At sunrise, national table tennis champion Shalmali Mhatre sits in her living room in central Mumbai, taking in the orange light. “I’m absorbing the sun’s energy,” she says.

Mhatre is not looking for alternative energy to save the planet — she is basking in the rays to ease tension and strengthen her game.

Stress can be a killer —and more and more sportsmen and sportswomen are looking at ways of combating nerves before and after a game. Some try conjuring up visual images of success before a tournament, and some simply sleep.

Chess champion Vishwanathan Anand sleeps through the night before a big game, waking up just in time for breakfast. “I always feel incredibly sleepy when I am in a tournament,” he says.

World billiards maestro Geet Sethi battles stress by visualising triumph before a game. Athlete P.T. Usha used to do that too. “I imagined getting off to a good start, accelerating and then touching the tape and then… standing on the podium, photographers flashing away,” says the 1980 Olympics runner.

For sportspeople, stress busting is as important as the game itself. “Too many sports careers have been cut short when people have constantly looked back at the past — inviting negative thoughts of failures rather than success,” says B.P. Bam, sports psychologist and retired inspector general of police (Maharashtra) in Nashik, who has helped revive the derailed careers of many top sportsmen.

Stress often accompanies the fear of defeat. When such thoughts cross her mind, Mhatre says she simply shifts her focus to the ball. After watching the sun rise she stares at a candle flame. So powerful is this concentration building exercise that “the table tennis ball with a 40 mm circumference appears like a football to my eye during the game,” says Mhatre, who began training in mind techniques at 16 a decade ago.

Sleeplessness is often a symptom of stress. On the night before hitting bull’s eye at the Beijing games, shooter Abhinav Bindra found that he couldn’t sleep. “I just tossed and turned. I didn’t even try to sleep — thinking I would sleep after the game,” he says. “At the end of the day, you just have to face your stressful situation with courage. There is no magic pill to counter stress,” he adds.

At the Munich air international shooting competition in 2006, Asian shooting champ Suma Shirur says her defeat came from “badly handled stress that led me to be totally out of sync.”

Shirur turned to yoga. “It helped me connect with myself and concentrate on the present,” says Shirur, who found strength in pranayam, a breathing exercise, when she took part in the Asian shooting championship in 2004.

Bam, who authored Winning Habits — Techniques for Excellence in Sports, teaches nyasa, a yogic practice which involves an awareness of the breath and body. In fact, deep breathing is a favourite of many a champion. Before a game, Anand says he likes to close his eyes, listen to some music or inhale deeply.

Sethi says he finds there is more stress in slower sports such as golf, shooting and billiards. “In fast and high contact games such as football, there is no time to think. You just have to kick the ball that’s coming at you.”

To avoid letting the nerves run amok before a tournament, Sethi likes to watch a film, visit a shopping mall, move about the sporting arena or, better still, watch another sporting event. Shooter Anjali Bhagwat did that too — she saw a film and got her thrills from watching master swimmer Michael Phelps and record-holding Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt weave their magic in Beijing. Distractive thoughts can be about anything, she says — “Shah Rukh Khan, your husband, a new dress.”

Sethi chooses to stay away from distractions such as parties or late nights. Not easy, considering “there’s always a casino near a tournament site and people from my game are always near a bar or club,” he laughs.

Vijayendra Singh, athletics coach, Sports Authority of India, says he advises athletes to stay away from rivals just before a competition. “Some claim to have clocked a better time than they actually did, leaving competitors in a mess,” he says.

Ultimately, each player has to be dealt with differently, says Mir Ranjan Negi, who coached the women’s hockey team in Chak De India. “If you don’t shout at a player from Punjab he won’t perform. But do the same thing to a Maharashtra player and he’ll forget his game,” he laughs, recalling the pressure put on the national hockey team before the 1982 Asiad, in which he was accused of throwing the match to Pakistan.

But at the end of the day, the game cannot be won by mind games alone. “The best way to handle stress is to be well prepared. Stress begins with being unprepared,” says Sethi.

Anand agrees. “When I was young I could just jump off the bed and play the game. But as you get older and maybe wiser, you start preparing much more.” But preparation too is not a perfect foil for performance jitters. “It’s like preparing for an exam and fearing you’ll be asked questions on a chapter you chose not to study,” adds Anand.

Earlier, stress busting was learnt on the job, says Sethi. To cool off in between his first world title match against Michael Ferreira in 1985 in Delhi, he recalls taking a walk with a friend and talking about “everything but the game.” But the wrong kind of distractions ends up pumping up stress levels. Asian billiards champion Devendra Joshi says it was his over riding eagerness that caused him to goof up at the Asian Billiards Championship, 2006, in Tehran.

As Bam has often seen, disaster happens when the focus shifts from the task to results. Shirur tells her own family never to ask about her scores. “If they’re good, I’ll tell you,” she tells them.

But a little stress, Anand argues, can be a good thing. “Just five minutes before a game you feel like you’ve swallowed fire. But that is good. If you have this feeling that everything is fine, things go terribly wrong.”

But the trick, they all agree, is to not let the fire engulf you. Or let the embers burn.