Why Anxiety Drives Both Peak Performance and Poor Performance
Anxiety is a feeling of pressure, worry, or stress usually caused by an important upcoming event with an uncertain outcome. In sports, almost every competition has elements of importance and uncertainty. As a result, anxiety is a normal feeling all athletes must learn to deal with.
Typically, when an athlete has anxiety before a sporting event there is a focus on the anxiety causing poor performance. However, the reality is that anxiety is just as important for driving peak performance as it is for driving poor performance. Therefore, it’s critical to manage anxiety and not to eliminate it.
This important observation was first made by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson in 1908. Being that this was over 100 years ago, you would think that everyone would understand this by now. Unfortunately, if you ask youth sports parents in particular, most would tell you that anxiety is bad and only hurts performance.
The key takeaway is that all athletes need to have the right amount of anxiety to perform their best. Too little or too much anxiety is the problem. With this in mind, the challenge is finding balance.
For me, this is more compelling evidence on why the mental side of sports is so important. Anxiety in sports is 100% mental. If an athlete learns to manage the level of anxiety they feel through visualization, deep breathing and mindfulness techniques, they can have a real tangible advantage over the competition.