How Your Performance Anxiety is a Performance Upgrade
You’re in the locker room, 5 minutes before the biggest performance of your career…
What are you probably feeling, physically, in this moment? Perhaps a racing heart, butterflies, sweat, and shaky hands are true for you.
These are symptoms of the body's stress response, which activates a part of the nervous system that causes these side effects.
Here’s a question that might be easy to answer:
How do you feel when you experience these sensations - good or bad?
Many people dislike this state - they’re uncomfortable with the butterflies in their stomach, the shakiness. It often manifests in anxiety, another feeling many people would love to be free from.
In sport psychology training, we help athletes tolerate this state of stress more effectively, which can lead to better performances. We even encourage people to love this feeling!
But is this even possible?
With a change in perspective, you may learn to fall in love with this pregame anxious state, or at least tolerate it.
This article provides reasons to appreciate your body’s stress response, and all of the uncomfortable sensations that come with it.
By welcoming, and not dreading, these physiological changes, you’ll feel less anxious and more confident, leading to better performances.
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Upgrades, whether in video games (putting points into speed) or in real life (receiving a promotion, increasing income), are often thought of having only pros, no cons. However, upgrades often come with a downside. Upgrading the speed of your character in a video game may include a penalty to strength. An upgrade to your job may mean more status and income, but also more responsibility and stress.
Back to your pregame locker room anxiety.
The components of the stress response (racing heart, shaky hands, butterflies) are at the front of your focus. They feel unpleasant, and your mind is programmed to pay attention to the unpleasant feelings as they might signal danger.
Although your life may not be at stake, status and the opportunity for advancement in your sport may be.
While you’re focused on the uncomfortable, you’re locked into the cons of your body’s essential upgrade system for performance: adrenaline.
Adrenaline, sometimes called epinephrine, is an incredible hormone the body releases when you need physical and mental upgrades to performance. It also explains why we feel the way we do before big moments.
Once again, let’s look at the stress response’s downgrades many people focus on, but now with the reasons behind them and their corresponding performance upgrades.
Increase in heart rate
Downgrade: a racing heart can feel uncomfortable.
Explanation: extra blood is pumped to the brain and muscles.
Upgrade: boosts to strength, speed, reaction time, and ability to strategize.
Nervous shaky hands
Downgrade: shakiness when wanting to be calm or sit still.
Explanation: dopamine is released in the body.
Upgrade: dopamine is essential in helping you move with peak efficiency. A lack of dopamine causes movements to be delayed and uncoordinated. Not ideal for sports! Excess dopamine causes unnecessary movements, like shaky hands.
Fun fact: surgeons sometimes bounce their foot up and down while operating as an outlet for excess dopamine so they maintain steady hands.
Increase in breathing rate
Downgrade: rapid breathing feels uncomfortable, may trigger anxiety.
Explanation: adrenaline increases breathing rate.
Upgrade: you take in more oxygen to supply your brain and muscles, allowing them to function at a higher capacity.
Excess sweating
Downgrade: discomfort.
Explanation: increased activity in the body increases heat. Internal temperature is maintained through sweating.
Upgrade: your body can fire up the systems into overdrive that are necessary for performance.
Feeling “butterflies”
Downgrade: stomach discomfort.
Explanation: blood is shuttled from your stomach to your brain and muscles, which causes brief contractions in the stomach due to a drop in blood and oxygen.
Upgrade: once again, your body is put in a state that can perform near your peak potential!
Anxiety
Perhaps the most uncomfortable downgrade you experience as a result of the body’s stress response is anxiety and worry. This has a less straight forward explanation. It’s all about the brain doing too much to try and protect you.
All of the prior stress response components, at one point, were felt before a painful game or costly mistake. Maybe it’s happened over and over again.
Your brain locks these in as conditions that may once again lead to this pain.
The result: you’re conditioned to (automatically) feel anxiety and worry at the onset of your stress response.
The brain is programmed to be on the lookout for danger. So, when these downgrades are associated with pain, your brain will try its best to signal this danger to you. When this signal gets too strong, it may manifest in anxiety, panic attacks, and perhaps even withdrawal from the game or sport.
What doesn’t happen, though, is your brain associating these “downgrades” with incredible performances. Those times where you, before a big moment, felt your heart beating out of your chest and butterflies knotting up your stomach. And despite that discomfort, you turned in a world class performance where you dominated.
Again, the brain is programmed to look out for danger. It doesn’t care to condition you to think “remember how I felt all of these stress response downgrades, and then I kicked butt?” That’s how the brain can be faulty in the age we live in today - the brain thinks our life is in danger before a game, but it’s just a sport.
Today, we use the adrenaline boost to hunt for goals, not food.
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The purpose of this article isn’t to change your brain’s programming. The goal is to help you work more effectively with how your brain operates.
Whether it’s before the game, or you’re moments away from shooting a free-throw, your brain will lock on to these uncomfortable sensations produced by the stress response.
Instead of spending energy trying to stop these automatic thoughts, or getting frustrated with how uncomfortable the adrenaline is making you feel, remind yourself of the upgrades, replacing your focus on the downgrades with more productive thoughts.
It can be in the form of gratitude:
“This racing heart is going to allow me to be as fast as possible”
“I can perform my best because of these sensations"
Or acceptance:
“This is how the body works. Everyone feels what I’m feeling to some degree”
“I can’t stop how I feel. Instead, I’ll focus on what’s within my control”
The refocus routine is one of the most important and versatile tools you can use to enhance your mental game.
It requires awareness of your stress and anxiety being produced by your body’s natural stress response. Once aware, you shift your mindset with a phrase like one above. Try pairing it with a physical cue to activate more of the brain and increase the effectiveness of your refocus routine. For example, add in a focal point to consistently look to (the scoreboard or a happy face drawn on your glove). Include ratio breathing to dampen the stress response and manage your rapid heart rate and breathing.
Summary: the uncomfortable sensations brought on by the body’s stress response that you feel before big moments is a necessary downgrade that comes with incredible upgrades to your performance as a result of adrenaline. Keeping this in mind can manage the discomfort and improve your focus.
Find me on instagram @zelicoperformance, and feel free to reach out to me with any questions and comments!
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