For this week’s mental health post, I decided to touch upon performance anxiety. You might not struggle with anxiety in your everyday life but chances are, you have experienced performance anxiety towards a challenge you faced at some point, may it be an exam, a sports competition or sharing your art on the internet. If you look up ‘performance anxiety’, most of the articles will point at stage fright, stress towards performing in front of an audience and fear of embarrassment, but performance anxiety is a little bit more than that. Based on my personal experience, I can extend the term to include generally negative emotions associated with the desire to perform well.
Performance anxiety isn’t something only musicians or entertainers deal with. In fact, it’s more common than you might’ve expected and it exists in so many of the environments that we interact within, on a daily basis: at school, at work, in competitive settings, even when we engage with our own hobbies. Performance anxiety happens when the desire to do well turns into an irrational fear and worries around performing poorly, which ultimately harm us or prevent us from doing well in the first place. It’s the harrowing anticipation of an exam and it builds up to the panic attack that you might have while filling in your answers. It’s the odd feeling that you get in the pit of your chest as you’re putting on your shoes to go to work. It’s obsessively thinking of cringey scenarios in which you fail, you disappoint everyone and you lose everything. Hopefully with these examples, I got my point across.
Why does performance anxiety exist to begin with? We can relate it all back to the first reports made on the ever-growing occurrence of mental health issues among millennials. Why is it that we all feel so anxious and worried? The truth is, a ginormous amount of pressure is placed on our shoulders since day one. There is so much coming our way from so many different directions, and it’s just hard to balance it all in this time and age. We are afraid to disappoint, and we are afraid to lag behind for too long, in case we do lose the train of life. And for the generations to come, it’s only getting worse – I’ve noticed it all in myself and in those around me, and I could write about it for pages and pages. The stress of our A Levels and how consumed we all were with getting through rather than actually learning something. Or my first job, which I’ve borne through out of pride and so not to give up. Or my current job, where I’ve invested so many hours and energy just to do well and prove myself and others that I am a hard-working, successful millennial. But for this post, fuck all of that. If you’re an anxious little duck and you want to sort yourself out, you’re in the right place.
One of the most prominent examples of dealing with performance anxiety in my student career: preparing a short story for my creative writing optional module in year one. I was so stressed with hitting the perfect formula, that I forgot why I signed up for the module in the first place: because I enjoyed writing, and that was what.
(source: personal archive)
A quick disclaimer before we actually begin: I am not a mental health expert. I might be doing a degree in Psychology, but that doesn’t give me the right to give you advice or even try to help you out. What I will do instead is share my experience with performance anxiety and what sort of mindset helped me in my most stressful, demanding times. Feel free to read this post through, give the things that I’m talking about a good think and see if they work for you. They might not and that’s okay, too.
The natural first step to take in tackling performance anxiety is to acknowledge that you are more than just how well you perform. If you experience performance anxiety, it might be because you’ve fallen into the trap of defining yourself, first and foremost, with the coordinates of your progress through life. And I’m not blaming you, it’s just so easy, I’d say almost instinctive to do that. I am a student, so I must get good grades. I must get past a certain average mean because that’s what’s traditionally considered to be good. I like running and I’m good at it, so I must make it into the athletics’ team. I must run two hours a day and make sure I get a certain average time before the competitions’ season starts. And having these goals is amazing. It’s what drives us to get better and make our dreams come true. But when you don’t get the grades that you were aiming for, or you don’t get the job you would’ve wanted, or you don’t make it into the athletics’ team or you lose the regional competition because you were just a couple of seconds slower than the front-runner, your attitude towards these goals can make it very hard for you not to think of yourself as a failure. Maybe you do get more motivated, maybe you work harder to do better next time but also, maybe you deliberately avoid taking breaks, you work longer hours and you push yourself to the brink of fatigue. Having goals is good as long as you know when and how to detach yourself from them every once in a while. Since a very young age we are given labels that give us a start in life and guide us for a bit, but we are never really taught to ponder over them or step away from them and just be us for some time. And it’s our duty to ourselves to self-teach that aspect.
There are multiple ways you can do that, but I’m only mentioning a few. Practising daily affirmations will provide you with a simple, yet powerful acknowledgement of the things you forget to think about, caught up in the stress of doing work. Short, concise things like I am doing well at being me or I am enough, will remind you that it’s alright even when progress doesn’t really go your way. Also, make sure you provide yourself with a weekly time window dedicated to introspection and self-exploration. Reflect on all the multiple things that you are and select those that remind you of your worth when it’s the hardest for you to accept that it exists in the first place. Maybe you didn’t get the grade that you wanted in maths, but you are an amazing cook and trigonometry will not keep you alive and well-fed. Coming from the same viewpoint, try and find yourself new areas for you to develop in. Picking up a new hobby will not put the same kind of pressure on you to do well, and it will also help you unwind and have fun.
Balancing a full-time course, a part-time job and volunteering taught me a lot about how stress and fatigue can affect performance.
(source: personal archive)
When you are dealing with performance anxiety, you subscribe to an exclusively negative mindset, so it is crucial that you shift to thinking more positively about your work. Again, easier said than done but not impossible. The more stressed and worried you are, the more you’ll think about your work with fear and resentment rather than passion and excitement – and frankly, which one is going to give you a better result? Not only you’ll be more likely to do enough for the results that you aim for, but you will also enjoy the process even more, regardless of the outcome.
Beyond all the fun that you’ll be having, remember to think of your progress in terms of why you want to succeed rather than why you simply must not fail. Make it about the good things that will come if you do well instead of the bad consequences that will become unavoidable if you perform poorly. It’s a gradual shift in the way you think of your responsibilities, and long-term it will be worth it. On the same wavelength, give yourself rewards rather than punishments. Celebrate every baby step you take instead of holding yourself accountable for not doing more than that. Keep it balanced, though, don’t spoil yourself for brushing your teeth in the morning, although that in itself can be an achievement, too. Really, what we’re looking at is focusing on the full half of the glass, which is really what defines the value of your efforts.
On a more material level, you can diminish the negative effects of your performance anxiety by improving your means of doing work. Help yourself by reflecting on how you are used to tackling your objectives and what is your general attitude towards doing work of any kind. Are you organised, or do you like going with the flow? Do you prefer taking your time with your work or do you work best under the pressure of approaching deadlines? Once you get to know your working style better, make your job easier by implementing and sticking to the things that make the end result of your work more fruitful. If you like organisation (like me), plan your work early on and in great detail – and if you don’t know how to do that, I recently wrote a post you’ll be interested in. If you are a huge procrastinator and you leave things until the very last minute (also like me), do the largest bulk of your work several days before it’s due. Find your style, jump into that trial-and-error journey and be prepared to make some mistakes, but for the greater good. As time goes by and you engage with different challenges at school, in the workplace or just in your everyday life, be open and flexible, and tailor your strategy to your needs, and as required by the situations you find yourself in.
Even in my creative writing endeavours or on this blog, I deal with performance stress quite a lot and I find it quite hard to enjoy what I'm doing while I am so concerned about always improving my style.
(source: personal archive)
Finally, one last thing that I’d advise you towards: keep a record of how you’re dealing with performance anxiety. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a journal if you’re not into that kind of stuff; again, this is a matter of discovering what works for you. By recording your experiences with anxiety around performance, you’ll figure out what it is you’re struggling with, and act accordingly towards making it all easier for you. It will give you perspective, and a path for you to follow even when you don’t really know what’s going on.
Do you experience performance anxiety? If so, how? I would love to hear your thoughts and start a conversation on the topic. Let me know how you found the post, and have a fantastic day!
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Photo source: personal archive.