PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

Performance Anxiety

Performance Anxiety

Anxiety

Anxiety is a feeling of apprehension that is a normal reaction to everyday life stressors. Feelings of anxiety are generally experienced in momentary instances due to the stress of daily life. When anxiety persists and affects the ability to function adequately in everyday activities, this is considered a sign of an anxiety disorder (Lloyd & Mayes, 2005, Pp. 28).

The mind and body are intrinsically linked. Just like the body, the mind needs to be "trained" to be as productive as it can be - how can you expect to reach peak performance in your sport if your mind is not fully focused on the game? Personal worries about money, family or relationships, sometimes underlying fears of failure, injury and humiliation can be holding us back without us even realizing it.

Performance Anxiety

To an athlete, performance anxiety is like the kiss of death. When this phenomenon starts to happen, the athlete involved panics and questions his skills. This happens when the athlete loses faith in his ability to win. Instead of giving his 100%, he can't give anything more than half of what he can do. An athlete's mindset is as important as his muscles and skills.

Discussion

The moment an athlete starts doubting his abilities, his performance will suffer. The more he performs poorly, the less he is confident that he can win the next time around. Management companies of athletes pay huge sums of money to therapists and psychologists just so their athletes will never have to go through this kind of anxiety.

Some factors that contribute to performance anxiety among athletes include insecurity about age, injury and salary. Aging athletes are more susceptible to this kind of disorder because they feel that their market value has diminished.

Self doubts regarding one's performance and a desire to impress others will create a high level of anxiety which leads to 'choking' as the athletes' focus on the game is lost as is his/her physical control. Athletes that maintain a proper combination of showing their physical skills and developing their mental game are able to adopt to any unfamiliar situation that they encounter (Hardy & Parfitt, 2007, Pp. 178).

Despite having popular appeal and being intuitively plausible, this traditional approach has been criticised for oversimplifying the relationship between anxiety and performance. It would be fair to suggest that the most central of these implies that moderate levels of intensity are appropriate for all athletes and does not account for individual differences in relation to an athlete's response to the stress of competition. Additionally, difficulties in the measurement of arousal have curbed the predictive validity of the theory in relation to the fact that confidence, motivation and trait anxiety are not taken into context and thus, alternative models have developed.

A model known as the Individual Zones of Optimal Functioning (IZOF) evolved in response to the concerns about the inverted-U hypothesis which was created by a Russian sport psychologist named Yuri Hanin. The IZOF model deviates from the inverted-U hypothesis in respect to the concept that the ...