Performance Anxiety - Girl in Spotlight
Anxiety,  Featured,  Mental Health

That’s Me in the Spotlight: Thoughts on Performance Anxiety

For today’s post, I want to talk about performance anxiety. You know, that debilitating fear or extreme case of nerves. Sometimes we call it “stage fright.” It overtakes some of us when we’re faced with doing a particular task in front of a group of people (um, public speaking anyone?). To start our discussion, let me tell you a story:

Ancient History

Once upon a time, in a decade long, long ago, I was a competitive figure skater. (OK, it wasn’t that long ago, but it certainly feels that way to me.) It has been many years since I laced up my skates and stepped onto the ice. Even so, I can still feel the wind on my face and smell the familiar, comforting scent of Zamboni exhaust fumes when I close my eyes. (You may find that strange, but, to quote Apocalypse Now, “Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of [Zamboni fumes] in the morning”).

Every year when U.S. Figure Skating’s national championships roll around, I feel a twinge of longing for that bygone period of my life. As I watch some skaters triumph and others flounder, I can’t help but reflect on my own experience. Generally speaking, most skaters (and probably most athletes in other sports as well) either thrive on the pressure of competition or it crushes them. I belonged, unquestionably, to the latter camp.

I know I was never destined to be a national or Olympic champion. But I can’t help but think that what I now recognize as crippling performance anxiety prevented me from realizing my full potential as a skater. Every competition, no matter how big or small, filled me with a sense of dread.

Performance Anxiety in Action

I was so afraid of falling while not wearing gloves that I insisted every competition dress I wore have long, heavy sleeves. If I did fall, at least I would only cut up my hands and not my arms too, I reasoned. I refused to leave the arena while my competitors performed. That meant I saw and heard the crowd’s reaction to their performances (which coaches generally discourage). But, I was too terrified I would miss my name being called. As I waited for my turn to take the ice, inevitably I felt queasy. My whole body shook. My legs turned to Jell-O. And, without fail, I always cried. Sobbed, really. Hysterically.

The grip of my performance anxiety was so tight, my body couldn’t find any way to relieve the tension other than uncontrollable blubbering. Coaches didn’t know how to handle me. They probably had never encountered a skater whose nerves manifested the way mine did.

Some simply told me to stop crying. Not possible when you aren’t in control of your emotions! Another threatened to take elements out of my program if I continued to miss them during practice sessions. (The judges were watching.) It was an equally ineffective tactic. A cornered, frightened animal typically will opt for one of two courses of action when threatened. It will either give in or lash out. My twelve-year-old, emotionally volatile self chose the second option. I retorted “don’t threaten me!” to the coach’s threat. Unfortunately, my volume was just a tad too loud to avoid drawing the attention of other nearby skaters and coaches. (Needless to say, that particular coach/skater partnership ended shortly thereafter. My outburst had embarrassed the coach to a degree from which there could be no recovery or forgiveness.)

It wasn’t the coaches’ fault, though. Nobody trained them to contend with the type and severity of the performance anxiety I had.

Coping with Performance Anxiety

My parents took me to see a sports psychologist, but my nervousness persisted. In retrospect, and viewed through the lens of the clinical psychology training I underwent in graduate school, I think I can pretty safely say that I needed to see a different type of psychologist to gain control of those nerves.

From what I recall, the sports psychologist’s approach at the time* relied heavily upon visualizations (imagine yourself landing the jump; picture yourself skating a clean program) and positive affirmations (“I am a talented skater,” “No one will remember if I fall”). This method was doomed to fail.

First of all, I struggle with visualization to this day because I am a verbal thinker, not a visual one. My thoughts occur in words and sentences, not in pictures. (Hence I am writing this story, not drawing it for you. I do have a diagram further down the page, though, so stay tuned.) Second, positive affirmations do little to change one’s thoughts when asserted blindly and without any evidence to support them (more on this to come). Finally, the problem wasn’t that I was choking when the pressure was on. (Think of basketball star missing a clutch free throw or a place kicker missing the field goal that would win the game.) Most of the time I performed pretty well.

A Different Kind of Treatment

No, the type of psychologist I needed to see was one who could treat social anxiety disorder (of which performance anxiety is a part). I almost certainly met the criteria for diagnosis (quoted from the DSM-IV, the official diagnostic source at the time; I have removed the irrelevant passages and denoted them with ellipses for clarity):

  • “A marked and persistent fear of one or more […] performance situations in which the person is exposed to […] possibly scrutiny by others.” CHECK. The judges, by definition, scrutinize your performance to provide scores.
  • “Exposure to the feared social situation almost invariably provokes anxiety, which may […] in children […] be expressed by crying, tantrums, freezing…” CHECK. See my description above.
  • “The feared [… ]performance situations […] are endured with intense anxiety or distress.” CHECK. Trust me on this one; that’s how I felt.
  • “The […] distress in the feared […] performance situation(s) interferes significantly with the person’s […] occupational functioning […] or there is marked distress about having the phobia.” CHECK. I think it’s safe to consider skating my occupation at the time; my life revolved around it. I seriously entertained the idea of quitting the sport altogether because performing made me so nervous.

Years later, I finally made this realization. I was discussing Thought Records with the five or six fellow graduate students in my Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) class. We were seated at a small table in the conference room of my mentor’s basement lab in the Psychology building.

Thought Records

The Thought Record exercise, most notably popularized in Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky’s book Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think, involves identifying the negative thoughts that automatically pop into our heads in a particular situation, then examining the evidence we have that both supports and refutes these thoughts (this is a simplified explanation, but you get the gist). This exercise is predicated on a core tenet of CBT, illustrated in this lovely diagram I created. (Which was once scrawled on a whiteboard somewhere by a professor I had, who was a disciple of the venerable Aaron T. Beck, who developed the underlying theory, and who tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built. OK, maybe not that last part, but I was on a roll.)

In essence, the idea here is that in any given situation (say, a figure skating competition), we experience an interplay of thoughts (“Falling means I’m a failure”), feelings (nervousness, anxiety), behavior (staying in the arena while competitors perform),** and physiology (sweating, heart palpitations, nausea). Some of these things are a lot easier to target for change than others. Physiology is pretty difficult to alter without medication. And, I challenge you not to feel angry when someone cuts you off in traffic or hurt when someone says something nasty about you. (More power to you if you find it easy to switch your emotional response like that; most people can’t.) But, changes in any one of these domains can cause changes to the others.

The Takeaway

Truth be told, the CBT approach probably would have really helped me reduce my performance anxiety. Negative thoughts flooded my mind. They begged me to challenge them with evidence and revise them into more reasonable assertions.

What if I fall?*** Everyone will see it, I won’t place well, and I’ll be a failure. Wait a minute! What are some more accurate thoughts?

  • Some people will see it, but they probably won’t remember.
  • The last time I fell during a performance, most people barely noticed. My interpretation of the music captivated them more than the fall.
  • I might not place well, but I’m only in control of my own performance, and others might fall too.
  • There are more competitions, and the results of this one don’t define me.
  • I have placed high at some events and lower at others. All I can do is the best I can.
  • Even if I fall on one jump, I can still succeed at all the rest. One isolated fall has no bearing on the rest of my program unless I let it.

The hardest part of this exercise is, undoubtedly, identifying the evidence that does not support our negative thoughts. Most people get stuck on the confirmatory examples and can’t move forward. Without the evidence to back them up, though, those anxiety-relieving restructured thoughts revert to the type of useless affirmations I mentioned earlier. So, if you think this technique could help you relieve some stress in your own life, I urge you to stick it out. Find some support and push past the easy stopping point until you can find the evidence you need to counteract the negative thoughts. If you do, you just might get some of the peace of mind I wish I’d had as a little girl, twenty years ago, standing alone at center ice with all eyes cast down upon me, praying for the pins-and-needles sensation to leave my legs and waiting for the music to begin.


Notes:

*I have no idea what the current best practices are for sports psychologists.

**Some people argue that crying belongs in the behavior category, but I tend to disagree. For me, crying was an uncontrollable physiological response to stress. I couldn’t stop it, no matter how badly I wanted to, which puts it squarely in the physiology camp to me.

***This type of “what if” question counts as a negative automatic thought because it’s rhetorical, and a whole slew of answers in the form of statements are hiding underneath.


References:

Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders : DSM-IV. Washington, DC :American Psychiatric Association, 1994.


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6 Comments

  • K E Garland

    This is useful. A therapist I once went to introduced me to CBT and it helped…a lot. Also, I recently read Iyanla Vanzant’s book, Get Over It!, which is predicated on CBT, but she also has four practices you can do at the end of the book.

    Also, I agree. Crying should not be in the behavior category. Since I’ve become more aware of myself, I realize tears are always right at the back of my eyeballs. Anything can happen to elicit my tears. I’ve just learned to keep them at bay.

    • Lori

      It’s great that you have figured out a way to keep the tears at bay! I never could, no matter how badly I wanted to. People who haven’t had the experience tend not to understand—-I was reprimanded at a previous job and told “you can’t cry here,” as if I had some control. “This is a business,” they said, “and your crying is embarrassing.” I wanted to reply with “no sh*t, Sherlock! Imagine how embarrassing this is for me!” What person, in their right mind, wants to be dubbed as someone who can’t pull it together at the office? Certainly not me! I needed to change my biochemistry a bit before holding back tears was even in the realm of possibilities. At least now I can walk into the pet store on the day of an adoption event and not crumble into a pile of snot and tears!

  • Vivian Franyi Kolofa

    Great piece, Lori. I still get that sick feeling in my stomach every time I have to talk or sing in front of a crowd. I have used some of the techniques you have talked about both to help me and those I mentored over the years without realizing why or how they could work to help overcome anxiety
    Nice to see your explanation.

  • Emily

    I agree that the crying is not always behavioral. When I am extremely stressed out or nervous or extremely angry, my reaction when whatever it is, is over, I cry my eyes out. I can’t stop. I always feel embarrassed but I can’t stop so I just have to let it pass. Like the hiccup crying and not breathing crying. Sucks.

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