Lessons from cricket about the mind’s experience of time Premium

Just like Test cricketers are focused on winning a series weeks in the future, our day-to-day functioning is governed by the larger projects that we are aiming for – be that career goals or family bliss. To reach these overarching goals, we must experience short periods of extreme pressure and anxiety. It is time, combined with an uncertain outcome, that leads us to experience this anxiety.

Bowlers playing for England and Australia in the current Ashes cricket series are collectively meant to deliver at least 540 balls each day (that’s 90 overs of six balls each – more if they bowl any no-balls or wides). If one side’s bowlers cannot capture all ten wickets in one day, they must toil on into the next.

Each of the five Test matches in the men’s series, and one in the women’s, last for a maximum of five days. To win, bowlers usually need to get the other side all-out twice. Australia’s men’s team won their first Ashes Test with only minutes to go in the final session of the fifth day.

In many ways, this biennial series feels a battle against time itself. Unlike most other sports such as football, whose matches are over in a short, set period of time, Test cricket represents abstract, long-term, targeted behaviour – something that people actually do on a daily basis. In this sense, the players in this Ashes series can teach us something about how the mind responds to time – and how this is linked to reward, threat and anxiety.

Just like these Test cricketers are focused on winning a series weeks in the future, our day-to-day functioning is governed by the larger projects that we are aiming for – be that career goals or family bliss. To reach these overarching goals, we must experience short periods of extreme pressure and anxiety. It is time, combined with an uncertain outcome, that leads us to experience this anxiety.

Think, for example, of an upcoming exam period which you don’t know whether you’ll excel at. Or when your future goal of love hinges on what will happen tomorrow when you ask out your crush. How we deal with such anxiety, which comes about partly because of the short timeframe of these key moments, can be of huge importance to our quality of life.

Research in psychology has shown that anxiety for humans comes in the form of negative, uncontrollable thoughts – a racing heartbeat, heavy shallow breathing, uneasiness and a sense of panic.

This is followed by our attention being snatched from us to focus on a real or imagined threat. In cognitive behavioural therapy, this is captured in the alarm-beliefs-coping model of anxiety (ABC).