Facing and Overcoming Performance Anxiety
Performance anxiety and stress presents itself in many different forms.
When you are facing the opening minutes before a game, or stepping your toe up to the starting line before a race, how do you feel? Do you get the butterflies in your stomach or does your heart start pounding? There are plenty of professional athletes that will get the pre-game jitters, it is a normal feeling. I still to this day will get butterflies and the shakes before I step up to a race or into any competition.
We think that anxiety and stress is a bad thing. However, the right amount of performance anxiety can allow athletes to be motivated, alert, and even have a more competitive drive. On the other hand, just over that right amount of anxiety and stress, can cause you to have continuous stress which will hinder your performance. When there is too much anxiety and stress prior to a competition, it can cause you to become stiff with fear of failure, embarrassment, injury, or even fear of success driving the anxiety.
Our Brain's Natural Response
Let’s dive a bit deeper to understand where these anxieties and stressors are coming from. Our brain has a natural response that associates our worries and anxieties as dangerous. This means our brain is wired to decipher our fears and believe they are real threats. The brain naturally wants to take us out of threat, so when the brain is triggered with the anxiety and fear of performance, the brain actually creates more anxiety and stress to warn us to stay away from what we are fearing. This natural response results in making the athlete’s performance anxiety worse, but we can retrain the brain to overcome these moments of stress and anxiety before a performance.
As we begin to retrain the brain, there are a couple approaches that have been used throughout the years, one being the Paradoxical method. In this method the athlete will find ways to increase the anxiety through mock competitions and facing their performance fears head on. As the athlete continues to face their fears, their anxiety towards those fears will decrease.
Pin Point Our Fears
How exactly do you know to pin point what fears to face? A method introduced in 1952 by Mary Cover Jones called Desensitization and later built upon by Joseph Wolpe to Systematic Desensitization can be used to uncover the fears associated with performance anxiety.
Facing and Overcoming Our Fears
In the first step, you will make a list of what is causing your fears or performance anxiety. Next, you will be introduced to coping techniques such as, deep breathing, visualization, meditation, etc in order to relax around your list of fears related to performance. Now that you have found your fears and targeted your coping techniques, you will be faced with and overcome your fears in performance anxiety. Starting with the lowest item on your list of fears and building through the list until you have faced and conquered all the fears on your list.
Cheyenne Autry, MS, ATC, CPT
Cheyenne Autry Coaching, LLC