Performance Anxiety

Anxiety is an emotional response experienced by athletes in training or performance settings, especially when they want to perform well. It can be described as our ‘response to a perceived threat’ and is a normal response that all humans will experience. For many athletes, a threat can present in the form of worrying about the result, fear of failure, doubting your abilities to execute, or thinking about negative consequences before they happen. It can present in two main ways – Cognitive (worry and negative thoughts) or Somatic (physical sensations such as elevated heart rate or muscle tension). Higher levels of anxiety have been shown to cause performance decrements while moderate levels of anxiety have been positively linked to performance enhancement.