Sports Performance Anxiety
By Breanna Perron
Performance anxiety is one of the most commonly reported symptoms when it comes to social fears. Today I will be discussing sports performance anxiety which is described as a decrease in athletic performance due to high levels of perceived stress. This stress can center from having an audience or having extremely high expectations of yourself. In the NCAA, there are almost half a million athletes that compete with some sort of performance anxiety.
My coach has always told me, “you need to have a 4.0 GPA in the classroom, but a 0.0 GPA in the ring”. I have always been the athlete who analyzes everything. What could I have done better? What could I fix? In practice, this can be a good thing because I am working on new techniques, but in a meet, it is detrimental to my success. Dr. Jim Taylor wrote “you can’t think your way through a competitive performance”. Athletes train every day for their competitions, most starting at a very young age. This means that the fundamentals are ingrained in their muscle memory. I could do hammer turns in my sleep, yet when it comes to a competition, like so many athletes, I fail to trust that muscle memory and instead try to “think my way through it”. For example, the 2018 giant slalom gold medalist, Mikaela Shiffrin, worked day and night with sport’s psychologist Lauren Loberg to calm her mind and compete at her best. Loberg stated “just like training, you have to be able to train your mind as well as your body”. If athletes could learn to shut off their minds and trust their talent, they would most likely see an increase in performance.
Feelings can make or break an athlete when it comes to performance anxiety. Having a fear of failure or high expectations are two things that greatly affect athletes. These two go hand-in-hand because with high expectations comes greater risk for failure. Every athlete, and people in general, have some goals in life (hopefully). My personal goal is making it to Nationals. The problem is when that becomes an expectation, the pressure to succeed makes it nearly impossible to compete at your highest level. It can be crippling. Furthermore, when expectations are that high, the fear of failure is exemplified. Who could possibly perform at their highest level if they step on the track/field/court thinking about how badly they could fail?
These feelings play a major role in the way we talk to ourselves (self-talk). Negative self-talk, in my opinion, has one of the strongest impacts on performance. If you were walking onto the court and your coach was on the bench yelling “you aren’t good enough”, “you are going to fail”, “that shot sucked”, etc. that would feel pretty awful. Why then, do we think it is okay to talk to ourselves like that? What is the difference?
Being aware of how your thoughts, feelings, and negative self-talk affect you during a competition is a great start to reducing sports performance anxiety. Why put in all the hours and hard work of training to let your mind get in the way of your accomplishments? Some real time things that you can do to reduce sports performance anxiety include the following:
1) Create a routine, do the same things when practicing that you do when competing.
2) Recognize your emotions and practice emphasizing the positive emotions
3) Use mental imagery to see and feel yourself performing successfully. Using imagery throughout the week to prepare for competition allows you to quickly imagine yourself in a position of success during competition.
4) Breathe. This is an underutilized tool. Not only can it lower your blood flow, adrenaline, and lessen fatigue and pain, it also is a physiological change that you can consciously regulate in order to calm yourself down. Slowing down your breathing and paying attention to it (being mindful), can help you focus and block out distractions, even your own thoughts.
5) Last but not least, trust. Trust that your coach has done all he/she can to prepare you for competition. Trust that you have put in the work to succeed.
Working to improve at some, if not all, of these tools can help to greatly reduce your levels of sports performance anxiety. Sports psychologists have chosen to fight for athletes who struggle with this. They do a wonderful job helping athletes cope with sports performance anxiety and learn some of these tools so they can perform at their best.
References
American Psychological Association. (2012). https://www.apa.org/topics/sport-psychologists
Taylor, J. https://www.drjimtaylor.com/4.0/consulting/prime-performance-system/
Taylor, J. (2016, May 23). 5 Mental Tools for Athletic Success. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201605/5-mental-tools-athletic-success
Todd, C. L, (2018, February 23). 6 Tips for Managing Your Anxiety from Olympic Sports Psychologists. https://www.self.com/story/6-tips-for-managing-your-anxiety-from-olympic-sports-psychologists