‘I used hypnotherapy to calm myself, and my performances went through the roof for England’

Former England cricket Jimmy Anderson has opened up about the pressures he faced while he was playing at the top level and how he had found recourse in hypnotherapy to deal with his anger issues during games.
In the interview with A Load of BS on Sport, now-retired Anderson spoke about experiencing red m (a fit of extreme anger that temporarily clouds a person’s judgement) during games. But he added that once he started using hypnotherapy, he started putting in his best performances on the field.
“When I was probably 29 or 30, I worked with this sports psycholog who suggested to me about using hypnotherapy (using hypnosis to try to treat conditions or change habits). So I went through a period of probably two or three years of using hypnotherapy to sort of mainlyfeel calmer and make sure I almost noticed the red m coming before it arrived and was able to do something about it. I think that helped me massively. My performances around that time went through the roof and that was probably the best I’ve played during my career.”
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Asked what hypnotherapy consed of, Anderson joked: “It wasn’t like he was waving a pocket watch in front of my face.”
Then Anderson detailed his elaborate hypnotherapy process: “Before each game the night before, I’d visualize the next day. So I would try and go through quite a lot of scenarios in my head; like picturing who I’d bowl against. I’d picture getting hit for fours, taking wickets. Not just positive stuff but negative as well. This was so that once I got into the game, I’d almost gone through a lot, I’d almost been there already, so I wasn’t surprised anything. So along with that he’d give me a CD — this is how long ago it was that there used to be CDs — to len to at night before I just sort of drift off to sleep like lening to his voice just giving positive reinforcement and key points that I want to remember throughout the day.
“We’d actually have a scoring system at the end of each day’s play and seven was where I wanted to be. Anything above a seven is over the line, it’s the swearing and shouting of the teammates and swinging punches at umpires. Stuff like that. And then if I was below a seven, my performance usually wasn’t as good as it should be. If I was too calm, too placid, then I was generally nowhere near good enough. So I needed to be really as close as seven as possible,” Anderson said.