I Have Performance Anxiety — SS #28

For as long as I can remember, I have been anxious on the tennis court.

At times, it has been debilitating.

There are way too many instances to recount one-by-one here but a particularly salient example is when I was drawn against a man in his 40s in an open draw in Brisbane (at Shaw Park) many, many years ago. I was a junior training probably 3–4 times a week, and, well, he was a player who, from memory, might have been a UTR 6 or 7 at best.

I knew that I should have won the match easily.

I was the player who trained all the time, and he was just some weekend warrior.

Yet when the match started I recall my thoughts being a crazy jumble.

I should win.

What if I lose?

I need to win.

What will my dad think?

What will my coaches think?

What about my friends?

When we started, I remember feeling short of breath and, almost irrationally, being so anxious that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get a single ball in.

Every time it came back onto my side of the court, I would just poke it over and into the court and hope that he would miss.

It was a painful experience, and a thought that imprinted in my mind at the time was something like, “Why am I doing this? Why am I playing tennis?”

I hated it.

With every pushed ball I despised being on the court.

It was as if my game had abandoned me.

And I simply could not execute automatically.

I made it through, though. I won. A match that someone of my skill level at that time should have won maybe 6–1, 6-2 took a lot longer. And it left me wondering why I’m even spending time on the court.

I would have been maybe 14 or 15 at that time.

I used to think that I hated tennis.

But mostly it was that I hated feeling that way.

Interestingly, there are a lot of theories and models from sports psychology that we could draw on to explain what was—and is—going on in the mind of an athlete who experiences these kinds of emotions and feelings in a competitive environment.

Attentional Control Theory (ACT) and Cognitive Anxiety

Eysenck et al. (2007) have posited the interplay between cognitive anxiety and motor performance—called Attentional Control Theory (ACT). Cognitive anxiety is central to this model; here’s how it works:

Anxiety Impacts Attentional Control: ACT notes that anxiety, specifically cognitive anxiety—such as the type that I was experiencing during that match—impairs attentional control in athletes, making it harder for us to focus on task-relevant information. For example, a player struggling with cognitive anxiety might struggle to track the ball or adjust their footwork to put their body in the right place. Basically, anxiety shifts the balance of attention from goal-directed to stimulus-driven attention. Another way to think about it is that anxious individuals are more likely to focus on distractions (internal thoughts or external stimuli) rather than the task at hand.

Impact on Working Memory: Cognitive anxiety also tends to overload our working memory. This occurs because of increased self-focused thoughts or worries and can detract from cognitive tasks that require focus or motor planning. Put another way, because we’re so fixated on internal thoughts, worries, and doubts, there’s only so much bandwidth that our brain can use to do all the other important stuff; like hit an incoming fuzzy yellow ball!

To Conclude on Attentional Control Theory: Under cognitive anxiety, attentional control diminishes, leading to poorer performance. So, cognitive anxiety, according to ACT, disrupts attentional control by prioritizing stimulus-driven attention, overloading working memory, which can, in turn, lead to performance decline.

The simplest way to think about ACT is this: excessive focus and rumination on thoughts and an internal focus caused by cognitive anxiety really screws with our ability to perform automatically.

My Most Recent Case and How I Overcame Cognitive Anxiety

My most recent case of performance anxiety came on a random Friday night. I’ve just moved, and I’m looking for players to hit and train with.

So I found a guy 4.5/5.0 NTRP player through a group chat and as is the case with most recreational players, all they want to do is play sets. They don’t want to work on their skills but just want to play matches.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, then, that after a customary 10-minute warm-up, my new partner asked me if I wanted to play a set.

I normally say no because there are specific things I’m working on in my own game (I’m taking the advice that I give to my virtual students, shocking!) but this time, I said fine.

And what do you know, I became incredibly anxious.

I started to think, What will happen if I lose this set? Will he think he’s better than me? Will he not want to invite me back to play with him? Even though I’m way more skilled than this guy he’s going to finish the match thinking he’s better than me.

What if I lose?

The injustice of it all was taking up my mental resources (think back to Attentional Control Theory). My cognitive anxiety was through the roof. I was thinking, How can I lose to this guy?

And more than that, I was thinking, What will happen if I lose to this guy?

He’s going to tell all his buddies that I’m not that good of a player.

So, clearly, if we use the ACT model, then my cognitive anxiety was causing me to focus on the bottom-up, stimuli such as internal thoughts and worries compared to just focusing on my performance.

0–0

Sure enough, the set starts, and my serve, normally one of my strengths after I rebuilt it, is struggling. My first-serve percentage was probably at 20% and more than that, because there was so much thinking and anxiety, I was not even swinging fast.

Serves were hitting the net at a pathetically slow pace.

In one service game, I might have double-faulted 3 times.

I was so tight and tense and anxious that I hit a forehand return into the bottom of the net.

Yikes.

Consistent, negative, automatic thoughts were rushing through my head.

1-2

I’m serving again now and I can’t stop the thoughts in my mind.

This guy is going to beat me in a set. I know that beating someone in a set almost means close to nothing, but for him, he’s going to think that he’s a better player than me. And that’s going to mean that it is laughable that I’m trying to give advice to other club and recreational players—and that I’m trying to coach them!

Did I tell you that cognitive anxiety sucks?

More double faults. More pathetic serves.

Stupid errors where I’m just thinking that I want to get the ball in and end up missing anyway.

I get broken. He holds serve after a tightly contested game where I miss some easy returns.

What will happen if I lose to this guy?

1-4

We sit down at the change of ends and… I need something. Something to break me out of this performance cycle. And I wish I had some epiphany for me to convey to you. Some super effective method that quickly turned me back into playing automatically… but that’s not true, and as you know I hate this idea of the magic pill that cures your ills that is often sold across online spaces.

But I did take my own advice from previous issues, which is backed by the literature, and what I did was that I tried box-breathing for a bit.

In truth, I had started it during the prior games, and all I was trying to do was just reduce my anxiety. Calm down a little bit so that I could gain a handle on what was going on.

Deep breath in. Hold for 4 seconds. Exhale for 4 seconds. Hold for 4 seconds. Repeat.

Slowly, I felt my anxiety reduce. And I shifted my focus to where I basically tried to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) myself. Here I used a mixture of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), where I focused in on irrational thoughts and their impacts and also looked at cognitive distortions from CBT.

Ok. If you lose, does that really mean you’re a worse player than this guy? Not really. That’s irrational.

If you lose, will that mean that you can’t share all the knowledge, information, theories, models, and experience you’ve gained in 20 years of tennis anymore? No. I’m catastrophizing. I’m also mixing in some all-or-nothing thinking and emotional reasoning.

Once I got a handle on what I was experiencing, and how I was being irrational and unfair to myself in so many ways, I turned my attention to the question I suggest that my players ask themselves often. And that question/statement is: “How do you want to play in 2 years? Your goal is to try and play that way today.”

And probably the most powerful tool I’ve found when it comes to this is The Crystal Ball Method. I have spoken about this before, and I first heard it from Steve Smith of GreatBase Tennis when he was instructing players on how they should look at match play, and its gist is something like this:

Imagine you could look into a crystal ball that would show you at the end of the match. Now I want you to imagine, win or lose, how you played your match. How did you hit the ball? How did you compete? What kind of self-talk did you use? Did you play timid, conservative tennis? Or did you play the way you wanted to play; true to yourself?

Interestingly, this method ties into components of goal setting, visualization, and self-talk—all of which are common psychological skills taught by sports psychology practitioners.

And it helped. When I got up to serve again, instead of focusing excessively on the outcomes of losing to this random guy I had just met through a group chat, I placed my focus on how I wanted to serve. And how I wanted to play.

Ok, you say you have a big serve? Have you really been serving that way and accelerating? Ok, you say you want to hit well off the ground? Are you committing to that? Or have you been pushing the ball?

More than that I really focused in on how I wanted to feel when I finished the set.

Did I want to lose knowing that I had played tight, tense, anxiously, and timidly? That I had played scared tennis, served poorly, pushed the ball, and had not fought and competed and enjoyed myself?

Or did I want to walk off the court knowing that I had hit big serves, attacked the net, accelerated on my groundstrokes, and played aggressive percentage tennis?

The latter is what I shifted my focus to.

And gradually, not just in one point, but after a few, I start playing better.

4–4 (Stay Present)

I’ve brought the set back to even.

Things are clicking. Now that my focus has shifted to how I want to play, my opponent is struggling to keep up with the weight of my shot.

I’m serving well. Two aces, lots of unreturnable serves. I’m hitting my returns hard and deep through the middle of the court.

My opponent is on the back foot a lot. And sure, I’m making mistakes and errors for sure, but I’m picking large, percentage targets that are giving me lots of room for error.

And that’s when a part of me starts thinking, hey, if I pull this off, then this would make a great story for my newsletter subscribers.

I stop being in the present and focusing on how I want to play.

I make some stupid mistakes.

And then I catch myself.

Stay here. Be present.

He puts in some double faults, and I head to the bench with a break.

5–4

I get up to serve for the set and again the anxiety starts to creep in a little bit.

What if I can’t close out this match?

Oh man, it would be a nice comeback.

More than that, it would show that I’ve conquered my cognitive anxiety—at least in this outing.

But again I catch myself, use some CBT.

Even if I lose from here, it would be okay. I’m just trying to focus in on playing how I want to play.

I really dig into that. Stick my emotional anchors into it.

Three big serves. Easy points. I go up 40–love.

Another big serve.

A short forehand.

I miss it in the middle of the net.

The thoughts kick in again.

Damn… what if I lose the game from here?

He breaks me… and then he holds and wins…

I quickly step up to the line.

A solid return by him, and we start a rally. I’m unfocused, monitoring a bit too much, so I miss a backhand long.

Now it’s 40–30.

What if you lose from here?

No. How do I want to play? How do you want to serve? How do you want to feel as you walk off the court?

I toss the ball into the air and go for it.

His return flies long.

Set to me.

How I Could Have Prevented Cognitive Anxiety

Looking back on this, I was ill-prepared. Knowing what club and rec players like to do—hint: they only like play sets— I should have been expecting my new partner to ask me this. And I should have spent some time modeling out in my mind if this was the case, how I was going to respond, and if I was going to play the set, what my focus was going to be on?

It would also have been handy to remind myself, that losing one set to a player somewhere doesn’t really mean much. What matters more is how I’m trying to play and how I’m trying to feel as I walk off the court.

If you’ve struggled with some of the issues that I’ve covered in today’s issue, here are a couple suggestions for you:

Set Process Goals: Before your match, focus on goals that keep you grounded in the present. These small targets help keep your mind on what you can control, no matter the outcome.

Use the Crystal Ball Method: Take a moment to picture yourself at the end of the match, focusing on how you’d ideally like to play, not just the score. Imagine the feeling of striking confidently and competing your hardest, so when the match begins, you’re mentally prepared to play the way you want.

Calm Yourself: Simple breathing exercises, like box breathing, can help center you before and during the match.

And if you want my help improving your performance on the tennis court and having a holistic, healthy, and long-term oriented approach to your tennis, consider working with me.

References

Eysenck M.W., Derakshan N., Santos R., Calvo M.G.. Anxiety and cognitive performance: attentional control theory. Emotion. 2007;7(2):336–353. doi: 10.1037/1528-3542.7.2.336.