Have you ever dealt with anxiety before or during games? To the point where your hands were shaking, you had that intense feeling of nervousness in your stomach, and your mind was racing all over the place and this caused you to underperform.
As a former college athlete myself, I struggled with a lot of performance anxiety. It was the anxiety I felt in sports that led me to work with a mental performance coach when I was in college.
As I did so, I began to understand where this anxiety came from. And most importantly, I learned how to work through my anxiety and play with this anxiety that I had.
In this article, I’m going to go over the main causes of sports anxiety and why athletes struggle with it.
The Core Driver of Sports Anxiety: Fear and the Need to Control
When we look at what causes anxiety in sports, the first thing that comes to mind is fear.
Anxiety is a direct result of fear.
Now, as athletes, this fear will come in the form of fear of failure. You might be afraid to have your stats drop or to let other people down.
But at the core of this anxiety will be a fear that you don’t want to perform poorly.
And when we have this fear, we then want to control the outcome. We want to control the result because if we’re afraid of something. We want to avoid the consequence at all costs.
And anxiety is all about control.
I want to control the outcome.
I want to control the result.
But before the game and during the game, if all I’m thinking about is this result, my mind is in the future. So I’m experiencing what is known as outcome oriented thinking. I’m thinking so much about what will happen.
And in that moment, the only way that to my brain feels like I’m controlling what will happen, is worrying about it. \
So anxiety is this worry about what will happen in the future. And it’s our mind’s need or drive to control the outcome.
That’s really where this anxiety is coming from.
Practice vs. Games: Why It Feels Different
An example of this is a player who performs really well during practice.
During practice, they’re not experiencing fear. The outcome to them doesn’t matter as much. So, they’re able to just play freely.
But then when they transition into a game, they’re worried about their stats. They’re worried about playing time. They’re worried about performing well or performing poorly.
As a result, they end up worrying about what will happen.
Anxiety vs. Normal Nerves
Now, it’s important for us to classify this anxiety in a different way than we classify nervousness. Because nerves, pregame jitters, are completely normal and a lot of times they will help you.
They give you motivation to play. They give you more energy and and a lot of times they can lead to better performances.
But when I’m working with an athlete, I like to separate anxiety and say this anxiety is much more about your thinking.
It’s about your mindset.
Nerves are physical, anxiety is mental. We want to classify it as more of a mental challenge.
We are thinking too much about the result. We’re trying to control the result. Our mind is racing and racing and racing.
So going back to that example, the player goes into a game and they are afraid of making a mistake. So then all they can think about is what will happen if they do make the mistake, and how they need to avoid that.
Their mind is stuck in the future.
Other Causes That Stem From Fear
In addition to fear of failure, there are three other causes, or challenges athletes experience, that contribute to sports anxiety:
- Pressure and Expectations
- Perfectionism
- Low Confidence
1) Pressure and Expectations
Another cause can be the pressure or the expectations that you feel from your parents and coaches, teammates, media, or anybody else.
And this expectation can lead to more worries about not living up to the expectations, disappointing other people, letting people down.
And again, the more you think about those different outcomes, those different results, the more you will be stressing, the more you’ll worry about what the result will be, and the more your mind will try to control that outcome.
This can result in feeling like you have to constantly prove yourself, which can lead to a spike in anxiety as well.
2) Perfectionism
Another cause is overthinking and perfectionism.
Perfectionism typically happens because if I’m really afraid of making mistakes during a game, a solution can seem to be playing perfectly.
But when I try to be perfect with my performance, all I’m going to do is stress about all the small things that could go wrong. I’m going to fixate on mistakes and I’m going to play tense.
That’s where we find tension come into our games when we’re experiencing anxiety because we’re so caught up in wanting to be perfect.
3) Low Confidence
Low confidence occurs as a result of fear, but it also feeds into fear because if I have a lot of confidence in myself and I have a lot of trust in my skills to where I know that I can go out there and play well, do you think that I’ll be as afraid of failing? Or will I have confidence that I’m not going to fail because I know I can play well?
Not having belief in your skills increases fear and anxiety.
And this is typically going to come in the form of what I call confidence in execution. Where you don’t trust in yourself to go out there and execute on game day.
You might have a lot of confidence in your skills during practice. You might logically know that you’re talented and logically know that you should be performing better, but there’s just this trust missing that you can translate those skills that you have into games.
This lack of trust will feed into more of this need to control, which again, results in this anxiety.
Cause of Sports Anxiety Simplified
The anxiety that you’re experiencing as an athlete is directly linked to fear. You are afraid of making mistakes.
It can also be caused by expectations, perfectionism, and low confidence.
But if we take everything we’ve discussed so far and we simplify it down to one idea, one core reason why you’re experiencing so much anxiety during games, it would be outcome-oriented thinking
And when we understand that, and when we put emphasis on that, it helps guide our attention onto a powerful solution: working to become more process-focused and working to keep our attention more in the present moment when we play.
And throughout all my work that I do with athletes, I personally believe that the simpler we can make a solution, the more likely it is that we are going to see progress.
If I know that I have to do a thousand different things to reduce my anxiety, it’s unlikely that I will reduce my anxiety.
But if I’m able to look at it and say, this anxiety, this intense worry and panic about what will happen, is there because my mind is so fixated on the result, then know I need to train myself to be more present when I play.
I need to build trust so I can be more present.
Now I have a very concrete solution for me to work toward.
And that’s what I want you to take away from this this article. You want to take away that any anxiety you’re feeling signals to you that your mind is trying to control the outcome.
You want that thing to happen, or you want to avoid the negative, and so you worry and you worry and you worry about it.
But unfortunately, all that worry does is take you out of the moment and causes you to play tense, play tight and underperform.
So, if right now you’re experiencing a lot of anxiety, work to become more present.
There are a lot of different sports psychology tools and techniques we can use to do so. But that’s the main principle: you want to work to be more present so you can play freely instead of playing with so much worry and stress about what the result will be.
Mental Coaching to Manage Sports Anxiety
If you are interested in learning more about how to develop that present mindset and how to work through this anxiety, I offer one-on-one mental coaching to help you with your anxiety as an athlete.
Click here to learn more about my one-on-one mental coaching program for anxiety.
And I also have an online course that’s a self-paced course for you to go through that is focused primarily on helping athletes overcome fear of failure and sports anxiety called The Confident Competitor Academy.
Just remember, sports anxiety is caused by fear of failure, the expectations you feel, the need to play perfect, and low confidence — which can all be simplified down to outcome-oriented thinking.
Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
