Sep 16, 2025.webp)
Nobody likes to lose. The potential for social humiliation and rejection after failing to perform at a certain standard can be crippling. This type of anxiety, called Performance Anxiety, can pop up in all areas of our lives. Competitions, school, the boardroom, and even our own relationships, performance anxiety can be detrimental to our mental health and, ironically, our performance.
This article will define performance anxiety and give you steps on how to conquer it.
What is Performance Anxiety?
Humans are social creatures. We survived by living in groups, and that need to be accepted by a larger group still drives much of our behavior (and anxiety) today. This is why many people find humiliation, rejection, and disappointment to be so painful. In the case of Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD), some people experience real, physical pain in response to real or perceived rejection.
Performance anxiety is the fear of failing or disappointing before performing. The performance could be literal, like a play or presentation. Other times, it could be how well you perform at a job, in a relationship, during sex, or playing a sport.
You might be experiencing performance anxiety if you experience:
- Rapid heartbeat or sweaty palms
- Shaky hands or trembling
- Dry mouth or trouble speaking
- Shortness of breath or dizziness
- Nausea or stomach discomfort
- Muscle tension or stiff posture
- Intense worry about failure or judgment
- Racing thoughts or mental blanking
- Negative self-talk or self-doubt
- Avoiding performances or presentations
Oftentimes, performance anxiety can be crippling and make you perform worse than if you had not been anxious. This failure will, in turn, make performance anxiety worse the next time you perform, increasing the chances of failure again. . . and on and on, the cycle of performance anxiety continues. This is why it is important to break the cycle of performance anxiety.
Types of Performance Anxiety
Coping with Performance Anxiety will depend on what area you experience it. There are numerous examples of performance anxiety, but some of them include:
Athletic Performance Anxiety
The nerves before a race or competition can be fierce. Sometimes, these nerves escalate to anxiety. When your thoughts start to cycle around failure and you start dreading the start line, performance anxiety can tank your performance and sap the fun out of a sport.
Stage Fright
Stage fright is the most classic example of performance anxiety. Maybe it’s an audition, school play, or presentation. Whatever the setting, you’ll be standing in front of people, sometimes alone, and expected to present or perform to a certain standard. Failing means disappointing people at best, and the worst consequences range from losing opportunities to losing your job.
Performance anxiety and stage fright can be hard to beat because they can be hard to rationalize. Failure does hold consequences, and you might be afraid of those consequences.
Instead of telling yourself that everything will be okay, check in with your thoughts. Are you catastrophizing? Or caught in a self-hate loop? These are detrimental and won’t be helpful. Replace them with neutral thoughts if you can’t replace them with positive ones.
Sexual Performance Anxiety
Although people experience performance anxiety in all areas of their lives, one area that is not talked about a lot is in sexual intimacy.
Society places a lot of pressure to have sex well and often. This can put undue pressure on people to “perform well in bed”, without giving any real guidance on what that looks like.
If you experience sexual performance anxiety, rest assured that you’re not alone, and there are ways to combat this performance anxiety.
How to Overcome Performance Anxiety
Now that you know how to identify performance anxiety, it’s time to overcome it. Breaking the cycle of performance anxiety isn’t about throwing toxic positivity at it until you believe that the only outcome will be a good one. That isn’t realistic, and could be detrimental.
Studies show that certain levels of stress are good for you. “Eustress”, as it is called, increases performance and satisfaction at completing a task.
The goal for overcoming performance anxiety isn’t to stop being anxious. Instead, it’s to move that unhealthy stress into healthy stress. Here are some steps to help you. They can be adapted to fit your unique situation.
- Don’t Forget to Breathe: The last thing you want is for your performance anxiety to spiral into a panic attack. Get ahead of future anxiety by focusing on your breath. You could practice the 3-3-3 method, box breathing, or color scanning.
- Be Prepared: What are you afraid of happening? Can you prepare for those situations? Over-preparing is a common pitfall of people who have performance anxiety, so make sure to stay mindful. Preparing might also look like getting plenty of rest, planning something fun afterwards, showering to make yourself feel good about yourself, or making a hype playlist for before your competition.
- Trust Yourself: When you’re performing, you have to rely on yourself to succeed. Practice this by trusting yourself before the performance, too. Learn to be your own best friend, critic, and support partner.
- If you can’t use positive language, use neutral language: “I can do this” is a great positive affirmation, but some people have a hard time believing it. “I can try my best,” is easier to believe and may yield better results. Plus, it is better than “I’m going to fail.” Pay attention to your thoughts. How can you replace the negative thoughts with positive ones?
- Practice visualization: Olympic athletes are known to practice visualization, a mindfulness technique in which you imagine the event playing out as you want it. The key here is to visualize the emotions along with the actions. For example, an Olympic swimmer might visualize the nerves of getting into position and waiting for the whistle, then the surge of adrenaline when they perfectly leap into the water. They’ll visualize the burn of their muscles and the endurance needed to push through, and only then will they visualize winning. Not just winning- but how winning makes them feel. This practice will help you feel prepared for the challenges and the victory.
Talk to a therapist about how these performance anxiety coping skills can be adapted to your unique situation. If performance anxiety is still crippling, talking to a therapist can help. You might have an underlying mental health issue.
Contact Lifebulb to be scheduled with an anxiety therapist near you today. We accept most major insurances and have little to no wait times.
