Sports performance anxiety is what happens when your mind becomes so focused on mistakes, results, pressure, or what other people will think that your body tightens up and your game suffers.
The goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety completely. It’s to learn how to respond to it so it no longer controls how you perform.
Instead of being fully engaged in the present moment, your attention shifts into the future. You begin worrying about what might happen, what must not happen, or what a mistake will mean.
That mental shift creates tension, hesitation, fear, and a loss of trust in yourself.
In other words, sports performance anxiety is not just “being nervous.” It is a pattern of worry and pressure that pulls you away from free, instinctive performance.
I know how frustrating that is. As a former college athlete, I struggled with a lot of sports 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 even when it was there.
Today, as a mental performance coach, I work with many athletes who deal with anxiety before games and during games. Sometimes it is even felt during practice.
The main way you begin working through sports performance anxiety is by learning how to bring your attention back into the present moment, build greater trust in yourself, and respond better to pressure.
What It Feels Like to Compete With Performance Anxiety
If you’re dealing with performance anxiety, you already know this isn’t just about “being nervous.”
It shows up in a very specific way.
You feel it before games, sometimes even before practice. There’s a tightness in your body. Your thoughts start racing. And instead of feeling excited to compete, you feel tense and on edge.
Then the game starts.
And you don’t play like yourself.
You hesitate, overthink, and second-guess decisions you normally make without even thinking about them in practice. It feels like you’re stuck in your own head, trying to control everything instead of just reacting and playing.
That’s what makes it so frustrating.
Because you know what you’re capable of. You’ve seen it in practice. You’ve done it before. But in games, it feels like you can’t access it the same way.
Over time, this can start to affect more than just your performance.
You may begin to dread games. You might put more pressure on yourself to “finally play well,” which only makes the anxiety worse. And instead of enjoying your sport, it starts to feel stressful and draining.
Sports performance anxiety can show up in different ways depending on the athlete, the sport, and the situation. Some athletes mainly feel it in their bodies. Others notice it more in their thoughts. And for many athletes, it affects both.
What you may feel in your body
- Rapid heartbeat
- Tight muscles
- Shaky legs or hands
- Dry mouth
- Sweating
- Dizziness or light-headedness
- Shallow breathing
- A heavy or tense feeling in your body
What may happen in your mind
- Racing thoughts
- Worry about making mistakes
- Fear of letting others down
- Fear of embarrassment
- Trouble focusing on the present play
- Self-doubt
- Feeling mentally rushed
- Feeling trapped by pressure
- A loss of trust in yourself
How anxiety may change the way you play
- You hesitate instead of reacting.
- You play it safe instead of aggressively.
- You hide during competition.
- You avoid the action.
- You overthink decisions.
- You rush your mechanics.
- You hold back instead of trusting your training.
I was working with a basketball player who experienced many of these symptoms, especially trembling legs. So much so that he told me it felt as though he didn’t have any control over his legs while playing.
Now playing basketball without feeling like you have control over your legs seems pretty tough, and it was. In fact, it was so hurtful to his game that the anxiety became something he feared.
As soon as he noticed himself becoming anxious, he grew worried about the fact that he was anxious. This led to even more anxiety.
One of the most common patterns I see is this: you don’t just get anxious—you start worrying about the fact that you’re anxious.
You feel the nerves, and your first thought is, “Here we go again.”
That reaction adds a second layer of pressure, which only makes the anxiety stronger.
The Difference Between Feeling Nervous and Playing Nervous
It’s completely normal to feel nervous going into a game. But there’s a big difference between feeling nervous and having those nerves turn into anxiety, which is what I classify as playing nervous.
Feelings of nervousness are natural and sometimes can even help you. They can give you more motivation or an adrenaline boost, and then you go out there and you perform better because of the nervous feeling.
But there are also cases where this nervousness becomes a distraction—where the athlete starts to feel anxious or afraid because they know that, in the past, when they felt nervous, they underperformed.
When we play nervous, we are scared of making mistakes. We are playing with anxiety and worry about what will happen, what other people will think, and how the game will turn out.
And what that translates to is a scared style of play where you avoid situations where you could make mistakes. Maybe you don’t play with as much confidence because you are so hyperfixated on the fact that you are nervous.
But when we simply feel nervous, we’re able to go out there and still play aggressively. We are still able to put ourselves in positions to succeed. We’re able to put ourselves in a position where we might make a mistake, but we accept that that’s a possibility and we’re going to play hard and play aggressively anyway.
It’s when the nervousness becomes a distraction, and the nervousness actually changes your style of play, that nervousness becomes a challenge.
Back when I was in college, I knew that when I felt nervous, I underperformed. So I began to associate the feeling of nervousness with underperforming.
As a result, I fought that feeling a lot.
But in doing so, I was actually creating a state of anxiety. So then I was going into games terrified that I would play poorly.
I would try to control the result because of how scared I was. This would cause me to perform stiff and timid because I was fixated on not making mistakes.
My feelings of nervousness translated into this timid, scared, anxious style of play because I was trying to fight that initial feeling of nervousness. I began to play nervous.
The Sports Performance Anxiety Cycle
To better understand sports performance anxiety, I like to break it down into three main factors: cognition, autonomic arousal, and the behavioral response.
Factor 1: Cognition (What you are thinking)
In my experience working with athletes, one of the main drivers of sports performance anxiety is where their thinking goes before and during competition.
Specifically, thinking too much about the future. This is known as outcome-oriented thinking.
This means your mind is focused too much on what is going to happen, what might happen, or what you hope does not happen.
Instead of being focused on the present moment, your attention is centered on the future. You are thinking about results, performance, consequences, and outcomes instead of the next play, the next movement, or the next thing you need to do.
This is why anxiety grows so quickly in sports. Once your attention leaves the present moment and moves into the future, pressure begins to build.
Imagine your focus is like a battery. Every time you think about what’s going to happen by the end of the game, you are draining energy out of the battery.
That energy is how much focus and attention you can give to what you’re doing. The more anxious you are, the more distracted you become—not by outside factors, but by your own mind.
Fear and Anxiety
Fear is one of the strongest drivers of sports performance anxiety, especially fear of failure, mistakes, judgment, or disappointing other people.
I worked with a softball player whose thoughts before games were filled with worries about not wanting to get out. She worried about getting benched, what her coach was going to think, and how badly she needed to get a hit.
Her anxiety was driven by what she feared would happen if she did not perform well.
When competition becomes about proving yourself, protecting your image, or avoiding judgment, it becomes much harder to compete freely.
And when we have this fear, we then want to control the outcome.
- I want to control the outcome.
- I want to control the result.
- I want to control what my coach thinks.
- I want to control whether I make a mistake.
The more we try to control the outcome, the more anxious we become and the more we get in our own way.
Trust and Anxiety
Sports performance anxiety is also closely connected to low trust.
If you trusted yourself completely to respond, compete, and handle whatever happened, there would be much less need to worry.
But when trust is low, the mind starts trying to control the future. It wants guarantees. It wants certainty. It wants to make sure nothing goes wrong.
That attempt to control the future is exactly what creates so much pressure and anxiety in the first place.
This is why building self-trust is such a huge part of overcoming sports performance anxiety.
Expectations and Anxiety
Another contributor can be the expectations that you feel from your parents and coaches, teammates, media, and yourself.
Expectations can lead to more worries about not living up to the expectations, disappointing other people, and 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.
These expectations tend to turn into a desire to be perfect, 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.
At the core of all of this is our thinking moving out of the present moment, into the future, resulting in a desire to control the result. Unfortunately, all we’re left with is sports performance anxiety in the moment that wreaks havoc on our play.
Factor 2: Autonomic Arousal (How your body reacts)
Following cognition comes the body’s reaction to those thoughts: our autonomic nervous system kicks in.
Now, I do want to mention that what I described above and what I am describing now in terms of your autonomic arousal is happening on a subconscious level. But I believe it is helpful to separate them so you can see which part you can try to change to help reduce your sports anxiety.
The autonomic arousal is the anxious feeling you’ve grown to hate.
This is where the racing heartbeat, muscle tension, shaking, shallow breathing, and other physical symptoms described earlier begin to appear.
These symptoms are real. They are physical. But they are also involuntary.
That’s a key point: this isn’t something you’re choosing. It happens automatically, often in a split second.
Factor 3: The Behavioral Response (How anxiety changes the way you play)
The number one behavioral response to sports performance anxiety is avoidance.
Experiencing anxiety is a terrible feeling, and so our mind’s natural reaction is going to be to avoid the situation causing the anxiety.
But what happens when what’s causing your anxiety is your sport?
We’re worried about making a mistake, and as a result, we experience intense feelings of anxiety. But the more anxiety we feel, the more we want to avoid the situation, so we end up sabotaging ourselves by performing poorly, which then ends up making our anxiety worse.
An athlete may stop playing aggressively, avoid the action, or shrink in pressure moments. Even when they still look engaged from the outside, internally, they may be trying to survive rather than compete freely.
I once spoke with the parents of a younger soccer player who was clearly not playing the same way in games as he did in practice. His parents said it looked like he was hiding out there.
That description was accurate. He was holding himself back because of the anxiety he felt surrounding mistakes.
Instead of aggressively going to the ball and fully getting into the action, he played more cautiously and passively.
This is one of the clearest behavioral signs of sports performance anxiety. The athlete wants to do well, but because of fear, they stop fully entering into the game.
The problem is not that your skill disappears. The problem is that anxiety gets in the way of expressing the skill you already have.
My ABC Strategy for Managing Anxiety in the Moment
When anxiety shows up before or during competition, you don’t need a complicated mental routine. You need something simple you can return to quickly.
A simple technique you can use when you start to feel anxious is something I call the ABCs:
- Accept that you’re feeling anxious.
- Breathe to ground yourself and calm your body.
- Change your thinking by using self-talk or returning your attention to a controllable, present-moment objective.
With the ABCs, our goal is to calm your body, reset your focus, and get back to what helps you perform well.
A: Accept that the anxiety is there
Before you can redirect your focus, you have to stop fighting the anxiety itself.
When athletes resist anxiety, they usually make it worse. They become frustrated that they feel nervous, which adds even more pressure to the situation.
Acceptance does not mean you like the anxiety. It means you stop wasting energy arguing with the fact that it is there.
I want you to try something with me…think about an orange. Picture the orange in your mind and see it clearly.
Now, I want you to stop thinking about the orange and tell yourself not to think about the orange. You hate the orange; get that orange out of your mind.
How’s that working for you?
Each time you mention the word orange, even though you’re trying to force it out of your mind, you see an orange, don’t you?
This goes to show that we cannot force a thought out of our minds. Similarly, you cannot force anxiety to leave. Instead, you must accept its presence and then shift your attention.
Before a game, it can seem very scary to accept your anxiety. You know the negative impact it has on your game, so the last thing you want to do is accept it.
But before a game, your goal is not to eliminate anxiety. Your goal is to stop fighting it so you can settle into the moment and focus on the controllable actions you want to take.
When you can say to yourself, “I feel anxious right now, and that’s okay,” you create space to respond with intention instead of fear.
A simple way to do this in the moment is to talk to yourself the way you would a teammate: “It’s okay that I feel nervous right now. I can still play well. Just focus on what I can control.”
That kind of self-talk helps you accept the feeling instead of fighting it, which makes it much easier to stay composed and move forward.
B: Breathe to calm your body and return to the present
Because anxiety shows up physically, you need a way to calm your body.
Breathing is one of the simplest and most effective tools for doing that.
When we’re anxious, our breathing tends to become shallow and rushed. By slowing your breathing down and lengthening your exhale, you help calm your nervous system.
Try this:
- Inhale for four seconds.
- Exhale for six seconds.
- Repeat for 60–90 seconds.
Bringing your attention back to your breath helps calm the body and anchor your mind in the present moment.
It’s not that you’re trying to feel perfectly calm or free from all anxiety. That’s unrealistic in the moment. The goal is to reduce the physical intensity enough that you can think more clearly and perform more freely.
C: Change your thinking and narrow your focus
Competitive anxiety is driven by fears and worries. To manage this kind of anxiety, you need to take control of what you’re thinking about when you play.
If your attention is on results, mistakes, stats, or what other people will think, anxiety will grow. So we need to shift your attention onto what you can control. This helps reduce anxiety and also helps you become more present.
If your attention is on controllable actions, anxiety begins to lose strength.
Ask yourself:
- What is my job right now?
- What is the next action I need to commit to?
- What can I control in this moment?
We don’t want to try to control our entire performance. We want to focus on what we can control in the moment, instead of having our mind try to control the future.
The ABCs are one of the many strategies I teach athletes dealing with sports performance anxiety inside my one-on-one mental performance coaching program. Learn more about one-on-one coaching for yourself or your athlete.
Build Trust Before Competition Begins
The ABCs give you a strategy for the moment anxiety appears. But you also want to prepare throughout the week so you don’t show up to a game simply hoping you won’t feel anxious.
Preparation helps us with anxiety because the more prepared we are going into games, the more confident we’ll be.
We want to make sure that:
- We are preparing as much as possible throughout the week, knowing that we will likely feel anxious.
- We prepare for how we will handle the anxiety in the moment.
What we don’t want to have happen is that we show up to the game and are hoping we won’t feel anxious today—but then we do feel anxious. And as a result, we start to panic and become anxious about the fact that we are anxious, since we know this anxiety ends up hurting our performance.
Trust Your Physical Preparation
Physical preparation helps us with anxiety because anxiety itself is focused on fear and doubt.
You may think:
- I don’t know if I can play well today.
- I really hope I don’t mess up because I’m afraid of getting pulled or I’m afraid of what my stats will look like.
So then you start trying to control the result, because you don’t trust that you can get the result. And the more you try to control it, the more anxious you get, and the more tension you play with.
The more prepared you are physically, the more you can say, “I trust my preparation. I feel like my skills are where they need to be.”
And then you can let go of the need to control the result.
Train Your Mind Throughout the Week
Mental preparation involves mental exercises that you do throughout the week: exercises to build your confidence and exercises to calm your mind and help you be more present.
My two favorite exercises when it comes to preparing for a game—especially when we know we’re going to be anxious—are visualization and mindfulness.
Sport visualization builds trust in yourself and your skills by imagining yourself playing well and succeeding in different scenarios.
Mindfulness uses meditation or mindful breathing to calm your mind and practice being present.
The more confident you are, the less you have to stress and try to control the result.
The more present you are, the less your attention is in the future—which is where anxiety grows.
Prepare for the Anxiety Itself
The final piece of using preparation to help with anxiety is this: prepare for being anxious.
Yes, doing your mental and physical preparation will reduce anxiety, but you will likely still feel a little anxious.
So we want to have a strategy for what you’ll do when that anxiety appears, because it will.
In my one-on-one coaching, we go through an anticipation exercise. We think through everything we can anticipate that will distract you, make you feel anxious, or make you doubt yourself. Then we come up with strategies to manage each one.
You want to trust yourself not just to play well, but to manage yourself well—your anxiety, your thinking, and your frustration.
If I’m anxious and I don’t know how to manage it, the first indicator of anxiety will make me panic. That panic makes things worse.
But if I know I have a strategy that’s been effective before, I don’t have to panic. I just apply the strategy.
A Pregame Routine for Sports Performance Anxiety
Before games, anxiety tends to build through anticipation.
Your mind starts jumping ahead to what might happen, what needs to happen, or what you hope does not happen.
That is why a strong pregame mental routine can be so powerful. It helps settle your body, guide your focus, and build a more confident mindset before competition begins.
We want to break this into two different phases: the night before and game day.
The night before
You might:
- Review your strategy.
- Think through good performances you’ve had.
- Do visualization.
- Do some calming breathing.
The morning of the game
You might:
- Ground yourself with meditation.
- Remind yourself of past successes.
- Use calming and confident self-talk.
Five to ten minutes before the game
Right before competition, keep things simple:
- Move your body and stay loose.
- Control your breathing.
- Focus on one or two simple objectives.
- Avoid overthinking your performance.
This is not the time to fix everything. This is the time to trust what you’ve already built.
Set a Clear Definition of Success
One of the best ways to reduce anxiety before games is to define success based on controllable actions.
If your definition of success is based only on outcomes, like getting a hit, scoring a certain number of points, or playing perfectly, pressure will rise quickly.
Instead, define success around the way you want to compete.
For example, success may mean moving aggressively, staying present, making quick decisions, trusting your swing, or committing fully to each play.
You can still have goals. But once competition begins, your job is to commit to the process.
When you trust your preparation and focus on execution, you give yourself the best chance to perform freely.
Remember Past Successes
Right before the game begins, remind yourself of past times you have performed well.
Think about moments when you trusted yourself, competed freely, and played with confidence.
This helps strengthen belief in your ability and reminds your mind that success is not unfamiliar to you.
Create a Specific Self-Talk Routine
Something that has really helped a basketball player I’ve been working with is altering his self-talk before a game. Instead of continuing to think worrisome thoughts, we’ve come up with a specific set of phrases he can repeat to himself.
These statements work to increase his confidence and calm him down as the game begins. This shows the power self-talk has against anxiety.
Self-talk involves how you think and how you speak to yourself. The reason it both increases and decreases anxiety is because of the influence our thoughts have on the way that we feel.
If before a game all you’re thinking about is how much you don’t want to mess up, and all the possible negative outcomes that could happen, that’s going to increase your anxiety.
You are talking yourself into being anxious.
On the other hand, if your self-talk involves encouraging words and is centered around reasons you have to feel confident and why you can be successful, well then that’s going to decrease anxiety because you are generating more positive feelings of confidence.
To make use of a self-talk routine, all you have to do is get yourself a piece of paper (or you can use the notes app on your phone) and make a list of statements that make you feel calm and confident.
Once you have your list made, your next job is to repeat it to yourself multiple times a day. The reason self-talk has helped the basketball player I work with is that he now has the statements memorized.
That way, during the game, it’s easy for him to remember what he wants to think.
So, for yourself, repeat the statements each day, and then, before the game, fill your mind with the new and encouraging thoughts you’ve created.
Use Visualization for Relaxation and Confidence
When dealing with performance anxiety in sports, there are two areas that need to be focused on: relaxation and building confidence. Visualization is incredible at doing both.
One way to use visualization is to briefly picture a place or situation where you feel calm and in control. This helps your breathing slow down, and your body relax.
Then, bring your focus back to your sport and mentally rehearse yourself competing with that same sense of calm and confidence.
You can also use visualization to build confidence:
- Get into a quiet location and sit in a comfortable position.
- Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths.
- Create your scene and imagine yourself performing your skills.
- Go into as much detail as you can and feel the emotion of being successful.
- Before a game, close your eyes and reimagine that scene to build confidence in the moment.
As you accomplish the task in your mind, confidence will begin to build gradually, until when the performance comes, your mind feels like it’s done this a thousand times.
Avoid Making Your Nerves Worse
When you feel anxious before a game, avoid these common mistakes:
- Trying to force yourself to feel calm
- Overthinking your performance
- Changing how you play at the last minute
- Focusing on the outcome
These will only increase anxiety and pull you further out of the moment.
What to Do When Anxiety Hits During the Game
During competition, sports performance anxiety often shows up as rushing, hesitation, overthinking, and physical tightness.
This is when you want to return to the ABC strategy: accept the anxiety, breathe, and change your thinking.
Here is what the ABC strategy can look like during a game:
- Accept: Notice what is happening. Recognize that anxiety is present without judging yourself or becoming frustrated that you feel it.
- Breathe: Take one slow breath. Use your breathing to settle your body and slow your mind down.
- Breathe: Release physical tension. Relax one area where you are holding tension, such as your jaw, shoulders, hands, or legs.
- Change your thinking: Use one short mental cue. Say something simple to yourself, such as “trust it,” “next play,” or “be here.”
- Change your focus: Commit to the next action. Bring your full attention to the next play, possession, point, or rep—not the entire game.
One of the most important mental skills during competition is narrowing your focus.
If your attention goes to the scoreboard, your stats, your last mistake, or what might happen later, anxiety will grow.
But when you keep bringing your attention back to the next play, the next possession, the next point, or the next rep, you make it much easier to stay composed.
Anxiety gets stronger when your focus becomes too big. Performance improves when your focus becomes smaller, simpler, and more immediate.
Common Situations Where Sports Anxiety Shows Up
Sports performance anxiety does not only appear five minutes before a game. It can show up at the beginning of a season, during practice, when you are worried about playing time, or whenever you feel like other people are judging your performance.
Anxiety at the beginning of a season
Something I see a lot in the athletes I work with is an increased feeling of nervousness and pressure at the beginning of a season. One of the main reasons athletes share that they’re feeling this way has to do with wanting to prove themselves to their teammates.
This is especially true if you’re on a new team and you’re wanting to prove yourself to your new teammates or to your new coach.
At the beginning of the season, if you’re experiencing nerves and worry about how things are going to go, this can quickly turn into fear and scared play. You don’t want to perform poorly, so you tighten up.
Instead, try to reframe your thinking:
- “I’m excited to show everybody what I can do.”
- “I’m excited to play well at the beginning of the season.”
This shift in thinking can change your performance. A simple reframe from nervousness to excitement moves you from being a nervous player to a confident one.
Anxiety During Practice
We get anxious during practice because we forget that practice is for improvement. We start seeing it as another game. Another chance to prove ourselves.
When you show up thinking, “I can’t make mistakes,” “I have to be perfect,” or “I need to impress coach,” you’re setting yourself up for anxiety.
Shift your mindset back to improvement. Accept that mistakes will happen, use mistakes as feedback, and focus on effort and improvement.
And just like we did above for your pregame routine, you can also create a short pre-practice routine:
- Take 30 seconds of deep breathing to calm your mind.
- Review your practice objectives for the day.
- Use a self-talk statement such as, “Mistakes are okay. I’m here to get better.”
- Briefly visualize yourself performing well and bouncing back from mistakes.
Even one or two minutes of focused mental preparation can make a huge difference in how you start practice. The key is intent, not length.
Anxiety About Playing Time
No matter how much you want to get playing time, what’s worse than even getting benched is being so stressed about playing time that you can’t focus on what you need to be doing.
Every athlete wants playing time. But stressing about it can cause you to play timid and scared when you do play because all you’re worried about is:
- Am I going to make a mistake?
- If I do, will coach pull me?
This stress about getting more playing time and whether or not coach will pull you turns into poor play. You play differently—scared, tense, timid—because your focus is on not making mistakes instead of simply doing what you need to do in the moment.
Focus fully on the minutes you do get. Control your effort, attitude, presence, and intensity. Make your goal to be proud of how you competed, regardless of how many minutes you received.
What if Anxiety is Making You Want to Quit Your Sport?
This is a question I receive a lot. I work with many athletes who are struggling with anxiety and simultaneously questioning whether or not they want to continue playing their sport.
Start by understanding what it is about anxiety that is leading you to think, “Maybe I want to quit my sport.”
Then ask yourself whether it is really the sport causing the anxiety or the way you are thinking about the sport.
Many athletes I work with who deal with anxiety also struggle with fear—fear of making mistakes and fear of letting people down. And honestly, that has nothing to do with the sport itself. That’s a pattern of thinking.
If it’s fear of results, mistakes, or pressure to practice perfectly, then quitting won’t necessarily solve the problem. Those same thought patterns may follow you into school, work, or another sport.
Here’s a video that goes into more depth on this question and helps you think through whether or not you should quit your sport if you’re anxious:
How to Manage Anxious Thoughts After Games
For some athletes, sports performance anxiety does not end when the game is over.
Instead, it shows up afterward through replaying mistakes, obsessing over what went wrong, and carrying frustration or fear into the next competition.
Let’s say you’ve played a game and now you’re lying in bed at night. The game keeps racing through your mind. You keep thinking about what happened during the game, replaying those mistakes you made, and worrying about what will happen in the future.
We must manage this type of anxious thinking because when you have anxious thoughts postgame, that can lead to more anxiety moving forward and less confidence for your next competition.
I was on a coaching call with an athlete, and she and I were talking about this exact idea. After her competition, she started to feel more anxious once it was over.
The previous week, we had gone over a pre-competition routine that helped her feel calmer and less anxious as she went into the event. She did pretty well, but naturally, like every athlete, she made some mistakes during the competition.
Those mistakes were replaying in her mind afterwards.
During multi-day competitions, she often struggled the second or third day because of the anxiety she felt from the previous day. She struggled to fall asleep and had less confidence going into the next day.
So we began going over a post-performance routine to help her sift through her thinking and then use some tools before bed to calm her mind.
Use a Post-Performance Evaluation
When you’re stuck in that anxious loop of thinking, you need to get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper. This helps you take a break from emotional worry and start thinking more analytically.
A simple evaluation might look like this:
- Write down positives from your performance. Our natural tendency is to focus only on what went wrong. But focusing on the positives builds confidence and puts you in a better state to analyze mistakes productively.
- List the mistakes or moments you’re anxious about. Write out exactly what you’re replaying in your mind and what you’re frustrated about.
- Identify what you can learn from them. Ask yourself, “What do I need to change to make this not happen in the future?” or “What can I focus on differently next time?”
This process shifts you from dwelling on mistakes to learning from them.
When you write things down, it’s easier to sift through the noise and clearly see what adjustments you can make. If you just leave all those thoughts in your mind, they swirl around uncontrollably and feed your anxiety.
Once you’ve done your postgame reflection—written down your lessons and adjustments—remind yourself that you’ve already gathered the information you need.
Now it’s time to let it go and be present.
If you struggle with a racing mind at night after competitions, try doing five to ten minutes of mindfulness meditation before bed.
The best counter for any sort of anxious thinking—before, during, or after games—is being present.
You do not need to keep mentally reliving the game in order to improve.
When You Need a More Structured Plan for Your Sports Anxiety
It’s normal to feel nervous before a competition. But sports performance anxiety becomes a bigger issue when it consistently interferes with your ability to trust yourself, compete freely, and enjoy your sport.
You may need a more structured mental training plan if sports performance anxiety is causing you to:
- Consistently underperform in games
- Avoid pressure situations
- Dread competition
- Obsess over mistakes after games
- Lose confidence in yourself
- Feel stuck in the same mental pattern season after season
- Hold back during games even when you know you are capable of more
At that point, it helps to stop hoping it will go away on its own and start treating it like a real mental performance issue that needs to be trained.
Sports performance anxiety is not a lack of talent. It is not proof that you are weak mentally. It is what happens when pressure and worry begin to interfere with your ability to trust yourself and stay in the present moment.
Mental Performance Coaching for Sports Performance Anxiety
If sports performance anxiety is holding you back in games, it helps to have a plan that is personalized to you.
Inside my 12-week one-on-one mental performance coaching program, we begin with an assessment of the anxiety you are experiencing, the situations that trigger it, and the thought patterns that are getting in the way of your performance.
From there, I create a personalized mental training plan based on your specific challenges, your sport, and what you want to improve.
We then meet once a week for a 30-minute Zoom session. During these sessions, we work through the plan together and practice the mental skills you need to manage anxiety, build confidence, improve your focus, and compete with greater trust.
Each week, you will have specific exercises and actions to complete. You will also use a workbook or journal to strengthen the skills we discuss and apply them during practices and games.
Between sessions, you can contact me through email or text if you have questions or need help applying a strategy to something that happened during competition.
As you continue practicing and competing, we evaluate what is working, identify where you are still getting stuck, and adjust the plan based on the results you are experiencing.
My approach to mental coaching is proactive. We need to look to past performances just long enough to get a solid understanding of how you think when you play well and what’s going on when you’re feeling overly anxious and nervous.
Once that information is gained and we’ve processed any past performances we needed to, it’s time to turn our attention to proactively strengthening your mindset.
We know that you’re going to feel anxious again in the future. Before a game, nerves will start to creep in. Our goal is to make sure you have developed a mind strong enough to manage these situations in a positive way.
One of the main areas we will focus on is regulating the thoughts you have before and during competition.
Knowing that outcome-oriented thinking is the main cause of anxiety in sports, you need to make sure you are keeping your thoughts centered on what’s happening now.
Another key focus of ours will be building confidence. The more you trust in yourself and the more belief you have that you can succeed, the less anxious you’ll be before the game begins.
A third key focus will be instilling a calm and clear mind.
A calm mind is a focused mind. This means, the more still your mind is, the more focused it can be. The stillness provides clarity, allowing you to focus your mind on what will help you perform.
The real goal is not simply to reduce the anxiety and nerves you feel. The real goal is to get you to play freely and full of confidence.
If you’re looking for a self-paced option, I also offer a six-week program called The Confident Competitor Academy. This course is designed to help you overcome anxiety and fear of failure, and build the mental skills you need to play freely and confidently.
If sports performance anxiety is currently holding you back, know that it does not have to stay this way.
It will not simply disappear on its own. But with the right mental training, you can reduce the anxiety you feel and learn how to compete with greater calm, confidence, and trust.
Schedule a free introductory coaching call to learn more about one-on-one mental coaching.
Learn more about The Confident Competitor Academy
Questions Athletes Ask Me About Sports Performance Anxiety
Is sports performance anxiety normal?
Yes, sports performance anxiety is common. Many athletes feel nervous before or during competition.
The problem is not the presence of nerves. The problem is when the anxiety becomes so strong that it leads to tension, hesitation, overthinking, or avoidance.
Why do I play worse in games than in practice?
Most athletes who play worse in games than in practice are not losing their skill. They are losing access to that skill because of pressure, overthinking, and tension.
Games create more consequences in the mind, which is why anxiety often shows up more strongly there.
How do I stop anxiety in sports?
You work on sports performance anxiety by learning to accept it, calm your body, focus on the present moment, improve your self-talk, define success by process, and build a strong reset routine after mistakes.
Can young athletes struggle with sports performance anxiety?
Yes, absolutely.
Young athletes often struggle with sports performance anxiety, especially when they put a lot of pressure on themselves, become highly focused on mistakes, or worry a lot about approval and performance outcomes.
Can mental performance coaching help with sports anxiety?
Yes, mental performance coaching can be very effective for sports performance anxiety.
It helps athletes identify the root causes of their anxiety and build a personalized plan to improve confidence, trust, focus, and composure under pressure.
Is sports performance anxiety the same as choking?
Not exactly.
Sports performance anxiety is the fear, worry, and pressure athletes feel before or during performance. Choking refers more specifically to a noticeable drop in performance under pressure.
Anxiety can increase the chances of choking, but the two are not the same thing.
