You’ve been thinking about tonight's game since you woke up, and by the time warmups start, your stomach is in knots, your hands feel a little shaky, and you’ve already been to the bathroom three times. You told yourself in the car that you were going to stay positive and trust your training, but now that you’re here, that doesn’t seem to be working. The whistle blows you might feel restless, unsettled, or even frantic, like the play is moving too fast for you to settle in. You might feel the opposite. Maybe your feet feel flat, or you’re struggling to get yourself going in the game. After the game, you keep wondering why you can’t just calm down and play the way you practice.
As a former Division I athlete and coach who now works with high school, college, and professional athletes on sports performance anxiety, this is a common struggle for the athletes I work with. Feeling this way doesn’t mean you’re mentally weak or doing something wrong. But this isn’t a problem that can be solved by simply telling yourself to calm down and practicing a few positive affirmations to repeat before each game.
If your performance-related anxiety is continuing to impact how you show up in competition, then this blog was written for you.
Key Takeaways for Athletes, From a Former Athlete, Coach, and Therapist
Performance anxiety in sports is your nervous system reading the game as a threat and shifting into the stress response, which floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol and produces the butterflies, the shaking, the bathroom trips, and the racing thoughts you cannot turn off. That same stress response takes the thinking part of your brain partly offline, which is why positive self-talk and visualization so often fail right when you need them, and why you cannot think your way out of it in the moment. Many athletes arrive at competition feeling dead rather than nervous because their system has been running the stress response for days, so the work has to start well before game day and has to include the people and pressures around you, not only your own coping skills. Working with the body first, building the capacity to actually feel the anxiety instead of trying to eliminate it, and putting consistent care into your nervous system between competitions is what makes performance anxiety manageable enough that it stops running your game.
How do athletes get out of their head?
Athletes get out of their head by getting into their body. You won’t stop overthinking with more or different thinking, because the racing thoughts are a symptom of a nervous system in the stress response, and the nervous system doesn’t understand verbal language.
When your nervous system detects a threat, real or perceived, it shifts into a sympathetic (fight/flight) state, the stress response. It doesn’t know the difference between a bear chasing you and a big game, and it focuses on one thing: keeping you safe and alive. It doesn’t need you to think positively to do that.
So when an athlete tells me they can’t stop overthinking a play, I don’t start with the thoughts. I teach my athletes the “Body First” approach. Change your posture, bounce, sway, or shake something out, go for a walk, stretch, breathe, or do something with a teammate. Once we work with the physiology, it helps us slow down and create space, and then we can return to our thoughts and maybe work with them. Body first, thoughts later. I wrote more about the nervous system side of this in my post on nervous system flexibility for athletes.
What causes performance anxiety in sports?
Performance anxiety in sports is caused by the nervous system detecting a perceived threat in the performance situation and shifting into a protective response, fight-or-flight, the stress response. For many athletes, that threat is the fear of making a catastrophic mistake (Cox & Kenardy, 1993), or the thought of “What if I mess up?” and “What will people think of me?”
At its core, performance anxiety is anxiety. The stress response releases adrenaline and cortisol, which have a cascading impact throughout the body. This is why athletes experience butterflies, feeling sick to their stomach, needing the bathroom constantly, tingling, sweating, shaking, muscle tension, a racing heart, and a mind moving 100 miles an hour or completely blank. Depending on when the anxiety starts, an athlete may get to the game, or even a little bit into the game, and feel completely dead. Their nervous system has been pumping cortisol for days.
I take a person-in-environment stance, which means I zoom out before handing anyone a coping skill and ask: what is actually creating the anxiety, what is happening around this athlete, and what systems and people are contributing? Many of the athletes I work with also have a lot of underlying nervous system dysregulation (aka ongoing chronic stress), so what looks like performance anxiety is often happening on top of a system that is already spending too much time activated, and that exacerbates the anxiety they experience around performance. I wrote more about that in my post on what chronic stress does to an athlete’s body.
Why can't I just think positively before a game?
Athletes can’t simply think positively before a game because the stress response impairs the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for logic, reasoning, and working memory. The prefrontal cortex is also a huge part of our ability to access strategies like positive self-talk. When we’re anxious, positive self-talk isn’t always accessible.
Arnsten (2009) showed that even mild acute stress causes a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities, and Arnsten and colleagues (2015) described how stress exposure weakens prefrontal networks and shifts the brain from reflective to reflexive control. During the stress response, the brain hands control from the slow, thoughtful part to the fast protective part. This is actually incredibly helpful and smart if you’re in danger but frustrating and overwhelming if you’re trying to run a set play.
That’s why, if you can’t just think positively, it isn’t a sign that you’re mentally weak, and it’s not a matter of willpower. Athletes come to me with a ton of self-blame around this, saying, “If I was mentally tougher, I wouldn’t have this much performance anxiety.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. Anxiety isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s linked to our stress response, which serves a function: to keep us safe and alive. That’s a beautiful thing, and sometimes it goes overboard, which is where we can seek support.
And when we beat ourselves up for it, we make it harder to navigate. When we remove the judgment of ourselves, we’re able to be with this experience and work with it. I’m not knocking positive self-talk. There’s a time and place for it, once the body has come down enough for the prefrontal cortex to come back online.
How to develop a pre-competition mental routine
How do you develop a pre-competition mental routine?
A pre-competition mental routine for an athlete with performance anxiety starts days before the event rather than in the locker room. And because no two athletes are the same, think of these as keys to build from rather than a formula.
1. Work upstream. Most athletes wait too long to manage performance anxiety. Start earlier by mapping out where stress accumulates in your day-to-day, noticing what is happening leading into performance, offloading what you can, and practicing regulation ahead of time.
2. Complete the stress response throughout your week. When you’re navigating ongoing stress, your nervous system can spend too much time in the stress response without enough opportunities to shift out of it. Completing the stress response means giving your body opportunities to move through that stress rather than continuing to carry it. Movement, crying, laughing, or connecting with someone you trust can all help. The goal is to work with stress consistently so you’re not arriving at competition already depleted.
3. Prioritize recovery and sleep. Many athletes are navigating chronic stress, making recovery an important part of helping the nervous system return to baseline. Sleep is a big piece of that, especially if you lie awake the night before a big game. We have to prepare the body for rest by helping it shift from a more sympathetic to a parasympathetic state. We can’t aim for perfect sleep, but we can work toward better sleep in and around performance consistently. I wrote more about this in my post on building a nervous system recovery routine.
4. Intentionally explore performance-enhancing practices. Meditation, visualization, and breath work are often recommended for performance anxiety, but they aren't supportive for everyone. When you're already anxious, these practices can be difficult to access and, for some athletes, may even increase the sense of threat. For others, they help. Sometimes we have to meet the energy of the anxiety rather than trying to force ourselves to calm down. This is highly individual, so get curious about what works for your system rather than assuming a particular practice is right for you.
How do you overcome performance anxiety in sports?
The key to working with sports performance anxiety isn’t elimination. The work is changing an athlete’s relationship to it, which means understanding the stress response, mapping how the anxiety shows up, and building the capacity to feel it without being ruled by it.
What keeps most athletes stuck isn’t the anxiety itself; it’s how they relate to it. Beating themselves up for having it, expecting not to have it, trying to get rid of it, jumping to fix it before they feel it, and ignoring it are the five patterns I see most. Each one keeps an athlete from getting to know their experience and befriending it, which in my opinion is the foundation of working with it.
I take a two-pronged approach, because I think we tend to focus too much on the individual and on immediate coping skills without zooming out. You can teach an athlete all of the coping skills you want, but if the environment and the people around them are really contributing to the anxiety, there are only so many coping skills you can do.
First, we look at the person and the environment: the systems and people around the athlete, the contextual factors contributing to the anxiety, and what is happening in the lead-up to performance. This is also where we look at how to offload some of that stress, because an athlete who arrives at the start of competition after days in a stress response is dealing with much more than those first few minutes.
Second, we build the toolkit, and I mean a comprehensive one, not just one or two coping skills. That includes acute skills for the moment, and long-term nervous system care that threads consistent regulation and safety into the system, instead of reaching for a coping skill only when the athlete is already highly activated. I don’t really work with the thoughts until we’ve worked with the body and the stress response.
It’s not about choosing between coping skills and the bigger picture. We have to work with both.
That is the work inside my [Nervous System Resiliency Program](INTERNAL LINK NEEDED, confirm coaching page URL), where I work with athletes at the high school, college, and professional levels to understand their stress response, map their anxiety, address the root causes, build tolerance for feeling it, and develop skills they can use in a variety of settings.
I know this experience from the inside, because as a Division I athlete, my own performance anxiety felt completely uncontrollable at times. I truly believe that if I had understood any of this back then, I think it would have gone differently for me.
Coaching doesn’t eliminate anxiety, and that’s not the point. But it does help make it manageable so athletes and their performance aren’t ruled by it, and many of the athletes I work with find that things like eating on game day and sleeping the night before get easier.
If you’re reading this wondering what’s wrong with you, nothing is. Performance anxiety is a human experience, and 99.9% of the time there’s a reason for it, based on your lived experience, your current sport experience, and the care and resources you have or have had to navigate it.
Before you close this page, notice what your body is doing right now, whether your shoulders are up, whether your breath is short, or whether your stomach is tight thinking about your next competition. You do not need to fix any of it. Noticing is the first skill, and it is one you can build.
If your performance anxiety has started to run your game, you can apply for the Athlete Resilience Program or book a free 15-minute consultation to explore whether working together feels like the right fit. If it helps to know who you would be working with, you can read more about my background.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to get out of your own head in sports?
The fastest way to get out of your own head in sports is to work with your body before your thoughts, because overthinking during competition is a sign the nervous system is in the stress response, and the thinking brain is partly offline. Change your posture, move, shake out your arms, breathe in a way that matches your energy, and orient to what is around you. Once the body settles, focus and self-talk become available again.
How to overcome mental blocks in sports?
A mental block in sports is usually the stress response interrupting a skill the athlete already has, so it is addressed by settling the body first, understanding what the block is protecting against, and rebuilding the skill in low-pressure conditions before adding pressure back. Forcing the movement or thinking harder about it tends to make the block worse. Support from someone who understands the nervous system helps when a block persists.
What are the symptoms of sports performance anxiety?
Symptoms of sports performance anxiety include a racing heart, butterflies or nausea, needing the bathroom repeatedly, shaking, muscle tension, sweating, narrowed vision, racing thoughts or going blank, irritability, trouble sleeping before competition, loss of appetite on game day, and wanting to avoid practice or games. Anxiety that runs for days before competition can also leave an athlete feeling flat and exhausted at the start.
Is performance anxiety a sign of mental weakness?
Performance anxiety is not a sign of mental weakness. It is the nervous system's stress response doing its job of keeping you safe, and it happens to athletes at every level, including the best performers in the world. The response impairs the part of the brain that handles positive thinking, which is why willpower alone does not fix it and why learning to work with the body matters more than being tougher.
About the Author
Emily Perrin, LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker, former Division I soccer player, and former Division I coach. She works with current and former athletes who are dealing with anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, and the emotional weight that can come with years in competitive sports.
Having spent nearly 15 years in athletics, Emily understands the pressure athletes often feel to keep going, stay disciplined, and look like they have it handled, even when they are struggling. Her work combines clinical training with lived experience in sport.
Emily's approach is trauma-informed and body-centered. She helps clients make sense of patterns like emotional shutdown, overthinking, people-pleasing, chronic stress, and harsh self-criticism. Her goal is to help athletes feel more grounded in who they are outside of performance, achievement, and sport.
This post is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact your local emergency services or call or text 988 in the United States.
References
Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648
Arnsten, A. F. T., Raskind, M. A., Taylor, F. B., & Connor, D. F. (2015). The effects of stress exposure on prefrontal cortex: Translating basic research into successful treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder. Neurobiology of Stress, 1, 89–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ynstr.2014.10.002