encounter on the pitch.