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Topics: Performance Anxiety
Universities: Radboud University, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
Researchers: Arne Nieuwenhuys and Raoul RD Oudejans

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Every athlete, at some stage in their career, has had the experience of performance anxiety: racing thoughts, jitters, excessive sweating, and an inability to “concentrate” or put their focus on the task at hand.

Performance anxiety is also costly to teams, organizations, and individuals. Inability to perform at generally acknowledged levels by teams and individuals can lead to loss of prize money, relegations to lower divisions, and generally suboptimal outcomes.

It’s a clear problem.

A leading position in the last few decades is that of Attentional Control Theory. This theory stipulates that under conditions of performance anxiety, athletes have the tendency to continually shift their focus toward bottom-up, threat-related stimuli. This includes both internal and external. For example, an athlete who’s experiencing performance anxiety might be fixated with their thoughts: “what will happen if I lose?” “What will happen if I can’t perform?” Or they may also shift attention to threats in their environment: “Coach is watching; I can’t mess this up in front of them” “Sponsors are here… I need to play well this game.”

This takes away precious cognitive resources from being task and execution oriented.

That this focus on attention is too narrow. And that it’s also important to consider how performance anxiety impacts:

For example, those with performance anxiety have a tendency to view ambiguous scenarios as more threatening than those without performance anxiety. This can lead to impacts on decision-making, such as being reactionary or choosing strange responses.

Performance anxiety also impacts physical (physiological) responses in the body. Responses such as increases in muscle tension and degraded cardiovascular outputs.

Have athletes who consistently make “safe” decisions? Or can’t perform in matches and games the way you see them perform in practice?

Have athletes who complain excessively about being fatigued compared to what you think their physical output was?

They may be suffering from performance anxiety.

Playing under performance anxiety often requires greater compensatory mental efforts, which may increase perceived effort and fatigue in athletes. This can lead to slower recovery and higher perceptions of exertion from athletes.

Consider implementing interventions that train attentional control, anxiety management, imagery, and training under pressure. Based on this review, reductions in performance anxiety can also result in better decision-making and less stress on physical exertion.

That’s it from us today.

See you next week.

P.s. this is a review, not a study. Meaning authors did not complete an experiment, but rather made comment on a research area in sport and performance psychology.

Reference

Nieuwenhuys, A., & Oudejans, R. R. D. (2017). Anxiety and performance: Perceptual-motor behavior in high-pressure contexts. Current Opinion in Psychology, 16, 28–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.03.019