Q: How can I overcome performance nerves and anxiety? (Part 2)
Part 2. Flow with the Feeling & Mental Drill #4 Paced Breathing
This is a 2-part article! If you missed the first one, you can find it here. Here’s what you can expect in part 2:
Should we be trying to get rid of our anxiety?
Thinking that feeds performance anxiety
Mental drill #4. Paced breathing
Have you ever ridden a wooden roller coaster?
The ride is often bumpy and the turns are jarring. As you ride, you might feel yourself getting stiff and hanging on for dear life! What I have found though, is that the more you resist the motion of the coaster and work to stabilize yourself, the worse your experience becomes.
In fact, allowing your body to be flexible and absorb the motion of the coaster can result in a much more enjoyable experience—one without a sore back!
Competitive sport comes with a variety of emotional experiences.
Out of habit, we often categorize feelings we encounter like excitement, joy, and pride, as being “good” and feelings like anxiety, disappointment, and frustration as being “bad”. The result of these labels is that we might work hard to avoid or suppress any feelings that we decide are “negative”.
Much like resisting the flow of the roller coaster, we wrestle our undesired feeling states and scramble to use strategies to alleviate our experience. The problem is, using mental strategies to get rid of our feelings often backfires.
Instead, naming your emotional experience (Mental skill #1) is a key first step to accepting and allowing any feeling to exist within your internal world. To be more psychologically flexible, we must learn to honor our emotional experiences without feeling controlled by them. After all, an emotion is just a mental signal that we can observe and allow to flow through us.
Just like a roller coaster, any emotion we feel is a temporary ride.
It cannot, and does not, last forever.
Why waste precious energy resisting it?
All too often athletes anticipate that performance anxiety will be a detriment to their performance. In reality, it can actually elevate performance to a greater level. Theories of performance anxiety state that an optimal level of physiological activation is needed to achieve optimal performance. Feeling “amped up” and buzzing with extra energy can be useful as your body prepares to exert a high level of effort.
I love asking athletes to describe their moments of peak performance in our meetings. Surprisingly, when I follow-up their story by asking, “Did you feel nervous?” most of them (if not all) emphatically say, yes!
They go on to share how they also felt energized, focused on the proper cues, and found themselves leaning in to the adrenaline that is produced when in a challenging situation. Focusing on aspects of their performance in their control and allowing nerves to fuel their pursuits created personal bests, resilience despite adversity, and positioned them for success.
I don’t believe that we need to rid ourselves of anxiety to achieve our best. Instead, noticing and allowing the emotion when it arises helps us to more freely shift our attention to other relevant cues or helpful actions in the moment.
What types of thinking drive performance anxiety?
Curiosity can help you explore what thinking patterns may be fueling your experience of anxiety. As I mentioned, any emotion you feel serves as a signal for how you are interpreting the world around you. Thinking patterns that shift your focus to aspects of performance outside of your control or place an overemphasis on your shortcomings can drive how nervous you feel.
Take a look at these examples:
Comparison
Critical self-talk
Concern of others’ opinions
Emphasis on winning
A focus on avoiding failure or other consequences
Worrying about the future or repeating a mistake
Viewing your symptoms of anxiety as hurtful to performance
Mental Drill #4. Paced Breathing
While we don’t need resit or attempt to avoid our experience of anxiety, we can reduce the physical experience of anxiety and feel more in control by regulating our breath. This is because breathing is an action we control in the present moment and shifts our focus away from feeding our anxiety with unproductive thoughts.
Before you begin, get curious about where in your body you are experiencing anxiety. Some people locate a tightness in their chest or a pit in their stomach. Once you’ve found it, breathe in through the nose, and visualize your breath going to that part of your body—allowing it to expand. As you exhale out through your mouth, imagine the intensity of the emotion softening.
You should feel your belly moving more than your chest when you breathe deeply. Counting is also an excellent way to pace your breathing and engage more with the present moment. Try inhaling for 3 seconds, and exhaling for 6 seconds. As and added benefit, breathing in this manner will naturally slow your heart rate down while giving your mind something else to do.
After 3 - 4 rounds of breathing, see if you can identify what important action or next step you could focus on right now that could position you toward the goal you wish to accomplish. Repeat as needed!
Thanks for reading,
- Dr. Di