It’s natural to want to play your best. You train hard to compete at a high level, not to go out there and not care about how you do.
But could expecting yourself to play well actually cause you to play with anxiety?
Sports performance anxiety is a mental game challenge where you experience extreme worries about what may or may not happen during the competition.
This anxiety will be experienced mentally (i.e. worrisome thoughts) as well as physically (i.e. nervous feeling in your stomach).
When you play with anxiety, it’s easy to find yourself underperforming due to the anxiety. Which only worsens the anxiety you experience since you have placed such high expectations on yourself.
So let’s explore the reason high expectations lead to sports performance anxiety, and a shift you can make to reduce anxiety and increase performance.
High Expectations & Sports Performance Anxiety
“I have to…”
What does it mean when you say you have to do something?
It means you better do it, or else. Or else what? Or else something bad will happen.
When you place that level of pressure on yourself to play well, it makes sense why anxiety would follow.
If you’re going into a game thinking, “I have to play well,” your attention is on the outcomes. You are thinking about what you need to achieve by the end of the play or game.
Now, it’s natural for you to want to achieve a result by the end of the game. That’s why you’re playing…to do your best. However, the goal of doing your best can quickly transform into worry about not doing your best.
When you worry about not doing your best, you grow anxious. When you grow anxious, you play tense and stiff and underperform.
When it comes to understanding just how high expectations lead to anxiety, we want to examine three areas of your game: before, during, and after a game.
Area #1: Before a Game
The first area we need to examine in terms of high expectations and anxiety is before a game.
When you place high expectations on yourself before the game, and think things like, “I have to play well,” it’s natural for anxiety to increase.
A great example of this comes from a hockey player I’ve been working with. When she finds herself thinking about how she needs to play her best during the game, her anxiety increases. She begins to worry about what will happen if she doesn’t play well and this leads to more and more anxiety.
But why is it that her thinking about wanting to play her best increases anxiety?
Because when she worries about wanting to play her best, she is trying to control the future. Her mind is working to control an outcome in the future. But it is an outcome she cannot control.
Therefore, anxiety increases.
This is the main reason high expectations before a game lead to anxiety. You want to play well so badly that you worry about playing well. That worry and wanting to play well lead to a mind that’s trying to control the future. And when you try to control the future, you only grow anxious in the present moment.
Area #2: During a Game
One of the main mental game challenges that stems from high expectations is losing composure. Losing composure involves having a difficult time moving on from mistakes.
The reason high expectations make it difficult to move on from mistakes is because you have failed to reach your high expectations by making the mistake. This results in feelings of disappointment and frustration.
When we link this to anxiety, we see anxiety grow following mistakes due to you not wanting to make another mistake and further separate yourself from the high expectations you set.
When you make a mistake during a game or something doesn’t go your way, do you think it will be easier or more difficult to move on quickly if you have placed high expectations on yourself to play well?
It will by far be more difficult.
And the more upset you get over a mistake, the more worry will form about making another mistake. Worry that leads to anxiety during a game.
Area #3: After a Game
Once the game is finished, we will see these high expectations be a way for you to judge how good or bad you feel about the way you played.
If you didn’t live up to your expectations (which is all too often the case with high expectations) how do you think and feel about yourself?
Are you happy and confident in yourself? Or do you put yourself down and feel disappointed in how you played?
Most of the athletes I’ve worked with in mental performance coaching who’ve dealt with high expectations have been their own worst critics following games.
Now that’s not always a bad thing and there is a benefit to being hard on yourself and looking for ways to improve.
But when you get down on yourself following a game due to high expectations, this is seldom in a productive way. More often than not, it’s in a self-critical way and does nothing but lower your confidence and increase stress.
The stress will be centered around needing to make up for your poor performance in your next game. This leads to more expectations and pressure you place on yourself and more trying to control the future.
As a result, we see anxiety increase once more.
Letting Go of High Expectations to Reduce Sports Performance Anxiety
Knowing that high expectations increase sports anxiety going into a game, what can you do to reduce this worry?
The ultimate goal is to get yourself to respond differently and think differently for all three areas I discussed above. But what I want us to focus on is just the first area.
The reason being, by reframing your expectations going into the game, everything else becomes easier.
So what we’re going to do is set a different kind of expectation for yourself. One that will help you instead of increasing worry and anxiety.
Setting a Controllable Expectation for The Game
A defining characteristic of a high expectation is that it is not 100% within your control. We see this clearly when we look at the expectation of wanting to score a certain amount of points or even to just play your best.
There are a lot of factors that go into you playing your best, scoring points, getting hits, etc.
But what about the idea of giving full effort, or having a positive mindset? Are there as many factors that go into those two goals, or are they more within your control?
They are absolutely more within your control. In fact, they are 100% within your control.
Now, when you think about games you’ve played well, would you say you gave it your all? Did you give full effort while you played?
What about your mindset? When you’ve played your best, did you have a positive mindset?
I would imagine so.
Therefore, if you want to play well, doesn’t it make sense to focus on either of those two goals, or any other goal that leads to you playing well?
This is known as being process focused. The more you focus on the process, the less anxiety you will experience.
What also happens, though, is that the more you focus on the process, the better your actual performance becomes.
This is the best approach I’ve found to minimizing high expectations and the anxiety they create.
Instead of setting high expectations for yourself, set controllable process goals.
You can still expect something of yourself. But be sure what you expect of yourself is 100% within your control. Otherwise it will only lead to worry and you trying to control the outcome of the game.
Final Thoughts
High expectations lead to anxiety due to worries about how the game will go. The more you worry about how the game will go, the more you will try to control the outcome.
Wanting to control an outcome and control the future is where we see anxiety thrive.
Instead of setting high expectations for yourself based on the outcome, set expectations that are focused on the process of your game. The elements that are 100% within your control.
Not only will these minimize anxiety, but they will also increase your chances of playing well. Since you are focused on the aspects of your game that lead to a good performance.
Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
