Sports Performance Anxiety Articles

Quick Summary:

• Nervousness before games is normal and can even boost performance, but it becomes harmful when it leads to anxiety or timid play
• “Playing nervous” happens when fear of mistakes, worry about others, or outcome-focused thinking changes your style of play.
• Accepting nervousness is the first step—fighting the feeling creates more anxiety and tighter, more fearful performances.
• Staying present is key to overcoming nervousness; focus on breathing, controllable objectives, visual cues, or simple self-talk.
• You can feel nervous and still play aggressive, confident, and free by accepting the feeling and redirecting your attention to the moment.

Quick Summary:

• Anxiety often comes from fear, doubt, and trying to control results, so preparation helps reduce it.
• Strong physical practice builds trust in your skills and lowers the need to stress about outcomes.
• Mental prep during the week—visualization and mindfulness—builds confidence and keeps you present.
• A pregame routine the night before and morning of competition helps you feel calm and ready.
• Having an in-game strategy (like the ABCs: Accept, Breathe, Change your thinking) allows you to manage anxiety when it appears.

It’s natural for us to spend a lot of time talking about the anxious thoughts you have leading into games. But what about the anxious

Quick Summary:

• Stressing about playing time pulls your attention away from the present moment, causing you to play tense, timid, and scared instead of freely and confidently.
• When athletes focus on not making mistakes or not getting pulled, they often underperform and create the very outcome they fear.
• Playing time stress creates a cycle of fear → holding back → poor performance → less trust and fewer minutes.
• The most effective shift is focusing fully on the minutes you do get, rather than worrying about future playing time.
• Athletes earn more playing time by controlling effort, attitude, presence, and intensity—being proud of how they played regardless of minutes.

Quick Summary:

• Sports performance anxiety is one of the most common mental challenges athletes face and is fueled by future-focused worry about mistakes, outcomes, and others’ opinions.
• In-the-moment techniques like acceptance, breathing, self-talk, and controllable goal setting help reduce anxiety by bringing attention back to the present.
• Acceptance is the foundation—fighting anxiety makes it worse, while accepting it allows you to calm your mind and perform despite feeling anxious.
• Long-term strategies like mindfulness meditation and visualization train the brain to be present and build confidence over time, reducing anxiety triggers.
• Combining in-the-moment tools during competition with long-term mental training leads to lower anxiety, greater confidence, and better performance.

Quick Summary:

• Feeling nervous is a normal physical and emotional response before games, especially in high-pressure situations like trials or big competitions.
• Playing nervous happens when those nervous feelings control your actions, causing you to play scared, hesitant, or overly safe.
• Athletes often default to playing nervous because the nervous system’s instinct is to stay safe and avoid risk—but this actually leads to more mistakes and less confidence.
• You can separate feeling nervous from playing nervous by accepting the nerves instead of fighting them and then shifting focus to controllable actions.
• You don’t need to feel confident to play confident—acting with confidence through controllable behaviors often builds confidence and reduces nerves over time.

Should you quit your sport if it’s causing you anxiety? This is a question I receive a lot. I work with many athletes who are

Quick Summary:

• Sports anxiety is driven by fear—especially fear of failure—and the mind’s need to control the outcome of performance.
• Anxiety shows up most in games (but can also be present in practice) because athletes become outcome-focused, worrying about stats, mistakes, playing time, and others’ opinions.
• Unlike normal nerves, which are physical and often helpful, sports anxiety is mental and rooted in overthinking, future worry, and outcome-oriented thinking.
• Common contributors to sports anxiety include pressure and expectations, perfectionism, and low confidence—especially a lack of trust in executing skills during games.
• At its core, sports anxiety comes from outcome-oriented thinking; the most powerful solution is learning to become more process-focused and present so you can play freely instead of tight and fearful.

Do you get really nervous at the beginning of a season? Do you feel more expectations and notice that you typically don’t perform as well

Do you overthink a lot before and during games? Before games, does your mind race, wondering about everything that’s going to happen? And then during